Against Interpretosis: Deleuze, Disability, and Difference

Phil Bayliss
School of Education and Lifelong Learning, University of Exeter
In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari describe interpretosis as the fundamental neurosis of mankind. The article explores the metaphor of faciality as a way of understanding interpretosis and its relationship to the concept of disability; it considers how poetics, as a dynamism that breaks the inertia of language habits, challenges interpretosis to enable transgressive cultural narratives for people facialized as disabled.

Disability is a concept, and the purpose of philosophy is to create concepts. Concepts, following Deleuze and Guattari are created as a function of problems which are thought to be badly understood or badly posed (pedagogy of the concept) (What Is Philosophy? 17). Tom Shakespeare, Mike Oliver, and Ben Simmons et al. argue that the problem of disability in a modernist agenda is located in two competing discourses (concepts): the medical and the social models of disability. The medical model is contested by social-model theorists who argue for a socio-political approach to enacting change within the social world by challenging disablism (and its familiar companions, sexism, racism, heterosexualism, etc.). This change seeks to overcome oppression and lead to emancipation. Such an understanding is located in an Enlightenment (humanist) perspective, which sees the human subject as autonomous and capable of perfection through changing societal structures, especially with regard to a rights agenda and social inclusion. The models, seeking to understand disability, locate it within the sociological dualism of the social (structure) or within the individual (agency). Can changes in structure result in changes in agency? Or can a change in agency (through the collective development of a disabled identity) create changes in structure? Such a project has been in place since the early civil rights struggles in the US and as recently as 2008, the call is still, for example, that the National Disability Strategy for Australia must keep going until all the problems are fixed. This example finds resonance in other international contexts, such as the continuing struggles for rights, independence, choice, and inclusion, expressed in the UK Department of Healths White Paper, Valuing People. If the social model calls for a removal of barriers to full participation, and this
Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 3.3(2009),281294 ISSN 1757-6458(print) 1757-6466(online) Liverpool University Press doi:10.3828/jlcds.2009.6

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process has been ongoing since the 1950s, it may be the case that the modernist agenda has failed to challenge the late-capitalist hegemony of the State and society in general. If we are to re-frame the question of how we understand the concept of disability, in a way that moves beyond a simple dichotomy of medical and social-model thinking, then poststructuralist questioning of existing domains of knowledge and praxis may offer opportunities for the development of what Giles Perring calls counter-cultural narratives (186). Tololyan, in his discussion of terrorism as a cultural narrative, argues that the problem of terrorism is not one of political struggle, but one of identity and what he terms projective narratives:
A projective narrative is one that not only tells a story of the past, but also maps out future actions that can imbue the time of individual lives with transcendent collective values. In a sense then, projective narratives plot how ideal selves must live their lives: they dictate biographies and autobiographies to come. They tell individuals how they would ideally have to live and die in order to contribute properly to their collectivity and its future. They prescribe not static roles but dynamic shapes of the times of our lives. (101)

If societal change (or the attempts to effect societal change) is related to projective narratives (the stories of struggle), then disability could be understood as such a narrative. A way forward may be offered by a poststructuralist understanding of how narratives emerge and how they can be contested. I will start by exploring issues of Deleuze and Guattaris complaint of interpretosis as a grand narrative of disability and then explore ways in which disabled people are facialized (bringing together signification and subjectification) through institutionalization (seen locationally and metaphorically). Finally, the article will offer an exploration into a nomadism of poetics to develop trajectories and lines of flight, through Deleuze and Guattaris exhortation to connect, conjugate, continue: a whole diagram, as opposed to still signifying and subjective programmes (Plateaus, 161).
Interpretosis and the Narratives of the Disabled Body

In Narrative Prosthesis, Mitchell and Snyder argue that a theoretical position underpinning their thesis is that disability inaugurates interpretation. They argue that literary efforts to illuminate the dark recesses of disability produce a form of discursive subjugation. The effort to narrate disabilitys myriad deviations is an attempt to bring the bodys unruliness under control (6). Interpretation uses systems of objectification to determine unruliness and to develop

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control. Significancethe relationship between signs, the signifier (what Deleuze and Guattari call expression) and their objects (the signified content) assumes an object of disability, which can be understood through the way the object is interpreted. In Towards a Semiology of Paragrams, Julia Kristeva introduces the concept of signifiance: the signifying process as a dynamic understanding of how signs come to be formed and used. Kristevas object is to explore, within the entire set of signifying gestures, the dynamic process whereby signs take on or change their significations (28). Signifiance assumes a dynamic relationship between signifiers and the signified, which change over time according to interpretative frameworks. Narratives of the broken body, of theories of physiology, of psychology, all assume a univocality, a one-to-one isomorphism of the signifier and the signified, and within the discourses of the medical or social models the drive to control unruly bodies leads to what Deleuze and Guattari call interpretosis:
It is well known that the psychoanalysts have ceased to speak, they interpret even more, or better yet, fuel interpretation on the part of the subject, who jumps from one circle of hell to the next. In truth, signifiance and interpretosis are the two diseases of the earth or the skin, in other words, human kinds fundamental neurosis. (Plateaus 114)

The relationship of the signified object and its signification is linked to its history, signifiance, the history of concepts from Michel Foucaults genealogy in the Birth of the Clinic to Mitchell and Snyders narrative prosthesis by way of Henri-Jacques Stikers History of Disability. Regimes of truth established through forms of expression (signifiance) have designated the disabled body as something static, not amenable to change without changing the corporeality of the disabled individual. Carlson shows, in her history of docile bodies, how understanding the disabled body as static is contrasted with a dynamic perspective, which sees the disabled body as inherently capable of change. For example, the classifications of the World Health Organization, in its use of concepts such as impairment, disability, and handicap, fix the bodythese forms of expression fix a content, which creates the disabled body as visible, where before the disability lay beneath the surface of the impaired body, and was invisible. Function cannot be seen (is not visible); handicap lies in the realm of the social and must be inferred; both must be inferred through observation and interpretation. Here, interpretosis creates the content through its forms of expression. Thus, in bringing the invisible to visibility, we have the new conditions, for example, Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (what Shannon Lowe calls a miskinetic neuropoliticology: the politics of constructing and disciplining the organism of the brain); and

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Aspergers Syndrome (Klin, Volkmar, and Sparrow), which was not recognized by the American Psychiatric Associations Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSMIVR) until 1994. For Deleuze and Guattari, (the) form of expression becomes linguistic rather than genetic: in other words, it operates with symbols that are comprehensible, transmittable and modifiable from outside ( Plateaus60). Where the relationship of expression and content (or form and matter) is one of interdependence, interpretosis, through creating new forms of expression, generates signifiance; creates visibility out of invisibility, through enunciating it. Foucault, in The Order of Things, makes the same point: that which can be articulated becomes visible. For Deleuze and Guattari:
Content then constitutes bodies, things or objects, that enter physical systems, organisms and organizations all of this culminates in a language stratum that installs an abstract machine on the level of expression and takes the abstraction of content even further, tending to strip it of any form of its own (the imperialism of language, the pretensions to a general semiology). (Plateaus 143)

I would call this the interaction between logos and nomos and its strongest formulation is within the field of nosologythe study of diagnosis, which pathologizes invisible differences made visible through expression and signifiance. Once expression and signifiance create a nomos through logos, the body is subjected to such articulation; subjection leads to subjectification: the body inscribed as disabled, becomes disabled. If forms of expression are linguistic (transmittable, modifiable) they may take the form of a majoritarian theory. Writing on Deleuze and Guattaris work as a political thesis, Phillip Goodchild describes a majoritarian theory as presupposing that:
One is given a perspective, together with a set of categories and presuppositions, by the historical, social, cultural and economic site one occupies, a site expressing preconscious interests Majority is defined not by numbers, but by a constant mode of existence that transcends its conscious plane of theoretical analysis Dominant social presuppositions take on the mask of necessity through reflection: everyone knows them and can understand them. (54)

In contrast:
Fiction is a privileged medium of social and political thought since it is not bound up with any theoretical illusions: it is no longer a question of telling the truth in order to bring people to a reflective consciousness of their real situation, for when the minorities are colonized by majorities, the people (as a set of modes of existence) are still missing (insofar as the only consciousness available to the oppressed is that of the majority) and only fiction can invent a people. (206)

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Here, the questions arise as to who has the power to make expressions. Who is the subject of enunciation? Who is the priest of the majoritarian theory? Who then forms the subject of the statement (to whom is the expression directed)? How do subjects of the statement become subjectified? For the project of disability, are there possibilities of breaking out, of deterritorialization, which break the connections between expression and content to allow for a radical disruption?
Faciality

Subjectification is enacted through a process described as facialization. Deleuze and Guattari assert that:
Signifiance is never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs and redundancies. Subjectification is never without a black hole in which it lodges its consciousness, passion and redundancies. Since all semiotics are mixed and strata come at least in twos, it should come as no surprise that a very special machine is situated at their intersection. Oddly enough it is a face: the white wall/black hole system. A broad face with white cheeks, a chalk face with eyes cut in for the black hole. Clown head, white clown, moon-white mime, angel of death, Holy Shroud. The face is not an envelope exterior to the person who speaks, thinks or feels. The form of the signifier in language, even its units, would remain indeterminate if the potential listener did not use the face of the speaker to guide his or her choice. Faces are not basically individual; they define zones of expressions or connections unamenable to the appropriate significations. Similarly, the form of subjectivity, where consciousness or passion would remain absolutely empty if faces did not form loci of resonance that select the sense or mental reality and make conform in advance to the dominant reality Thus the black hole/white wall system is, to begin with, not a face but an abstract machine that produces faces according to the changeable combinations of its cogwheels. (Plateaus 167168)

I am concerned with how disability is established; how children become disabled subjects. Education, as a major social institutionfollowing Foucault and Licia Carlsonproduces docile bodies. Deleuze and Guattari write that:
The various forms of education or normalization imposed upon an individual consists in making him or her change points of subjectification, always moving towards a higher, nobler one in closer conformity with the supposed ideal. Then from the point of subjectification issues a subject of enunciation, as a function of a mental reality determined by that point. (Plateaus, 129)

The child on entering school has not been facialized; the white walls are smooth; signifiance has not been inscribed on the body; s/he is located in expression

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the signifier (expression) is without content (signified). The mythos of the child precedes the logos/nomos of inscription on his/her face. The child inhabits a smooth space of child, rhizomatically described, which allows an escape from (or non-entry into) arborescent social networks, where the child becomes the disabled child. The processes of socialization have not yet allocated a place in the landscape. The strata of collective assemblages of enunciation that construct childhood through the discursive practices of the school-machine have not yet inscribed the face or defined the landscape in which the face must operate (the Socius). Majia Nadesan, in her work The Social Construction of Autism, shows that the nineteenth century saw the rise of the identification of childhood as a distinct phase of human development, which could then be studied, examined and reported onthe child becoming a case (the history of the child being then inscribed on the body). The school operates as a carcereal society, as a discursive practice, or what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a stratum on a plane of consistency. The stratum of the school abstract machine defines the subjectivity of the child through definitive signifiersignified normalcy and positions the child with respect to inscriptions of face. The white walls and black holes of the face are created through subjection to strata. The child is subjected to the order-word. Deleuze and Guattari describe education as a machine for producing order-words:
Language is not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience ... Language is neither informational nor communicative. It is not the communication of information but something quite different: the transmission of order-words, either from one statement to another or within each statement, insofar as each statement accomplishes an act and the act is accomplished in the statement. (Plateaus 76, 79)

The order-word of disability is accomplished and interpreted through the Foucauldian acts of hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and examination. These processes together define the arborescent (linear, hierarchical) pathways, which are determined in advance: the majoritarian theories of development. Where the child has a broken body or broken mind, strata are formed that determine the position of the child with respect to broken bodies. The child becomes the body; the faciality and subjectification of the disabled child creates the child as disabled. Disability then becomes a prescription of interpretation, defining the arborescent structures as pathways of development, that through facialization determine patterns of intervention. The landscape becomes what Foucault, in The Birth of the Clinic, calls spatialized. Foucault argues that medical epistemes construct medical objects, which

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transcend the visible; they become abstractions, which are located in the body. The results are thus: Primary spatialization: there exists a disease entity, which can be described (increasingly in terms of genetics). Primary spatialization is a process of conceptualization/abstraction. Here disability exists as an abstraction, which transcends the body to explain functional incapacity. Secondary spatialization: there exists a body in which the disease is located. The body is abnormal, described in terms of functional anomaly. But function can be seen in terms of Deleuzes brick,1 where concepts can be determined at different levels of connectedness, or as different connections within a semiotic network. What level of analysis is appropriate: the objective or the subjective, the ideational or the relative? Disability is realized through diseased bodiesthe low-incidence genetic anomaliesor through diseased minds, realized through the intellectual low functioning as measured by standardized psychological testing. Measurement of secondary spatialization proves primary spatialization. Tertiary spatialization: there is a requirement for a social space in which the body may be located and looked after. Functional incapacity defines guardianship and trusteeship. Foucault argues in Power/Knowledge that discursive practices create regimes of truth; people with disabilities are subject to strategies, technologies, and programmes, which exercise power/knowledge relationships (245249). Erica Burman, in arguing against the madness of measurement states that:
psychology, as the science of the singular, disembodied mind, confirms the power of the dominant group by placing them at its center, as the norm. It is then a short but crucial political step from the statistically patterned norm (of what is) to the moralpolitical (and clinical) evaluation of normal (i.e. what should be). (50)

Social Spaces: The Socius, Poetics, and Nomadism

The space of what Deleuze and Guattari call the arborescentdetermined through prescribing pathways of developmentOthers the child as different,
1. A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. What is the subject of the brick? The arm that throws it? The body connected to the arm? The brain encased in the body? The situation that brought brain and body to such a juncture? All and none of the above. What is its object? The window? The edifice? The law the edifice shelters? The class and other power relations encrusted in the laws? All and none of these. What interests us are the circumstances (Plateaus xii).

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deficient, disordered (the alterity of the body creates difference). Othering is conditioned by the stratum (discursive practices), which inscribes the face. This Othering, created by Foucauldian hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and examination, restricts and normalizes. Once normalized, the child has a face and becomes Other through the operation of:
an inspecting gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorizing to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself. A superb formula: power exercised continuously and for what turns out to be minimal cost. (Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 155)

The child becomes contentnot understood as childbut expressed through the signifiance of special educational need, the disabled. These generic categories lie on the stratum (outside the child), but through faciality and inscription, the content is written on the body of the child. The school as the main (arborescent) discipline for creating Other disrupts the engagement of the child with lines of flows within an (unordered) smooth space that lies outside of the discipline of docile bodies, on the plane of consistency. Todd May shows how Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate that the normative government of practice is located in the Socius. If we conceive of social networks as ordered (arborescent), these seem to be consistent with a concept of what Tonnies calls Gesellschaft, where the idea of community (the Socius) is predicated on common interest (the commonality of faces does your face fit?). Through Othering and faciality/signifiance, the individual disabled child is pre-figured (as disordered) and through Gesellschaft, is outside. The arborescent, transcendental, pre-figured community, defines membership and is disrupted by the broken bodyit is difficult for the disabled child to become a member. In contrast to the arborescent, Deleuze and Guattari postulate the rhizomatic:
A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, cognitive: there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs and specialized languages. There is no ideal speaker-listener, any more than there is an homogeneous linguistic community. (Plateaus 7)

The rhizomatic chimes with what Kristeva describes as poetics:

Only in poetic language is found the practical realization of the totality (though we prefer the term infinity) of the code at mans (sic) disposition. In this perspective, literary practice is revealed to be the discovery and the explorations of the possibilities

Against Interpretosis 289 of language; an activity that frees man from certain linguistic (psychical, social) networks; a dynamism that breaks the inertia of language-habits and offers the linguist a unique opportunity to study the becoming of the signification of signs (signifiance). (28)

Poetics constitute a semiotic of infinite possibilities embedded within ordinary language, which escape significance, through exploring signifiance. Signifiance allows for the development of creative transgressive meaning, while a level of signification presumes a socially instituted and socially controlled meaning. Poetry, in Kristevas sense of signifiance, allows for transgressive readings of disability.2 If we challenge the arborescent and deterritorialize and reterritorialize on poetic networks these are predicated on Gemeinschaft (Tonnies, community based on blood or kinship) and also sharing. Jean-Luc Nancy, in The Inoperative Community, argues for a concept of community, which only comes into being through the enactment (performance) of sharing/community. In Nancys terms, a community is not prefigured or signified: the act of sharing the community comes into being as a coming into presence. The psychological or transcendental perspective (interpretosis) inscribes community as sharing post hoc: a principle is established which both requires and defines membership that preconstitutes both the individual and the principle of being-in-the-community. This is a form of totalitarianism. However, sharing in Nancys sense, does not pre-figure or totalize that sharing: it is an action (performance), not a state for which principles can be adduced a priori, i.e., performance is not an order-word. Sharing co-constitutes both individual and community. In some cultures (e.g., Mongolian nomadic society), sharing underpins survival and, in the sense I am writing here, brotherhood, which transcends the subject-as-individual, is sharing. This idea of sharing and its relationship to community allows for reflection within either an arborescently structured Socius, or one that is unstructured rhizomatically. Is the Socius a striated or smooth space? In Mongolian culture, nomadism (the rhizomatic) is co-terminous and contiguous with sedentary culture: the arborescent (Moses and Halkovic). In Deleuze and Guattaris writing, nomadism is a metaphor for escape (deterritorialization). Stanley Stewart, in his history of the Mongol Empire and the revision of Chingiss Khans reputation as a great leader of the largest empire the world has known, shows that when Chingiss died his broken body was revered and the
2. There is a contradiction in Kristevas conceptualization of signifiance, which allows for an opportunity to break language habits, and Deleuze and Guattaris assertion that signifiance, along with expression, constitutes interpretosis as a fundamental plague. Here, I follow Kristevas reading.

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war machine went to a lot of trouble to guard both his body and his spirit. The broken body here (for Chingiss) is not ordered on a stratum, which belongs to the sedentary (facialized as Other/disabled), instead the brotherhood of the war machine ensured sharing and maintained a spirit, which overcame the body. Deleuze and Guattaris nomadology and the nomadic war machine constitutes the war-band (the outside minorities) through sharing; the immanent projective narratives of minoritarian fictions create and enable the war-band; they bring it in to being, they do not disable it. The war machine rejects the sedentary. If the sharing can be maintained through epic (oral) poetry and myth, then stories create the war machine, they also create the projective narrative of what it means to share in the community, by performing community. The minoritarian fictions of community (in Nancys sense of the shared community) follow poetics, not interpretosis. The mythic (following Kristeva) offers forms of expression and enunciation, which does not abstract content, and counteracts the imperialism of language. The use of poetics allows transgressive meanings to be developed by both the self (as the possibility of writing the self/projective (auto)biography) and the audience. The potential transgressive meanings are not dictated by the author; a poetics offers alternative linguistic networks, which offer counter-cultural narrative possibilities. Self (or identity) is no longer dependent on Battersbys grand narratives, but is rather an emergent property between self and audience, as Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst demonstrate in Audiences. Such emergence is locational and temporal. Giles Perring, in writing about performance and people with learning difficulties, argues that:
an objective (of counter-cultural narratives is one) that challenges mainstream cultural and aesthetic precepts and views about disability. It often flows from a perception of the value of transgressive and nonnormative qualities in learning-disabled people creating a concern for addressing their marginalisation and institutionalisation. (186)

School destroys fictions by replacing them with eternal truths that must be learnedthese, following Walter Ong, are a property of literacy, as opposed to oracy, and are not created. The projective narrative of disability sees impairment as the defining characteristic of facialized bodies. Challenging faciality, the storied-self moves between the episodic and the narrative self, between the oral and the literate, between the ordered and the disordered. We understand broken bodies from stories of the war-band, not the universal (totalizing) discourses of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSMIV) and the Inter-

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national Classification of Disability, Impairments and Handicaps (ICIDH2). The movement between the ordered and the disordered symbolizes a landscape and the writings of Deleuze and Guattari conjure images of nomads, who occupy smooth space:
Smooth (vectorial, projective, or topological) space and ... striated space: in the first case space is occupied without being counted and in the second case space is counted in order to be occupied ... the nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths he goes from one point to another; he is not ignorant of points ... But the question is what in nomad life is a principle and what is only a consequence. To begin with, although the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine, the reverse of what happens with the sedentary. ... Second, even though the nomadic trajectory may follow trails or customary routes, it does not fulfill the function of the sedentary road, which is to parcel out a closed space to people, assigning each person a share and regulating the communication between shares. The nomadic trajectory does the opposite: it distributes people or animals in an open space, one that is indefinite and noncommunicating. (Plateaus 362363, 380)

Outcomes-based education, the sociology of health, the programmes of the carcereal, all these define the arborescent, the sedentary, the measurable. They allocate closed spaces; they define both the destination and the road (travelling through the landscape). The final destination (solution?) denies the journey to the DSMIVed child and the diagnosed body. They cannot keep up, they cannot make it Physical journeys along roads need bodies, eyes, and minds. Nomadic journeys in the landscape need none of these.
Journeys in the Landscape: Transgressive and Non-normative Narratives

Deleuze and Guattari exhort us to escape, to deterritorialize:

Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities, segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times , experiment, living-in-itself; connect, conjugate, continue: a whole diagram, as opposed to still signifying and subjective programmes. (Plateaus 161)

Fiction, poetics, and performance offer the experiment of transgressive texts. The increasing use of video media (YouTube) by, for example, Mat Fraser, Amanda Baggs, Bill Shannon, and, in the UK, Channel 4: The Comedy Lab, and many others use the transactions among text, audience, and performer (author) to challenge the faciality of disability. Rosenblatt, in her book The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work, reassigns the

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relationship of the author and the audience, where these two co-constitute each other. A poem is what happens when text is brought into the readers mind and the words begin to function aesthetically, creating the landscape. It is the act of reading that creates the meaning of the text. In this sense a text is not authored. Petra Kuppers in her engagement with poetry demonstrates the necessity of a poetic imagination in reconfiguring crip culturesomething that is hard and personal:
In many ways, I think ... poems and their performance of meaning clasp something of crip cultures force. I, and you, and we want to know what it is like to live, and to live like that, and want to tell, but the telling is hard, difficult, personal, made impossible by the slip of the knife in a word, and the word gabbling on the page. And the force of connection denied can throw us momentarily, but never for ever: thats life, and I just have to try again. (Performing Determinism 103)

The nomadic landscape evades the spatialization from which arborescent programmes spring. If my reading of Deleuze and Guattari is correct, facialization is natural (a function of what it means to be human, to belong to a tribe). This is to suggest that if we challenge interpretosis, we do not eradicate facialization. Transgressive cultural actions do not remove faces, but replace them. An aesthetic based on poetics creates different faces. Further, in her conversation with Neil Marcus, Kuppers concludes:
Disabled lives cannot just be celebrated, represented in affirming positive images. By focusing your explorations on sexuality, you speak to the insecurities all people share, to thoughts about isolation, desire, despair, body image, connection. And you speak to the ordinariness of connection: not (necessarily) grand love, the opera of romance, but the small acts of connection that sustain and nourish people. I see performance as a machine that produces difference: as a poetry machine that makes people and words, metaphors and stories, bodies and breaths touch each other. In performance, we can create a hundred words for disabled. (Contact/Disability Performance 151)

Here, disability is located in the normal (in the sense of the everyday, not in the sense of the normal/abnormal distinction). As a concept it ceases to be thing, but asserts itself as relationship. Disabled people are peoplethrough performance we can create a hundred words for people. Performance, based on challenging existing faciality, challenges narrative prostheses. The narrative performances of Amanda Baggs and Bill Shannon, and others, do not stand as metaphors for the Socius ; instead they deterritorialize the concept of disability away from broken bodies and reterritorialize it on the concept of person and the lived experience of difference. Goodchild states that a Deleuzian renounces life in opinion and representation in the hope of finding life in experience and Deleuzean ethics counterpose affirmation to judgement: they

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restore encounter. Ethics concern relations rather than representations (207). Creativity and experimentthrough media-based and narrative texts, through transformation of logos into mythosis based on encounter. The development of counter-cultural narratives disrupts ableism, through affirming difference, not judging it.
Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Dr. David Bolt and the others of the editorial team (along with the anonymous reviewers) for their support and help in writing this article.

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About the Contributors

After completing a BA in Linguistics at the University of York, UK, Phil Bayliss (P.D.Bayliss@ exeter.ac.uk) trained as a teacher of children with intellectual difficulties. He did his Ph.D. in the area of discourse and integration, and since becoming an academic at Exeter University has completed research in the field of inclusion (particularly for children with autistic spectrum disorders), and performance for people with intellectual difficulties. He is Course Director of the Masters programme in Special Education, Disability and Inclusion and has supervised a range of Ph.D. students, latterly with an emphasis on poststructuralist approaches to understanding disability and inclusion. Ria Cheyne (riacheyne@googlemail.com) is a postdoctoral teaching fellow in the Faculty of Education, Liverpool Hope University and teaches topics including cyberculture, science fiction, and the intersections of disability, technology, and identity. Her main research interests are popular and genre fiction, particularly science fiction, and representations of disability in literature. She has written for Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Science Fiction Studies, and Extrapolation. She is currently working on a monograph on genre conventions and disability representation in contemporary popular fiction. Dan Goodley (D.Goodley@mmu.ac.uk) is Professor of Psychology and Disability Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, Department of Psychology. His research interests circle around issues of inclusion, politics, and disableism. He has written a number of publications in Disability Studies and is currently working on An Introduction to Disability Studies: Psyche, Culture and Society. This book builds on previous writings around Deleuze and Guattari and includes considerations of other pro-/anti-psychoanalytic ideas. Laura Hershey (laura@laurahershey.com) is a writer, poet, activist, and consultant. She is the author of Survival Strategies for Going Abroad: A Guide for People with Disabilities (2005). Her articles and poems have appeared in a wide range of publications. Both as an author, and as a leader in disability-rights organizing, she has worked on issues such as disabled womens leadership, community-based support services, opposition to physicianassisted suicide, disabled peoples right to keep Medicaid benefits while working, visibility of LGBT people with disabilities, and crip literature. Her website is http://www.LauraHershey.com. Anna Hickey-Moody (Anna.HickeyMoody@Education.monash.edu.au) is a lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She is interested in how we can re-frame questions of social justice, and, as such, her research intersects across cultural studies of youth, disability, and gender. Drawing on philosophy and the arts, she is interested in how bodies marked as somehow being disadvantaged might be thought in new ways. She is co-author of Masculinity beyond the Metropolis (2006) and co-editor of Deleuzian Encounters (2007). Petra Kuppers (petra@umich.edu) is a disability-culture activist, a community dance artist, and Associate Professor of English, Theater and Dance and Womens Studies at the University
Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 3.3(2009),305306 ISSN 1757-6458(print) 1757-6466(online) Liverpool University Press doi:10.3828/jlcds.2009.9

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