I’ve been thinking for a long time about the phenomenological space between being seen and the art of being seen. Like Foucault I believe that our smallest gestures are both performed by us and of us. People with disabilities must traverse this acculturated labyrinth with a good deal of emotional intelligence or what we like to call comic irony in the English Department.
But what interests me as I get older is the space between performing an identity and the pre-disposed cultural script, for that’s a vast space, like the distance between wearing your first pair of shoes and putting on your old man slippers. What I mean is that there’s a revery or imaginative dynamic to standing or rolling in the world that’s not sufficiently identified by performance theories no matter what we say. I think the poetics of disability is still in its infancy, but the point is clear that diversity, especially physical or neurological diversity holds enormous promise for the cultural imagination and for the imaginer. Our friend Anne Finger has written brilliantly about the tight and rich fusion between embodied strangenesses and imaginative opportunity and I urge you to read all her work but especially her recent short stories.
Sometimes when I talk about the poetics of disability people think I’m romanticizing disablement, thereby reinscribing compensatory metaphors of giftedness but this is not what I’m suggesting at all. Instead I mean to say that the conditions of diffused mentation that physical difference manifests makes possible the kinds of rich, lyric points of imagination–a circumstance that many people with disabilities know quite well.
A fine arts program that extends and explores the imaginations of physical differences is a dream I continue to hold to.
Just some thoughts on a day of high wind here in Iowa City.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 