Disability and Poetics

See the provocative and problematic "Manifesto of the Disabled Text" recently posted to the International Exchange for Poetic Invention: http://poeticinvention.blogspot.com/2008/06/manifesto-of-disabled-text.html

Here's my reply, as posted to the comments box on that site.

Reply to “Manifesto of the Disabled Text” (http://poeticinvention.blogspot.com/2008/06/manifesto-of-disabled-text.html)

What Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson are doing in their manifesto is appropriating "disability" as a vehicle. Disability is then subsumed in the metaphorical thrust to transgress literary decorum. I deeply sympathize with what seems to be the actual argument: that certain literary conventions, from formal to linguistic conventions, are linked to identity politics with material ramifications, even collusions, for socio-political oppression. This broad argument is worth inflecting in the context of the social model of disability, but we need to be careful that we do as much justice to that context as we do to the issues of cross-cultural and hermeneutic progress implied by the attention the manifesto duly links to translation.

In my own work, I have been willing to push the term pretty far within the bounds of the social model, as I understand it, and with some stake in it beyond rhetoric, as I am both a poet and legally disabled. But this manifesto, at the very least, lacks any palpable self-reflexive gesture, wherein we could find a way to animate some heretofore neglected aspect of disability studies itself. In this sense, by failing to speak for its putative identity-formation, it doesn't really earn the appellation "manifesto."

It seems that deploying disability as a critical category means a category of "impairment" is necessary, too. There's nothing like that here. It's disavowed, in fact. The real social conditions of difference that the field is poised to illuminate disappear.

I have thought through these problems in two forthcoming articles, in Contemporary Women’s Writing and the Journal of Modern Literature, respectively. I’d paste in my very brief piece--“Toward a Post-Ableist Poetics”—if it weren’t yet forthcoming in the 20th anniversary issue of XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics. After it’s out, I’ll drop it in to the thread at the Non-Site Collective (http://www.nonsitecollective.org/node/397), where Eleni Stecopoulos, Amber DiPietra, and others are doing interesting and certainly related work. And finally, someone who’s probably done more to tease out the implications of the relationship of “disability” to “impairment” (i.e. what he calls “complex embodiment) is Tobin Siebers. His new book will be crucial in this regard: http://www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=309723

--Patrick F. Durgin

“What will an investigation of disability and poetics look like? Strange, asymmetrical, twitchy and enlivening, I hope.” (Amber DiPietra)

I’m writing to respond to and voice my support and admiration for Amber DiPietra’s post on how local writers might interact with disability studies in challenging and useful ways. Amber’s is one of the most cogent and important calls to the poetry world I've read in quite a while. Her articulation of what’s at stake, the pitfalls of what we might call “official” disability literature, the potential role of poetics, have helped me to clarify my own thinking as I work with Steve Dickison and Elise Ficarra on potential programming that would explore the poetics of embodiment, illness, medicine. Although the two concerns are not the same, they both entail a desire for a poetics of somatic practice that moves away from “therapeutic” narratives toward writing experiments that do cultural work through other means, including formal innovation, opacity, visceral intelligence. Such experiments necessarily entail a fundamental rethinking of how form relates to “content,” of how writing and art might relate to “physical impairment.”

The Poetry Center event with Robert Kocik and Eric Greenleaf was the first of what we hope will become a series of events enacting a dialogue between artists, health practitioners, scholars, and patients. (Like all Poetry Center events, this event was videotaped and archived, and is available for viewing.) We seek to draw upon, and put into conversation, Bay Area traditions and strengths in poetry, biomedicine, and "alternative" or holistic or heterodox healing. I have to thank Amber for reminding me that the Bay Area has been the leader in the Disability Rights movement as well—-in all of these fields, vanguard practices, activism, and ethos make the Bay Area a privileged place for the experiment Amber calls for and for the experiment Elise, Steve, and I would like to see.

As Rob Halpern said at this weekend’s Small Press Traffic conference, communities are formed as much by exclusion as they are by affiliation. Along with who is included in, or excluded from, “community,” we might think of who is even visible and who has access, at multiple levels, to enter into the spaces in which those communities form—-access enabled or disabled by architecture and access enabled or disabled by a literary scene’s consciousness or lack thereof.

Amber’s call reminds me of those who are still rendered invisible when we talk about communities and diversity, when we speak of people of color, women, queer people, academics and “nonacademics,” but not of people with disabilities, not of patient/advocates, not of bodies that don’t signify necessarily or immediately as “resisting” or “cyber” or “transgressive” or don’t necessarily forefront questions around race, ethnicity, gender. It’s not, of course, that these communities are mutually exclusive, or that—-as someone [?] said this weekend, we even know what/who they are. Rob Halpern writes, “The body is the limit of what can and can’t be experienced as common: it’s the promise and the limit of community.” He raised the idea of community “as a negative, as a placeholder for something that’s not yet here, a potentiality as yet inactive…”

It seems to me there’s little consciousness of the difference of bodies, in terms of disability, and sensitivity, and illness, and conditions—-and how these differences can be both subject to, as well as transform, factors like access and form. Access, movement, form, symmetry are seen as transparent; anything that might diverge from the assumed forms gets rendered as invisible. It’s the aesthetics that, perhaps most tragically, are invisible—-what aesthetic challenges and innovation arise from conditions. We will all become disabled at some point. Constraints lead to rather than impede aesthetics. That’s not to say that art is a symptom or a product of the condition, but it does mean that conditions and aesthetics are sympathetic and this sympathy generates experiments and evolutions and revisions and reconfigurations.

“How can we have a dialogue around disability and poetics, not just at the political or social level, but at a generative level--one that begets new experiments in writing? To live with or study disability is to be constantly questioning form and constantly working toward formal innovation—whether that is through accessible architecture or the far reaches of cyber humanity. How can this be translated to syntax and the raw stuff of poetry?” (Amber DiPietra)

Poets who strive to realize social justice through formal and linguistic innovation can indeed “do better” than exercises in affirming identity or therapeutic/cathartic narratives. What we can do is not exercise but move—-become conscious of movement, breath, the forms our movement takes, the forms our access or lack of access or denial of access, found or fund. And yet I believe we can also reconfigure what “therapeutic” means, to retune it to older and more complex meanings, to see its work not as something normalizing and telic but as something ongoing and chronic, treating the present moment—recuperating time in that way.

“Aesthetics: the improvisation I make of my sensitivity syndrome.” (from _Idiopathic_.) Aesthetics can’t come but from the intelligence of our conditions. All our asymmetrical intelligent bodies. Disability founds aesthetics—-for all persons, not just those with disabilities. If we became conscious of that, perhaps we might start to see how all our conditions determine our forms, how architecture—-physical, social, legislative—-determines all our access. Robert Kocik enters in here: how can architecture, then, treat conditions of inaccess and facilitate aesthetics?

In writing this I’m wary of taking the focus away from people with disabilities, but at the same time I do aim to provoke empathy—-at the level of proprioception rather than toward catharsis, at a generative rather than pathetic level.

I’m going to quote from Robert Kocik’s "Proposal for Renovating The Feldenkrais Center in Manhattan" [posted under Curricula at http://nonsitecollective.org/node/428.]

"It’s more than a matter of air quality. ‘Respiration’ is the word I end up with. How can entering the room be like learning how to breath? Especially for children with motor difficulties...who have been less able to properly develop the muscles of respiration."

And continuing from his “Some Notes About The Built-Environment In Relation To The Feldenkrais Method”:

"My role is to provide an environment that helps practitioners and parents take part in the learning process of children with neuromotor difficulties. By focusing on the practical, material needs of The Field Center space, it’s possible to furnish an environment that effectively extends the somatosensory dialogue with which the Feldenkrais practitioner engages a child.

(If only subtly, and perhaps especially when nearly unnoticeably-- even while a built environment is, say, only backdrop for the kinesthetic loop between a practitioner and child--we’re suffused with our surroundings.)

As a body/mind practice opens awareness through movement, so may awareness be opened by means of the built environment. In this way, developmental exploration involves body/mind/built-environment.

. . .

At some point in every moment and in every movement the proprioceptive opens to and is opened by the exteroceptive. Just as a bodyworker assists motor development, the architect puts in place directed aesthetic information. This architected information, manifest as color, weight, texture, surface, position, configuration, utensil, table, window, etc (all based on the measure and pleasure of the body) is absorbed by the nervous system. The nervous system integrates this information as impetus and motor imagination. As such, a door handle or spoon is part of the extended afferent network, cycling signals back to the nervous system.

Designing an object as that which connects the exteroceptive to the kinesthetic is the work of body/mind/built. Design focused as such increases functionality on all levels.

Functionality, fluency, efficacy and flourishing make up another set of developmental correlates.

Awareness through interaction with the built environment is a matter of attuning and provisioning...and not a matter of challenging and imperiling. Instead of using design to double up or knot up the developmental process (by challenging the challenged), to increase agility body/mind/built seeks novel extremes in accommodation and facilitation. Not only for the benefit of children with developmental difficulties, but for anyone...freedom of movement is always a frontier. And without a sensitively correlated setting situated as far from the obstacle course of coercion as possible, we have no grounds for realizing that we’ve barely begun to function.

. . .

Just as the Feldenkrais Method offers the disabled a motor interchange that normally arises from one’s own movements, body/mind/built offers the nondisabled alternative sensory information that normally doesn’t arise from one’s habitual interactions.

. . .

Body/mind/built is a dialogue between ability and disability.

It’s not the disappearance of function in convenience and competence but the revealing of ways in which we’re constantly facilitated. It is a matter of trying to manifest the grace that sustains us.

Attention through furnishing is a positive neotony, extending the gestation period in which we massively acquire and rewire. It’s the setting that corresponds with the caring for each other which is all we have to ease or abolish the insults.

Gentle is more radical. More at the root of it.

By removing the distance between disability and ability, I don’t mean to diminish in any way the hardship of living with CP or PDD or ADHD. I do mean to suggest that development is lifelong if our works make us aware.

(Perhaps the greatest learning difficulty for the able-bodied is the learning to live with that which a child who has only ever lived with loss of function has always known.)"

Amber's entry prompted me to join in and contribute to this site--I have been working on articulating something of what a "post-ableist" poetics would look like. There is a short manifesto on this topic I have coming out in the forthcoming issue of XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics. I have two journal articles about to be published on this topic as well, in Contemporary Women's Writing and Journal of Modern Literature, respectively. The guiding principle that I've hit upon in writing these essays is that the discourses of disability studies and radical modernist poetics ("experimental," if you will) converge where two strains of disability studies discourse converge: that is, where considerations of "dependency" and "psycho-social" disability are concerned.

On one hand, you have someone like Lennard Davis writing of a "dismodernist ethic" based on a "rhizomatic" subjectivity--a fundamentally social, non-solipsistic subjectivity. On the other hand, you have "crip" poets whose modes of working are neoromantic, and whose concerns are centered around independence and reductive notions of embodiment (physical impairments are privileged). But take, for example, an experimental poet like Hannah Weiner. How does her work foreshadow the most radical articulations of disability as a critical category that not only implies but demands "the subject" be figured as a social entity. Weiner's work was deploying the so-called "social model" of disability without necessarily being motivated by the civil rights struggles specific to persons with disabilities. And this work was being done simultaneous to some of the most important, initial gains made in Bay Area disability activism.

If there is any documentation of the Kocic et al readings and workshops, I'd love to have access. I'm in Chicago, unfortunately.

More soon...

hi, just wanted to say this post is thot provoking. thanks.looking forward to this expanding...