In this second edition of Foucault and the Government of Disability there are four new chapters in Part V, ‘Disability and Governmentality in the Present’, but it is a book worth reading from the start for the first time and for the second time. This review cannot cover Foucault’s work but aims to convey something of its value and impact that the authors offer in their highly engaging chapters. Tremain introduces Foucault’s work by explaining bio-power and the mode of governmentality that emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century. Bio-power differs from sovereign power and repression; the growth of social institutions, work, insurance systems, and so on, are normalising strategies, individualised and taken up by individuals. Liberalism, she states, occurs though auto-critique; its oppositional mode is its form of governmentality:
One of the most original features of Foucault’s analysis is the idea that power functions best when it is exercised through productive constraints, that is, when it enables subjects to act in order to constrain them (Tremain 2001, 2002). (13; original emphasis)
Analysis entails examination of what is seen as natural, social, ethical and liberatory. Chapters identify the ways that disabled people experience and resist the effects of bio-power and show how normalising strategies link to wider discourses such as legal and welfare systems, the democratic nation-state, patriarchy and colonialism. We see how violence can occur, not as a result of a top-down power, but as an effect of bio-power where ‘disability’ and ‘ability’ define citizenship, human and unthought human.
In Part I, ‘Epistemologies and Ontologies’, analysis is not limited to ideas or language but the accounts, practices, places, subjectivities produced and resisted. Sullivan examines the everyday experience of people in a centre for paraplegics where individuals are subject to medical and moral discourses towards the ‘self-caring para’. Yates discusses the experience of microphysics of power in a care service where individuals know what ‘you’ have to do, what ‘you’ are not permitted to do. Both chapters show how individuals recognise the effects such as pain and punishment and become docile or resist. These ways of being and understandings of reality show us that these are not examples of ‘poor practice’ or types of individual but the effects of continuous normalising strategies that contribute to wider societal discourses. Erevelles presents two court scenarios over a century apart in which evidence of the ‘free’ and ‘autonomous’ subject is sought to determine culpability. Similarly the category of autism is constantly contested and yet the label flourishes as the basis for education ‘programmes’. Kumari Campbell explains that the free and autonomous human, the legal citizen, is in a duality with the ‘terror’ of the Other, unthought human; ‘disability’ is supplementary to ‘ability’.
In ‘Histories’, Part II, chapters highlight the ways these discourses operate as multiple, constantly changing practices that can appear linear and progressive. Carlson examines the turn from institutionalising people deemed ‘feebleminded’ in the nineteenth century to measurement of IQ in the twentieth century, and suggests that when we see the incoherence and effects of such classification, we can no longer ‘speak for’ people. Berger reminds us that institutionalisation was unheard of prior to the period of Enlightenment. In her history of nineteenth-century institutions for deaf children in America, she discusses the links between prestigious buildings, science, God and nation-state discourses and docile subjects deserving of charity or resisting and still contributing to that productive life. Snigurowicz examines how being exhibited or exhibiting was banned in France in the 1800s as medical discourse prevailed over superstitious and religious discourses around disability. Performers moved from stage to streets to cafes according to the proliferation of permits and laws. Their ‘art’ gave way to displays of accomplishment as a ‘self made man’; an ideal core to meritocracy.
In Part III, ‘Governmentality’, analysis of the links between the individual and the totalising practices shows individual freedom to be a social matter. Waldschmidt discusses new techniques and rationalities of human genetics. Categories of risk and individuals in that group become the risk to population security. The genetic counsellor does not advise the mother; as an autonomous individual she will make a decision as if risk had been detected, rather than the probability calculation, as the only normal act. Simons and Masschelein discuss inclusion in education not in terms of disabled children’s inclusion but the inclusion of all as stakeholders in a diverse democratic society. Matching the unique individual with good instruction is the education enterprise with skills in participation a key focus:
Social relations are now regarded as the outcome of enterprising activities of individuals. (216)
Individual and totalising practices are also found in Drinkwater’s study of supported housing in the Valuing People UK policy context. Staff valued behaviour, sharing their entries in ‘the book’ as a team to persuade behaviour compliance:
Perhaps it is in the very moment of valuing ‘the person’ (the instance of greatest ethical commitment) that support services exert their greatest subjectifying force, the end of which is the production of a citizen well integrated into the given constitutional framework – of rights, responsibilities, and equal opportunities. (234)
Description of the tactics of power and strategies of freedom is advanced to open up a ‘critical space’.
From a different angle authors identify the multiple practices that do exclude disabled people. Anderson examines the American sports stadium and despite requirements in equality legislation and successful lawsuits, what is deemed normal and deviant is built into routes in, types of tickets, view from seats, booking notice required, and so on, separating those deemed normal and deviant. Goggin and Newell analyse the proliferation of telecommunications and convergence of media tracing its spread, its inaccessibility and its normative marketing purpose. Again despite again legal requirements and successful lawsuits, successive laws have endorsed ‘add on’ technology rather than demanded investment to determine accessibility individualising disability.
The practices of bio-power are made visible and strategies of resistance and transgression are recognised as vital and dangerous. In Part IV, ‘Ethics and Politics’, Allan outlines an ethical project as a conversational work in progress for inclusive education. Rather than non-disabled students developing sympathy and social skills as voiced in her study, they would be using skills to question themselves as would staff. Disabled students would also undertake ethical work together to develop their desires. Morgan tells us the ‘true story’ of Gender DiMorph Utopia, a story about extensive and multiple, intimate micro practices and totalising macro practices. Speaking out about ‘naturalizing theories that justify violent patriarchy’ (319) and publishing subjugated knowledges (that are also discursive but not of that episteme) is key, and also dangerous as hostility and further disciplinary techniques can proliferate.
In Part V, ‘Disability and Governmentality in the Present’, Peers provides a genealogical auto-ethnography of the supercrip narrative and its practices:
I learned, trained, and paid to move like a hyper-able inspirational athlete, and both this movement and this training became components of my very embodiment and subjectivity. (338)
She rejects this ‘inspirational’ docile subjectivity and takes up that of the ‘revolting gimps’, the non hyper-able disabled relegated to the bottom of the social hierarchy:
Practices of empowerment lead us to believe that the activist path to social change involves even greater engagement with the disciplinary practices and the liberal ‘empowering’ regimes that subject us. (345)
McGuire also alerts us to the dangerousness of advocacy drawing commonalities between the ‘war on autism’ and the ‘war on terror’ in the United States. The militaristic turn enshrined in US law on autism makes all aware of its terror, its prevalence and its spread. Despite immediate opposition from the autistic community, ‘awareness’ material is replaced by film of parents and children endorsing the message. The ‘war on terror’ also uses dividing statements of civilised life and terror. The spread of both epidemics must be stopped at airports or prenatal screening for normative life is to be secured.
In the final two chapters the authors explain why they refuse to engage with questions about the value of life. When the status of human is questioned with regards to learning disability, Taylor explains that violence goes unrecognised and grief is unexpected. She shifts attention to the conditions in which such questions emerge and suggests suspension of universalising judgement as an action to take in the midst of such debates. Kolarova analyses how choosing a ‘good death’ has emerged (over ‘good health) and suggests we ask what is the impact of practices such as assisted suicide for disabled people and examine the white supremacist rationality in the outsourcing of care services in ‘paradise’ in the Global South.
The book includes debates about Foucault’s work around what some see as the absence of the material and the body. In his chapter, Hughes is critical of what he sees as Foucault’s non-material view of the ‘docile body’. He favours phenomenology where the body is both subject and object and argues that disability politics requires emancipatory conception of power. Other chapters do not present this view, as already shown. Allen states that Foucault’s work is all about the body, power is deployed directly to the body, but he argues both discourses and the subject are social. Goggin and Newell identify longstanding repressive forms of power and are critical of the view that there is no central oppression.
For me, Foucault and the Government of Disability demanded that I question ethics, empowerment and inclusion. It also demands that I think about how I do that. I do have a question about duality. While chapters highlight the incoherence of disability and ability, the book does seem to leave ‘staff’, counsellors and coaches as non-disabled, but perhaps that is a different book.
Department of Social Work, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK
[email protected]
© 2016 Tillie Curran
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2016.1141572