>From Marta Russell:
``For theory one has to go to the Brits. They HAVE written primarily from a theoretical vantage point. Also they have rightly criticized US disability movement for lacking theory....
...I just discovered an Australian writer, Brendan Gleeson who has written "Geography of Disability" Routledge 1999. He is a materialist as well -- more so than even Michael Oliver, the British disability theorist who has done most of the ground work. Vic Finkelstein was the first in 1980 to present a historical account of industrial capitalism -- also British. I now cite these writers because the American resources (except for Charlton) are so vacuous...''
Good, I'll chase these Brits and the Aussie down. I am afraid I dismissed the English, maybe because my ex-wife was...
``No one has written the political economy of disablement, however. Though I have taken on the topic in various articles, it deserves a book...''
Little wonder, since it is a huge task. It might be (is?) impossible to do in one book. There is just too much to say and too many worlds that intersect. I would think more toward writing a library. First there are just the bare bones empirical events, times, places, people, institutions. The little I've read so far can't get this sequence ordered. While I was skimming through Foucault, I thought shit Mike you make it sound easy, but there is no order to history or rather there are numerous orders that all meet the same empirical criterion. Anyway, that's one book or library section. Then there are the sequences you just referred to---an historical ground of industrial capitalism (a few libraries there). Then there is a whole legal, linguistic, social, and cultural domain of actions and reactions that are interwoven, as various institutions, social relations, terminologies, languages are adjusted and created. This is where Foucault and Stiker come in.
Stiker's history is a cultural, predominately French history that depends heavily on Levi-Strauss for its conceptual method and approach. It is nominally Marxist, in the sociological and cultural sense of the word. The material base for his approach is textual. Here is a long quote from the Introduction (Interlude on Method) to give you some idea.
``A society reveals itself by the way in which it treats certain significant phenomena. The problem of disability is one such phenomenon. To speak at all pertinently of disabled people is to disclose a society's depths. It amounts to say that a book like this one, which is not divorced from praxis, is on a theoretical level from the very outset, on the level of the sociability (or sociableness: Fr. _sociabilite_) of a society, by which I mean its fundamental capacity to have people live together plus the anthropological information on the social competency.
Reassociating the question of the disabled with that of society presupposes substantial historical detachment. The matter is made even more difficult by the fact that historical works on this subject are uncommon and too selective. But this presupposes, in addition, a question that has gone unnoticed, if we think that beyond the cliches there is still something to be discovered. It is common today to identify exclusion (at times quite subtle) and protest against it (an action always very divided). The reason for the exclusion can be pinpointed fairly easily: an economic system predicated on profitability; an economic system that can afford the luxury of generously helping its subjects, who are often its victims, but that considers prevention and sociovocational reintegration burdensome; a cultural system that no longer knows how to make difference viable because its schemas are those of identity, of `all the same'; a system of medical power based on the clinic and its history. We shall try here to ask the question in a different fashion: why does society try to integrate the disabled? What is behind this intention? And more exactly, why does society want to integrate in the way that it does?
These questions can be asked of all societies, of all forms of sociopolitical organization. The question of integration seems even more general than that of exclusion, because---paradoxically, for our contemporary mentality---integration is more of a constant in human societies than exclusion. To initiate an analysis of the social workings of disability by way of its integration is a method more critical, even more militant, than to address it in terms of exclusion. The motives and factors that lead to rejection, even when such rejection is hidden and subtle, are fairly obvious to the attentive. Integration passes more unnoticed. Sometimes it even seems to occur on its own. It embodies claims that are widely supported today. Everything contributes to masking the reasons for integration, to forgetting them, to jumbling the various means of integration under the aegis of an ethics of integration. From the moment you integrate, who would venture to come looking for how it happens, why it happens, and in the way it does?
Today, for example the endless goodwill of our liberals, often enough similar to that of the Left, prevents us from questioning the procedure itself. The most common slogan speaks of `being like the others' (etre comme les autres). A first line of inquiry comes to mind at once: to be, or to seem to be, like the others? This is not a trifling question. What is asked of people considered disabled? A secret, a lie, a falsification? And why is this asked of them? And why may they themselves demand it? Then there is the matter of being like the others. Are they then all so similar, opposable as a group to a category that may have no existence other than by the overly simple mechanism of a massive contrast? And who is supposed to be imitated in the equation `like'? What kind of image is constructed socially of the individual who is made the object of imitation? What is the cultural model that is thus being imposed? To what society, to what type of sociability, does this imitation refer?
The relevance of these questions about present intentions to integrate allows us, better than any other means, to investigate different social environments. If efforts at integration are not a modern phenomenon and are a historical fact of other societies, it is possible to make enlightening comparisons. A door opens on a history of disability...The dilemma, exclude or include, hides a whole series of exclusions that are not all the same and of inclusions which are not commensurate...'' (16p, Stiker, A History of Disability, Uni Mich Press, 1997, originally, Corps infirmes et societe, 1982)
The chapter titles are: The Bible and Disability: The Cult of God, Western Antiquity: The Fear of the Gods, The System(s) of Charity, The Classical Centuries: The Chill, The Birth of Rehabilitation, Epilogue, Appendix: Stages in the Legislation, Notes, Selected Bibliography.
I finished Longmore's intro essay (A New Disability History) last night and while he sounds better than I thought at first, the collection of essays itself will tell.
It still comes down to capital, and nobody in the US wants to say it. So, Marta, you're are going to have to write it.
Nobody in the US wants to say it, because, all of sudden the entire facade cracks open. The whole body of social and cultural viability, its humanism is eviscerated into the industrial machinery of capital and profit, and ground up to bloody little shreds. The whole so-called economic genius of US capital is to figure out a way to pretend this isn't a blood product, and than arrange and re-configure the social relations of disability so as to profit from them in their simultaneous destruction---that is pretend this amounts to progress in human rights, and then charge for it.
``So Chuck, are you saying you aren't or are considering writing the Berkeley story?''
I don't know. The truth is that the memories are killing. If I imagined somebody to write with it, it would have been John Hessler, as he was in `68-69, when he was finishing up a terminal MA in French, working with Don Lorence and others on putting the Rolling Quads together, and starting to sort through the materials Ed had gotten from OE on doing a student services project. We used to play chess at night in the nurses station at Cowell. John used to murder me in chess. I was dividing my attention and talking about Camus and Sartre---a fatal mistake. Now I wished I had read Foucault then, so we could have laughed about the meaning of confinement, punishment, i carceri. Mine appeared immanent, since I had just refused induction. John used to wear these heavy black rimmed glasses with a turtleneck sweater and looked like he belonged on the cover of some radical french student poster. He was at his sharpest then, funny, cruel, ironic, and heartfelt all at the same time---everything you want to see in an awesome politically minded intellectual who was ready to put words into action.
Now I can't think of anybody, since they are all dead or disappeared.
Mary Lou is an obvious choice, and I asked her, but, you know she hates writing. That's all she does and she hates it. I suspect we profoundly disagree over the Marx angle too. Another choice is Dennis (my Biophysics buddy) who is blind, but he is even worse than Mary Lou about writing. He is so lost in a divorce and custody battle for his kids---there is another issue, the stripping of disabled people of their children---that he can't think straight.
So anyway, I am leaving it alone for the moment. First, I'll do the reading, then think some more about it.
Chuck Grimes