The philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote famously about “the desiring machine”—a way of highlighting the feedback loop between commodities or “products”, advertising, depression, government, and a hundred other dynamics of the abjection industry. In Deleuze’s articulation desire itself becomes reality—hence social production determines that all living beings, even their organs, become machines.
Another way to think of this is that we are no longer beings who wish to acquire things—we are merely acquisition devices.
Borrowing from Antonin Artaud, Deleuze argues that under the tryannay of desire we actually beocme bodies without organs—in effect our very tissue is subsumed by desire.
Now cultural problems associated with disability are familiar enough: activists in dis-communities can recite the catalogue: “nothing about us without us” we say; “defend disability life’ we say; inclusion and community living are a must; we have a host of desires connected to affiliation. They are right.
But Deleuze is right: capitalism enforces illness to maintain its reality. And dis-activists must “out” this at every turn.
And so what do we say about affiliation? Do I merely wish acceptance? A key to the Mens room? “Look! There’s a blind man with a key to the Mens room! Let’s do a Super Bowl ad!”
BTW: Super Bowl ads are “low drivel” and if one loves them, one also loves power. Which is of course to love abjection. Loving abjection means you likely are addicted to inspiration porn. People really do fight for their servitude. (Spinoza)
I do not wish to be docile within my disability. Craving the Mens room.
What I fear is disability inclusion mis-understood, lived as a singular goal, becoming its own engine of repression—a machine of acquisition, fueled by its repressed, neurotic blood.
I fear the desire of repression. Not the disability itself.
Planet of the Blind 