While social realist epistemologies have proven effective as a powerful advocacy tool for impaired people (Sullivan & Munford, 2005), a number of exciting ideas
following post-modern understandings about how the world operates have emerged within contemporary disability literature. These ideas theorise notions of impairment and disabling conditions from wider social and cultural spaces. These ideas
foreground aspects of the interdependency that shapes the division made between the idea of impairment conditions and the idea of support needed. In doing so they address some of the pitfalls inherent in ‘idealised’ concepts from which current disability support initiatives are created (Scott-Hill 2002).
Disability and the Notion of Cartesian Dualism
For Ussher (1997) the concept ‘disability’, rather than being located within a disabled/non-disabled binary is set on a material-discursive continuum. Those who align themselves on the material end of the continuum focus on disability as the physical aspect of the impaired individual’s experiences and on the literal implementation of institutional control on the material, social and economic
environment (see Oliver, 1990). Those at the discursive end look at ‘disability’ from within social and linguistic domains, noting the symbols and signs of ideology, culture and power that are inherent in the word (see Peter, 2000). Ussher’s view is
that epistemological discussion needs to move away from notions of binary divisions to allow for recognition and foregrounding of the processes of interaction and interrelationship within these two locations (Ussher, 1997, p. 2).
Iwakuma (2002) further suggests that both individual and social realist theoretical analyses of disability issues currently follow traditional euro-western, Cartesian dualisms of mutual exclusiveness – that if something is A it cannot be B at the same time – with perhaps detrimental material outcomes. For example, normality represents a standpoint position which assumes that all able-bodied people will have access to all rights in equal capacity at all times. Disability becomes it’s (excluded) opposite. An inability to see the fluidity of both positions at the same time will produce
implementation difficulties for any material practice. Any idea set with such a binary framework will produce limited outcome possibilities for disabled people and those who support them, particularly when these outcomes are sought within a social system that prioritises one aspect of this binary over the other.
Disability as a Material Reality of Inter-Relationship
For Price & Shildrick (2002) the reality of the ‘disabled position’ is that it cannot be fixed, but is productive of the breakdown of certainty experienced by ‘the abled’ in the company of a disabled person. Each encounter between abled and disabled people becomes as much a complex mix of emotion and sensation as it is a professional or clinical connection. However, what is disrupted is only the illusion of bodily and psychic wholeness that the notion of normalcy/abled implies. Price & Shildrick (2002) use the role of touch to illustrate this process of interactive encounter. In touching we ‘become the other’, with the interactive sensation produced through the moment of touching seen as indivisible from the sensation of being touched.
Locations of power and powerlessness become diffuse through touch, as it becomes impossible to distinguish clearly between active and passive positions. What also becomes diffused is the idea that binary notions of subject/object are valid frameworks for analysis of the relationship between disabled/abled bodies.
Disability as a Cultural Orientation
For Cheu (2002) ‘disability’ describes a culturally based orientation to the social world rather than either a set of theoretical, binary related notions, or a mutable position on a continuum. Disability becomes part of a “representational system” (Cheu, 2002, p. 199) that signals more than either a bodily impairment or a curable, treatable or socially accomodatable condition, or even a socially created phenomenon. Rather the concept includes larger systems of representation that are culturally
perpetuated. Within this perception, even the notion of (medical) cure is socially constructed. Thus ‘disability’ becomes “how society has defined what a body can do as much as what, in actuality, a body can do” (Cheu, 2002, p. 107). Within this ‘what a body can do’ field of perception, material bodies only look, move and respond in ways that an individual believes bodies will look, move and respond. This view raises the question: What/Who has control of the constructions of ‘disabled/abled’ reality? Is it what is believed rather than what is known?
The Standpoint Position for the Data Analysis
The premise, that ‘disability’ can be viewed as an aspect of a series of culturally perpetuated, larger systems of representations underpin the change in framework through which the data gathered for this thesis is explored. Adopting the idea of a culturally signifying representational process as the theoretical basis is to include a number of allied ideas in validation of key aspects of this position. These ideas
include the insight that there is no ultimate truth (Giroux, 1996) to be found within the configurations of people, places, things and ideas that become the cultural signifying representations of ‘disability/ability’ referred to by Cheu (2002). However, these configurations assume, through negotiation, certain binary logics (eg Ussher 1997; Iwakuma 2002). These logics can be seen as derived from modernist inspired assumptions about key facets of the euro/western world. Implicit in and through the creation of these binary positions is the premise of favoured and non-favoured power effects. These effects are productive of the discord created when the social, material and emotional networks that uphold the concepts ’disability/ability’ are constantly held in tension (Foucault, 1978).
In this scenario, power is the element that binds together the socio-cultural and socio- material conditions created by the combination of people, places, things and ideas that describe disabling conditions. However, power is not fixed for all time within any binary location but inter-relates productively (Foucault, 1975) rather than objectively or subjectively between and through individuals who may or may not be impaired or abled (Price & Shildrick 2002). Bodies of knowledge held as language, are central to the deployment and redeployment of the material, social and emotional effects of these inter-located productions (Foucault, 1975). Thus, ‘disability’ is not just something that is either invested in, through or by any individual but is seen as a series of redeployed multi-layered disbursements of power through which
disabled/non-disabled identities and relationships are equally shaped. Adopting this conceptual position means being able to consider the support-needed aspect of disability as more than just something one material body ‘does’ to another within specific temporal spaces. It becomes a continual and reciprocal set of prior-formed interactions that are themselves embedded in processes that reproduce what lies within broader socio-cultural locations (Marks, 2002).
Disability and Support Interconnections
A number of postmodernist-related strands of enquiry are outlined in the next section of the chapter. This enquiry details the lines of thought I follow to come to understand the interrelationship that characterises operation of the disabled/support binary. These ideas highlight “a particular trajectory of a collusion with modernism” (Potter, 2005, p. 113) in so far as I see the ideas I work with from this point on as going beyond the parameters of individualist/social realist standpoint frameworks. Yet I also
acknowledge an in-collusion position with the functionalist beliefs outlined earlier in the chapter, as they continue to actively engage the disability and disability support area.
Developing a Post-Modern Position
Modernist thought is based on the concept of a rational, independent, autonomous individual that connects the ontological aspect of human beings to existing epistemologies about the nature of humankind. This interface is said to provide an
accurate description of how aspects of the human condition have come to be (Giroux, 1996). These notions analyse the autonomous individual as in a symbiotic relationship with certain assumptive principles. These principles broadly include the “unity of humanity, the individual as a creative force in society and history, the superiority of the West, the idea that science is truth and the belief in social progress” (Corker & Shakespeare, 2002, p. 2). Within these frameworks, the hope is that society will become fully inclusive of all individual differences when everyone adheres to these foundational principles.
Post-modern thought holds back from placing the idea of the rational individual as the core element from which to explain, contain or change how social worlds work (Scully, 2002). A post-modern position maintains that knowledge about the world and actions that arise there-from do not necessarily derive from these core elemental principles, but are seen as social effects that assume power from an assembly of multiple social and cultural logics that derive from multiple locations (Thomas & Corker, 2002). This assertion decentralises the dominant role of the individual as the starting point from which explanations of why things are as they are, or why things are not as they should be, are created and developed.
Individuals are not the autonomous creators of themselves and adapters of their social words in a multiple-location view. Rather they are intrinsic in complex webs of social relations that determine who can appear where and in what capacity within constantly shifting social spaces. Within postmodernism the hope that society will become fully inclusive through means of full adherence to a set of fixed, assumptive principles is tempered by a questioning stance in relation to how these principles might be constructed and what pitfalls these constructions might contain.
Ontology: The Material Body
Re-locating meaning outside the confines of essentialist concepts of ‘the body’ has enabled post-modern thinkers to deprioritise the role of the physical body in favour of recognising the existence of bodies-in-construction, through which variable meanings are located, constructed and negotiated within and through the medium of existing social conditions. As such, a post-modern position questions functionalist ideas that
locate the individual as a corporeal identity (Price & Shildrick, 2002), viewing material bodies as much a product of social construction and interpretation through language as they represent essential realities. The pre-eminence of biological authority that underpins the centrality of the autonomous body within modernism is replaced with the possibility of a diversity of bodily positions and locations. From this point, the idea of bodily identity becomes a map rather than an essence (Kuppers, 2002), where only “through text and practice” (Price & Shildrick, 2002, p. 65) does any corporeal body become material. Material bodies take on a variety of iconic shapes, including the medical body, the fantasised body, the erotic body, the developing body, the supportive body or “the body in pain” (Scully, 2002, p. 54).
Epistemology: The Body of Knowledge
To set ideas within a post-modern context is to move beyond the notion that
knowledge is that which is acquired by individuals through the application of pre-set epistemologies and methodologies. Within post-modernism, what counts as
“knowledge and knowing” is developed through “the constant flux of cultural
movements” (Michalko, 2002, p. 175), thus ‘knowing’ contains more than that which can be substantiated empirically and objectively verified as fact (Michalko, 2002). Within postmodernist thought, theories and facts are no longer stand-alone items but become interdependent and relational terms. “Facts are only facts within some theoretical frameworks” (Bevan & Bevan, 1999, p. 16) and ‘knowledge’ becomes no more than the construction of certain ways of saying and doing over time (Baker, 2005). What counts as knowing constantly shifts in time and space while issues of authority or who knows what, and legitimacy or how they know it, become deeply questionable issues. Such queries as: who is the knower in this context and what counts as knowledge at this time, become critical starting point questions in respect of any process of investigation into how “social and cultural history” (McKenzie, 2005, p. 456) shape the material practice of assistance.
The value of a post-modern belief as an epistemological position is that these notions uphold the idea that the support-needed aspect of disability is more than just an issue of (ablebodied) support for the impaired/disabled. How the non-disabled/able-bodied binary aspect of this interrelationship is constructed and the influence it holds can be
foregrounded as an equally important consideration. This consideration is necessary not just because it helps the disabled (see Tregasis, 2004), but also because a post- modern perspective views these relationships as mutually constituting each other (Price & Shildrick, 2002, p. 65).