Disability as Multitude: Re-working Non-Productive Labor Power David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder Temple University and independent scholar. The term disability re-orients critique away from individual malfunction and toward interactions of bodies with inadequately adapted environments. The article employs Hardt and Negri's concept of multitude as a means of imagining alternative value for "non-productive bodies"
Disability as Multitude: Re-working Non-Productive Labor Power David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder Temple University and independent scholar. The term disability re-orients critique away from individual malfunction and toward interactions of bodies with inadequately adapted environments. The article employs Hardt and Negri's concept of multitude as a means of imagining alternative value for "non-productive bodies"
Disability as Multitude: Re-working Non-Productive Labor Power David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder Temple University and independent scholar. The term disability re-orients critique away from individual malfunction and toward interactions of bodies with inadequately adapted environments. The article employs Hardt and Negri's concept of multitude as a means of imagining alternative value for "non-productive bodies"
Disability as Multitude: Re-working Non-Productive Labor Power
David T. Mitchell, Sharon L. Snyder
Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Volume 4, Number 2, 2010, pp. 179-193 (Article) Published by Liverpool University Press For additional information about this article Access provided by UFSCAR-Universidade Federal de Sao Carlos (3 Oct 2013 22:06 GMT) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jlc/summary/v004/4.2.mitchell.html Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 4.2 (2010), 179194 Liverpool University Press ISSN 1757-6458 (print) 1757-6466 (online) doi:10.3828/jlcds.2010.14 Disability as Multitude Re-working Non-Productive Labor Power David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder Temple University and Independent Scholar People with disabilities are often relegated to the status of non-productive labor power as a key aspect of their social depreciation. Marxist tradition situates potential and unemployable workers as members of the surplus labor force (those who embody potential labor and therefore exert downward pressure on wages and job security), but this designation fails to adequately capture those situated essentially outside of Capitalism. While theorists must continue to critique the ravages of poverty that result from chronic unemployment, the article employs Hardt and Negris concept of multitude as a means of imagining alternative value for non-productive bodies (Empire)particularly in their ability to form alternative networks of existence and resistance to normative relations of consumption, competition, and class confict. Such an active engagement with concepts of corporeality (i.e. the body as active mediator of the world rather than passive surface of imprintation) is critical to a more fully politicized realization of disability as instrumental to what Spinoza called the radical potential of true democracy. Beyond Surplus Labor Power One signifcant contribution of Disability Studies to the feld of Cultural Studies has been in charting transformations in historical understandings of human variation. Whereas the term handicapped marked individual bodies as insuf- fcient, disability re-orients critique away from individual malfunction and toward interactions of bodies with inadequately adapted environments. Further, the term disability also identifes material bodies (the corporeal) adjusted to approximate norms, average capacities, and subjective aesthetic standards. Dis- ability moves away from late eighteenth-century ideas of individual incapacity (and, ultimately, social Darwinian unftness) toward populations that experi- ence socially produced exclusions based on sensory, cognitive, and/or bodily typicality. In other words, as a result of Disability Studies scholarship and mod- ern day disability movements, disabled people have shifed from modernitys exception (a lineage of defect to be isolated and eradicated) to postmodern exceptionality (failing bodies resuscitated by an increasingly medicalized state). In the latter state, the ontology of disability retrieves a formerly fallen object and makes it newly available for cultural rehabilitation. While rehabilitation ofen refers to a productive process of recovery, leading to a return to employment 180 David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder and the activities of civic life, here the term suggests something less optimal yet equally signifcant. Cultural rehabilitation refers to normalization practices through which non-normative (i.e. non-productive) bodies become culturally docile. Tis process accomplishes its task of adjustment through the exercise of neo-liberal power that is both benign and disciplinary. Rather than social pariahs, disabled people increasingly represent research opportunities in the sense that medical sociologist Aihwa Ong means when she argues that treating ill and disabled Cambodian refugees in the U.S. increasingly became the justifcation for state and local clinics to obtain much- needed funding from the federal government (96). Rather than a former eras economic burden, then, disabled people have become objects of care in which enormous sectors of post-capitalist service economies are invested. In the terms of recent theories of political economy, disability has been transformed into a target of neo-liberal intervention strategies. Disabled people, once thrown out of the labor system because of their lack of productivity in a competitive labor market, now fnd themselves at hand for [the] purposes of accumulation at a later point in time. Put in the language of contemporary postmodern polit- ical theory, we might say that capitalism necessarily and always creates its own other (Harvey, 141). Te historical production of others situates bodies in a position tantamount to un(der)explored geographies: they come to be recog- nized as sites for the exercise of the primitive accumulation that fuels capitalism. While such developments arrive, inevitably, with their own contradictions, they also provide opportunities for re-thinking disability, not only as socially but also as materially produced subjectivities. In turn, people with disabilities produce their own alternative navigations that provide opportunities for both analyzing their further integration within networks of late capitalism (that which Michael Hardt calls afective labor), and also attendant modes of resist- ance to dominant models of consumption, family, sexuality, labor, functionality, etc. In other words, this article is an initial foray into ways in which we might actively think disability into the picture of the production of social networks, forms of community, and biopower. For as Hardt explains, the two orders of engagement are not mutually exclusive: In the production and reproduction of afects, in those networks of culture and com- munication, collective subjectivities are produced and sociality is produced. Even if those subjectivities and that sociality are directly exploitable by capital. Tis is where we can realize the enormous potential in afective labor. (Affective Labor) We want to begin thinking about new horizons of disability in a multicultural, transnational, and post-imperialist world. To apply the prefx post- to these Disability as Multitude 181 historical movements is not to suggest their end. Each continues a dynamic legacy of exploitation, travesty, and domination that reverberates in the afer- math of a lengthy period of military and cultural subjugation. However, like other dynamos (the term Henry Adams used to represent the churning engine of industrial capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century) they must come to rest of their own inertia or metamorphose into a new hegemonic amalgam: one made of the scraps of the old imperial machine and alternative formations of resistance now co-opted; a newly minted, prostheticized, even if ultimately compromised social organization. As Hardt and Negri argue, rather than feeling doomed about the saturation of imperial power through networks of capitalism we might also see room for potential: Te immediately social dimension of the exploitation of living labor immerses labor in all the relational elements that develop the potential of insubordination and revolt through the entire set of laboring practices (Empire, 29). International movements of disabled persons have managed to cultivate forms of insubordination within global capitalism by leveraging pressure for social equality and accessible public commons with reference to other move- ments demanding similar objectives. In 2000 a group of disabled women in South Korea protested a dangerous lif by setting up tents in an underground subway; a Bosnia-Herzegovina disabled student-led campaign made pedestri- ans aware of curb cuts for wheelchair users by painting them bright yellow; and a Russian disability group blocked entrance to the Moscow underground rail system to hinder others from entering as they were excluded due to a lack of alternative forms of ingress. In each of these examples, people with disabilities staged their protests by seeking to produce parallel experiences of exclusion in others who took their own ease of entry in public spaces for granted. Global disability movements have waged their campaigns around concepts of univer- sal access to collective areas while also calling attention to the dwindling exist- ence of the commons under neoliberal privatization schemes. Te creativity of these civil disobedience tactics turns exclusions on their head. In Marxist terms, disability protest makes people who are not identifed as disabled see the world as if through a camera obscura. Tey use the produc- tion of temporary inaccessibility for non-disabled users in order to point out the daily impediments faced by people with disabilities. Even in the midst of protesting structural barriers disabled activists are narrated as fragile and as taking unnecessary chances with their already too fragile health. However, as Mike Davis points out in Planet of Slums (2006), a proper systemic analysis needs to invert the terms of this recognition by placing the blame for vulner- ability in its appropriate place: Fragility is simply a synonym for systematic 182 David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder government neglect of environmental safety (125). Additionally, within dis- ability collectives we fnd alternative discourses to consumption, standardiza- tion, and belonging that ofer important possibilities for collective political action on a global scale. Teories about new forms of political resistance bear a great deal of signif- cance for Disability Studies and global disability movements. Tis is not only because the forms of political resistance now operative might allow a new assessment of disability bio-politics on a global scale (witness the recent pas- sage of the 2006 United Nations charter on global disability rights), but because international disability movements may serve as key examples of Hardt and Negris controversial formulation of postmodern militancy: Te multitude designates an active social subject, which acts on the basis of what sin- gularities share in common. Te multitude is an internally diferent, multiple social subject whose constitution and action is based not on identity or unity (or, much less, indiference) but on what it has in common. (Multitude, 100) Within this defnition of coordinated yet non-unifed insurgencies, Hardt and Negri have most consistently cited the Zapatista movement and the spontan- eous uprisings of protestors during meetings of the G8. Te sociology of these resistance groups reveals the participation of members who do not align them- selves primarily on the basis of foundational social identities such as race, class, ethnicity, or gender. Rather, contemporary resistance movements bring with them alternative values of living that oppose corporatist, consumptive models of everyday life. Tey specifcally attack late capitalist culture in terms of the productive dimension of biopower wherein lifestyles of over- and under-con- sumption operate as false universals (Empire, 27). It may seem strange to cite disability movements in the context of a defnition of multitude that is not based on identity. Afer all, disability seems to mark a horizon of contemporary identity-based politics based on variable bodily cap- acities, appearances, and experiences of stigma developed without common community institutions or practices of everyday life. For Negri, the multitude is the power of the singularities that are brought together within cooperative constellations; and the common precedes production (Kairos, 215). Tis characterization better captures the productive multiplicity that characterizes movements of disabled peoples goals at a micro and, ultimately, macro level. First, disability does not constitute a shared social condition. Instead, dis- abled people recognize the intense diferences that constitute their bodies (what Negri calls resistant singularities) as their greatest commonality. Te embrace of idiosyncrasy, functional diversity, and aesthetic impropriety across bodies Disability as Multitude 183 has both an empirical and socially derived utility. Tis embrace is empirical in the sense that disability movements contest inadequate universalist categories of medicine and rehabilitation. According to Disability Studies, the imprecision of medical taxonomies of deviance simultaneously pathologizes and groups disparate experiences as shared when they may in fact be disparate in a phe- nomenological sense. Te embrace is socially derived because the unity of disabled people fghting for their rights seeks a radical edge that is essential to revolutionary politics: Te [multitude], the producers of the common formula from which they arenone- thelessexcluded, are the motor of the materialist teleology, because only the mul- titude of the poor can construct the world under the sign of the common, pressing forth relentlessly beyond the limit of the present. (Negri, 185) As explained above, cross-cultural eforts by disability groups to seize the com- mons in the name of universal accessibility for all bodies contests the neo- liberal states justifcation of privatization. Disability movements, as opponents to accumulation by dispossession, play a critical role in the expos of neo- liberal practices that disenfranchise people from access to shared public space (Harvey, 43). Beyond these two important applications of Disability Studies to critiques of postmodern capitalist containment strategies, disability may also be approached in a manner that, perhaps, no other political theory allows. Rather than focusing on more traditional Marxist objects of resistancesuch as the worker or the masses or class confictHardt and Negri expand the boundaries of efective political culture not only beyond identity (particularly that of nation), but also beyond the critical Marxist category of surplus labor power. Whereas surplus labor power denotes a concept of an ever available pool of laborers that assists in keeping wages down, job security tenuous, scab labor a prevalent threat against worker agency, and a misdirection of identifcation between the proletariat, potential proletariat, and the bourgeoisie, the category leaves entire populations outside of the defnitions of resistance. Negri puts the question in this manner: But can those who are excluded from work still be considered part of a living labor? Of course, since even the excluded are part of the common. And the poor person, who is more excluded than anyone, i.e. the singularity at the greatest risk at the edge of beingat the point where Power closes of the teleological striving towards the to- comethe poor, therefore, are the most common. For if it is only the common that produces production, those who are excluded but participate in the common are also the expression of living labor. (Kairos, 225) In order to create a less exclusionary defnition of subjects beyond notions of labor and surplus labor (both remain tied to defnitions of competitive markets), 184 David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder Negri uses living labor to suggest forms of creativity that cannot be reduced to an economic value. His defnition of resistant subjects does not simply expand outwards to include those who occupy non-productive bodies, but rather takes its lead from those whose capacities make them unft for labor as the baseline of human value. In fact, the more risk individuals experience within capitalism, the less likely they are to feel invested in its continuance. As those cultural constituencies lef out of the loop of potential labor, non-productive bodies are inoculated against participating in the misdirected destabilization of workers as so ofen characterizes the activities of those in the surplus labor ranks. 1 The Work of Non-Productive Bodies Who are the inhabitants of non-productive bodies? What do they have to do with disabled people? Why have they existed below the radar of radical labor theory for so long? Non-productive bodies are those inhabitants of the planet who, largely by virtue of biological (in)capacity, aesthetic non-conformity, and/ or non-normative labor patterns, have gone invisible due to the infexibility of traditional classifcations of labor (both economic and political). Tey rep- resent the non-laboring populationsnot merely excluded frombut also resistant to standardized labor demands of human value. As many recognize, the term disability was frst coined in the mid-1800s to designate those incapa- ble of work due to injury. Tis grouping identifed disabled veterans of the Civil War as eligible for various governmental supports: a pension, prosthetics, life training, etc. Likewise, the diagnostic category of feeblemindedness in the same period defned those who, due to congenital feature, were incapable of par- ticipating in a competitive market-based economy. Tis group also qualifed for levels of public support largely received in centralized, carceral forms of insti- tutional care. As we argue in Cultural Locations of Disability (2006), member- ship in this latter classifcation group resulted in the coercion of individuals to exchange their liberties for social supports. Tis designation as non-productive developed in spite of the fact that many institutional residents participated in laboring economies developed within institutional societies: residents farmed 1. In Tus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsches philosopherprotagonist, Zarathustra, gets tired of human- ity and takes up a life among the ironically titled, higher menthose who have been excluded from dominant culture due to their discordant bodies, behaviors, and appearances. We analyze this alter- native social formation of disabled people in chapter 3 of Narrative Prosthesis: Discourses of Disability (2000). Disability as Multitude 185 the institutions land, provided housekeeping services to fellow inmates and administrators, supervised each other on behalf of the institution, produced products for the statebrooms, clothing, baskets, etc.at excessively low wage rates. In many cases nothing more was provided in exchange for their labors beyond the beneft of living an excluded life within the walls of the institution. Within this context of disability as non-productive bodies lay an unseen net- work of labor practices where the presumably insufcient provided for them- selves within the walls of an undetected economy. Institutions ofen operated as if they were small city-states that actively rendered the labor of the non-labor- ing classes invisible. In many cases by the early twentieth century, a majority of institutions could claim themselves as self supporting. Ironically, such claims in efect disproved the theory upon which institutions were based: those who could not compete in a labor market should be sheltered from its demands in an institutional world that functioned as a closed circuit of dependency and care. Instead, institutional residents made an ideal labor forcethose who could ef- ciently meet the needs of their own segregated societywhen conditions could be adjusted according to the principle: from each according to their ability to each according to their need(s). Te realization of Marxs famous formulation in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha within institutions consequently posed a threat to reigning orders of capitalism operating beyond the walls of the institution. In fact, historically, capitalists and bourgeoisie alike have sought remedies in legislatures across the country against institutional labor practices. Blind broom-makers in downtown Chicago were shut down because their efciency undermined the ability of other broom manufacturers to make a proft during 1910. Tese workers with visual impairments, in turn, went on strike and forced the city to re-open their place of employment on the basis of their status as an exceptional class of laborers. 2 Tis is one of the great ironies of institutional life for those who were deemed non-productive on the basis of physical, sensory, and/or cognitive incapacity. Te identifcation of hordes of people designated as non-productive bod- ies and located on the outermost fringes of productive economies replaces now antiquated categories such as the masses. Te potential for widespread civil unrest proved compromised because workers found themselves engulfed within networks of capital that kept them enthralled. Further, as modernity gave way to post-modernity, the antagonistic divisions between workers and 2. Te history of this early disability identity-based labor protest and other conducted by deaf work- ers in 1903 can be found in the Chicago Disability History Exhibit that ran from April 20September 15, 2006 at the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum in Chicago. We believe these may be the frst labor movements by self-identifed workers with disabilities. 186 David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder capitalists that were anticipated to fuel revolution became increasingly blurred. No longer did one participate in a simple, agonistic division of labor, but, for Hardt and Negri, David Harvey, Frederic Jameson, and other political theorists, late capitalism now saturated every nook and cranny of life and became increas- ingly confused with the natural order of things. One could fnd no outside to capitalist production given that the network of exchange had grown so difuse and pervasive (here we fnd Hardt and Negris concept of biopolitics, borrowed from Foucault). Capitalisms power came to be increasingly located in its ability to naturalize its own artifcial economic context within every social interaction. Tis marked the birth of what Marx anticipated as social capitalism. Te critical question asked by todays theorists of postmodern political econ- omy is that which Negri poses to himself in his essay, Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo: Nine Lessons to Myself : how can this biopolitical (intellectual and co-operative) mass, which we call multitude, exert governance over itself ? (209). In other words, where does resistance manifest itself once a concept of the workers revolution no longer seems tenable and how will this resistance govern itself without the institution of new hierarchies of inequality? In order to formulate responses to Negris question as articulated further in his writings with Michael Hardt, Empire, Multitudes, and Commonwealth, we must unpack it in as literal a way as possible. Biopolitical represents the degree to which every aspect of living is ensnared by late capitalism: economic, social, artistic, cultural, etc. Whereas modernitys capitalism saw division and segrega- tion as its strategy of divide and conquer among laboring parties in a strategic- ally segmented labor production process (i.e., the prior economic production mode of Fordism), Postmodern capitalism elevates cooperation across spatially, geographically, and culturally difuse networks that place individuals in contact with each across disparate geographies. Multitude replaces masses in that a multitude is defned as productive singularities (bodies) that cannot be col- lapsed into a universal formula of normative labor identity. And here we will make our claim: within this formulation of resistant bodies Hardt and Negri essentially recognize forms of incapacity as the new galvanizing agent of post- modern resistance. Non-productive bodies represent those who belong to populations desig- nated unft by capitalism. Tus, whereas traditional theories of political econ- omy tend to stop at the borders of the laboring subjects (including potential laborers), the concept of non-productive bodies expansively rearranges the potentially revolutionary subject of lefist theory. If one is wired into the system in some mannerand, for Hardt and Negri, there is no such thing as an outside to this formulationthen one actively participates in the global Disability as Multitude 187 give and take of biopolitical life. While such a claim may seem to defate the potential for signifcant political action, given the seemingly boundless abil- ity of capitalism to produce subjectivities advantageous to its own livelihood, the alternative proves equally accurate: those whom Frantz Fanon designated the wretched of the earth come into greater contact with each other through immaterial communication networks characteristic of modes of production in afective labor markets and opportunities for collective action increase. We now ofer a brief description of how disability collectivities may be recognized as the paradigm of this alternative formula of resistance. Disability as Deconstructive Method By the end of the nineteenth century, eforts to segregate, restrict, and oppress populations, identifed variously as feebleminded, subnormal, deviant, etc., went increasingly trans-national. Eugenics, the social engineering project that sought to eradicate defective traits from a nations hereditary pool, went global. Scientifc collectives were formed, restrictive policies were translated from one cultural context to another with relative ease, categories of pathol- ogy proliferated, and parallel populations found themselves increasingly the subjects of incarceration practices. Policy-makers, scientists, psychiatrists, and institutional administrators referenced the efective restrictions at work in other nations in order to put pressure on their home legislatures to adopt frm meas- ures. In other words, modern capitalism recognized the utility of international markets in segregation strategies toward disabled people (and others deemed non-normal) and actively traded in their dissemination (there are echoes of Homi Bhabhas DIS-semi-nation here). In Cultural Locations of Disability, we point out that a profound and devastating irony was at work in the progressive period: as the discourse of disciplinary eugenics became increasingly mobile and international, disabled peoplethe very subjects of that discoursefound themselves increasingly immobilized. Teir labor was not absent, but rather cor- doned of and contained within the parameters of the modern-day institution. A fully Foucauldian network burgeoned within this period with disabled people as the global objects of its eforts. Within the U.S., Canada, west- ern Europe, and Australia, nations argued a logic of racial improvement and purity; in Russia the old czarist lines were disqualifed as inferior due to the eugenics concept of inbreeding; in Asia entire countries such as Korea found themselves disabled by virtue of another (Japan in this case) colonizing powers emasculation of the country. In other words, the discourse of eugen- 188 David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder ics, applied unevenly and non-uniformly, functioned as a meta-disqualifer of entire populations whose diferences (perceived or actual) served as the source of their inferiority. Here we fnd the historical roots of a global efort to classify bodies as non-productive and therefore outside of capitalist competitive labor markets all together. Te modern-day disability-rights movement, consequently, is not essential- ly European or American or Western by necessity of the fact that wherever the discourse of eugenics could be found (in one form or another), counter- insurgent forces arise. Tese resistance strategies increasingly surface within populations designated as non-productive, but, for Hardt and Negri, non- productive bodies prove imminently productive because they occupy outposts of alternative biopolitical discourses, lives imagined and realized in contrast to, even counter-posed against, more dominant discourses of consumption, productivity, family, and nation. In part these insurrectional communities of non-productive bodies begin with a deconstructive method in that they cre- ate group conceptions founded on theories of the malleabilitythe necessary mutancy evenof strict borders, classifcations, and social relationships. Te introduction of this strategic fuidity proves critical to the creation of counter cultural formations as they rely upon the expos of the artifciality of late capitalisms naturalness as their political alternative. Disabled bod- ies, as defnitively multiple forms of embodiment that cannot be universal- ized even within condition groups, rely for their insurrectional force on the non- transcendental nature of their diference. Tis is the impetus for upsetting medical and rehabilitation-based models of pathology that transect the globe. Disability movements function as counter-discursive resistance eforts at the global level while sustainingand even honoringlocal diferences. Tis is one of the powerful lessons that Jim Charltons Nothing About Us Without Us (2000) has brought to Disability Studies with its comparativist, international interview methodology. Meet Me at the Global We draw to a conclusion with a laundry list of ways in which disability groups produce a viable counter-narrative of biopolitics. Disabled persons are made, willingly or not, into the legitimate non- workers those who refuse to participate not in productivity but in the productive net of capitalism that ensnares all in the seemingly infnite practice of consumption as synonymous with life. Te disabled people that we know are some of the worst Disability as Multitude 189 consumers on the planet because they have neither the means, the interest, nor the gullibility of mistaking meaning with market. For instance, disabled artists in the U.S. live some of the most sparingly non-consumptive lives and, yet, this is what we admire about them the most. Tose who identify as non-disabled ofen strain to occupy the increasingly common forms of prosthetization that supplement failing bodies trying to nav- igate late capitalist environments. To a great degree this prosthetic discomfort comes about for those still inhabiting narratives of the natural body. Disabled people, in turn and by necessity, have surrendered this artifcial nostalgia for a version of their bodies as natural, pure, and unsupplemented. In this manner they become, truly, the quintessential project of postmodernity. Global capital increasingly relies on the development of workforces that can manipulate immaterial data across an ever-expanding array of communication networks. Such labor ofen involves a variety of skills such as: (1) the ability to sit in rooms with others for hours on end; (2) the capacity to performatively represent oneself in cybernetic space through non-visual or oral forms of com- munication; (3) the ability, and even willingness, to function in virtual locations that are not subject to aesthetic criteria of appearance that so ofen result in exclusions of disabled people from employability; (4) substantial amounts of leisure time that goes relatively uninterrupted by the nuisance of family, friends, or love interests (we mean this only partially as tongue-in-cheek); and (5) a willingness to be devoted to ones job because so much of what counts as an outside life has already been rendered unavailable (the inaccessibility of rec- reation, religion, or geographies beyond an immediate space). We are increas- ingly approaching a time when all that formerly passed as the undesirability of life in a disabled body proves increasingly advantageous from the standpoint of an immaterial labor market. However, and perhaps even more importantly, even outside of the formal workforce disabled people fnd themselves manipulating data of a political nature across national boundaries. Disabled peoples organizations and dis- abled individuals now routinely exchange survival strategies and political tac- tics with other non-productive bodies in formerly unreachable locations. Tus, the international participation of eugenics discourse in the earlier part of the last century has been met by an increasingly globalizing discourse of counter- eugenic eforts. Disability rights movement leaders now exchange policies and solutions with each other in order to pressure their own legislatures into adopt- ing human rights platforms based upon comparisons with other policy- and rights-based actions. Tese eforts efectively turn eugenic-based strategies on their heads and can be fueled by commerce across global cybernetic networks. 190 David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder Following out the logic of non-productive bodies allows us ways of conceiv- ing of disability as a potentially efective political foundation for new forms of resistance, particularly in that disability (as those who refer to TABS [the tem- porarily able-bodied] remind us) potentially cuts across all marginalities. Yet, its founding recognition of unity based in diference (i.e. what we have called in another context, the politics of atypicality or intensive individual singulari- ties that cannot be neatly collapsed in a coherent identity) could prove more efective than those diagnosed by Laclau and Moufe and iek as balkaniz- ing identity-based approaches to diference that undermine more spontaneous forms of collective action. Of course we do not mean to overlook the fact that disability collectivities have discovered creative ways of fracturing their own collectivities, particularly on the basis of unproductive debates over who is disabled and who is not- disabled, disability hierarchies, tokenism, marginalization of expressive modes (i.e. putting the pragmatics of policy over arts), the neglect of disabled people of color, old boys and old girls networks of power brokering, and so on. But there is also a series of productive ways to organize political constituencies that we owe to the creativity of disability movements around the worldnamely, since disability movements continue to operate at the meta-national level, disabled people without borders. To return to Hardt and Negris thesis explicitly, we stress that disabled bod- ies prove so integral to late capitalism because the model upon which capital- ist exchange rests has shifed so dramatically. Disability may present the best intervention object of all in that it provides an opportunity to renew capital in new geographies of the body. Because disabled bodies persist throughout his- tory, and in militarized economies we produce them in great numbers at home and abroad, market economies increasingly reference them among their tar- get audiences. Marketing Imperfect Identities Nearly all of capitalism now fnds itself pitched toward imperfection as the standard with product supplementation as the solutiondiuretics, impotency, indigestion, mobility aids, depression, manias, hearing loss, vision correction, chronic fatigue, etc. Te body has become a multi-sectional market; whereas Fordist capitalism cultivated divided worker populations by hierarchicalizing the assembly line; postmodern capital divides us within our own bodies. We are now perpetual members of an audience encouraged to experience our bodies Disability as Multitude 191 in piecesas fractured terrains where the bad parts of ourselves are mul- tiple. Whereas disabled people were trained to recognize their disabled parts as defnitely inferior, late capitalism trains everyone to separate their good from bada form of alienation that feeds the markets penchant for treating our parts separately. Te body becomes a terrain of defnable localities, each colo- nized by its particular pathologies dictated by the medicalized marketplace. Tis late capitalist litany of bodily frailties, imperfections, and incapacities gluts advertising networks as the hegemonic product pitch strategy of today. Within this environment disability rapidly becomes synonymous with a humanity that we are all seeking to overcome. Te imperfect is our standard. Te rise to legitimacy of comfort industries results as the twentieth century closes. We are all subject to disciplinary regimens of the therapies that have now transcended their subordinate position within health science and medicine to become our cultural training gurus. Even more than Medicine, the Terapies have now gone cultural and encourage our mass dedication not to perfection but to the infnite pursuit of improvement. Once relatively isolated disabil- ity rehabilitation regimens are now applicable to all citizens, just as all citizens grow increasingly responsible for policing their own well being. Terapy is the market, and the degree to which one resists therapy is the degree to which one resists greasing the market. Refusal of our bodies as perpetual objects of profes- sional labors provides a model of resistance wherein the ways our bodies func- tion does not lead us to fall prey to regimes of standardization. We now fnd ourselves encouraged not to conform to a general norm but rather condition- based norms that others who presumably share our disability group establish. Tis is really nothing but a move from a medical model based on an elusive average body to a therapy-based norm of an elusive average disabled body. Today late capitalism thrives on the production of new spaces for exploit- ationthe promotion of the exotic as a strategy of consumption rather than the promise of the homogeneous amid locales of diference. Te body itself has become an outpost for this strategy. An intensive interior is now cannibalized as new erogenous zones of intervention. To combat this tendency, disability culture rises as a counter-valuing mechanism; one that cannot aford to mis- take its own artifcial productions as more natural, but rather, following Hardt and Negri, as a self-acknowledged product that seizes the biopolitical terrain as revisable. Non-productive bodies work a revolution within the conception of worker subjectivity. Te non-productive body is not simply a body incapable of working within the narrow standardization eforts of capitalism, but rather, as Hardt and Negri explain, it represents the way some deviants perform dif- ferently and break the norms in doing so (Multitude, 200). Tese diferences 192 David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder may result in a rigid exclusion from dominant economic networks but they continue to produce and, in turn, be produced: thus, postmodernism may be generally described as a culture of manufactured sentience: one that wires the life of feeling and fesh directly into the circuitry of prosthetic supplementation (i.e. prosthetics from sip n puf systems to Xbox cyber realities). Democracy and Disability A true democracy based on variation cannot be collapsed into a totalizing essence/identity/unity. Based on their multiple formulas of diference, disability organizations help to expose transcendence as a false dream of market com- pensation. If we conceive of disability as a material expression of variation, then embodied diference may be recognized as a paradigm for true democracy. Spe- cifcally, those made expendable by late capitalism on the basis of a congenital or acquired incapacity serve as an active recognition that normalization func- tions as little more than a faade that disguises humanitys defning heterogene- ity. Atruer disability-based model of social production is better understood as the interdependency of intense singularities working for common goals rather than the obverse which is the functioning logic of capitalism: intense singularities suppressed by common goals and imposed by corporations upon those who produce products and profts from which they do not adequately beneft. Politicized alternative disability-based social organizations have tended to situate their counter-discursive productions at both the macro and micro levels of experience. At the micro-level diferences proliferate and disability dedicates itself to unearthing the lack of duplication from one body to another; at the macro level disability draws together socially debilitating experiences (i.e. lack of employment, ouster from sexual circuits of interaction, exclusionary archi- tectural standards, etc.) and identifes the degree to which global oppression operates on disabled people across cultural contexts. As a result, bands of dis- abled people have produced viable alternatives to the consumptive models of capital and the expulsion of bodily imperfection in order to envision a meaning- ful contrast of lifestyles, values, and investments adapted to life as discontinuity and contingency. 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