Foucault

 In this long text titled "The Meaning of Knowing," Nietzsche takes up a text by Spinoza in which the latter sets intelligere, to understand, against ridere [to laugh], lugere [to lament], and detestari [to detest]. Spinoza said that if we wish to understand things, if we really wish to understand them in their nature, their essence, and hence their truth, we must take care not to laugh at them, lament them, or detest them. Only when those passions are calmed can we finally understand. Nietzsche says that not only is this not true, but it is exactly the opposite that occurs. Intelligere, to understand, is nothing more than a certain game, or more exactly, the outcome of a certain game, of a certain compromise or settlement between ridere, lugere, and detestari. Nietzsche says that we understand only because behind all that there is the interplay and struggle of those three instincts, of those three mechanisms, or those three passions that are expressed by laughter, lament, and detestation.

 Several points need to be considered here. First, we should note that these three passions, or these three drives—laughing, lamenting, detesting—are all ways not of getting close to the object or identifying with it but, on the contrary, of keeping the object at a distance, differentiating oneself from it or marking one's separation from it, protecting oneself from it through laughter, devalorizing it through complaint, removing it and possibly destroying it through hatred. Consequently, all these drives, which are at the root of knowledge and which produce it, have in common a distancing of the object, a will to remove oneself from it and to remove it at the same time—a will, finally, to destroy it. Behind knowledge there is a will, no doubt obscure, not to bring the object near to oneself or identify with it but, on the contrary, to get away from it and destroy it—a radical malice of knowledge.

 We thus arrive at a second important idea: These drives—laughing, lamenting, detesting—can all be categorized as bad relations. Behind knowledge, at the root of knowledge, Nietzsche does not posit a kind of affection, drive, or passion that makes us love the object to be known; rather, there are drives that would place us in a position of hatred, contempt, or fear before things that are threatening and presumptuous.

              Michel Foucault

Solomon

There is so much pain in the world, and most of these people keep theirs secret, rolling through agonizing lives in invisible wheelchairs, dressed in invisible bodycasts.

      Andrew Solomon

U N

The charity approach treats persons with disabilities as passive objects of kind acts or of welfare payments rather than as empowered individuals with rights to participate in political and cultural life and in their development. What characterizes this approach is that persons with disabilities are not considered able to provide for themselves because of their impairment. Consequently, society provides for them. No environmental conditions are considered under this approach; disability is an individual problem. From this perspective, persons with disabilities are the target of pity and they depend on the goodwill of society. In addition, persons with disabilities depend on duty bearers: charity houses, homes, foundations, churches, to which society delegates policies on disability and responsibility towards persons with disabilities. Under this model, persons with disabilities are disempowered, not in control of their lives and have little or no participation. They are considered a burden on society. Because charity comes from goodwill, the quality of “care” is not necessarily consistent or even important. • If society’s responses to disability are limited to care and assistance for persons with disabilities through charity and welfare programmes, opportunities for advancement are very limited. The risk—as with the medical approach—is that persons with disabilities will remain at the margins of society. This approach does not support their participation. If persons with disabilities continue to be considered as “unfortunate”, requiring compassion, depending on contributions and assistance and on the goodwill of others, their opportunities for empowerment become very limited. The charity approach increases the distance between persons with disabilities and society rather than promoting equality and inclusion.

- THE CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES (United Nations)

United Nations

“Interpreting article 12, paragraph 3, in the light of the right to live in the community (art. 19) means that support in the exercise of legal capacity should be provided through a community-based approach. States parties must recognize that communities are assets and partners in the process of learning what types of support are needed in the exercise of legal capacity, including raising awareness about different support options. States parties must recognize the social networks and naturally occurring community support (including friends, family and schools) of persons with disabilities as key to supported decision making.

Non-discrimination includes the right to reasonable accommodation in the exercise of legal capacity (art. 5, para. 3). Reasonable accommodation is defined in article 2 of the Convention as “necessary and appropriate modification and adjustments not imposing a disproportionate or undue burden, where needed in a particular case, to ensure to persons with disabilities the enjoyment or exercise on an equal basis with others of all human rights and fundamental freedoms”. The right to reasonable accommodation in the exercise of legal capacity is separate from, and complementary to, the right to support in the exercise of legal capacity.

To this end, the Committee urges States parties to ensure that persons with disabilities have the opportunity to make meaningful choices in their lives and develop their personalities, to support the exercise of their legal capacity. This includes, but is not limited to, opportunities to build social networks; opportunities to work and earn a living on an equal basis with others; multiple choices for place of residence in the community; and inclusion in education at all levels.

Recognize persons with disabilities as persons before the law, having legal personality and legal capacity in all aspects of life, on an equal basis with others. This requires the abolition of substitute decision-making regimes and mechanisms that deny legal capacity and which discriminate in purpose or effect against persons with disabilities. It is recommended that States parties create statutory language protecting the right to legal capacity on an equal basis for all.”

- United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

depression

 

The physical pain is unbearable, your body is inert and feels too heavy, your mind is not functioning, and you cannot escape the feeling of being stuck, stagnated, that the race is run and that the present — which is hell — is all there is and all that can ever be imagined to be.

Mikkel Krause Frantzen

Foucault

Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power.

                   Michel Foucault

Paine

So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. 

Thomas Paine

Chamberlin

"Rather than a hierarchical structure in which some participants are clearly in charge of others, true alternatives feature a cooperative and democratic structure. Although there may be divisions of function, they are fluid, and one who takes the helping role at one point may be the one who receives help at another".

Judi Chamberlin

"People who have been patients know from their own experience that warmth and support (when they were available) were helpful and that being thought of and treated as incompetent were not. Even when a person is experiencing distress, he or she can still be helpful to others. A person who is experiencing extreme pain may temporarily need to be only a "taker" rather than a giver, but such situations are often relatively short-lived (although being treated badly--as frequently happens in mental institutions--can prolong them). Being able to reach out to another person--even when one is feeling bad oneself--illustrates to the person in distress that he or she is not incompetent and worthless. Taking part in making decisions, even simple ones, shows a person that he or she does have some control over his or her life and gives that person the confidence to participate in more substantial group decision making in such areas as financial policy and staff hiring.

There are immense practical problems involved in trying to set up Patient-controlled alternative facilities and services. Money is difficult to find. Opposition from professionals, who are accustomed to being in charge and to thinking of patients as incompetent, can be enormous. Ex-patients may be uncertain of their own abilities. In later chapters, I describe some of the alternatives that exist and how their organizers dealt with these difficulties".

Judi Chamberlin

Foucault

Basically power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or the linking of one to the other than a question of government. This word must be allowed the very broad meaning which it had in the sixteenth century. "Government" did not refer only to political structures or to the management of states; rather it designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed: the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick. It did not only cover the legitimately constituted forms of political or economic subjection, but also modes of action, more or less considered and calculated, which were destined to act upon the possibilities of action of other people. To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others. The relationship proper to power would not therefore be sought on the side of violence or of struggle, nor on that of voluntary linking (all of which can, at best, only be the instruments of power), but rather in the area of the singular mode of action, neither warlike nor juridical, which is government.

                 Michel Foucault

Foucault

People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.

           Michel Foucault

"The idea that those giving aid need to “fix” people who are in need is based on the notion that people’s poverty and marginalization is not a systemic problem but is caused by their own personal shortcomings. This also implies that those who provide aid are superior".

"The charity model encourages us to feel good about ourselves by “giving back.” Convincing us that we have done enough if we do a little volunteering or posting online is a great way to keep us in our place. Keeping people numb to the suffering in the world-and their own suffering—is essential to keeping things as they are. In fact, things are really terrifying and enraging...and feeling more rage, fear, sadness, grief, and despair may be appropriate. Those feelings may help us be less appeased by false solutions".

"In the context of professionalized nonprofit organizations, groups are urged to be single-issue oriented, framing their message around "deserving" people within the population they serve, and using tactics palatable to elites".

"Some people doing social movement work would articulate their goal as having governments provide relief. That is not my approach. I think that we should celebrate government concessions as an indicator of our movements building influence and capacity, but as someone who has spent my life studying poor relief and disaster relief programs...it is clear to me that government relief will always exclude stigmatized populations, be distributed through racialized-gendered hierarchies of deservingness, and be inadequate.

Additionally, the government can withdraw relief, and will do so, as soon as possible. This is the history of welfare in the US—it expands during crisis when people are organized and there is a real threat that people will topple the machine of extraction and wealth concentration, and then it contracts as quickly as possible after."

"Mutu­al aid isn’t just about helping each oth­er. We help each oth­er based on a shared recog­ni­tion that the sys­tems aren’t deliv­er­ing and are actu­al­ly mak­ing things worse".

"Solidarity is disincentivized, yet solidarity is what builds and connects large-scale movements. Mutual aid projects, by creating spaces where people come together based on some shared need or concern but encounter and work closely with people whose lives and experiences differ from their own, cultivate solidarity.

Mutual aid projects also build skills for collaboration, participation, and decision making".

"Of course, we bring our learned practices of hierarchy and (de)valuation with us even when no paycheck or punishment enforces our participation. However, experiences of being in groups voluntarily motivated by shared transformative principles and a sincere effort to practice them can build new skills and capacities."

dean spade

“For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books, and homes without heat in the winter.”

 For charity cannot right a wrong; only justice can do that.

           Henry George

Bakunin

If I bow before the authority of the specialists and avow my readiness to follow, to a certain extent and as long as may seem to me necessary, their indications and even their directions, it is because their authority is imposed upon me by no one, neither by men nor by God. Otherwise I would repel them with horror, and bid the devil take their counsels, their directions, and their services, certain that they would make me pay, by the loss of my liberty and self-respect, for such scraps of truth, wrapped in a multitude of lies, as they might give me.

          Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin 

depression

 

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

Sylvia Plath

dpdr excerpt

Dissociation during traumatic events (also referred to as peritraumatic dissociation [18]) can be considered an adaptive defense mechanism to cope with overwhelming threat that cannot be prevented or escaped [3, 11•]. States of subjective detachment (e.g., depersonalization, derealization, and numbing) may help to create an inner distance to the overwhelming experience by dampening unbearable emotions and reducing conscious awareness of the event. The traumatic situation may be perceived as an unreal film-like scene that is not happening to oneself but observed from a wider distance. Somatoform symptoms such as analgesia and out of body experiences (e.g., the sense of floating above one’s body) may reduce awareness of physical injury [16].

While direct translations between animal and human studies are difficult [21], some models have conceptualized peritraumatic dissociation analogous to the freezing response observed in animals (see, e.g., [16]). The proximity of threat may at first elicit an orienting response, preparing the organism for an active defense mechanism (fight or flight reaction [22]), associated with increased sympathetic nervous system activation (e.g., in heart rate, blood pressure, and release of stress hormones). In situations that cannot be controlled or escaped, the threatened organism may more likely engage in a passive defense mode, accompanied by tonic immobility, increased parasympathic activity, and a “shut-down” of the arousal system [14, 16, 21, 23]. Passive reactions (i.e, tonic immobility) in the face of unescapable threat may enhance survival when the chance of escaping or winning a fight is low or impossible, e.g., by reducing the risk of being detected [23, 24]. As pointed out before, however, translations from animal to human research are complicated by conceptual and methodological differences (see, e.g., [21]).

There is evidence that peritraumatic dissociation increases the risk of subsequent PTSD [18, 25–30]. Although the precise mechanisms remain elusive [18, 28], disturbed information processing, most prominently memory alterations, may play an important role in this relationship [31–34]. Dissociation is thought to interfere with a coherent encoding of salient events [35–37], leading to a fragmentation (compartmentalization) of memory: sensory, affective, and cognitive aspects of the traumatic event are encoded and stored as separate elements, which may later reoccur as implicit intrusive flashback memories, accompanied by strong sensory impressions as if the traumatic event was happening again in the present [29, 38–42].

Sierra and Berrios proposed that symptoms of depersonalization may be associated with a “disconnection” of a cortico-limbic brain system, involving the amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and prefrontal structures. In this model, depersonalization is more broadly conceptualized as a state of subjective detachment, involving emotional numbing, emptiness of thoughts, analgesia, and hypervigilance [62]. It is assumed that these symptoms are associated with increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), and ACC [63], brain areas implicated in attention, cognitive control, and arousal modulation. Increased recruitment of the PFC may (both directly and indirectly via the ACC) lead to dampened activity in the amygdala and a marked attenuation of automatic responses, comparable to “shutting down the affective system” [62, 64–66]. The amygdala is fundamentally involved in salience detection and emotion processing such as the initiation of stress and fear responses [63, 67–69]. States of detachment (e.g., numbing) may thus be associated with reduced reactivity in this area [70].

                      Annegret Krause-Utz, Rachel Frost, Dorina Winter, and Bernet M. Elzinga 

anxiety

“More than a few people, some of whom think they know me quite well, have remarked that they are struck that I, who can seem so even-keeled and imperturbable, would choose to write a book about anxiety. I smile gently while churning inside and thinking about what I’ve learned is a signature characteristic of the phobic personality: “the need and ability”—as described in the self-help book Your Phobia—“to present a relatively placid, untroubled appearance to others, while suffering extreme distress on the inside.”

 Scott Stossel

 

“The truth is that anxiety is at once a function of biology and philosophy, body and mind, instinct and reason, personality and culture. Even as anxiety is experienced at a spiritual and psychological level, it is scientifically measurable at the molecular level and the physiological level. It is produced by nature and it is produced by nurture. It’s a psychological phenomenon and a sociological phenomenon…The origins of a temperament are many faceted; emotional dispositions that may seem to have a simple, single source—a bad gene, say, or a childhood trauma—may not.”

 Scott Stossel

Kierkegaard

And no Grand Inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety, and no spy knows how to attack more artfully the man he suspects, choosing the instant when he is weakest, nor knows how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared, as anxiety knows how, and no sharpwitted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused as anxiety does, which never lets him escape, neither by diversion nor by noise, neither at work nor at play, neither by day nor by night. 

                                 SØREN KIERKEGAARD

dpdr

DSM-IV characterizes dissociation as disruption of the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity, or perception of the environment. ICD-10 acknowledges that it may also involve the sensory and motor systems, leading to symptoms, which are subsumed under the term of conversion: ‘‘partial or complete loss of the normal integration of immediate sensations, and control of bodily movements’’.1 In general, dissociation can be understood in three distinct ways: (1) as a lack of integration of mental modules or systems, (2) as an altered state of consciousness, and (3) as defense mechanism. All of these are partial or even complete failures to deliberately control processes and take actions that can normally be influenced by an act of volition, for example, the ability to bring accessible information into conscious awareness or move voluntary muscles, we have found that in stages of shutdown as well as during later reappearance of dissociative states, reality construction becomes more difficult. These typical behavioral features include that threatened individuals cannot hear, see, or perceive well anymore. They move less – due to excessive muscle tension – until motility stops. Furthermore, they have difficulties understanding language and are unable to produce speech.

 

Maggie Schauer/Thomas Elbert

A gramme is always better than a damn

“If distress proves that the distressed are ‘defective’, it also proves that nothing much is psychologically distressing and damaging. It means that both cause and effect are located within ‘defective’ individuals. It is effectively a not guilty verdict for every form of oppression and abuse, and sympathy and solidarity with harm doers, and with the harm itself.

It has removed context from our suffering and made it a trivial matter, as well as making it an entirely individual problem, as if any upset or disagreement with our social system is proof of personal malfunction, and the system itself is flawless.

It enables a punishing approach to those who are most hurt from onlookers both inside and outside of the industry.

It promises a magical no-effort solution to “mental illness” where no one needs to change anything and no one needs to take responsibility for anything and we can continue to pretend that life’s a lark and anyone who doesn’t feel that way needs to be “fixed.” A gramme is always better than a damn.

The obvious reason for defining people as “ill” rather than suffering from the concrete realities of society is that “society” gets a pass, while the individual reacting to it is deemed the problem. Any question as to who benefits from that?

And don’t forget those abused by partners or guardians. If a wife or teen looks stressed and out of it while the abuser is well dressed and knows what to say the shrink will blame everything on the abuse victim. “Nobody’s fault. Just the crazy with the messed up brain. Their fault always. But we’re not ‘blaming’ ‘cause we write them off as hopeless so they can let us take care of them like five year old’s ‘till they die. See how nice we are!”

Thucydides

Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Thucydides

Woolf

But let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.  Probably it will be something laughable.

                                                                                            Virginia Woolf

warehousing

 “Me, I have never been in the hands of the people in white coats, but I have been involved (and recently) with people who tell the most horrendous stories of what happens in psychiatric hospitals – I have been listening to such stories for about 30 years and they don’t seem to have changed. I’m not going to write in detail about it because I want to say a bit more about the homeless industry and this post is too long already. When people are offered accommodation by outreach workers, it is usually hostel accommodation and it starts about £185 per week and goes up from there. Yes, there are lower rents but they are exceptional. As I said above, I was in B&B following an operation – it was an operation on an industrial scale – a small building divided into 15 flats by a company and let out to people referred by the local authority – they owned another 4 buildings in that part of London and possibly others elsewhere, rent per person (some tenants were families) was £300 a week. Breakfast, by the way, was ‘covered’ by providing two sliced loaves, a litre of milk, sugar, marg and a packet of breakfast cereal, but no utensils or cutlery. I have had friends (I am thinking of a really quiet guy with no drug, alcohol or mental health issues) who were charged £360 a week in hostels – highest (same guy) was £60 a night in Bayswater. I was offered a flat by a Christian housing association who deal with the homeless for £270 a week – I have heard of similar rents from many other people. If you want to look for work (or if you are telling the dole you are looking for work) it puts you in a very difficult situation. It’s fundamentally about warehousing people and making money out of them, and on a national scale the amount of money involved must beggar belief. I have heard from several sources that many outreach workers actually take backhanders to refer people – you can just smell the money around...I’ve only skimmed the surface – spend any time around homeless people and you hear endless stories of corruption. And all those workers are so sanctimonious, they’re all trendy lefties and they all read the bloody Guardian. End of.”

Tremain

Notice, furthermore, that insofar as this account of how the subfield of bioethics is politically motivated assumes, following Foucault, that power relations are productive and circulate between and through multiple and often conflicting sites, the account does not take recourse in foundationalist assumptions about truth and knowledge that invariably underpin appeals to “ideology” as either the font of or result of power relations. Indeed, dominant notions of ideology, insofar as they assume that power suppresses truth and authenticity, advance a juridico-discursive conception of power whereby power is fundamentally repressive, generally is held by and operates from a centralized authority such as the state or a certain social institution or group, and reigns from the top down.

                                                                        Shelley Lynn Tremain

Tremain

For my argumentative claims in the chapter, and indeed throughout this book, rely upon Foucault’s understanding of power (force relations) as both intentional and nonsubjective. Power, Foucault explained, is calculated and always exercised with a series of aims and objectives. In this way, power is intentional. Nevertheless, usually no seat of power can be located nor can a group be identified as the holders of power, that is, be identified as the decision makers who direct and coordinate the complicated network of dispositifs (apparatuses) that circulate in society. In this way, power is nonsubjective.

                                                                       Shelley Lynn Tremain

Jaber (On Girard)

The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence. The purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony to the community. Men can dispose of their violence more efficiently if they regard the process not as something emanating from within themselves, but as a necessity imposed from without, a divine decree whose least infraction calls down terrible punishment. Take the expiatory procedure of the Chuckchi people who avert feuds by killing an (innocent) member of the family; by killing, not the murderer, but someone close to him, an act of reciprocity is avoided and the necessity for revenge bypassed. Only violence can put an end to violence, and that is why violence is self-propagating. Analogous to avoidance of physical contact with the anathema in Greek culture, to do violence to a violent person is to be contaminated by his violence. It is best to arrange matters so that nobody is directly responsible for his death. To abandon without provision in mid ocean. To leave stranded on top of a mountain. To force him to hurl himself from a cliff. The role of the surrogate victim is honoured by architectural sites dedicated to the spirit of collective unity: tombs of heroes, the omphalos, the agora and in the polis itself. The traditions attached to these localities and the rituals associated with them make clear that sacred mob violence formed the origin of the polis.

       Athar Jaber

 

Girard

“...the victim...is a substitute for all the members of the community, offered up by the members themselves. The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence; it prompts the entire community to choose victims outside itself” (ibid., p. 8)."

excerpt (Mbembe)

...This attitude demands that such acts of death and banishment succeed in erasing the face (its living substance) that gives the enemy his humanity. The task of disfigurement and erasure is almost a precondition for any execution under the contemporary logic of hatred. Within societies that continue to multiply structures of separation and discrimination, the relation of care towards the other has been replaced with a relation without desire. Explaining and understanding, knowledge and recognition, are no longer necessary requirements. Hospitality and hostility have never been so opposed, a factor that serves to explain the interest in returning to those intellectual figures for whom the misery of men and the suffering of enemies were never mere ‘silent remainders of politics’. [34] Instead, they were always combined with a demand for recognition, notably in contexts where the experience of being unrecognized, humiliated, alienated and mistreated was the norm. 

         Achille Mbembe

depression

Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, "Never real and always true," and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know that it is absolutely true. It’s very confusing.

      Andrew Solomon

 

The educational system, whether lay or clerical, the structure of moral reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary honesty of workers who are given a medal after many years of good and loyal service, and the affection which springs from harmonious relations and good behavior - all these aesthetic expressions of respect for the established order serve to create around the exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which lightens the task of policing considerably. A multitude of moral teachers, counselors and "bewilderers" separate the exploited from those in power.

Frantz Fanon

Mingus excerpts

I want to specifically name my privilege as a disabled person, when so many of us are locked up in prisons, institutions, group homes, or in the back rooms of our families’ houses. I have a level of mobility that many disabled folks don’t have and I know it is a huge reason I am visible.

We are not anti healthcare or science, but are rather exposing the reality that many of us are dependent on the medical industrial complex while we are simultaneously trying to change it and ultimately build alternatives to it. Many of us don’t want to have to turn to the MIC, yet have few other viable options. There are no easy answers and the contradictions we are living in are often painful and unjust.

“Forced Intimacy” is a term I have been using for years to refer to the common, daily experience of disabled people being expected to share personal parts of ourselves to survive in an ableist world. This often takes the form of being expected to share (very) personal information with able bodied people to get basic access. Forced intimacy can also include the ways that disabled people have to build and sustain emotional intimacy and relationships with someone in order to get access—to get safe, appropriate and good access.

Disabled people are expected to “strip down” and “show all our cards” metaphorically in order to get the basic access we need in order to survive. We are the ones who must be vulnerable—whether we want to or not—about ourselves, our bodyminds and our abilities.

I think we need to work to challenge and dismantle binaries in strategic and relevant ways that are both grounded in the world that we exist in and that help move us towards the world we want. Simply avoiding binaries or pretending that they don’t exist, is not helpful, and often erases the current reality of disabled people who face very real oppression and violence everyday because they get marked as disabled.

I see this happening over and over as mixed-ability  spaces and groups begin talking about disability and ableism. All of a sudden the conversation quickly jumps to how “everyone is differently abled” and how “we’re all disabled in some way.” And while I think it is important–very important–to talk about how ableism impacts us all (because it does), we cannot ignore the truth that ableism impacts us all in very different ways. And while we may, someday want to live in a world where all of our different bodies are accepted and where we honor everyone’s different abilities, we don’t live in that world yet and we will never get there until we are able to sit with, face and understand what is. There’s where we want to be and where we are. And part of where we are, is that many people are living inside of this binary, being labeled as “disabled” in very real and violent ways, and being denied access to resources because of it; many people are dying inside of it. And many people are thriving inside of it, gaining very real superiority and able-bodied privilege that offers them distance and disconnection from those deaths and that violence. Where we are, is that there are many people who don’t have the luxury of escaping that binary or pretending it is something other than what it is. We cannot move toward disability justice without the lived experiences of the people who get marked and oppressed as disabled and any work to challenge, reimagine and transform what disability is or could be cannot forget this.

Isolation gets used as a tool across the board, against so many people, but it’s also something I think that colors so many disabled people’s lives. I would bet that most of us in this room have at one point or another struggled with our mental health. I would bet that most of us have experienced some type of abuse either from our families, within our relationships or even within our organizing. All of us have trauma and we all carry generational trauma in our bones, breath and cells.

Many times access is a quick fix, an add on or a “just tell me what to do and I'll do it” type of angry/guilty shuffling. I want us to not only to be able to be part of spaces, but for us to be able to fully engage in spaces. I don’t just want us to get a seat at someone else’s table, I want us to be able to build something more magnificent than a table, together with our accomplices. I want us to be able to be understood and to be able to take part in principled struggle together—to be able to be human together. Not just placated or politely listened to. 

 

         Mia Mingus

Nothing founds us outside of a struggle to establish those bonds by which we are sustained.

          Judith Butler

Weller

‘Agemben’s analysis indicates that modern bio-political power maintains liberal order through the exclusion of bodies and minds that fail to confirm to the liberal vision…inclusion in the mainstream can only be achieved through a demonstration of the individual’s ability to function as a rational self-actualising liberal subject. In this kind of order, a benevolent response denotes exclusion from the mainstream. Moreover, as people with disabilities report, the struggle to avoid benevolence and achieve inclusion becomes the constant feature of the disability experience...For Agamben, homo sacer is a figure who is alive, and yet beyond law, inhabiting a place where all normal rights, expectations, connections, honour and meaning are suspended. Because homo sacer is a diminished life form...it becomes ‘an object of violence that exceeds the sphere both of law and of sacrifice.’

Penelope Weller

According to Frederick Douglass, in the U.S.A, fist fights would break out amongst slaves who argued about whose slave master was the best, the richest, the most powerful, the kindest etc. but that doesn’t mean that what their masters did was kind in any meaningful sense. Before shooting himself in the head in front of the Greek parliament Dimitris Christoulas said:‘I am not committing suicide. They are killing me.’But were there is no victimization there is no crime.

Moten

Logistics emerges as much as the science of loss prevention as the science of moving property through the emptiness, of making the world as it travels by filling it. This is not making the road as we walk, in the anarchist tradition.

Fred Moten

excerpt Moten

Because what are we to make of the fact that today it is the science of logistics that most seems to have realized the Heart Doctrine of Zen Buddhism? It is the science of logistics that dreams of flow without blockage, and tries to turn these dreams into reality. Hard logistics and soft logistics work together. The yang of the Belt and Road and the yin of the algorithm fantasize together of no block. If this is true, we should be worried. In its origins, and its contemporary mutations, logistics is a regulatory force standing against us, standing against the earth. Logistics begins in loss and emptiness. And it begins in a fundamental misapprehension called spacetime. The loss that marks ownership, specifically the ownership of private property, the loss of sharing, the loss of the earth and the consequent making of the world, is simultaneously the misapprehension that what is privatized is empty and will be filled by ownership itself, by properties, by properties placed into it. This emptiness will be filled with an interior. This emptiness is confirmed by logistics, by the mobilization, the colonizing drive, of this interior – where properties are imported into empty space. This begins, again, with Locke or, at least, we can begin again through him. His concept of the mind as tabula rasa – often portrayed as an Enlightenment move away from predetermination – is a projection of this emptiness that must be owned and filled. For this emptiness to become private property it must be filled with and located in the coordinates of space and time. Space emerges as the delimitation of what is mine, and time begins with the theft and imposition when it became mine. The individual mind and its coming to maturity out of the tabula rasa mark this first conquest. Enlightenment interiority emerged from this emplotment of time and space – to borrow from Hayden White – this separation from what is shared. But interiority is only for the owning mind. Because what allows this mind to take possession of itself is its ability to grasp property, which is something it now posits as beyond itself. It takes what it is taken from for what it needs to create itself, and not just needs but compulsively, interminably, voraciously seeks without end. In other words, the emplotment of time and space in the mind takes place through the emplotment of time and space on earth, in a conversion of emptiness into world, and is simultaneously taken as a fulflment of mind, its interior appointment in and of what can now be conceptualized as body. Is it a leap to say logic and logistics start here inseparably?

        

Fred Moten

“The subject who was never here, cannot then disappear, it can only haunt.”

           Fred Moten

O’Donohue

There is a huge abyss within every mind. When we belong, we have an outside mooring to prevent us from falling into ourselves. As memory gathers and anchors time, so does belonging shelter longing. When longing dies, creativity ceases.

         John O’Donohue

depression

 

“So, there are these three neurotransmitters that are super important for being happy and motivated and just generally being able to do things: serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine. When you have depression, your brain does not produce enough of one, two, or all of these. That's bad. You stop wanting to do things, and often it feels completely impossible to do anything at all. If you don't understand this, that's okay. Just realize it's a thing. I do not understand being able to go grocery shopping without any emotional preparation - or being able to make phone calls, or get up in the morning, or eat without emotional preparation. The only thing that always sounds appealing is sleep because I don't have to consciously experience anything. Experiencing things sounds hard. So we don't understand each other. That's fine. Let's just not get upset about it or say really offensive things. Actually let's just use that as a general rule. Don't get upset or say offensive things when you don't understand’’.