Learning disability and inclusion phobia: past, present and future

With this offering, Goodey continues to assert his position as one of the most important and trenchant critics of learning disability. In many respects, this work builds on his earlier volume, A History of Intelligence and ‘Intellectual Disability’ (Goodey 2011). However, where the former felt more akin to a clinical evisceration of the intertwined concepts of intelligence and intellectual disability, Learning Disability and Inclusion Phobia feels more like a shotgun blast, with a full load of highly diverse conceptual pellets, mostly, hitting their target. The result is not always pretty.

Goodey draws on a wide range of sources to construct his argument about the tendency of society towards ‘inclusion phobia’ and to create ‘outgroups’, which are radically excluded from society and its norms precisely so that those norms can be constructed and maintained. Rather than going over previously established terrain, Goodey largely takes as read the absurdity of imagining that ‘learning disability’ could ever be an actual objectively and inevitably existing thing. Instead, his sights here are set more on accounting for how the maintenance of this historically contingent and transitory concept are linked directly to the needs of modern society that elevates reason above all else as the definitive human characteristic.

Such is the rate at which the reader is presented with concepts from radically heterogeneous sources that the whole enterprise seems in danger of collapse at times; certainly, it is not always easy to understand how we are to put it all together. The central concept of ‘inclusion phobia’ draws mainly from cultural anthropology. However, the term is unhelpfully slippery. Insofar as a phobia or fear is a feeling, it is a psychological phenomenon. Groups can share such phobias, and often do, but these remain shared psychologies. The question arises, then, as to whether inclusion phobia is being used: to refer to mass, but shared and linked, individual states of mind; as an anthropomorphic metaphor to describe cultural phenomena, as though cultures were themselves in states of fear; or in an entirely different sense to denote actual social and cultural processes, their mechanisms and determinants. The trouble is that the concept appears to try to all of these things. Indeed, Goodey’s suggestion that it be included in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders seems to situate it at the level of an individual pathology, notwithstanding the fact that most if not all of the Manual seems untenable in light of his approach.

Ultimately, I found the concept of ‘inclusion phobia’ to be unsustainable and lacking in coherence, although the amount of conceptual bricolage attached to it certainly did not help. A fourth possibility for such a concept, not one realised, was simply that it was an effective critical tool for historical and cultural analysis. Alternatively, perhaps, Kristeva’s (1982) account of ‘abjection’, which does a more effective job of bridging the psychological and cultural, or geographers’ studies of ‘liminality’ (for example, Sibley 1995), would have provided a more effective theoretical platform.

Nonetheless, Goodey does demonstrate the absolutely vital role of history in the critical enquiry of any idea or practice. Without it, studies of any aspect of human existence, whatever that might mean, remain skewed, impoverished or downright specious. In two of the book’s latter chapters he demonstrates this by turning his pitiless glare onto the creation of autism. On clinical, conceptual and practical levels, Goodey reveals the circular and self-generating basis on which autism rests. He links the ‘diagnostic explosion’ (28) of autism among children in the late 1990s to inclusion phobia and the shifting polarity of the exclusion away from the axis of intelligence, towards the more encompassing one of capacity for social being, as constituted by autism. Autism, he observes, now attracts more attention and funding in universities than does learning disability, and also attracts greater funding and professional kudos in the education system. Whether, however, his withering critique is absolutely dependent on the idea of ‘inclusion phobia’ is questionable.

One important challenge that the book raises for disability studies and politics is that, protestations aside, the reality is that learning disability remains marginal to both. The foundation for the critiques of the exclusion of women, ethnic minorities and, more recently, disabled people was to challenge the incorrect assumption that they were less capable of reason than white males. No such challenge is possible for those whose status is the very definition of that social exclusion. Goodey suggests that, other than sharing the term ‘disability’, there is an essential difference between the social categories of learning disability and physical disability.

Whilst Goodey is generally accurate in his critiques of other theorists, he does occasionally miss the mark. Perhaps the greatest shame here is his misreading of Agamben, who might have provided some succour to his position. Goodey suggests that, for Agamben, the excluded and devalued become reduced by eugenics to the level of homo sacer, and thus ‘bare life’. In fact, Agamben’s suggestion goes much further. He suggests that, with the failure to securely attach the notion of ‘human’ to anything other than biology, we are all reduced to homines sacer. It is this contemporary problem that also gives transhumanism (and post-humanism) critical traction. However, despite making numerous appeals to a putative personhood for all, Goodey never entirely spells out any post-Lockean basis for it.

Although Goodey’s central target of ‘inclusion phobia’ is positioned at the very centre of human, at least western, society, he is neither a utopian idealist nor a political pessimist. Whilst the book does not conclude with a blueprint for social change, Goodey identifies two key aspects of progressive political action in defence of people with learning disabilities. First, to put pressure on the political indifference that allows even progressive policies to go unimplemented because no-one cares enough about an outgroup to ensure that they are. Second, to overcome the cowardice that allows the ‘narcissistic bullying’ (165) of people with learning disabilities in their everyday lives to go on unchallenged.

Learning Disability and Inclusion Phobia ends on a relatively optimistic note that person-centred planning (PCP) has the potential to effect changes to the ‘tectonic plates of abuse’ (165). Whilst this may be true, PCP itself has to be situated within a historically contingent context of neoliberal individualism, which the analysis does not entirely do. Also, Goodey dismisses other professional perspectives for their ‘distorting lenses … [which] … steal … personal identities … at birth’ (165), thus implying that there is a pre-social identity at birth there to be taken. Whatever that might look like, Goodey is surely correct to situate progressive politics in ‘the minutiae of daily practice’ (165), where the everyday struggles for recognition and inclusion take place.

Murray K. Simpson
School of Education and Social Work, University of Dundee, Dundee, UK
[email protected]
© 2016 Murray K. Simpson
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2016.1198555