EPTC 2016
Fluency and the Biopolitics of Hegemony
Joshua St. Pierre
[DRAFT: DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION]
In this paper I will argue thathegemony takes root not simply through ideology but the material ordering of bodies, and I offer the analytic of “fluency” as a way to understand the closing of the site of politics through the production of seemingly uninterrupted spaces, temporalities, and meanings. The project is an immanent critique of both disability studies and contemporary political theory, for not only has the attention to “normalization” within disability studies sometimes veiled other operations of power and modes of disability, but I suggest that using “fluency” as a material focal point can help denaturalize the workings of ideology and hegemony. Without effacing the concept of normalcy, I thus seek to draw attention to “fluency” as an intertwined force at work in the construction of ableist worlds, one that is co-articulatedthrough the discourses of biopower and hegemony.
Fluency is defined as an “effortless flow of speech” (Guitar 2006), a coordinatedyet often strainedperformance of bending the energies and capacities of bodies towards stable and univocal futures. Autistics are compelled to restrict stimming, to sit on their hands (to have “quiet hands”), and thereby reroute bodily capacities to the performance of both docile and so-called intelligible communication. As Zach Richter has argued (2014), the facial tics and erratic gestures of dysfluent speakers are never communicative inflections, but are made abject and cast out of the communicative realm altogether by what I am here calling technologies of fluency. What is left is an efficient semiotic operation that instrumentalizes our relations with others. Or more precisely, if fluency is a type of Foucauldian technology, then the function of this biopolitical strategy is to regulate and focus the communicative event towards specific, technical ends through the logic of optimization and closure. In particular, it is this drive towards closure—towards stability, clarity, intelligibility—that mobilizes fluency as a political, hegemonic operation.
While fluency is first and foremost an ableist process enacted within the material and psychic, it that must also be located within the social and the political. Fluency smooths over the frictions within bodies, thereby limiting their possibilities, but this is always in service of reducing frictions between bodies, subjects, discourses, institutions, and processes. One theoretical entrance into fluency is thus the Marxist discourse of “hegemony,” which refers to the permeation of a particular ideology (that of the ruling class) throughout the economic, political, and cultural spheres of a society. Hegemony, much like fluency, is the impulse towards a seamless order without interruption. It is only by regulating the desires and relations of the working class within every sphere of life that capitalism can generate consent and reproduce itself—as if it were the only option. This last part is essential to the operation of hegemony, since like compulsory able-bodiedness, capitalism offers a choice when there is actually none. We are “free to sell our labour” within a hegemonic system that not only offers no genuine alternative to capitalism, but actively seeks to render any alternative unimaginable. How does capitalism “cover its tracks” to appear as if we all agree? How does compulsory able-bodiedness?
One possible answer positions fluency at the intersection of hegemony and biopolitics, where fluency can be understood as an immanent mechanism by which hegemony is produced and maintained within the bodies of a population. This reading, note, departs somewhat from Gramsci and his interlocutors like Hall, Laclau, and cultural studies more generally, for whom hegemony is necessarily routed though ideology and “articulated”through discourse and representation. One of my concerns with this Gramscian logic (especially as it has been taken up within disability studies) is that hegemony and counterhegemony rely heavily on norms of intelligibility that circulates ableist and populist demands for legibility/intelligibility that restrict the possibilities (of access, participation, and belonging) for dysfluent people and thereby undercut crip communities. The more orthodox—yet directly related—concern is that a focus on “ideology” risks attributing the solidification of social order to representation rather, as Jon Beasley-Murray (2010) argues, than mapping it to a “politics that is immanent and corporeal, that works directly through the body” (180). Consider, briefly, three related modes in which fluency operates as a biopolitical-hegemonic technology: 1) conforming subjects to a stable system of representation; 2) reducing friction to secure a smooth relay of biopower; and 3) regulating collective time.
First, fluency sits at the crossroads of hegemony’s need, on the one hand, for univocal meanings to be continuously re-enacted within the material, and, on the other, the biopolitical governance of human capacity and difference at the most capillary level of human life. It is a linchpin between representation and bodies, a technology that “constitutes the subjects who then conform to or recognize a system of representation” (181). By generating singular and measured utterances that can represent the individualized subject, fluency secures the ideological demand for clarity and transparency (Beasley-Murray 180) beneath technologies of representation within the corporeal. Put otherwise, the naturalization of able-bodiedness occurs not just in the articulation of ableist and eugenic ideology, but in the material production of subjects that appear “ready-made” to conform to stable and univocal systems of representation.
Second, and in turn, fluency cultivates subjects who can be re-presented in stable iteration (cf. Butler 1990) and who thus interlock cleanly within biopolitical and productive systems. The “linguistic exchange” is modelled after the juridical contract and the economic exchange, both which represent a fluid transaction between necessarily pre-defined and stable subjects who each speak and act with a singular,rational voice. Technologies of subjection must take into account and manage friction: to pre-empt rupture through a totalizing field of intelligibility that leaves little room for interpretation and dispute, and to eliminate the performative slips that destabilize social reproduction. This is once more a yearning for closure. The hegemonic system of compulsory able-bodiedness impels us to perform ability seamlessly, fluently, and, in turn, fluently.
Third, and again in turn, we must recognize that fluency as a mode of neoliberal and late-capitalist governance both quickens and collapses time in the service of dominant social orders. The issue for a crip politic is that our shared present is uninhabitable (Garland-Thomson 2012) or unlivable (Butler 2004) for any body that strays outside of hegemonic temporal norms. Fluency can be read as a distinctly modern project bound to the technical management of time, or what Elizabeth Freeman terms “chrononormativity” (2010). As she explains, “Corporations and nation-states seek to adjust the pace of living in the places and people they take on: to quicken up and/or synchronize some elements of everyday existence, while offering up other spaces and activities as leisurely, slow, sacred, cyclical, and so on and thereby repressing or effacing alternative strategies of organizing time” (2010, 12). Put in terms of fluency, chrononormativity attempts to eliminate friction and instantiate in our bodies and relations the distinctly modern flow of time that is at once linear, forward-facing, and uninterrupted.
One of the ableist effects of fluency is that it regulates access to the present. Norms of fluency, traversing all social registers, shape who gets to participate within encounters, political and otherwise. Yet while the accelerated temporality of fluency has worrisome overt consequences in itself, it also hides a distinctly hegemonic function. That is, fluency works to close the present moment such that nothing, in the existential sense,happens. Fluency channelizes the human capacity for action within our communicative bodies to mitigate the possibilities of something aporetic interrupting the tractable passage of time. The hegemonic impulse towards closure, the collapse of polyvocal access and engagement within the encounter, is ultimately an effort to render the present and its possibility for rupture utterly inert.
In sum, I have argued that neoliberal and postindustrial subjects are rendered governable and productive through technologies of closure that seek to collapse the encounter—or, at least, collapse polyvocal access and engagement with the encounter—through a series of sutures enacted upon and through the body. Only by inscribing social order in our bodies and smoothing over the site of politics can compulsory able-bodiedness manifest as a stable, seamless, and natural field—everywhere and nowhere at once. “Compulsory able-bodiedness,” as Robert McRuer argues, “functions by covering over, with the appearance of a choice, a system in which there actually is no choice” (McRuer 8). While paraded around in discourses and practices like liberal eugenics, this “choice” is in fact covered by fluent processes that disavow thick moments of collective access and judgment. The “choice” is covered over by fluent processes that regulate and streamline the encounter and thus effectively exclude the voices of those most affected by eugenic logic. Ableist and eugenic ideology contribute to this “common ground” of disability oppression, the apparent consensus on the desirability of able-bodiedness, but this hegemonic ideology is always a secondary inscription: an echo of the material in the sphere of representation.
1