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Disorder As “Pseudo-Idea”

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Disorder As “Pseudo-Idea” Disorder as “Pseudo-Idea” Steven Angelides is Honorary Senior In the tradition of Western metaphysics, Research Fellow in the Department of Modern the concepts of “order” and “disorder” invoke— indeed, are constituted by and constitutive of— History, Politics and International Relations at 1 Macquarie University, Australia. He is the sequential and dichotomous logics. Within author of A History of Bisexuality (2001) and these logics order functions as the privileged is completing a book entitled The Fear of term, the norm, that which is primordial and Child Sexuality. Preliminary work from this prior to the differences that go by the name of manuscript, published in GLQ, was awarded disorders. Disorders figure not only as second- the 2004 MLA Crompton-Noll Award for best ary, temporary, or erroneous re-iterations of essay in lesbian, gay, and queer studies. prior orders (biological, psychological, epistemological, or social). Disorders also figure—as the prefix of “dis” suggests—as Abstract negations of these orders. Disorder acts, in This essay deconstructs the order/disorder other words, against the “natural” or binary. Drawing on the work of Henri Bergson, normative order(s) of life. Where order is it replaces the idea of disorder with the con- naturalized, idealized, and perpetually pursued, cept of two positive orders. The essay con- disorder is lamented, depreciated, or cludes with a philosophical example of how we might reconceive the biomedical opposition of pathologized as something to be corrected, normality/pathology without relying on the cured, or transcended, if not in the present idea of disorder. tense then in an imaginary future order. But what is this notion of disorder that functions as order’s negation? Of what does it consist? Résumé Cet essai déconstruit le concept binaire de And what is its relationship to order? normal/trouble. En se basant sur le travail Questions about the epistemological d’Henri Bergson, il remplace l’idée du trouble status of the pairing of order and disorder are avec le concept de deux « normativités » anything but abstract and immaterial. Notions of positives. L’essai conclut en offrant un exemple order and disorder are much more than philosophique sur comment re-concevoir ideational. Ideas and concepts are, as quantum l’opposition biomédicale de normalité/ path- theorist Karen Barad (2007) notes (following ologie, sans avoir recours à l’idée du trouble. Niels Bohr), part of “material-discursive apparatuses” which are themselves “formative of matter and meaning” (146). In other words, ideas of order and disorder are intrinsic to the material structures and practices that produce what come to be known as individuals and populations, just as these ideas assemble, organize, govern, and give meaning and affective depth to human lives. This is nowhere more apparent than in the material- discursive apparatus that is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Far from a directory of inconsequential and abstract technical jargon, the DSM 4th edition comprises concepts of mental disorder that profoundly shape the embodied realities of human life, happiness, suffering, and even death. Alterations to meanings of disorders correspondingly produce alterations to the sub- stance and liveability of human life. 10 www.msvu.ca/atlantis ■□ 35.2, 2011 This essay is an attempt not to map commonplace, “the idea of order itself is the effects of categories of disorder on either briefly sketched, implied, or it is ignored individual lives, but to contribute to one such altogether” (8). This is more than a little un- epistemological alteration to the very notion settling, especially given the prevalence of of disorder itself; an alteration that might clear the term disorder as a descriptor and the ground for profound transformations of definition for innumerable behaviours, identities, human life. It is divided into three parts, two conditions, and states of being. So what of which correspond roughly to two moves of exactly is order? To be sure, it has multiple deconstruction—reversal and displacement— meanings. At its simplest, we might think of and the final section, which considers, via the order, following the OED, as “sequence or work of Georges Canguilhem, an example of succession in space or time,” as “the course how we might reconceive the biomedical or method of occurrence or action,” or as an opposition of normality/pathology without relying “arrangement found in the existing con- on the idea of disorder. stitution of things” (1459‒1460). Implicit here are notions of complexity and heterogeneity Order and Its Other(s) (i.e., an entity or system having distinct parts). It seems obvious, perhaps even Pure homogeneity is not ordered according to necessary, to begin a discussion of disorder standard logic, it would seem, because there by first considering the notion of order. is no differentiation, no arrangement, and no The concept of order is fundamental sequence. There is, rather, only uniformity. to Western thought and to thought itself. It is Usually, some notion of lawfulness or necessity central to perception, to action, to organization, is implicit or added to the definition of order, to categorization, to language, to causality, to such that the parts of an entity or system are the event, to the phenomenon, and to governed or patterned by some ordering communication. As physicists David Bohm principle. Rudolph Arnheim, for example, and David Peat (2000) note, the “notion of defines order as “the degree and kind of order extends beyond the confines of a lawfulness governing the relations among the particular theory; permeates the whole infra- parts of an entity” (in Lorand 2000, 9). structure of concepts, ideas, and values; and Similarly, order is usually assumed to be a con- enters the very framework in which human dition of logical or comprehensible arrange- thought is understood and action carried out” ment among the separate elements of a (104‒5). Two of the hegemonic traditions of group. Western thought, namely metaphysics and What unites (or perhaps “orders”) any rationalist science, are both made possible concept of order, however, is the idea that it by, and are centrally concerned with, order: can be defined in a single concept. This orders of nature and orders of logic, orders of assumption of only one type of order is endemic experience and orders of meaning, practical to rationalistic science and metaphysics, and orders and ideal orders, unknown orders and it operates as a default or foundational con- known orders, existent orders and orders cept of these paradigms. That is, at its simplest, longed for. Thought, knowledge, human only one kind of order exists, and this is practice, and life are reflective of both the opposed binarily to disorder. Of course, within drive to order and the drive to apprehend the metaphysical schema, it is certainly order. Thought, knowledge, practice, and life granted that there are multiple sub-orders or are reflective of order itself. types of order. However, all sub-orders and However, despite, or as philosopher types of order are conceptually derivative of, Ruth Lorand suggests, perhaps because of, its or secondary to, some prior notion of order as centrality to thought, knowledge, experience, a singular concept. Order resides, it appears, and action, order is a concept that has re- at the origin of all sequence, and sequence is ceived relatively scant philosophical con- the essence of order. The definition of order sideration. Lorand (2000) notes that while dis- is thus circular, tautologous, and self-referential: cussions of “existence, status, kinds and order is part of its own definition. measure of order in a given system” are www.msvu.ca/atlantis ■□ 35.2, 2011 11 The distinction between order and groups, and societies that take disorder as an disorder usually operates as a classical binary organizing principle. The categorization and opposition. The binary functions as a hierarchy: treatment of individuals defined by the DSM IV order precedes disorder; order is privileged is one of the more obvious examples of this. over disorder; order sets the terms of Throughout the last several decades, disorder’s meaning; and order requires a a number of social movements have emerged contrast with its subordinate to establish its to challenge hegemonic constructions of superiority. In this way the order/disorder binary apparently “disordered” subjectivities, be- is exemplary of the Derridean “metaphysics haviours, conditions, and bodies. Among these of presence.” Order becomes what Jacques prominent movements are, of course, anti- Derrida (1976) would call the “transcendental psychiatry, gay liberation (and queer), and signified” (49). Its presence is implied by, and disability movements of the 1960s, 70s, and figured as, the foundation of, all meaning. 80s. (Feminism is another obvious move- Disorder, in contrast, is the absence of order ment.) As we know, anti-psychiatry led the (and thus meaning); it is order’s negation. Of way by launching an attack on the normative course, within metaphysics, even though terrain of mental health. R.D. Laing, Thomas disorder is constituted as the negation of Szasz, Michel Foucault, and others fiercely order, like order itself, disorder is assumed to contested notions of mental disorder and be a reality—even if only an intuited one. illness, normality, and pathology. (Unfortunately, Disorder exists, so it is assumed, despite the this does not seem to have inhibited the fact that the dualistic logic of its framing seemingly ever-expanding list of mental dis- constructs it as an absence of order. It is the orders in the DSM IV.) Drawing on anti- reality of the other to order, even if that is not psychiatry, gay liberation applied this critique to possible to conceptualize. Epistemologically, dominant notions of homosexuality as a mental therefore, disorder is almost always the disorder and pathology. And disability activists projection of absence onto the Other (by and scholars have rigorously challenged pre- other I mean other entities, other conditions, vailing notions of disability as an individualized other states of affairs, other people).
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