Book Review: Disability Rhetoric (Jay Dolmage)

Reviewed by Michael Northen

There are two types of books that everyone claims to have read yet I have been unable to finish. The first are those like Joyce's Ulysses (and those of other contemporary poets I might name) where my poverty of imagination simply does not allow me to grasp what they are trying to show me. The second are those like Heidegger's Being and Time (or substitute any book by Derrida) that are intellectually beyond me and seem to be coming from somewhere in an academic empyrean that I do not have access to. For me Jay Dolmage's Disability Rhetoric, despite its attempt to be readable, participates in both of these difficulties. That is unfortunate because like the work of Lennard Davis, David Mitchell, Tobin Seibers and Robert McRuer, some of the disability studies giants whose shoulders Dolmage's work stands on, Disability Rhetoric strikes out to chart new territory. Undoubtedly, that is what makes it the challenging work that it is.

Because of its importance to disability studies, Disability Rhetoric will not need to worry about a secure place in the libraries, classrooms or research of scholars whose institutions are making a concerted effort to keep abreast of the field. However, in the spirit of disability studies pioneer Steve Brown — who many years back pointed out that while activists needed the academy to provide them with intellectual underpinnings from which to argue their cause, those in the university needed the activists to keep them grounded — the value of Dolmage's work will be limited if it cannot somehow be translated into language understandable by the reasonably intelligent reader interested in knowing what disability studies has to offer. It is in this spirit, and with apologies to the work that Jay Dolmage has done, that I am offering my Cliff Notes version of Disability Rhetoric. (I have read the entire book.)

Two key concepts are necessary in accessing Dolmage's work: rhetoric and mētis. The first most people will have heard of, even if in a colloquial way. The second is probably not in anyone's list of the one hundred most frequently used words. Because they are so pivotal, the author takes up his usage of these two words in the introductory section of the book, his "Prothesis." Rhetoric focuses on the use of language for persuasive ends. Dolmage states (and repeats), "I see rhetoric as the strategic study of the circulation of power through communication." The premise that communication cannot be divorced from power may be common currency in post-Foucault academic circles, but for those encountering it for the first time, it can be an unsettling and not at all obvious, notion.

The author's definition of mētis as "the rhetorical art of cunning and adaptive intelligence" is more slippery, even when he adds, "Unlike the forward march of logic, mētis is characterized by sideways and backward movement." While this may just seem like cageyness on Dolmages's part, part of his point is that mētis by its very nature is not something that can be pinned down. It is, however, an important tool.

For those not regularly involved in discussions of philosophy, the short story is that Plato has done us a disservice. In his day, Plato (in the voice of his teacher Socrates) had a running argument with a prominent group known as the Sophists, teachers who would train students in various ways to win an argument, regardless of the actual "truth" of the situation. That is, they taught rhetoric. Plato, on the other hand, believed that there were indeed universal truths and that they could be arrived at through linear logic. His view won out and for two thousand years more or less we have been raised to believe that there is one true, story, position, point of view or way to be. Dolmage (along with many others) challenges this viewpoint arguing that it is power, not truth that shapes our cultural beliefs and that rhetoric employing the tool of mētis is a way to subvert that power.

What does all of this have to do with disability? The concept of disability is a consequence of the idea that there is one right way to be, act, look, or think and that anything that lies outside of those parameters is abnormal. Rhetoric, through mētis, is potentially capable of deconstructing normalcy, showing that not only is the idea of what is normal particular to specific cultures but that even with those cultures it was never monolithic. Dolmage argues that in actuality some of what we now think of as abnormal (including abnormal bodies) and attach negative connotations to were looked upon either as neutral or even positive.

From a disability studies point of view, another disservice that Plato performed, in addition to his scuttling of rhetoric, was minimizing the importance of bodies in his belief that only ideas are real. Ideas and logic work well together, of course, because they have no necessary recourse to the corporeal world, especially not bodies. Dolmage makes it one of his primary tasks to disrupt this belief by claiming that language is a product of the body and thus all speech is rhetorical and all rhetoric embodied. It is not a far leap from that to the notion that non-normal bodies count.

Much of Disability Rhetoric is dedicated to Dolmage's attempts to use mētis as a means of interrogating cultural attitudes towards disability in sample periods of history. A considerable portion this occurs around the figure of Hephaestus in Greek Olympian god consistently depicted with a disabiity, but there are others, as well. The premise of this focus is that myths are the bearers of cultural beliefs and attitudes. (One of the more intriguing of those myths is that of the goddess Metis, representing embodied knowledge, being swallowed whole by Zeus, recapitulating the way in which culture as a whole consumes and subdues differences.) To bring his methods onto a more contemporary stage, Dolmage devotes an entire chapter to the application of his rhetorical methods to the recent movie, The King's Speech. Even for those with no particular interest in disability theory or rhetoric, it is a fascinating discussion.

Inserted between the six formal chapters are two "Interchapters" that for teachers of introductory disability studies or literature courses may be the most valuable feature of the book. Because Americans in general are so surrounded by images of disability that they may not even recognize as metaphorical, Dolmage has provided an "Archive and Anatomy of Disability Myths." It is a table listing the myth, a description and an example.

For instance:

Myth: Disability as Object of Pity and/or Charity
Description: People with disabilities are represented as sad and important, a problem that can be solved via charity.
Example: Dickens' Tiny Tim is the prototypical example from literature.

This very practical feature of Disability Rhetoric could provoke discussions in a classroom that would be illuminating both in helping students to understand their own particular biases and in understanding why people with disabilities would object to such characterizations.

The second Interchapter is "Repertoire and Choreography of Disability Rhetorics." As Dolmage points out early in the book, one of the dangers of substituting a disability rhetoric for one that is centered around concepts of normalcy, is that in "correcting" and deposing the old rhetoric, the new disability rhetoric now becomes the gatekeeper. To avoid this Dolmage proposes a number of alternative disability rhetorics (fifteen to be exact), any or all of which might be called upon depending on the occasion. Again, this is set up as a table with the name of the rhetoric, a description and an example. While not as immediately concrete as the list of myths, this table surfaces a variety of rhetorics that would take an instructor or student much research and imagination to uncover.

Despite these Interchapter aids, it is not the casual reader with a disability that is Dolmage's main audience, and it is precisely the same qualities that make the book a labor-intensive read that also make it valuable for researchers and students of disability studies. One of the most immediate features is a rich bibliography, twenty pages long and with hundreds of sources, that an energetic researcher would find immensely valuable. It is not merely a bibliography for show. In a spirit that fosters collaboration and the recognition of work of his colleagues, Dolmage draws from and makes use of the ideas of others working in the field. On one level, he builds upon concepts like David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder's narrative prosthesis and Robert McRuer's alignment of queer theory and disability, but he also works on the micro-level. Into almost every paragraph is woven a phrase or line of someone else in this field, as he does in this sample paragraph discussing the impact of Plato, mentioned above:

In Phaedo, Plato lectured that "we shall continue closest to knowledge if we avoid as much as we can all contact and association with the body" (1961d, 111). As Kristen Lindgren points out, this fear of the body was attached to a fear of disease — "any diseases which attack us hinder our quest for reality" (ibid; Lindgren 2004, 146). The body has been seen as "a distraction for philosophers and an unfit subject for philosophy" (Lindgren 2004, 146).

What Dolmage accomplishes is both to lead beginning researchers to relevant work that may not be on their immediate radar and to bring some recognition to those like Lindgren and her small crew and what they are achieving at Haverford College. Such a technique works particularly well with Dolmage's layering approach that employs a variety of rhetorics and allows for numerous voices that may in fact be adding to his thesis even as they contradict it.

There is at least one more layer built into the structure of Disability Rhetoric that an be useful to researchers — at least the curious researcher — and that is in the footnotes. In Dolmage's own words:

The footnote will not be used primarily to support my own arguments but rather to make space for parallel, contradictory, or more fully elaborated others. When I offer a list of authorities, I do so not primarily to short up my own argument, but because I imagine that you (like me) might be curious to look elsewhere, and might very well learn more from leaving this book than you would from staying in it."

While the price to pay for entering Disability Rhetoric may be a certain amount of erudition, those with the entry fee will find much in these footnotes to get their investigative juices flowing.

Dolmage recognizes that his work provides no easy answers. To the reader, he says, "What I hope to show is that the action of a mētis historiography, a mētis rhetoric is also to layer a rich variety of meanings, array the stories that are most contested, and offer double and divergent means of engaging these stories so that readers might find their own rhythm at their own pace."

Of course, it isn't that easy, and that is a large part of Dolmage's point. He has put an immense amount of work into Disability Rhetoric. It's work that needs to be digested by scholars, then passed along to students, policy makers, and the general public interested in the disability issues. How successful any trickledown theory can be is an open question, but in his latest book, Jay Dolmage has done his part. Now it is up to those of us in the middle — the translators — to do ours.

Michael Northen is the editor of Wordgathering and an editor iwth Jennifer Bartlett and Sheila Black of the anthology Beauty is a Verb: the New Poetry of Disability.