Dyslexia: The Government of Reading

248 Pages·2013·1.402 MB·English

by  Tom Campbell (auth.)

Dyslexia
Dyslexia
The Government of Reading
Tom Campbell
University of Leeds
© Tom Campbell 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013
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First published 2013 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-45221-7 ISBN 978-1-137-29793-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137297938
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
1 Introduction 1
Genealogy 8
A Restorative Practice 12
2 Bio-politics, Normalcy and the Numerical Plotting
of the Population 22
From Sovereign Power to Bio-power 22
Elaborating the Bio-political Thesis 26
The Reorganisaton of Life: The Invention
of L’Homme Moyen 31
Conclusion 46
3 Governing Readers from Limitation to Proliferation 48
The Technicalities of Governing: Technologies,
Government, Governmentality 49
The Mass Production of Texts 55
Governing the Danger of Literacy Through Limitation 56
The Proliferation of Texts and the Proliferation of Readers 61
Technologies of Proliferation 1: The School 65
Technologies of Proliferation 2: English Literature 70
Conclusion 73
4 Reading Difficulties Become a Medical Concern 76
Aphasias and the Acquiring of a Difficulty with Reading 77
A New Diagnosis: Congenital Word-blindness 91
Conclusion 103
5 The Technological Operation of Congenital
Word-blindness: Marking Some Differences
as More Deserving Than Others 105
A Technology of Differentiation 107
One is Deserving if One Can be Cured 115
Advocating an Early Diagnosis 117
v
vi Contents
Training and Education 121
The Insertion of the Hereditary Hypothesis 123
An American Challenge 128
Defending the Borders 135
Conclusion 137
6 Psychological Explanations of Congenital Word-blindness 141
The Objectives of The Psychological Clinic 143
Reading Difficulties in The Psychological Clinic 153
Beyond The Psychological Clinic 165
Conclusion 177
7 The Problem of Producing Literate Subjects: Education and
Specific Reading Difficulties 179
The Veneration of Reading and its Importance to Education 180
The Measurement of Reading 184
Teaching Difficult Readers 191
Remedial Reading 208
Conclusion 210
8 Conclusion 212
The Fashioning of Congenital Word-blindness and the
Establishment of a Jurisdiction 212
The Invention of Congenital Word-blindness as an Event
in the History of the Government of Reading 218
The Productive Character of Bio-power 219
Rethinking Genealogy 222
Notes 229
References 231
Index 241
Acknowledgements
My mother and father, June and Simon, must be thanked first for their
unwavering belief and limitless support throughout my education.
Without this support, particularly in my formative years (where they
fought for me tirelessly), I would not have had the opportunity to write
this book. Similarly, there can be no doubt that Amy Charlesworth’s
intellectual support throughout was invaluable in bringing this project
to fruition, and that says nothing of the proofing of draft after draft,
and constant encouragement.
I would like to thank all my colleagues, past and present, at the School
of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds, UK. In particular,
Mark Priestley and Anne Kerr, whose careful mentoring added much
to the project and my intellectual development. Conversations with
Chris Till, Mark Davis, Paul Bagguley, Angharad Beckett and Austin
Harrington have all, in different ways, shaped the character of the book.
I also thank the staff and students of the Department of Disability and
Human Development, University of Illinois, Chicago, IL, USA, where
much of the research for this book was completed, for welcoming me.
Various friends and colleagues have looked over earlier drafts, and I
would like to extend my gratitude to them all, but particular apprecia-
tion is owed to Ben, who read the final manuscript.
An earlier version of Chapter 4 appears in Health Sociology Review
(2011), 20(4), 450–61.
vii
1
Introduction
The diagnosis of ‘dyslexia’ and the medical problematisation of read-
ing difficulties were almost unknown 100 years ago, yet today the
British Dyslexia Association (2010) estimates that up to 10% of the UK
population may have some form of dyslexia; in the USA it is estimated
to be as much as 20% of the population (Marazzi, 2011a). The first
diagnosis of dyslexia-like symptoms as a congenital impairment was
recorded in Morgan’s (1896) paper in the British Medical Journal, ‘A Case
of Congenital Word Blindness’. At the turn of the twentieth century
five people had been diagnosed as dyslexic; at the turn of the twenty-
first century, the Dyslexia Institute estimated that there are six million
individuals who could be diagnosed with some form of dyslexia in the
UK alone.1 At the turn of the twentieth century, fewer than ten articles
had been published on reading disabilities, yet today a search for dys-
lexia on Google Scholar returns 120,000 entries. With this rapid growth
in numbers of diagnoses and the proliferation of pages written on this
topic, it is no surprise that in the middle of the twentieth century dys-
lexia was proclaimed to be the disease of the century (Mucchielli, 1963).
Throughout the twentieth century, laboring began to increasingly rely
upon our linguistic and communicative capacities. Literacy became
central to production, and dyslexia came to describe a difficultly with a
key characteristic of the newly dominant style of laboring in the West.
The research problem I wish to investigate is how, over a relatively
short period of time, this newly-diagnosed impairment has become
so ubiquitous, and ask how such a diagnosis becomes legitimate as a
significant psycho-medical category. Using the example of dyslexia,
this book investigates which political, economic and moral forces are
involved in the formation of a diagnostic category; how new categories
of medical, psychological and administrative labelling are formed; what
1
2 Dyslexia
factors contribute to their invention; and how diagnostic discourses
are legitimised through legislative change, educational policy and the
practices—discursive and otherwise—of educational psychologists,
teachers and parliamentarians. The genealogy of the diagnostic cat-
egory that is drawn within these pages begins with the first murmurings
around its invention, taking in its ossification and eventual diffusion
into a variety of different disciplinary fields.
The primary objective of this book is to examine the social relations
that allowed the diagnostic category of dyslexia to form. Through his-
torical scholarship it aims to show how this happened—through an
analysis and description of this material, assertions are made about why
this diagnostic category was invented. This investigation is primarily
concerned with trying to explain why industrialising societies began
to regard certain previously invisible phenomena, or unproblematic
characteristics, as impairments. Various different vocabularies have
been deployed to describe the symptoms that will become understood
as dyslexia. The first was ‘congenital word-blindness’. Others deployed
at various points in time include ‘congenital aphasia’, ‘alexia’, ‘symbol
amblyopia’ and ‘amnesia visualis verbalis’.
As the pages that follow are mainly concerned with the formation
of an obscure medical diagnosis (congenital word-blindness) over
a century ago, it may seem to the reader that this investigation is an
impersonal endeavour concerned with small events in the annals of
the history of medicine. The problems that I am investigating are, in
fact, deeply personal; it is an attempt to understand my own relation-
ship with a diagnosis I received as a 10-year-old—a diagnosis that, once
received, enabled me to access support that changed my educational
experiences. The writing of this book was ultimately motivated by a
desire to understand how it has become possible for me (and others like
me) to receive such a diagnosis. This question has its origins through a
reading of two literatures: the philosophy of Michel Foucault and disa-
bility studies. I became convinced that disability should be understood
as a social phenomenon and, concurrently, that the historical forma-
tion of the categories we use to describe ourselves should be carried out
to produce, as Foucault has suggested, an ontology of ourselves. Tracing
the genealogy of dyslexia became the object of my research, and my
investigations were aimed toward understanding how a proliferation
of impairment categories across the twentieth century shifted the way
that we think of our own bodies and the bodies of others.
Further elaboration on the way so-called Foucauldian genealogy has
been operationalised in this book is provided below, but first I would
Introduction 3
like to draw attention to a key distinction between this book and pre-
vious genealogies—the specificity and size of the object in question.
Foucault’s most famous genealogies deal with modern forms of punish-
ment and sexuality, while other influential studies deal with disciplines
such as psychology, as detailed by Nikolas Rose’s work or Ian Hacking’s
work on statistics. The object of my research is undoubtedly more mod-
est, with dyslexia being a single psycho-medical diagnosis rather than
a large and pervasive discipline. Treating psycho-medical categories
as technologies of power has particular analytical advantages. Unlike
Foucault-inspired histories of disability, such as Henri Jacques Stiker’s
genealogies of impairment categories, will contribute toward to the his-
torical understanding of disability not through analysing disability as
a totality but, instead, through describing the conditions of possibility
for a specific impairment category the rationale behind why particular
human characteristics are problematised will be mapped.
This study, therefore, is a response to calls for a sociology of impair-
ment, but does not respond to these calls by developing a sociology of
impairment that focuses on lived experience or embodiment. Rather,
varied genealogies of impairment categories are proposed, which are able
to describe the conditions that problematise specific human attributes.
This study is one such genealogy. Diagnostic and impairment categories
alike are to be understood as technologies of power whose workings and
operations can be mapped. The second advantage is that unlike those
genealogies that describe the operation of power at the level of the indi-
vidual and the population, genealogies of impairment categories are
able to describe how the constitution of the body and the population,
through the prism of bio-politics, makes it possible for power to flow
at both molecular and molar levels. Genealogies of impairment catego-
ries therefore form a necessary appendage to the various genealogies
of scientific disciplines (Hacking, 1982, 1990, 1991; Miller, 1992; Rose
1985, 1999) that have corrected and deepened our understanding of
the shift from sovereign power to bio-power.2 The appendage offered
hopes to augment the detail by which we can understand the modula-
tion of power, as it infuses and traverses across institutions, machiner-
ies of government and the body of the population. How power becomes
entwined with capital, coming to act in a molecular fashion, on diverse
human characteristics is beyond the vision of the human eye. The indi-
vidual body is replaced as the object of tactics of power, as discrete and
distinct attributes become open to management. It is hoped that these
genealogies, focused upon a smaller object of inquiry, will allow for an
analytical contribution to the understanding of power that enriches,