The Disarticulate: Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity

312 Pages·2014·1.579 MB·

by  James Berger

The Disarticulate
CULTURAL FRONT
General Editor: Michael Bérubé
Manifesto of a Tenured Radical Critics at Work: Interviews 1993–2003
Cary Nelson Edited by Jeffrey J. Williams
Bad Subjects: Political Education Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of
for Everyday Life Queerness and Disability
Edited by the Bad Subjects Production Team Robert McRuer
Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity How the University Works: Higher
Simi Linton Education and the Low-Wage Nation
Marc Bousquet
The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs,
and the Future of Literary Studies Foreword by Cary Nelson
Michael Bérubé
Deaf Subjects: Between Identities and Places
Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress Brenda Jo Brueggemann
Bruce Robbins
The Left at War
Doing Time: Feminist Theory Michael Bérubé
and Postmodern Culture
No University Is an Island:
Rita Felski
Saving Academic Freedom
Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital Cary Nelson
Edited by Jani Scandura and
Fantasies of Identification:
Michael Thurston
Disability, Gender, Race
Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Ellen Samuels
Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions
The Disarticulate: Language, Disability,
Lennard J. Davis
and the Narratives of Modernity
After Whiteness: Unmaking an American James Berger
Majority
Mike Hill
The Disarticulate
Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity
James Berger
a
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
www.nyupress.org
© 2014 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing.
Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that
may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
For Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data,
please contact the Library of Congress
ISBN: 978-0-8147-0846-0 (cloth)
ISBN: 978-0-8147-2530-6 (paper)
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials
to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Also available as an ebook
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Disarticulate and Dysarticulate 1
1. The Bearing Across of Language: Care, Catachresis,
and Political Failure 15
2. Linguistic Impairment and the Default of Modernism:
Totality and Otherness: Dys-/Disarticulate Modernity 53
3. Post-Modern Wild Children, Falling Towers, and the
Counter-Linguistic Turn 105
4. Dys-/Disarticulation and Disability 141
5. Alterity Is Relative: Impairment, Narrative, and Care
in an Age of Neuroscience 183
Epilogue: “Language in Dissolution”
and “A World without Words” 231
Notes 239
Works Cited 275
Index 295
About the Author 301
>> v
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments
Writing, as all writers know, is generally a solitary, often a lonely pur-
suit. This project seemed especially so. I wrote most of my first book
in grad school, and so had the support and good company of a faculty
committee and assorted fellow students. I didn’t have a full-time job,
didn’t have children. We were all there together working on our books.
Then, if we were fortunate, we got academic jobs. Perhaps our fami-
lies expanded. It took more effort and ingenuity to create and sustain
social and professional communities. I didn’t do such a good job of that.
My book about disarticulation—in its linguistic and social senses—was
written in something of a disarticulated condition. It became a ten-year
struggle to articulate.
I was not entirely alone, of course. My colleagues in the English
Department at Hofstra University, where I taught from 1997–2007,
were enormously supportive and contributed significantly to my think-
ing. Let me mention with particular gratitude Lee Zimmerman, Tom
Couser, John Bryant, Shari Zimmerman, and Sabina Sawney.
During my time at Hofstra, I received a National Endowment for the
Humanities Fellowship (2002–2003), which helped me greatly in my
writing.
Thanks also to my new colleagues in American Studies and Eng-
lish at Yale. This new job—teaching courses that expand my thinking,
replacing a two-hour commute on I95 with a fifteen-minute bike ride,
and a semester research leave not stipulated in the standard senior lec-
turer’s contract—has greatly assisted me in finishing the book.
And my heartfelt thanks to the following, whose help in the form
of comments on drafts, conversation about the project, or general
encouragement has been invaluable: Jeffrey Bernstein, Avital Ronnell,
Tobin Siebers, Richard Deming, Nancy Kuhl, Jean-Jacques Poucel, and
>> vii
viii << Acknowledgments
all the members of the Yale Working Group in Contemporary Poetics
(our conversations always helped unclog my articulations); Ed Ryan,
Rachel Adams, and the Future of Disability Studies project at Columbia
University(for our discussions and, especially, for making me feel wel-
come in this field); Joanna Klink, Henry Sussman, Mark Osteen, Sheila
Blumstein, Eileen Boris, Lisa Zunshine, and Porter Abbott.
Thanks especially to Graham Cassano for the most intellectually
stimulating and challenging conversations of the past dozen years—
and, of course, for the music.
Thanks to students and faculty at University of Pennsylvania and
University of California-Santa Barbara for allowing me to present por-
tions of this project and providing insightful commentary.
Thanks to Robert McRuer and another, anonymous, reader for NYU
Press. I am profoundly grateful for their very serious readings and
comments; to my editor at NYU, Eric Zinner, for his enthusiasm and
encouragement; and to Michael Bérubé for his interest in my work over
the years, as well as for encouraging me to submit this book to the Cul-
tural Front series.
A special thanks to my parents, Arthur and Jean Berger, for asking
me continually, “Now what is your book about?”; for showing me how
to respond ethically and politically to society’s disarticulated; and for
their extraordinary devotion to their daughters.
Let me thank also those who have distracted me from writing, but
enriched me immeasurably. Thanks to my political comrades in New
Haven—at the Connecticut Center for a New Economy (CCNE), Com-
munities Organized for Responsible Development (CORD), and most
recently, New Haven Rising—in solidarity to Adam, Hugh, Janis, Mike,
Cristina, Lisa, Gwen, Ian, Scott, and the whole gang. We’ve accom-
plished some amazing things, and there’s a lot of work still to come.
And thanks to my musical pals—to the Skamatix, the NMS Premier
Jazz Ensemble, Blue Pontiac, and the Lyric Hall Orchestra (you know
who you all are). I need to do politics and I need to play music; other-
wise, nothing else can happen.
In 2007, I received my most massive new portion of distraction and
inspiration: the birth of my daughters, Hannah Lily and Teya Samara.
I’ve seen them grow from tiny infants in incubators to solid, curious,
beautiful, and very loquacious and articulate little girls. Perhaps I could
Acknowledgments >> ix
write a book about them, but a sentence now seems beyond me. In any
event, they draw, dance, know the meanings of “soporific” and “exqui-
site,” can tell you the story of The Magic Flute (and mimic the Queen
of the Night’s arias), climb trees, can’t quite bicycle without training
wheels—no, wait, they just learned last week!—, are not convinced, I
don’t think, that there’s no crying in baseball. I am exhausted all the
time. I want only to be present for them and out of their way, and let
them exhaust me till I’m one hundred.
Finally, thanks to my wife, Jennifer Klein—my best friend, clos-
est comrade, colleague, and true love; a wonderful mother, a superb
scholar, and developing into a pretty good jazz drummer. Jennifer, like
her father, the late Ted Klein, is an exemplar of integrity and moral
courage. Jen and I were working on our books over most of the same
years, and she beat me to publication by a year—thus, I get to footnote
her rather than the other way round! We both write about care—in very
different but overlapping senses—so we’ve been able to help each other
a great deal. We next plan to do a writing project together. We’ll see if
we can; I won’t spell it out here, but if we pull it off, it will be a good one.
Anyway, thank you, Jen, from the bottom of my heart, for everything.
* * *
Portions of this book have, in differing versions, appeared elsewhere,
and I am grateful to the original publishers for permission to reprint.
Part of chapter 3 appeared in PMLA 120 (2005) as “Falling Towers and
Postmodern Wild Children: Oliver Sacks, Don DeLillo, and Turns
Against Language.” Part of chapter 4 appeared in JAC: A Quarterly Jour-
nal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Rhetoric, Writing, Multiple Litera-
cies, and Politics 24 (2004) as “Trauma Without Disability, Disability
Without Trauma: A Disciplinary Divide”; and part appeared in Ameri-
can Book Review 26.6 (2006) as “Models of Uncaring.” Part of chapter
5 appeared in Autism and Representation, ed. Mark Osteen, as “Alter-
ity and Autism: Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident in the Neurological
Spectrum.”