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PhD Thesis: 'Distributing Disability: Embodied Difference, Technology, and the Human''
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This paper discusses how everyday technologies contribute to the enaction of disability, in particular by continually frustrating the formation of a general sense of ease in the world. It suggests that bodies have a fundamental relationality, within which technology comprises a central aspect; and that the very entity called the human is constituted through relationships with technologies. Then, it considers two ways that the organisation of technology is involved in the realisation of both ability and disability. First, it describes how the distribution of technological resources for activity are centred around bodies that are attributed normality and correctness, which also de-centres bodies falling outside this category: the former are enabled to act while the latter are not. Second, it proposes that ability and disability also involve habit: activities that have not only been repeated until familiar, but in which body and technologies can be forgotten. That typical bodies are centred allows them to develop robust habitual relationships with technological environments in which body and technologies can recede from attention, and crucially, to acquire a sense that their engagements will generally be supported. Atypical bodies, as de-centred, lack this secure ground: they cannot forget their relations with environments, and cannot simply assume that these will support their activity. This erodes bodily confidence in a world that will support the projects, whether ordinary or innovative, that constitute a life.
'Inhuman’ can denote that something is dehumanising or that it lies outside of the category ‘human’. In the first sense, it could refer to the kind of inhuman gaze proposed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This pins another down as an object, denuding them of their full significance, and thereby precludes the conditions necessary for a fully human ethical relation. This chapter sketches how common understandings of disability might be thought of as ‘dehumanising’. If disability is bound up with articulation of the human, humanist resources are inadequate with regard to ethical questions concerning atypical bodies that overspill conventional human parameters. The chapter outlines why responses to dehumanisation that appeal to the category of the human are inapt. By considering the relationship between bodies and technology, it also outlines some alternative and positive senses of the inhuman.
In this paper I talk about very basic kinds of technology, and how these contribute to the enaction of disability. I first sketch some commonplaces concerning the body and technology, before outlining my own position on these: that the body has a fundamental relationality, of which technology comprises an aspect. Then I outline inter-mundane technology (a low level artefactuality that supports activity while falling outside awareness, so that its contribution goes unacknowledged and the activity appears natural) and the technological unconscious (habituated expectation about how the world is). Finally, I discuss how norms materialised in inter-mundane technologies lead to one way disability gets enacted, to erode bodily confidence in the world.
This paper addresses disability and technology through the work of Gilbert Simondon. Here, an individual—living or technical—is not a self-contained substance, but one phase in a process of individuation, relative to what he calls the preindividual: a share of unfixed potential for becoming, that makes individuation’s trajectory, in principle, open. This informs following criticism of two understandings of technology. First, that it is a utility to realise human ends. I suggest that technologies are also depositories of meaning. Their development does not allow increasing mastery by a human essence that remains the same throughout, but is one dimension of the ongoing invention of the human. However, I also reject as essentialist and anthropocentric Bernard Stiegler’s ontological proposal that the ‘being-prosthetic’ of the human is due to an originary vulnerability or lack, and that the human is different in kind from everything nonhuman on account of technology. The human is one trajectory within living individuation, and is united not by lack but potentiality for differentiation. This leads to consideration of relations between technology and disability other than utility or prosthesis-as- compensation (each of which presumes a whole they either extend or complete). Technology increasingly demarcates boundaries between the properly and improperly human: despite claiming pluralism, technological prognostication often involves circumscribed, overdetermined notions of valued (and disvalued) abilities. For Simondon, however, ‘perfecting’ a technology increases its ‘margin of indetermination’, or openness to different applications. Similarly, I will understand ‘technical ethics’ as repudiation of absolute closure within (human) individuality, for openness to untapped potentials traversing living bodies and technologies. Rather than use of machines to extend supposedly inherent abilities for the normative human, I advocate exploration of unactualised potential and invention of new modalities for living-with-machines.
Presentation from workshop with Donald A. Landes (Université Laval, Quebec) on his book 'Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression', at University College Dublin on 18 May 2016.
Organised by Luna Dolezal (Trinity College, Dublin / Durham University) and Danielle Petherbridge (University College Dublin).
This paper examines how abiding concepts of ability and function contribute to identification of impairment with deviation from normal health, then posits ‘normal ability’ as a socio- historical elaboration, and finally outlines an alternative normative framework grounded in capacities and goals of embodied agents.
In standard medical accounts disability describes morphological properties with negative health entailments, typically warranting intervention. Disability scholars, however, distinguish two kinds of entailment with biological or social provenance: impairment describes mere bodily facts and attendant limitations (not automatically warranting intervention); disability describes socially-instantiated discrimination flowing from negative assessment of impairment (demanding political response). However, I contest such bifurcation of existence into discrete strata, and that impairment remains a deviation from ‘normal’, ‘healthy’, ‘functioning’ morphology.
Without reevaluation of purportedly objective conceptions of ability and function, impairments remain identified with health decrements. I suggest that ability is instead historically contingent, meaning not that discourses differently mediate the selfsame biological objects. Rather, relational processes individuating human form and activity are developmental, contingent and overspill biological/social boundaries. And crucially, all such development involves ‘prosthetics’, and all human interaction is relationally-constituted and incorporates manifold props, broadly understood. Unqualified ability is a mystification.
Accordingly, I outline an alternate health concept eschewing ideal ability or comparison against normal state. This ‘existential phenomenological’ account involves critique of existing norms, and production of new, avowedly contingent ones appropriate to particular bodies, and their contexts and projects. A ‘healthy life’ is both critical and productive, and situates embodied experience within wider biosocial, technological and discursive relations.
