What I'm Reading: Stacy Clifford Simplican, "The Capacity Contract"

This is my first foray into disability studies and I liked it! The book is tough: it lays its methodological bones bare in ways that sometimes feels like treading water and on top of that the concepts it’s trying to get across are difficult too. But I picked up a lot.

Clifford explains that for about four hundred years we’ve had a loose sketch of the ideal political subject - someone who is informed, verbal, aware of themselves as an agent, aware of the social consequences of their actions, and able to communicate their needs and desires to others. However, this kind of subjectivity requires a certain threshold of cognitive ability and as such it excludes many people with intellectual disabilities. Moreover, both Locke and Rawls (among many others, but Simplican focuses closely on those two) actually explicitly define their ideal political subjects using intellectual disability as a foil; Locke says that political subjects are not “idiots” (read: intellectually disabled) and Rawls banishes them to the fringe cases of justice - the people in the Rawlsian original position are explicitly cognitively abled. So the modern boundaries of political subjectivity are fundamentally, marrow-deep exclusionary of people who have political interests and deserve to participate.

This is a charge we could level not just at traditional liberal or conservative politics, but even Leftism, of both the Marxist and non-Marxist varieties. Orthodox Marxism places emphasis on achieving class consciousness - workers coming to understand the ways in which capitalism exploits them; identity politics today places emphasis on understanding how one is oppressed and how others with similar constructed identities are likely to have similar experiences of oppression and therefore shared political goals - claiming an identity and articulating a demand for authentic recognition from oppressors. Since both of these forms of politics require cognitive operations that many people wth intellectual disabilities find tougher, both enforce “compulsory capacity.”

Simplican argues that we need to not necessarily ditch these political projects wholesale, but accept a plurality of political subjectivities, understanding that some people should have a place in our politics but that predicating membership on cognitive capacity would exclude them, and being open to new methods of political participation. Alliance, dance, humour, and even just being publicly present, rather than consigned to a hierarchical institution, are all tactics of political engagement she explores through interacting with people with intellectual disabilities of various kinds. She further argues that solidarity based on shared vulnerability can go further than solidarity based on capacity, and I found those sections quite moving.

Dustin Timmons got me this book from my wishlist, thank you Dustin! It is a tough one, but if you’d like to pick it up you can get it here.