Canguilhem The Normal And The Pathological Pdf Creator
The Norm-Referenced and the PathologicalIt is not fair to say that disability studies has ignored Canguilhem. According to Google Scholar, the text has been cited 1,591 times. Of those, 457 mention 'disability' and 154 mention 'disability studies.' We cannot assume these are the only places where Canguilhem has been taken up, but this pool gives us a good vantage point to apprehend how the field has already reckoned with Canguilhem's work. As my survey of these citations finds, there is surprisingly little variation in the way disability studies has employed The Normal and the Pathological.It becomes clear when you sift through these 154 texts that cite both Canguilhem and disability studies that The Normal and the Pathological is referenced in many central texts of the field.
The Norm and the PathologicalWe can start with a straightforward but bold claim about Canguilhem, that The Normal and the Pathological predates the social model of disability as it was articulated by activists and scholars in the U.S. Starting in the 1970s.
In one of the only sections where he addresses the notion of disability specifically, Canguilhem writes,For an invalid there exists in the end the possibility of some activity and an honorable social role. But a human being's forced limitation to a unique and invariable condition is judged pejoratively in terms of the normal human ideal, which is the potential and deliberate adaptation to every condition imaginable.This concept of the externalization or 'forced limitation' on the body is extended in a discussion of a patient whose arm was cut by a moving circular saw.
The arm was saved but suffered 'an atrophy of all the muscles.' Canguilhem returns to his insistence on disease's relation to the whole person when he says that the man will be able to operate in the end according to former norms (i.e., he will be able to take up his job again) even though he might not experience them as precisely as before the accident. This focus on what he later calls 'levels of life' shows an attention to the way that any organism must continually make negotiations between its hereditary script of life and its environment. Canguilhem goes all the way to reckoning with theories of evolution and 'Life' to understand how the environment shapes an organism, a tack that predates what we now call the 'social model.' When he writes near the end of his text that 'it takes a great deal of clarity coupled with great courage not to prefer an idea of disease where some feeling of individual culpability can still find a place in an explanation of disease,' he describes precisely the weighty task early disability studies scholars were facing.Canguilhem finds philosophical footing for a number of things that disability studies holds dear: patient activism, the suspect heft of physicians on individuals' social lives, and a consideration of environmental factors on the value attached to certain 'deviant' bodies.
We can see how this footing rests on the critique of the normal-pathological quantitative relationship, but Canguilhem takes it further for us. His section devoted to unpacking the difference between a 'norm' and an 'average' should be required reading for those interested in the rise of social statistics and the birth of human taxonomies that began to label and therefore privilege able bodies. He wants to know whether the norm, as a culturally-inscribed value system, is derived simply from the average, a quantitative measure. In a reading of Adolphe Quetelet, a progenitor of probabilistic statistics, he finds that this indeed happened by assigning, in Quetelet's words, an 'ontological regularity' to the arithmetic average.
In other words, the average does not immediately or ineluctably give rise to the norm, but as Quetelet and his ilk assigned meaning to this expression, the norm gave rise to a higher expression of regularity that then informs the norm. In Canguilhem's characteristically acute style of critique, he exposes a logical flaw in this reasoning while introducing a term that disability studies today might usefully crib: 'A human trait would not be normal because frequent but frequent because normal, that is, normative in one given kind of life.' That it is only one 'kind of life' where a trait is considered normative opens the door on the other worlds disability studies has tried to imagine in academic and activist circles for decades.In the section immediately following his reading of Quetelet and the norm/average relationship, Canguilhem writes about 'a new concept in pathology' that we could also call 'a new concept in disability studies.' This concept — error — began to enter medicine as information theory helped to shape a notion of the body that analogized things like amino acids and macromolecules to codes and messages. This helped account for conditions, such as certain metabolic diseases, that did not manifest since birth but could not be understood as simply environmental. Conceiving of hereditary biochemical disturbances as 'errors' of DNA sequencing helped explain previously misunderstood phenomena.
And for Canguilhem, error thankfully leaves the crudity of the normal-pathological relationship behind because it promises to reconfigure a sick individual as 'the effect of universal mixing, love and chance' in a gradient structure of sickness and health.Canguilhem also puts ethical heft behind this concept. He writes that in using a notion of error, 'Disease is no longer related to individual responsibility; no more imprudence, no more excess to incriminate, not even collective responsibility as in the case of epidemics.'
He also considers the signification of the term for those it is being used to label: 'The term error mobilizes the affectivity less than the terms disease or ill, wrongly nevertheless, if it is true that the error is, at the outset, miscarriage.' Error becomes a way to conceptualize the mutability of health without reducing it to essential extremes. And in this way, error might help us reckon with structural problems like ableist stigma where other notions of the body fail. Canguilhem, then, gives us not only the basis for critiquing the cultural manifestations of the meteoric rise of human taxonomies attendant in modern medicine, but also its ontological underpinning.
The Normative and the PathologicalRosemarie Garland-Thomson first introduced the notion of the 'normate' in her book Extraordinary Bodies and it was taken up by many in the field as an oft-cited term. The neologism explains how absolute able-bodiedness is a veritable impossibility. The normate is not a real person, but a 'cultural self': 'the figure outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normate's boundaries.' In being positioned closer or further away from the normate, we come to be represented as more or less human. But essential in this notion is that no single person ever truly occupies the normate position; there is no absolutely healthy, abled-bodied individual, immutably perfect. We all hope to live long enough to become disabled one day.
We are all, as is often said in disability studies, temporarily able-bodied.This insistence on the mutable character of able-bodiedness has been important for establishing disability studies' institutional presence and we can think of it as an extension of Eve Sedgwick's 'universalizing notion' of sexual politics that was similarly effective for queer studies. Canguilhem offers a further extension of this reasoning that might give it an even firmer base. What he calls 'biological normativity' is his essential gambit in defining the pathological as a truly distinct category from the normal. He says that those with genetic abnormalities nonetheless sustain in their bodies; they have their own norms. Here he draws crucially a Darwinian notion of selection as a constant negotiation between an organism and the environment.
Canguilhem The Normal And The Pathological Pdf Creator Online
He writes,If biological norms exist it is because life, as not only subject to the environment but also as an institution of its own environment, thereby posits values not only in the environment but also in the organism itself. This is what we call biological normativity.This is a sharp divergence from the medical dogma that established 'normal' features of health and well-being that are used to assess many bodies on the same spectrum. Canguilhem, embracing a holistic complexity of each body's relation to its own norms, exposes a logical fallacy in how medicine understands deviation.With this in mind, we might imagine a more radical idea about normalcy: not that no one is perfectly normal, as the concept of the 'normate' suggests, but instead that everyone is normal.
'If it represents adaptation to imposed circumstances,' Canguilhem writes, 'every state of the organism, insofar as it is compatible with life, ends up being basically normal.' If we extend this into disability studies as an argument with social and political consequences, we might say that insofar as people live in accordance with norms that they determine, 'disability' loses its specificity as a process during which individuals adapt to their environments. The Normally-Conceived and the PathologicalWe can move to perhaps a more fine-grained line of thinking that we inherit from Canguilhem and it involves his reconfiguration of the subordinated status of technology to science.
Canguilhem finds in Leriche's writings an important way of placing technique, or technology, on par, if not ahead, of science in an epistemological pecking order. Canguilhem writes,Let me repeat once more that the intrinsic value of Leriche's theorylies in the fact that it is the theory of a technology, a theory for which technology exists, not as a docile servant carrying out intangible orders, but as advisor and animator, directing attention to concrete problems and orienting research in the direction of obstacles without presuming anything in advance of the theoretical solutions which will arise.This is because, in Canguilhem's gloss, Leriche considers 'the judgment of the technician' in ways that Comte and Bernard and others do not. Since it is the patient who first calls attention to the transformation caused by disease, it is the technician who then brings instruments to bear on felt evidence to then finally call up pathological reasoning. This is important because it reverses the logic often used to shore up the medical model of disability: that medicine can read the body objectively and proceed from 'science' in a way that abstracts lived experience. Canguilhem and Leriche give us a way to build from the ground up, in a way of recognizing that power does not exist monolithically descending from on high. What Canguilhem calls 'iatrocracy' (a word curiously absent from the Oxford English Dictionary but whose meaning we can estimate as 'rule by physicians') might be successfully challenged by shifting focus from the authority of medical science to the pragmatic necessity of medical technology.We could even say that Canguilhem's elevation of the status of technique is an early manifestation of the 'descriptive turn' humanistic and critical social scientific inquiry has seen in recent years.
Bruno Latour's imploration in Reassembling the Social was for researchers of the social world to describe — only describe — the assemblages that make up the world without assuming they already exist. Disability studies has begun to take up the promise of this kind of description for its capacity to depathologize individuals automatically stigmatized by ableist categorizations. This line of thinking has become particularly attentive to the dangers of a critical mode that can no longer furnish robust empirical accounts of the social world, a parallel to what scientized medicine did when it subordinated the role of technique in establishing the primacy of the normal-pathological relation.While Latour suggests ethnography as his solution to the problem of 'the social,' Canguilhem suggests phenomenology instead. In theorizing the technician as a kind of medium between a patient and a physician, Canguilhem foregrounded the very experience of disability beyond what ethnography might achieve through rigorous description. As a launching pad for future disability scholarship, we can ask: How could our methods begin to capture the lived-in-ness of disability as an essential way of bearing witness to the prime ontological status of experience? Might this mean that we must reimagine not just the concepts we use to label this experience, but also perhaps our very structures of language, representation, and communication?
If it's true as some say of identity politics, that its contemporary crisis is in the status of personal evidence it initially made room for with revolutionary results, Canguilhem's call for a return to phenomenology might be a viable way to give critique back its steam. Bibliography. Baynton, Douglas.
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