Abstract
Critical disability studies must respond to the inequities of globalization and place an analysis of disability at the epicentre of a geo-political imagination. Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Multitude provide us with the sparks to fire this imagination. Their work synthesizes critical analyses of globalization, the economic expansion of late capitalism, rapid developments in communication and the impact of biopower on the subjectivities, living conditions and activism of ‘the global citizen’. This article uses their concepts of Empire and Multitude to give voice to the practices of disabled families in the Global North and Global South; the stories of Wayan (an Indonesian disability activist and mother) and Isabelle (a British mother of a disabled child). We conclude that the work of Hardt and Negri can be critically employed to theorize ‘disablism in Empire’ whilst articulating the activism of the ‘disabled Multitude’ in ways that speak across South/North divides.
Introduction
Critical disability studies must respond to the inequities of globalization and place an analysis of disability at the epicentre of a geo-political imagination. Specifically Global North critical disability studies have failed to engage with the Global South (Grech, 2009, 2011; Meekosha, 2008, 2010, 2011). There are 400 million disabled people in the Global South (66–75% of the world’s disabled people). As Grech notes (2011), guesstimates have emerged, claiming that 82% of disabled people live in the Global South in conditions of poverty and that one-fifth of the world’s poorest people are disabled people. The assumption of a disability and poverty relationship has created the strongest linkages between disability and the broader development agenda. Whilst disabled people do indeed make up the majority world, they remain excluded from global citizenship. As Goodley (2011: 39) notes:
Citing a number of resources (including http://wecando.wordpress.com/about/ and http://www.apids.org), Meekosha (2008) questions the implicit values of Northern hemisphere disability studies including (i) claims to universality (what happens in the ‘Global North’ should happen in the South); (ii) a reading from the Metropole (a methodological projection of ideas from the centre into the periphery); (iii) emphasis on the importance of Northern feudal/capitalist modes of production (with an accompanying ignorance and grand erasure of indigenous/traditional modes of living of the South); (iv) a colonialism of psychic, cultural and geographical life of the South by the North and (v) ignorance of the resistant-subaltern- positions of ‘Global Southerners’.
Grech (2011: 3) makes the powerful case that:
Disability studies … has not served the subject of majority world disability, dominated by white, Western, middle class academics, its debate imbued with ideological, theoretical, cultural and historical assumptions – those pertaining to, and grounded in Western urban post-industrialised societies, notably West European and North American (WENA). Despite Western foundations, disability studies has reached hegemonic status in the disability and majority world debate as the exportation of its ideas (notably the social model of disability) from North to South continues unabated. This seems to be legitimised by numerous factors: the marginalisation/exclusion of disability in the development sector; the monopolisation of most things disability by the Western disability studies; and the assumption that disability theories and writings from the West are transferable across the globe with few or no modifications … Overall, as Stone (1999) contends, this transfer/imposition of epistemologies is more akin to imperialism than to empowerment.
Meekosha and Grech remind us of the material differences associated with what we might term the ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’. We follow their use of the terms ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’ as strategic categories to recognize high income, rich, Western European and North American nations and their antithesis. However, while material, economic, cultural and political distinctions exist between the Global North and South, to what extent can we as disability studies scholars address transnational commonalities and differences? Can critical disability studies speak across these divides? And, crucially, how might disability theory speak to and from the South to the North (and vice versa) in ways that acknowledge the ‘glocal’ nature of disability: exposing the global while acknowledging the local? Furthermore, as many cultural aspects of Global North and Global South countries seep into one another as a consequence of the flows of globalization, to what extent does this further complicate our understandings of disablism and the North/South divide?
While mindful of the often extreme differences in conditions between nations located in rich and poor areas of the globe – associated with wealth, poverty, opportunity, access to healthcare, (post)colonization, war and famine – our article looks to make connections across these areas. Our task is to consider the impact of increasing global capitalism and associated transnational flows of people, information, commodities and capital spreading to most corners of the world (Grech, 2011: 31). Here the work of Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004) emerges as a cornerstone for making sense of some of the complexities of globalization and their impact on the subjectivities and politics of people across Global North and Global South contexts.
This article seeks to place an analysis of disablism in global and local contexts. Disablism is defined by Thomas (2007: 73) as ‘a form of social oppression involving the social imposition of restrictions of activity on people with impairments and the socially engendered undermining of their psycho-emotional well being’. The extent to which these conditions of disablism are felt differently in Global South and Global North contexts will be explored but in relation to wider transnational perspectives on globalization. While we accept that disablism will take on different forms in particular contexts across the globe, we seek to develop a framework that is sensitive to shared processes of globalization that inform the psychological, emotional and material conditions of disablism. Or, as Meekosha (2010, 2011) puts it, to develop a geopolitical sensitivity to theorizing about disability and disablism. We will demonstrate that the work of Southern disabled scholars and activists – and for that matter the work of those in the Global North – can be supported through the employment of the works of Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004) which provide possibilities for theorizing disablism in Empire whilst articulating the activism of the disabled Multitude in ways that speak across South/North divides. Indeed, through the use of Hardt and Negri, we find it possible to break down some of the assumed differences between the Global North and South, to trouble the very conception of a North/South divide and to seek out, instead, overlapping interests and political commitments between activists who are located in very different parts of the globe.
Empire/Multitude
Hardt and Negri’s (2000, 2004) self-described post-Marxist examination of globalization has been enthusiastically taken up by scholars and activists around the world (Abbinnett, 2007; Browning, 2005; Rustin, 2002; Vulliamy, 2001). Their work synthesizes critical analyses of globalization, the economic expansion of late capitalism, rapid developments in communication and the impact of biopower on the subjectivities, living conditions and activism of ‘the global citizen’ and the postmodernization of life itself. Empire is conceived of as a post-colonial and post-modern process, in which knowledge, particularly from the Global North, spreads across the globe in ways that are, potentially, imposed on, appropriated and resisted by citizens in their local contexts. Hardt and Negri are Marxists in attitude and postmodernists by design. Their work also combines the biopolitical analyses of Foucault with the affirmative philosophies of Deleuze and Haraway. 1 Balakrishnan (2000: 143) characterizes the world conceived by Hardt and Negri as one ‘living in a springtime of peoples, a world overflowing with insurgent energies. In a period where others merely cast about for silver linings, Hardt and Negri announce a golden age’. While interested in the ways in which powerful Western European and North American nations police, govern and master the global economic and cultural stage, they attend crucially to the workings of supranational organizations (such as the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) which, through their prescriptions of human rights, regulations of national economic markets and prescribed forms of governance, simultaneously discipline, prohibit and norm the subjectivities of transnational subjects (Hardt and Negri, 2000). The cosmopolitan rhetoric of these institutions conceals a punitive function which is focused on the events of political dissent and the revolutionary imagination which emerge from the biopolitical regime (Abbinnett, 2007: 45). Crucially, and affirmatively, their ideas allow us to consider the ways in which citizens are subjected to big modern ideas (such as choice, competition, capitalism, meritocracy, science and medicine) while also holding on to more local concerns (such as mutuality, community, tradition and local expertise). Empire denotes a shift from heavy industrial manufacturing towards a knowledge economy (Abbinnett, 2007: 45). Human subjects of the Global North and the Global South are hybridized and mixed: a complex ‘global’ amalgam. At the heart of Empire is the Foucauldian notion of biopower. Discourses of biopower are re/produced in institutional regimes (of family, school, healthcare and welfare setting, prison and workplace) in the context of the new world order; comprised of the bomb (USA), money (transnational corporations) and ether (the Internet) (Balakrishnan, 2000: 144). Our sense of selves and others are made through biopolitical constitution of our subjectivities.
Subjectivity is a constant social process of generation … the material practices set out for the subject in the context of the institution (be they kneeling down to pray or changing hundreds of diapers) are the production processes of subjectivity … the institutions provide above all a discrete place (the home, the chapel, the classroom, the shop floor) where the production of subjectivity is enacted. (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 190)
Citizens from the Global North and Global South are more and more likely to come into contact with biopower through the rapid global expansion of the capitalist free-market. This is classic Foucault. Biopower designates the regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primary goal (Žižek, 2008: 34). Biopower regulates life from the interior of subjects, a power that human subjects embrace and reactivate of their own accord (Rustin, 2002: 453). Ideas from psychiatry, psychology and education, for example, know no fixed boundaries as they are caught up in plural pan-national exchanges of information and communication. ‘Empire’ refers to a globalized biopolitical machine (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 40) – or biopolitical capitalism (Abbinnett, 2007: 51) – through which theories and practices of subjectivity, being and psychology spread across the globe, infecting or affecting citizens in every corner of the world. As Balakrishnan (2000: 143) puts it: Empire is a diffuse, anonymous network of all-englobing power: a phantasmic polity. Its flows of people, information and wealth are simply too unruly to be monitored from metropolitan control centres. Yet, following Goodley and Lawthom (2011), the processes of biopower have in mind a preferred subjectivity: healthy, rational, autonomous, educated, economically viable, self-governing and able: a self-contained individual (Sampson, 1988). And if you don’t fit: then Empire is ready to fix you. Disabled people are very familiar with Empire: as their bodies and minds are diagnosed, treated and made Other in the constantly evolving processes of biopolitics. Alterity – the Other of the Eurocentric self – has become constituted on the boundary of the colony and the Metropole (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 124). The European self ‘needs to confront its Other to feel and maintain its power, to remake itself continuously’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 129). Hence ‘the Orient’ is made in Europe and exported back to ‘the Orient’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 125) and, we could add, ‘the disabled’ is made in an Ableist culture and transported back to ‘the disabled’ (see Campbell, 2009). The mind, body and intellect of the masses are becoming increasingly subsumed under the exploitative regimes of capital (Abbinnett, 2007: 51). That said, Hardt and Negri (2000) are mindful of the ways in which global citizens envisage
Empire threatens to stem activism through whispering ‘the names of the struggles in order to charm them into passivity’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 59). Yet, simultaneously, its biopolitical nature cannot help but produce a surplus of desires, dreams and psychologies that demand democracy (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 66). Empire carefully crafts forms of juridical power: order and peace plus the plural creation of subjectivities, hybrids and mixtures. Hence, while new subjectivities are made in the technological metamorphoses of the imperial biopolitical machine, what is created is the Multitude, which sustains and threatens to destroy Empire (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 62). They refer to this as the ‘boomerang of alterity’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 130) which seeks to transform Otherness ‘into something positive, intensifying it’ claiming it as a moment of self-consciousness. The Multitude is created through the excesses of Empire. The Multitude is produced alongside and through Empire.
The Multitude is developed as a biopolitical concept: a dialectical concept that suffers and produces, is poor though also rich, that extends beyond the Marxist proletariat to include poor people, migrants, workers, the unemployed, parents, children and carers; a concept that captures the realities of the ‘global recomposition of the social classes’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004:66). The diversity of the Multitude, for Abbinnett (2007: 44), can be viewed in the anti-capitalist movement in the 1997 protests in Washington, Melbourne, Prague, Seoul, Quebec city and Gothenburg. And we can add to that the 2011 Arab Spring political demonstrations in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya and the student protests in London. The Multitude is ‘a multiplicity of singular differences’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: xiv) encompassing class, race, sex and gender (to which we can add disability which is, unfortunately, omitted by the authors 2 ). The Multitude emerges as a consequence of Empire – as the logic of recuperation (Abbinnett, 2007: 54) – but looks beyond it (Hardt and Negri 2004: xvii) and includes any one and any Other who struggles to fit with Empire’s forms of life.
These struggles can ‘leap to the virtual centre of Empire’ at any time (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 58) because biopolitical organization of capitalism has fundamentally altered the conditions under which surplus value is produced: immaterial labour, the economy of desire, exchange, innovation and discipline through which capital circulates (Abbinnett, 2007: 48). These are biopolitical struggles not against a single enemy but with and against the biopolitics of Empire with the kinds of subject that Empire wants us to be and the kinds that we want to be (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 53). Here we find the productive potential of the Multitude ‘to sabotage and destroy with it’s own productive force the parasitical order of postmodern command’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 66). The poor and the unemployed, they argue, are oppressed and creative because their flexible working is crucial to the cogs of economic and social production (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 135). The diversity of protest movements of the 1990s is due to a shift from industrial to biopolitical production: a shift to the general intellect of a new proletariat (the multitude) (Abbinnett, 2007: 44).
Marginalized workers, including those in the Sweatshops of Delhi and London, have the potential to disrupt the ontological constitution of Empire (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 134). Their participation feeds into networked actions against sweatshops (http://www.nosweat.org.uk/). Economic migrants and political refugees are both displaced and experiencing flight that is ‘something like a training of the desire for freedom’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 134). This nomadic subjectivity allows possibilities for break-out and reinvention (see Braidotti, 2006). Desertion, nomadism and exodus aided the collapse of East and West Europe and have called for new forms of collectivity such as the World Union of Workers (mentioned by Hardt and Negri, 2000) and Industrial Workers of the World (see http://www.iww.org/). The postcolonial hero is the one who continually transgresses territorial and racial boundaries, who destroys particularities and points towards a common civilization (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 363). The multitude is reminiscent of Fanon’s (1976) vision of ‘maids, unemployed, prostitutes and work-less men’ who make up the ‘native’ population of colonized countries and are the crucial players in the process of decolonization. Women’s domestic work and childrearing – devalued and relied upon by the Global North and South – hold the potential for the re/production of life itself (e.g. http://www.parentsforinclusion.org/). The experience of institutionalization, segregation and pathologization of the 1960s aided the radicalization of disabled people (e.g. Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation, Not Dead Yet), while more contemporary forms of psychologization experienced by disabled people have resulted in various forms of disability activism (e.g. Inclusion International, Disabled People’s International, Mad Pride). The information technology paradigm has served to commodify the affective skills of those who are paid to solicit responses from the public (call centre operatives, service workers, carers).
Hardt and Negri (2004) are able to make these ambivalent claims about the oppressive and resistant qualities of some of society’s most oppressed groups because they embrace a number of epistemological starting points. First, while the enlightenment of early modern societies and early capitalism promoted transcendental forms of being, Empire and the resultant Multitude threaten to produce immanent subjectivities. Transcendentalism is ideological, a European grand narrative, that values reason, rationality, the power of the state, state sovereignty and control of the populace (Hardt and Negri, 2000). This is a philosophy that idealizes the ‘Big Subject’ described by Braidotti (1994) as ‘man-white-western-male-adult-reasonable-heterosexual-living-in-towns-speaking-a-standard-language’. Immanence refers to the potentiality and humanism of desires and subjectivities produced through the biopolitical machinations of Empire and the production of the Multitude (Hardt and Negri, 2000). Here is the possibility of the Other subject: the ‘little subject’ which is often the subject that is crossed out (subject). Hardt and Negri’s view of an immanent sense of being recalls Foucault (‘resistance is primary with respect to power’: Hardt and Negri, 2004: 64) and Deleuze (for example in their discussions of the rhizomatic connections of the Multitude, see Goodley, 2007 for a disability studies overview of this idea). There is an interest here in the spaces between reason/liberty/transcendentalism and passion/difference/immanence (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 120). The Multitude is ready to burst with resistance because Empire has endowed it with a surplus of ‘intelligence, experience and knowledge and desire’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 212).
Second, Hardt and Negri keep a Marxian preoccupation of material labour (and paid work) but bolt on immaterial labour. While always mindful that material labour still forms the majority of labour today (Browning, 2005) their biopolitical interests shine light on the immaterial labour of Empire and the Multitude. They are interested in the transformation of the labour process which has created a new proletariat through an emphasis on knowledge and affect (with the latter showing an increased weight of activities focused on health, education and social care) (Rustin, 2002). Empire gains its potency through the biopolitical governance of individuals and the production of forms of subjectivity, and Empire also sets out the conditions for its own demise: creating a surplus of subjectivities and abundance of human productivity (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 106). It does this through the hegemony of immaterial labour – knowledge, information, communication and emotional reproduction. Places that were formerly the remit of the private/personal (e.g. sexual relationships, families, households) are increasingly governed by public interventions which seek to normalize their practices and create ideal national citizens. These areas of affective/emotional/immaterial labour – which include the service industry, health and social welfare services, caring and maternal work – know no hours of work (beyond the 9 to 5 working day), are always labouring and in the process of becoming experts about themselves. 3 The counter power of the Multitude can emerge only through language, innovation and technique which are necessary to the continued expansion of capital (Abbinnett, 2007: 49). The mother of Empire, for example, is a knowing mother, an educated mother, a mother who feels the pressure of somatic citizenship to ensure that her children are well nourished, well cared for and safe. Such demands are increasingly the case in both the Global South and Global North as Empire advances. The repossession of power by subjects with new systems of non-material production and internalized regulation create possibilities for new kinds of resistance (Rustin, 2002: 453).
Third, Empire produces new breeding ground for forms of subjectivity (Hardt and Negri, 2000) and ‘the real wealth … resides in the common: it is the sum of the pleasures, desires, capacities and needs we share’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 149, my italics). The ‘common’ (which is used instead of the commons) is the transnational and local site of the biopolitical production of the Multitude. In the common we can find Postfordist, urban and rural based, guerrilla forms of activism – small mobile units; networked through the Internet; local and global; potentially horizontal: the democratic organization of the biopolitical common (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 89).
The Multitude is composed of a set of singularities – a social subject whose difference cannot be reduced to sameness – a difference that remains different … a singularity of essence but a common aim. (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 99–125)
There is now nothing significant that lies outside of the existing regimes of production and governance (Rustin, 2002: 454). The Multitude exemplifies a postmodern paradigm of subjective production (O’Neill, 2002: 303) because we all now live in an affect economy (Clough, 2003: 359). We are asked, therefore, to look for the possibility of the common to produce new subjectivities. The Multitude is ‘pure potential, an unformed life force, and in this sense … aimed constantly at the fullness of life’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 176) because (biopolitical) capitalism is ‘vulnerable at all points to riot and rebellion’ (Balakrishnan, 2000: 144). This affirmative conception of the Multitude permits a productive conception of the Global South whilst keeping in tune with Global Southern theorists who have exposed the ways in which supranational organizations of Empire have given money to poor countries to reduce poverty on the proviso that these countries establish a liberal order for a global market place (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 176). One of the International Monetary Fund’s loan requirements of Argentina has been the reduction to pensions and programs for elderly people, many of whom are disabled (McRuer and Wilkerson, 2003: 3). Chaudhry (2010) suggests that an autocorrective focus of Neoliberalism can be found in Empire where, for example, the World Bank funds self-help groups in India to pacify the impact of neoliberal policies on rural agricultural life. She notes that a decrease in state funding, an emphasis on urban living, means that self-help groups are bank-rolled in order to help the rural poor get themselves out of poverty. The cosmopolitan rhetoric of these institutions conceals a punitive function that is focused on the events of political dissent and the revolutionary imagination which emerges from the biopolitical regime (Abbinett 2007: 45). Yet, as the transnational institutions of Empire territorialize nations, they cannot but help to produce a surplus of bio-politics: social subjects that are able to use the tools of Empire for their own means and ends. Empire thus creates conditions for postcolonialism that are not only against imperialism and Eurocentrism but also affirm difference, ambivalence, hybridization, fractured identities and mimicry that will lead to a gathering of people in the diaspora (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 145). Hence, the work of Hardt and Negri may be seen as offering a positive antidote to the more cynical analyses of the poisonous nature of capitalism (e.g. Žižek, 2008). 4
Stories/Resistance
[we] need to celebrate collective solidarity, connection, responsibility for dependent others, duty to respect the customs of one’s community – instead of western capitalist culture’s valuing of autonomy and liberal freedom. (Žižek, 2008: 123)
It would appear that Hardt and Negri provide us with a vocabulary for capturing the reactionary effects of globalization whilst, simultaneously, illuminating resistance and potentiality. Such a framework is, we would argue, a productive one of clear relevance to critical disability studies across the Global South and Global North. This article will now draw on two narratives. The first, taken from what might be typically viewed as the Global South, presents an ethnographic account of a disabled mother in Indonesia. 5 The second, taken from interviews with parents of disabled children in England, captures one mother’s account. 6 These accounts are chosen for a number of reasons. First, they demonstrate some connections between the global and the local. Second, their accounts merge from the Global North and Global South but in ways that indicate differences and similarities in terms of disablism and resistance to this process. Third, we believe the accounts capture in practice the actions of the Multitude: actions that Browning (2005) suggests remain opaque in the work of Hardt and Negri. They allow us to think of Empire across the Global South/North through the Multitude. And crucially, while disability politics is omitted from their analyses, we suggest that their concepts can be employed to make sense of the politics of disability.
Wayan
The centre of the disabled person’s organization is a good hour’s drive away from the nearest big town. The organization is housed in a compound, quite typical of domestic living on this Indonesian island, but bears the marks of its preview incarnation as a special school and residential setting for disabled adults and children. Unlike the steep and sloping steps of the pavements so typical of the inaccessible villages and towns, the compound boasts smooth, wheelchair friendly accessible paths between the buildings, which are formed to create a quadrangle. On one side is the organization’s headquarters and office. Filled with filing cabinets, desks and three computers, the office allows communication via the Web and telephone.
The organization’s website details their aims to promote the inclusion and integration of all disabled people in Indonesian society. Previous activities have included the performance of a traditional cultural show by disabled actors, dancers and musicians – combining dance, music and an epic Hindu tale – and a demonstration that took to the streets of a nearby town demanding accessible transport and pedestrianization. The show has been filmed and the office workers were working flat out to burn the show onto DVD to keep up with demand. To another side of the quadrangle are living quarters. Shared bedrooms are occupied. This includes Wayan and her new born child. Wayan is also the president of the organization and explains to us how she juggles her professional and parenting commitments. Our time together was interrupted by colleagues’ enquiries as they sought advice on various ongoing projects. The baby was passed to a colleague, the wheelchair was moved over, Wayan took to it and made her way to the office.
The third part of the building boasts spaces for physiotherapy and classrooms for the education of disabled children. Some children attend the classroom for most of their education. For others, they use the organization for the early years of their primary education before moving on to local mainstream schools. The organization is part-funded by rich benefactors from places such as Hong Kong and Singapore. During our meeting we were introduced to a Singapore businessman who explained the kinds of fund raising activities that had been undertaken back in Singapore to raise funds for the group. The talk is distinctly about ‘charity’, ‘helping the group’ and ‘supporting their independence’.
The final part of the quadrangle is used by local disabled artists. Their work combines traditional Indonesian illustrations and modern paintings. The work is exhibited and sold at the organization’s shop in the local town and supplies regular and essential funds for the organization.
Hardt and Negri encourage us to read Wayan’s account in terms of the dialectical interplay between Empire and Multitude. At its most simplistic level this reading emphasizes the postcolonial nature of life, captured by Fanon’s (1976: 55) observation that the frontiers of any context always ‘remain open to new ideas and echoes from the world outside’. Hardt and Negri push this point further by celebrating the possibilities for resistance as a consequence of the excesses of Empire. The re-presentation of traditional dance and theatre by disabled people captures the hybridized nature of the Multitude and is reminiscent of the reassertion of traditional values through the human rights Empire discourse around disability politics described by Bradbury and Ndlovu (2009) in relation to the South African context. These researchers remind us that globalization is not a one-way street and that collectives bring cultural and political complexity to political manifestations of the local/global and traditional/new. There is a powerful message about capability, potentiality and creativity conveyed through disabled performers enacting familiar cultural shows. This had the potential to change attitudes of the wider community, with these changes appearing to be contingent on ‘increased visibility of the disabled person, contact with others, and in particular on being seen trying to perform something that was socially and culturally valued, especially in a work-related activity’ (Grech, 2011: 121). This is a very different picture of im/material life from the realities of sweatshops and factories owned by the transnational companies, relocated from the Global North to the Global South, in which we can find many disabled people. We ignore these realities at our peril. Yet, Wayan’s story indicates other possibilities.
That the group is plugged into the Web indicates the potentiality of the Multitude for communication: ‘networked organizations, spatial mobility and temporal flexibility’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 276). Hence, while each struggle relates to the singular or the local, the Multitude is immersed in the common of the Global Web, or as Otto (1999: 4) puts it, ‘change involves the interconnected processes of changing the way we, as individuals, locally understand the world as well as altering the global economies and practices of power’. The networked nature of the organization suggests, in contrast to Browning (2005: 207), that the plurality of actions of the singularities of the Multitude can be articulated between themselves. Indeed, activism is increasingly spreading via communicative networks through which global capitalism functions (Abbinnett, 2007: 47). While accepting the digital divide that still persists between poor and rich income countries (and within countries between the technologically rich and poor), technology opens up possibilities for an externalization of the self: an opening up of flows and communication; the flattening of life itself (Lash, 2001). Deleuzian scholars understand interconnectedness as rhizomatic: a horizontal, ever-morphing interconnection of desires. Wayan’s group’s regular email contact with other Indonesian (and international) disability organizations demonstrates this interconnection. A Google search finds their group’s website positioned alongside others including Disabled People’s International and the United Kingdom’s Disabled People’s Movement.
The organization’s strong activist heart clearly aims to promote the community participation of disabled people and to transform the inaccessibly built environment – key components of the politics of disability (Oliver, 1990). These ambitions, familiar to Global North disability activists, have the potential to engage in ‘anthropological transformations of subjectivity’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 312). The surplus nature of the immaterial labour of Wayan and her colleagues allows them to combine multiple roles of educator, mother, carer, advocate, activist, fundraiser, worker and cultural performer. They seek to educate Indonesian society through demonstration and cultural performance and in this sense appear to ‘create new institutional and social models based on it’s [the Multitude’s] productive capacities’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 308). The discourse of human rights – a modernist ‘truth’ – can be used by Wayan’s organization in ways fit for the purpose of the local. Wayan is true hybridized subject: parent/activist, service provider/user. The work of the organization connects with other disability organizations such as the Independent Living Movement and Community Based Rehabilitation. Wayan overturns the orientalist view of the Global Southerner as uncivilized, untouched by globalized networks of knowledge and lacking. She is potential. The organization captures the notion of the common: a place for heterogeneous forms of activism to emerge (including human rights activism, radicalism, ecologism, etc): a gathering of alterity (Abbinnett, 2007: 54). Yet, just as we acknowledge the potential of the Multitude, we are also reminded of the repressive elements of Empire. This is, perhaps, most apparent in the Singaporean funding of Wayan’s group. As Grech (2011: 52) observes, the hierarchical relationship between (high income nation) donors and (poor income nation) recipients is often all too apparent, threatening to create conditions of loyalty and accountability of NGOs and Disabled People’s Organizations to those holding the purse strings, ‘with ideologies moving from donor to recipient (almost invariably from North to South)’. We sense the potentially stifling impacts of Empire’s charity and patronage. But, simultaneously, Wayan and her comrades capture the surplus nature of Empire, where desires and new forms of subjectivity associated with the politicization of disability, the value of community education and the sharing of care and education inevitably emerge out of the patronage of rich donors. Wayan and her comrades are systematically involved in subverting disabling attitudes in the wider compound outside the compound and promoting valued interconnections between disabled women in the compound. Following Grech (2011: 231), overall, charity, in whatever form it comes, may and often does help. The key to the existence of charitable acts, beyond the spiritual and the cultural, remains practical. However despised the word might be among the disability and other rights movements, we perhaps need a renegotiation of charity, because it is ultimately renegotiated by the recipients themselves.
Isabelle
Isabelle is the mother of a five year old daughter, Pearl, who lives in a town in England. Amongst many other qualities, Pearl has the label of Down Syndrome. She has two brothers (who have not been labelled as disabled) and she attends a mainstream school. Isabelle spoke to one of our colleagues, Katherine Runswick Cole, about the challenges faced by Pearl and how these differed from those experienced by her sons. If her sons wanted to do something, like Karate or football, they just do it because ‘they are physically here in the community. If I want something for Pearl I actually have to make it appear, make it happen, find the place, get the support, and sometimes I just can’t be bothered. I know it sounds awful but I want to be lazy for her as I am for the boys’. Making things happen has become a full time, 24-7 job for Isabelle.
Isabelle has refused some forms of professional support such as social work. She told us that she does not care for social services; ‘telling me how I am and what I should be doing’. In contrast she has embraced the local parents’ group and values the opportunity of being with similar families who accept the difference of children. She has time for professionals: ‘I’m learning all the time with Pearl. And teachers, they do a really complicated job, for not really that much money, they have no time during their day to make resources for my daughter. But, I suppose that we are looking for the people who are more than just “9 to 5ers”. You do find the most incredible people, the people who do the transport to special school are just great, and Pearl has a great relationship with them’.
One of Isabelle’s friends has a daughter who has seizures. This proved difficult for the child and the family because the school insisted on phoning the mother every time the child had a fit. This made it hard for Isabelle’s friend to keep a job and raised questions about the potential of the school to accept disabled children; ‘if the school is going to say it’s inclusive then that includes the child’s medical needs. It’s ridiculous. Her son just needs to sleep after he has had a fit’. In her own case Isabelle has found her dealings with Pearl’s school tiring and demoralizing. Indeed, she has spent a lot of her own time designing bespoke books – which include photographs and text – that can be used by the teachers with Pearl to aid her reading and has developed sign language with Pearl to aid communication. Neither the books nor the signing has been followed up in the school. This is clearly a shame because, as Isabelle mentions; ‘When I go into the school playground people are so happy to see Pearl, I absolutely believe that she makes a positive contribution to that school and that children’s life are better for it. And children are quite tolerant, they just shift a bit and accommodate, in general I think they are quite kind, they just say well she can’t do this so we’ll do that, in a way the adults don’t most of the time’. Changing the way people view disability is a constant driving force for Isabelle.
Isabelle, our mother of the Global North, exemplifies the practices of immaterial labour. We note that her version of labour has no 9 to 5 day: the immaterial labour never ceases. The account is strong in terms of the biopolitical governance and self-management demanded of educational institutions of families of a disabled child. Isabelle is subjected to repressive actions of Empire that seek physically to control the expression of dissent (Abbinnett, 2007: 49). Simultaneously, we are drawn to the Multitude (of parents of disabled children) who labour for more enabling versions of their children’s subjectivities and responsive forms of care and education. This might be seen as the ‘becoming biopolitical of production’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 115): a contradictory process of being caught up in the biopolitical acts of schools and teachers (key agents of Empire) and the becoming productive of the parent (singular parts of a resistant Multitude). Isabelle not only responds to services and institutions, she is recast as ‘immaterial labourer’, as what Hardt and Negri (2000: 408) term ‘social worker’ (a broader notion that the practitioner role normally associated with this title), an element of the power of the Multitude as ‘an embodied power of knowledge and being, always open to the possible’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 408). Isabelle, like Wayan before her, may be seen as being part of a multitude that ‘through its practical experimentation will offer models and determine when and how the possible becomes real’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 411). One of these models relates to new forms of somatic citizenship (Rose, 2001) which Isabelle enacts in her complex dealing with professionals and other parents for rethinking how to respond inclusively to the needs and desires of impaired child bodies. The primary site of struggle is found in the terrain of the production and regulation of subjectivity (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 321). In this case: reproducing new subjectivities that view disabled children in positive ways; capable rather than deficient; warranting support rather than segregation. Isabelle, like her (unknown but clearly related comrade) Wayan, produces a ‘set of grievances against Empire’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 288). Abbinnett (2007: 50) observes the regime of immaterial labour, into which capital produces new forms of collective desire which exceed the established legal and political organization of the world economy. Empire, then, antagonizes the new world order and gives rise to new forms of language, experience and intellect. In order for capital to reproduce itself, it must constantly reinvest in the practical intellect of the masses and so the political project of Empire is focused on the effects (affiliation and resistance) produced by this constant provocation of autonomy and desire among the global workforce (Abbinnett, 2005: 49), which includes our immaterial labourers such as Isabelle. Isabelle’s story perhaps captures the problematic nature of an individualistic concept of human rights and offers up a more collectivist approach:
The discourse of civil and political rights serves to legitimate and promote individualistic self-interest, whereas a socialistic approach is concerned with social obligations that satisfy the needs of everyone. (Otto, 1999: 2)
Both mothers display their potential for hybridized connections with others that might make them radically unprepared for normalization (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 216). Just as the ‘22 year old graduate who sets up his own computer business in Silicon Valley may be as much an exemplar of this spirit [of the multitude] as the NGO worker trying to prevent famine, though their ethics are different’ (Rustin, 2002: 456), Wayan and Isabelle share an ethics and a desire to challenge disablism. They share the different local/global and material/virtual qualities of the multitude. As one of us explores in Goodley (2009: 260):
following Deleuze and Guattari, a key site for the politicization of disabled people can be found in their work with their bodies (and minds) where they destabilize, perhaps at times explode, such individualized understandings of body/self/psychology/identity – in order to make connections with other bodies and entities.
It is possible to refigure Isabelle as part of a multitude that means ‘we are masters of the world because our desire and labour regenerate it [biopower] continuously’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 358). The multitude seeks technological sabotage, communication and aesthetic subversion – characteristic of anti-capitalist politics – heterogeneous but connected (Abbinnett, 2007: 49). As mothers, both Isabelle and Wayan tap into the wider politics of disability associated with disabled families (McLaughlin et al., 2008).
Conclusion
While we have made a case for the use of their ideas, it is important that we acknowledge criticisms that have been levelled at Hardt and Negri. These include their avoidance of a foray into the political unconscious of Empire (O’Neill, 2002); overplaying the affirmative elements of the multitude particularly in the poorest parts of the globe (Balakrishan, 2000); their underestimation of the inhuman conditions attached to the supposedly nomadic qualities of migration (Rustin, 2002); their failure to recognize the inequities reproduced by biopolitics particularly in relation to women (Clough, 2003); and the irrelevance of their concepts in a post 9/11 world (Okur, 2007). Žižek (2008: 14) singles out Negri as a liberal communist who overemphasizes the power of digital capitalism. Balakrishnan (2000: 146) argues that the power of the multitude may burn out at the level of the local, failing to fan out across the national, let along global, worlds of labour. It is important not to be seduced by any theoretical manifesto:
Empire offers by contrast an optimism of the will that can only be sustained by a millenarian erasure of the distinction between the armed and the unarmed, the powerful and the abjectly powerless … Empire does not develop any sustained programme for the injured and the insulted of the world. (Balakrishnan, 2000: 147)
Meanwhile, Abbinnett (2007: 53) concludes that ‘in the end, there is no concrete realisation of democracy, only messianic performance of just acts within the limitless regime of biopolitical exploitation’. We might also note that Hardt and Negri’s work lacks a gender and class dimension, focusing in as it does on the concept of the Multitude, ignoring very material differences (Meekosha, 2011). The fact that Wayan and Isabelle typify the expectation of women to take on extended care, community and social work – as part of the ‘naturalized’ role of women – is a fact not lost on feminists (e.g. Hochschild, 1983). That many disabled women and mothers of disabled children face burn-out should not be forgotten (Tregaskis, 2004). Hardt and Negri can be viewed as lapsing into a hopelessly dreamy post-Marxist neverland narrative of humanity that fails to take seriously very real material examples of poverty, the powerful existence of the nation state and the ever-growing centrality of class conflicts. The Multitude is viewed as nothing more than an ephemeral concept that masks wider struggles based upon the realities of local, class and gender politics. 7 Moreover, Hardt and Negri’s idealized view of hybridity of cultures risks glossing over issues of inequality and power disparities (Grech, 2011).
While acknowledging these criticisms, we do believe that Hardt and Negri, at the very least, fire a geo-political imagination that can add substantively to critical disability studies. They permit us to read stories across Global North and Global South contexts that are tuned into shared individual and local actions that have far-reaching global impacts. Isabelle and Wayan remind us that ‘disability cannot be encapsulated in all embracing models, promoting instead the need for openness to multiple and changing definitions of disability’ (Grech, 2011: 98). Our mothers represented in this article alert us to the social work they enact in mundane, everyday contexts.
What affective labour produces are social networks, forms of community biopower … [and this] seems to provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism. (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 294)
If one plateau of the politics of disability is the politics of the Multitude then it is possible to read the stories presented above in terms of their Southern/Northern relevance and global potential. Hardt and Negri (2004: 309) argue that activism in an age of Empire requires ‘a science of plurality and hybridity, a science of multiplicities, that can define how all the various singularities express themselves fully in the Multitude’. ‘The global citizen’ and ‘the singular power of a new city’ each constitute a ‘singularity that is readily produced by cooperation, represented by the linguistic community, developed by the movements of hybridization’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 395). A key task is to ensure that the singular activisms of disability politics in the Global North or Global South are cherished for their singular contribution to the self-empowerment of disabled people alongside their contribution to the wider plural exchanges of disability politics that are expressed in the discourses of supranational organizations such as Disabled People’s International. A critical disability studies would, though, embrace the position held by Hardt and Negri (2004: 323) that ‘imperial geopolitics has no centre and no outside: it is a theory of internal relations in the global system’. The transformative contributions of our Global South comrades must be upheld as much (or more) as the familiar actions of other disabled comrades, based in the Global North. ‘No group is disposable in Empire, we are all producers and consumers of biopower’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 335). This view of the Multitude would have serious implications for reform of supranational organizations such as the United Nations: when we reach a stage where the Global South informs the Global North around freedom, liberty and human rights. Here, Wayan’s activism is celebrated as much as Isabelle’s, and their immaterial labour is responded to with energy and will.
On this biopolitical fabric, Multitudes intersect with other Multitudes, and form a thousand points of intersection, from the thousand rhizomes that link their multitudinous productions, from the thousand reflections born in every singularity emerge inevitable the life of the Multitude. (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 355)
Such intersections feed into Žižek’s critique of universal human rights which privilege the rights of ‘white male property owners to exchange freely on the market and exploit workers and women’ (2008: 123). Instead, the multitude encounters the ‘rise of the universality [that emerges] out of the particular lifeworlds’ (2008: 123).
The task of activists, producers and consumers of Empire and the Multitude is to become different – more than one is: ‘the Multitude creates a new race … a new humanity’. (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 356)
While it is crucially important to maintain a geo-political sensitivity to the material and historical conditions of inequality, we need also to find ways of celebrating resistance to disablism – wherever and whenever that might be found.