Tom Campbell

The social model of disability as an oppositional device

This article engages with debates about the UK Disabled People’s Movement’s ‘Big Idea’ – the social model of disability – positioning this as an ‘oppositional device’. This concept is adapted from the work of the art theorist and activist Brian Holmes, elaborated using insights from Foucault and others. The model’s primary operation is introducing contingency into the present, facilitating disabled people’s resistance-practices. We recognise, however, that the device can operate in a disciplinary manner when adopted by a machinery of government. Whilst our primary goal is to understand the character and operation of the social model, by providing a more general definition of an oppositional device as the concrete operation of technologies of power, we also propose a concept potentially useful for the analysis of the resistance-practices of activists involved in a wide variety of struggles. This concept may thus have implications for wider social and political analysis.

From aphasia to dyslexia, a fragment of a genealogy: An analysis of the formation of a 'medical diagnosis'

Abstract Having a difficulty with reading, or being unable to read, has not always been a medical problem. In the late nineteenth century, physicians such as (Broadbent 1872; Hinshelwood 1895) became interested in identifying particular bodies with reading difficulties. This article is focused around the question of ‘how’ reading difficulties were formed as a concern for medical researchers. It shall be suggested that the existence of acquired word-blindness as a legitimate medical diagnosis had established the inability to read or difficulty with reading as a medical concern, albeit with a different aetiology. This constituted the practical conditions and established a vocabulary that made congenital word-blindness a technically feasible diagnosis. The medical concern for a difficulty with reading was in most cases a concern with how this difficulty could be overcome. The clinical criteria that were negotiated for congenital word-blindness seem to have been negotiated in relation to rationalities of government concerned with capitalising the population. This article forms part of part a wider project to use analytical concepts drawn from Michel Foucault to help map a genealogy of dyslexia.

The temporal horizon of ‘the choice’: Anxieties and banalities in ‘time’, modern and liquid modern

‘Time’ has been central to Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of modernity and his subsequent account of its solid and liquid variants. The experience of time in these accounts announces the coming of new opportunities, but it also signals a corrosion of our moral sensitivity. In this article, I assess Bauman’s contribution to the sociology of time and the centrality of our temporal character for his philosophical anthropology. There is a unique chance to be moral in liquid modernity, by unshackling the outdated and habitual ethics of the past. The danger, however, lays in an increasingly ‘hurried life’, where a ‘nowist’ culture demands endless answers to the most banal of choices, often before these choices have even arrived. I argue that for Bauman the historical power of culture is to raise the ‘ought’ above the ‘is’. This results from our character as temporally-aware creatures. In our liquid modern times, the haste of life and its individualizing forces shift the character of that temporal awareness, endowing us with a false set of needs crafted by the market. The project of humanity itself has become, in Bauman’s diagnosis, subservient to maintaining the goals of the market.

Hidden Paths in Zygmunt Bauman’s Sociology: Editorial Introduction:

In the immediate aftermath of his death, a number of excellent articles were written that each provide a different door into the vast room of Bauman’s sociology. In the past year or so, there have also been a number of books that have set about providing a more ‘critical analysis’ of his work whilst also considering how sociology might look anew and move creatively ‘beyond Bauman’ (Blackshaw 2016; Jacobsen ed. 2016; Rattansi 2017). In so doing, these welcome contributions clearly take Bauman’s sociological imagination very seriously and provide useful reference points for both scholars and students seeking a more robust examination of Bauman’s ideas. Each contribution deserves to be read and studied as they provide new and considered insights into Bauman’s legacy for the social sciences and humanities. Throughout the article that follows, we make our own contribution to the curious reader’s deliberations on these debates by shining a light on those aspects of Bauman’s work that may have become somewhat hidden and possibly overlooked in what we see as a growing tendency to focus primarily upon his later writings on ‘liquid modernity’. We argue that in order to grasp fully the meaning of Bauman’s writing in the more popular post-2000 phase, it is vital that one understands these earlier foundations of his thought. In this way, we hope that we may go some way to rebalancing the concerns of some contemporary critics.

Foucault, social movements and heterotopic horizons: rupturing the order of things

Abstract In this article, we explore and develop the utility for social movement studies of Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of heterotopia. Informed by Foucault’s theorizing, we propose a heuristic typology of social movement heterotopias. Five heterotopia ‘types’ are considered: ‘contained’, ‘mobile’, ‘cloud’, ‘encounter’ and ‘rhizomic’. Each has particular attributes, but all challenge normal, routine politics. They do so by being, from the perspective of state and capital, either in the ‘wrong’ place, moving in the ‘wrong’ way, or involving the ‘wrong’ connections, affinities or organization. These are constructed-types, proposed for the purpose of description, comparison and prediction. These social movement heterotopias are different types of space that facilitate practices of resistance and transgression. We situate Foucault’s writing on heterotopia at a pivotal moment in his intellectual career, when he became increasingly concerned with how particular mechanisms for modulating the creative force of resistance/power are invented, the types of bodies they craft and the politics they make possible. We propose an interpretation of heterotopia that relates it to his later work on power, resistance and freedom, and the interplay of his ideas with those of Gilles Deleuze.

The Problem of Producing Literate Subjects: Education and Specific Reading Difficulties

This chapter describes the work of a variety of authors whose writings on reading in educational journals made the school an increasingly hospitable site for a diagnosis such as congenital word-blindness to be deployed. The processes by which children learnt to read; the importance of these bodies acquiring the ability to read in order to develop a more advanced understanding of various subjects; the development of a concern that some pupils had a pronounced difficulty with reading; techniques for improving overall reading rates of a class and individuals accredited as having a difficulty; tests used to examine reading ability; the perceived social–cultural benefits of reading; and the emergence of specific techniques for educating children accredited with congenital word-blindness are all discussed in the journals from which I have drawn the following discussion.

Governing Readers from Limitation to Proliferation

In this chapter the concepts of government, strategy of government, governmentality and a variety of associated concepts shall be elaborated upon. The government of reading will then be analysed to describe how a shift in the strategy of governing literacy helped to constitute dyslexia’s conditions of possibility. These concepts help to provide a theoretical framework, and illuminate the empirical context that makes it possible for me to conduct the precise genealogy of this diagnostic category, a technology of power—dyslexia. This book primarily studies the operations of technologies of power. I am not studying the formation of a governmentality, but rather how they relate to technologies of power. It is necessary to develop a more elaborate description of government and governmentality so that it is evident that my analysis of technologies and machineries of government refer back to a particular reading of the usage of the concepts of government and governmentality in the post-Foucauldian genealogical tradition.

Bio-politics, Normalcy and the Numerical Plotting of the Population

In this chapter I will draw upon Foucault’s work on the shift from sovereign power to bio-power. The exposition of this process draws upon historical and theoretical studies that have further elaborated Foucault’s work concerning this transition. Through describing the changes in style, techniques and practices of government that took place during this period, I will outline the conditions that made the constitution of dyslexia as a diagnostic category possible. In this discussion I place particular importance on the invention and deployment of ‘normality’; related developments in insurance and accounting; the emergence of disability as an administrative category; and changes in the perception of intelligence that occurred around the institutionalisation of psychology.

The Technological Operation of Congenital Word-blindness: Marking Some Differences as More Deserving Than Others

In the previous chapter the formation of reading difficulties as a medical problem was described. This process lead to the development of two diagnoses: acquired word-blindness as a type of aphasia and congenital word-blindness. I described how the production of congenital wordblindness as a medical condition utilised the technical innovations of acquired word-blindness. As a technology of power, congenital wordblindness was essentially a recalibration of acquired word-blindness. This recalibration allowed for relations of power to be articulated onto a new array of bodies. The scrutiny of my description now moves away from the formation of a precise field of knowledge—the diagnostic category congenital word-blindness—towards a further exploration of how the diagnosis operates as a technology of power. This is a problem that I began to discuss in Chapter 4, and in this chapter I will describe how the diagnosis operates as a specific technology of power, the flow of power to new sites that engender new ways for it to disperse onto bodies and the particular way it then acts upon those bodies. The following discussion is concerned with providing a detailed description of how congenital word-blindness functioned and how its operation was framed by being understood as a problem under the jurisdiction of ophthalmology.

Reading Difficulties Become a Medical Concern

Having difficulty with reading, or being unable to read, has not always been a medical problem. In the late nineteenth century, physicians such as Broadbent (1872) and Hinshelwood (1895) became interested in identifying particular bodies with reading difficulties. These physicians were able to establish a particular population of persons understood as having reading difficulties. This chapter is focused around the question of ‘how’ reading difficulties were invented as a concern for medical researchers. I describe how this interest began to solidify into a diagnostic category, leading them to write reports in some of the most well-known and respected medical journals in Britain (Hinshelwood, 1895; Kussmaul, 1877). In response to this problem I will consider how the diagnosis of acquired word-blindness, a technology of power, was crafted, paying particular attention to why a difficulty with reading, in its acquired form, became a medical concern during the late nineteenth century. It will be argued that this diagnostic category provided the clinical precedents and many of the techniques that allowed for congenital word-blindness to become a viable diagnosis. I will describe how acquired word-blindness was used as a point of departure for the crafting of congenital word-blindness.