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5. Sovereign, Productive, and Efficient: The Place of Disability in the Ableist Society
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The critique of productivity and sovereignty yields a radically different concept of labor. This is the concept of labor as care, which has been recently worked out in gender and feminist philosophy. Eva Feder Kittay (1999), in particular, speaks of it as the work of dependency—a concept which, not confined to the economic sphere, has the power to redraw the map of political philosophy as a whole, as well as of the study of culture.1 It does so by showing the falseness of the notion of the independent , fully autonomous, individual, and by replacing it with the infinitely more sensible notions that dependency is an inescapable condition of human experience and care is the only truly adequate way to relate to the fact of Chapter Five Sovereign, Productive, and Efficient: The Place of Disability in the Ableist Society w Look: this is my reward / For taking care of you —Sophocles, Antigone “What is that word ‘menial’? I never heard it,” said Edith. “It is obsolete now,” remarked her father. “If I understand it rightly, it applied to persons who performed particularly disagreeable and unpleasant tasks for others, and carried with it an implication of contempt. Was it not so, Mr. West?” —Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward. 2000–1887 The rule of capital through the wage compels every ablebodied person to function, under the law of division of labor, and to function in ways that are if not immediately, then ultimately profitable to the expansion and extension of the rule of capital. —Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community SOVEREIGN, PRODUCTIVE, AND EFFICIENT 133 dependency. Typically, the independent and fully autonomous individual is male;2 the work of dependency and care is, as typically, seen as what “naturally ” belongs to women; it is, as Diemut Elizabeth Bubeck says, “women’s work” (1995: 24).3 Needless to say, this is only due to the fact that historically the work of care has been done (and it is still mostly done) by women (pp. 40–41). As Kittay also says, the fact that this type of work is “largely gendered” does not entail that it needs to be (1999: xiv). The aim of this chapter is to show that the centrality of the concept of care requires that the logic of productivity and sovereignty be dismantled; in other words, care cannot become the new essential difference, the new modality of organizing political communities and society as a whole, of managing individual lives and communal situations, unless the realities of exploitation and domination are eliminated. Under such realities, care can be a bureaucratic and mechanical application of police measures, a paternalistic attitude and practice, but it could not become the adequate response to the condition of dependency—a response that includes adequate agency. Indeed, adequate agency constitutes the univocal and common ground of the carer and the cared for; in true care, they can both display and experience adequate agency—adequate not to some institutional measures of society, but to the actual conditions of their existence.4 At the same time, the critique of productivity and sovereignty would reach a blind spot without a concept such as care, capable of offering a viable and powerful alternative to the condition of the present, and, indeed, to the history of the human adventure. It is in this sense that I review here some of the literature on the labor of care and on the question of disability (where the inescapability of dependence and the necessity of care become most evident). That is, I try to think care, dependency, and disability in the light of the critique of productivity and sovereignty and, at the same time, confirm the importance of such a critique from the point of view of the centrality of care and the inescapability of the condition of dependency, which includes what is problematically called disability.5 In Labor of Fire, I indicated—along the lines of a concretely utopian thinking—that after productive labor (as the labor that produces and increases capital), the time/space of creative labor would open up. Yet, the category of creative labor did not acquire there a specific connotation. It was only put in relation to its most obvious occurrence, artistic labor; yet it was not given the amplitude required by an activity responsible for the constitution of the social as a whole. In reality, creative labor, and this includes the...