We’ve all been getting booster shots self-quarantining these past couple of weeks.
Karine remarked to me how differently different people are affected by them. She gets a sore arm, for instance, while a day goes by and then I get three days of a mild but depressing cold. Another friend faints, yet another gets so sick she moans she would have done better to get the damned disease naturally. Another has no idea what we’re talking about.
The Covid virus too is now different to what it was before, more contagious: at least three people have called me recently to warn me they’ve tested positive. In nearly two years this has never happened. So, in addition to watching and hearing about the different reactions among people in my circle, I’ve been standing around a lot more in the local pharmacy, watching how differently different perfect strangers take all this different common Covid experience.
Too much testing myself has affected me. I have become very ambivalent about having my nose reamed by a long cotton swab. I would now rather silently submit to an improvised enema from Nurse Ratched than undergo yet again one of these five-second nose swabbings. I have noticed, though, that nobody else in the impossible swarms of those getting tested seems especially troubled by the swabbing experience.
Even so, testing is making me nervouser and nervouser. As I write, I have said ‘No’ to a home test before hosting a perfectly legal, eight-person New Year’s gathering… I shall instead bury myself at the foot of my bed unless an enraged Karine insists on testing that Nurse Ratched/enema proposition.
Has my ‘difference’ – fear and loathing of to Covid testing – crossed into mental ‘disability’? Has difference crossed from ‘can’ do to ‘can’t do’ such that I no longer function in the normal range of humans?
Ridiculous idea. Just because you get a little fed up with something, you don’t slip from your god-given “difference” to “disability” surely… you can still choose… Right?
I have been thinking a lot about “difference” and “disability” for the past couple days, since I saw a mother-daughter dance performance called De Françoise à Alice, choreographed by Mickaël Phelippeau. It appears I’m not the only one to be struck by the performance. It has another date at a new annual arts show at Carreau du Temple called Everybody, so, who knows, perhaps you’ll be able to see it! Everybody, which is open to ‘every body’ in every sense, starts in mid-February and features visual arts, physical training techniques and dance-performance. It’s programming turns, of course, around difference, associating themes such as gender, consciousness and sexuality. For instance, Marta Izquierdo Munoz’s excellent woman-warrior piece Guérillères is featured alongside Annabel Guérédrat’s I’m a Bruja (‘bruja’ = witch) with performances (or performers) that touch on “disability” by doing without specifying, such Chiara Bersani’s Seeking Unicorns. Bersani herself is about two-feet tall.
The ‘Alice’ of De Françoise à Alice has a disability, too: Down syndrome.
Alice says that Down syndrome is a state of being – “Je suis trisomique” – rather than a burden she has to (awkwardly) bear. She claims, in effect, that the extra chromosome makes her different rather than disabled. Alice is right.
As much as difference allows, Alice can do what she wants to do, just as you and I can, as much individual difference allows. I don’t know if she can boil carrots and most people I know of can, or if she can frog jump five feet high, and most people I know can’t, or if she can pilot the death ship of the Apocalypse, and, I hope most people I know do not want to, but she can certainly do what she wants to as much as the next person can. That means that I can apply the same critical principles to Phelippeau’s choreography as to Alice (and Françoise) ’s performance as I would to any other performers.
When the curtain goes up, it becomes evident immediately that Alice, within Françoise’s caress, is the principal: her performance absorbs me. Alice, in particular, talks, moves, then dances, with aplomb, sensibility and intelligence – as she moves, I meet her movement in my bones and skin. Her movement sharpens and flows into what I perceive as Dance, capital D: she creates and informs a shared happening of feeling, meeting and imagination.
As I come to this realization, it seems obvious to me – and, Dorothy, I’m not 14 any more – that my sense of ‘difference’ is distorted by my notion of ‘disability’. ‘Disability’ is a brake on a full appreciation of difference.
The distortion and the brake are owing to my underlying Oomph-capitalism Weltanschauung; I’m defending a moral order I’ve spent most of my life trying to run away from. Oomph-capitalism posits a self-sprung Individual, a paragon of pure, self-sufficient Oomph, not just an honest working fella who resists charity from his betters because they’re too busy pulling up their boot straps and studying the Bible. The Oomph paragon is the One Who Needs Nothin’ From Nobody. In the Oomph-capitalist mindset, it is not Oliver Twist’s Oomph that leaves Mr. Bumble sputtering but Oliver’s self-incriminating admission that he needs ‘more’ food, more ‘help’.
The 1990 movie Pretty Woman, “a modern-day fairy-tale”, which played on one of the local television channels as uplifting Christmas-spirit duff, figures Oomph ideology pretty well. Although he must, as for every other primate, have been born squalling for his mother’s tit, Oomph paragon, the handsome Richard Gere, opens the script by showing how he needs nothing: not money, nor pretty women, nor even driving lessons for his fancy car. The unnecessary hero and pretty woman of the title, played by a nubile but gum-chewing Julia Roberts, on the other hand, is surrounded by friends eagerly helping her become a Hollywood Boulevard prostitute. Roberts spends the whole script showing she has enough natural Oomph-capitalist fiber to need no help from nobody neither, thus winning the utterly self-sufficient Richard Gere and, with him, a life among people she can ignore or tip, as she pleases, fuck you.
The idea of ‘disability’ suggests, without asserting a concrete claim, that, in some cases, difference goes beyond ‘natural’ difference. That’s to say that with an unlimited acceptance of difference, some humans will get what they need with, as Allen Ginsberg famously demanded, just their good looks. That would be egalitarianism run wild. ‘Disability’ makes an imaginary line beyond which ordinary rules of fairness and justice don’t apply and notions of ‘special’ humans – not just Alice with 21 chromosomes, but especially Richard Gere with billions of inherited dollars – can apply. Alice may get a little more help and protection than, say, my cross-eyed grandson, but Richard Gere, besides getting to keep everything he is born with, gets self-iterating superiority rather than mere difference to go with it. On the one hand, he can test Julia Roberts’ (or your) existential merit and call attention to his own Oomph-virtue by doing so: Roberts’ obvious (social and moral) disability validate whatever bribes the Oomph paragon proffers.
In short, ‘disability’ is about as seamless a con-trick as there is for making sure “accepting difference” doesn’t mean actually accepting it.
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