A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Etheses - Queen Margaret ...

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subordination insulates some people from the force of the contradiction between the
desire for sovereignty and the ineliminable fact of finitude, enabling them to live
within that contradiction at other people‟s expense... We might say that social
structures pay an ontological wage: they organise the human world in ways that
make it possible for certain people to enjoy an imperfect simulation of the
invulnerability they desire, leaving others to bear a disproportionate share of the
costs and burdens involved in social life (Markell, 2003:22).
Disability is the ontological price paid by people with impairments for the relative security
and comfort of people able to occupy the normate position. The position of the normate is
one that is valued and rewarded because it involves the fulfilment of the role that
contemporary social organisation requires. However, it is also a position which is less than
fulfilling of human potential and involves the ultimately futile pursuit of meaning within the
alienating products of the capitalist system.
Markell argues that oppressive relations between social actors are not the result of
misrecognition of others, but stem from contradictions in our ways of understanding the self.
Acknowledgement avoids this trap, being
directed at the basic conditions of one‟s own existence and activity, including,
crucially, the limits of „identity‟ as a ground of action, limits which arise out of our
constitutive vulnerability to the unpredictable reactions and responses of others
(Markell, 2003:36).
He emphasises that acknowledgement is not a magical recipe for removing from human
relations „the full range of experiences that can make social life unpleasant or difficult to
bear‟ (Markell, 2003:37) and identifies this kind of promise as a weakness inherent in
prognoses offered by both supporters of redistribution and recognition politics. The view that
all it will take to put things right for once and for all is a fairer distribution of resources or a
recognition of „who we really are‟ is naive and flies in the face of historical experience.
Rather, in being directed towards our own conditions, acknowledgement
accepts our finitude, and involves coming to terms with, rather than vainly
attempting to overcome, the risk of conflict, hostility, misunderstanding, and
alienation that characterises life among others (Markell, 2003:38).
I regard Markell‟s position as important because it does not seek to theorise away the reality
of pain, discomfort, darkness and fatigue that real life involves. Whereas the project of