Martin Huth is Post Doc at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Innsbruck. He is currently PI of the project The Limits of Imagination: Animals, Empathy, Anthropomorphism (P 35137-G) funded by the FWF. Further research priorities are theories of vulnerability, human-animal studies, biomedical ethics, and political phenomenology.
A post by Martin Huth
As part of some work in progress, this article shall discuss a form of social imaginative resistance, which relates to the imagination of the experiences of individuals whose embodiment can be conceived as “non-normate” (Garland-Thomson 2017), i.e., people whose bodies are not in line with alleged standards of normalcy. This illustrates the phenomenon of a limited imaginability or even unimaginability not only of the various forms of existence of people with disability, but also more generally of human beings who belong to the domain of abject bodies.
Especially in the phenomenological tradition, accounts of empathy highlight the quasi-perceptual access we have to mental states and feelings in others. We do not encounter opaque but rather already expressive bodies so that we are neither in need to infer from behavior nor to simulate it in order to get a firm grasp of what is going on with another (Scheler even contends that there is a universal grammar of bodily expression; 1973). Imagination as a bodily practice – since mental activities are inevitably rooted in our body (Merleau-Ponty 2012) – forms a pivotal prerequisite for a more complex understanding of others because, for instance, motivations of mental states are beyond the direct accessibility of the other (Moran and Szanto 2020).
However, scholars in the field of (critical) dis/ability studies have highlighted a gradual or even radical impossibility of empathizing with people who are living with and through non-normate embodiment and a widespread inability to picture their lives as happy, meaningful and rich. Reynolds (2017), for instance, detects a frequent ableist conflation of disability and suffering or illness. This sort of misconceiving people with (variegated kinds of) disability has been explained by the differences between various forms of bodily existence. More specifically, the very orientation in the world through a particular kind of embodiment would not allow someone to properly empathize with and imagine significantly different kinds of existence, e.g., those with impaired vision, the necessity to use a wheelchair or cognitive disabilities (Scully and Mackenzie 2007).
However, I want to suggest that what prevents us from appropriately grasping the respective experiences and forms of existence is not or not always a stark inability in the sense of a logical or practical impossibility (even though I admit that the otherness of bodily orientations is a considerable hindrance to fully understand another’s experiences), but quite often a form of imaginative resistance. Imaginative resistance has been described as unwillingness or failure to imagine a fictional world, in which behaviors and norms appear as greatly deviant, for instance, if we try to imagine a society in which infanticide is considered as morally permissible or even good (Gendler 2000; Szanto 2020). Yet, I want to emphasize that moral norms are but one kind of norms that are related to this phenomenon. More specifically, as regards the case of non-normate embodiment, hegemonic normative phantasms of the allegedly normal bodily constitutions including particular versions of health, autonomy, self-sufficiency and invulnerability appear to be powerful on an individual and on a social level (Gilson 2014). Norms of embodiment substantiate a “power to produce – demarcate, circulate, differentiate – the bodies it controls” (Butler 1993, 1).
Drawing from Kristeva, Butler conceives such a demarcation of bodies as a process of social abjection. Basically, the notion of abjection describes a psychic process of exclusion as a reaction to threats to the borders of the bodily self and its integrity. Abjection is, therefore, unavoidable and necessary to become and remain a self. What has been subject to abjection (e.g., excrements, open wounds etc.) becomes, equipped with an intolerable significance, the source of repugnance, horror and disgust (Kristeva 1982, 11). Butler (1993) transforms Kristeva’s analysis of this psychic process into an analysis of social processes in order to explain the abjection of forms of sexuality other than those who conform with heteronormativity. Thorneycroft (2020), in turn, uses the notion of social abjection to analyze ableism and the connected marginalization of people with disability.
Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the body schema together with the habitual body (2012) builds a crucial prerequisite for understanding the individual internalization of social abjection. The proper body provides basic dispositions not only for behavior, but also for perception, affective responses, empathy and imagination. These tacit dispositions are inevitably socio-culturally saturated since in human embodiment and behavior nothing can be related only to nature or to social construction. Even vision is co-constituted by a certain (pre-reflective) ‘use’ of the look (ibid.). Thus, social abjection can operate (just like the psychic version, which can actually not be neatly separated from the social one) at the level of perception and imagination by constituting affected individuals and populations and their appearance and behavior as, e.g., disgusting or terrifying. As for disgust, it is obvious that an adult’s dribbling, unarticulated sounds or the like may evoke disgust and even gagging (Thorneycroft 2020) – while this is usually not the case with babies. Fear may be produced through the experience of an ‘unfamiliar’, ‘deviant’ appearance or allegedly unpredictable behavior. Propaganda movies made during the NS regime such as the infamous Dasein ohne Leben (Existence without Life) from 1941 aimed at reinforcing social abjection and at mobilizing this kind of affective response to people with non-normate embodiment. This can be interpreted as part of a politics of abjection.
However, apart from such abhorrent culmination points, comparatively ‘soft’ forms of social abjection appear to be quite powerful. People with disabilities are seen and/or imagined as tragic figures, pitiable and unlucky (Thorneycroft 2020, 12). By the same token, disabled bodies become an imaginary repository for social anxieties about troubling concerns such as vulnerability, control, and identity (cf. Garland-Thomson 2017, 6) – they are the actual vulnerable. In some cases – and I think (based on my experiences as a care worker for people with cognitive disability having witnessed a number of reactions and responses to the appearance of non-normate bodies in the public) they are quite frequent – there occurs even a fear of contamination or contagion, which may well operate beneath people’s explicit intentions.
As noted, I want to suggest that this process of abjection is rooted in the social phantasm of the self-sufficient, invulnerable subject (Gilson 2014); vulnerability is the abject or outside (of the inside) of the individual as well as the collective self. Further, recall that abjection is not a process that can ever be stopped or avoided. As for vulnerability, there might be a need to expel this ontological condition of embodiment at least to some degree from our body image in order not to conceive ourselves mainly or even exclusively through the lens of risk, inability or dependency. Gallagher (1986) has introduced the distinction between body schema and body image: While the body schema provides the pre-reflective basis for our orientation in the world, our intentions and our dispositions of behavior, the body image forms the explicit picture of our very body. To be sure, they can be distinguished, but not separable and influence each other.
The abjection of vulnerability has individual and social significance: On an individual level, a failure to keep vulnerability in a distance from the body image could result in a defensive and overcautious form of existence, which can be, for instance, related to depression or melancholia. On a social level, an over-emphasis on vulnerability may lead to disempowering structures and practices. However, the imaginary of the human has taken the afore-mentioned form that pictures normalcy as close to invulnerability (Gilson 2014). This particular version of a shared normalcy leads to a (tacit) disavowal of vulnerability, which becomes a repressed/abjected outside within the body schema and cannot be included in the body image. By the same token, bodily frames of perception and of imagination build a ready-made gestalt of people with disability, often rather independently of what kind of disability they have. Thus, non-normate kinds of embodiment as imaginary repository of vulnerability become an outside of normalcy, are perceived as deviant and evoke repulsive visceral responses such as disgust or fear. Also, this perceived deviance and the tacit attribution of vulnerability may well lead to a pre-reflective resistance to imagine the kinds of being-in-the-world and the experiences of individuals, e.g., using a wheelchair, using a white cane, or having a cognitive disability. Imagination provides us with an intuitive, quasi-sensory and vivid content and not only with merely abstract suppositions (Husserl 2005; Kind 2017). Therefore, the imaginative schemes of disability as representing lack/privation, suffering or being/feeling unlucky prevent us from a more appropriate attempt to grasp the forms of existence that do not conform to an alleged normalcy. Instead, these schemes are likely to be reproduced by virtue of a pre-reflective process of abjection.
References
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