Disability and the promises of technology: Technology, subjectivity and embodiment within an order of the normal

Abstract

TECHNOLOGYTechnology, subjectivity and embodiment within an order of the normal The topic of this article is the promises of technology for disabled people. The starting point is that disabled is not something one is but something one becomes, and, further, that disability is enacted and ordered in situated and quite specific ways. The question, then, is how people become, and are made, disabled -and, in particular, what role technologies and other material arrangements play in enabling and or disabling interactions. Drawing on a study of the uses of new technologies in the lives of disabled people in Norway, and recent work in disability studies as well as social studies of science and technology, this article explores precisely what positions and capacities are enabled; how these are made possible in practice; the specific configuration of subjectivity, embodiment and disability that emerges; and the limits to this mode of ordering disability and its technologies. The argument is that in this context the mobilization of new technologies works to build an order of the normal and turn disabled people into competent normal subjects. However, this strategy based on compensation achieves its goals only at a very high price: by continuing to reproduce boundaries between abled and disabled, and normal and deviant, which constitute some people as disabled in the first place. There are thus limits to normalization. And so, notwithstanding their generative and transformative power, technologies working within an order of the normal are implicated in the (re)production of the asymmetries that they and it seek to undo.

Human, Non-Human, and Beyond: Cochlear Implants in Socio-Technological Environments

“…If biotechnical practices or neuroprostheses like CI are often discussed in the context of the border between medical therapy and enhancement, these particular filmic production of first-time-activation videos demonstrate how the borders between hearing and non-hearing as well as between normal human hearing and CI hearing are reinscribed by turning deaf patients into active participants in the hearing world. How these normativities are (re-)enacted [63] and what kind of (non-)hearing subjects emerge will be demonstrated in the following analysis.…”

“…This also applies for concepts of dis/abilities, which cannot be considered as being prefabricated then applied and attributed to humans regardless of the socio-technical context. Speaking with Moser, our Bpoint of departure is that disabled [and normal] is not something one is but something one becomes and, further, that disability is ordered and enacted in situated and quite specific ways^ [63,374]. Thus, by taking into account the different entities by which it is reciprocally shaped, we suggest that the CI arrangement is a mobilizing agency that engenders mediation processes.…”

“…In working with a clearly media theoretical approach, the aim of this article is neither to praise the CI as a medical means of restoring hearing loss and thus turning non-hearing people into Bcompetent normal subjects^ [63] nor denounce it as a Btool for cultural genocide^ [72,4]. Rather, we emphasize the particular socio-technical arrangements that condition the (re-)production of dis/ability, a dimension which has yet to be sufficiently addressed in the field of disability studies.…”

“…and psychological capabilities as well as states of consciousness that lead to improving the natural human condition [9]. While posthumanist and transhumanist visions euphorically affirm an enhancement of the Bdeficitary basic hardware^of the human body [35,63], ethical discourses on dehumanization via cyborgization are reworked as dystopian visions in contemporary popular narratives such as Captain Picard's transformation into the Locotus of Borg in the Star Trek: The Next Generation (CBS, 1987-1994) series or Murphy's technological Brestoration^in Paul Verhoeven's Robocop (Orion Pictures, 1997). Such filmic representations of the cyborg pessimistically articulate an erasure of basic human attributes and social skills either in favor of the greater good of a forced, assimilated society (Star Trek) or the physical and psychological tortures of the fusion of the body with technological elements and the lamentation over the lost humanness (Robocop) [91,463].…”

Taken for Granted: Material Relations Between Disability and Codes/Guidelines

“…Mapping through actor-network theory facilitated our understanding of who or what the actants [2][3][4][5][6] were in our three different museum cases and how their entanglements and enactments began to shape an understanding of how designers design for disability. The evidence of the relationships between actants was drawn from the description, mapping and interpretation of our three case studies.…”