Disability and the promises of technology: Technology, subjectivity and embodiment within an order of the normal

Abstract

The topic of this article is the promises of technology for disabled people. The starting point is that disabled is not something one is but something one becomes, and, further, that disability is enacted and ordered in situated and quite specific ways. The question, then, is how people become, and are made, disabled – and, in particular, what role technologies and other material arrangements play in enabling and or disabling interactions. Drawing on a study of the uses of new technologies in the lives of disabled people in Norway, and recent work in disability studies as well as social studies of science and technology, this article explores precisely what positions and capacities are enabled; how these are made possible in practice; the specific configuration of subjectivity, embodiment and disability that emerges; and the limits to this mode of ordering disability and its technologies. The argument is that in this context the mobilization of new technologies works to build an order of the normal and turn disabled people into competent normal subjects. However, this strategy based on compensation achieves its goals only at a very high price: by continuing to reproduce boundaries between abled and disabled, and normal and deviant, which constitute some people as disabled in the first place. There are thus limits to normalization. And so, notwithstanding their generative and transformative power, technologies working within an order of the normal are implicated in the (re)production of the asymmetries that they and it seek to undo.

Keywords:

• disability
• technology
• subjectivity
• ordering
• normalisation

Notes

1 The article builds on a study of new technologies in the lives of disabled people conducted in Norway in the period 1996–2003. It consisted of several parts, focusing respectively on Norwegian ICT policies for the disabled, user–producer cooperation in the development of technical aids, the uses of new technologies in everyday life, and ways of becoming disabled after road traffic accidents. The first three parts were funded by the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs in Norway, the latter by a university grant. The technologies I looked at were, broadly defined, categorized as ‘ICT based technical aids’. I did not, however, look at these aids in isolation, but in relation and interaction with other kinds of technologies and material arrangements in people's everyday lives. Altogether I interviewed 30 disabled people, and half of the group I visited a number of times over several years. The research subjects were partly recruited through disabled people's associations, partly through IT units and regional centres for technical aids, and partly through network and snowball techniques. In order to protect the confidentiality and anonymity of interviewees, their identities have been disguised.

2 It should be noted that normalization is but one mode of ordering disability – and yet a dominating one in the context of the Norwegian welfare state. Public policy on disability became founded on a principle of normalization as early as 1967, and, despite changes in the rhetoric and discourse of public policy, it still works to normalize, in practice, through the strategy of compensation it is built upon. I will return to this later on. The social movement related to Wolfensberger was one element that contributed to articulate and translate normalization into healthcare professions, disability discourse and disability policy, but not the only one. The formulation of a public disability policy was informed by critiques and debates within social science, healthcare professions, the press, an emerging disability movement, disability movements in other countries, an action for ‘justice for the disabled’, etc. It is this collection, articulation and translation of multiple voices and actions into a welfare state ideology and a public policy that has become embedded in an extensive apparatus of public services and measures, that lends the normalizing mode of ordering its strength in the ordering of disability today. So, accordingly, the production of an order of the normal that I explicate here refers to a much broader ‘movement’ and discourse, enacting itself in and becoming circulated into many other locations and practices than those of healthcare professions. Although there are already existing alternatives, including for instance passion and fate, my concern here is with this extensively circulating order of the normal. The reason for this is that the technologies, or technical aids, that are made available to disabled people in Norway are (almost without exception) provided by the state through the National Insurance system, and so also work within this mode of ordering. On alternative modes of ordering disability, see Moser (2003, 2005).

3 Actor-network studies are better characterized by how they proceed than by what they claim. And I use ‘studies’ rather than ‘theory’ advisedly, because ANT is not a theory but rather an approach, a set of methodological principles and a vocabulary, and perhaps even a relational ontology (Latour 1999, 2005; Law 1994, 2004). Its advice is to set out with as few assumptions about what there is in the world, and how its elements are related, as possible. The aim is to proceed from this undetermined framework and trace the unfolding of path or order building. One should not make a priori distinctions between entities and actors, or define in advance what kind of entities might be granted agency and explanatory force. One should thus not privilege human agency or the social in the first instance. The unit of analysis should instead be relations and interactions, or the heterogeneous practices that carry and produce relations. If we follow this methodological advice, it turns out that both agency and subjectivity are distributed and attributed across a wide set of materials, objects and entities that go into practices, and much more widely so than is usually assumed in social theory. Just as objects are made to be, so agents are made to do. Worlds and realities are not simply socially shaped and constructed, then, but rather made possible in a materially heterogeneous set of relations and interactions. This draws on the one hand on anthropological and ethnomethodological traditions, which assume that agency as well as order emerge in and through interaction, and on the other hand on a French, non-essentialist historical and philosophical tradition deriving for instance from Canguilhem and Foucault's work. Indeed, actor-network studies need to be understood within this tradition of empirical philosophy, which empirically investigates the specific and localized conditions for both knowing and realities, and the generativity both of discourses and of a much wider set of relations and interactions that Foucault referred to as ‘dispositifs’ (Foucault 1981). These intellectual debts are acknowledged for instance in Law (1994, 2004) and Mol (1999, 2002).

4 In order to capture the collective yet materially heterogeneous and so never purely ‘social’ character of social realities, and also to avoid the usual a priori distinctions between nature and society, human and non-human, much STS work uses the notion of ‘collective’ instead of ‘social’. See for instance Callon & Law (1995). In the following I adopt this usage.

5 Law (1994, p. 95). In the following I also adopt the term ‘mode of ordering’. It treats social order as a verb rather than a noun, as an ongoing, precarious and recursive process, and stresses the material heterogeneity as well as the multiplicity and complexity of social ordering. It also implies a move from a focus on network construction – or how relations become structured and fixed in place and made durable in networks – to the much more precarious, ongoing and never finished enactment of ordering. The construction of a network according to this is only one possibility.

6 TV2 was the first commercial broadcasting company in Norway, and is the biggest competitor to the national broadcasting channels.

7 There is a national system for the distribution of technical aids, and the rights to these aids are established by law in the Act of National Insurance. I quote: ‘People with permanent impairment of functions have a right to technical aids when these are necessary and appropriate to acquire or stay in suitable employment, to improve the ability to function in daily life or to be cared for at home.’ § 10-7 in ‘Lov om folketrygd’ [Act on Social Insurance] av 28.2.1997 nr. 19.

8 The term ‘subjectivity’ appears within neither disability discourse, nor disability policy documents, nor less articulated practices in everyday life. The terms used here are the medical and biological notions of ‘cognitive faculties’ or ‘cognitive functions’, which add up to a more general ‘cognitive competence’. The way this is constituted is as a capability of the brain, to do with cognition, that is with thinking, reasoning, knowing and consciousness. I, however, will stick to the term ‘subjectivity’. The reason is that the term ‘cognitive faculties’ seems to deny other embodiments of those capabilities than that of the brain.

9 The environmental control system thus works to draw things together, as Bruno Latour has put it (1992).

10 Even if in daily practice things are ragged, there is a discernible pattern to this ordering. As part of this, a particular configuration of the subject emerges, too. The excerpts of data mobilized here are treated as symptoms of such unfolding ordering. There is of course not enough space in this article to demonstrate how this gets expressed in the data in the fullest sense. See Moser (2003).

11 It can be argued that these are clearly gendered subjectivities, and that what is enacted here is not only disability but also gender, and in particular a quite specific form of masculine gender. I have explored such intersections between gender, disability and class in Moser (2006, forthcoming).

12 This is parallel to Bruno Latour's (1993) argument that processes of purification and hybridization are at work simultaneously: bounded, centred, independent, individualized actors appear to be detached individuals with inherent subjective capacities and agencies – but they still rest upon attachment, distribution and hybridization. Jarle's environmental control system is exemplary here: unlike most other systems, it hides the networks in the walls and in infra-red beams, and so contributes to let at least parts of Jarle's embodiments disappear into the background.

13 This formulation is from the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs (2001) White Paper 22: From Users to Citizens. A Strategy to Knock down Disabling Barriers, p. 41 [NOU 2001: 22, Fra bruker til borger. En strategi for å bygge ned funksjonshemmende barrierer].

14 This conceptualization of disability inadvertently takes for granted and naturalizes the normal from which a reduced function then deviates, and builds a compensatory model of disability rather than one that opens up and accommodates differences. Here I would like to quote a salient commentary by disability activist Eli Knösen: ‘A discrepancy between my capabilities and society's demands. But what is that? Imagine one said something equivalent about racism. That the exclusion of coloured people is due to a misfit between the individual biological condition and the looks, colour of skin, and ethnicity demanded by the social environment?’ In interview in Handikap-nytt, the newsletter of the Norwegian Association of the Disabled (NHF), vol. 4/2000, p. 27.

15 This has also recently been developed in disability studies, for instance in Thomson (1997a).

16 The boundary performed between body and mind, the devaluation of the body, the idea of disembodied mind, its role for the figure of the ‘modest witness’ on which academic work has become based, have all been thoroughly discussed in feminist work. For one influential version of this, see Haraway (1991, 1997). My interest here is in the actual enactment of this boundary and how it is made possible – or not.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ingunn Moser

Ingunn Moser is a researcher in the Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo. She has been working in the fields of science and technology studies and disability studies for a decade. She has investigated disabled people's uses of new technical aids and been involved in evaluations of Norwegian ICT policies for the disabled. Her PhD dissertation was Road Traffic Accidents: The Ordering of Subjects, Bodies and Disability (2003).