Foucault and the Government of Disability

Signs of Reason: Rivi

nirmala erevelles


 Signs of Reason Rivière, Facilitated Communication, and the Crisis of the Subject But all that I ask is that what I mean shall be understood. —pierre rivière On June 3, 1835, in the village of la Faucterie, a young man named Pierre Rivière brutally murdered three members of his family, actions that he justi‹ed with a memoir that served as testimony to his sanity—an event that inspired Foucault’s text, I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother. In this text, Foucault juxtaposed legal and medical testimony from the ensuing trial with Rivière’s explicit memoir in order to explore how power structures and social institutions in nineteenth -century Europe collaborated in bringing to birth “the psychiatrization of law, the medicalization of crime, and the therapeutization of justice” (Szasz 1975). By offering a microanalysis of this case, Foucault’s text exposes “the chaos of values and beliefs, of knowledge and power” (Kurzweil 1975) that emerged out of the battles that took place between the medical experts and the judicial body in their attempts to ascertain whether the author of this “insane” crime could also be the author of a lucid and coherent text. After all, how could someone who was believed to be the “village idiot” demonstrate an ability to write and reason? More than a century later, a similar “chaos of value and belief” has arisen in the ‹eld of special education in regard to the educational de‹nitions of autism and mental retardation. In 1990, Douglas Biklen, a noted scholar and advocate for persons with disabilities, published an article in the Harvard Educational Review entitled “Communication Unbound: Autism and Praxis,” in which he reported on the unexpected literacy that students who are labeled autistic or mentally retarded demonstrate when they are assisted 45 by an augmentative communication system called “facilitated communication .” Facilitated communication involves the provision of physical and emotional support to individuals with “severe” communication impairments as they type, or as they point to letters or pictures on a communication board. Biklen and his fellow researchers have claimed that the physical support offered through facilitated communication enables these individuals to overcome the physical challenges that interfere with their ability to perform certain motor tasks (Biklen and Cardinal 1997). In other words, when individuals who previously had been perceived as severely developmentally disabled used techniques of facilitated communication, that is, when facilitators provided varying degrees of physical support to these individuals, they expressed sophisticated thoughts. It was not long before Biklen’s report attracted the attention of several critics who argued that Biklen’s assumptions contradicted, and possibly ignored, scienti‹c evidence (see Shane 1994; Spitz 1997; Twachtman-Cullen 1997). These critics pointed out that since medical and scienti‹c evidence has shown that students with autism or mental retardation have not been able to communicate on demand, it should follow logically that they are incapable of a whole host of simple and complex performances (Shane 1994). Critical of the subjective approaches of qualitative research that Biklen and his colleagues offered as proof of the effectiveness of facilitated communication, these critics argued that when facilitated communication was subjected to objective , rigorous, and controlled experimental testing, it failed to meet scienti ‹c criteria of validity (who is the real author of these communications ?), reliability (how consistent are these communications?), and generalizability (can these tasks be performed on demand in different situations ?). To further complicate matters, some court cases, which were initiated when a few young adults who had used facilitated communication made unsubstantiated allegations of sexual abuse, triggered additional inquiries into the legal issues concerning the authenticity of authorship that the facilitation involved. Because of this turn of events, Biklen and his colleagues were accused of supporting and propagating inappropriate medical -educational treatment of students who had been labeled autistic or mentally retarded, and of violating ethical standards. In this chapter, I argue that both of these controversies foreground the crisis of the humanist subject. That is, I argue that the “chaos of value and belief” that these two controversies have generated bring to bear seemingly simple questions: Are people who have been identi‹ed as cognitively disabled competent (or incompetent) to represent themselves? Is it possible that these people can have observable physiological, cognitive, or behav46
Foucault and the Government of Disability ioral disabilities, but also exhibit behavior and thinking that could be...