Philosophy and the Apparatus of Disability
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Abstract and Keywords
Mainstream philosophers take for granted that disability is a prediscursive, transcultural,
and transhistorical disadvantage, an objective human defect or characteristic that ought
to be prevented, corrected, eliminated, or cured. That these assumptions are contestable,
that it might be the case that disability is a historically and culturally specific, contingent
social phenomenon, a complex apparatus of power, rather than a natural attribute or
property that certain people possess, is not considered, let alone seriously entertained.
This chapter draws on the insights of Michel Foucault to advance a historicist and
relativist conception of disability as an apparatus (dispositif) of power and identify
mechanisms of power within philosophy that produce the underrepresentation of disabled
philosophers in the profession and the marginalization of philosophy of disability in the
discipline.
Keywords: disability, Michel Foucault, apparatus, historicist, relativist, underrepresentation of disabled
philosophers
Philosophy and the Apparatus of Disability
Shelley L. Tremain
The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Disability
Edited by David T. Wasserman and Adam Cureton
Subject: Philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
Online Publication Date: May 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190622879.013.5
Oxford Handbooks Online
Philosophy and the Apparatus of Disability
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A Naturalized Narrative
Throughout the last decades of the twentieth century, discussions about disability became
increasingly prevalent in mainstream philosophy, especially with the resurgence of work
on social justice from the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) forward
and the emergence and expansion of the subfields of cognitive science and bioethics.
Despite the apparent variety of the questions that mainstream philosophers have asked
about disability, however, the cluster of motivational assumptions that underpins almost
all their inquiries takes for granted the metaphysical status and epistemological
character of the category of disability and designation itself, casting them as self-evident
and thus philosophically uninteresting. On the terms of this cluster of assumptions,
disability is a prediscursive, transcultural, and transhistorical disadvantage, an objective
human defect or characteristic that ought to be prevented, corrected, eliminated, or
cured. That these assumptions are contestable, that it might be the case that disability is
a historically and culturally specific and contingent social phenomenon, a complex
apparatus of power, rather than a natural attribute or property that certain people
possess, is not considered, let alone seriously entertained. Indeed, many feminist
philosophers uncritically accept the aforementioned assumptions about what disability is
and what we know about it. Even some philosophers of disability do not rigorously
question the metaphysical and epistemological status of disability, but rather advance
ethical and political positions that largely assume the self-evidence of that status.
The bias in philosophy that the inequalities that accrue to disabled people are self-
evidently natural and inevitable has yielded the belief that these disadvantages are most
appropriately addressed in the domains of medicine, the life sciences, and related fields
rather than in philosophy departments. Thus, the assumption that critical analysis of the
status of disability is not appropriate subject matter for philosophical inquiry has shaped
philosophy departments, influencing hiring practices and decisions, course curricula, the
composition of conference lineups, professional networks, and editorial boards, the
contents of edited collections, and so on. In other words, the assumption that disability is
a philosophically uninteresting human characteristic and the underrepresentation of
disabled philosophers within the profession are inseparably embedded in the institutional
infrastructure of the discipline, mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing.
Insofar as philosophers have conceived the social inequalities that accrue to disabled
people as the inevitable consequences of a self-evident physiological, or natural, human
characteristic, they have presupposed certain assumptions about the relation between
biology and society—that is, between nature and nurture—that I aim to undermine.
Dorothy E. Roberts (2016) has distinguished heuristically between two approaches to the
question of the relation between biology and society: “the old biosocial science” and “the
new biosocial science.” As Roberts explains it, the old biosocial science posits that
biological differences produce social inequality, whereas the new biosocial science posits
that social inequality produces biological differences. The biological determinism of the
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old biosocial science, she notes, is achieved in several ways: first, the old biosocial
science approach separates nature from nurture in order to locate the origins of social
inequalities in inherent traits rather than imposed societal structures; second, the old
biosocial science postulates that social inequalities are reproduced in the bodies,
especially the wombs, of socially disadvantaged people rather than reinvented through
unjust ideologies and institutions; third, the old bioscience identifies problems that stem
from social inequality as derived from the threats that oppressed people’s biology itself
poses to society rather than from structural barriers and state violence imposed upon
oppressed people; and fourth, the old bioscience endeavors to intervene and fix perceived
biological deficits in the bodies of oppressed people rather than end the structural
violence that dehumanizes them and maintains an unjust social order.
Roberts explains that, by contrast, the new biosocial science posits that every single
biological element, every single biological process in the human body, every human cell,
and everything that happens to a human cell is affected by society. All of life, Roberts
remarks, is at once biological and social. There is, in short, no natural body. Genes do not
determine anything. Moreover, our brains are plastic, with the ability to be modified by
social experience. Both epigenetics and social neuroscience, Roberts points out, show
that biology is not a separate entity that interacts with the environment; rather, biology is
constituted by these interactions (2016; see also Roberts 1998, 2012; Prinz 2012; Gilman
and Thomas 2016). With Roberts, various authors have argued, furthermore, that critical
analyses of biosocial science must consider how claims about the social construction of
biological phenomena are produced, in what contexts they are mobilized, and for what
political purposes. Victoria Pitts-Taylor argues (2010, 635), for example, that if we are to
take the plasticity of the brain seriously, we must think critically about the historicity of
this ontology and the political and economic forces that have produced the historical and
epistemological conditions of possibility for its uptake. As Andy Clark (1998) puts it, the
plastic brain is a situated brain, culturally, biologically, and socially.
Michel Foucault’s insights can be used to denaturalize and de-biologize disability. Many of
Foucault’s insights upon which I have drawn for this purpose were introduced and refined
in his discussions of abnormality, madness, deviance, and other discursive objects that
intellectuals and nonintellectuals alike commonly associate with disability. Indeed, my
argument has extended these discussions and is most aptly characterized as a feminist
philosophical inquiry into what Foucault referred to as the “problematization” of
phenomena in the present. Foucault’s studies of abnormality, madness, and deviance
(among other things) were not intended to provide normative responses to these
phenomena, but rather were designed to show how these phenomena emerged as
problems to which solutions came to be sought. Likewise, my philosophy of disability does
not offer an explicitly normative feminist proposal or response to the phenomena of
disability, nor does it provide a (normative) feminist critique of a given normative
response to the phenomena of disability. Such a given proposal, response, or critique
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would allege to show that there is a certain definitive solution to the “problem” of
disability.
The feminist philosophical inquiry into the problematization of disability that I have
developed was designed in large part to indicate how a certain historically and culturally
specific regime of power has produced certain acts, practices, subjectivities, bodies,
relations, and so on as a problem for the present, as well as to indicate the role that
philosophy has played and continues to play in the elaboration of this problem. I followed
Foucault’s suggestion that inquiry into the problematization of a given state of affairs
attempts to uncover how the different solutions to a problem have been constructed, as
well as how these different solutions resulted from the problematization of that given
state of affairs in the first place. Thus, I have aimed to show how a certain regime of
power has produced impairment as both the prediscursive—that is, natural and universal
—antecedent of culturally variant forms of disability and a problem for this regime of
power to which the regime offers solutions. In other words, one of my aims has been to
indicate how a certain apparatus of power has brought impairment—the naturally
disadvantageous foundation of disability—into being as that kind of thing.
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The Apparatus of Disability
Foucault’s innovative conception of apparatus (dispositif), technique of genealogy,
analyses of biopower, and prescient claims about liberalism and neoliberalism (among
others) can be used to investigate the ways that the tradition, discipline, and profession
of philosophy have contributed to both the problematization and apparatus of disability,
as well as to the naturalization of the allegedly objective antecedent of disability—namely,
impairment. In “The Confession of the Flesh,” Foucault (1980, 194) defined an apparatus
(dispositif) as a thoroughly heterogeneous and interconnected ensemble of discourses,
institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, scientific statements,
administrative measures, and philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions that
responds to an “urgent need” in a certain historical moment. In other words, an
apparatus is a historically specific and dispersed system of power that produces and
configures practices toward certain strategic and political ends.
To understand disability as an apparatus is to conceive of it as a far-reaching and
systemic matrix of power that contributes to, is inseparable from, and reinforces other
apparatuses of historical force relations. On this understanding, disability is not a
metaphysical substrate, a natural, biological category, or a characteristic that only certain
individuals embody or possess, but rather is a historically contingent network of force
relations in which everyone is implicated and entangled and in relation to which everyone
occupies a position. That is, to be disabled or nondisabled is to occupy a certain subject
position within the productive constraints of the apparatus of disability. In the terms of
this understanding of disability, there are no “people with disabilities” and “able-bodied
people,” but rather there are “disabled people” and “nondisabled people.” Just as people
are variously racialized through strategies and mechanisms of the apparatus of race but
do not “have” races and, furthermore, just as people are variously sexed through
strategies and mechanisms of the apparatus of sex but no one “has” a sex, so, too, people
are variously disabled or not disabled through the operations of the apparatus of
disability but no one “has” a disability. In the terms of the feminist philosophy of disability
that I have advanced, to refer to someone as “a person with a disability” is to commit a
category mistake. That females and people of color (which are by no means mutually
exclusive social groups) have been perceived in the recent histories of Western and
Northern nations as the bearers of sex and race, respectively, does not mean that males
are not also sexed in accordance with the apparatus of sex, nor that white people are not
racialized in the terms of the apparatus of race. Equally, the fact that one is not subjected
as a disabled person does not indicate that one occupies a space apart from the
apparatus of disability.
Key classificatory schemes and distinctions made in disability theory—such as the
distinctions between visible disabilities and invisible disabilities, mental disabilities
versus psychological disabilities, physical disability versus cognitive disability, physical
impairments as opposed to sensory impairments, severe disabilities versus moderate or
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mild disabilities, high functioning and low functioning—are, themselves, strategies of
these relations of power; that is, these distinctions and designations are performative
artifacts of the apparatus of disability that naturalize this state of affairs, reinstituting
disability as a personal attribute or individual characteristic. That disabled people reify
these (and other) historically contingent products of the apparatus of disability and
incorporate them into their sets of beliefs, theories, values, and practices in a host of
ways, interpreting them as the substratum or ground of putatively natural or even
socially constructed identities, should be recognized as a strategic mechanism of the
“polymorphism” (as Foucault referred to it) of (neo)liberalism; that is, the continuous
capacity of a liberal regime of force relations to respond to critique by molding the
subjectivities of individuals in particular ways. When disability is situated within the
domain of force relations, that is, when disability is construed as an apparatus of power,
its collaboration with other apparatuses of force relations—such as settler colonialism
and heteronormativity—can be more readily identified and investigated.
The conception of disability as an apparatus is premised on an understanding of the
relation between power and causation that runs counter to current and emerging work in
philosophy of disability and disability studies. For this conception of disability does not
rely on some variation of the assumption that impairment and disability could be taken up
as politically neutral and value-neutral objects of inquiry were it not for disabling
practices and policies of exclusion that the ideological requirements of power place on
them. This assumption is fundamental to a dominant sociopolitical conception of disability
—namely, the British social model of disability—according to which impairment is a
politically neutral human characteristic on which disability (construed as social
oppression) is imposed. With the conception of disability as an apparatus, by contrast, no
domain of impairment or disability exists apart from relations of power. Impairment and
disability can never be freed from power, nor, furthermore, can there be a
phenomenology that articulates these supposedly prediscursive domains. Power relations
are not external to impairment and disability and their nexus in the apparatus of
disability, but rather are integral to this relationship, constituting the knowledge and
objects that these historical artifacts affect, as well as the artifacts themselves. As
Foucault explained,
Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types
of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations),
but are immanent in the latter; they are the immediate effects of the divisions,
inequalities, and disequilibriums which occur in the latter, and conversely they are
the internal conditions of these differentiations; relations of power are not in
superstructural positions, with a role of prohibition or accompaniment; they have
a directly productive role, wherever they come into play. (1978, 94)
Since there is no exteriority between techniques of knowledge and strategies of power,
and insofar as knowledge–power relations are constitutive of the objects that they affect,
one of my aims is to identify and examine discussions within philosophy around which
historically specific responses to disability, produced in accordance with the requirements
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of the apparatus of disability, have coalesced; that is, I aim to identify and examine
“especially dense transfer point[s] for relations of power” (Foucault 1978, 98) within
philosophy that the apparatus of disability has produced, thereby contributing to its
expansion and to the constitution of its naturalized elements, of which impairment is only
one. Within the discipline of philosophy, the subfields of bioethics and cognitive science
are most easily recognizable as domains within which the constitutive effects of the
apparatus of disability are produced; however, such sites of power can be identified
across and throughout the discipline.
Philosophers of disability ought to ask: How has the combination of (1) philosophical
discourses that reinforce the apparatus of disability and (2) discursive practices within
professional philosophy that consistently ignore disability enabled (3) resistance to the
apparatus of disability within the discipline and profession of philosophy themselves?
That is, how has this combination of discourses made possible the formation of a
“reverse” or “counter” discourse on disability—namely, philosophy of disability? As
Foucault wrote, “Discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a
hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing
strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines
and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it” (1978, 101). Where
there is power, there are resistances; yet these resistances, too, contribute to the
elaboration of the very objects to which they are directed as resistance. Thus, the
historical conditions of possibility for resistance to the apparatus of disability are also
historical conditions of possibility for its expansion and consolidation.
Historicizing and Relativizing the Apparatus of
Disability
Given the nonfoundationalist conception of impairment and disability that I have
elaborated and continue to hold, it should come as no surprise that the philosophy of
disability that I advance is both relativist and historicist. I define relativism as the
philosophical doctrine according to which different societies and cultures create different
beliefs and values under different historical conditions. I define historicism as the
philosophical doctrine according to which beliefs and values emerge as a consequence of
historical events and circumstances (see Prinz 2007, 215, 234–235).
An interlocutor might point out that the aforementioned definition of relativism refers to
a form of it—namely, descriptive relativism—that is uncontroversial among philosophers:
most philosophers grant that different cultures have different beliefs and practices. Such
an interlocutor might in turn argue that I need an additional argument if I wish to
advance a stronger relativism whereby different cultures have different beliefs and
practices that have equal claims epistemologically and ethically. Let me point out,
therefore, that although philosophers generally agree that descriptive relativism is true
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with respect to science, religion, and values—that is, every culture has its own beliefs
about these things—most of them implicitly presuppose a kind of universalism about
certain categories taken to be fundamental, especially categories that they believe are
based in biology, categories such as life and death, health and disability, and pleasure and
pain. In short, not even descriptive relativism is an obvious thesis.
Nevertheless, the relativism of my position does not require the sort of epistemological or
ethical appeal upon which the interlocutor insists. For the relativism of the philosophy of
disability that I have advanced is established and substantiated by and through its
historicism; that is, the historicism of my philosophy of disability should be conceived as
both theoretically prior and antecedent in practice to its relativism, which is, therefore, a
derivative of the historicism. Insofar as I argue for the historicist and artifactual
character of disability, I establish its relativist character. Claims about the historical
transformation of concepts and practices need not necessarily imply their improvement
and progress. By both definition and design, the relativist and historicist feminist
philosophy of disability that I elaborate offers a new approach to the questions and
concerns about disability that philosophers of disability and disability theorists raise, an
approach that is dynamic and historically and contextually sensitive to an extent that
other philosophies of disability are not.
My choices of relativism and Foucault’s historicism as vehicles through which to
articulate a feminist philosophy of disability will be unpopular, if not dismissed, in many
circles within philosophy. Indeed, Foucault himself explicitly denied that his work was
relativist (see Foucault 1982, 212). Although he offered no explanation for this denial, the
fact that, in the same context, Foucault also denied that his work relies on skepticism
suggests that he may have assumed that a relativist approach required that he refuse
even historicist claims to truth, a refusal that he did not make. Nevertheless, many
philosophers trained in Anglo-American philosophy continue to refer to Foucault’s work
as relativist as means to discount its philosophical significance and complexity. As David
Wong (2006), who has written extensively about relativism, points out, most philosophical
discussions of relativism in Anglo-American philosophy are designed to make relativism
an easy target for derision and condemnation, seldom revealing what motivates people
who are attracted to it as a philosophical approach. Such discussions, Wong notes,
usually come early in standard introductory textbooks in order “to get relativism out of
the way so that the ‘serious’ philosophy can start” (xi). The strategy, he explains, is almost
always negative or purports to show some incoherence in relativist argumentation. Rarely
do philosophers who are critical of relativism attempt to formulate a version of it that is
“nuanced and plausibly motivated” (xi). Despite Foucault’s own denial that his claims
were relativist, I nevertheless associate both his refusal to universalize and his historical
approach with a form of relativism to develop a historicist and relativist feminist
philosophy of disability that is nuanced and plausible, politically informed and provoked.
In my view, the historicism at the heart of Foucault’s claims establishes them as relativist
or, at least, makes them amenable to a relativist approach.
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That Foucault used historical approaches to the phenomena that he investigated, rather
than purportedly ahistorical conceptual analysis, deductive reasoning, and logical
argumentation, is another reason why many, if not most, mainstream “analytic”
philosophers dismiss or at least disregard his work. Jesse Prinz (himself a relativist), who
draws on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche to recommend a genealogical method for
philosophical inquiry, is a notable exception to this rule in mainstream analytic
philosophy. Prinz asserts that the important lessons to derive from Nietzsche’s
genealogical approach to morality are that each of the values that we currently cherish
has a history, that these histories may not be favorable, and, furthermore, that these
histories may not suggest our progression toward ideas that are truer or more beneficial.
Our disregard for the historicity of our values, Prinz writes, gives us a “false sense of
security” in them: “We take our moral outlook to be unimpeachable” (2007, 217). In other
contexts, Prinz has drawn on Nietzsche’s genealogical method and the sentimentalism of
David Hume to develop a historicist and relativist approach to morality that takes account
of historical contingency and cultural variation in ways that, and to an extent that,
normative ethical theories do not. Prinz’s aim is to show that the genealogical method can
be effectively used to inquire into the genesis of human values. A genealogical
investigation of human values, Prinz explains, confirms that moral convictions are
products of social history and accident, rather than derived from intuition, revelation, or
deductive reasoning from normative principles. Philosophers who investigate where
moral beliefs and values originate are usually said to commit the “genetic fallacy,”
according to which the origins of morality are irrelevant; however, Prinz (217, 235)
argues that genealogy—as a method to investigate origins—can enable us to discern
when a given value originated in circumstances that are ignoble and therefore is
especially suitable for reassessment. Genealogy, he states, “is an under-utilized tool for
moral critique” (243).
Biopower and Normalization
In his lecture of January 7, 1976, at the Collège de France, Foucault introduced an
analysis of power that contrasted with accepted understandings of it that he referred to
as “juridico-discursive” conceptions of power. In the terms of juridical conceptions, he
pointed out, the individual possesses power (as one would possess a commodity) in the
form of inherent, inalienable rights, the transfer or surrender of which (through a
juridical act or a contract) constitutes a sovereign. Foucault argued to the contrary that
power is not something that is exchanged, given, or taken back but rather is exercised
and exists only in action. In addition, Foucault disputed the assumption of juridical
conceptions according to which power is fundamentally repressive. Though consensus
and violence are the instruments or results of power, he remarked, they do not amount to
its essential nature (2003, 13). As he put it, “The exercise of power can produce as much
acceptance as may be wished for: it can pile up the dead and shelter itself behind
whatever threats it can imagine. In itself the exercise of power is not violence; nor is it a
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consent, which, implicitly, is renewable” (1982, 220). For Foucault, the question that
political philosophy should ask about power is this: How—that is, by what means—is it
exercised (217)? Indeed, one of the most original features of Foucault’s analysis is the
idea that power functions best when it is exercised through productive constraints.
Furthermore, he argued that the continued preoccupation with juridical conceptions of
power in modern political philosophy has obscured the productive capacity and subtle
machinations of a form of power that began to coalesce at the end of the eighteenth
century, namely, biopower. In the January 11 lecture of his 1977–78 course at the Collège
de France (subsequently published in English as Security, Territory, Population: Lectures
at Collège de France, 1977–1978), Foucault described biopower as “the set of
mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the
object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how,
starting from the eighteenth century, modern [W]estern societies took on board the
fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species” (2007, 1). The apparatus of
disability has been integral, indeed vital, to the strategies of this relatively recent form of
power.
From the eighteenth century forward, biopower, by taking as its object “life itself,” has
worked toward increasingly efficient and economical management of the problems that
variables of sex (and other phenomena) pose for the political economy of populations and
individuals. Biopower, Foucault wrote, is “what brought life and its mechanisms into the
realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of
human life” (1978, 143). Life—its enhancement, amplification, quality, duration,
continuance, and renewal—has become an urgent economic and political concern that
government policy and practice address to wrest management and control of it.
Biopower’s management of life has entailed the inauguration of a novel set of strategic
measurements, including the ratio of births to deaths, the rate of fertility in the
population, and the rate of reproduction, as well as a body of statistical knowledge and
administrative cataloging of states of health and perceived threats to it.
The consolidation of the modern concept of “normal” legitimized and occurred in tandem
with the new statistical knowledge and other techniques of population management that
stemmed from biopower. As François Ewald (1991, 138) explains, the norm enabled
biopower, “which aims to produce, develop, and order social strength,” to steadily do the
work that juridical modes of governance, characterized by forcible seizure, abduction, or
repression, had done in the past. The norm accomplished this expansion by enabling
discipline to develop from a simple set of constraints into a mechanism and by
transforming the negative restraints of the juridical into the more positive controls of
normalization (141). From the eighteenth century on, the function of technologies of
normalization has been to isolate so-called anomalies in the population, which can be
normalized through the therapeutic and corrective strategies of other, associated
technologies. Technologies of normalization are not merely benign or even benevolent
responses to these anomalies in the social body. On the contrary, technologies of
normalization are instrumental to the systematic creation, identification, classification,
and control of such anomalies; that is, they systematically contribute to the constitution
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of the perception of anomalies (such as impairment) and operate as mechanisms through
which some subjects can be divided from others. Foucault introduced the term dividing
practices to refer to modes of manipulation that combine a scientific discourse with
practices of segregation and social exclusion to categorize, classify, distribute, and
manipulate subjects who are initially drawn from a rather undifferentiated mass of
people. Through these practices, subjects become objectivized as (for instance) mad or
sane, sick or healthy, criminal or law abiding (1982, 208). Through these practices of
division, classification, and ordering, furthermore, subjects become tied to an identity and
come to understand themselves scientifically.
In the final chapter of The History of Sexuality, volume 1, provocatively titled “The Right
of Death and Power over Life,” Foucault explained the historical shift away from the
juridical exercise of power to regulatory control and the coercion of normalization:
[A] consequence of this development of bio-power was the growing importance
assumed by the action of the norm, at the expense of the juridical system of the
law. Law cannot help but be armed, and its arm, par excellence, is death; to those
who transgress it, it replies, at least as a last resort, with the absolute menace.
The law always refers to the sword. But a power whose task is to take charge of
life needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms. It is no longer a
matter of bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty, but of distributing
the living in the domain of value and utility. Such a power has to qualify, measure,
appraise, and hierarchize, rather than display itself in its murderous splendor; it
does not have to draw the line that separate the enemies of the sovereign from his
obedient subjects; it effects distributions around the norm. I do not mean to say
that the law fades into the background or that the institutions of justice tend to
disappear, but rather that the law operates more and more as a norm, and that the
juridical institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses
(medical, administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part
regulatory. A normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of
power centered on life. (1978, 144)
Foucault regarded normalization as a central—if not the central—mechanism of
biopower’s management of life, the life of both the individual and the species. Biopower
can thus be defined as a historically specific combination of normalization and population
management conducted through vast networks of production and social control.
Beginning in the eighteenth century, Foucault noted, the power of the normal has
combined with other powers such as the law and tradition, imposing new limits on them.
The normal, he explained, was established as a principle of coercion through the
introduction of standardized education, the organization of national medical professions
and hospital systems that could circulate general norms of health, and the
standardization of industrial processes and products and manufacturing techniques.
Normalization thus became one of the great instruments of power at the close of the
classical age; that is, the power that the norm harnessed has been shaped through the
disciplines that began to emerge at this historical moment (Foucault 1977, 184). For, from
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the end of the eighteenth century, the indicators of social status, privilege, and group
affiliation have been increasingly supplemented, if not replaced, by a range of degrees of
normality that simultaneously indicate membership in a homogeneous social body (a
population) and serve to distinguish subjects from each other, to classify them, and to
rank them in a host of hierarchies.
In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault (1977) noted that
normalization initially emerged in eighteenth-century military schools, orphanages, and
boarding schools as an effective form of punishment, “a perpetual penalty,” a persistent
disciplining. In Foucault’s terms, discipline is neither an institution nor an apparatus but
rather a type of power and a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of
instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, and targets. Discipline is an
“anatomy” of power, a technology of power that may be assumed by (1) particular
institutions—such as schools or hospitals—in order to achieve a certain end, or (2)
authorities that use it as a means to reinforce and reorganize their established means of
power, or (3) apparatuses that use it as their mode of functioning, or (4) state
apparatuses whose primary function is to assure that discipline reigns over society in
general, namely, the police (215–216). As a technology that has facilitated the expansion
of biopower, disciplinary normalization aims to make the body more efficient and
calculated in its acts, movements, gestures, and expression, to produce a body that is
“docile,” that is, a body that can be subjected, used, transformed, and improved. Modern
discipline can be summed up thus: it enables subjects to act in order to constrain them.
Disciplinary “punishment”—that is, normalization—has brought into play five distinct
normalizing operations. First, individual actions are referred to a totality that is
simultaneously a field of comparison, a space of differentiation, and a rule to be followed.
Second, individuals are in turn differentiated from each other in relation to this rule that
functions as a minimal threshold, as an average, or as an optimal outcome toward which
individuals must move. Third, the natures, grades and levels, and abilities of individuals
are hierarchized and quantified. Fourth, these quantifying and hierarchizing measures
introduce the constraint of a conformity that must be achieved. Fifth, the limit of
difference, the far side of “the abnormal” that will define difference per se in relation to
all other specific differences, is codified and enforced by penalty (correction, segregation,
and so on). The five elemental modes of normalization are thus comparison,
differentiation, hierarchy, homogeneity, and exclusion. The punitive impulse that
regulates normalization compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, and excludes individuals
in order to homogenize a population that, by virtue of its homogeneity, can be more
effectively utilized and modified. In short, the disciplinary power of the norm relies on
coercion, rather than open repression or violence. Hence, Foucault pointed out, the
centrality of normalization to a form of power (biopower) that aims to exert a more
positive influence on life, undertaking to administer it, to multiply it, and to impose on it a
system of regulations and precise inspection (1977, 182–184; see also Knobe 2017).
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In his January 25, 1978, lecture at the Collège de France, Foucault described disciplinary
power in this way:
Discipline, of course, analyses and breaks down; it breaks down individuals, place,
time, movements, actions, and operations. It breaks them down into components
such that they can be seen, on the one hand, and modified, on the other. It is this
famous interdisciplinary analytical-practical grid that tries to establish the
minimal elements of perception and the elements sufficient for modification.
Second, discipline classifies the components thus identified according to definite
objectives. What are the best actions for achieving a particular result: What is the
best movement for loading one’s rifle, what is the best position to take? What
workers are best suited for a particular task? What children are capable of
obtaining a particular result? Third, discipline establishes optimal sequences or
co-ordinations: How can actions be linked together? How can soldiers be deployed
for a maneuver? How can schoolchildren be distributed hierarchically within
classifications? Fourth, discipline fixes the processes of progressive training
(dressage) and permanent control, and finally, on the basis of this, it establishes
the division between those considered unsuitable or incapable and the others.
That is to say, on this basis it divides the normal from the abnormal. (2007, 56–57)
Foucault, in his writing on punishment and his subsequent writing on the history of
sexuality, described how knowledges produced about the “normal” case become vehicles
for the exercise of disciplinary force relations that target certain people. The etymology
of the term normal offers clues to the relation between this form of power and the notion
of normality. Ian Hacking (1990) notes that the first meaning of normal that current
English dictionaries provide is something like “usual, regular, common, typical.” This
usage, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, became current after 1840, with the
first citation of “normal, or typical” appearing in 1828. Hacking remarks that the modern
sense of the word normal was not, however, furnished by education or cloistered study
but rather by the study of life (1990, 161–162). In an illuminating discussion, Hacking
explains that the word normal became indispensable because it provided a way to be
objective about human beings, especially given the inseparability of the notion of normal
from its opposite, namely, the pathological. The word normal, he writes, “uses a power as
old as Aristotle to bridge the fact/value distinction, whispering in your ear that what is
normal is also all right” (160). The word normal bears the stamp of the nineteenth
century just as the concept of human nature is the hallmark of the Enlightenment, says
Hacking. Whereas in the past we sought to discover what human nature is, we now
concern ourselves with investigations that will tell us what is normal (161). He points out
that although the normal stands “indifferently for what is typical, the unenthusiastic
objective average, it also stands for what has been, good health, and what shall be, our
chosen destiny.” “That,” he contends, “is why the benign and sterile-sounding word
‘normal’ has become one of the most powerful ideological tools of the twentieth
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century” (169). It is especially noteworthy for my argument that, as Hacking explains, the
modern usage of the word normal evolved in a medical context (165).
In the late 1700s, there was a significant reconfiguration of the concept of the
pathological and its relation to the normal. Disease came to be regarded as an attribute
of individual organs, rather than as a characteristic of the entire body. Pathology,
likewise, was reconfigured, becoming the study of unhealthy organs, rather than the
study of sick or diseased bodies. Unhealthy organs could be investigated, in part, by the
chemistry of fluids, such as urine or mucus, that actual living beings secreted. The
concept of the normal came into being as the inverse of this concept of pathology: a given
state of affairs or process of the body was normal if it was not associated with a
pathological organ. In other words, the normal was secondary to, derivative of, and
defined by the pathological.
F. J. V. Broussais’s principle—that life is a matter of excitation of tissue and disease is
“irritation” of the tissue of a given organ—inverted this relation of entailment between
the pathological and the normal (Hacking 1990, 82). The pathological became defined as
deviation from the normal, and all variation became characterized as variation from the
normal state. Pathology was no longer conceived as different in kind from the normal but
rather as continuous with it (164). This new understanding of the normal and the
pathological that emerged in the late 1700s is one, but only one, component of what I
refer to as “the diagnostic style of reasoning,” a style of reasoning that has enabled the
consolidation and expansion of biopower. Given the importance of statistical knowledge to
the operations of biopower, it is not surprising that Broussais—to whom Auguste Comte,
for one, attributes our modern understanding of the normal—was connected to the first
use of statistical data to evaluate medical treatment (Hacking 1990, 81).
The category of normal is generally assumed to identify an objective, static, universal,
and ahistorical internal disposition or character or state of a given human being. As I
have indicated, Foucault endeavored to show that the notion of the normal is a historical
artifact that emerged through and facilitates the operations of a historically specific
regime of power—namely, biopower. Following Foucault, Hacking (1990) and other
philosophers and theorists have worked to demonstrate how the coercive and contingent
character of the normal operates, in specific contexts, in incremental and other ways (for
example, McWhorter 1999). These discussions about the historical and cultural
contingency of the concept of the normal and its embeddedness in apparatuses of power
are vital to my argument about the historical specificity of disability; for once we
recognize that the category of the normal is historically and culturally specific, rather
than ahistorical and universal, it becomes easier to show that the idea of disability—and
its antecedent, impairment—too is a historically and culturally specific invention of force
relations. If the category of the normal is a historical artifact, then any phenomenon
whose identity—including objects and practices that make up the identity—is established
and distinguished on the basis of its departure from and relation to that category must
also be a historical artifact.
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Bioethics as a Local Center of the Apparatus
Mainstream bioethicists generally assume that their task is to apply the universalizing
and ahistorical principles of deontology, utilitarianism, or virtue ethics to situations that
arise in biomedical contexts; that is, they presuppose that medical encounters provide
opportunities for the expression and application of extant values such as autonomy, well-
being, and liberty (see Beauchamp and Childress, 2012). I have assumed Foucault’s
insight that power is productive in order to show that the very articulation and practice of
these values through (for instance) the use of technologies and the decision-making
procedures that surround them effectively generates and configures the values (see also
Hall 2015, 169; 2016). A neoliberal governmentality—in support of which the apparatus of
disability and other apparatuses of (for instance) racialized and gendered force relations
have coalesced—undergirds the academic field of bioethics and has motivated its
emergence and expansion, including the incessant production within certain areas of the
field of questions and concerns about impairment and the refinement of positions that
rationalize its prevention and elimination.
Foucault (2008) argued that the phenomena that, from the eighteenth century onward,
begin to appear as problems that require management emerged as such and developed
their urgency within the framework of liberal governmentality. Foucault defined
governmentalities—that is, rationalities of government—as systems of thinking about the
practice of government that have the capacity to rationalize some form of this activity to
both the people who practice it and the people upon whom it is practiced, where this
capacity entails to render both thinkable and applicable or acceptable. Consider
Foucault’s remarks about the three major forms that technologies of government take in
their development and history: first a given technology of government takes the form of a
dream or utopia; then the dream of the technology of government develops into actual
practices or rules to be used in real institutions; finally, the practices and rules of the
technology of government become consolidated in the form of an academic discipline
(Foucault 1988, 145–162; see also Hall 2015, 166–169; 2016).
My argument is that the academic discipline of bioethics is an institutionalized vehicle for
the biopolitics of our time; that is, bioethics is a technology of government that provides
intellectual resources designed to facilitate the “strengthening” (read: fitness) of a
certain population and the elimination of others. I submit, furthermore, that the implicit
and explicit governmental tenor of bioethical inquiries and discussions contributes
substantially to the hostile environment that disabled philosophers confront in philosophy.
As a product of biopower, bioethics, I contend, implicates the discipline and profession of
philosophy in the apparatus of disability and the subordination of disabled people in ways
that, and to a degree that, no other subfield of the discipline does, although cognitive
science and cognate fields continue to gain considerable ground in this regard.
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Bioethics is generally regarded as the most suitable (if not the only) domain in philosophy
for critical considerations of disability. My argument is, however, that bioethics actually
operates as an area of philosophy whose guiding assumptions and discursive practices
are significant obstacles to (1) acknowledgment that the questions—metaphysical,
epistemological, political, and ethical—that the apparatus of disability raises are
genuinely philosophical and (2) recognition that disabled philosophers who investigate
these questions are bona fide philosophers. Indeed, bioethicists serve as gatekeepers,
guarding the discipline from the incursion of critical philosophical work on disability and
shielding the profession from infiltration by disabled philosophers. Exceptions to this
exclusion are of course admissible and even serve to legitimize both the subfield of
bioethics and the discipline in general, typifying the polymorphism of the (neo)liberal
governmentality from which the subfield of bioethics has emerged and enabling
philosophy to proceed under the guise of political neutrality, objectivity, and disinterest.
The charge according to which critics of genetic technologies, physician-assisted suicide,
and euthanasia employ “slippery-slope reasoning” is a striking case in point. Many
bioethicists, some of whom have substantial influence on public policy, argue that the
philosophers and theorists of disability (and disabled activists) who criticize these
practices engage in fallacious argumentation by using “slippery-slope reasoning” to
advance their claims; thus, their positions ought not to be taken seriously (for instance,
see Schüklenk et al. 2011).
Jocelyn Downie and Susan Sherwin (1996, 316) distinguish between two kinds of slippery-
slope arguments that critics of assisted suicide and euthanasia make: logical slippery-
slope arguments and psychological slippery-slope arguments. Downie and Sherwin
explain logical slippery-slope arguments in this way,
If we allow assisted suicide and euthanasia, we will not be able to draw any
meaningful distinction between acceptable and unacceptable killings, and, hence,
we will inevitably slide toward the bottom of the slope (i.e., toward allowing
involuntary euthanasia and thus the killing of demented patients, mentally
handicapped humans, indigent human, and any other group deemed to be “unfit”
for continued existence). (emphasis in original)
Downie and Sherwin claim that there is a simple response to this sort of slippery-slope
argument; namely, that if there is a morally significant difference between evaluation of
life at the top of the slope and evaluation of life at the bottom of the slope, then the
necessary materials to erect a barrier on the slope are available; or, if there are good
reasons why practices at the top of the slope should be allowed that are not available at
the bottom of the slope, then descent down the slope is not logically necessary (317). The
second type of slippery-slope argument—psychological slippery slopes—poses more
difficulty, Downie and Sherwin write. Psychological slippery slopes, they explain (quoting
ethicist James Rachel), take this form: “Once certain practises are accepted, people shall
in fact go on to accept other practices as well. This is simply a claim about what people
will do, and not a claim about what they are logically committed to” (Rachels 1975, 65, in
Downie and Sherwin 1996, 317; emphasis in Rachels). Downie and Sherwin write that the
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question of whether people will accept involuntary euthanasia if they previously accepted
voluntary assisted suicide and euthanasia is an empirical one, requiring investigation that
has not been conducted. They remark, furthermore, that “There are many reasons to
doubt the validity of the Nazi experience as an appropriate test, since the death camps
were created under a totalitarian regime with little concern for individual
autonomy” (Downie and Sherwin 1996, 317).
My argument is that the critiques of assisted suicide, euthanasia, and prenatal and other
genetic technologies that bioethicists associate with slippery-slope reasoning astutely
identify the incremental normalization of modern force relations that operates through
the inculcation and utilization of a relatively recent kind of subjectivity; that is, I contend
that the charge of slippery-slope reasoning that (many) bioethicists direct at critics of
genetic technologies and physician-assisted suicide results from the failure of these
bioethicists to recognize that the critiques address the nature and operations of force
relations under neoliberal governmentality, including the production of neoliberal
subjects whose management and modification of biological life is taken as fundamental to
self-hood and responsible citizenship (see Pitts-Taylor 2010).
Let me underscore and elaborate these assertions. I maintain that (1) these critiques
cohere with a sophisticated and compelling account of the productive character of
modern force relations; (2) these critiques cohere with the conception of disability as an
apparatus of force relations that I have articulated throughout this chapter; and (3) the
arguments with respect to autonomy, choice, and informed consent that mainstream and
feminist bioethicists advance to undermine these critiques are themselves products of
and implicated in this apparatus of disability, operating in the service of neoliberal
governmentality (see also Kolářová 2015; Hall 2016; Tremain 2006, 2008, 2010).
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Shelley L. Tremain
Shelley L. Tremain holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy and has authored many books and
articles on feminist philosophy of disability, Foucault, ableism in philosophy, and
disability and genetic technologies, including Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of
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Disability, which won the Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities
for 2016. She also edited Foucault and the Government of Disability and was the
2016 recipient of the Tanis Doe Award for Canadian Disability Study and Culture.
