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Disability & Society

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Bauman's Strangers: Impairment and the invalidation of disabled people in modern and postmodern cultures
Bill Hughes Available online: 01 Jul 2010

To cite this article: Bill Hughes (2002): Bauman's Strangers: Impairment and the invalidation of disabled people in modern and post-modern cultures, Disability & Society, 17:5, 571-584 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687590220148531

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Disability & Society, Vol. 17, No. 5, 2002, pp. 571584

Baumans Strangers: impairment and the invalidation of disabled people in modern and post-modern cultures
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BILL HUGHES
Glasgow Caledonian University, School of Social Science, City Campus, Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow G4 0BA, UK

ABSTRACT Modernity is at the heart of the transformation of impairment into disability. This paper seeks to map out the processes that underpin this claim. Its focus is on the cultures of modernity and post-modernity, and how these complex legacies have constituted and invalidated mental and physical difference. The work of Zygmunt Bauman, particularly his use of the sociology of the (modern) stranger and his redemptive critique of modern and post-modern cultures provides a framework for the discussion. Baumans work has no explicit connection to Disability Studies, but his sensitivity to modern patterns of exclusion and othering provide not only a useful template to think through the relationship between modernity and disability, but also a useful corrective to the tendency in UK disability studies to ignore the cultural turn.

Introduction Modern culture was desperate for order, quick to sti e transgression, uncomfortable with difference, anthropoemic with respect to strangers. Modernity wanted everything neat and tidy; no mess, no matter out of place. Yet despite being the age of the anal retentive, an age in which the Dionysian impurities of desire, spontaneity and passion were sacri ced at the alter of reason, modernity witnessed the melting of everything solid (Berman, 1983). Modern culture is marked by a failure of re exivity or, more precisely, by an uncritical view of itself as a civilising tendency, as the handmaiden of progress and the vanquisher of superstition. Despite being a time in which difference, creativity and change were everywhere in evidence, the embodied self in modernity was constituted by social concepts which discouraged difference, creativity and change (Diprose, 1993, p. 4). Excess, daring, valour, vigour, vitality, in short, everything that is easy, necessary, free (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 48) is tamed and made temperate by the pious moralisms, civilising legislative
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initiatives, constraining customs and aesthetic poverty of modernity. Nietzsche saw modern culture as mediocre and moribund because it is offended by anything that disturbs the sense of order. Chaos in the arch-enemy of a rationalising order that demands homogeneity, clarity and perspective. Rationalist modernity argued Alain Touraine (1995, p. 201) rejected or forgot anything that seemed to resist the triumph of reason, or else con ned it in repressive institutions. I suspect that many disabled people are likely to recognise and applaud the characterisation of modernity as a culture of forgetfulness, exclusion and con nement. It seems to hold up a mirror to their experience of it. Modernity has laboured under the myth of cultural essentialism, hung on tenaciously to the view that, social differences are at best incidental variances on one, universal, true and essential human nature (Lemert 1997, p. 40). Yet it has excluded and oppressed people who have had to bear the burden of this legacy because differences have been castigated, stigmatised and pathologised. Modernity is a normalising culture. Narrow norms of human authenticity have played havoc with the lives of those who have been marked with incidental variances from the ideal. The essentialist dream has tended not only to ignore but also to invent and compound difference by transforming it into the realities of discrimination and disadvantage. Disabled people and the disability movement must develop a critique of modernity because critics of modernism have been suggesting that the co-existence of universalism and exclusion is more than mere historical coincidence (Kahn, 2001, p. 46). In this essay, I intend to use the sociology of the stranger as a template to analyse the modern and post-modern, cultural forms of exclusion and invalidation experienced by disabled people. Although Jenny Morris (1996) has edited a book entitled Encounters with Strangers, it does not make an explicit appeal to the sociology of the stranger. Indeed, it is an invitation to disabled men and non-disabled feminists to embrace the concerns and experiences of disabled women. It is these two groups who are constituted as the strangers and the target of the texts familiarisation agenda. The use of the term stranger is more of a literary device than a claim upon a sociological construct. A very brief historical overview of the sociology of the stranger, suggests that it has classical sociological roots. It can be traced back to Georg Simmels 1908 essay, aptly entitled The Stranger (Simmel, 1971). Simmels concern with reciprocal sociation led him to examine how the other is produced in interaction and his personal historical location in a world of collapsing gemienschaft underpinned his concern with itinerancy, on the one hand, and the issues of remoteness/proximity and detachment/participation, on the other. Alfred Schutz (1944), founder of sociological phenomenology, was interested in the spatial co-ordinates of recognition, and the way in which the familiar and the homely are threatened by the approach of the stranger. The German tradition of the sociology of the stranger had a powerful impact on American, in particular Chicago, sociology as its key gures like Park, Lo and and Reismanstruggled to make sense of the urban multiculturalism of the US melting pot (Harman, 1988). It should be made clear at the outset that I do not intend to make use of the Simmel/Chicago School notion of the stranger. In this view, we are all strangers, separated from one another by the

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maelstrom of urban anonymity. In Simmels metropolitan world, the existential condition is one of isolation, of extreme subjectivism and reserve and this, indeed, is the only possible response to the extreme objectivism of modern culture. Others are always near but always remote. The tragedy of modern culture is that there is no possibility for authentic, reciprocal social relations. In this conception of modernity, it matters little whether or not one is a disabled person, for in the lonely crowd, we are all starved of intimacy; we are all atomised and estranged from one another. This legacy aside, the concept of the stranger has played a signi cant role in sociological discourse. It has been evident in positioning the researcher with respect to the subjects of ethnographic study (Agar, 1980). It is well represented in urban studies (Lo and, 1973), studies of colonialism (Bailyn & Morgan, 1991) and, recently, in feminist scholarship on post-coloniality and migration (Ahmed, 2000). In much post-modern literature one can detect the sociology of the stranger in discourses on the other and othering. However, this discussion will draw primarily on the work of Zigmunt Bauman. Despite, or perhaps because of, his ambivalent attraction to post-modernist sensibilities, Bauman retains the notions of the stranger in his work and uses it frequently, if unsystematically, in his many critical explorations of the cultures of modernity and postmodernity. Unlike Simmel, Bauman is not interested in strangerhood as an existential outcome of life in modern times. He is concerned with how social and cultural practices produce and invalidate strangers. In order to embellish the theoretical language of the sociology of the stranger, he draws on anthropology and philosophy. Mary Douglas notion of the other as dirt as matter out of place and Sartres idea of the slimy (visqueux) as that which is constituted as the repulsive are both concepts which are part of Baumans repertoire (Bauman, 1973, 1989). It is Baumans work that will be the main point of reference for this application of the sociology of the stranger to modern and post-modern cultural processes of disablement. I will argue that the failure of the social model of disability to embrace the cultural turn in social theory (Hughes, 1999, 2000) can be abrogated, in part, at least, by an appeal to Baumans radical critique of the cultures of modernity and post-modernity, and to his life long hermeneutic endeavour to understand the other (1978, p. 203).

The Modern Way: Rectifying Anomalies, Ma(r)king and Banishing Strangers Michel Foucault (1967, p. 13) described madness a dark disorder which opposes the minds luminous and adult stability. In the Age of Reason, madness becomes the great anomaly, a cancer at the heart of the community. As the early moderns embraced reason, its opposite became a central source of anxiety, lth that needs to be extracted, cleansed. Bauman (1997, p. 5) claims that at the heart of modernity one nds a dream of purity a vision of order, a world clean and hygienic. Modernity is opposed to tradition and as such, it stands for a perpetual new beginning. Purity must be continuously rede ned and new purifying projects continuously invented:

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From Foucault we get a vision of early modern culture as a place longing for order and purity: The early modern concern with health has been extremely durable (Mellor & Shilling, 1997, p. 44). Disease and impairment represented the negation of morality. Physical and mental anomaly became constituted in fact, metaphor and memory as a threat to the fabric of existence. The image of the leperthe stranger par excellence of the late middle agessat heavily on the minds of folk long after its elimination as a practical problem: What doubtless remained longer than leprosy, and would persist when the Lazar houses had been empty for years, were the values and images attached to the gure of the leper as well as the meaning of his exclusion, the social importance of that insistent and fearful gure which was not driven off without rst being inscribed within a sacred circle. (Foucault, 1967, p. 6). To banish impurity was essential to the physical and spiritual integrity of modern people. Fear of the other or the stranger was based on the fear of incorporating impurity into the body: dirt was symbolically linked with sin while cleanliness and sobriety were markers of righteous living (Mellor & Shilling, 1997, p. 44). The volatile medieval body (Classen, 1993; Elias, 1978, 1982: Mellor & Shilling, 1997) was replaced by the protestant modern body that was marked by discipline and control, and which closed itself off from those impure others who represented moral danger and the possibility of contamination. The impulsiveness and openness of the medieval baroque body with its carnavalesque predilections (Bakhtin, 1968, p. 39) was much less prejudiced towards abjection and physical difference, much more comfortable with the happy negation of uniformity and similarity. As Striker (1997) has argued, the ubiquity of plagues in Medieval Europe meant that impairment and bodily difference were part of the fabric of the daily existence. The closed body of modernity, however, exacerbates social distance. It seeks to exclude rather than incorporate alterity. A barrier built of prejudice and resentment frequently proved more effective than the thickest of stone walls. Active avoidance of contact is constantly boosted by the fear of contaminationin the literal and metaphorical sense: the strangers are believed to carry contagious diseases, to be infested with insects, to defy rules of hygiene and thus represent a health hazard; or to spread morbid ideas and habits, practice black arts or dismal and gory cults, disseminate moral depravity and laxity of mores. Resentment spills over everything one can associate with strangers: their way of talking, their way of dressing, their religious rituals, the way they

Baumans Strangers organise their family life, even the smell of the food they like to cook. (Bauman, 1995, p. 62)

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Bauman refers to the modern taming and reversal of the carnivalesque, of the constitution and invalidation of alterity. To be other, to be designated strange is to be de ned as the antithesis of cleanliness, rationality and order. Deviant worlds are multiplied as similarity and uniformity become the guiding principles of cultural constitution. For sure, as capitalism and modernity took hold and began to inform intercorporeal relations, impairment met with prejudice and resentment, but in the wake of the medicalisation of disability, a preference for the thickest of stone walls became the more attractive policy option. The con nement of the stranger suited the bourgeois predilection for boundaries clearly drawn, absolute categories that legitimated the hierarchical separation of this from that. In the modern period, socially sanctioned segregation of disabled people, reinforced negative societal attitudes towards human difference (Braddock & Parish, 2001, p. 52). Economic prerogatives transformed impairment into idleness and the cultural fear of contamination informed the strategy of social distance that led to the great con nement: What modern strangers did not t was the vision of order Merely by being around they interfered with the work that the state swore to accomplish and undid its efforts to accomplish it. The strangers exhaled uncertainty where certainty and clarity should have ruled order binding was a war of attrition waged against the strangers and the strange. (Bauman, 1997, p. 18) With the modern state in no mood to compromise on its vision of order, all permissiveness in relation to difference and disability is annihilated. Difference is to be severed or corrected, exiled or normalised. The invalidation of disabled people was based on an anthropoemic strategy which meant vomiting the strangers, banishing them from the limits of the orderly world and barring them from all communication with those inside (Bauman, 1997, p. 18). With respect to disabled people modern medicine became the vehicle for achieving this end. Medical values and bourgeois values are practically inseparable. Bourgeois values, derived from enlightenment universalism, can have no truck with that which is perceived as anomalous for reason in ascendancy is the champion of normality. The project of modernity could not conceive of co-existence with strangers, since this would be co-existence with disorder, with fault and aw. Modernity is the re nement of techniques of correction and self-correction. As the early custodial total institutions became medical spaces, and the legitimacy to identify and correct pathological bodies became embedded in them, then disabled residents became the eshy testing ground for rehabilitative practices. Sterilisation, shock therapies, psychosurgery were just some of the rehabilitative strategies used by professionals as cures or palliatives in their war against mental illness and a variety of impairments (Braddock & Parish, 2001). The science of rehabilitation was the bourgeois solution to the demon of imperfection. If the demon could be exorcised then the cleansed individual could be returned to the orderly world. If not, then she was con ned forever in the

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invisible spaces behind the high walls where the others lived in what Bauman (1987, p. 19) describes as a state of suspended extinction. The relief of modern fear and anxiety rests in either making the strange familiar or hiding it from the sensitive gaze of the average decent citizen. However, modernity is not always this benign. A suspension on extinction can be revoked. One of Baumans most controversial claims is that the Holocaust was no historical aberration (1989). Rather, it was consistent with the project of modernity, commensurate with its anthropoemic response to strangers. Historians tend to blame the excesses of Teutonic culture for the concentration camps and their Fordist technologies of genocide and sociologist have tended to view the holocaust as an accident at the margins of the modernising processes of rationalisation. Bauman (1989, p. xiii), on the other hand, argues that the holocaust was a characteristically modern phenomenon that cannot be understood outside of the cultural tendencies and technical achievements of modernity. This is a thesis that Disability studies must pay attention to. Clearly, modernity has had a great deal of dif culty in incorporating impairment. The modern history of the estrangement and segregation of disabled people is testimony to this. That which cannot be made orderly is offensive and must be eliminated. The logic that created the total institutions of the great con nement is commensurate with logic that created the concentration camps. Both are not simply formal equivalents as Goffman argued in Asylums (1968), they are equivalent as responses to the problem of political hygiene, expressions of the institutionalised need to purify the body politic. They differ only in that one solution is more nal than the other. It is the end that justi es the means and so the means matter not. If the problem of disability is conceived in terms of the disposal of impaired bodiesthat is, in the modern waythen a policy shift from incarceration or sterilisation to incineration can be justi ed on technical grounds. The eugenic sterilisation law enacted by the Nazis in 1933 was based on a legal framework developed in California in the 1920s (Reilly, 1991). Modernity by extrapolation from Baumans thesiscan be regarded as a necessary, though not suf cient condition for the mass murder of disabled people. Bureaucracy is ultra-rational, driven to embrace the abnormally normal. It makes cruelty and barbarism possible because it has no sense of suffering and should it be asked to provide a moral justi cation for its actions then it can always appeal to a banal utilitarian ethic like social Darwinism. The bureaucratic machine thrives on social distance and makes no direct or emotional contact with the ushed face of the doomed stranger. The totalitarian state violence that sponsored the genocide of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, disabled people and other undesirables was produced by unique cultural and historical conditions, but nonetheless, the holocaust must be understood as an extraordinary example of the irrationality of modern rationality (Beilharz, 2000, p. 98). Modern culturein Baumans viewis both heterophobic and morally indifferent, and as such will be well disposed to any means that proposes the extirpation of difference. Given this position, it is little wonder that in the 1990s, Bauman tries to inject moral sensibilities into cultural critique by drawing on Levinas (1981) argument that ethics is rst philosophy and that responsibility for the other is paramount to the extent that moral action precedes rational

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calculation. Modern history suggests that when the reverse is the case, disabled people will suffer at the hands of power. Mitchell & Snyder (2001, p. 213) argue that the desired eradication of disability is countered only with the ferocity of an ultimate recalcitrance to violent utopian solutions. Yet there is a twist to this story that renders Baumans appeal to ethics, with respect to disabled people, somewhat problematic. In modern culture, impairment is a personal tragedy (Oliver, 1990) and disabled people are responded to by non-disabled others as the victims of tragic events. If, as Bauman suggests, that modern people fear contamination from the impurities that strangers are thought to embody, then the fear of disability is, by de nition, the fear of the ominous presence or lightning strike of physical or mental transformation and its tragic consequences. Tragedy is trouble and ruin, but there is no blame attached to its settlement upon an individual. Consequently, the disabled stranger is deserving of a sympathetic response. The speci c form of strangerhood inscribed upon the bodies of disabled people in modernity requires a particular type of social response, one which is dominated by pity but expressed primarily, through the apparatus of non-disabled hegemony, as compassion. This cocktail of interpretation of emotional responses to disability is most modern and most charitable. The charitable institutions of modernity have mobilised the emotions invested in the tragic and the pitiful to patronise, banish and, at times, exterminate or propose the extermination of the people who could not possibly have or attain a reasonable quality of life. Sometimes, the tragic are better off dead. The Nazis took this aphorism literally and pressed its sentiments into the service of mass extermination. It is dif cult to regard this form of responsibility for the other as an appropriate ethic. Tragedy is messy and modernity and mess are incompatible. Bauman argues (1989, 1991, 1997) that the modern impulse to tidy up is based on the horror of deviation. As such, modernity is bent on the bulldozing of all unauthorized difference and all wayward life-patterns. It seeks to decry and banish and evict the other, the different the ambivalent (1991, pp. 252253). Impaired bodies and tragic lives have been, quite clearly, targets of this deeply ingrained cultural fastidiousness and its excessive remedies. The Post-Modern Way: Celebrating Difference Post-modern culture marks a change of mood. The stranger could be cool and disorder could be interesting or pleasurable. Differences pile up upon one another, distinctions previously not considered relevant to the overall scheme of things and, therefore, invisible now force themselves upon the canvas of the Lebenswelt (Bauman, 1997, p. 13). Post-modernity is modernity without utopianism, modernity cast adrift from the illusion that its project will deliver truth, happiness, and equality for one and all. The enlightenment slogans are dying. The new watchwords for the new times are liberty, diversity, tolerance (Bauman, 1991, p. 98). Modernity sought to legislate and control, to engineer the social and to dominate nature. Post-modernity seeks to interpret and mediate between a plurality of more or less equal truth claims (Bauman, 1987). Such a context is more likely to

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be able to accommodate and even recognise the validity of strangers and strange ideas. The post-modern word viewin Baumans thinkingis amenable to the pluralism and heterogeneity of values and experience, much less bothered with the modern pre-occupation with the ordered totality. The postmodern mind is altogether less excited than its modern adversary by the prospect of enclosing the world in a grid of neat categories and clear cut divisions. We are somewhat less horri ed today by the nasty habit of things spilling over their de nitional boundaries (Bauman, 1997, p. 167) In modernity, disabled people were one of the groups who symbolised contingency and uncertainty. Now that contingency and uncertainty are fast becoming a way of life, then the modern heterophobia that could not handle it seems less challenging and so, not only has a context for more tolerant behaviour emerged, but those who have been victimised by the quest for civilised order have begun to exploit the opportunity to assert their identities and to celebrate the very attributes that, in modernity, had made them strangers. Disabled people have challenged prejudice with pride. The disability movement and the social model of disability and (by extension) disability studies owes its origins to and is a child of the counter culture. It is, therefore, formed out of and from an historical moment that was marked by a profound challenge to the hegemony of order and authority. The Independent Living Movement (ILM) in the USA for example was part of a broader culture of resistance (Barnes et al., 1999, p. 68) that challenged medical authority and the widely held view that disability and dependency were synonymous. Culture can be said to originate in the process by which a group of people come together in order to organise and re ect upon their own lives. Cultureat least in the tradition established in Britain by Raymond Williamsrefers to the ordinary, to the web of meanings and practices (or activities) that inform the organisation of everyday life. [1] The counter culture is rst and foremost a celebration of difference, a festival of despised identities, a coming out of all those unruly elements who refused to be puri ed, suburbanised, made into the image and likeness of a sterile and unimaginative sense of responsibility, and an overbearing sense of order and duty. It is only once the project of modernity starts to dissolve, or rather show signs of a condition of post-modernity within itself, that difference and heterogeneity can become a basis for social relations: alongside the collapse of the opposition between reality and its simulation, truth and its representationcomes the blurring and the watering down of the difference between the normal and the abnormal, the expectable and the unexpected, the ordinary and the bizarre, domesticated and wildthe familiar and the strange, us and the strangers. (Bauman, 1997, p. 25) The decarceration of disabled people from total institutions in the later part of the twentieth century corresponds to the epochal moment of the happy collapse into fragmentation and uncertainty that Bauman (1991) regards as the hallmark of

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post-modern times. The other comes out into the world and shows herself and will not go away: We are everywhere these days, wheeling and loping down the street, tapping our canes, sucking on our breathing tubes, following our guide dogs, puf ng and sipping on the mouth sticks that propel our motorised chairs. We may drool, hear voices, speak in staccato syllables, wear catheters to collect our urine, or live with a compromised immune system. We are all bound together, not by this list of our collective symptoms but by the social and political circumstances that have forged us as a group. (Linton, 1998, p. 4)
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It is the rst clause of the rst sentence that is the most telling. We are everywhere these days. This is, of course, an exaggeration. There are still barriers, places and spaces where disabled people cannot go, but there has been the beginning of a transition from invisibility to visibility that brings impairment into the lives of non-disabled people. Some of the closed social spaces of modernity are opening up. The stranger is no longer incarcerated. She has a face and demands recognition. Forms of embodiment and intercoproreality are changing. According to BuciGlucksmann (1994) the sensuousness of the baroque is making a comeback. The hegemony of the disciplined, modern protestant body [2] is being challenged by the more exible, sensuous and impulsive baroque modern body (Mellor & Shilling, 1997). Modernity was a design for certainty and a project of domination (Bauman, 1991, p. 4). The scent of indiscipline with respect to body or self was a cause for alarm and mobilisation of cadres of rectifying professionals. For Bauman, the post-modern is the rise of the awareness, and acceptance of contingency and ambivalence. There was contingency and ambivalence a plenty during modernity, but the engrained habit of self-deception kept it concealed. Now that contingency is our destiny and the hubris that oiled the wheels of modernity is much less in evidence, then impairment can be transformed from a symbol of disorder and tragedy (Oliver, 1990) into nothing out of the ordinary, merely another example of the pervasiveness of contingency and difference. Bauman (1991, p. 235)drawing on philosophers like Heller, Rorty and Levinascontends that post-modern culture offers, theoretically at least, possibilities for revalidating those whom modernity transformed into its otsam and jetsam: to unravel the emancipatory potential of contingency-as-destiny, it would not suf ce to avoid humiliating the others. One needs also to respect themand respect them precisely in their otherness, in the preferences they have made, in their right to make preferences. One needs to honour the otherness in the other, the strangeness in the stranger, remembering that the unique is universal, that it is being different that makes us resemble each other and that I cannot respect my own difference but by respecting the difference of the other

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Post-Modern Aporias Lets not get over optimistic. Postmodernity is a site of opportunity and a site of danger (Bauman, 1991, p. 262). Bauman (1997, p. 14) is not over optimistic about the depth of post-modern tolerance or its love of difference. The new criterion of purity and inclusion in post-modern culture is the ability and willingness to consume. Unless disabled people have the resources and wherewithal to participate in cultures of consumption, then they will continue to be marginalised. Even if prejudice with respect to physical and/or mental difference declines, those who lack economic capital will become awed consumers (Bauman, 1998, p. 93) and will be driven into the underclass. Poverty is and always has been the key factor in the modern constitution of disability and the major solution to it, namely entry to the labour market is still problematic. Post-Fordist economies offer some opportunities for some groups within the disabled population, most notably, the younger better educated minority. However, the outlook for the majority of disabled people of working age remains bleak (Barnes et al., 1999, p. 116). This is a truth that disabled people cannot afford to ignore. If, as Bauman argues, that post-modern society is organised around consumer freedom, then those who are not able to exercise it will be recognised as outsiders. Many disabled people will become part of what Bauman (1998) calls the new poor. While the material realities of post-modern existence offer limited prospects for disabled people, certain cultural developments should also be greeted as potentially unwelcome. As I have argued elsewhere (Hughes, 1999, 2000), our ocularcentric culture, with its preference for physical and mental perfection, is a source of aesthetic discrimination that invalidates and excluded people with impairments. The post-modern celebration of difference seems to be swallowed up by the modern penchant for aesthetic normalisation and the valorisation of ideal standards of beauty. The growth of hyper-reality and the dominance of representation by the image, suggest that post-modernity is primarily a visual culture: From TV to newspapers, from advertising to all sorts of mercantile epiphanies, our society is characterized by a cancerous growth of vision, measuring everything by its ability to show or be shown and transmuting communication into a visual journey. It is a sort of epic of the eye and of the impulse to read. (De Certeau, 1988, p. xx) One can argue that this cultural context ups the ante with respect to the importance of physical capital and simultaneously embodies negative consequences for impaired people. As Baumans biographer, Peter Beilharz (2000, p. 130) writes: The postmodern body, like the city of Los Angeles, is an artefact, where a mirage, that of personal use, still guides the image of the perfect face and body, while the face and body of the other bring out nothing but offence and repulsion. The argument that the baroque sentiments of postmodernity valorise corporeal difference and contingency may be less convincing in light of a claim such as this.

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For Bauman, post-modernity does not replace modernity. It is a set of more or less co-existent tendencies within it and, therefore, a set of cultural forces that may not necessarily be able to assert themselves. Indeed, contingency, by its very nature, is not particularly assertive and, therefore, hardly the best candidate on which to base a programme of cultural renewal. To validate the invalidated, such a programme would be a requirement. Indeed, some commentators have argued that there is evidence that in the contemporary world, there is a re-commitment to the project of modernity (Kahn, 2001, p. 129). This suggests the hardening of heterophobia, rather than the celebration of difference. It is dif cult to resist the evidence that (cultural) racism is globally in the ascendancy. Equally, it is dif cult to resist the argument that racism and disablism are bedfellows that feed from one another. Surely, it is artless to suggest, that overnight, the stranger will cease to offend and repel. Bauman teaches that modernity is not eclipsed by post-modernity. The modern intention that made difference into an offence: the offence, the most mortal and least forgivable sin (Bauman, 1991, p. 255) has not evaporated. Disabled people are still viewed as symbols of tragedy, as reminders of the frailty of existence and non-disabled culture continues to resist and despise the most obvious lessons of the human condition. The refusal to recogniseand, indeed, celebratefrailty and imperfection makes each of us a stranger to ourselves. No one can escape contamination by tragedy yet modernity deludes itself by embracing a project of puri cation and transcendence that is continuously hoist by its own utopian petard and, thus, it banishes and excludes what it should welcome and embrace.

Conclusion Miles (2000, pp. 606608) broaches the issue of revulsion as a response to disability and refers to Nietzshes argumentfrom Zarathustraagainst the over compassionate God who dispenses pity and alms to disabled people. For Nietzsche, this godDickensian to the coreneeds to be eliminated. The fall of this god would be more relief to the recipients of pity and alms than all the bountiful gestures and philanthropic displays of pity and alms that have served to salve the consciences of the pious and the pure. Charity and benevolencethe light side of institutionalised disablismis much darker than it seems and in Baumans work it can be linked to the darkest moment of modernity when the quest for perfect order led Jewish and disabled people to the gas chambers. Pity and alms are the stuff of modern bourgeois compassion, the olive branches offered to those who have been deemed unworthy to live with the blessed and the beautiful. This kind of compassionand the civilised modernism that promotes itis a hairs breadth from barbarism. The modern bureaucratic mode of administration has shown its talents for barbarity, that is, for the social production and reproduction of the immorality of indifference. Indeed, modernity has been a master class in moral indifference. It has divested the use and deployment of violence from moral calculus and has emancipated the desiderata of rationality from interference of ethical norms or moral inhibitions (Bauman, 1989,

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p. 28). In the ugly gap between modernity and moralitycreated by the former disabled people have tried to survive. Joel S. Kahn (2001, p. 46) suggests that we need to look closely at the paradox that appears to lie at the heart of all agendas based on universalising aspirations at least up until now, namely that they seem to coincide with historical practices of exclusion, more often than not framed in a language of naturalism. Bauman suggests that the universalising aspects of modernity lead to cultures of exclusion, a desperate desire to create unity, uniformity and familiarity, such that the stranger is continuously constituted and expunged. One can argue that, from the point of view of disability studies, Baumans hermeneutics embody the implication that modern culture is the process that transforms impairment into disability, bio-physical status into oppression. The invalidating practices of modernity are derived from a narrow, attenuated sense of inclusiveness in which anything or anyone out of the ordinary has to be assimilated or banished. The ordinary is a product of ratiocination and is therefore established as a truth that, in turn, constructs the extra-ordinary as a threat or a danger. Baumans redemptive critique of morality (Delanty, 1999, p. 100) is set in motion by his sensibility to what modern bureaucratic rationality, and the culture of puri cation and corporeal discipline can do to constitute and invalidate subjects. Extrapolating from Baumans appreciation of the processes that constitute the other as strange, we can appreciate how the culture of modernity contributes to the disablement of impaired people and we can learn that the post-modern promise is profoundly contingent, posing threats to and offering opportunities for the movement of disabled people. To date, disability studies has been coy about postmodernity and its intellectual roots in the cultural turn. However, this is changing. Mike Oliver (2001, pp. 149150) has recently encouraged students of disability to investigate disability issues in the postmodern world. Furthermore, although he remains, quite rightly, a strong proponent of the view that, for disabled people the world over, survival is more important than cultural representation, he clearly rules culture into the agenda for contemporary disability praxis. This paper has been an attempt to explore that agenda by using Baumans work as a point of departure.

NOTES [1] Culture was de ned by Williams (1965, p. 57) as: a description of a particular way of life which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour. The analysis of culture from such a de nition is the clari cation of meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of life, a particular culture. This praxiological approach to culture is also central to Baumans work. Mellor & Shilling (1997, p. 47) do not like or use the term postmodern but prefer, like Giddens, to stress epochal continuity: The bodily forms characteristic of contemporary Western societies are not simply post modern, but can be seen, metaphorically, as straddling the borders between the past, present and future. The disciplined, cognitively focused bodies of early modernity persist but are increasingly accompanied by a resurgent sensuality

[2]

Baumans Strangers
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