Disability & Society

ISSN: 0968-7599 (Print) 1360-0508 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cdso20

Disability studies after the ontological turn: a

return to the material world and material bodies
without a return to essentialism

Michael Feely

To cite this article: Michael Feely (2016): Disability studies after the ontological turn: a return
to the material world and material bodies without a return to essentialism, Disability & Society,
DOI: 10.1080/09687599.2016.1208603

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2016.1208603

Published online: 29 Jul 2016.

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 Disability & Society, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2016.1208603

Disability studies after the ontological turn: a return to

the material world and material bodies without a return to
essentialism
Michael Feely
Department of Social Work and Social Policy, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Downloaded by [Simon Fraser University] at 06:41 02 August 2016

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Over recent decades, poststructuralist theories have allowed critical Received 23 July 2015
disability scholars to challenge essentialist understandings of the Accepted 29 June 2016
human species and to contest discourses which divide humans
KEYWORDS
into ‘normal’/‘impaired’ subjects with respect to a wide – and ever Poststructuralism;
expanding – range of corporeal and cognitive traits. For critics, ontological turn; disability
however, these theories are deeply flawed. By focusing primarily studies; new materialism;
on language, poststructuralism shifts our critical attention away posthumanism; Deleuze
from the often harsh material realities of life for disabled people.
This has led some to turn to critical realism and to effectively re-
essentialise impairment. In this article, I wish to consider an alternative
approach. I suggest that the recent ‘ontological turn’ in social theory
has seen the emergence of new-materialist approaches – including
Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology of assemblage and methodology
of assemblage analysis – which allow us to consider disability as a
material phenomenon without a return to essentialism.

Points of interest

• Poststructuralism is a way of thinking about the world that focuses on language. It

suggests that the language we use to describe people will affect how we treat people.
• Poststructuralism allows us to challenge language that divides human beings into ‘nor-
mal’ and ‘impaired’ people. It suggests that we could use more inclusive language and
treat people in more inclusive ways.
• Critics of poststructuralism say it focuses too much on language. It overlooks the harsh
realities of life people with impairments face such as living in inaccessible neighbour-
hoods or being in pain.
• Recently a new way of thinking called new materialism has emerged. This allows us to
focus on language and the harsh realities of life that some people experience.
• New materialism could prove very useful for disability researchers and activists.

CONTACT  Michael Feely  mfeely@tcd.ie

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 2    M. Feely

Introduction
Philosophical essentialism remains a contentious topic amongst disability theorists. Within
essentialist thought it is assumed that for any specific kind of entity (e.g. a human body)
there exists a specific set of attributes or characteristics that any entity of that kind must
possess. These essential attributes or characteristics are presumed to be immutable, inherent
and context independent. Put differently, an individual entity (e.g. a human body) must
possess an essential set of attributes or characteristics to secure membership of its type or
kind (i.e. to be a proper human body). Essentialist thought has arguably been, and continues
to be, a cause of much suffering for millions of humans with anomalous bodies or minds,
functioning to exclude these people from full human status and, at times, justifying eugenic
efforts to eliminate them.
Essentialism is certainly not new but it does take different forms in different ages.
Aristotelian essentialism, for example, suggests that species have an ideal form or a timeless
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essence, which individual members approximate to a greater or lesser degree, without ever
fully embodying (Futuyma 2009). During the nineteenth century, Davis (2010) argues, the
Aristotelian notion of the ideal human was usurped by the neo-essentialist concept of the
statically normal human. Eugenic scientists began constructing bell curves and calculating
statistical norms for a whole range of corporeal and cognitive traits. These putatively objec-
tive statistical norms were quickly to become moral norms, and subnormal outliers – for
example, those with low IQ scores – were pathologised as deficient and diseased. Moreover,
they became seen as a problem to be eliminated through a range of eugenic measures.
In this article, I seek to explore some of the ways disability scholars have responded to
essentialism. I begin by explaining how poststructuralist disability scholars have drawn on
the theories of Foucault and Butler to attack essentialist understandings of the human and
to deconstruct ‘normal’/‘impaired’ distinctions. I then turn my attention to critiques of post-
structuralist approaches, which suggest these approaches divert critical attention away from
the harsh realities of life experienced by, and the embodied experiences of pain endured
by, many disabled people. Whilst these shortcomings have led some scholars to effectively
re-essentialise impairment and advocate for a turn to critical realism, I argue this not the
only option. The recent ‘ontological turn’ has seen the emergence of several new-materialist
ontologies and methodologies which allow us to consider the material and embodied
aspects of disability without a return to essentialism. At this stage I focus on and seek to
elucidate just one of these new-materialist approaches: Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) anti-es-
sentialist ontology of assemblage and methodology of assemblage analysis. I conclude by
suggesting that this approach is potentially very useful from a disability studies perspective
because it allows us to combine the benefits of older poststructuralist theories – the ability
to contest oppressive identity categories – with a thorough engagement with material reality
and material embodiment.
Throughout the article, in order to clarify concepts, I will offer concrete examples relating
to intellectual disability. Additionally, in order to elucidate how Deleuze and Guattari’s ontol-
ogy and methodology might be applied to social research, I will consider the concrete case
study of a community-based intellectual disability service in Ireland named Rathbeg Services
(pseudonym).
 Disability & Society   3

Critical disability studies’ attack on essentialism

The social model conceptualises impairment as real, whilst holding that disability – environ-
mental and attitudinal barriers that prevent those with impairments from participating in
society – is a social construction that could be reduced, even irradiated, given enough polit-
ical will. In recent decades, critical disability scholars have gone further, arguing that impair-
ment, as well as disability, should be seen as a social construction rather an essential truth.
To make this argument they have borrowed from Foucault’s work on discourse and the body.
Foucault is interested in how – in the modern period – powerful social-scientific discourses
such as psychiatry, which classify and prescribe responses to human diversity, have produced
devalued subjects (‘a person with an intellectual disability’) and social species (‘people with
intellectual disabilities’). Foucault’s account of devalued subject creation (see Rabinow 1984),
when applied to the field of disability, does not deny the existence of diversity amongst
humans. However, it does offer an explanation of how a cognitively and corporeally diverse
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human species came to be conceptually split and hierarchically ranked into valued ‘normal’
subjects and devalued ‘impaired’ subjects with respect to a range of traits. In short, this was
the product of a specific set of interrelated scientific and social processes, namely scientific
classification, dividing practices and subjectification. Scientific classification involves arbitrary
taxonomical acts by authorities within human sciences. For example, the decision to classify
those who score above 70 in an IQ test as ‘normal’ and those who score below 70 as ‘impaired’.
While such decisions are arbitrary, because they are found within a seemingly scientific
discourse, they come to be accepted as objective and true. Dividing practices, meanwhile,
are practices of separating humans arbitrarily classified as ‘impaired’ from the ‘normal’ major-
ity, which serves to increase their otherness (e.g. segregating ‘impaired’ people through
institutionalisation). Finally, subjectification involves bodies that have been authoritatively
classified as ‘impaired’ coming to accept the pathological labels applied to them as their true
identity; for example, when a man classified as intellectually disabled begins to accept this
and comes to think ‘I am a man with an intellectual disability’. At this point subjectification
is complete.
Once a subject has accepted their ‘impaired’ identity, participating in identity politics
becomes possible. Thus a group of people who have been labelled as ‘impaired’ can come
together as a political group (e.g. a self-advocacy group for people with intellectual disabil-
ities). Furthermore, the collective voice of the ‘impaired’ group can begin to make political
demands: ‘We are people with intellectual disabilities and we demand our rights’. Identity
politics can be a powerful political strategy but from a Foucauldian perspective there is a
price to be paid: the devalued social group accepts, rather than contests, the discourses that
have constituted them as different and lesser.
Through a Foucauldian lens, the division of the human species into valued ‘normal’ and
devalued ‘impaired’ subjects, has come, over time, to appear natural and inevitable. However,
this appearance is illusory, and the distinction is actually ‘nonnatural and hierarchical (or
cultural and political) rather than self-evident and universal’ (McRuer 2006, 37). As such,
‘normal’/‘impaired’ distinctions become contestable and potentially alterable. Indeed, it is
possible to point to many examples of putative impairments that have been re-signified as
differences. For example, in 1973 the American Psychiatric Association dropped homosex-
uality from their diagnostic manual: same-sex desire ceased to be a psychiatric disorder and
became a difference (Silverstein 2009). Also in 1973, the American Association on Mental
 4    M. Feely

Deficiency jettisoned the category of ‘borderline’ mental retardation and ‘with a stroke of a
pen, thousands of people with an intellectual disability were “cured” overnight’ (Bray 2003,
9). These acts of de-pathologisation through authoritative re-signification are significant,
suggesting that many more bodies and minds which are currently devalued as ‘impaired’
could be re-signified in less oppressive ways.
For those who accept the Foucauldian account, new political responses to the problem
of impairment become possible. Because labelling people as ‘impaired’ is arbitrary, it
becomes legitimate to resist these labels and to refuse to identify with them, either at
an individual or a collective level. We see an example of resistance at an individual level
within empirical research on how people labelled intellectually disabled self-identify.
In short, many of these people resist or reject the labels applied to them (see Finlay and
Lyons 2005). Meanwhile, we encounter an example of collective resistance in the case
of the international neurodiversity movement, which resists the construction of autism
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and other cognitive ‘impairments’ as disorders and insists they should be re-signified as
non-pathological differences (Jaarsma and Welin 2012). Recently, Runswick-Cole (2014)
has gone further still, suggesting an additional move beyond the fixed subject positions
of ‘neurodiverse’ and ‘neurotypical’.
The work of Judith Butler and queer theory more generally – which is much indebted to
Foucault – has also proved influential amongst critical disability scholars. Butler (1990, 1993)
famously began to question traditional feminist identity politics and to imagine alternative sub-
versive strategies to denaturalise the male/female conceptual divide. Inspired by these moves,
certain critical disability scholars – sometimes referred to as crip or cripqueer theorists – began
to explore ‘the potential risks and exclusions’ (Kafer 2013, 15) of disabled identity politics and to
imagine strategies to blur rather than reify the normal/impaired divide. In important works of
this type, Corker (1999, 637) calls for theories of disability ‘prepared to problematize the notion
of impairment as a “biological foundation”’; Tremain (2002, 2005) deconstructs the impairment/
disability distinction; McRuer (2006) shows how subversive performances (such as non-disabled
people ‘coming out’ as crip) can expose the artifice of ‘normal’/‘impaired’ distinctions; and Shildrick
(2009) and Goodley (2011) explore the capacity of anomalous bodies to ‘crip’ and ‘queer’, and
ultimately expand, normative assumptions regarding the body.
For cripqueer theorists, the work of Foucault and Butler is important because it suggests
that we do not have to accept inherited frameworks for categorising human diversity. Given
enough political pressure, these frameworks could be demolished and replaced with less
oppressive ways of conceptualising, and responding, to diversity. For critics, however, the
problem of impairment cannot be solved by thinking differently and those that believe it
can be are deeply misguided, even dangerous.

The critique of poststructuralist disability studies

Poststructuralist approaches have been the subject of much critique within academia in
general, and disability studies in particular. Critics regularly cite three problems: these
approaches overlook the (often inaccessible) material world that disabled people inhabit;
they are unable to engage productively rather than critically with science and technology;
and they discount the importance of embodied experience, including pain.
Regarding poststructuralism’s failure to deal with the realities of the material world,
Shakespeare (2014, 52) suggests that ‘critical disability studies writers generally seem much
 Disability & Society   5

more interested in texts and discourses than in the ordinary lives of disabled people’.
Meanwhile, Wendell (1996, 45) notes that ‘in most postmodern cultural theorizing about the
body, there is no recognition of – and, as far as I can see, no room for recognising – the hard
physical realities that are faced by people with disabilities’. Similarly, Barnes (2012, 23) argues
that poststructuralist accounts ‘downplay the material reality of disabled people’s lives’ and
have served to de-radicalise disability studies by diverting critical attention from identifying
and challenging material forces underpinning disablement ‘towards a politically benign
focus on culture, language, and discourse’.
Poststructuralism’s difficulty with discussing the material world also leads to problems engag-
ing productively with the material sciences and new technologies. These shortcomings have
been highlighted by philosophers, scientists and disability scholars. The philosopher Searle (1998,
38), for example, suggests that while cultural practices may be relative, treating the knowledge
produced by material sciences as simply a social construction is foolish and prevents meaningful
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engagement with ‘the most successful system that the human intellect has ever produced for
getting knowledge of how the world works’. Material scientists have voiced similar objections,
sometimes in very creative ways. In 1996, for instance, the physicist Sokal submitted a spoof
paper – which suggested quantum gravity was a social construction – to a postmodern journal,
Social Text. The journal published the jargon-rich but utterly meaningless paper, prompting a
gleeful Sokal (1996) to invite poststructuralists who believed gravity to be a social construction
to jump from his apartment window. Poststructuralism’s ambivalent and often suspicious position
on science and technology is also problematic and limiting for disability studies. To explain, from
a Foucauldian perspective, a prosthetic arm might be treated with suspicion as a normalising
device whilst overlooking its positive potential to increase a body’s capacities. Similarly, psychiatric
medications might be understood as disciplinary technologies that produce docile patients whilst
overlooking their capacity to reduce mental pain and visceral suffering.
This brings us to a third common criticism of poststructuralist approaches: that they fail
to provide an account of embodied experience. In Grosz’s (1994, 116) words: ‘The body
remains primarily as a text to be marked, traced, written upon by various regimes of insti-
tutional, (discursive and non-discursive) power’. Meanwhile – in common with the social
model – poststructuralist approaches remain relatively silent on the embodied and visceral
aspects of impairment, including pain. Shakespeare makes this point by drawing on personal
experience:
I confess to a certain discomfort when it comes to non-disabled researchers … telling me, who
has two rather painful and disabling impairments, that impairment does not exist or is only the
product of discourse … My problem is my physical embodiment and my experience of negative
symptoms arising from impairment. (2014, 66–67)
Similarly, Vehmas and Watson (2014, 649) argue that certain impairments – for example,
motor neuron disease and depression – are undesirable ‘not merely because of the cultural
representations attached to them but because these conditions … cause suffering irrespec-
tive of one’s cultural environment’. Finally, Siebers (2008) suggests that – in overlooking
visceral experience – poststructuralists offer wholly inadequate solutions to the problem of
impairment, and their political strategy of refusing to identify as impaired is deeply flawed
because it ultimately implies that ‘imagination can cure what ails the body’ (2008, 76).
Overall then, for critics, poststructuralist perspectives offer an incomplete and unsatis-
factory account of disability. What is needed is a more holistic approach that includes con-
sideration of the material environments people with impairments inhabit and their embodied
 6    M. Feely

experiences. Consequently, some advocates turn to Bhaskar’s critical realism (Danermark

2002; Shakespeare 2006, 2014). This, they argue, allows for non-reductionist, multifactorial
accounts that consider disability on a multiplicity of levels (the biological, the socio-eco-
nomic, the cultural, etc.).
However, the critical realist approach is also, in certain ways, problematic. Srnicek (2007, 22)
notes that whilst allowing for a non-reductionist exploration of social issues, Bhaskar’s critical
realism does not avoid recourse to essentialism and continues to define entities ‘through their
participation in a common essence’. In keeping with this, alongside a return to material reality,
we often find a return to essentialism within critical realist accounts of impairment. Shakespeare
(2006), for example, ridicules the argument that all human beings – whether putatively ‘normal’
or ‘impaired’ – are reliant on a range of assistive technologies. Evoking the essentialist concept
of a species norm, he insists that the use of assistive technologies by people with impairments
is fundamentally different: ‘While both aeroplanes and wheelchairs enable individuals to over-
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come the natural restrictions of their bodies, walking is part of normal species functioning for
human beings, whereas flying is not’ (Shakespeare 2006, 51).
Thus whilst the turn to critical realism allows for a renewed focus on the material world
and sentient material bodies, it may also involve a return to essentialism and an acceptance
of discourses that construct those with anomalous bodies and minds as fundamentally dif-
ferent from, and less than, the normal majority.

Assessing the critique of poststructuralism

It is important to complicate caricatures of poststructuralism offered by critics such as
Shakespeare (2014, 54), who suggests that for many poststructuralist thinkers ‘there is no
world, outside of language’. This is certainly not a position that either Foucault or Butler hold.
Foucault’s understanding of discourse encompasses both language and actual social prac-
tices. Moreover, his later concept of the dispositif allows for an even greater consideration
of materiality (Foucault 1980). Similarly, Butler (1993) does not suggest there is nothing
beyond discourse. She simply argues that any attempt to describe the body necessarily
shapes the meaning of the body. Nonetheless, while Foucault and Butler do not discount
materiality, their particular epistemological positions and methodological approaches do
mean they tend to privilege the importance of discourse over other aspects of existence.
Much of their work explores how discourse shapes and affects a relatively passive material
world whilst not exploring the converse: how an active material world shapes and affects
discourse. Put differently, in focusing on discourse they may be guilty of ‘neglecting material
and non-human forces’ (Blaise 2013, 193). However, these shortcomings need not force us
to embrace essentialist ontologies which accept impairment as a brute fact. There are ways
to retain the radical potential of poststructuralism – the ability to contest oppressive identity
categories – whilst also exploring the actual material world, the material sciences, and the
visceral experience of having a body.1 Recent years have seen what has been termed the
‘the ontological turn’ within continental philosophy and, with it, the emergence of new
ontologies and methodologies, which seek to explore both the material and semiotic forces
which make up reality, without a return to essentialism (see Barad 2007; Braidotti 2011;
DeLanda 2006).
 Disability & Society   7

In the rest of this article I will concentrate specifically on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987)
new-materialist ontology and methodology of assemblage analysis and consider their poten-
tial to examine disability-related phenomena. My aim is to contribute to the burgeoning
field of Deleuzian disability studies (see Bayliss 2009; Feely 2015; Goodley 2007; Roets 2009;
Shildrick 2009; Simmons, Blackmore, and Bayliss 2008) by providing a general and accessible
introduction for those new to Deleuze.

Introducing Deleuze’s ontology

Deleuze is – in certain ways – dissimilar to poststructuralist theorists such as Foucault and
Butler. In short, these thinkers belong, to a greater or lesser extent, to the idealist philosoph-
ical tradition. As such, they tend to be highly sceptical of ontology (the study of what there
is in the world) because ontological statements (statements about what there is in the world)
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actually serve to constitute the entities they presume to describe. Deleuze, by contrast, fully
embraces ontology, albeit of an idiosyncratic variety (see May 2005). Deleuze’s ontology
acknowledges that discourse is important, and affects material entities, but simultaneously
holds that material entities are important and affect discourse. Thus Deleuze collapses the
traditional discourse/matter divide and suggests that both discursive statements and mate-
rial objects are real and, moreover, they are mutually affecting (see Figure 1).
Within this ontology, material and semiotic entities ‘have the same ontological status’
(Grosz 1994, 167). Thus existence, for Deleuze, becomes a flat ontological plane populated
by different but mutually affecting material and semiotic entities. To make such an ontology
work, however, requires a new way of thinking about and discussing actual material entities,
rather than representations of them.

Deleuzian materialism
Deleuze espouses a particular and anti-essentialist variety of materialism. He believes in a
material world which precedes any human observer and exists outside (or more accurately

Figure 1. Foucauldian/Butlerian epistemology versus Deleuzian ontology.

 8    M. Feely

alongside) human concepts and language. However, his materialism stresses ‘change and
difference’ (Taylor 2013, 47). Nothing has existed forever or will exist forever: from a particular
human body; to the human race; to the planet Earth and the Sun. Everything in the Deleuzian
universe is in motion, continually becoming at different rates of speed (mayfly eggs, becom-
ing nymphs, becoming mayfly duns, becoming mayfly spinners, becoming plentiful and
high-protein trout food, becoming large trout, becoming catch of the day on a disability
service fishing trip) and slowness (molten lava, becoming mountain, becoming rocks, becom-
ing sand, becoming glass, becoming a window in a disability service daycentre).
In a universe where everything is continually becoming, it is impossible to speak of the
essence of any entity (its true identity at all times and in all places). Eternal essences are what
DeLanda (2006, 49) calls ‘a kind of “optical illusion” produced by relatively slow rates of
change’. The concept of the essence, a remnant of classical thought, was imagined by minds
that were unaware, for example, of evolution or plate tectonics. Thus for Deleuze the essence
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is an anachronistic and ontologically questionable concept. This position is also held by

many in the material sciences who are unequivocal that ‘essentialism and evolution are
incompatible’ (Ereshefsky 2007, 9).
As discussed previously, within disability studies the conventional way to attack essen-
tialist thought is to highlight variability in the language used to describe an entity over time
or between cultures in order to demonstrate that its supposedly immutable essence is actu-
ally historically and geographically variable. Deleuze offers an alternative approach. His
materialism, which is much indebted to Spinoza, allows us to think and speak about bodies
(or any entities). However, it insists that we reject the traditional preoccupation with essen-
tialist questions (‘What is a body?’) and focus instead on its currently actualised, or what
Deleuze calls actual, capacities (‘What can a body do?’) as well as its potential, or what
Deleuze terms virtual, capacities (‘What else could a body do?’).
At this stage, a concrete example may help to explain the distinction between a body’s
actual and virtual capacities. A particular service user of Rathbeg Services, who has a diag-
nosis of cerebral palsy, may be currently unable to speak. Thus, in Deleuzian terminology,
producing speech is not an actual capacity of this body (something it can presently do).
However, this is not to say that an inability to speak is an essence of this body (a brute truth
that must exist at all times and in all places). If this currently speechless body had access to
sufficient resources and cutting-edge speech production technologies, it might acquire the
capacity to produce speech. In Deleuzian terminology, producing speech may be a virtual
capacity of this body, something it cannot currently do but could potentially do in a different
context. Indeed, we can see a concrete example of the process of a virtual capacity becoming
an actually capacity in the case of Cillian McSweeney, a young Irishman with cerebral palsy
who secured considerable media coverage in 2014. Cillian was once unable to speak, and
struggled to communicate: ‘My close family could always communicate with me using ges-
tures and a process of elimination but it was very frustrating’. However, when he collaborated
with technologists and learned to use software including Eyegaze (which allows him to
generate synthesised speech by looking at words and symbols on a screen) he gained the
capacity to speak and even write songs: ‘I realised that by using Eyegaze, I could put feelings
into words … Technology is vital to me’ (McSweeney quoted in thejournal.ie 2014).
For Deleuze, we simply cannot discuss what a body can do in a way that ignores its con-
text. Indeed, in Srnicek’s words:
 Disability & Society   9

Concrete individuals are never ontologically isolatable from their environment … In fact, the
division between individuals and their environment is in many ways already an abstraction from
the real situation. (2007, 29)
Because a body always/already exists within a specific material context, its capacities – the
things it can and cannot do – are always contextual and relational. Therefore a list of these
capacities will necessarily be ongoing. The capacities of a particular human body, for exam-
ple, will be radically different depending on whether it is underwater, in space, on horseback,
online or offline, rich or poor. This focus on context-dependent capacities also applies to
non-human bodies. For example, we do not ask the essentialist question ‘What is a pencil?’
(‘a writing implement comprised of wood and graphite’) but rather ‘What can a pencil do?’
(which suggests an ongoing list of context-dependent capacities: ‘it can write, it can stab; it
can be burnt as firewood …’).
Crucially for disability studies, Deleuzian materialism avoids a return to essentialism or
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‘normal’/‘impaired’ distinctions, whilst allowing us to recognise the very real limitations some
bodies face. To explain, it avoids essentialism by affirming that all human bodies differ from
each other and that each and every body is in a process of continual change and becoming,
always differing from its younger self (Hickey-Moody and Woods 2008). However, this does
not prevent us from acknowledging a body’s limitations. At certain points in its process of
becoming, and within certain contexts, a particular body will experience a whole range of
limitations or things they cannot do. For example, as mentioned previously, a particular body
within Rathbeg services with cerebral palsy may be, at the current moment and in its current
context, unable to speak. However, this limitation remains context dependent and is not an
essence of the body or a brute truth. If its context changes, and it gains access to technologies
such as Eyegaze, producing speech may become something this body can do.
A focus on the context-dependent capacities, rather than essential identities, of entities
‘opens up a whole new canvas’ for social scientists (Wetherell 2012, 75). In the field of disa-
bility research, the Deleuzian approach makes the traditional obsession with categorising
and ascribing fixed identities to bodies redundant. All that matters is discovering more and
more context-dependent capacities or things a body can do. The only way to do this is
through creative thought and ongoing experimentation.

Deleuzian materialism and science

In contrast to constructionist epistemologies, Deleuzian anti-essentialist materialism allows
for ‘a rigorous, clear, precise, useful engagement with scientific disciplines’ (Bonta and Protevi
2004, vii). As such it allows disability scholars to engage productively, rather than critically,
with the material sciences. These sciences can and do tell us what certain entities can or
cannot do within specific contexts (e.g. ‘Can sound waves travel through a vacuum?’, ‘What
is the boiling point of water at sea-level?’). Moreover, this scientific knowledge is extremely
useful. It allows us create things which increase the number of things a body can do (e.g. new
electronic communication technologies) or that alleviate embodied distress (e.g. drugs that
alleviate pain). This non-essentialist scientific knowledge (regarding the context-dependent
capacities of material entities) is, however, very different from the knowledge produced by
the human sciences which Foucault critiques. These dubious sciences have, at times, sought
to sort human bodies into hierarchical and fixed identity categories. Furthermore, these iden-
tities have, at times, been presented as objectively true, immutable and context independent.
 10    M. Feely

Whilst a Deleuzian approach allows us to critically re-engage with the material sciences, it
simultaneously allows us to take a highly critical stance towards essentialist social scientific
practices which attempt to ascribe fixed identities. Within Deleuzian terminology, when a
body is ascribed one of these identities (e.g. ‘a person with a profound intellectual disability’),
it is ‘over-coded’ and this prevents us from thinking creatively about the infinite number of
things this body can or could do in different contexts. Whilst, during the science wars of the
1990s, poststructuralism was often pitted against science, this need not be the case. The
enemy is not, and never was, science. The enemy is the essence.
In short, then, the Deleuzian approach is not limited in the same ways as the more familiar
poststructuralist theories of disability. It can and does offer a way to discuss the material
world and the material sciences. As such it offers a materialist alternative to the social model
as well as the critical realist approach. It allows us to acknowledge the context-dependent
limitations of bodies without accepting impairment as a brute truth.
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Embodied affect
The Deleuzian approach is also less limited than Foucauldian and Butlerian approaches when
it comes to discussing embodied and visceral experience. To elaborate, while constructionist
epistemologies will only allow us consider the representation of embodied experience,
Deleuze offers the concepts of affect and sensation, which allow us to discuss actual visceral
and embodied experience.2
Affect and sensation are viscerally embodied feeling in and of itself rather than how the
feeling is translated into discursive thought or language. In Abel’s (2007, 3; original emphasis)
words, a body experiences affects and sensations ‘on the level of their own reality rather than
on the level of their “meaning”’. Meanwhile, in Deleuze’s (2005, 26) terms, affect involves
‘direct action on the nervous system’ and ‘sensation is that which is transmitted directly, and
avoids the detour and boredom of conveying a story’.
To illustrate by example, imagine a service user of Rathbeg disability service named Tom,
riding a red bike along a suburban street. Tom is cycling towards the local supermarket,
where he has a job interview for a supported employment position. Suddenly, and unex-
pectedly, a Jack Russell darts out into the road. Tom brakes sharply and is catapulted over
the handlebars of his bike.
For Tom, the shock of the fall and the pain of flesh scraping, and bone crunching, against
concrete belong to the pre-discursive realm of embodied affect and sensation. The thoughts
that flow through Tom’s interior monologue a second later as he picks himself up, on the
other hand, are discursive rather than affective (‘Jesus, my palm is cut. That looks pretty
deep… Shit, the front wheel is ruined too’).
Whilst embodied sensation and affect is in some respects outside discourse, its relation-
ship to discourse remains complicated. To begin, affect can only be discussed, in conversation
or in a journal article, through discourse which, as Butler (1993) suggests, necessarily shapes
what it attempts to describe. Moreover, whilst embodied affects and sensation sometimes
precede discursive thought, discursive thought can also trigger embodied affects and sen-
sations. Returning to the previous example, whilst examining his buckled front wheel, Tom
might think: ‘I can’t cycle that bike. Jesus, I’m going to miss the job interview.’ These thoughts
may trigger biological processes such as a release of adrenaline from the adrenal gland,
increased heart rate and the experience of an affect we label as ‘fear’ (see Figure 2).
 Disability & Society   11
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Figure 2. Relationship between affect and discourse.

It is perhaps most productive to think of affect and discourse as different but inextricably
linked and mutually affecting. Doing this allows us to move beyond purely discursive
accounts of disability and also to consider the importance of visceral experience, which may
include pain.

Embodied subjectivity
An appreciation of the importance of both the material environment and material embod-
iment leads Deleuzians to complicate earlier poststructuralist accounts of the body and
subjectivity. Regarding the body, earlier poststructuralist accounts of a relatively passive
body shaped by discourse are replaced by a ceaselessly becoming biological body in a
dynamic relationship with its environment: ‘[the body is] a script written by the unfolding
of genetic encoding [but also] a text composed by the enfolding of external prompts’
(Braidotti 2008, 180). Similarly, in Deleuzian accounts, the discursive subject (the thinking,
speaking ‘I’) is replaced by an embodied subject always affected by its material environment
and embodiment as well as by its position in discourse (Braidotti 2011; Protevi 2009). This
increased attentiveness to the extra-discursive aspects of human experience is also poten-
tially significant for disability studies. For instance, it allows Overboe (2009) to explore and
affirm oft-discounted disabled lives that do not involve the discursive aspects of subjectivity
(e.g. the lives of those with extensive brain injuries, advanced Alzheimer’s, etc.).

Introducing assemblages and assemblage analysis

Consider the previously discussed case of the service user of Rathbeg Services who cannot speak.
A biological account of this problem might point to brain damage leading to dysarthria as the
source of the problem. A constructionist account, often considered the antithesis of a biological
account, might look at how speechless bodies are constructed in language. The DeleuzoGuattarian
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987) concept of the assemblage and the methodology of assemblage
 12    M. Feely

analysis provide a means of combining these apparently oppositional perspectives whilst adding
additional perspectives. To elaborate, an assemblage account of why a particular service user,
diagnosed as having cerebral palsy, cannot currently speak might consider:

• the biology of the particular body and its actual physical capacities (the things it can
and cannot do in its current material context);
• existent communication technologies and current research into communication
technologies;
• what funding is, or is not, available for this;
• how the relevant legislation and policies enables and constrains access to speech tech-
nologies; and
• how societal discourses construct speechless subjects and the provision of expensive
technologies to them.
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The assemblage analyst would seek to map how the complex interaction of all of these
elements produces the problem of a body that cannot currently speak.
Deleuzian assemblages can be thought of as networks of heterogeneous elements ‘whose
unity comes solely from the fact that these items function together, that they “work” together
as a functional entity’ (Patton 1994, 158).The significance, indeed the beauty, of this philo-
sophical concept is that it encourages and allows us to think about how orders of existence
traditionally considered separate (e.g. the biological, the economic, the discursive) come
together and operate as a whole to form a particular understanding, activity or entity.

Thinking about assemblages

Thinking about entities as assemblages requires new modes of thought. For Youdell (2011),
taking up assemblage analysis involves accepting that orders of existence traditionally
regarded as separate (the climatological, the biological, the discursive, etc.) are all potentially
significant. This can seem counter-intuitive at first because we are accustomed to academic
analyses which, implicitly or explicitly, privilege one order of analysis, and read an entire
system through that particular order. Being (perhaps unfairly) reductive: for the Marxist it is
the economic base; for the sociobiologist it is the gene; and for the constructionist it is the
signifier. In sharp contrast, DeleuzoGuattarian assemblage analysis refuses to privilege and
grant final causality to a particular order. Instead it is concerned with ‘the ways apparently
inchoate elements come together to form a particular whole’ (Youdell 2011, 46).
To conceptualise how an assemblage of radically different elements work together as a
whole, we need to let go of, and begin to scramble, habitual modes of thought, specifically
the conceptual schemata which Deleuze and Guattari(1987) call ‘aborescent’ thought. Such
thought is hierarchical, vertical and linear: imagine an account of intellectual disability which
proceeds by defining mild, moderate and severe varieties. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) want
to begin moving beyond such rigid modes of thought and analysis which serve to stifle
creativity and produce predictable results:
Deleuze and Guattari move away from hierarchical, tree like or ‘aborescent’ forms of thinking
or analysis; forms they see as dominating and constraining knowledge, social orders and social
subjects through their rigid and linear hierarchical relations. (Youdell 2011, 46)
To do this they offer a new system of thought explicated through a metaphor or figuration
drawn from botany: the rhizome. The rhizome is a complex subterranean tangle of
 Disability & Society   13

interconnected root-like sprouts which spreads in a horizontal fashion and has no centre.
Thus rhizomatic thought is horizontal rather than vertical; it is non-linear, follows multi-di-
rectional connections between different orders of existence, and the creative connections
it makes are necessarily ongoing and never ending:
A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power,
and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 7)
Thus, in imagining Rathbeg Services as an assemblage (comprised of architectural buildings,
information technologies, biological bodies that experience affects, flows of capital, dis-
courses; and relevant policies and legislation) we should not establish one element (such as
discourse) as transcendent and determinant, and follow (in a linear fashion) how it shapes
or creates the other elements. Instead, understanding the differences between the compo-
nents of the assemblage (and the orders of existence) to be horizontal rather than vertical,
our analysis should follow rhizomatic multi-directional links: from the biological, to the dis-
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cursive, to the economic, etc. (see Figure 3)

Figure 3. Rathbeg Services as an assemblage of material and discursive components, all rhizomatically
interconnected and mutually affecting.
 14    M. Feely

Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 7) remind us that ‘any point of a rhizome can be connected
to any other, and must be’. Thus in thinking rhizomatically about the disability service assem-
blage we might consider, for example, how flows of capital have affected the architecture
of the disability service. This might involve noting that during the ‘Celtic Tiger’ years the
disability service could afford to, and did, add large extensions to many of its daycentre
buildings. However, thinking rhizomatically could also involve considering the converse:
how architecture affects flows of economic capital. For example, the fact that the disability
service invested in these extensions means it must now, in a time of austerity, allocate a
larger proportion of its overall budget to paying for central heating. Rhizomatic modes of
thought and analysis will never, and can never, lead to final closure (for Deleuze, knowledge
production is divergent rather than convergent). However, thinking rhizomatically about
assemblages will allow us to draw ever more detailed (but always incomplete) maps of
particular entities, pose new questions and follow creative and experimental trajectories in
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academic analysis.

Relations within and between assemblages

To recap, an assemblage is a collection of ‘multifarious elements – living and nonliving
– that come together, temporarily’ (Shildrick 2015, 18) and work together to produce
something. However, assemblages – as DeLanda (2006) points out – should not be
understood as seamless totalities or closed systems. Any assemblage will be made up
of smaller assemblages and a part of larger assemblages. Indeed we can think of social
assemblages as being like Russian dolls. For example, we might imagine a body labelled
disabled assemblage, which is part of a particular daycentre assemblage, which is part
of the Rathbeg disability service assemblage, which is part of the national disability
service assemblage and so on. As scale increases, each assemblage will have emergent
properties that both enable and constrain its component parts (e.g. a particular body
assemblage enables and constrains its organs, the disability daycentre assemblage ena-
bles and constrains its bodies, Rathbeg Services enables and constrains its daycentres,
etc.).
In addition to encompassing smaller assemblages, and being a component of larger
assemblages, DeLanda (2006) suggest we can think of assemblages as having relation-
ships of interiority (between component parts) and the potential for relationships of
exteriority (with other assemblages). For example, the disability service assemblage
encompasses relations of interiority between, say, its head office and its daycentres.
Meanwhile it might have relationships of exteriority with other assemblages, such as
local supermarket assemblages that employ service users on a supported employment
basis. In addition to relationships within and between assemblages, it is always possible
to remove a component from one assemblage and plug it into another. For example,
the disability service might sell an older, large-scale institutional building to a property
developer who in turn converts it into apartments, whereupon it will become a compo-
nent of a residential property assemblage. Deleuzian thought actively encourages us
to experiment with taking components out of one assemblage and plugging them into
another. This is precisely how creativity works.
 Disability & Society   15

Principles of assemblage analysis

Whilst assemblage analysis is a necessarily counter-traditional, anti-authoritarian, creative
and unpredictable process, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) do offer some principles. Specifically,
they suggest we can: identify and arrange an assemblage’s component along a material/
discursive continuum; consider forces of continuity and change within the assemblage along
a deterritorialisation/reterritorialisation continuum; and map flows of heterogeneous sub-
stances through and within the assemblage. I shall now explain each of these analytic
concepts.

Material/discursive continuum
Because assemblages include both material entities and discourses – what (Deleuze 1999,
33) calls ‘a mushy mixture of the visible and the articulable’ – it is useful to think about them
along a material/discursive continuum (see Figure 4). In analysing Rathbeg disability service
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as an assemblage we might identify and describe its components as follows:

• Architectural buildings – for instance, daycentres and residential buildings – made of

concrete, glass and so on.
• Information technologies (computers, telephones, etc.).
• Economic capital (public funds and charity) which flows into, within and out of the
service.
• Biological bodies that all differ from each other with respect to their capacities and that
all experience a range of visceral affects and sensations.
• Medical discourses which split biological bodies into ‘normal’/‘intellectually disabled’
subjects and managerial discourses which sort bodies into a hierarchy of professional
subject positions (‘Service Director’, ‘Service Managers’, ‘Care Workers’ and ‘Service
Users’).
• Policy documents and relevant legislation that the service must adhere to.

These components should be understood as distributed horizontally, interconnected

rhizomatically and mutually affecting. It is also important to note that within assemblage
analysis, the researcher is assumed to be inextricably entangled in, and to inevitably affect,
the assemblage they seek to map (Coleman and Ringrose 2013). Thus claims to objectivity
are jettisoned and the researcher becomes another component of the assemblage to be
analysed.

Reterritorialisation/deterritorialisation continuum
To allow us to think about processes of continuity and change within an assemblage, Deleuze
and Guattari (1987) offer a reterritorialisation/deterritorialisation continuum. Reterritorialisation

Figure 4. Components of the disability service assemblage imagined along a material-discursive axis.
 16    M. Feely

refers to the ways in which continuity, sameness, borders and boundaries are maintained within
an assemblage. Meanwhile, deterritorialisation refers to the ways in which the assemblage’s bor-
ders and boundaries are simultaneously blurred, subverted or escaped, allowing for change, the
proliferation of difference and processes of becoming. Each and every assemblage will contain
both reterritorialising forces which act to maintain its borders as well as ‘cutting edges of deter-
ritorialisation which carry it away’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 88).
Thus, in relation to Rathbeg disability service, we might choose to analyse how the sex-
uality of service users is reterritorialised (i.e. how the sexual capacities of bodies are limited
and how sexual norms are upheld) and deterritorialised (how new sexual capacities become
actualised and sexual norms are subverted). Reterritorialising forces might include the
following:

• The architecture of residential houses (e.g. an absence of double rooms).

• Surveillance technologies (e.g. Internet surveillance software that monitors Internet
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usage within daycentres and reports ‘inappropriate’ searches).

• Service policies (e.g. rules forbidding ‘overnight visits’ in residential houses).
• Legislation (e.g. current Irish legislation, which effectively outlaws consensual sex
between people with intellectual disabilities).

Meanwhile, deterritorialising forces might include the following:

• Subversive use of institutional architecture by service users (i.e. ‘relaxation rooms’

become ‘make out rooms’).
• Clandestine use of information technologies (e.g. service users can access sexual infor-
mation and/or services on their smart phones).
• Political action (self-advocates and certain Irish politicians are currently campaigning
for more liberal consent laws).

The deterritorialisation/reterritorialisation continuum encompasses processes of conti-

nuity and change which pertain to, or cut across, multiple orders of existence (the architec-
tural, the technological, the discursive, etc.). However, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) sometimes
elect to use a more specific coding/decoding distinction when specifically discussing pro-
cesses of continuity and change in language. For example, in Ireland, a country where dis-
ability services were traditionally run by religious orders but in recent decades have become
increasingly secular, ‘immoral’ sexual behaviour has been re-coded as ‘inappropriate’ sexual
behaviour.

Flows
Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 25) also suggest that we can think of assemblages as being
made up of, and acting upon, flows of heterogeneous substances: ‘An assemblage in its
multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows simultane-
ously’. Regarding the example of the disability service, the assemblage analyst might seek
to map how personal information regarding service users flows into, within and out of the
service or how economic capital (funding) flows into, within and out of the service and so
on. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) are interested in how assemblages both enable and constrain
flows, allowing them to travel in certain directions and not others. Within social assemblages,
power can serve to capture and direct flows to serve the interests of certain groups more
than others and these arrangements can coalesce into relatively stable systems of
 Disability & Society   17

domination (Haggerty and Ericson 2000, 609). For example, in Irish disability services the
overwhelming majority of public funding that flows into services continues to be directed
towards service provider salaries (see Department of Health 2012); meanwhile, most service
users live in relative poverty. Thus, it should be noted that assemblage analysis allows us to
explore the distribution of economic resources (or any other resources) in a much more
in-depth fashion than purely discursive approaches.

Questions about assemblages and analysis as activism

Jackson and Mazzei (2012, 1; original emphasis) suggest that ‘an assemblage isn’t a thing
– it’s the process of making and unmaking the thing’. Thus an assemblage can be understood
as a mixture of components, belonging to different orders of existence, that come together
over time; these components work together for a time to produce something; and, in time,
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they will fall apart and join other assemblages. Therefore, within assemblage analysis, valid
research questions must not relate to essence or identity. Instead, as Srnicek (2007, 28; orig-
inal emphasis) explains, questions about assemblages must relate to ‘the processes which
produce and continually function to sustain them’. More specifically, he suggests, questions
should pertain: firstly, to the assemblage’s processes of individuation (meaning how its het-
erogeneous parts came together over time); and, secondly, to the actual workings of the
assemblage (meaning how the parts work together in the present to produce something).
Finally, we can ask questions regarding the virtual potential of the assemblage (meaning
what else it could do, how it could be made to function differently, etc.). Thus, returning to
the previous example of Cillian McSweeney – the young man with cerebral palsy who secured
access to cutting-edge technology and gained the capacity to speak – we might conceptu-
alise this phenomena as a speech assemblage and ask the following questions:

1.  What were the heterogeneous components or forces that came together to make
this possible (in this case, bodies with a variety of capacities, new technologies,
funding from U2 and the Ireland Funds, societal discourses around accessibility,
inclusion, etc.).
2.  How do all of these components work together and what do they produce? (They
currently work to allow Cillian speak, compose and play music.)
3.  What else could this assemblage do? (Could the technology be modified to enable
Cillian to drive a car? Could the technology Cillian has access to be made available
to others?)

Hickey-Moody and Malins (2007, 1; original emphasis) suggest, from a Deleuzian per-
spective, that social and political change ‘can be affirmed not only through corporeal forms
of action (such as street protest …) but also through rethinking the social issues one is hoping
to change’. Thus assemblage analysis is not simply an academic attempt to describe the
phenomenon, it is also a form of activism that may open up new ways of intervening in,
affecting and changing the phenomenon in a positive way. In Patton’s (2007, ix) words,
Deleuzian analyses call ‘for connection with forces outside the text’. Thus, in the case of the
speech assemblage, the analysis might contribute to further technological experimentation,
to a search for other potential sources of funding, or to a political campaign to make access
to speech technologies a right which is not dependent on charitable donations.
 18    M. Feely

Conclusion
In this article I have argued that the poststructuralist theories of Foucault and Butler have
proved very productive for critical disability scholars. In short, they have allowed them go
further than the social model and to contest the conceptual division of our species into a
valued ‘normal’ majority and a devalued ‘impaired’ minority. This said, critics of poststructur-
alist approaches – writing from both social model and critical realist perspective – have
identified some very real shortcomings. There is some validity to claims that older poststruc-
turalist approaches fail to engage with the often harsh material realities of life for disabled
people. However, in their attempts to return to material reality and material embodiment
some of these critics also return to essentialist understandings of the human body. This is
not the only option. The recent ontological turn in the social sciences has seen the emergence
of a whole range of new-materialist ontologies and methodologies (see Barad 2007; Braidotti
2011; DeLanda 2006). All of these approaches can be seen as attempts to bring materiality
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back into social scientific methodologies without returning to essentialism. All are potentially
productive avenues for disability studies.
In this article I have focused on the potential of just one new-materialist approach.
Deleuze’s anti-essentialist materialist approach is particularly interesting for disability studies
for a number of reasons. Firstly, it lets us explore the material environments disabled people
inhabit and to engage productively with the material sciences and new technologies.
Secondly, it allows us to consider what material bodies can and cannot do within specific
contexts and permits us to acknowledge the very real limitations of certain bodies in certain
contexts without resorting to essentialism. Thirdly, it enables us to speak of the embodied
and visceral aspects of human existence, including pain. In short, a turn to Deleuzian mate-
rialism allows one to combine the advantages of older poststructuralist theories (the ability
to contest oppressive identity categories) with a thorough engagement with material reality
and material embodiment. Meanwhile, the DeleuzoGuattarian methodology of assemblage
analysis potentially allows disability scholars to create ever more complex and in-depth – but
always incomplete – analyses of disability-related issues. Such analyses would allow us to
explore, from a multiplicity of analytic perspectives (biological, technological, economic,
discursive, etc.), how dis/enabling assemblages emerged and how they function in the pres-
ent. Crucially, this analytic approach would also encourage us to move beyond critique and
to begin thinking productively and creatively about how disabling assemblages could be
altered or made to function differently.

Notes
1. 
While this article focuses on new-materialist approaches, it should be noted that certain
phenomenological approaches to disability, inspired by theorists including Merleau-Ponty,
can also address these shortcomings.
2. 
Somewhat confusingly, Deleuze also uses the term ‘affect’ as shorthand for an entity’s capacities
to affect and be affected.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
 Disability & Society   19

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