310 RüdigerKunow
SpectralDisabilities,or,WhatYouSeeIsWhatyou(Don't)Get
As I have argued repeatedly throughout this chapter, disability is
both an experience and an identificatory modality, a modality based, at
times anxiously, on a body of social and cultural knowledge (leaving
aside here the expertise of medical people and therapists). In a culture
that privileges the seen over the unseen, and where identities are
assigned on the basis of appearance, disability unsurprisingly comes to
us as a form of immediate knowing, what Foucault (in a context not
addressingdisability)called"aperceptibleknowledge"(Or derofThings
131), a knowledge practice which, as he argues, is provisional and
contingentand,asIsaidatthebeginning,basedonsensualimpressions.
Knowledge of this kind was instituted in the 18th century by
scientificdescriptionsofthenaturalworld.Thedevelopmentofmodern
medicine and the normative apparatus that has emerged in its wake has
increased our capabilities to discern and classify disability as a non-
normative form of embodiment and at the same time endowed these
classifications with a seemingly self-evident objectivity: "Natural
history is nothing more than the nomination of the visible. Hence its
apparentsimplicity,andthatairofnaivete[sic]ithasfromadistance,so
simple does it appear and so obviously imposed by the things
themselves'"(OrderofThings132).
Foucault's skepticism is well-founded, especially in the field of
disability. Non-normative embodiment is what "meets the eye," almost
automatically. It is an identification which can be misleading and
misled. As we have seen above concerning cosmetic surgery and other
alterations, visual evidence about the human body cannot always be
trusted. For non-normativities classified as disability this means that
they are inextricably involved in the dialectic between visible and
invisible, outside and inside, surface and depth. In other words, the
degree to which disability, socially and culturally, depends on what I
identified above as a diagnostic practice, explains why it has so often
been accompanied by speculations, in political but also popular culture,
of being a fraud, feigned with the intention to deceive and to attain
financialandotheradvantages:the"disabilitycon."Thisisnotonlytrue
of our time with its frenzied neoliberal aversions against anybody that
does not fit the norm of the self-sufficient, enterprising individual. In
fact, there is a long history of how visual markers of embodied