I started reading “the Philosophers” when I was around ten. In a sense there was nothing else to do. Yes I read other things. Poetry, novels, Ian Fleming, instructional manuals. But I had the half-starved mind’s musical anger to know why the body; why the damned consciousness though I didn’t call it that and you shouldn’t either.
Back then I read with a gramophone. Big boxes of recorded books would arrive on my doorstep from the Library of Congress. Those were the days when the classics were available for the blind and I remember reading the following:
“Anybody can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.”
I didn’t know the term “gestural violence” yet but I was bullied at school and daily.
Gestural violence is a means of bullying. Today I’m a university professor and I see how It occurs in the academy because the agora is patrolled space.
Bullying is epigenetic and happens across the globe. It’s not merely a human trait. Chimpanzees have been known to murder their own. The desire to punish even minor differences crosses borders and species. But human bullying, owns what I will call, for lack of a better term, an architectonic structure, which is entirely political. In his altogether relevant book from the early 1960’s Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity Erving Goffman wrote:
“The Greeks, who were apparently strong on visual aids, originated the term stigma to refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier. The signs were cut or burnt into the body and advertised that the bearer was a slave, a criminal, or a traitor—a blemished person, ritually polluted, to be avoided, especially in public places. Later, in Christian times, two layers of metaphor were added to the term: the first referred to bodily signs of holy grace that took the form of eruptive blossoms on the skin; the second, a medical allusion to this religious allusion, referred to bodily signs of physical disorder. Today the term is widely used in something like the original literal sense, but is applied more to the disgrace itself than to the bodily evidence of it.”
Architectonic stigma/bullying comes from constructed and layered significations. The social construction of stigmatized bullying is therefore more sinister than primate bullying. Strictly speaking all of Michel Foucault’s work is concerned with the political enforcement of normality and its accompanying structures of correction. Paris is a good laboratory as it’s still even in its post-modern assembly a late medieval city. Like Kafka’s Prague, Paris is built from disciplinary power, its architectures crafted by coercive persuasion and milieu control. Stigma/bullying where disability is concerned became in Paris a matter of cleaning the streets. In other words we may usefully understand the modern city as a machine of categorization. As Goffman puts it:
“Society establishes the means of categorizing persons and the complement of attributes felt to be ordinary and natural for members of each of these categories. Social settings establish the categories of persons likely to be encountered there. The routines of social intercourse in established settings allow us to deal with anticipated others without special attention or thought. When a stranger comes into our presence, then, first appearances are likely to enable us to anticipate his category and attributes, his “social identity”—to use a term that is better than “social status” because personal attributes such as “honesty” are involved, as well as structural ones, like “occupation.”
We lean on these anticipations that we have, transforming them into normative expectations, into righteously presented demands.”
The ableist believes he or she has the right to her normative expectations; moreover, has the right to be joined only by men or women, boys or girls who sustain those expectations. In sum, all ableism is bullying, relies on stigma and involves what Nietzsche called “will to power”—“My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (–its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement (“union”) with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on…” (from The Will to Power, s636, Walter Kaufmann, trans.)
I like to think of gestural violence as the will to ableism.
Just two days I ago I found myself riding in an elevator with a professor who has (as he believes) “secretly” labeled my presence problematic at the university. Because we were side by side in a tight space he tried joking with me, peformatively, jocular, and every syllable was just more violence.
Again I thought of Aristotle: “Good habits formed at youth make all the difference.”
I said nothing. See the first quote above.
ABOUT: Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the memoirs Have Dog, Will Travel; Planet of the Blind (a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”); and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening and of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light and Letters to Borges. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Fulbright Scholar, he has taught at the University of Iowa, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Ohio State University. He currently teaches at Syracuse University where he holds a University Professorship in Disability Studies. He is a frequent speaker in the US and abroad. His website is StephenKuusisto.com.
Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey is now available for pre-order:
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(Photo picturing the cover of Stephen Kuusisto’s new memoir “Have Dog, Will Travel” along with his former guide dogs Nira (top) and Corky, bottom.) Bottom photo by Marion Ettlinger
