The child, dis/ability and the human

The child has always had a complex relationship with both the human and Dis/ability: at one and the same time the child has been defined as the least human (or not human at all), the pre-human, the post-human and the most human and as the least Dis/abled, the pre-able, the post-able and the most Dis/abled. The child also sits in a strange place in terms of academic thinking as people – including academics – tend to assume childhood as being the most common-sensical of identities: everyone knows what a child is and shares these views freely, with conviction and often with humour and/ or pathos and this is true too of the Dis/abled child, constantly and consistently invoked in funding and charity appeals and in political speeches and policies as both the most vulnerable and the least vulnerable in being seen to be always, after all still, a child. It is only when even the lowest bar of the requirement for being defined as a child is not reached that the definition establishes what is least human or not human at all and this then might be, for instance, the criminal, the insane, the animal, the ultimately Dis/abled, the foreigner or the refugee. The child and Dis/ability, then, are a measure of the ‘human’ as these other ‘others’ are too.

Thinking at all about the child, also in relation to the human and Dis/ability, therefore challenges everyone’s common-sensical and above all emotional investments in what the child is for them known to be, for sure. I want to propose here that the (Dis/abled) child has been both least and most affected by the issues that this symposium is focusing on: one the one hand, every report available reflects how austerity’s cuts in health care, social care, housing, Disability funding and education (including specific educational Disability funding sources) affect the Dis/abled child even more than the already affected adults because the child sits within the frames of the adult twice-over; within the family within society (whatever ‘family’ or the ‘social’ are defined to be). In this sense the Dis/abled child has been most affected, but at the same time least affected in other senses in that this situation is not new or different: this has always been the case for the Dis/abled child and the Dis/abled child has further not been changed in the ways it is defined in relation to the human.

Because of the Dis/abled child being situated as a measure of the human (not, most and least) it is also invoked constantly in the resistances and protests against austerity and the implications of austerity, but my greatest worry in the midst of all of this is that because the Dis/abled child is also already ‘known’ to everyone – a site of truth – these protests and resistances in fact all too often – wittingly or unwittingly – operate on exactly the same principles as austerity and casino (or audit) capitalism themselves. Key to this, for instance, are issues like mental health, defined by almost everyone – for or against austerity and neo-liberalism – in terms of a commonly agreed cognitivism, of which Julian Henriques et al in their ground-breaking and radical 1984 (and 1998 new edition) volume Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity wrote that:

Discourses rooted in the notion of a unitary, rational subject still predominate in the social sciences in spite of critiques which have shown such a concept to be untenable. [… It] survives not so much in explicit defences of the model as in the implicit assumptions of various dualisms: social and cognitive, content and process, the intentionality of agents and determination by structures, the subject as constituted or constitutive. […] we utilized poststructuralist theories and psychoanalysis to show up the limitations that cognitivism imposes for those, who, like us, wanted to break with the tendency of psychology’s research to reproduce and naturalize the particular rationalist notion of the subject. […] The resilience of these paradigms in psychology, as much as in the common sense understandings of human behaviour, supports our belief that the book serves its original purpose of helping to authorize the breaking of the mould.^[1]

Henriques et al were here explicitly challenging the notion of what constitutes the ‘human’ at times of which they write in the 1998 revised edition that ‘[w]hen Changing the Subject was first published [in 1984], the New Right had come to power in Britain, and an ideology which has come to be described as neo-liberalism, supported by powerful institutions like the World Bank, was about to change the political landscape across the globe.’^[2] Here we are still and again, I would say, and yet Henriques et al’s proposition that in their view ‘psychology can only renew itself by engaging with a multiple, relational subject not bounded by reason: such an engagement should profoundly disturb psychology’s assumptions and its self-understanding’^[3] has not only remained the province and interest of very little and increasingly marginalised academic research and teaching or political activism but is ever-more firmly in place as the general underpinning assumption of almost all articulations, wherever they place themselves: a rationalist, cognitivist, subject and its attendant self-evident object produce and are inherent to the widely-used claims of, for instance, ‘voice’, ‘agency’, ‘identities’, ‘empathy’, ‘transparency’, ‘neuroscience’, ‘the brain’, ‘audit’, ‘fake news’ (and its attendant ‘true news’). Many of these claims operate often too in Dis/ability studies, gender and sexuality studies and feminism, precisely fields where one might have expected a resistance to an obedience to and compliance with the terms of neo-liberal, casino/ audit capitalism, but which instead are all too often are part of the swelling chorus of demands for more ‘voice’, more ‘agency’, more ‘empathy’, more transparency, more neuroscientific studies and knowledge of ‘the brain’, and even more and better ‘audit’ and more ‘true news’ and less ‘fake news’. All these naturalised claims on the one hand profess outrage at the ‘proven’ unscientific nature of any anti-cognitivist critiques, such as the psychoanalysis or post-structuralism invoked by Henriques et al, already knowing what a self-evidently ‘clear’ science brings to the table, even if it is not always seen to have done so quite enough (yet). On the other hand, as an inevitable counter-point, a deep suspicion of any such self-evident science relies paradoxically on exactly the same naturalised claims, just to the opposite effect. And it is in this that we can recognise Henriques et al’s ‘various dualisms’ in action as the only acceptable and accepted options, whether ‘for’ or ‘against’.

What, then, to do? Key here to Henriques et al’s kind of arguments are not that we should dispense with the ‘various dualisms’ in order to instate in-turn after all a superior set of terms or claims as this would constitute only yet another repetition of those dualisms themselves anyway: only more more [sic]. Instead, they propose different ways of thinking about the subject – not in terms of its ‘content’, but in terms of its framing: how any subject (and object) is always seen and defined as such in the perspective of another. This is the key argument drawn also from psychoanalysis, albeit a psychoanalysis itself read within such terms (rather than the ‘psychologised’ version of psychoanalysis of popular culture but also much academic research), that any ‘subject’ is necessarily and always divided against itself – any ‘I’ has articulate even its own ‘I’ from elsewhere. Such ways of thinking do not lead to grand narratives and standardised methods, approaches or procedures but to a disruption of the naturalisation of claims. As Carolyn Steedman, Cathy Urwin and Valerie Walkerdine explain in their 1985 volume Language, Gender and Childhood in relation to their writing on both childhood and gender:

[our] approach requires a form of analysis which does not simply point to the existence of either alternative forms of language or lacunae of silence as expressions of social inequality. Rather, it demands that we understand the possibilities for change by examining how forms of speaking and forms of truth have been produced, and how these regulate and circumscribe what can be said about what, when and where. In this process, we are also forced to re-analyse what constitutes subversion and resistance, and how the subjective and the political intersect.^[4]

This perspective allows us to ask, for instance, when a child is seen to speak, how and why is it seen to be speaking its own voice? This issue is fundamental to difficulties surrounding both the study and the care of the child in any context, including in legal, educational or social welfare situations, where the dualism at play is either the view that the child is the perfect speaker of pure authenticity or that it is purely imitative, speaking only the words that others have supplied to it.

References

^[1] J. Henriques, W. Hollway, C. Urwin, C. Venn and V. Walkerdine, ‘Foreword’, in J. Henriques, W. Hollway, C. Urwin, C. Venn and V. Walkerdine, (eds), Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 1998 [1984]), pp. ix–xx, pp. ix–x.

^[2] Changing the Subject, p. x

^[3] Changing the Subject, p. xviii

^[4] C. Steedman, C. Urwin and V. Walkerdine, ‘Introduction’, in C. Steedman, C. Urwin and Walkerdine (eds) Language, Gender and Childhood (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,1985), pp. 1–10, p. 2.

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