Critical Disability Theory

In the emergence of critical disability theory from the binary of ability in disability theory, Rosemarie Garland Thompson, one of the founding mothers of disability theory, publishes Misfits. This shift reconceives disability as a wider process than physical, visible, and medical disability. In expanding the individualistic model of selfhood to relational, as affectively entwined with the wellbeing and care of all living beings, people, plants and animals, we gain a more comprehensive notion of disability. The concept of misfitting is a process of misfitting rather than a category of misfit; it captures the resistance we run into from what is considered ‘normality’. Garland Thompson constructs a social model of disability rather than a medical one. This model acknowledges that someone is only ‘disabled’ because they are part of a world where they’re deemed abnormal from. This presumption can find its way into social interactions or in architectural or legislative infrastructure for example. If disabled people formed a community they wouldn’t need to identify disability as anything other than the norm. Some people, however, never occupy this disabled ‘Us’. Racialized or BIPOC folk, women, medically disabled, and indigenous peoples will never be in this position of comfort.  GT’s position is reformist, it challenges the binary of ability and disability and grounds it in a spectrum of debilitation. Alot of us will experience some form of incremental deterioration through disability, wars, labor, and racialization. People employ different extents of ability and disability, some might be privileged by their manhood or whiteness, others worn down by a process of erosion launched by the environment, social atmosphere, by wars and labor too. GT thus capacitates both ability and disability through the material condition of possibility surrounding our being in the world. Critical disability theory expands the experiences that can considered from the framework of disability theory. For one, we can now understand the global south’s underdevelopment as a process of erosion launched by imperialism and colonialism; or illegal migrants as an especially precarious position without access to health care, resources or sickdays. Garland Thompson develops that ‘The future is disabled’. Growing old is becoming disabled. Eventually, most of us live to become disabled, we deteriorate. Different people will have different access to therapeutics, this is a measure of your identity or social privilege.    

Critical Ethical Vision

Alia Al-Saji’s Critical Ethical Vision discusses the ethical dimension of perception. In conversation with feminist philosophers Linda Martin and Kelly Oliver, both racializing and sexist perceptions are discussed under the same framework of objectifying vision. Al-Saji contrasts Merleau Ponty’s objectifying vision and his account of the painter’s vision; the later being closer to the kind of critical ethical vision that can “accommodate a critical reflection of its own conditions and an ethical attitude to the otherness of what it sees.” The practical remedy to “body-bound (and error-ridden)” viewing of the world as a collection of objects is to view it instead for its incorporeal, affective and unseen properties with the “Eye of the Mind” (375). Seeing rightly recognizes the essential and historical properties of a person, their dynamic volitional character, their spirit and heart with a unique, free, and autonomous will rather than the reductive properties of their bodies and the stereotypes that follow from the categories we classify these bodies in, stereotypes we’ve been socialized to sort bodies into most often incorrectly. 

Racist and sexist ways of seeing are habitually and socially apprehended to objectify the other. Al-Saji argues that critical vision offers an avenue for habits that don’t “make the world into objects.” With Oliver who claims a “loving vision” as an alternative, Al-Saji and Alcoff propose a more socially conscious ”anti-racist vision” that sees the “conditions, material, historical, social and discursive of racializing perception.” In turn, a feminist vision recognizes how bodies are gendered, excluded, and occluded based on their sex and gender (376). Al-Saji grounds critical-ethical vision in the attunement to affective “dimension generative of visibility” that takes up the memory of the “materiality of life” and its supervening social dimension. A history of racial and patriarchal domination configured the present day along with a history of still active resistance. C-E vision incorporates the other’s vision by seeing with the other. Not by assuming their frame of reference necessarily, any more than acknowledging their own lived experiences and historicity, and more aptly, to see in a world in which others are actively and dynamically seeing or sensing with us (377). Seeing with the other in a shared visible world. 

Objectifying Vision

The “profane” objectifying vision that Merleau-Ponty contrasts to the vision of the painter reduces the world to an observable world of material objects. This view of the world as made up of isolated “and self-enclosed solids” neglects both the humanity and dependency of community members. It comes with the attitude “as though [they] meant nothing to us and yet [were] predestined for our own use” (377). 

The vision assumes an absolute distance between seer and seen, “soaring-over” others, a habit that forms in choices, “eye movements and bodily kinaesthesis.” Objectifying vision is not aware of the nature of its own habits of envisioning (378) and “generative power.” In reducing the world to bodies, living beings’ bodily schemas are taken out from their temporality, their situation, and construction within historical and social formations, and thus their liberty of reconstruction. Objectifying vision views lived bodies as solely ‘biological’, unchanging, and “oppressed by their nature” (378-79). The histories of eroticizing, alienating, or repressing female and black bodies are taken out of purview (379). Al-Saji elaborates that Merleau-Ponty held two forms of invisibility for objectifying vision, the “material and historical genesis of vision” including the social hierarchies and geographies of power that generated the opportunity for sight. The impact of reducing the world to bodies and neglecting the historicity of the present is reinforcing social modes of repression. In Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing Like A Girl” the patriarchal gaze reduces “feminine” bodies to objects and creates a lived tension in women. This tension is between socio-culturally constructed identity of the “hesitant, fragile, and constantly self-referred” and the self-evident human power of constructing one’s identity freely. Al-Saji shares a woman feels at once “called on to act, yet at once feels one’s concretely feminine body to be incapable of such action” (381). Although feminine capacity and life choices extend beyond “biological essentialism”, the objectifying gaze both makes a cultural claim about a biological fact then hides the cultural (and thus pliable) nature of this claim. 

Critical Vision of the Painters 

This vision considers the social structures that “configure what we see”, it takes up the past, is self-reflective of habits of sight, grounded in felt affect, and embodied in behavior. The Painter’s vision “sees for the sake of seeing” and makes “visible the invisible.” Artists’ vision is individuated sees anew every moment and is experienced through different memories. Bergson’s account of the line for example, configures not only the “physiognomy of a visible thing”, but is in fact alive, and generative through a “temporal élan that materializes forms in its movement of expression”, a “rhythm of existence” (383). For a Painter, even “color and line have material and historical flesh.”

When Merleau-Ponty sees a painting he says: “I would be at great pains to say where is the painting I am looking at. For I do not look at it as I do a thing; I do not fix it in its place. My gaze wanders in it as in the halos of Being. It is more accurate to say that I see according to it, or with it, than that I see it.” (389) To see with the painting “according to it”, Merleau-Ponty struggles to ground the Being of the painting in the materiality of space, instead of a mere object, the painting contain a whole world of affect, meaning, style and memory. 

A painting has its own “affective atmosphere” and “disrupts our habitual rhythms and perceptions”. It engages us affectively before we can even reduce the painting to an object, and thus promotes a “receptive seeing.” (388). Merleau-Ponty elaborates two senses of seeing with others. The first is always present, there’s a “history by contact”, that always implies others as members of my field of vision, “a lateral passivity and dependence on others” (389). In short, a debt our vision owes to the parents, community, friends who made my sight and habits of seeing possible, who instructed my gaze. The objectifying gaze forgets these immaterial debts along with the history of a “non-familiar and alien” other’s discrimination for their otherness that leads an objectifying gaze to reinforce the representation of bodies as “exotic or threatening in itself” (389. It appropriates the “flesh of others” to whom my attachment is rendered invisible” (389). Despite depending on the other in my community, the objectifying vision passively, with indifference, reinforces their differences and their history of discrimination and exploitation underlying the treatment of these differences. 

A critical, ethical and loving vision is attentive to seeing with others rather than “disregarding [the visible] its affective roots in sociality and history.” It does not reduce a person to a constructed then forgotten bodily schema attributed to the biology of women or people of color. 

Notes on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology

Sartre was invigorated by Husserl’s attempt to ground philosophy in affective, sensuous and naturally present experience. Far more successful at capturing nature’s reality herself than realists and idealists’ “mental surrogates for the real” ever could!

In an essay written by Sartre in 1939 on intentionality, Jean-Paul captures the scene like this. Realists and Idealists fail to escape Descarte’s cogito “I think and so I am”, constructing reality mechanically with the intellect rather than discovering it with the senses. What Sartre calls “digestive philosophy” would take a meteorite or a flower to be a “Certain assemblage of “contents of consciousness”, “ through a process similar to a spider trapping “things in its web…reducing them to its own substance.” It failed to dawn on them that the meteorite was the actual object we point to in the sky and the flower is what we hold in hand. The conceptual assimilation of the intellect of “things to ideas, of ideas by ideas, of minds by minds" as Laland is quoted carries in attitude into the world; one of “assimilation, unification, identification”. This attitude and methodology doomed philosophers to find at the bottom of every well they dig, only a reflection of themselves.          

A realist will encounter a tree in its absolute form, enter into communication with and dissolve the absolute into a realistic impression of this tree. Husserl and Sartre contend that we can’t dissolve a tree “in consciousness”, consciousness and the tree do not share soluble natures. A phenomenologist will only ever have a relative view of the world external to consciousness, never an absolute one. Although “consciousness and the world are given at one stroke”, consciousness, reducible not to a “physical image” but to the flash of light that took the image, cannot dissolve into the tree even if it were to fly out of the “moist gastric intimacy” of our bodies and hugged the tree. Conciouenss still wouldn’t fall into the tree because the tree is “beyond” the observer, and the observer “beyond” the tree.

Sartre draws from conciouenss’ illuminating, dynamic, and irreducible nature, that in keeping honest with oneself, “knowledge could not…be compared to possession”. Purified consciousness for Sartre, a clear “strong wind” has “nothing in it but a movement of fleeing itself” (4). Although the world sits outside of consciousness, consciousness has no insides to enter, rather it is like a “whirlwind” of “being beyond itself” (5). This “flight” beyond oneself belongs to Husserl’s famous maxim that “all consciousness is consciousness of something.” Sartre notes that consciousness “fly[s] out into the world” from the no-thingness of consciousness and teh world to emerge on the other side as “consciousness in the world”. An observation that Sartre credits to Heiddger’s notion of being-in-the-world, that being can’t be divided from the world it emerges from. Despite “recoup[ing] itself” consciousness “destroys itself” as the necessary condition for “consciousness that exists as consciousness of something other than itself.” This self-nhilating feature of consciousness to fly outwards into the world, the surpassing of itself as affective experiences of “hatred, love, fear, sympathy”, Husserl calls intentionality. Our “subjective” ways of “discovering the world” are given affective weight in reality and are intimately tied to properties we find in the world. Sartre praises Husserl for delivering us from the “internal life” that has been relocated to the outside world. Our selves are now our in the open, outside, in thew world, among others. “It is not in some hiding place that we will discover ourselves; it is on the road, in the town, in the midst of the crowd, a thing among things, a man among men.”