The Disarticulate: Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity, by James Berger

Abstract

Disarticulate: Language, Disability, and Narratives of Modernity, by James Berger. New York University Press, 2014. 320 pages. James Berger's second book has been published in New York University Press's Cultural Front series, which, rather than having a thematic focus, develops new ways of thinking about--and promoting--open and egalitarian societies. As such, his title represents something of a misnomer. The Disarticulate, as Berger explains in book's helpful introduction, was originally The Dys-/Disarticulate, before editorial decision erase slash so as avoid confusion. erasure and subsequent reintroduction of this slash, this confusion, this stutter acts as a fitting reenactment of ethical challenges presented by this book, which concerns itself with relationship between symbolically apprehensible and not-linguistic, speaking and non-speaking. For Berger, figure of dys-/disarticulate resides, or at least is imagined reside, at boundary of social-symbolic, a liminal place where there is no adequate terminology. As disarticulate, this figure is forcibly severed from social fabric, stigmatized, silenced, possibly physically dismembered (2). As dysarticulate, this figure is blocked from standing at convergence of all of language's impasses: those of injury, trauma, neurological variation, socio-political silencing, and workings of itself as plots its own aporias. Figured linguistically as outside of language and perceived as other, dys-/ disarticulate foregrounds and problematizes representational strategies and ethical considerations. Berger brings a wealth of both professional and personal experience bear on such matters. His first book, After End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (1999), engaged with limits of by considering what would be symbolic remainder after trauma, after apocalypse. His relationship with his two developmentally disabled sisters, Susan and Claudia, led him, meanwhile, reflect on experiences of separation, questions of home and institution, feelings of sibling responsibility, and, ultimately, issue of care as it relates those with linguistic and cognitive impairments. Issues of metaphor, trauma, and care animate this important work, which has much offer fields of disability theory, literary studies (particularly study of modernist and postmodern literature), and neuroscience. Today, all of us live among ruins of Babel. first, Adamic, purported be a perfect a that named things truly, unambiguously, perfectly. Each term was precisely a proper term. With fall of Babel came fall languages, into ambiguity, duplicity, multiplicity, jokes, puns, lies, translations, fictions, and truths in plural (16). If was once indexical, truly naming thing, after this second fall it became merely conventional, always dependent on a third term. According Berger, if is tropic, lacking proper terms, then should be understood as general condition of language. Catachresis is, for him, very foundation of language. As such, account of its workings constitutes a great deal of this book. Berger defines catachresis, or kata-chresis (kata: against; chresis: use), as an abuse of language, that is, as the use of wrong word or of a word with a standard usage in one context dragged a use against usage in another (28). A good example of this would be statement I see a voice. Understood in this way, catachresis takes common understanding of metaphor its extreme. Where metaphor commonly means make implicit comparison between two different things, summoning a term from one context another, catachresis means to 'bear across' . . . from inexhaustible, and inexhaustibly desired, realm of not-language language (29). …