322 RüdigerKunow
serve, from outside, to classify that individual, but what exists between
individualsbydintoftheirmultipleinteractions"(32).
There is thus aperformativedimension attaching itself to late or
disabledlife.Takingacuefromfeministtheoryonemightevensaythat
people are "do ing age" or "do ing disability" in ways reminiscent of
those other people who are "doing gender"as a sometimes routinized
"accomplishment embedded in everyday interaction" (West and
Zimmerman 125). Such a constructionist reading would go some way
toward describing the activities recorded above of persons like silver
agers, residents in care facilities, the women inPush Girls, also the
fictional characters inConfidence-Man. At the same time, however, the
performativesof"doingage"or"doingdisability"shouldnotbetakenas
giving license to those highly fashionable views which assert that both
embodiments are just cultural constructs and in doing so tend to
downplay the material hardships of living in a non-normative body as
well as the social and cultural discrimination often encountered by
persons which are interpellated into both conditions in the
communicative interaction between them and those regarded as
"normal." I have above addressed the work of Stanley Cavell and his
repeated insistence on "the absolute responsibility of the self to make
itselfintelligible,withoutfalsifyingitself"(Conditionsxxvii)evenifthis
needs to rely on imperfect, linguistic, even proto-linguistic forms of
representation."Makingoneselfintelligible"forCavelldoesnotmeanto
create direct and stable correspondences between the somatic and the
semantic which answer the requirements of epistemological certainty
espoused by Wittgenstein, but rather to be committed to a
communicative ethos reminiscent of what in the language of the
Frankfurt School would be phrased as owing the other person good
reasons for one's behavior. If, in Cavell's words, "my knowledge of
othersdependsupontheirexpressingthemselves,inwordsandconduct"
(Conditions254), then all the knowledge people can attain, here about
another person's bodily condition, depends on the communicative
interactionbetweenthem.
The "expressions" exchanged in this interaction will never offer
unassailable certainty about somebody else's embodiment and therefore
will not do away with the cultural mystifications, the spectrality
surrounding late life or disability, and they will certainly not guard
againstsimulatedageordisabilitycons.Whattheydooffer,though,isa