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Mobility Disability

Langan, Celeste.

Public Culture, Volume 13, Number 3, Fall 2001, pp. 459-484 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

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459

Mobility DisabilityCeleste Langan

To think about mobility disability is to think about norms of speed and rangesof motion; perhaps also of desired ends. Rousseau long ago declared in TheSocial Contractthat the cripple who wants to run and the able-bodied man whodoesnt will both remain where they are. But by focusing on internal resources

and intentions, Rousseau forgot to mention all those whose mobility is affected by

external constraints. To consider those constraints is to notice how the built envi-

ronmentsocial practices and material infrastructurescan create mobility dis-

abilities that diminish the difference between the cripple and the ambulatory

person who may well wish to move.

Two examples, one from the United States, one from Turkey. Title VI of the

1964 Civil Rights Act appeared to sweep away legal obstacles to the mobility of

African Americans. But in The Legacy of Jim Crow in Macon, Georgia, David

Oedel (1997: 98) describes how the contemporary transportation infrastructure

still has discriminatory effects:

A steady stream of seemingly innocuous funding and operational deci-

sions . . . have, since 1964, quietly but effectively restricted the mobility

Public Culture 13(3): 459484Copyright 2001 by Duke University Press

I would like to thank Carol A. Breckenridge; the editorial board ofPublic Culture and its manu-

script editor, William Elison; my colleagues Susan Schweik (who lent me her library as well as her

expertise), Michael Lucey, and Robin Einhorn; my audiences at the Disability Criticism Conference

and at the University of California at Berkeley; and especially Joseph P. Valente, for having so bril-

liantly helped me to make the essay better than the one he read.

T

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of poor African-Americans and other disfavored minorities who do not

own cars. Meanwhile, these same officials and citizens have simultane-

ously lavished public funds on transportation accommodations favored by

the car-owning majority, who have used the new and improved roads,

streets, and highways in effect to live free from close contact with poor

African-Americans and others similarly situated.

The power of funding and operational decisions to create mobility disabilities

becomes even clearer upon consideration of the Turkish case, where discrimina-

tion takes place under the sign not of race but of modernization: the homogeniza-

tion and amplification of speed.Responding to (but also stimulating) the massiveurbanization and mobilization of its population, Turkey has built new multilane

highways with lowered gradients that allow traffic to move with greater efficiency.

All sorts of traffic one encounters on other roads, however, are absent on the new

freeways. Pedestrians, horse-drawn carts, and tractors are all prohibited; highway

signs proclaim which forms of mobility are no longer up to speed. Those dis-

qualified from travel on the new highways may soon discover that schools, stores,

and other public facilities are more spread out and harder to reach, for such ampli-fied norms of mobility alter the spatial dimensions of peoples lives.

Two Hollywood films of recent vintage offer contrasting representations of

the mobility disabilities created by norms of speed in the United States. David

Lynchs The Straight Story (1999) chronicles the journey of sixty-eight-year-old

Alvin Straight, whose visual impairment prohibits him from driving and whose

antipathy to being a passenger whether in his daughters car or on a bussets

him on the unusual course of riding a lawn mower from Iowa to Wisconsin, at an

average speed of three to four miles an hour (roughly the norm of walking).

Lynch makes us aware, as we watch the film, of the extent to which even our

visual experience of space has been transformed by speednot only by the

twenty-four-frame-per-second speed of film projection, but by the rate at which

cameras usually move over the landscape. The deliberately slowed pace of the

film creates the illusion of real time, and the return to a human scale implied in

the title reinforces the films thematic suggestion that autonomyfigured as

escape from the immobility implicit in mass-mediated consumptionis still pos-

sible. As Straight painstakingly repairs his mower, builds his trailer, and buys his

prosthetic grabber, he seems to tap an interior resourcefulnesstalents and

industrysufficient to restore the capacity for what might be termed automobil-

ity to his aging body. In its offbeat way, The Straight Story enshrines the appear-

ance in the discourse of freedom and in the public sphere of a new political cate-

Public Culture

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gory: the individuals with wheelchairs recognized by the 1990 Americans with

Disabilities Act (ADA).

But the film partly undermines, or at least complicates, its celebration of

Straights independence in two scenes about failed automobility. On his first try,

Straight gets barely five miles out of town before his mower breaks down. After

having it towed home and finding it irreparable, he takes his shotgun and blows

the defective mower to bitsas if it didnt deserve to live. Using his savings to

purchase a newer mower, Straight gets much farther the second time. But halfway

toward his destination the old man has an accident that burns out his motor, and

he must delay the completion of his journey until he receives enough money fromhis Social Security check to pay for repairs. There are, in other words, two aspects

of Straights mobility disabilityphysical and economic; and two necessary con-

ditions for the recovery of automobilityequality of opportunity (wheelchair- or

lawn moweraccessible highways) and sufficient material resources to take

advantage of that opportunity.1

The other road movie I have in mind is Speed(Jan De Bont, 1994). As the title

indicates, the films sensibility provides a counterpoint to that of Lynchs. Yet ittoo brings attention to what we might call prosthetic travel. The films distinctive

contribution to the action genre is the substitution of the bus for the car as the

lead vehicle; the bus seems unsuited to the role precisely because it relegates

potential actors to the status of passengers traveling along a fixed route, whereas

the conventional chase scene of action films represents the superior agency of the

hero as the greater speed at which he or she negotiates the world. The frisson of

Speeddepends on the injunction (courtesy of the disabled villain, played by Den-

nis Hopper2) that the buss speed must not drop below fifty miles per hour; the

reminder is that, in normal circumstances, buses go considerably more slowly

than that, even when they travel on freeways.

The narrative mechanisms by which the bus is transformed into an action

vehicle are mostly obvious. Two charactersclearly identified as infrequent

users of mass transittake over its navigation after the bus driver is shot. The

character played by Sandra Bullock is heard frequently to declare I love my

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1. Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon (1997: 33) describe the New Deals creation of a two-track

welfare system, whereby programs such as Social Security and Unemployment Insurance were con-

structed to create the misleading appearance that beneficiaries merely got back what they put in and

were thereby saved from the stigma attached to dependency programs.

2. Disability criticism has remarked how often film represents villains as physically disabled, and

Speedis no exception: Hopper plays Howard Payne, a cop who was forced to retire as a consequence

of having sufferedon the joba disabling and disfiguring injury to his hand.

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car; she is riding the bus only because her license to drive has been temporarily

suspended for speeding. She drives the bus under the direction of the policeman,

played by Keanu Reeves, who has left his SUV behind only to perform the requi-

site rescue. Keeping the speedometer above fifty requires them to perform all

sorts of off-route maneuvers, including, in a climactic scene, the achievement of

flight.3

But the film imagines the other bus riders much differently. They are almost

entirely low-income people of color, with assorted others whose automobility is

disabled by quasi-cognitive impairments: the white woman too nervous to drive

the Los Angeles freeways, the white tourist who doesnt know his way around.This imagining complicates the problem that Speed, as an action film, is supposed

to solve. For the hostage situation that traps the bus passengers is virtually

indistinguishable from their regular status as bus riders, or so the film implies.

The status of passenger and the status of hostage are virtually conflated. And if

the bus is abnormally forced by a villainous demand to go above fifty, the film

suggests that going below fifty the threat posed by congested highways rep-

resents an equivalent loss of freedom. The injunction to speed is general.One population of bus riders is not represented in Speed: physically disabled

people. Its too bad, in a waynot just because it might make the film more

mimetically accurate or increase the visibility of disabled people in the public

imagination, but because the ambiguous mobility that disabled people represent

in that imagination (an ambiguity evident in that curious phrase, confined to a

wheelchair) might capture the ideological contradiction that Speed exposes.

Although the passengers have freely choseneven paidto ride the bus, the

suggestion is that the bus (or mass transportation in general) is an imperfect form

of mobility in its evident confinement of passengers to a fixed route and a speed

regulated from elsewhere. And despite the contrast between bus and automobile

on which the film depends for its originality, Speedsuggests that the enforced

community of hostages is generalizable to the population at large. We are at once

hostages to speed and to a failure to maintain speed. The normative tyranny of

this express bus threatens and is threatened by all those who cannot get out of

its way quickly enough; as the bus barrels down the surface streets and through

intersections where it would, under normal conditions, make regular stops, it can-

not now even stop for traffic lights or pedestrians. The demand to pause in con-

sideration of others is represented as life threatening.

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3. This achievement is not as otherworldly as it might appear. See, for example, Neferti X. Tadiars(1993) fine essay on Manilas flyovers, or highways that bypass urban decay and crowding.

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The solutions the film poses to this conundrum are revealing: on the one hand,

an expanded highway system with restricted access (the bus escapes highway

congestion by bursting through to an as-yet-unfinished extension); on the other, a

quicker completion of the L.A. subway system (Reeves and Bullock blast through

a subway-construction wall in the last episode of the film). Subways, presumably,

have the virtue of keeping slower citizensmass-transit usersout of the pub-

lic view, off the streets. These solutions are not unfamiliar to Los Angelenos; the

city has already experimented with toll roads for the wealthy, and the controver-

sial redirection of transit funds from the bus system to subway and fixed rail has

been much in the news. It is as if this social stratification of transportation optionsis necessary to release the privileged minorityin this case, Reeves and Bul-

lockfrom what Ronald Dworkin (1981: 312) calls the slavery of the talented:

the perception that ones own mobility options have been hijacked by public

policies that try to equalize mobility resources. Only such a stratified transporta-

tion system, ironically, seems to guarantee that mobility will be felt as freedom.

And thus Speed, in its peculiar way, introduces an even newer category of politi-

cal subject than the ADAs individuals with wheelchairs: the mass-transitdependent.

Now, the segregation of transportation is widely deplored by the disability

rights movement; perhaps one of the most familiar signs of that movements suc-

cess has been the wheelchair lift on buses. The other familiar signthe parking

space reserved For Handicapped Parking Onlyis more controversial. The

two sites of conjunctionthe wheelchair and the bus, the wheelchair and the

(space of) the automobilebring into focus two common attitudes toward dis-ability law. Access to buses is often seen as a proper extension of civil rights, as a

matter of equal opportunity and a provision of formal justice. But reserved park-

ing spaces are greeted with far more ambivalence; to some they represent a

denial of equal opportunity, an unwarranted affirmative actioneven a quota

systemand a distributive injustice. These attitudes also align in certain ways

with the two films I have described. The Straight Story represents mobility dis-

ability as an individual problema problem of how to restore automobility, and

thus a certain agency, to the individual. Speed, on the other hand, represents the

danger of prosthetic justice: the bus so equalizes the mobility of individuals

that it appears to threaten liberty.

What makes both films so potentially illuminating for disability criticism is the

fact that their two representations of prosthetic travelthe wheelchair as (indi-

vidually enabling) car, the wheelchair as (socially constraining) buscall atten-tion to a larger ideological conflation: freedom and mobility. When disability

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scholars and activists speak of access, they have a wide variety of sites in view:

access to educational opportunity, to jobs and services, to the public sphere. But

the familiar blue-and-white wheelchair symbol predominates over other signs of

disabled access because it so powerfully expresses the assertion of rights as

a desire for what we call social mobility. Social mobility is the product of a cer-

tain tension between what constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe (1988: 1436)

describes well as the warring tendencies of democratic freedom: equality and

liberty.4 In the context of this war, we may say that mass transportation and the

wheelchair are similar in that each works to equalize disparities in (social) mobil-

ity. The other term in the dialectic, liberty, tends to be imagined as an attribute ofnature of the unimpaired, unassisted body. The location of liberty in individual

bodies (or selves) is what is used to explain the different outcomes of suppos-

edly equal opportunities.

This imagining of liberty is shared by people with widely differing attitudes

toward the proper balancing of liberty and equality. In his seminal essay, Energy

and Equity, Ivan Illich (1978: 119) articulates a theory of democratic justice and

just transportation that rests on the following claim: People move well on theirfeet. . . . People on their feet are more or less equal. People solely dependent on

their feet move on the spur of the moment, at three to four miles an hour, in any

direction and to any place from which they are not legally or physically barred.

More recently, when he was governor of Colorado, Roy Romer (recently

appointed to head the Los Angeles school system) declared his willingness to

consider alternatives to reduce air pollution from cars that dont result in a loss

of freedom or have prohibitive costs. One of the great privileges of being humanis to be free (Daly 1991: 370). Of course, we notice an odd torque in this latter

declaration: the freedom that Illich located in the body has been alienated, reified,

and commodified in the automobile.

In the rest of this essay, I explore the implications of this metamorphosis the

ideology of freedom as automobility recoded as the freedom of the automobile

for disability studies. I suggest that the object of restoring automobility to indi-

vidual bodies reinforces the model of liberal individualism, which is grounded in

the false premise of bodily equality as the basis of democratic justice. I propose

here to dispense with that false premise by recognizing in the artificial form of

the citizen aprosthetic subject, whose capacities for liberty depend on the built

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4. See also Tribes (1988: 143638) discussion of two interpretations of equal protection gener-

ated by the opposing principles of liberty and equality: equality of treatment and treatment as anequal.

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environment of the public sphere. I therefore wish to undertake a deconstruction

of mobility disabilitynot to deny the difference between people with bodily

impairments and those whose mobility is limited in other ways, but to develop a

new account of what is required for just transportation. I propose that the reduc-

tion of mobility disparities depends on an omnibus model of rightsa model that

may require abandoning the (always problematic) category of the physically

disabled in favor of an alliancea strategic nonessentialism, so to speak

among the (social) mobility-impaired.5

I want to outline a framework for this model by taking my own unusual jour-

ney, from William Wordsworths liberal/Romantic representation of a travelingcripple in The Prelude to a trio of documentary films by contemporary U.S. film-

maker Haskell Wexler. This seriesgrouped retrospectively under the title Bus

Trilogyhas no immediately obvious relevance to disability criticism; indeed,

hardly a single visibly disabled person is seen in the first two films, at least in part

because neither of the buses on which the films focus is wheelchair accessible.

Moreover, since the buses transport social activists to a mass demonstrationa

marchthey might appear to sustain the long history of representing walkingas the exercise of democratic freedom and agency, a representation that Words-

worths poetry (along with Rousseaus political theory) helps to install. But the

films undermine the simplicity of that association by foregrounding one precon-

dition of such mass demonstrations of political presence: the availability of mass

transportation. To gain access to that elusive public sphere, it appears foot travel

alone will not suffice. Political agency is now exercised by a newly collective ver-

sion of that prosthetic subject whose first appearance in the public sphere was, asthe case of Wordsworth will suggest, coincident with the development of demo-

cratic liberalism.

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5. Although I will propose an omnibus model of rights, I mean to distinguish this model from the

liberal omnibus fantasy that recurs in disability writing; for example, in Georgina Kleeges recentSight Unseen:

On the bus recently a man stopped the driver, saying, Yo! Theres a little handicap brother

that wants to get on. . . . No one challenged the mans use of the word. He was a big man,

over six feet tall. His voice boomed out of his chest and had more than a hint of a threat in it.

. . . The man who spoke was African-American. The handicapped brother was not. The bond

between them, between us all at that moment, was the bus. (Kleege 1999: 4142)

While such passages reinforce my suggestion that the bus is the form of transportation marked as

disabled, such that becoming a passenger signals dependency, they idealize the possibility ofalliance under such conditions.

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The Nineteenth-Century Background

Wordsworths emphasis on freedom as automobility, legible throughout The Pre-

lude, is an important context for understanding a contrast he develops betweentwo imaginings of the bourgeois public sphere that London represents. His own

childhood imagining of London as a distant site of infinite possibility is con-

trasted with another vicarious experience, narrated in the following passage:

in our flock of Boys

Was One, a cripple from his birth, whom chance

Summoned from school to London; fortunate

And envied traveller! When the Boy returned

After short absence, curiously I scanned

His mien and person, nor was free, in sooth,

From disappointment, not to find some change

In look and air, from that new region brought,

As if from Fairy-land. Much I questioned him;

And every word he uttered, on my ears

Fell flatter than a cagd parrots note,That answers unexpectedly awry,

And mocks the prompters listening. (7.90102 [1850])

Why, we might ask, does Wordsworth note that the boy was a cripple from

his birth? Would not the return of any visitorwhose appearance would be

unlikely to have been changed by a sojourn in Londonhave been productive of

equal disappointment? Surely we may suspect that Wordsworth wishes to use the

apparent oxymoron of a cripple who becomes an envied Traveller in order to

figure the complex relation between actual and imaginative mobility. We are

meant to notice that there is nothing in actual physical mobility that guarantees

the transcendence of outward forms that Wordsworth will associate with both

aesthetic and political autonomy. To this extent, the boy is the mere representa-

tive of those masses whose increasing accumulation in cities seems less the prod-

uct of autonomy than automatization; they move but are unmovedunchangedby the experience. On the other hand, the inference that the boy cannot travel

to London and back under his own powerthat he is physically transported

importantly reinforces an all-too-common assumption in representations of

disability: that a particular physical impairmenthere, a motor impairment

implies sensory and cognitive impairment as well. It is as if we are to assume that

the boy has been blind and deaf to the wonders of London; hence there is no

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change in his look, and his language suggests even a hearing deficiency, since

he answers unexpectedly awry.

But there is another aspect of Wordsworths representation of the crippled

traveler that deserves attention. The poets careful scanning of the boys mien

and person is a search not only for signs of aesthetic sophistication, but also for

signs of physical mobilization. It is as if the youthful Wordsworth, associating the

metropolis with an increase in mobility, assumes that the boy will have acquired,

in a Lamarckian manner, a portion of that mobilityas if the traffic in move-

ables of wonder (7.706) for which London is remarkable includes a traffic in

mobility itself. And it is just possible that this last supposition is partly true; atleast when Wordsworth finally visits London, he notices, amid the metropolitan

melange, a travelling cripple, by the trunk cut short, / And stumping on his

arms (7.203 4; emphasis added). One spectacle the city affords, apparently, is

the disordering of the difference between prosthetic and autonomous travel.

If Wordsworth appears to regard these figures with a fairly conventional

mixture of antipathy and fascination, his identification of the source of that

antipathy and fascination seems to me more unusual. Because his figures ofimpaired movement stand in relation to the technological enhancements of the

city, Wordsworth ties physical impairment to a broad spectrum of disabilities

introduced by capitalism. The contrasting rates of speed in London and the coun-

tryside are only one example of the social construction of a norm of mobility that

threatens to identify walking itself as a mobility disability. There is a correspon-

dence, after all, between Wordsworths traveling cripple and his description else-

where of the wealthy who roll in chariots (Wordsworth 1949: 2.99), a corre-spondence that foregrounds the relevance of capital to the concept of disability.

For Wordsworth, both kinds of amplified mobility the privately owned chariot

and the broad causeways of (the) capital threaten to make traveling cripples of

us all.

Precisely because Wordsworth associates the traveling cripple with a metro-

politan traffic in moveables, the latter is a figuration that allows consideration of

the historical difference mass culture makes both to the concept of the disabled

body and to the concept of the citizen. For Wordsworth, London represents the

dangerous capacity of the built environment to distribute goodslike mobility

conventionally thought to be the inalienable properties of the body. Such traffic in

moveables in mobilitysignifies the transformation of the human being into a

prosthetic subject. Moreover, it complicates the notion of political identity as

well, for the concentration of technology and capital in the built environment of

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the city and throughout the empire supersedes not only nature, but also the

authority of political institutions to determine the extent and limits of various

freedomsincluding that fundamental freedom of liberal democracies, the

freedom to come and go without permission.6

We might clarify the issue by reference to that other hallowed freedom of

democratic liberalism, freedom of speech. A prominent opponent of campaign

contribution limits, citing the cost of aNew York Times ad, opines that in a demo-

cratic republic of 260 million, amplifying ones voice is just plain expensive

(Howd 2000: 20). This suggestion that networks of mass communication work to

mute the voices of many and amplify those of a few has at least the virtue of sug-gesting that speech is a prosthesis enabling the citizen to participate in the public

sphere. By contrast, Justice John Paul Stevenss almost nostalgic (and Wordswor-

thian) insistence, in Nixon v. Shrink Missouri PAC(528 U.S. 377, 398 [2000]:

398) that Money is property, it is not speech, rests on the unexamined assump-

tion that speech is inherently democratic because it is equally distributed among

bodies. But the PAC-man and the speech-impaired citizen together testify to a

different actuality. Capital-intensive technologies of amplification not only ofspeech, but also of mobilityhave so altered social being that even the unim-

paired (but also unassisted) body has the character of a disabled subject. Tribe

(1988: 1305) puts the dilemma thus:

The very idea of articulating constitutional constraints and obligations is

threatened with incoherence by the same interdependence that has made

liberal individualism of Mills variety inadequate to the contemporary task

of building doctrine. For it is arguable that the more human activity and

human personality are shaped by the forces and pressures of homogeniza-

tion spawned by mass industry and the mass media the forces that

define the culture and constitute the economy the less sense it makes to

spin out special limits and duties for government.

While we might agree with Tribes statement of the problem, the solution is not to

abandon the field of political justice, but rather to abandon liberalisms dream ofthe autonomous subject.

It is when we add to Tribes list the development of mass transportation

including the mass transportation system of highways for carsthat we notice

how Wordsworths traveling cripple, like the familiar blue-and-white wheelchair

symbol, is a figure that both threatens and promises to extend the concept of the

political subject with rights beyond the supposedly natural boundaries of the

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6. Cf. my discussion of Benjamin Constant in Langan 1995.

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body, to include collateral objects that might be necessary to assure that subjects

appearance in the public sphere. But it is not the physically disabled alone who

require such collateral objects. I want to propose that the contemporary analogue

of Wordsworths traveling cripple, and a necessary supplement to the concept of

individuals with wheelchairs that now structures the logic of accessibility, is

that other category of mobility disability I have invoked: the category of the

mass-transit dependent.

To think through the relation between the figure of the traveling cripple and

the condition of the mass-transit dependent is, I realize, a potentially controver-

sial move, since my object is, primarily, to use disability studies to reconceptual-

ize class as a category relevant to equal protection under the law. The chief

attraction of such a project may be its counterintuitiveness. If we recognize the

affinity of disability rights activism with earlier movements for racial and gender

equality, it is because we have become attentive to the ways in which the body is

variously marked to naturalize legal exclusions and social hierarchies. But the

relation between the body and class is far more tenuous. And that, precisely, is

the potential value of the analogy for disability studies. Class is a category ofidentity that draws attention to the socially constructed character both of mobility

norms and mobility disabilities.

Using class as a category through which to understand what I call the pros-

thetic subject has two significant advantages. First, it properly marks mobility

disability as a contingent rather than an essential aspect of identity. What distin-

guishes class from race or gender as a form of identity is its transitivity. Indeed,

class as an identity is only lived in this transitivity; you are only made coincidentwith your class identity in the act of distancing yourself from it, as Pierre Bour-

dieu (1984) argues. Class therefore offers a powerful tool for imagining an iden-

tity for disabled subjects that rejects, on the one hand, the permanent status of the

victim, and, on the other, the fantasy of a cure or rehabilitation that would dis-

solve the identity itself.

Second, to invoke the category of class is to represent this transitivity as the

unclosed space between equality and liberty. We might say that class is the

remainder that Nancy Fraser (1997: 77) identifies in her critique of the Haber-

masian model of the public sphere: the question of open access cannot be

reduced without remainder to the presence or absence of formal exclusion. For,

as she points out elsewhere, economic dependency is increasingly vilified once

political rights are guaranteed by statute: Absent coverture and Jim Crow, it has

become possible to declare that equality of opportunity exists and that individual

merit determines outcomes (Fraser 1997:136). One might think of the ADA, and

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its emphasis on individuals with wheelchairs, in this light as an attempt to dele-

gitimate the category of class altogether by appearing to eliminate the most stub-

born remainder of inequalitybodily difference.7 But for that very reason, the

ADA sets the stage for a radical program of justice, since the calcification of eco-

nomic subordinationstheir resistance to abolitionsuggests the inadequacy

of merely formal equality.

One advantage of beginning with Wordsworth, in nineteenth-century England,

is the historical perspective it presents for thinking about disability and citizen-

ship. In nineteenth-century Anglo-American law, disability was a far more

inclusive term than currently, as Anita Silvers (1998) and others have pointed out.

Thomas Macaulays essay On the Civil Disabilities of the Jews, the release of

Irish Catholics from disability, and the Womens Disability Bill of the 1870s suf-

ficiently remind us of why it would not be wrong to call liberal political efforts to

extend the votefrom the Reform Bill of 1832 to the Freedom Rides of the

1960s forms of disability activism. But insofar as these legal disabilities were

justified, however erroneously, by reference to bodily difference, the history of

the elimination of political disabilities can still misleadingly suggest that thesolution for inequality is either the normativization of the body or the wholesale

abstraction of citizenship from the body. I wish to restore and even extend the

definition of disability as an exclusion from political power. My purpose is not

to abstract the citizen from embodiment, but rather to demonstrate the important

insight of disability studies that the autonomous body no longer provides (if it

ever did) an adequate model of social agency. Instead, what is needed is a reimag-

ining of the public spherea reimagining that recognizes the public sphere as abuilt environment and that therefore defends rights to transportation, education,

and employment not as matters of general welfare but as necessary civil rights.

What kind of justice disability demands has been a vexed issue for scholars

both within and outside of disability studies. Physical disability often serves as a

kind of limit case for philosophical reflections on formal justice and as an occa-

sion to produce feelings of responsibility or charity in political arguments defend-

ing welfare or advocating some other form of (private) distributive justice. In

other words, disabled bodies have often been employed in the political discourse

of liberalism as occluding figures for class. But more recently, as disability schol-

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470

7. Oddly, in their Genealogy of Dependency essay, Fraser and Gordon (1997) fail to consider

the ca tegory of the physically disabled. They describe only three negatives that help to constitute

the positive independence of the nineteenth-century wage-laborer: the pauper, the native or slave, and

the housewife. Even if we presume that the category of paupers includes the physically disabled, theelision is a problematic one.

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ars themselves debate appropriate kinds of legal remedy, the relation between

physical disability and other conditions that constrain opportunity has been

addressed more directly.

In one powerful recent meditation on these issues, the philosophers Anita Sil-

vers and David Wasserman debate how to resolve the warring tendencies of

equality and liberty. Is disability rights activism a call for formal, or distributive,

justice? Is its purpose to restore differential mobility to bodies unduly con-

strained by discriminatory practices, or does it seek to equalize mobility dispari-

ties? Silvers argues the former case, describing the Americans with Disabilities

Act and similar legislation as a defense against discrimination, a case of purely

civil rights. She works carefully to distinguish federal funds directed toward

retrofitting the built environment from any redistribution of economic resources:

To illustrate, although public transportation systems must be made acces-

sible, the disabled are owed only that level of mobility enjoyed (or

deplored) by public transportation users, not the higher level achieved by

private automobile users, despite the fact that many people with disabili-

ties cannot drive and thus do not have the mobility equivalent to nondis-abled car owners. The comparatively greater inconvenience of using

public transportation is visited equally upon disabled and nondisabled

nondrivers. Consequently, this is not an instance of disability incurring a

discriminatory lesser level of service. (Silvers 1998: 12445)

In her response to Wassermans criticism that the ADA leaves most disabled

people with a far greater burden of mobility than other people, Silvers (1998:

257) reveals the motive behind her insistence on formal justice: To further com-

pensate those whose residual transportation burden is due to their impairments,

but not those for whom poverty, lack of language skills, or other deficient cir-

cumstances impose a similar degree of burden, is to privilege disability over other

disadvantages without justification.

Silverss ability to register here a variety of disadvantages that might impair

mobility is characteristic; she does not insist on formal justice because she is

insensitive to economic and cultural disadvantages. But she seems unwilling or

unable to imagine a class to which all of these disadvantaged citizens would

belong. The problem, as she understands it, is the wide range and frequent inci-

dence of disadvantage that is not traceable to social choice (Silvers 1998: 254)

that is, to discriminatory policies and practices. While Silvers admits a point that

Wasserman (1998: 157 n. 23) will make much more stronglythe revealing fact

that federal legislative support for the disabled intensified during an era of pro-

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nounced welfare retrenchmentshe appears unable to reconcile the model of

distributive justice to her idea of liberty. For example, she even imagines a

Dworkinian slavery of the talented visited on disabled people by the demands

of distributive justice: if both the employed mobility-impaired individual and

the unemployed one need to use wheelchairs, assessing the former to pay for the

latters mobility may prevent the employed person from purchasing her own

wheelchair (Silvers 1998: 260). We are almost reminded here of John Grays

(1986: 64) classic defense of private property in the liberal state as an institu-

tional vehicle for decentralized decision-making. But as we reflect on the extent

to which the funding of transportation options and the determination of speed

limits are indeed forms of social choice, it becomes more possible than Silvers

imagines to trace a wide range of disadvantages to those choices.

Can we sustain Silverss powerful representation of the formal justice of the

ADAwherein all funding provisions are conceived as reparations for past dis-

crimination, as a necessary retrofitting of the public spherewithout excluding

the rights of access to this retrofitted public sphere of the economically disabled?

The question is important, I maintain, because it is one of the great contributionsof disability studies to blur the difference between the two categories. Take Sil-

verss own account of discrimination against Deaf culture. She writes that

the conceptualization of language that denied manual signing the status

of being language is a nineteenth-century artifact developed to homoge-

nize communication and so facilitate the civic and commercial transac-

tions of the emerging urban society. Signings defect lay not in its power to

signify but rather in its requirement for face-to-face contact, a characteris-tic considered retrograde in an era when enhanced ability to communicate

over distances facilitated commerce. (Silvers 1998: 72)

Here we have an example of precisely that homogenization of mass culture to

which Tribe calls attention as potentially requiring a new model of civil rights.

Thus, the Deaf person who experiences discrimination on the job; the native

Spanish speaker refused a job because of limited English; the worker laid off (andgradually made indigent) by the adoption of new technologies; even the person

who is unemployed largely because adequate transportation to job centers is not

availableeach would seem to have claims of justice before the law. We cannot

call the claims equal, perhapsthe language disability of the Spanish speaker

is more transitive than the Deaf personsbut in each case, we note that it is

changing norms for participation in the public sphere that create the deficiency or

disability that might lead to dependency.

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As Wasserman points out, the issue of disability rights raises two central prob-

lems. First, as noted above, the problem is deciding among competing claims for

the redistribution of resources. The second problem is the possibility that secur-

ing the right of people with disabilities to live in the world demands an indefi-

nite commitment of resources (Wasserman 1998:180). Even if it were possible

(though I maintain it is not) to formalize a category of physical disability that did

not depend on the rejected medical model but was still capable of distinguishing

between socially constructed physical impairments and socially constructed

poverty, the retrofitting of the public sphere to make it fully accessible to the dis-

abled is not a one-time expenditure. Wasserman (1998: 179) quotes one judge dis-

tressed by this implication of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973:

What must be done to provide handicapped persons with the same right to

utilize mass-transportation facilities as other persons? Does each bus have

to have a special capacity? Must each seat on the bus be removable? Must

the bus routes be changed to provide stops at hospitals, therapy centers,

and nursing homes? Is it required that buses be able to accommodate

bedridden persons?

This barely suppressed rant demonstrates the ambiguity of what the ADA will

later identify as reasonable accommodation. There are, of course, different

ways of imagining what constitutes a reasonable expenditure to facilitate the

full participation of disabled people. But the issue has real effects. In her review

of the impact of the ADA on accessible transportation, Rosalyn Simon (1996:

300) establishes two important trends: paratransit services grow steadily to meet

increasing demand and utilization of increasingly accessible fixed-route systems

remains low. It is difficult to reconcile this apparent preference and growing

diversion of resources with the premise of the ADA, for as Simon (1996: 306)

goes on to point out (and as Silvers would undoubtedly insist),

The ADA is a civil rights statute, not a transportation or social service

program statute. The ADA clearly emphasizes non-discriminatory access

to fixed-route service, with complementary paratransit acting as a safetynet for people who cannot use the fixed route system. Under the ADA,

complementary paratransit is not intended to be a comprehensive system

of transportation for individuals with disabilities.

Moreover, Simon (1996: 319) suggests, the unintended expansion of paratransit

is having a measurably negative effect on what we might call a general social

progress in mass transportation: Paratransit is becoming a disincentive to fixed

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route expansion, as transit systems admit limiting the expansion of fixed route

service because of the corresponding paratransit service area implications.

Of course, what this focus on the possibly negative effects of ADA provisions

on the availability of mass transportation in general risks leaving out of consider-

ation is the far larger public funding of automobility for the (ostensibly) nondis-

abled. We do not frequently consider federal spending on new or retrofitted high-

ways in the same light in which expenditures on curb cuts, ramps, or wheelchair

lifts for buses are regardedeither as a luxury or as a questionable redistribution

of resources. Yet, spending on highways does amplify the mobility of some, and

it may decrease the free range of others. But this means that spending on curb

cuts, chair lifts, and accessible bathrooms might also affect the mobility of others.

It suggests the inadequacy of imagining the repair of social injustice on the model

of automobility.

What are we to do, then, in the situation that now obtains, in which the privi-

leging of disability over other disadvantages threatens to become a real issue?

Shall we, because cuts in public transportation would appear to dispossess

equally all citizens of that mobility option, decide that it is nondiscriminatory? Ordo we weigh into the equation the factproved in the legal case the Bus Riders

Union brought against the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority

(the subject of one of the Wexler documentaries, discussed below)that cuts in

the extent and frequency of service have disproportionately negative effects on a

population that can be classified not in terms of race, gender, or physical disabil-

ity, but rather as transit dependent? I want to insist that the development of what

might be termed, after Bullard and Johnson 1997,just transportation, entails thecontinued attempt to diminish disparities in relative mobility, rather than (as Sil-

vers and others would have it) merely maintain disparities of class across disabled

and nondisabled populations. Otherwise, the problem ofsegregationwhich dis-

ability activism makes the cornerstone of the claim for redress from discrimina-

tionwill not have been fully addressed. Even Silvers (1998: 21) suggests that

paratransit fails to fulfill the spirit of the ADA on these very grounds. We should

recognize, she writes, that both public and private special services programs for

people with disabilities are aimed at individuals whose participation is feared to

disrupt the efficiency of our ordinary transactions.

Surely it is not merely coincidental that both the civil rights movement against

race disability and the more recent (physical) disability rights movement should

have focused particular a ttention on access to public transportation. Although I

have been somewhat selective in my accumulation of examples, it is certainly the

case that mobility is a far more frequent subject of disability scholarship than

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sensory or cognitive difference. So much public funding and public property is

devoted to transportation that the identification of citizenship with physical

mobility is somewhat inevitable. But there is, as I have suggested, a split in that

identification: the notion of freedom attaches to the automobile, symbol of pri-

vacy and relative social mobility, while mass transportation represents the bot-

tom limit, or floor, of equality. This opposition is, of course, patently false, since

the extent to which supposedly private modes of transportation are subsidized

by public funding projects can be documented. But the conceptual hierarchy of

transportation options also lends a particular affect to the figure of the bus, gen-

erally framed as the poorest relation.

The bus has a history of enabling and extending participation in the public

sphere. We might invoke Washington Irvings (1864: 455) description of the 1832

Reform Billthe great reform omnibus moves but slowlyas a particularly

telling example, for although Irving may have meant to indicate nothing more

than the generality and internal contradictions of the bill, the prototype of the

modern bus was making its appearance concurrently in the streets of Paris; dur-

ing the July Revolution, theAnnual Register(1830: 188) reported, A barricadewas formed across the street by one of those long coaches to which Parisians

have given the name omnibus. The bus is a singularly slow vehicle of trans-

portationa traveling cripple, one might almost say, when compared to other

forms of mass transportation or even the automobilebecause it has more inter-

ests to serve. Having usually a greater number of points for access and departure

along its fixed route, the bus is more irregular in keeping its appointments; it is

this openness to contingency that makes it, finally, not only a portion of the pub-lic sphere, but also a figure for the transitivity orprogressive aspect of that pub-

lic sphere. Or that is the lesson, I hope to show, of the remarkable series of docu-

mentaries by the filmmaker Haskell Wexler.

The Bus Trilogy

What Wexler calls hisBus Trilogy consists of three films made over the course of

nearly forty years, each of which correlates the figure of the bus with a particu-

lar social movement. Each of the threeBus documentaries is, of course, an inde-

pendent artifact with specific formal features and values as well as a distinct sub-

ject. None of them can be said to make a central issue of disability as it has been

recently conceivedas bodily variations that become impairments in interaction

with various socially constructed environments. But, as viewed together, the

three documentaries sketch a history of the disabled civil subject that offers an

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orientation for rethinking the demands of justice and reconstructing the public

sphere.

The first film, The Bus, documents a bus trip from San Francisco to the March

on Washington in August 1963. In the national imaginary, that march is remem-

bered chiefly for Martin Luther King Jr.s I Have a Dream speech. Wexlers

documentary, on the other hand, foregrounds the preconditions for the achieve-

ment of such a powerful political speech act the amassing of bodies that gave

Kings voice such representative power. Perhaps the single most relevant sound/

image of the documentary occurs near its end, when the pedestrian march is just

getting under way in the vicinity of the buses that have allowed this freedom of

assembly. The spiritual We Shall Not Be Moved is the song of choicebut it

is access to mass transportation that has enabled the marchers to exercise politi-

cal will, to demonstrate the freedom to go and to return that is the precondition

for consensual government.

The relevance of the bus as an icon of civil rights does not emerge immedi-

ately. The Bus begins with Wexler and his assistant arriving at the family resi-

dence of one of the participants in the bus ride, a California teenager. Her mothertells the filmmakers that as far as walking for causes is concerned, its nothing

new with our family. I remember my grandfather, who was reared in western Vir-

ginia before the Civil War, always bragged that hed walked forty miles to vote

against secession. My family were abolitionists there. . . . The fact that the

teenager must take a Greyhound bus to exercise the kind of political agency her

great-grandfather could accomplish on foot suggests the need to reimagine the

very nature of the freedom to travel recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court asamong the fundamental rights of personhood the Constitution guarantees.8 Not

only does the sheer geographical extent of the modern United States make it

impossible for the vast majority of the population to travel to the capital under

their own power, but the transportation infrastructure of the national space has

been legally engineered to disable pedestrian travel, since most limited-access

highways are closed to pedestrian traffic by statute. Even where pedestrian t raf-

fic on highways is permitted, that permission does not usually include the right to

protest to the government for the redress of grievances. Indeed, this is a lesson

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476

8. Cf. Tribe 1988: 137883. Many such assertions date from 1964an interesting coincidence

with the rise of civil rights activismbut Tribe (1988: 1379) also cites a decision in Williams v. Fears

(1900), in which the Chief Justice asserts, Undoubtedly the right of locomotion, the right to remove

from one place to another according to inclination, is an attribute of personal liberty. Tribe also sug-

gests that the emphasis on interstate rather than intrastate travel is an outgrowth of the Articles of

Confederation.

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King himself would learn in 1965, when the intervention of a federal judge was

required for the fifty-two-mile Selma-to-Montgomery march to proceed.9

Given that The Bus documents a historical moment whose extraordinary opti-

mism was driven by a faith in the ability of civil rights legislation to eliminate

social injustice, it is perhaps unsurprising that the film represents the bus as a

vehicle for the achievement of consensus.10 In fact, much of the conversation

caught by Wexlers microphone centers on one of the bus drivers, a Greyhound

employee who is gradually converted to the virtues of the March on Washington.

As with The Straight Story, the slow pace of the bus and monotony of the land-

scape seem to contribute to the possibility of such conversions. There is even

room for disagreement, as when a young black man angrily complains that peo-

ple froze in their seats rather than disembarking with him as he tried to buy cig-

arettes at an obviously hostile rest stop in Hagerstown, Maryland.

Wexlers intuition that the figure of the bus can be used to imagine social

progress has radical implications that go beyond this liberal fantasy of bus-as-

space-of-democracy, however. Not only does the fight about cigarettes suggest

that the fantasy of interior consensus is sustained only by bracketing the worldexterior to the discursive space of the bus; another conversation reveals the

limits of mobility imagined by the Civil Rights Act. A white man named John

explains his reasons for undertaking the cross-country bus trip to Washington by

recounting an earlier conversation he had had with a black civil rights activist

named Artie:

Artie, if I were youyou know, you cant put yourself in another

persons place, but I said, if I were you, by God, I would be a Black

Muslim. And he said, No, youre wrong, John, because there is a

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9. In deciding the case ofWilliams v. Wallace, the presiding judge cited a conflict between rea-

sonable accommodation and economic efficiencythat disability scholars will find familiar. On the

one hand, Kings Alabama Project was protected by freedom of assembly: The law is clear that the

right to petition ones government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups.

Conversely, the judge accepted that heavily trafficked highways exist principally to facilitate travel

and commerce, not speech activities. The decision on their behalf held that the wrongs they had suf-

fered were sufficiently grievous to justify any inconveniences to commerce that a peaceful march

might entail. See Krotoszynski 1995: 6970.

10. Surely we are meant to a ttend to the irony of the fact that the bus is chartered from the Grey-

hound line; the Greyhound buses ridden by Freedom Riders, exercising their newly validated right to

interstate travel in 1961, were often attacked and burned as they made their way into Jim Crow terri-

tory. Another irony is more latent: the Greyhound company successfully lobbied for the exemption of

over-the-road (interstate) buses from ADA mandates on the logic that the cost of making its fleet

wheelchair accessible would require the curtailment or elimination of service to rural areas. See

Dempsey 1991.

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promise in this Republic. Once, I could not leave Alabama and travel to

Texas and know that I could find a place to sleep, a place to eat, or even a

place to buy gas. And now I think I know that I can travel that way and

at least buy gas!

The deep irony of this description of social progress is felt not only in its reduc-

tion of political freedom to the freedom to buy; it is also evident in its capitulation

to the ideology of automobility. Wexlers films, by focusing on the discomforts of

bus travel as the price of democratic deliberation, resist such a capitulation.

Bus II, at first glance, has even less to do with disability issues, and might even

appear to disrupt the rich analogy that could be developed between the quasi-Freedom Riders depicted in The Bus and wheelchair activists. Filmed twenty

years after the first documentary, Bus II accompanies a group of antinuclear

activists traveling from Los Angeles to the 1983 United Nations Disarmament

Conference and the march the largest in U.S. history to that date that was

held in connection with it in New York. Like the Greyhound charter in The Bus,

the refurbished school bus that transports the Bread not Bombs group is clearly

not wheelchair accessible, and no visibly disabled people participate in the cross-country trip. The passengers seem less culturally and racially diverse than the rid-

ers on The Bus; moreover, the chief drama of the trip is generated by the infight-

ing that develops among the participants. However, Wexlers focus on the internal

politics among the bus riders is key to a central theme cultivated over the course

of the trilogy: the continuing negotiations concerning the direction and pace of

the bus, far from constituting a form of social hijacking of individual capacities

the slavery of the talented to an unwieldy and indeterminate general interestactually express the character of democratic rights. This understanding is brought

home in one extended conversation that takes place between the bus riders and an

official at Los Alamos, a nuclear research site supervised by the University of

California, which brilliantly captures the impaired agency that nuclear weapons

represent to the protesters:

Protester #1: My feeling about these two labs managed by the Universityof California is that it gives them a false sense of validity. No one asked

me if I wanted a neutron bomb. If this is a democracy, I think someone

should have.

Lab Spokesperson: Who asked you if you wanted a vehicle? You know

there are a lot of people on the highway killed every year. And yet, you

knowand yet, democratically, if you thought vehicles were bad,

you could do the same thing youre doing now, and no one would stop

you.

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Protester #2: But isnt there a conscious choice that a person makes when

they get on the freeway and they realize, Hey, there are a lot of people

out there that are driving and dont know what theyre up to? AndI

might make a mistake, whereas, I mean, if a bomb goes off ten miles, ortwenty miles, from here, and we have no control over whos dropping it,

or whos making it, or how big its going to be, its going to affect us; its

going to affect people farther away. We have no choice in that matter.

The spokespersons comparison of nuclear weapons to a car and the protesters

rejection of the analogy are both relevant, I think, to the conceptualization of

mobility disability. Though the bus riders sometimes feel a constraint on their

movement that would not be apparent if each drove a car, they have consented to

that constraint and have developed mechanisms for the ongoing negotiation of its

severity. Although the car seems to offer a greater degree of agency, the isolation

of each driver, the impossibility of negotiation and communication with other

drivers, makes that driver more vulnerable to decisionsto speed, to drop a

bombin which he or she did not participate, but that may have injurious effects.

The analogy between the car and the bomb, proffered first by the Los Alamosspokesperson, suggests that the amplification and reification of agency both

terms represent mean the imminent demise of the space of publicity.

Bus Riders Union, the third film, makes explicit the suggestion of its prede-

cessors that the citizen is a prosthetic subject, and that the exercise of political

agency in a public sphere organized by capitalism requires the kind of transitive

alliance described by a bus riders union: an alliance forged among people who,

whatever their differences in social and physical status, belong to the categoryof the mass-transit dependent.11 Whereas the earlier two Bus films focused on

interstate travelthe form of mobility most strongly protected by constitutional

guarantees the subject ofBus Riders Union is the deteriorating bus system of

Los Angeles. As the organizers explain, the L.A. Metropolitan Transportation

Authority (MTA) devoted only 30 percent of its public funds to the bus system,

even though 94 percent of mass-transit users are bus riders; the remainder of the

budget was diverted to suburban light rail and a downtown subway running all offive miles. This discrepancyand the effective undermining of equal protection

it implies, given the fact that people who ride the bus are by and large people of

color, majority women; theyre oftentimes elderly, theyre disabledbecomes

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11. A thirty-minute segment ofBus Riders Union can be downloaded for viewing at http://www.

slickpictures.com. Other information about the film and the Bus Riders Union can be obtained at the

organizations Web site, http://www.busridersunion.org.

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the basis of a successful lawsuit against the MTA. But the Bus Riders Union is

not content to use the legal system; nor does the legal system prove entirely sat-

isfactory. The groups lawyers initially capitulate to the MTAs demand for a

means testa test of economic disadvantage for the proposed monthly buspass. But as Eric Mann, the director of the Labor Strategy Center that organized

the Bus Riders Union, declares, such a means test would be exactly the opposite

of what we want, which is a better bus system for everybody. The issue, of

course, is that such a means test would mean marking buses as poor peoples

transportation and therefore adding institutional reinforcement to the transporta-

tion segregation and inequity the Bus Riders Union seeks to end. I hope the anal-

ogy to disability rights is clear: the Bus Riders Union rejects the identification of

(auto)mobility disability with bodily lack, individual abnormality, and disadvan-

tage and instead calls attention to the social policies and social constructions

constructions truly material in nature that, as Illich (1978: 138) puts it, cripple

the power to move.

But there is more than an analogy between mass transit dependency and

(physical) disability at work inBus Riders Union. Indeed, one of the most impor-tant differences between this film and the earlier Bus documentaries is that the

buses that serve as the narrative vehicles of the film are, for the first time, wheel-

chair accessible. Moreover, disabled people are part of the coalition experi-

ment; they share the condition of mass-transit dependency with other union

activists. Even though, as one disabled union member, Aisha Salaam, puts it,

traveling with a wheelchair makes it a multiple of times harder to get around by

public transportation, such mobility difficulties as Salaams are seen to be differ-ent in degree, not in kind, from those of the Spanish-speaking late-night janitors

who are never informed when the Owl Service is cut, or from those of Della

Bonner, another Bus Riders Union organizer, who offers an eloquent explanation

of the political importance of the Bus Riders Union. Bonners mass-transit depen-

dency, we learn, was occasioned by her decision to become a caregiver to her

eighteen-year-old son, disabled by leukemia:

The two years bout fighting for him and his life, I became unemployed. I

made the decision to do so because it was more important for me to be a

mother. And that decision led me into an economic state of decline that

subsequently made me become totally public-transportation dependent.

And public transportation, I soon learned, had always been deficient but

there was a greater deficiency with me under those circumstances. I

would get out of class, take the Number Four bus on Santa Monica and

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Vermont and go downtown and transfer to the Number Seventy-one and

go to [the hospital] and have to walk two blocks up the hill.

In the person of Della Bonner, then, we behold the near impossibility of distin-

guishing between physical and economic disability, since the sign of the latter

her public-transportation dependencyis induced by her intimate relation

with someone who is physically disabled.

But one need not have a disabled family member to recognize such a relation.

Aisha Salaam describes the continuing difficulty confronting wheelchair users

who ride accessible public transportation, explaining that most places I wanted

to go, I had to take a minimum of three buses to get there. That means a minimumof three times that Id be told that the lift equipment is not working. Shortly after

interviewing Salaam, Wexler captures just such a moment on film. Members of

the Bus Riders Union organizing at a bus stop are themselves unable to board the

bus because of a lift equipment failure. One organizer explains:

The bus broke down. I think what happened was: he was trying to take the

wheelchair lift up and it must have gotten stuck and so now he had to

empty out the bus because it broke down, so that all these people have to

wait for the next bus, which will probably be overcrowded anyway, so

only a few will fit in and then theyll have to wait for the next one after

that.

One of the unlucky would-be passengersa black woman not in a wheelchair

angrily comments: Im late to work right now, you know, just because ofthis.

You know theyre not going to keep having me late, and theyre not going to paymy bills, and you know, then what? Can I sue them? Im sick of this. The inde-

terminacy of the referent this leaves unclear whether the woman regards the

cause of her temporary immobilization as the inoperative wheelchair lift or the

inadequate public transit system in general.

But the symbolic problem here is precisely that ambiguity. Some might read

the scene as suggesting a breakdown in the machinery of equal rights, an over-

burdening of the concept of formal justice by substantive demands. It is the goalof the Bus Riders Union, on the contrary, to expose how the organization of the

public sphere by corporate capitalthe disproportionate investment in trans-

portation accommodations to facilitate commerce and the mobility of the car-

owning majority of the wealthy suburbshave constrained the mobility, at once,

of both wheelchair users and the mass-transit dependent.

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Conclusion

In Energy and Equity, Illich (1978: 138) erroneously asserts that people are

born almost equally mobile. Disability scholars have not only made us sensitiveto the error of this assertion and to the fact of corporeal variation. They have

demonstrated that disability, far from merely describing marginal conditions, is

central to imagining forms of identity. It would be infinitely more accurate, after

all, to say that people are born almost equally immobile; infancy is a condition of

mobility deficiency and social dependency.

The importance of this reconceptualization seems to me twofold. It draws

attention to the social construction of mobility, and it preserves the category ofequality as relevant to the imagining of social progress. We begin to recognize in

public transportation systems only the extension of those conditions that allow

the potential for mobility to develop. The consequence is that we may reject the

extremity of Illichs distinction between pedestrian and prosthetic mobility, a dis-

tinction made evident in his description of the generalized disability of the pros-

thetic subject of mass culture:

To gather for him means to be brought together by vehicles. He comes

to believe that political power grows out of the capacity of a transporta-

tion system. . . . He believes that the level of democratic process corre-

lates to the power of transportation and communication systems. He has

lost faith in the political power of the feet and of the tongue. (Illich 1978:

123)

At the same time, however, we may uphold the validity of Illichs representationof mobility as the foundation of equity:

Citizens of a society founded on the notion of equity will demand the pro-

tection of this right against any abridgement. It should be irrelevant to

them by what means the exercise of personal mobility is denied, whether

by imprisonment, bondage to an estate, revocation of a passport, or enclo-

sure within an environment that encroaches on a persons native ability to

move in order to make him a consumer of transport. (Illich 1978: 138)

In their new alliance, the mass-transit dependent and individuals with wheel-

chairs allow a richer understanding of the forms of mobility that democratic jus-

tice requires. It is only within such an alliancea nonessentialist alliance that

recognizes both potential conflicts of interest and the transitivity of identity

that the relative value of various forms of mobility can be adjudicated.

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Celeste Langan is an associate professor of English at the University of California

at Berkeley. She is the author ofRomantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simu-

lation of Freedom (1995) and currently is working on representations of bodily

and national sovereignty in post-Napoleonic Europe.

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