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Normalisation and its discontents: Continuing conceptual confusion over theory/praxis issues regarding the empowerment of people with intellectual disability

The proper role, if any, to be played by third parties in the lives of people with intellectual disability has long been an issue of dispute. With the inception of disability studies as a legitimate branch of sociological and philosophical thinking, this debate has moved from the colloquial to the theoretical. In this scholarly field the argument typically centres on the value of normalisation/social role valorisation (SRV) as the preeminent blueprint informing the nature of such relationships. With a specific focus on the intellectual impairment of Down syndrome, I will offer a critique of the chief claims made by the competing frameworks of the social model of disability and poststructuralism – or, at the very least, influential authors who align themselves with either of these two camps – in order to establish whether, when it comes to real-life questions of practice, they add anything substantive to the ongoing debate. Since its inception, the philosophy of normalisation/ SRV has been subjected to an array of criticisms regarding the theoretical assumptions it employs, the conclusions it reaches, and its application in practice (Campbell, 2008, 2009; Chappell, 1997; Oliver, 1999; Race, Boxall, & Carson, 2005; Tremain, 2005). For the purposes of this paper, the most relevant of these are as follows: that it perpetuates a realist understanding of ontology in relation to the nature of intellectual impairment; that it views the relatively restricted cognitive capacity of, for example, people with Down syndrome as an effect of their biology rather than a social construction; that it fails to respect individual freedom and consequently reproduces the power imbalance between professionals and people with intellectual disability; that it is conformist in its positing of an agreed conception as to what it means to be “normal,” which it pushes people with intellectual disability to meet; and that it is apolitical, in that it passes responsibility for the oppression of people with intellectual disability from society back to the individual. In this paper I will deal with each of these issues in turn to argue that when it comes to issues of praxis the competing ideologies – in the broad political sense of the term – have more in common than they would like to admit. Before examining the nature of this debate, a few words are necessary to clarify the philosophical approach of this paper; that is, its form and content is primarily that of a second-order investigation into “talk about talk” of normalisation/SRV, to argue that when one carefully examines the major critiques of normalisation/SRV from a conceptual perspective, it is revealed they lack propositional content and should be categorised primarily as being ideological in nature. Although the concept of ideology is a contested one, my use of the term in relation to the categorisation of particular statements employs a minimalist definition, to wit, a statement is deemed to be ideological in nature when, unbeknown to itself, it collapses the descriptive/normative distinction. In other words, the scholarly assumption I ammaking is that although the authors under scrutiny, as is this one, are coming from a certain ideological perspective – in the broad political sense of the term – they are nevertheless making what they think are truth claims in relation to the issues under investigation. However, the argument I am advancing is that many such claims do not deserve to be classified as true in any meaningful epistemological sense of the term, but rather should be classified as irreducibly normative in nature. Although such an endeavour may seem unduly negative, this paper’s intended contribution to disability research has both destructive and constructive objectives, which in this context are effectively mutually constitutive. To invoke Wittgenstein (1953), if “philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language” (p. 47), then this focus on semantics is not just semantics in the pejorative sense of the term.