- Foucault and the Government of Disability
The first thing to say about Foucault and the Government of Disability is that it is the best book on disability and Foucault ever done. The second thing to say is that it is also the only book on Foucault and disability. So the question arises, why did it take so long to see a significant volume linking this thinker with this identity category? Shelley Tremain, for her part, has [End Page 298] written on Foucault for a long time, but her influence is only now being felt. So this book, collecting many excellent essays on governmentality, institutions, sexuality, and so on, is a welcome addition to the intellectual life of disability studies. With it, we may well hope, Foucault's insights will find a more direct appeal to those who are involved in disability studies.
To explain the relative absence of Foucault, we might want to consider that disability studies has basically been an Anglo-American endeavour, which is just beginning to expand its insights into the globalized world. As an Anglo-American endeavour, it has for the most part eschewed continental philosophy and cultural criticism. The works of Merleau Ponty, Levinas, Foucault, Derrida, Agamben, and others have composed a rather small rivulet in the torrent of positivist, quantitative, and qualitative work done first in the realm of sociology, political science, and legal studies—and then in the cultural and humanistic extensions of the enterprise. It is true that the British school has focused on continental philosophy but only to the extent that it included Marx, Engels, Gramsci, and other socialist writers and thinkers, all of whom were again largely in the positivist mode.
Foucault presents us with an interesting example of a continental thinker whose work is a blend of metaphysics and data. The fact that Foucault himself rarely engaged with Derrida or any of his philosophical confreres illuminates his positivist side, but at other moments he does seem very much a part of the poststructuralist enterprise. His use of the archive links him with historians, but his analysis of the archive brings him into a broader area of philosophy, sociology, the history of ideas, and the like.
While it is rare to see Foucault entirely excluded from discussions of the body in the newer phase of disability studies, his appearance is often largely a token one. Foucault's main insights about the clinical gaze, madness, the panopticon, docile bodies, and so on are used as touchstones, but his larger theory and its implications are usually left behind. The reason for this, which becomes fairly obvious in reading Tremain's collection, is that the application of Foucault qua Foucault to disability is not one that will yield obviously libratory solutions to onerous social and political problems. In fact, Foucault, in his full-strength, undiluted form is powerful medicine verging on poison. There is no feel-good, uplifting message to be distilled from the bitter dose of analysis that Foucault offers. There is no safe place to hide from the klieg lights of his scrutiny of institutions and practices that make up modernity. So inviting Foucauldeans to a party is like bringing an annoying pessimist to an optimists' ball. They'll hate the music, criticize [End Page 299] the food, and don't try to say "have a nice day" to them. But, in the end, they may be right about it all.
When you read many of the essays in this collection, you see that being a Foucauldean in disability studies will put you in opposition to much common wisdom and received ideas. In this sense, true Foucauldeans are contrarians when it comes to celebrating the virtues of identity politics, mainstreaming, and assisted living, for example. That's why we haven't seen a lot of this work on the disability marketplace, since its tough-to-take analysis doesn't lead to easy solutions. Another reason is that, unlike Marxism for example, Foucauldism has no obvious political solutions, no party, no ideal state to be formed...