challenging the 'normal': towards new conceptual frameworks
Jos Boys (August 2008)
To invoke disability as a category of critical analysis is, at the present time, a fairly radical endeavor. Unlike other identity-categories such as gender, race, and sexuality, (dis)ability is not yet widely recognized as a legitimate or relevant position from which to address such broad subjects as literature, philosophy, and the arts.
Ellen Samuels “Critical Divides: Judith Butler’s Body Theory and the Question of Disability” 2002 NWSA Journal, Vol. 14 No. 3 (Fall)
In this article I want to suggest that, rather than locating disability as a politically correct but relatively marginal ‘add-on’ to the theory and practice of architecture, starting from disability can open up contemporary debates for critical and creative inspection; not just about how to re-think disability and design but also how we conceptualise diverse human subjects and their participation in material spaces more generally.
Exploring this suggestion demands an engagement with Disability Studies, a lively and emerging field which includes a central concern with contemporary cultural theory in works such as Lennard J. Davis’s Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism and other difficult positions and the Tom Shakespeare and Mairian Corker edited collection Postmodernism/Disability. What these authors argue is that thinking about disability offers a critique of much contemporary cultural theory, particularly it’s celebration of ideas about otherness, marginality and hybridity. As Erevelles writes:
…disabled people have historically been located at the margins of the margins of our social world in spaces that have been construed as irrelevant to the economy, society, culture and even radical theory.
Erevelles, 1997:1
She suggests that in much contemporary theory (across feminism, post-colonial and cultural studies etc.,) the marginality of disability is being perpetuated because it is merely being added onto other ‘identities’ as a cursory inclusion, rather than explored for both its similarities and differences with other forms of ‘otherness.’ Many authors are both examining why disability continues to be an absence in much post-modern and contemporary writing, and how it might help us unravel the gaps in, and difficulties with that work.
The Other in post-modernity and post-structuralism
Erevelles links these problems to the recent cultural turn, whereby older assumptions of simple binary differences – male/female, middle/working class, black/white, gay/straight etc., - have been replaced by a new interest in multiple identities. Outsiderness and otherness become interesting positions to play with. There have been many writers in this field, offering many variations, including many who have been influential on architectural theory and avant-garde practice such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Paul Virilio, Rosa Bradotti, Elizabeth Grosz and Luce Irigarary.
This kind of writing is very seductive, and offers many important challenges to older, rationalist and modernist understandings of architecture. But what is actually going on here? All too often there is, I suggest, a problematic slippage between the Other as a real, marginalized person or social group and as an abstract idea, a conceptual notion or an imaginary ‘figure’. Otherness becomes either a means to play with ideas, or a state that can be freely chosen, a deliberate location on the ‘margins’.
Here, as an example, I want to briefly engage with one of the works of feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, who, following her book Space Time and Perversion(Routledge 1995), began to look more explicitly at architecture, resulting in a series of essays gathered together in Architecture from the Outside (MIT Press 2001). Grosz first places herself as an ‘outsider to the field’, but as one who feels that “architecture and its associated qualities of space, spatiality and inhabitation held too much fascination not to be addressed in more depth.” (p1). Grosz, then, initially places herself (and her subject discipline, philosophy) as alien, unassimilable being, other or stranger to architecture, simultaneously aligning herself with other outsiders to the practice of design, who may thus be able to see what are ‘unspoken conditions’ are for those inside architecture:
While concepts of the social, the cultural, the collective, and the communal have always oriented architectural interests, it is the outside condition of the community – the alien or the stranger – that serves to cohere and solidify a community as an inside. The place of the destitute, the homeless, the sick and the dying, the place of social and cultural outsiders – including women and minorities of all kinds – must also be the concern of the architectural and the urban just as it has been of philosophy and politics.
Grosz 2001, Introduction xvii
This is not a location of criticism or negativity, linked to any yearning to be inside. It is more the site of positivity and innovation because “outside architecture is always inside bodies, sexualities, history, culture, nature – all of those others its seeks to exclude but which are its constitutive edges, the boundaries of its operations.” Grosz’s aim then, is to submit architecture to these others, so as to be able to see space ‘in quite other terms”.
Immediately this suggests some problems, most obviously about what differences there might be between being located ‘outside’ as an academic philosopher, compared to, for example, a homeless person. Perhaps, more importantly, is what comes to be articulated as ‘outside’ to architecture understood as subject knowledge and practice. Here Grosz seems to make a ‘common-sense’ view (that is, an idea thought with not about) that architects, treated as an homogeneous entity, continue to occupy a ‘rational’ and modernist space, where users are defined neutrally – without bodies, or least (as she clarifies later) without bodies being theorised or engaged with in relation to their sexual specificity.
Because of the complexities of the term architecture itself standing for both the process of designing and the resulting product, this at once introduces two ambiguities. First, inasmuch as material landscapes must inherently incorporate bodies, then we should surely be just as interested in architecture from the inside - that is, from the diverse experiences of everyday occupation.
Second, in locating herself as an unproblematic ally with other ‘outsiders’, Grosz blurs issues of difference - even whilst appearing to engage with them, This is both in making equivalent through analogy very diverse and non-related identities (not only around gender, race etc., but also occupation position and disciplinary systems/conceptual frameworks) and in assuming that her ‘alien’ location has obvious similarities with other Others. In this way she makes invisible the specific and enjoyable privileges of the cultural intellectual in having the time and resources to examine processes of meaning-making on behalf of those others. Grosz can claim (and enjoy) her outsider status and the frisson of risk that it implies; but of course she does this from a place of privilege, not from the reality of being marginalised or discriminated against.
There is a premium on establishing the capacity to see from the peripheries and the depths. But here there lies a serious danger of romanticizing and/or appropriating the vision of the less powerful while claiming to see from their positions. To see from below is neither easily learned nor unproblematic, even if we ‘naturally’ inhabit the great underground terrain of subjugated knowledges.
Donna Haraway “The persistence of vision” in Nicholas Mizoeff (ed) The Visual Culture Reader Routeldge 1998 p193
As Ahmed writes, with this post-modern turn:
The figure of the stranger has been taken to represent all that was excluded or de-legitimated in modernity with the belief in order, sameness and totality.
Sara Ahmed Strange Encounters: embodied others in post-coloniality. Routledge 2000 p4
Thus the idea of the Other becomes not a threat or a problem but instead a reminder of the differences we should celebrate; a previously marginalized grouping whose very outsiderness we can use to criticise the assumptions of an essentialist and ‘normal’ human. We can all be others, nomads, partial observers of the world. But this is a particular kind of otherness, which values particular qualities whilst in fact obscuring the realities of diverse kinds of embodiment. As Ervelles says, in this approach the writing of social difference on different bodies centres on the "(re)signification of such bodies to (re)possess emancipatory, transgressive, hybrid subjectivities that continually transgress borders and open up unlimited possibilities". (Erevelles, 1997:1) There are two key issues here. First, this kind of otherness can be freely chosen. Second, these are imaginary and privileged abstract bodies, not ones embodying lived experiences. These are romanticised, often eroticised versions of transgression, but still fully autonomous and unhindered by bodily limitations or markings:
The disabled body is a nightmare for the fashionable discourse of theory because that discourse has been limited by the very predilection of the dominant, ableist culture. The body is seen as a site of “jouissance” that defies reason, that takes dominant culture and its rigid, power-laden vision of the body to task…The nightmare of the (disabled) body is one that is deformed, maimed, (…) Rather than face this ragged image, the critic turns to the fluids of sexuality, the gloss of lubrication (…) But almost never to the body of the differently abled.
Davis, 1995 quoted in Creal, 2006:3
First, then, what matters about the body - around it’s aesthetic appearance, behaviours, modes of communication, freedom of movement – remains under-theorised, implicitly shared rather than explicitly different. Second, bodies are utterly controllable; they can be ‘played’ with at will. Bodily qualities over which one has little or no choice (skin colour, shape, illness, accidental damage) are invisible. Not only can Disabled bodies do not (cannot) belong in this picture, but the assumed ‘ordinary’ dimensions of ‘ablebodiedness’ such as independence and self- determination are neither problematicised nor noticed.
Re-locating disability
How then can disability help us re-think about embodiment? Authors such as Samells, Erevelles, Davies and Corker argue, in different ways, that the disabled body/disability/ abnormality continues to be central in its role as a reflective trope/metaphor/ stereotype/figure which ‘shores up’ the categories of the normal/able-bodied, despite its invisibility in most contemporary cultural theory. This occurs through two simultaneous processes. First, the disabled body is perceived as a containable, figurable concept – an unproblematic category in opposition to non-disablement which functions to reproduce particular everyday social and spatial practices as ‘normal’. Second, disability generates enormous anxiety as a ‘problem’ which seems to have in it the potential to be uncontainable/uncontrollable, threatening the ‘normal’ by calling its assumptions into question.
the figure of the alien reminds us that what is ‘beyond limit’ is subject to representation: indeed what is beyond representation is, at the same-time, over represented.
Ahmed 2000, p2
But Ahmed also argues that to move beyond these stereotypes of able/disabled normal/abnormal we have to move beyond an idea of identity as representation – as almost literally written on the body. Our bodies and their relationships to each other and to objects and spaces are centrally relational practices: each of us through our bodies, lives what Judith Butler calls a performativity that simultaneously re-inscribes and calls into question matters of embodied identity in our everyday practices. We don’t live the essentialist stereotypes of being a Woman, Man, White, Black, Able-bodied or Disabled, we live our relationships to them through a wide range of potential interpretative strategies, both conceptually and through our lived actions.
Ahmed argues that human diversity cannot be reduced to, or found in, representational forms. She argues that the concept of Other is often used as yet another stereotype, given an assumed linguistic and bodily integrity, that is it contains a recognizable meaning (all others are the same). Other/margin/nomadic in this version, as we have seen from Grosz’s writing, is the cool place to be intellectually, in simple binary opposition to same/centre/static, all of which are now marked as boring and old hat.
Of course, the standard array of Others – under-class/women/black and ethnic minority/homeless/disabled are of as many different sorts as are ‘non-others’; but just as with the essentialist binary divisions of male/female normal/abnormal the concept of Other in post-modernity is all too often also cut-off from the social and material relations of each individual’s diverse existence. As Ahmed says, we are not all other in the same way.
Why is this a problem? It means that people located in the category of other are elided together as equivalent in their marginality. This avoids dealing with the social, cultural and political processes by which disadvantaged groups are differently framed as invisible/over-visible. It enables real and inequitable differences between others (between well-paid academics and a homeless person for example) to somehow be blurring into a pretence of sameness. And it avoids the difficulties and complexities of context, personalities, life histories and geography – which all can ‘undo’ a elegant theoretical conceit – to remain concealed.
And, at the same time, as Davis shows, the tendency to group people into increasingly multiple identity categories is already conceptually flawed:
What characterises the limitations of the identity group model is in its exclusivity (which contains the seeds of its own destruction through the paradox of the proliferation of identity groups). As ever more complex, specific identities are articulated, we move towards each individual representing a ‘category’ of one.
Lennard J. Davis Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism and other difficult positions New York University Press 2002 p23
He therefore suggests that we have to move beyond either believing that disabled and Deaf people are victims who deserve ‘special case’ treatment because of their important differences to everyone else; or that we are all ‘the same’ underneath. Davis argues that both these positions re-inforce rather than challenge the disabled/non-disabled divide.
Thinking disability differently; from body categories to relational spaces
Most immediately, then, design theories and practices need to begin "to undo the hegemony of the normal/abnormal binary and to institute alternative ways of thinking about the abnormal body." (Davies, 1995: 49). We need to understand more about how particular framings of disabilities are perpetuated and to listen to how deaf and disabled people themselves articulate their lives. This is not by generalising from various medical conditions or ‘requirements’ but by listening to the diverse narratives of disabled people; and by learning about the many different and creative strategies disabled people develop to deal with the inadequacies of the material world.
Here, we need to consider how a disability-led perspective informs a broader social and theoretical framework. Capturing and responding to a variety of experiences is not just a matter of relativism: of merely accumulating different perspectives, opinions or actions. Our bodies first and foremost are the point of view that each of us lives as subjects; but we also are bodies-for-others, as our corporeal realities interact. This recognises that different bodies have various characteristics, like height or weight, "as part of the normal diversity of the human community" (Creal, 2006: 7). But we can also be alienated bodies, positioned into taking someone-else’s view on how our body is defined. The post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha (1994) has shown how the patterning of stereotypical identities into binary divisions (such as able-bodied/disabled, white/black, male/female, old/young) where one term is marked in common-sense as superior to other, represents attempts to naturalise particular versions of how society works, in support of specific relationships of power and inequality. The location, conventionally, of the disabled body with the functional, objective, clinical and technical in architectural education is based on such a patterning and conspires to perpetuate its lowly status within the discipline.
But Bhabha also shows how such attempts at imposing such an order on the world are always partial and ultimately unachievable. In addition, disabled and deaf people do not live the stereotypes of disability; they live their many different relationships to them. In this process, material space, and its routine social practices is one of the means through which diverse attempts to perpetuate normative representational, spatial, physical and social practices are repeatedly enacted, adapted, challenged and accepted. This is because material space makes both concrete and transparent the forms of conduct it assumes:
Transparency is the action of distribution and arrangements of differential spaces, positions, knowledges, in relation to each other, relative to a discriminatory, not inherent, sense of order. This effects a regulation of spaces and places which is authoritatively assigned; it puts the addressee into the proper frame or condition for some action or result.
Homi Bhabha The Location of Culture Routledge 1989 p?
Architecture and design heavily implicated here: it deals with our relationships to space at the most immediate, intimate and mundanely ordinary (normative?) This is where material settings intersect with what Bhabha calls rules of recognition – the behavioural rules through which it is assumed we will ‘normally’ occupy a space. And, as with attempts at stereotyping, these rules both assume a natural authority and simultaneously fail to ever to be imposed everywhere; because there are always people who are excluded, or cannot recognise themselves in those particular framing.
This suggests the beginnings of a critical and creative approach centred on relational spaces and encounters (both theoretical and material). Ahmed proposes that in order to move beyond a focus on the (abstract) body of the other and identity, we should think instead about the spaces of encounters. This is conceptualized as not just the space between people, but also between people and objects, or for example, readers and texts or architects and drawings. We could also understand it as the space where ideas intersect:
Encounters are always mediated and partial. Encounters involve the production of meaning as a form of sociality. That is, meanings are produced precisely in the intimacy of the ‘more than one’ by ‘coming together at a particular time and place (to) generate certain possibilities and foreclose others.
Ahmed 2000, p15
This shifts the inquiry from representations (on the body, in the space) to relationships, processes and contexts. Any encounter is necessarily mediated by who is there, who is not, why they are there (or why not), what they bring to the situation and w hat they take away. Such events involve meanings-in-the-making through a process in space and over time.
Importantly encounters are not just a space of sharing and recognition but also of conflict, differentiation and negotiation. They involve interpretations, talk, gestures, bodily relationships, and actions. So how do encounters work? In each case we now have two questions which allow the exploration of disability beyond being a stereotypical marker of identity or difference.
What embodied knowledge and experience do we the participants bring to the encounter?
What are the routine social and spatial practices which frame the encounter?
Here, disabled and ‘non-disabled’ participants are not separated out; all have parity in the space of the encounter itself. But the impact of framing disabled people in ways not of their making remains central to the investigation. As Davis writes:
Disability is not so much the lack of a sense or the presence of a physical or mental impairment as it is the reception and construction of that difference.
Davis 2002 p50
Taking positions
Unravelling the precise personal, social, aesthetic and spatial qualities of our encounters with ideas, texts, objects, spaces and each other offers not just a way to engage more creatively and poetically with disability; it incorporates an ethical positioning. Unlike much contemporary cultural theory which centres on ‘becoming’, that is, on opening up possibilities through deliberate accident and unexpected juxtapositions, Davis’s approach maintaining a clarity about the importance of difference as inequality; and of the need for a concern with social justice;
The rhizomatic vision of Deleuze’s solution to the postmodernist quandary presented by power, with its decentred, deracinated notion of action, along with neo-rationalist denials of universals, leaves us with a temporary, contingent way of thinking about agency and change. The dismodernist vision allows for a clearer, more concrete mode of action – a clear notion of expanding the protected class to the entire population; a commitment to removing barriers and creating access for all.
Davis 2002, p3
Davies is here arguing that what we need to have a way of thinking of the diversity of human participation, which enables (and enjoys) the ambiguity of/cross-overs between categories; but which also critically engages with how bodies are ‘marked’ differently, so that particular inequalities are endlessly perpetuated in our everyday practices and spaces.
How, then, might engaging with disability open up forms of theory and research which can both enable methods for critically analysing the assumptions built into our 'normal' social and spatial practices, and indicate modes of creative re-mapping of these practices?:
I am in the East Room at Tate Modern in London for a public lecture about disability arts. It is rectilinear, monochrome, modern, minimal with floor to ceiling glazing on three sides, currently curtained, and with a long table in front of the remaining blank wall. The occupants are settling: time is taken negotiating and sorting the space for a better fit. A woman lies across a large black sofa (out of her wheelchair and in less pain on her back). One of the speakers is of short stature. He rests his chin and arm directly on the table. Other people position themselves and are positioned – for comfort, for view, for friendship. Sightlines are orchestrated to BSL and SSC interpreters and other bits of useful technology. Signing makes it’s own spaces for the deaf participants. The conventional serried ranks of chairs are disrupted, adapted, some shuffled into smaller semi-circles of parallel conversations. Relationships in the space take on a different form, from parallel and active/passive to eddying and contingent.
Throughout the talks, speakers are interrupted where a point is not clear. Tensions open up momentarily between speaker and participant or between participants where their preferences do not align, or where translatory devices are not working properly. A deaf and learning disabled participant questions the cultural ‘jargon’. Signers stop proceedings to check if they have understood properly. All sorts of spaces are endlessly being negotiated.
Jos Boys, unpublished diary notes 2007
In this lecture room, the long table with few chairs behind, faced by many rows indicates the ‘normal’ form of operation. Conventionally this is a space where the 'top table' does the talking and the audience passively listens, except for specifically located moments for verbal exchange, normally after the speakers have finished.
But such seemingly transparent spaces are disrupted and rippled when the ‘normal’ rules of recognition of such a public performance don’t fit or are refused. Hitherto unnoticed spaces of interaction reveal themselves as relationships, as acts of translation between space, event and bodies, which cannot be merely assumed or distractedly enacted; but which produce a kind of positive stutter in space and time.
The participants here, then, disentangle themselves from the homogeneous mass of assumed normality and open up processes of recognition and translation to disagreement, negotiation, to the taking of time, and the re-adjustment of relationships in the room. At the same time the differentiality of socio-spatial practices is exposed; both between the different disabled and Deaf people present in the room, and between these particular disabled and non-disabled people and their stereotypical ‘namings’. These various stutterings are built on a mixture of consensus, tensions, contradictions, mismatches or unintended consequences. Challenging the 'normal' then, I suggest, is very much about this taking time and attending to difference, so as to refuse the assumed obviousness and transparency of what happens in specific situations and material settings. Here starting from disability becomes - returning to Erevelles - not only a "legitimate and relevant position from which to address such broad subjects as literature, philosophy, and the arts", but also a central, relevant and creative place to begin re-thinking contemporary cultural and architectural theories.
References
Sarah Ahmed Strange Encounters embodied others in post-coloniality Routledge 2000
Homi Bhabha (1994) The Location of Culture Routledge
Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert (eds) (2005) Deleuze and Space Edinburgh University Press
Creal, L. D. (2006). The “Disability of Thinking” the “Disabled” Body Course paper for Ambiguous Bodies: Studies in Contemporary Sexuality course paper, York University, Toronto, Canada: http://www.normemma.com/indxarti.htm (accessed 12/12/06)
Davis, J. L. (1995) Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body Verso
Davis, J. L. Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism and other difficult positions New York University Press, 2002
Erevelles, N. (1997). ‘Re-Constituting the ‘Disabled’ Other: Historical Materialism and the Politics of Schooling’ Paper presented at Annual Meeting of the American Research Association Chicago, March 24 – 27. (Accessed 01/12/06)
Elizabeth Grosz Space Time and Perversion Routledge 1995
Elizabeth Grosz Architecture from the Outside MIT Press 2001
Donna Haraway “The persistence of vision” in Nicholas Mizoeff (ed) The Visual Culture Reader Routledge 1998 p193
Ellen Samuels “Critical Divides: Judith Butler’s Body Theory and the Question of Disability” 2002 NWSA Journal, Vol. 14 No. 3 (Fall)
Tom Shakespeare and Mairian Corker (eds) Disability/postmodernity; embodying disability theory Continuum 2002