Their framework necessitates disabled performance under an ableist hierarchy – that
internalizes ableist violence and fuels passivity
Campbell 13, Assoc Professor Fiona Kumari Campbell Griffith Law School, Problematizing Vulnerability: Engaging Studies in Ableism and
Disability Jurisprudence, http://lha.uow.edu.au/content/groups/public/@web/@law/@lirc/documents/doc/uow166211.pdf
Law itself not only regulates the constitutional compartmentalization of abledness and disability,
juridical systems of thought in effect bring into being what is sayable about differences 21 and also
proffer limits of citizenship and social inclusion in the realm of domestic and international laws. Non-discrimination laws
have moved away from a traditional compartmentalized minority identity approach towards generic and comprehensive legislation. What are
the possibilities, challenges, loses or dangers in vacating the more familiar theoretical axis of gender and race and subsuming them into a more
expansive and fluid notion of ableism which attempts to act as an explanatory framework of asymmetries of difference? Indeed does the state
Disabled peoples’ interactions with law
necessitate that disabled performativity and its ensuing subjectivities are iterated in accordance with
of ‘non- disability’ exist and if so what exactly does non-disability denote?
discourses mediated within a norm of ableism . These performances of disability in law, the fabricated
legal fiction of disability, produce subjectifying discourses where disabled subjects are brought into
being, not just for themselves, for the for rest of those engaged in the judicial process (including the
‘text’, reports of law) inaugurating what can be said and what is unsayable about disability and which
kinds of bodies are ‘re-cognised’ as the protected class known as disabled
. In this process Name and Form produces the existence of the disabled through a prescription in ableist systems codes that notify through
regulations, legal definitions and diagnostic classifications (enumerative passports). The work of Laura Rovner (2001) is instructive in shedding
light on lex crip who is validated and the consequences of any resistive action by disabled litigants who do not play the game. In law
the
complex and contradictory stories of people’s lives are reduced to ‘stock stories’, a simulation that is
woven together to create a particular impression of wrongdoing, entitlement and remedy . Elizabeth Cain
(1994) refers to the role lawyers as symbol traders, as they act as translators who ‘ black box’ complex
and contradictory facts into smooth, targeted, persuasive argument.
negative and even positive. Boxes
Stock stories invest stereotypes: both
and stereotypes conceptualise stories and enact, perform and corral
identities . The usage of negative stock stories in law can reinforce negativity and create passivity as
well as fear . Disabled litigants need to self-identify with the law’s definition of who is a ‘genuine’
disabled person
(usually a statute, but also in court judgements). These stock stories resonate with dominant values (they tap
into
and draw upon explanatory frameworks) of disabled people as victims, unfortunates, dangerous,
ruined lives, lives not worth living, damaged goods, and sufferers . Clients who embrace dominant narratives often
face difficulties in shedding that representation once a case is over.
2ac AT: Framework
USFG = the people
Howard, 2005 (Adam, “Jeffersonian Democracy: Of the People, By the People, For the People,”
http://www.byzantinecommunications.com/adamhoward/homework/highschool/jeffersonian.html, 5/27)
the government is the people, and people is the government. Therefore, if a particular
government ceases to work for the good of the people, the people may and ought to change that
government or replace it. Governments are established to protect the people's rights using the power they get from the people.
Ideally, then, under Jeffersonian Democracy,
Their conception of decisionmaking is the calculative basis for violence – only the aff
thinks through aporia
Caputo 97 (John D. Caputo, Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus at Syracuse University and the David R. Cook Professor of
Philosophy Emeritus at Villanova University, 1997, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, pp. 121-124)
There is" justice only if there is aporia, only if the way is
blocked, only if we have run up against a stone wall. When the way is not blocked, then we are just
sailing along on automatic, with cruise control and with our hands barely on the wheel, staying inside
the lines, applying the law, remaining securely within the horizon of the possible, of the
programmable and applicable. We could let a computer do it. This is exemplified by one of the quick
and easy solutions that reactionary, crowd-pleasing politicians have found these days to address the deeper
difficulties of "criminal justice": "Three strikes and you're out." The computer can count to three, can calculate
the felonies, can pass a life-sentence. You do not need a judge, and you do not guarantee justice with this
expedient, demagogic formula; you get only legality, conformity to law--and votes (which is the point of these laws). The lines of justice
run deep within the abyss and interstices of singularity, about which there can be no calculation (not to
This notion of justice and singularity is articulated by Derrida in what he calls the "aporias of justice." "
only "judgment." Deconstruction and justice everywhere encounter a single, overarching
aporia--that created by the chiasmic interweavings of justice as "infinite, incalculable, rebellious to
rule and foreign to symmetry, heterogeneous and heterotropic," and law as "stabilizable and
statutory, calculable, a system of regulated and coded prescriptions" ( FL 48/ DPJ22). The infinity,
incalculability, and heteronomy of justice, which goes to the heart of deconstruction, suggests a
comparison with Levinasian ethics. For Levinas, the face of the other who commands me infinitely and places me in a position of "absolute dissymmetry," is itself comparable to the
mention votes),
Hebrew notion of kadosh, of "sanctity" (saintete) as the separate and apart, the transcendent, that whose sacrosanct holiness sets it apart and demands our respect. While this characterization is reserved for God in Jewish
theology, Levinas extends it to the other (autrui), both the neighbor and the stranger, whom he says we must "make welcome." To what extent, then, does deconstruction converge with these Jewish, Levinasian motifs? To what
). Let us instead examine three
aporias, three examples of a single aporia that distributes itself across three domains, which might
also be described as three axioms of Derrida's "inventionalism." For justice and the law are not supposed to be opposites but to interweave: laws ought
to be just, otherwise they are monsters; and justice requires the force of law, otherwise it is a wimp. (1) The Suspension of the Law. A decision is just not
merely by conforming to law, which ensures mere legality, but only if the law is, as it were, lifted or
suspended, so that the judge "invents" the law for the first time, or, better, "re-invents" the law, not by
extent is deconstruction a Jewish science? ^_To resolve that issue here, Derrida says, will involve us in too many "difficult questions" ( FL49/ DPJ22
beginning absolutely de novo but by making a "fresh judgment" (Stanley Fish) in a new situation. Such a decision, then, is both regulated (by law) and not regulated (responsive to justice), stretching the constraints of the law to
The situation is not
a case but a singularity. Otherwise, the judge is not a judge but a calculating machine, and we do not
need a judge but a computer, and we do not ensure justice but mere conformity to law. Still, neither is
the judge free to improvise and leave aside the law. A just decision is found in the distance between a
blind and universal law and the singularity of the situation before us ( FL50-52/ DPJ22-24). 6 (2) The Ghost of
Undecidability. One of the things for which deconstruction is raked over the coals is the notion of
"undecidability," which its hasty critics, all too quick to pass judgment, confuse with simple indecision. Undecidability is taken, or mistaken, to mean a
pathetic state of apathy, the inability to act, paralyzed by the play of signifiers that dance before our eyes, like a deer caught in a headlight. But rather than an inability
to act, undecidability is the condition of possibility of acting and deciding. For whenever a decision is
really a decision, whenever it is more than a programmable, deducible, calculable, computable result
of a logarithm, that is because it has passed through "the ordeal of undecidability." One way to keep this straight is to see
that the opposite of "undecidability" is not "decisiveness" but programmability, calculability, computerizability, or formalizability.
Decisionmaking, judgment, on the other hand, positively depends upon undecidability , which gives
us something to decide. Like everything else in deconstruction--here comes a nutshell--deciding is a possibility sustained by its
impossibility. So a "just" decision, a "judgment" that is worthy of the name, one that responds to the
demands of justice, one that is more than merely legal, goes eyeball to eyeball with undecidability, stares it in the face
(literally), looks into that abyss, and then makes the leap, that is, "gives itself up to the impossible decision"
include the demands of justice in a new, different, and singular situation. For every "case" is different; every case is more than a case, a casus--a falling from or declension of universality.
( FL53/ DPJ24). That does not mean it is "decisionistic," for that would break the tension in the opposite direction, by dropping or ignoring the law altogether and substituting subjectivistic autonomy for responsibility to the other.
One revealing result of Derrida's line of reasoning is that "only a decision is just." The only thing that
can be called "just" is a singular action in a singular situation, and this only for the while that it lasts,
in the instant of decision. The warm glow of justice never settles over the law, the rule, the universal, the "maxim" that can be drawn from this singular "event," or still less over the person deciding,
who can never say "I am just." (Or else, Abraham is lost!) Justice must be continually invented, or reinvented, from decision to
decision, in the occasionalistic and "inventionalistic" time of the moment. That is why Derrida speaks
of a "ghost" of undecidability: for the undecidability is never set aside, never over and done with. It
hovers over a situation before, during, and after the decision, like a specter of justice, disturbing it
from within, divesting it of absolute self-assurance ( FL52-57/ DPJ24-26). (3) Urgency. However difficult,
unprogrammable, undecidable the situation, justice does not wait; it is demanded here, now, in the
singular situation . Justice cannot wait for all the facts to come in, which they never do. Justice cannot
wait for the System to be completed, as Johannes Climacus might have said, which is supposed to happen soon, the final
results being expected in a week or two. Even if somehow a situation could be saturated with
knowledge, still a just decision would not be programmed by the knowledge, which would reduce it to
a calculation, but would require a leap from the accumulation of cognition into the act. However
much time is expended in deliberation, a just decision would always require an expenditure without
reserve, would require resources other than knowledge and deliberation , would always demand action in a "finite moment of urgency
and precipitation," and would always be "structurally finite," that is, compelled to put an end (finis) to the deliberation in a moment of nonknowledge. We act in "the night of non-knowledge and non-rule," he says, in which we are
Justice
precedes knowledge, is older than knowledge, and belongs to another order--more performative than
constative, if that distinction would hold up--than knowledge.
"mad about this kind of justice," not because we have simply jettisoned all rules and thrown reason to the winds but because we are forced to reinvent the rule under the pressure of the present situation.
Limited dialogue is impossible
De Cock 1 (Christian De Cock, Professor of Organizational behaviour, change management, creative problem solving, 2001, “Of Philip K.
Dick, reflexivity and shifting realities Organizing (writing) in our post-industrial society” in the book “Science Fiction and Organization”)
'As Marx might have said more generally, 'all that is built or all that is "natural" melts into image' in the contemporary global economies of signs and space' (Lash and Urry, 1994, p. 326).
The opinion seems
to be broadly shared among both academics and practitioners that traditional conceptions of
effective organizing and decision-making are no longer viable because we live in a time of
irredeemable turbulence and ambiguity (Gergen, 1995). The emerging digital or 'new' economy seems to be a
technologically driven vision of new forms of organizing, relying heavily on notions of flexibility as a
response this turbulence. Corporate dinosaurs must be replaced with smart networks that add value. Words such as 'cyberspace' 3 and
'cyborganization' drip easily from tongues (e.g. Parker and Cooper, 1998) and 'the organization'
becomes more difficult to conceptualize as it 'dissipates into cyberspace' and 'permeates its own
boundaries' (Hardy and Clegg 1997: S6). Organizations are losing important elements of permanence as two central features of the modern organization, namely the assumption of self-contained units and its
structural solidity, are undermined (March, 1995). Even the concept of place becomes increasingly phantasmagoric as locales get thoroughly penetrated by social influences quite distant from them (Giddens, 1990). In this
new organizational world 'reality' seems to have become only a contract, the fabrication of a
consensus that can be modified or can break down at any time (Kallinikos, 1997) and the witnessing point - the natural datum or physical reference
point - seems to be in danger of being scrapped (Brown, 1997). This notion that reality is dissolving from the inside cannot but be related with
feelings of disorientation and anxiety. Casey (1995, pp. 70-1), for example, provides a vivid description of the position of 'the self' within these new organizational realities. This
is a world where everyone has lost a sense of everyday competence and is dependent upon experts ,
where people become dependent on corporate bureaucracy and mass culture to know what to do. The
solidity (or absence of it) of reality has of course been debated at great length in the fields of philosophy and social theory, but it remains an interesting fact that organizational scholars have become preoccupied with this issue in
recent years.
Hassard and Holliday (1998), for example, talk about the theoretical imperative to explore the
linkages between fact/fiction and illusion/reality . It is as if some fundamental metaphysical questions have finally descended into the metaphorical organizational
street. Over the past decade or so, many academics who label themselves critical management theorists and/or postmodernists (for once, let's not name any
names) have taken issue with traditional modes of organizing (and ways of theorizing about this organizing) by highlighting many
irrationalities and hidden power issues. These academics have taken on board the idea that language has a role in the constitution of reality and their work is
marked by a questioning of the nature of reality, of our conception of knowledge, cognition,
perception and observation (e.g. Chia, 1996a; Cooper and Law, 1995; Czarniawska, 1997). Notwithstanding the importance of their contributions, these authors face the problem that in order to
condemn a mode of organizing or theorizing they need to occupy an elevated position, a sort of God's eye view of the world; a position which they persuasively challenge when they deconstruct the claims of orthodox/modern
Chia, for example, writes about the radically untidy, ill-adjusted character of
the fields of actual experience - 'It is only by … giving ourselves over to the powers of "chaos",
ambiguity, and confusion that new and deeper insights and understanding can be attained' (Chia, 1996b, p. 423) using arguments which could not be more tidy, analytical and precise. This of course raises the issue
of reflexivity: if reality can never be stabilized and the research/theorizing process 'is always
necessarily precarious, incomplete and fragmented' (Chia, 1996a, p. 54), then Chia's writing clearly sits rather uncomfortably with his ontological and epistemological
beliefs. In this he is, of course, not alone (see, e.g., Gephart et al.., 1996; Cooper and Law, 1995). This schizophrenia is evidence of rather peculiar
organizational analyses (Parker, 2000; Weiskopf and Willmott, 1997).
discursive rules where certain ontological and epistemological statements are allowed and even
encouraged, but the reciprocate communicational practices are disallowed . Even the people who are
most adventurous in their ideas or statements (such as Chia) are still caught within rather confined
communicational practices. To use Vickers' (1995) terminology: there is a disjunction between the ways in which organization theorists are ready to see and value the organizational world (their
appreciative setting) and the ways in which they are ready to respond to it (their instrumental system). When we write about reflexivity, paradox and postmodernism in organizational analysis, it is expected that we do this
, the notion that 'if not consistency, then chaos' is not admitted even by all logicians, and
is rejected by many at the frontiers of natural science research - 'a contradiction causes only some hell
to break loose' (McCloskey, 1994, p. 166).
Creation of frameworks for speech and thought is violent—reject them
Meszaros 89 (Istvan, likes Marx not Adam Smith. The Power of Ideology, p 232-234)
unambiguously. 4 And yet
Nowhere is the myth of ideological neutrality – the self-proclaimed Wertfreiheit or value neutrality of so-called ‘rigorous social
science’ – stronger than in the field of methodology. Indeed, we are often presented with the claim that the
adoption of the advocated methodological framework would automatically exempt one
from all controversy about values, since they are adequate method itself, thereby saving
one from unnecessary complications and securing the desired objectivity and uncontestable
outcome.
Claims and procedures of this kind are, of course, extremely problematical. For they circularly assume that their
enthusiasm for the virtues of ‘methodological neutrality’ is bound to yield ‘value neutral’
solutions with regard to highly contested issues, without first examining the all-important question as to
the conditions of possibility – or otherwise – of the postulated systematic neutrality at the plans of methodology itself. The
unchallengeable validity of the recommended procedure is supposed to be self-evident
on account of its purely methodological character.
In reality, of course, this approach to methodology is heavily loaded with a conservative
ideological substance. Since, however, the plane of methodology (and ‘meta-theory’) is said to be
in principle separated from that of the substantive issues, the methodological circle can
be conveniently closed. Whereupon the mere insistence on the purely methodological character of the criteria laid
down is supposed to establish the claim according to which the approach in question is neutral because everybody can adopt it
as the common frame of reference of ‘rational discourse’.
Yet, curiously enough, the proposed methodological tenets are so defined that vast areas of vital social concern are a priori
excluded from their rational discourse ‘metaphysical’, ‘ideological’, etc. The effect of circumscribing in this way
the scope of the one and only admissible approach is that it automatically disqualifies in
the name of methodology itself, all those who do not fit into the stipulated framework of
discourse. As a result, the propounders of the ‘right method’ are spared the difficulties that go with acknowledging the real
divisions and incompatibilities as they necessarily arise from the contending social interests at the roots of alternative
approaches and the rival sets of values associated with them.
This is where we can see more clearly the social orientation implicit in the whole procedure. For – far from offering
an
adequate scope for critical enquiry – the advocated general adoption of the allegedly
neutral methodological framework is equivalent, in fact, to consenting not even to raise
the issues that really matter. Instead, the stipulated ‘common’ methodological procedure succeeds in transforming
the enterprise of ‘rational discourse’ into the dubious practice of producing methodology for the sake of methodology: a
tendency more pronounced in the twentieth century than ever before. This practice consists in sharpening the recommended
methodological knife until nothing but the bare handle is left, at which point the new knife is adopted for the same purpose. For
the ideal methodological knife is not meant for cutting, only for sharpening, thereby interposing itself between the critical intent
and the real objects of criticism which it can obliterate for as long as the pseudo-critical activity of knife-sharpening for tits own
sake continues to be pursued. And that happens to be precisely its inherent ideological purpose.
Naturally, to speak of a ‘common’ methodological framework in which one can resolve the problems of a society torn by
irreconcilable social interests and pursuing antagonistic confrontations is delusory, at best, notwithstanding all talk
about ‘ideal communication communities’. But to define the methodological tenets of all rational discourse
by way of transubstantiating into ‘ideal types’ (or by putting into methodological ‘brackets’) the
discussion of contending social values reveals the ideological colour as well as the
extreme fallaciousness of the claimed rationality. For such treatment of the major areas of conflict,
under a great variety of forms – from the Viennese version of ‘logical positivism’ to Wittgenstein’s famous ladder that must be
‘thrown away’ at the point of confronting the question of values, and from the advocacy of the Popperian principle of ‘little by
little’ in the ‘emotivist’ theory of value – inevitably always favours the established order. And it does so by
declaring the fundamental structural parameters of the given society ‘of of bounds’ to
the potential contestants, in the authority of the ideally ‘common’ methodology.
However, even on a cursory inspection of the issues at stake it out to be fairly obvious that to consent not to question
the fundamental structural framework of the established order is radically different
according to whether one does so as the beneficiary of the order or from the standpoint
of those who find themselves at the receiving end, exploited and oppressed by the
overall determinations (and not just by some limited and more or less easily corrigible detail) of that order.
Consequently, to establish the ‘common’ identity of the two, opposed sides of a structurally safeguarded hierarchical order – by
means of the reduction of the people belong to the contending social forces into fictitious ‘rational interlocutors’, extracted from
their divided real world and transplanted into a beneficially shared universe of ideal discourse – would be nothing sort of
methodological miracle.
Contrary to the wishful thinking hypostatized as a timeless and socially unspecified rational community, the elementary
condition of a truly rational discourse would be to acknowledge the legitimacy of
contesting the given order of society in substantive terms. This would imply the articulation of
the relevant problems not on the plane of self-referential articulation of the relevant problems not on the plane of selfreferential theory and methodology, but as inherently practical issues whose conditions of solution
point towards the necessity of radical structural changes. In other words, it would require
the explicit rejection of all fiction of methodological and meta-theoretical neutrality. But,
of course, this would be far too much to expect precisely because the society in which we live is a deeply divided society. This is
why through the dichotomies of ‘fact and value’, ‘theory and practice’, ‘formal and substantive rationality’, etc. The conflicttranscending methodological miracle is constantly stipulated as the necessary regulative framework of the ruling ideology.
What makes this approach particularly difficult to challenge is that its value-commitments are mediated by methodological
precepts to such a degree that it is virtually impossible to bring them into the focus of discussion without openly contesting the
framework as a whole. For the conservative sets of values at the roots of such orientation remain several steps removed from the
ostensible subject of dispute as defined in logico/methodological, formal/structural, and semantic/analytical terms. And who
would suspect of ideological bias the impeccable – methodologically sanctioned –
credentials of ‘procedural rules’, ‘models and ‘paradigms’?
Once, though, such rules and paradigms are adopted as the common frame of reference of
what may or may not be allowed to considered the legitimate subject of debate,
everything that enters into the accepted parameters is necessarily constrained not only
by the scope of the overall framework, but simultaneously also by the inexplicit
ideological assumptions upon the basis of which the methodological principles
themselves were in the first place constitution. This why the allegedly ‘non-ideological’
ideologies which so successfully conceal and exercise their apologetic function in the guise of
neutral methodology are doubly mystifying.
Twentieth-century currents of thought are dominated by approaches that lend to articulate the social interests and values of the
ruling order through complicated – at times completely bewildering – mediations, on the methodological plane. Thus, more
than ever before, the task of ideological demystification is inseparable from the investigation of the complex dialectical
relationship between methods and values which no social theory or philosophy can escape.
2ac AT: Cap
Ableist normalcy locks us all in a state of crisis because society fears impairment –
this creates the condition for privatization and rampant capitalism
Betcher 6, Dr. Sharon V. Betcher, Associate Professor of Theology Vancouver School of Theology, Canada, Saving the Wretched of the
Earth, http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/721/898
Incanting the Foucauldian truism that "power operates--and therefore can only be opposed–discursively," Davis (1995) elsewhere notes that
"this normalcy
must constantly be enforced in public venues (like the novel), must always be creating and
bolstering its image by processing, comparing, constructing...images of normalcy and the abnormal" (p.
44). But the public venues of the medicine show of remediation to normalcy are by no means limited to the novel. Such shows are staged
throughout both the discourses of theological Christology, especially its liturgical expositions, and biotechnoscience. And the
real illusion
of the medicine show happens among the audience: the theatre of geeks, freaks and grotesques, all
needing to be cured, serve as but the prompts for the inner subjective theatre of crisis, lack, and
repression that churns in the guts of most modern persons . As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2000) observes,
capitalism requires subjects in perpetual crisis: "Privatization of the ["modernizing"] impulse means
compulsive self-critique born of perpetual self-disaffection ..." (p. 38). The technology of subjective
normalcy punishes not only persons with disabilities; this theatrical performance becomes
introjected as anxiety, shame or fear around how "normal" bodies should perpetually remediate
their deviances, which multiply under speculation . The deviations of bodies and subjectivity opened
out in the name of health has become the consuming crisis of postmodern subjectivity --literally, a
"consuming" crisis, in terms of personal (eviscerating political) attention and appropriation of
resources.
Fear of disability trains subjects to desire the ideological fantasy of bourgeois norms
Betcher 6, Dr. Sharon V. Betcher, Associate Professor of Theology Vancouver School of Theology, Canada, Saving the Wretched of the
Earth, http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/721/898
Redemption's Social Optic: When read through the optics of modern realism, encounters between the protagonist Jesus, "vital, pure and busy"
(von Harnack, 1908), and a person with a "disability" become medicine shows. In such scenes, disabled characters appear as but stage props in
the constituting of humanism. The literary genre of modern realism, disabilities theorist Leonard Davis (2002) explains, emerged in the late
eighteenth century "as an ideological form of symbolic production whose central binary is normal-abnormal" (p. 98). Further, "this dialectic
works in a fundamental way to produce plots," (p. 95) such that deviance is encountered and "cure as closure is the rule" (p. 98). Observing that
modern novels seem to feature a multiplicity of disabled bodies, but set only like plot props over against the central protagonist, Davis
concludes that "narratives involving disability always yearn for the cure, the neutralizing of the disability." "The
fantasy of normality,"
Davis advises us, " needs the abjection of disability to maintain a homeostatic system of binaries " (99).
This narrative commitment to the redemption of deviance--whether by repair, by rescue from social censure or
by extermination (Mitchell, 2002)--supports the development of the modern subject, Davis (2002) argues, training
the subject to desire "the ideological fantasy of" (p. 96) and "the comfort of bourgeois norms" (p. 99) by
denigrating disability. If miraculous remediation can be, according to the redemptive plot line of
modern realism, the only viable conclusion to such a story, the trick will be to look behind the curtains
of this medicine show so as to observe the formation of subjective normalcy.
Foregrounding disability is a fundamental challenge to the capitalist order -- it
exposes exploitative labor relations, forges collective agency, symbolizes rebel
agency, and challenges the Christian capitalist concept of miraculous rejuvenation
Betcher 6, Dr. Sharon V. Betcher, Associate Professor of Theology Vancouver School of Theology, Canada, Saving the Wretched of the
Earth, http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/721/898
Toward a Theology of Subversive Cohabitation: In Palestine around the end of the first century c.e., a new innovation upon
the Isaianic concept of a Crip Nation was wielded as the basis of a "theology of subversive cohabitation" (Sawicki, 2000, p. 60). Miracle stories
have been arranged in the gospels so as to "replicate...in miniature the story of the Exodus," explains biblical scholar Burton Mack (1998, pp.
222-3). Floated on the lore of miracles, calling the reluctant into collectivity, crip bodies stage an Exodus "within" Empire. If "the boundaries
crossed [by those receptive to the miracle lore] were social boundaries...," as Mack insists (p. 223), then I would say the secret to subversive
cohabitation has to do with learning, as must every crip, to become (as the 20th century philosopher Gilles Deleuze would say) a
"body
without organs"--a body which deconstrues its social organizational alliances, like our patterns of
overwork, as these circulate desire through the body, both individually and communally. Becoming a
Crip Nation, then as now, pivots upon a critique of economic structure and demands re-imagining
collectivity, kinship, interdependence
(Meekosha and Dowse, 1997). Whether the language of crips in prophetic and synoptic
literature figured literally, given what happens to health in imperial contact zones, or metaphorically, so as to evoke "slaves of God, not of
Caesar," these images
called for subversive living even within the belly of empire .
Subversion, however, worked not by marching army against army, but rather by excising and otherwise
exciting desire so as to swerve empire from within. Such wisdom appears to have been introduced by
the Crip Nation, those who knew the secrets of disarticulating social desires without losing life-love. I
wonder if
solidarity with the Crip Nation--an awareness that " disability is a socially-created category
derived from labor relations, a product of the exploitative economic structure of capitalist society "
and " one of the conditions that allow the capitalist class to accumulate wealth " (Russell and Malhotra, 2002,
p. 1)–could
be the sign by which "insurgent subjects" might today "create a collective agency
1994, p. 199)." Could not
(Bhabha,
the Crip Nation--that is, disablement as a reminder of capitalism's chokehold on
the laboring body , if also the body's desire for collectivity , for not having to go it alone-- serve as
symbol for the "transmission of rebel agency " (Bhabha, 1994, p. 200)? Similarly, transvaluing Spirit from
guarantor of miraculous remediation towards the recognition of persons living the variability and
vulnerabilities of bodies with real presence to life , may allow Christians to get inventive about
subjectivities that take their leave of contemporary, englobing capitalist economics.