Figuring disability
Kate Kaul, York University in Toronto, Canada
Abstract
Felix Guattari suggests, "...in a certain sense people who are operating on the level of social sciences or on the level of politics ought to 'make themselves schizophrenic'...I mean that we should have the schizophrenic's capacity to range across fields" (83). Margrit Shildrick asks, "what are the figures of difference that haunt the western imaginary, and what would it mean to reflect on, rework and valorise them?" (103). Shildrick uses monstrous corporeality to explore embodiment and subject relations; Guattari uses the figure of the schizophrenic to imagine the possibilities of inter-disciplinary work.
The language of post-modern writing relies heavily on what can be read as images of disability (blindness, madness, cyborg bodies) and which are often presented as an inability to read the world; at the same time, these images of disability are supposed to clarify; metaphor makes the world readable, comprehensible. This paper considers not just images but the discursive tactics of post-modernism, treating Guattari's text as a particular and political textual figuring of disability which confines the schizophrenic to metaphor, outside of any possible subject -- or even object -- of writing. The paper also considers Shildrick's attempt to re-figure the category of the monstrous and its implications for disabled people as an engagement with the politics of writing. The use (and ongoing production) of disability as a category of hyper-visibility, of incoherence, or of metaphorical, symbolic meaning, leaves disability in the figurative; this paper argues that shifting the discursive function of disability is a political, semiotic, project which is crucial to a critical disability studies.