Making Life Work: Freedom and Disability in a Community Group Home

2. Governing Disability in the Community

On moral grounds there was no debate—especially after Willowbrook—that abuse and coercion were integral to institutions for people with intellectual disability. As a legal matter, too, there was little argument that the rights of inmates were being violated in the most fundamental and egregious ways. This emerging consensus accounts for the readiness of New York and some other states to sign consent decrees. Apart from the honorable goals they laid out, such decrees avoided costly legal proceedings the states would have had to mount on indefensible positions. But the transformed climate of opinion is one thing. It is quite another matter to accomplish the actual task of providing services in the community, supervising individuals who are free but considered incapable of living independently. 37 2 GOVERNING DISABILITY IN THE COMMUNITY The citizen is construed and addressed as a subject actively engaged in thinking, wanting, feeling and doing, interacting with others in terms of . . . psychological forces. . . . In the family, the factory, and the expanding systems of counseling and therapy, the vocabularies of mental hygiene, group relations, and psychodynamics are translated into techniques of self-inspection and self-rectification. These techniques are taught by teachers, managers, health visitors, social workers, and doctors. Through the pronouncement of experts in print, on television, in radio phone-ins, they are woven into the fabric of our everyday experience, our aspirations and dissatisfactions. Through our attachment to such technologies of the self, we are governed by our active engagement in the search for a form of existence that is at once personally fulfilling and beneficial to our families, our communities, and the collective well-being of the nation. —Nikolas Rose, Inventing Ourselves Group homes in principle are no different from other settings that aim to mobilize individuals to act freely for themselves in specific ways. This is what Foucault (1991) called the “government” of conduct and argued was the defining strategy of ruling in liberal societies. I use the term “liberal” in the broad classical sense, to refer to liberal individualism and the form of rule in which authority, for the most part, is exercised indirectly and depends on the consent and participation of the governed. Many writers now use “neoliberal” to emphasize the increasing role and changing forms of individuality in policy, politics, and culture over the last three decades. The term “liberal” is adequate here, because my purpose does not require a comprehensive theoretical and historical account of these issues. My aim is to demonstrate some of the situated and practical ways they are realized in and organize a specific group home. Similarly, I do not take up debates about the meaning of concepts such as rights, freedom, and liberty, but use them in the general sense. This is how such concepts are used both as legislative and regulatory ideals and in the course of everyday life at Driggs House. Although group homes are often portrayed as an exception to a liberal form of rule, ideally they are an organizational realization of the problem and strategy of rule that defines liberal societies. Like most professional settings, Driggs House is organized by the tension between authority and the freedom of individuals inherent in liberal societies. This ongoing tension is managed—and must be managed— by enabling individuals to govern themselves. The very notion of providing services to citizens in the community presumes that even those whose capacity for freedom is always in question are somehow able to govern themselves. In this sense, the question of citizenship, for me, is practical rather than theoretical. Other writers draw on the theoretical literature about social citizenship to address intellectual disability (Barnes), use disability to highlight the conceptual limits in the literature and problems of policy (Rummery), or examine the relationship between forms of citizenship and social movements (Barnes and Oliver; Beckett). I rely on the concept of government, because it encourages a focus on practice. Government, in this sense, does not refer to liberalism as a political program or theory of the state. It is a “rationality” posed by the dilemmas of liberal forms of ruling between the liberty of the individual citizen and the legitimate boundaries of state authority (Rose 1998a, 1999b). Having recourse to direct coercion only in specific 38 governing disability situations, authority is exercised indirectly for the most part, and the practical resolution of this dilemma is the measure of its legitimacy. Government also does not refer just to the...