Metics, Methods, and Modernism

Attending to someone or something in the socially “wrong way” (such as calling out colleagues at a conference for failing to attend to issues of racism or ableism or sexism) can cause discomfort, or rather, according to Ahmed, can cause the person doing the calling out to be perceived as the cause of others’ discomfort. As she notes in On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, “To even use the word ‘racism’ can mean to become the subject of ill will. . . . Describing the problem of racism can mean being treated as if you have created the problem, as if the very talk about divisions is what is divisive.”[15] It is possible, for example, that this special cluster’s calling out (most pointedly in Urmila Seshagiri’s introduction) of the relative imbalance of attention to women modernists, even in the “new” modernisms, will be perceived as causing discomfort rather than merely pointing it out. Following Ahmed, we might think of such uncomfortable calls to shift our attention as a form of alienation, of making one affectively alien. As Ahmed explains, “We become alienated—out of line with an affective community—when we do not experience pleasure from proximity to objects that are attributed as being good.”[16] In Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams describes the varied and contested connotations of the word “alienation,” concluding that alienation provides “evidence of extensive feeling of a division between man [sic] and society.”[17]  In his 1985 essay, “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism,” Williams attributes “certain productive kinds of strangeness and distance” to a wave of “immigration to the metropolis.”[18] Williams does not delve into the violent genealogies of such immigration, focusing instead on migration from the rural to the urban, but Ahmed is clear that “[t]o speak out of consciousness of such [colonial] histories, and with consciousness of racism, is to become an affect alien” (Promise of Happiness, 158). Moreover, for Ahmed, alienation is experienced as more than cognitive “strangeness” or “distance.” It is linked to one’s “orientation” and presence in social space:

alienation is an intense burning presence; it is a feeling that takes place before others, from whom one is alienated, and can feel like a weight that both holds you down and keeps you apart. . . . Everything presses against you; you feel against the world and the world feels against you. . . . The revolutionary is an affect alien in this specific sense. You do not flow; you are stressed; you experience the world as a form of resistance in coming to resist a world (168–69).

There are many ways one can experience the world as a form of resistance or “pressing in” upon one’s self—a stair at the entry to a gathering place, an “overzealous” law enforcement officer on one’s route to a job interview, a bathroom that requires a birth certificate for admission, a denial of health care, a withholding of respect—the list is long and cumulative in effect. A queer/crip/metic form of alienation might thus be imagined as pressing back upon the pressure to face the world in “the right” (i.e. dominantly structured) way, thereby generating epistemic and material friction.

Biopolitical Dis-ease and Crip Futurity

Crip theory, which is one, but certainly not the only, mode of pressing back against dominant pressure, analyzes the force of social norms as they impinge upon bodies, minds, and psyches, especially those which deviate from culturally constructed ideals and are therefore deemed pathological. That is, crip theory moves us to attend to particular aspects of biopower—compulsory ablebodiedness (following McRuer) and hetero-ableist temporality (following Alison Kafer). Crip orientation is not at the expense of, but in complex relationship with other analyses of biopower, including critiques of scientific racism and queer theory. Such analyses of biopower are especially helpful to understanding the cultural landscapes of early twentieth century Western Europe and North America, and therefore for understanding the cultural landscape(s) of modernism. For pragmatic reasons (“modernity” can stretch out for centuries depending on how one defines it) as well as culturally-specific reasons (modernism coincided with the apotheosis of biopower in eugenicist and totalitarian atrocities of the mid-twentieth century), I am sympathetic with Seshagiri and James’s call for drawing temporal boundaries around the concept of  (Euro-American) modernism, although the recent resurgence of (neo)fascist thought and activity may provide motivation for further contemplation of modernism’s recrudescence in the early twenty first century.[19]

“Recrudescence” is not as tangential to crip theorizing as it might initially seem. The term recrudescent evokes nonlinear temporality. The OED defines it as “breaking out again; resurgent, reviving” or in medical terms as the reoccurrence of a “disease, symptom, or condition.”[20] The language of disease or symptom is of course problematic, but we might imagine recrudescence as the return of dis-ease, something like discomfort as Ahmed describes it.[21] Both the affective force of dis-ease in spatial settings among bodies that are shaped (or misshaped) by the repeated pressure of cultural norms and the oppressiveness of normative temporality are concerns of crip theory, which nuances both the social model of disability favored among disability studies scholars and the skepticism of futurity evident in recent strains of queer theory.[22] Disability studies has been very clear about locating disability not within an individual who may have atypical traits or capacities, but rather in the social structures that make it difficult or impossible for a person with such traits to navigate a world riddled with impediments and barriers to that navigation. The social model of disability calls into question the “medical model” of disability, wherein disability is a property of an individual who must adapt to social structures through accommodation or long-awaited cure. Kafer defines her crip “political/relational” perspective as a  “friendly departure” from the social model of disability, insofar as she recognizes the social dimensions of disability, but balks at a strict demarcation between impairment—“any physical or mental limitation” and disability—“the social exclusions based on and social meanings attributed to, that impairment.” [23] For Kafer, a strict social model of disability does not sufficiently address the lived realities of persons with conditions such as “chronic illness, pain, and fatigue” who face the disabling conditions of society but also “the often-disabling effects of our bodies” (Feminist, Queer, Crip, 7). As a result, in a strict social model, a person’s desire for a future made more livable through medical intervention can be confused with the (justly critiqued) eugenicist hope for a future without disabled people. As Kafer explains:

Focusing exclusively on disabling barriers, as a strict social model seems to do, renders pain and fatigue irrelevant to the project of disability politics. As a result, the social model can marginalize those disabled people who are interested in medical interventions or cures. In a complete reversal of the individual/ medical model, which imagines individual cure as the desired future for disability, a strict social model completely casts cure out of our imagined futures; cure becomes the future no self-respecting disability activist or scholar wants. (7)

The concept of futurity is vexed in crip theory, especially given that, as Kafer notes, those outside the norm for ablebodiedness and/or ablemindedness “were—and often are—figured as threats to futurity” (31). On the one hand, utopic visions of a future without disabled people have too often resulted in blatantly eugenic ideologies and practices. Virginia Woolf, for example, was persuaded by her doctors to forego having children. One of those doctors was George Savage, who cautioned that, “an insane patient may have an insane, idiotic, wicked, epileptic or somnambulistic child.”[24] Kafer reads the history of such eugenicist ideas against Lee Edelman’s critique of reproductive futurism. On the one hand, reproductive futurism holds the present hostage for the sake of some imagined and ideal future child. For Edelman, “queerness” entails resistance to this reproductive futurism and the heteronormative social order it props up (No Future, 3). On the other hand, as Kafer notes, following Jose Muñoz, “The always already white Child is also always already healthy and nondisabled; disabled children are not part of this privileged imaginary except as the abject other” (Feminist, Queer, Crip, 32–33). Kafer thus argues for a notion of crip futurity rather than eschewing futurity altogether: “The task, then, is not so much to refuse the future as to imagine disability and disability futures otherwise, as part of other, alternate temporalities that do not cast disabled people out of time, as the sign of the future of no future” (34). Crip temporality—the insistence that disabled people have a present worth inhabiting and future worth imagining, resists the pressure of cultural dis-ease (or discomfort as Ahmed defines it) while calling out the impairing and disabling effects of dis-ease upon bodies and minds that do not meet normative ideals.

Dis-ease, from a crip/feminist perspective, amplifies the force of social and cultural conditions that stigmatize in the name of normativity, inhibit access to life sustaining resources in the name of the health of a population, extinguish lives (the lives of others conceived of as a threat to the health of the polis) in the name of preserving, or as Michel Foucault says, “administering” life.[25] Under biopolitical regimes, the large scale killing of others is justified (and I can’t help thinking of the urgent work of the Black Lives Matter movement in this regard, or the drone killings of mostly brown people to ensure “security” for mostly white people) in the name of serving and protecting a social structure where, as Foucault explains, “power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population” (History of Sexuality, 137).[26] With this in mind, crip theory is an important tool for feminist work in modernist studies not because it is new (as if simply being newer makes a tool or practice better), but because it critically addresses the effects of biopower on bodies, subcultural populations, and (perhaps most critical for scholars in the humanities) cultural imaginaries that naturalize biopower’s effects. In a nutshell, crip work is necessary because lethal forms of biopower are so resilient.

Cripping Modernism

Kafer advocates a crip mode of “reading” (I would say “attending”) that disrupts disabling cultural imaginaries and “mov[es] us toward accessible futures” (Feminist, Queer, Crip, 149–50). This entails “looking for disability in places it has gone unmarked” (or, to put it another way, paying attention to disability in places it has gone unattended) (150). When we orient ourselves to attend to disability, it suddenly appears everywhere we turn in modernist work, revealing a great deal about how normative and non-normative bodies, minds, and affective dispositions function in a given cultural imaginary. To be clear, I’m not the first person to notice the ubiquity of disability representations in modernist literature. Janet Lyon, Michael Davidson, Joe Valente, and Maren Tova Linnet, among others, have undertaken important studies of disability in modernism.[27] My primary aim in this essay has not been to offer another reading of modernist literature to set alongside their exceptional work, but rather to incite queer/crip/feminist (and perhaps metic) modes of inhabiting modernist studies. [28] To borrow from Medina’s borrowing of DuBois, a crip mode of attending can help us “feel the weight of the ignorance of the [ableist] world” and perhaps provide enough “epistemic friction” to dislodge normative cultural imaginaries (Epistemology of Resistance, 196, emphasis in original).

That said, here are some examples of how even mainstream modernism might appear “otherwise” (to borrow Kafer’s term) when we attend to it in a crip mode.[29]  When we reread Lady Chatterley’s Lover in a crip mode, for example, Clifford’s depiction becomes much more salient and conversations about masculinity, class, normative heterosexuality, militarism, and virility can be called into question for their assumptions about able-bodiedness. Clifford comes home from World War I “[c]rippled for ever, knowing he could never have any children.”[30] He is thus cast into a different relationship to futurity, a relationship that Lawrence depicts as soulless and polluted by mechanistic industrialism. Clifford is presumed not capable of being sexual with his wife, Constance. Her father even goes so far as to warn her against the potential of becoming a “demi-vierge” because, from Sir Malcolm’s perspective, Clifford is obviously not able to satisfy Constance sexually (Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 17). From the start of the novel, then, Lawrence relies on and propagates the presumption that a man in a wheelchair is not capable of being sexual. Clifford’s disability serves as a symbol, for Lawrence, of a larger problem in British culture—a loss of “natural” virility due to the seemingly unnatural ravages of industrialism, militarism, and, perhaps, feminism. Indeed, before Clifford’s injury, his sex life is portrayed as atrophied, somehow unmanly—“Clifford anyhow was not just keen on his ‘satisfaction,’ as so many men seemed to be. No, the intimacy was deeper, more personal than that. And sex was a mere accident, or an adjunct” (12). Clifford’s disability is both overdetermined and underdeveloped, serving less as a particular condition confronted by a particular man than as the apotheosis of what is already a given (Britain’s emasculation by industrialism) in the worldview presented by Lawrence’s novel.

One can see this nexus of concerns about normative masculinity coalescing in other scenes involving disabled characters in modernist work. For example, the “telling secret” of Jake’s apparently sexually debilitating injury in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises operates as the organizing trauma in the narrative, standing in for the loss implicit in the novel’s epigraph (attributed to Gertrude Stein), “You are all a lost generation.”[31] It is taken for granted in the logic of the narrative that Jake and Brett (Lady Ashley), who are in love with each other, cannot consummate a sexual relationship because of Jake’s war injury.[32] The exact nature of Jake’s injury is never revealed, just its effects, which render Jake incapable of performing sexually with Brett (or any other woman). Jake is able to kiss and to hold Brett and is apparently otherwise able-bodied, which leads the reader to infer that Jake has suffered some sort of injury to his genitals. Here, a crip reading reveals the normative logic (and resultant despair) of Hemingway’s narrative. As is the case in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, sexual penetration by a normatively functioning penis is apparently the definition of sexual performance that will satisfy a “normal” woman. Brett and Jake can’t be together, despite their clear desire to be, because of Jake’s disability. Their relationship, like their “lost” generation, has no futurity. As such, Hemingway’s depiction of Jake participates in the temporal logic that Kafer critiques, placing Jake “out of time and out of our futures” (Feminist, Queer, Crip, 33). Jake is like the “steer” (a castrated bull) set in amongst the virile bulls in order to “run around like old maids trying to quiet them down” (Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 106). It is only Jake’s stoicism (and perhaps alcoholism) that keeps him from being like an “old maid”—feminized and banished from the normative temporality of “reproductive futurism.”[33]

It should come as no surprise, given the entwining of biopower, scientific racism, and eugenics in the early twentieth century, that the other character likened to a “steer” in The Sun Also Rises is Robert Cohen, who is the subject of so many anti-Semitic slurs in the novel.[34] The stereotype of the feminized Jewish man has been examined carefully by scholars such as Sander Gilman and Daniel Boyarin.[35] How do we read the conjunction of this stereotype and disability in yet another modernist novel where it surfaces, James Joyce’s Ulysses? Is Bloom’s public masturbation a sign of his virile masculinity, or a marker of his overdetermined queerness as a Jewish man in overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland? How does Gerty’s “lame[ness]” complicate our understanding of Bloom’s voyeuristic public sex, especially given that Bloom regards Gerty’s limp as a kind of turn on—“Curiosity like a nun or a negress or a girl with glasses?”[36] In her recent book, Linett performs an extensive reading of Gerty’s lameness and its place in Bloom’s autoerotic fantasy, so I will not reduplicate her magnificent work here, except to suggest that the scene is one of many in a litany of representations of disability as it stands in for, complicates, or overdetermines sexuality in modernist work.[37] I could go on: Benjy in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, whose intellectual disability makes him a naïve (untouched by psychoanalytic insights about normative sexuality) narrator in a narrative all about the intricate/incestuous sexual miasma of the Compson family; Stevie (whom Joe Valente has dubbed the “accidental autist”) in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, whose cognitive atypicality seems to represent for Conrad both degeneracy, overdependence on feminine protection, and manipulability; and Tiresias in T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” who is both blind and gender non-binary (having been both man and woman, therefore an “old man with wrinkled dugs”).[38] What surfaces from reciting this litany is a constellation of ideas about normative masculinity, sex (the verb), and gender. This constellation has the potential of illuminating how literary modernism (or modernisms) respond to and contribute to biopolitical social formations such as eugenics, scientific racism, sexology, psychology, and gender normativity.

As I have noted, these examples are not meant to be exhaustive or authoritative, but rather suggestive. In many ways, my litany is a recital of what becomes quite obvious once we begin, like Kafer, “looking for disability in places it has gone unmarked” (Feminist, Queer, Crip, 150). That the obvious has gone relatively unremarked for five or more decades of scholarship on modernism is perhaps the most salient observation I can make about modernism, feminism, and methodology, for in order for us to attend to what is right before us (or perhaps behind us, in that spot the size of a shilling that we can’t describe for ourselves) our methods must not be fixed, but rather susceptible to being dislodged and therefore adaptive. Such adaptive, admittedly methodologically impure, work is necessary—not simply because it helps us to understand modernism more thoroughly, but also because it can help us to understand how cultural imaginaries are formed, perpetuated, and hopefully transformed in our own biopolitically charged moment.