What Are We Is Found By Discovering What We Are NOT
by Craig Slee
This is not about identity.
You, I, We, are not what we think we are. Bayo Akomolafe once defined disability as the failure of power to contain itself. The field we call disability cannot be contained. It leaks. What we are, as identity, is a container, a bounded space, a mappable set of co-ordinates? This is often formed by our responses to the many worlds we inhabit, and are inhabited by. This is the occulted secret every crip comes to learn, as a rite of passage. It is a very simple, stark fact, experienced with a kind of smiling (sometimes bitter) mirth. We lurk on the periphery of the human, marginalised - sometimes flung there like Haphaistos from Mount Olympos in some apotropaic arc. Out of sight, out of mind, precisely because our outlines, the shapes of our bodyminds, do not ‘fit’ and discomfort - trouble - many. The passage comes when we begin to ken one simple fact. To ken is to move beyond the boundaries of what is usually defined as knowledge - it is to engage within a field of relationality and kinship, to undergo the constant process of becoming-aware through intimate acquaintance no matter the role time and distance may play. |
Kenning overflows the discrete categories of knowledge; it is at once a linguistic method of circumlocution, turning a noun (that structure of identity and naming) into a poetic, metaphorical phrase which avoids naming via that noun. A sea is not a sea, but a whale-road, battle-sweat is blood, and a throne-walker might be a wheelchair user. Each is evoked by others brought into relation. But kenning is also the experience of understanding through-and-with, discovery-with. It decentres the knower as sole arbiter, requiring there be another presence in order for recognition to happen. By contemplating the dyadic nature of this we can say that any kenning is a confession, a declaration of need.
We need help-to-be.
There is always more-than-one-party, and each party is themselves composed of the queer excess of kennings and thus we might say that each presence, thing and being needs-as-verb, The kosmos itself is needing-and-helping itself to exist in a complex web of kenning - which in and of itself is constantly shifting and leaking beyond boundaries of form and identity. Each named thing, exceeds its own naming.
Of course, by now, you may be impatient with me for not giving you the simple fact I talked about earlier. So here it is, despite disability being a culturally constructed field: we exist at the heart of the human. The crip will emerge from every human in time - humans age, and if they don’t die, they become us. To dis/able the human is to engage in becoming-as-crip - the process of kenning , the submergent processural activities of the marginalised, the peripheralised. It is this which allows for the emergence of anything which can be described as a centre. Not the other way around.
To decentre the human then, is to note the role of the other agencies which create its emergence. To pay attention to what worlds are occulted, inside it, and beneath it. As the German poet Novalis put it: “The external is an internal raised to a level of mystery.” Despite the idea that the human ejects the dis/abled - to paraphrase Campbell, the abled, and hence the human, requires disability as something to define itself against; a not-that which reinforces and buttresses itself.
It externalises its own innards - turning itself inside out in order to preserve its surface outer appearance. In such a turning inside-out, it self-hollows, and in doing so, surface becomes-all-that-it-is. Then, it must fight harder to preserve its concrete, quantising, all-knowing categorising self that stands upright and alone.
Mystery is antithetical to knowing, but not to kenning; it is fugitive, ever excessive, adept at eluding the deathgrip of certainty. Mystery is not one thing, but instead is a shapeshifting multitude. It delights in leading seekers down the garden path, deeper into the woods, where the witches, wolves and giants live.
The hollowed out-human refuses to acknowledge the cavernous spaces within itself; to re-cognise those same lands of mystery in generative fashion. It cannot ken that the strange worlds lying beyond the pale are inside. That they are simultaneously within, and beneath the hollow, deeply denied presence it names void. To do so would be counterproductive to the project of the human subject.
It knows itself, is legible, visible, as it projects outwards, expanding ever further in its quest to shape all it encounters into its own image, its own borders, believing its own propaganda that it is re-ordering, reacting the unknown into the known. It cannot conceive that the mystery exceeds its boundaries, and will never be captured.
This is why it names the void so. To say otherwise would acknowledge the failure of its mechanisms of capture and redaction. It would require acknowledging that the very thing it requires be outside is its own ground which it struggles to deny - that it is not in total control, and is as leaky as a sieve. That it is failing as a container and its much vaunted surface is covered in cracks and holes; the topos of that surface is thus moved and shifted by the tectonics of which the cavern is but an entryway.
To ken the void, the hollow is to become aware of the subsurface worlds, the chthonic depths in which crippled smith-gods toil and teach, smiling at the tall tale of their casting down. They are always where they were, where they were supposed to be, amidst the children of Gaea.
The blacksmithery and the manifold chthonic mysteries of cripkult await. What we are is more human than human, which is to say we exceed its bounds.
We were here, now, we were here first, we were here during, and will be after. We have always been here. The kennings of our impairments as generative calls, our seeming powerlessness as a kind of dis/power (that which troubles power’s own ideas of hegemony and identity? When the appearance of absence signals presence, desire, need and other agencies; that which enhances and highlights what we are already in the midst of?
What happens when what we are leaks into other things? When the ability to contain, to bound, and bind, is impaired: when ‘I’ breaks, just as when a bodymind begins to lose its ability to make sense.
That is, where the human fails to ‘maintain’ itself, and begins to break down and leak vitalities which are sensed and sensing, but do not make sense. Experiences that are strange occurrences, sweeping through us like rushing involuntarisms, spastic seizures. Overwhelmed processors, abraded nerves?
Where the bodyminds we are amidst become queer and strange to us, as alien as fungi, lichen and rhizome? Could this lead to a kind of rewilding of the self, as forest, as ocean, or something like? The horde of Others inside the self?
More than can simply be expressed as “porous assemblage”, the notions of pack, band etc have a rich philosophical history expressed in the works of Deleuze and Guattari. And thus, on a practical level, what happens when we embrace We rather than I, acknowledging absence, incompleteness and mystery? What does it do to our ideas of trust if we accept that totality and control is impossible, and yet there is always more?
There is always more-than-one-party, and each party is themselves composed of the queer excess of kennings and thus we might say that each presence, thing and being needs-as-verb, The kosmos itself is needing-and-helping itself to exist in a complex web of kenning - which in and of itself is constantly shifting and leaking beyond boundaries of form and identity. Each named thing, exceeds its own naming.
Of course, by now, you may be impatient with me for not giving you the simple fact I talked about earlier. So here it is, despite disability being a culturally constructed field: we exist at the heart of the human. The crip will emerge from every human in time - humans age, and if they don’t die, they become us. To dis/able the human is to engage in becoming-as-crip - the process of kenning , the submergent processural activities of the marginalised, the peripheralised. It is this which allows for the emergence of anything which can be described as a centre. Not the other way around.
To decentre the human then, is to note the role of the other agencies which create its emergence. To pay attention to what worlds are occulted, inside it, and beneath it. As the German poet Novalis put it: “The external is an internal raised to a level of mystery.” Despite the idea that the human ejects the dis/abled - to paraphrase Campbell, the abled, and hence the human, requires disability as something to define itself against; a not-that which reinforces and buttresses itself.
It externalises its own innards - turning itself inside out in order to preserve its surface outer appearance. In such a turning inside-out, it self-hollows, and in doing so, surface becomes-all-that-it-is. Then, it must fight harder to preserve its concrete, quantising, all-knowing categorising self that stands upright and alone.
Mystery is antithetical to knowing, but not to kenning; it is fugitive, ever excessive, adept at eluding the deathgrip of certainty. Mystery is not one thing, but instead is a shapeshifting multitude. It delights in leading seekers down the garden path, deeper into the woods, where the witches, wolves and giants live.
The hollowed out-human refuses to acknowledge the cavernous spaces within itself; to re-cognise those same lands of mystery in generative fashion. It cannot ken that the strange worlds lying beyond the pale are inside. That they are simultaneously within, and beneath the hollow, deeply denied presence it names void. To do so would be counterproductive to the project of the human subject.
It knows itself, is legible, visible, as it projects outwards, expanding ever further in its quest to shape all it encounters into its own image, its own borders, believing its own propaganda that it is re-ordering, reacting the unknown into the known. It cannot conceive that the mystery exceeds its boundaries, and will never be captured.
This is why it names the void so. To say otherwise would acknowledge the failure of its mechanisms of capture and redaction. It would require acknowledging that the very thing it requires be outside is its own ground which it struggles to deny - that it is not in total control, and is as leaky as a sieve. That it is failing as a container and its much vaunted surface is covered in cracks and holes; the topos of that surface is thus moved and shifted by the tectonics of which the cavern is but an entryway.
To ken the void, the hollow is to become aware of the subsurface worlds, the chthonic depths in which crippled smith-gods toil and teach, smiling at the tall tale of their casting down. They are always where they were, where they were supposed to be, amidst the children of Gaea.
The blacksmithery and the manifold chthonic mysteries of cripkult await. What we are is more human than human, which is to say we exceed its bounds.
We were here, now, we were here first, we were here during, and will be after. We have always been here. The kennings of our impairments as generative calls, our seeming powerlessness as a kind of dis/power (that which troubles power’s own ideas of hegemony and identity? When the appearance of absence signals presence, desire, need and other agencies; that which enhances and highlights what we are already in the midst of?
What happens when what we are leaks into other things? When the ability to contain, to bound, and bind, is impaired: when ‘I’ breaks, just as when a bodymind begins to lose its ability to make sense.
That is, where the human fails to ‘maintain’ itself, and begins to break down and leak vitalities which are sensed and sensing, but do not make sense. Experiences that are strange occurrences, sweeping through us like rushing involuntarisms, spastic seizures. Overwhelmed processors, abraded nerves?
Where the bodyminds we are amidst become queer and strange to us, as alien as fungi, lichen and rhizome? Could this lead to a kind of rewilding of the self, as forest, as ocean, or something like? The horde of Others inside the self?
More than can simply be expressed as “porous assemblage”, the notions of pack, band etc have a rich philosophical history expressed in the works of Deleuze and Guattari. And thus, on a practical level, what happens when we embrace We rather than I, acknowledging absence, incompleteness and mystery? What does it do to our ideas of trust if we accept that totality and control is impossible, and yet there is always more?