Introduction: A Pathetic Event The problem is that the story is too simple, I think. I have learned that in real life, there are more twists and turns. The black is not entirely black, and the white turns out to be a different color entirely. There are never only two choices. I am trying to find a new story, but I am finding it hard. It takes too long to explain it all, and I keep on losing the thread. I am sure it would be easier if I just told the old story. Many people still like it, certainly. But how can I tell a story if I am not certain it is true? Of course, this is not a true story either. But that’s different. - Tom Shakespeare On March 12, 1990, nearly 1,000 disabled individuals converged on Capitol Hill to protest delays in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The legislation had passed the Senate in September 1989 but remained stalled in the House despite widespread bipartisan support. At the end of the demonstration, around sixty protestors affiliated with American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (a militant, direct action group better known as ADAPT) got out of their wheelchairs and attempted to climb the steps of the Capitol. Photographs from the “crawl-up” mostly focus on Jennifer Keelan, an eight-year-old with cerebral palsy who crawled to the top of the stairs on her elbows and knees. This was not Keelan’s first protest. She had been arrested a year prior while attending a similar ADAPT protest in Montreal. The photograph of Keelan reaching the top of the stairs was, according to Joseph Shapiro, “the one…image from the ADA fight to register in public memory.” While the crawl-up did succeed in attracting the attention of the media—which until then had provided scant coverage of the passage of the ADA—many within the disability rights community were critical of ADAPT’s employment of what were perceived to be demeaning and stereotypical images of disabled individuals. The Disability Rag, a prominent disability rights publication, commented: “One might question why a movement intent on showing that disabled people are adults, not children, would make their central media image a child.” Why, they
Absent a stable and coherent definition with which to unify what is otherwise a disparate assortment of intellectual and physical conditions, a number of theorists have suggested a different approach that takes disability as its starting point. Rather than consider disability as a “deviation from a presumed normal center,” this approach reverses this construction such that disability becomes the rule rather than the exception. On this view, an awareness of the ways in which we are all dependent on others calls into question the boundaries that render disability as ability’s unimaginable other. Insofar as disability is characterized by a heightened dependency on others, so the story goes, then we are all potentially disabled. Far from occupying the space of the “radically other,” then, disability becomes a universal category of which we are all members. In this paper, I examine what I identify as the “ethical turn” in disability studies; namely, the recent emphasis on reimaging disability as a universal category that invites a heightened sense of obligation to the disabled Other (who is also, potentially, one’s self). Notwithstanding the value of acknowledging vulnerability and dependency as aspects of the human condition, I argue that this approach does not fundamentally alter the way we already think about disability, nor does it necessarily address the “unease around questions of human frailty,” that disability is said to provoke. However valuable an ethics grounded in the acknowledgement of vulnerability and dependence might be in thinking differently about disability, it has so far failed to connect this ethical practice to collective action. It is more often the case that disability becomes “good to think”—useful to the extent that it enables what Lauren Berlant calls an “aesthetics of compassion—the cultivation of the senses toward a more nuanced and capacious engagement with scenes of human activity.” I will begin by providing a brief overview of recent developments in disability studies in order to better understand what precipitated this ethical turn and why it has appeared as a
between compassion and pity being far too short). In order to better understand how compassion operates in these discourses, then, I turn to the thought of Hannah Arendt, whose analysis of the influence of compassion on the French Revolution helps to illuminate why the claim to a common disabled identity is both politically misguided and potentially dangerous. For, as Arendt reminds us, “compassion…abolishes the distance, the in-between which always exists in human intercourse” (OR, 76), and it is this in-between that is necessary for action—and therefore, politics—to occur. Against Compassion In her analysis of the “devastating” role of compassion in the French Revolution in On Revolution, Arendt notes that the American Revolutionaries, unlike their French counterparts, did not have to confront the mass poverty that so confounded and entranced figures like Robespierre and Rousseau (62). Undistracted by the misery and want of les malheureux, they could remain committed to the achievement of freedom necessary for the foundation of the republic. The French Revolutionaries, on the other hand, were faced with a people whose conditions, despite the fall of the monarchy, remained very different from their own. Lacking a common cause through which to unite these disparate groups, it was compassion—what Robespierre referred to as “’that imperious impulse which attracts us towards les hommes faibles’”—that served to temporarily bridge this chasm (65). This harnessing of compassion for political purposes is problematic for several reasons. The first is what Arendt identifies as compassion’s tendency to “abolish” the worldly space between individuals necessary for collective action. Compassion—the capacity to feel with suffering others—demands that what unites individuals is not a common cause (the foundation of freedom, for example), but rather a common sentiment—a feeling with a tenuous (if not