A brief disclaimer before we get started, dear reader. This post will deal with the construction of ability and disability from my twice-exceptional point of view. It will therefore necessarily draw on my own experiences, in this case these will be high school experiences. If at any point I come across as salty about my high school years it’s because I am. Now on with the show.
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The world was trying to split me in two. That was the answer to a question I had been asking myself for most of my young life – Why am I obsessed with twice exceptionalism? The answer, distilled to its essence, is that people have a fundamental inability to see two things in one. Take optical illusions; was that H&M dress black and blue or white and gold? Are those hot dogs or a pair of legs? Are these lines really the same length? In a way I (along with other twice exceptionals) am an optical illusion. I don’t mean that I contain multitudes. Its’ not a statement on metaphysics. I mean that to this day people have difficulty seeing me as the gifted scholar I am and as a crip. I still register looks of surprise when, after a night of discussion and banter over drinks, a staff member brings me my walker. By the same token I register befuddlement when someone who sees me as disabled first realizes that I can not only produce full sentences but that they might not even be in my intellectual league.
These ideas first started to crystalize for me as a result of a series of absurd indignities during my high school career, the first of which being the fact that I had to do high school at all. People with my intellectual gifts who don’t have physical disabilities typically skip high school. They go to Bard or Phillips Exeter and get PhDs by 21. I understand why, academically, high school was a breeze. However, I was obliged to suffer through four years of “development” in a world dominated by the incomprehension and petty tyrannies of school administrators.
Among these small exercises of autocratic power included denying me an aid to escort me through the turbulent halls between classes. I have balance issue and, in case you hadn’t notices, teenagers tend not to be the most conscientious of anything – walkers included. I also had to fight for scraps of independence afforded to other students without a second thought. Seniors, for instance, were allowed to eat off campus but the school was “too concerned” about my wellbeing to allow me that freedom. How that fits in with denying me an aide to walk me to class I’ve yet to figure out.
Perhaps the greatest indignity sat sandwiched between math and AP philosophy, my IEP chart. I was meant to achieve, with the help of some fresh-faced therapist from the local community college, silly goals, writing a couple of paragraphs on my own, for example. The absurdity of being infantilized one hour and blowing college-level coursework out of the water the next was, on its own, risible. However, when compared to the mental rigor of my extracurricular life it became too much to bear.
I would spend weekends delivering highly-coveted sermons for the Jewish business elite and organizing interfaith conferences with BBYO. I debated Johnathan Sachs for God’s sake! And after every intellectual success I was greeted at school with low expectations and the insistence that I “be a good boy and do what my aides say.”
I find that anger often leads to rumination and boy was I angry. I chewed over the processes that lead to these wildly different receptions of the singular person me. The fundamental conclusion I came to is that we construct ability and disability using the same social process. I owed both my exaltation and my infantilization to the same collective consciousness. That is to say that other people’s perception of how much effort it would take me to do any task was influence by their perception of me as either-body first – a medical specimen weirdo – or brain-first – prodigious orator and analytical thinker. More on the specifics of that in a subsequent post.
What others failed to do was evaluate me holistically on my abilities and capacities. That is to say that nobody was able to see me as both crip and prodigy, instead creating false generalizations and mental schema based around one archetype or the other. In doing so people tore me in two. I was unable to be my full self in the eyes of others.
Thus began my fascination with the way society constructs ability and capacity. You, dear reader, will no doubt have picked up on the fact that this blog will deal with those terms a lot. This bit of back story is as good a place as any to drill down on some definitions.
Bear in mind that I am not claiming that these definitions of ability, capacity, and related terminology are the only definitions, nor am I claiming that they are the best definitions in all contexts. Rather, it is important that I lay out my construction of these terms because the particular ways in which my definitions interweave and interact allow me to paint a clearer picture of the social processes this blog aims to describe and analyze. That is to say examining social phenomena, as opposed to playing word games, is the point. I’m laying out these definitions in order to better use language as a laser pointer to highlight constellations of collective consciousness in our shared planetarium.
Moreover, the social phenomena this blog analyzes affect and intervene in everyone’s everyday routines. They are found at the core of injustice and marginalization. Yet, they cut murky figures in both in our personal lives and in the academy. My definitions aim to turn the brightness up on the laser pointer so that we can better see the relationships between social phenomena stemming from ability and real world events running the gamut of importance from kickball tournaments to geostrategy and nuclear armament.
Let’s start with the basic building block of all of these terms, capacity. At its most basic level a capacity exists when the potential to carry out a given action is materially possible, provided the necessary conditions for that action are in place. In order for a capacity to exist we don’t need context, cultural or otherwise, as capacity is the precursor to ability. Capacity is action in a vacuum.
An ability, on the other hand is contextualized capacity. Imagine, if you will, the first person to ever skip a stone. Sure, early humans had some idea of what constituted a good throw – strength, accuracy, quick release – but those abilities are tangential to the understanding of physics, arm angle, and structural dynamics that contribute to a properly skipped stone. Therefore the very first skipped stone marked the discovery of a capacity. It probably blew some minds, too. The very next skipped stone, however, shattered the vacuum and by virtue of providing a standard of comparison, and thus merit, began to construct the ability of skipping stones. Put another way; if there is no standard for comparison we can’t evaluate ability. The first attempt at stone skipping you witness is a demonstration of capacity, every subsequent attempt you see helps you construct your idea of that particular ability.
That’s not to say that capacities always evolve into abilities. In most stories of prophesy and magic capacities remain just that. Jesus walking on water is and remains a capacity because there is no standard for comparison. Not only has nobody else done it but Jesus performs the feat no better or worse with each given iteration.
By the same token it is possible to have a capacity where ability already exists. This is the case with children who, by virtue of ignorance of the existence of ability, conceive of their own capacities before constructing any ability.
True vacuums are rare and from there absence spring the figure of protoability. Protoabilities are capacities which arise from the novel recombination of existing abilities. Because there are already standards of merit for these abilities a protoability can be initially evaluated as an ability, albeit incompletely.
Think for a minute about parkour. If you frequent the same corners of YouTube as I do you’ll have visions of springy, sinewy young people vaulting over seawalls and landing on pylons, or clambering up the face of a building with nothing but bare hands and feet, or catapulting down staircases in ways that must surely anger the gods of gravity and good sense. If you’re anything like me you’ll have seen jaw-dropping feats of creative motion and devastating falls that make your insides feel like jell-o. You’ll have seen examples of acrobatics that would earn a ten from even the stingiest of Russian judges and laughable flubs, flops, and fumbles. You understand what constitutes good parkour; it’s easy to sift the wheat from the chaff.
Now think of the first time somebody attempted parkour. Was it good? Was it meritorious? What would the Russian judge have given it? As the questions become more specific it becomes increasingly difficult to provide a reasonable answer.
Was it good? Well, we understand which athletic feats are impressive and which are not. Scaling a building of vaulting over a seawall onto a pylon provide unimpeachable examples of athletic merit, as such, we could evaluate these acts as meritorious even if we can’t pinpoint exactly why. How would an Olympic judge have scored the first act of parkour? That’s a tricker question to answer. There are no clear reference points, no true standard of comparison. Protoabilities live in the space between these questions. Once standards of merit are established through comparison protoabilities, like capacities, become abilities.
These vignettes illustrate the processes of abilification, that is the social processes that take place both within and outside of the individual through which ability is constructed. When the process is external, that is the construction of ability through comparison with others it is interactive abilification. Conversely, the internal process, the construction of ability through self-comparison over time (common in children as they construct their initial ideas about their own capacities and abilities), is introspective abilification.
Often these tracks run simultaneously and occasionally the perceptions misalign. I call this meritocratic dissonance. It is particularly common among twice exceptionalism and is the root of many of the worlds problems.
Think about Bobby Fisher. His twice exceptional brain hid his mental anguish from those who saw only chis chess brilliance. Or Hellen Keller whose physical disabilities kept others, and herself, from seeing her brilliance. In my case my introspective abilification has never aligned with the abilities others ascribed to me. People tend to see me as either brilliant or disabled, unable to place me in both worlds. Since I was born the world has been trying to split me in two. The Theory of Everyone – capital realism, the definitions I’ve outlined above, and everything else it entails – aims to join the two halves. For me and for everyone