Writing about disability history has many potential pitfalls. Roughly, you can either be empirically meticulous and boring, or you can be theoretically and analytically broad-minded, and thus exciting for those who are unconcerned with empirical evidence but insignificant for those who are. Or at least this is the way I have seen historical scholarship about disability. Pieter Verstraete’s book is not a historical treatise as such but, rather, a theoretical study about the formation of disability and disabled identity in the West during the past 200 years or so.
In the Shadow of Disability draws heavily from Foucault’s work, which the author is openly very much in love with. Personally, I have never been all that excited about Foucault; I have found his analyses fascinating but written often in an unnecessarily complicated manner. Also, I have been uncomfortable with his broad-minded (mis)use of empirical data. Naturally, my perspective on Foucauldian scholarship is probably skewed due to my ignorance as well as my own theoretical premises that are partly incompatible with Foucauldian views.
To me, Verstraete’s book seems like a treatise written to other Foucault believers. A reader with postmodern leanings will probably be impressed by the various original/unconventional analogies and references in this book. Someone educated according to the conventions of analytic philosophy, like myself, may feel just completely stunned – be out like a snowman (idiom that makes perfect sense to Finns, but very little to Aussies).
To an extent, different schools of thought and resulting academic turfs are inevitable. Having said that, scholars should aim to write in a way that their analyses are at least in principle accessible and comprehensible to readers from foreign intellectual terrains. My intellectual capacities, and especially my understanding of Foucault’s work, are likely inadequate to be able to appreciate fully Foucauldian analyses. Whatever the truth is, the truth is that I really do not know what this book is all about.
The book starts with a depiction of an old photograph taken in the early 1900s where a woman and a man are riding a tandem bicycle. This is all that can be seen in it without additional information – which Verstraete fortunately provides: the woman was called Katie McGirr who was deaf-blind, and the man Mr Cook, who worked at the New York Institute for the Deaf. Verstraete is ‘bewildered by this thought-provoking photograph’ because of the fact that the deaf-blind Katie McGirr is sitting in front of the tandem and presumably steering it. What follows is a logical step in the analysis that for me contains too many elements of a leap of faith:
the picture … symbolizes the continuous plea for independence and participation … [it] reflects some of the contemporary discussions related to the central concept of disability identity … [and it] reflects a tendency to consider disabled people as citizens whose talents and potentialities should not be relegated to well-hidden institutional complexes. (23)
I stared at the photograph long and hard, but I was unable to see any of this. I continued to read and hoped that the following analysis would justify the previous conclusions, but I hoped in vain. Verstraete aims to unpack disability history with devices such as shadow metaphor, Walter Benjamin’s allegory of chess-automaton with its reference to a ‘hunchbacked dwarf’, and with an analysis of solitude and solitary practices that ‘instigated the transformation of disability into a problem for human thought’ (83). I was bewildered by these analyses as they seemed random and their relation to disability too often simply artificial.
Partly this may be the result of the disorganized narration of the book. I found reading the book extremely difficult because the author did not take the trouble to inform the reader how the plot will proceed, or did not follow it in the first place. On page 33 the author makes a narrative effort to inform what he is about to do by stating two questions: whether ‘non-disabled people are eligible for doing disability history’ and how disability history could be done in a way ‘that the dangers attached to the contemporary politics of identity are avoided’. After posing these questions, the discussion digresses immediately. I was not able to find any answer to the latter question, but regarding the first question Verstraete seemed to suggest that the problem is solved by rejecting the artificial distinction between disability and able-bodiedness, able-bodied and disabled people. As a result, we would apparently be able to:
consider the shadow not as a negative artefact of particular obstacles that were placed between the sun and man, but rather as a source of inspiration that might lead us to a new path for thinking about disability politics: one that evades a dichotomous terminology. (43)
In my view, the last chapter, ‘The Politics of Activity’, is clearly the best part of the book. It connects disability into poverty and citizenship by discussing various social processes and interventions that aimed at making disabled people productive and proper. Unfortunately, the chapter (and the book) ends just when it started to get interesting.
I love Paul Auster’s fiction. It contains abstruse parables that go completely over my head. And that is fine, being confused is part of the pleasure of reading fiction. But when I read academic texts, especially philosophy, I expect my fuzzy thoughts to be cleared; I want to be told loud and clearly who the murderer is. But that’s just me. For those who are not all that fussy about the difference between Auster and Aristotle, Verstraete’s book will probably work just fine.
University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
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© 2014, Simo Vehmas
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2014.905283