Dyslexia

The Government of Reading

T. Campbell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137297938
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The diagnosis of 'Dyslexia' and the medical problematisation of reading difficulties were almost unknown one hundred years ago, yet today the British Dyslexia Association estimates that up to ten per cent of the UK population may have some form of dyslexia, with numbers in the United States estimated to be as high as twenty per cent. The Government of Reading investigates how this problematisation developed and how a diagnostic category was shaped in response to this.

1

Introduction

The diagnosis of ‘dyslexia’ and the medical problematisation of reading difficulties were almost unknown 100 years ago, yet today the British Dyslexia Association (2010) estimates that up to 10% of the UK population may have some form of dyslexia; in the USA it is estimated to be as much as 20% of the population (Marazzi, 2011a). The first diagnosis of dyslexia-like symptoms as a congenital impairment was recorded in Morgan’s (1896) paper in the British Medical Journal, ‘A Case of Congenital Word Blindness’. At the turn of the twentieth century five people had been diagnosed as dyslexic; at the turn of the twenty-first century, the Dyslexia Institute estimated that there are six million individuals who could be diagnosed with some form of dyslexia in the UK alone.¹ At the turn of the twentieth century, fewer than ten articles had been published on reading disabilities, yet today a search for dyslexia on Google Scholar returns 120,000 entries. With this rapid growth in numbers of diagnoses and the proliferation of pages written on this topic, it is no surprise that in the middle of the twentieth century dyslexia was proclaimed to be the disease of the century (Mucchielli, 1963). Throughout the twentieth century, laboring began to increasingly rely upon our linguistic and communicative capacities. Literacy became central to production, and dyslexia came to describe a difficultly with a key characteristic of the newly dominant style of laboring in the West.

The research problem I wish to investigate is how, over a relatively short period of time, this newly-diagnosed impairment has become so ubiquitous, and ask how such a diagnosis becomes legitimate as a significant psycho-medical category. Using the example of dyslexia, this book investigates which political, economic and moral forces are involved in the formation of a diagnostic category; how new categories of medical, psychological and administrative labelling are formed; what factors contribute to their invention; and how diagnostic discourses are legitimised through legislative change, educational policy and the practices—discursive and otherwise—of educational psychologists, teachers and parliamentarians. The genealogy of the diagnostic category that is drawn within these pages begins with the first murmurings around its invention, taking in its ossification and eventual diffusion into a variety of different disciplinary fields.

The primary objective of this book is to examine the social relations that allowed the diagnostic category of dyslexia to form. Through historical scholarship it aims to show how this happened—through an analysis and description of this material, assertions are made about why this diagnostic category was invented. This investigation is primarily concerned with trying to explain why industrialising societies began to regard certain previously invisible phenomena, or unproblematic characteristics, as impairments. Various different vocabularies have been deployed to describe the symptoms that will become understood as dyslexia. The first was ‘congenital word-blindness’. Others deployed at various points in time include ‘congenital aphasia’, ‘alexia’, ‘symbol amblyopia’ and ‘amnesia visualis verbalis’.

As the pages that follow are mainly concerned with the formation of an obscure medical diagnosis (congenital word-blindness) over a century ago, it may seem to the reader that this investigation is an impersonal endeavour concerned with small events in the annals of the history of medicine. The problems that I am investigating are, in fact, deeply personal; it is an attempt to understand my own relationship with a diagnosis I received as a 10-year-old—a diagnosis that, once received, enabled me to access support that changed my educational experiences. The writing of this book was ultimately motivated by a desire to understand how it has become possible for me (and others like me) to receive such a diagnosis. This question has its origins through a reading of two literatures: the philosophy of Michel Foucault and disability studies. I became convinced that disability should be understood as a social phenomenon and, concurrently, that the historical formation of the categories we use to describe ourselves should be carried out to produce, as Foucault has suggested, an ontology of ourselves. Tracing the genealogy of dyslexia became the object of my research, and my investigations were aimed toward understanding how a proliferation of impairment categories across the twentieth century shifted the way that we think of our own bodies and the bodies of others.

Further elaboration on the way so-called Foucauldian genealogy has been operationalised in this book is provided below, but first I would like to draw attention to a key distinction between this book and previous genealogies—the specificity and size of the object in question. Foucault’s most famous genealogies deal with modern forms of punishment and sexuality, while other influential studies deal with disciplines such as psychology, as detailed by Nikolas Rose’s work or Ian Hacking’s work on statistics. The object of my research is undoubtedly more modest, with dyslexia being a single psycho-medical diagnosis rather than a large and pervasive discipline. Treating psycho-medical categories as technologies of power has particular analytical advantages. Unlike Foucault-inspired histories of disability, such as Henri Jacques Stiker’s genealogies of impairment categories, will contribute toward to the historical understanding of disability not through analysing disability as a totality but, instead, through describing the conditions of possibility for a specific impairment category the rationale behind why particular human characteristics are problematised will be mapped.

This study, therefore, is a response to calls for a sociology of impairment, but does not respond to these calls by developing a sociology of impairment that focuses on lived experience or embodiment. Rather, varied genealogies of impairment categories are proposed, which are able to describe the conditions that problematise specific human attributes. This study is one such genealogy. Diagnostic and impairment categories alike are to be understood as technologies of power whose workings and operations can be mapped. The second advantage is that unlike those genealogies that describe the operation of power at the level of the individual and the population, genealogies of impairment categories are able to describe how the constitution of the body and the population, through the prism of bio-politics, makes it possible for power to flow at both molecular and molar levels. Genealogies of impairment categories therefore form a necessary appendage to the various genealogies of scientific disciplines (Hacking, 1982, 1990, 1991; Miller, 1992; Rose 1985, 1999) that have corrected and deepened our understanding of the shift from sovereign power to bio-power.² The appendage offered hopes to augment the detail by which we can understand the modulation of power, as it infuses and traverses across institutions, machineries of government and the body of the population. How power becomes entwined with capital, coming to act in a molecular fashion, on diverse human characteristics is beyond the vision of the human eye. The individual body is replaced as the object of tactics of power, as discrete and distinct attributes become open to management. It is hoped that these genealogies, focused upon a smaller object of inquiry, will allow for an analytical contribution to the understanding of power that enriches, rather than repeats, Foucault’s thesis of the shift from sovereign power to bio-power.

Christian Marazzi’s analysis of post-Fordism suggests that this economic shift can, perhaps, be understood as a linguistic turn in the economy (Marazzi, 2011b; Marazzi et al., 2008). This builds on the work from those involved in the Operaismo and Autonomia movements, particularly the research conducted on immaterial labour, cognitive labour and the increasing deployment of our general linguistic capacity in contemporary forms of capitalist production. His writing draws attention to the relationship between financialisation and language; to the increasing articulation of our general linguistic capacity into production; to the way in which the capitalist mode of production itself becomes, in many ways, a language. Aphasia and dyslexia are explored by these writers to help describe the conditions experienced by the cognitive worker in contemporary capitalism (Lotringer and Marazzi, 2007). Paolo Virno (2003) fired the first salvo, relating how our general linguistic capacity has become the very point upon which contemporary immaterial exploitation is built. Even in successful communication, something remains unrealisable and opaque. For Virno, this is a kind of aphasia and, as such, it is a site that should be defended against commodification and exploitation. Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi points to the ‘dizzying’ rise of dyslexia in the youngest generations, particularly ‘in the social and professional classes most involved in the new technologies of communication’ (Berardi, 2009: 87) The acceleration of labouring under cognitive capitalism means we not only do not have the time to read a page from beginning to end, but that we are also becoming increasingly incapable of doing so. Marazzi (2011a), points to the importance of understanding dyslexia for analysing the dynamics of cognitive capitalism. In his account, the number of diagnoses has grown over the last 30 years in conjunction with the linguistic turn in the economy. Alberto Toscano (2008) provides a concise summary of this analysis:

In a recent investigation into managerial thinking on the virtues of dyslexia, Christian Marazzi has pointed to the manner in which the informational saturation-bombing and ‘anthropological shock’ that characterises contemporary financialised capitalism has turned a linguistic pathology into a subjective ‘comparative advantage’. Fortune 500, among others, has honed in on ‘dyslexic achievers’ as a category of managers, who mine their condition for the ‘capacity to alter and create perceptions, an extreme awareness of the environment in which one is immersed, a greater-than-average curiosity, an ability to think in images, intuition and introspection, multi-dimensional thinking and perception, a capacity of feeling thought as real, a vivid imagination’. (2008: 67)

The importance placed by autonomist thinkers on the diagnosis of dyslexia for understanding the cognitive character of contemporary capitalism suggests that it is particularly indicative of the contemporary conditions of laboring. Marazzi (2011a; Marazzi et al., 2008) has been concerned with theorising how an economic shift—from Fordism to post-Fordism—re-constituted a linguistic pathology into a comparative advantage. In this book, however, I describe the process by which these characteristics became understood as a linguistic pathology. I hope to underline how the organisation of an economy and a style of government can produce impairment categories. Mapping the conditions of diagnostic possibility will indicate the conditions in the mode of production and rationalities of government that have augmented human labour as power is increasingly directed towards the utilisation of our general linguistic capacity. The diagnosis of dyslexia points towards the productive nature of knowledge existing between us, in the commons. Language has often been understood as the key mechanism for understanding the common character of production or, more precisely, how production can have a common character; the diagnosis of dyslexia seems to suggest that mechanisms, for instance the printed page or a tablet screen, through which we access knowledge produce barriers that make it difficult for some people to access the material upon which collective production depends.

The formation of diagnostic categories to describe specific learning difficulties suggests an anthropological shift that proceeds Marazzi’s ‘anthropological shock’. A shift that, in my view, is best understood through the intersection of two lines. The first is that immaterial or cognitive labour has significantly increased its importance in the character of our economy, resulting in specific problematisations of human flesh, whereby characteristics that were previously unproblematic become pathologised; as the bodies most hospitable to the accumulation of capital are transformed; and as our linguistic capacity becomes increasingly articulated into the accumulation of capital. The second traces the manner in which power operates upon both the body of the individual and the body of the population. By flowing onto increasingly microscopic sites, power can act upon a layer of human flesh that is invisible to the naked eye. In contemporary capitalism the diagram of the human that power is able to operate on ‘is man plotted by a thousand numbers’—a plotting that makes possible a diagram where we can be understood as thousands upon thousands of spectrums, dots on lines, that can be acted upon, cultivated and manipulated. Through writing a genealogy of dyslexia I hope to illuminate the way in which the diagram of the body moves from being material to immaterial as it takes on a microscopic and panoramic view simultaneously. Out of this diagrammatic shift developed an array of techniques and practices that can act upon attributes beyond the body visible to human eyes, beyond the touch of human hands. This discussion is taken forward in Chapters 2 and 3.

Investigating the genealogy of dyslexia will contribute to understanding this shift for two key reasons. First, like all impairment categories, it is a technology of power that, when engaged to accredit an individual as dyslexic, also serves to carve a population from the multitude—a population of dyslexics. The diagnosis is both a consequence of and contributing factor to the increasing de-materialisation of the figure of the human. Second, the diagnosis itself describes a difficulty with an activity of immaterial labour—reading. The diagnosis makes possible the management of bodies engaged in immaterial labour. Investigating the conditions that made it possible to diagnose an individual as dyslexic and the way the diagnosis operates as a technology of power will provide a better understanding of the workings of a post-Fordist mode of production wherein immaterial labour has become increasingly commonplace. It is, of course, not surprising that as a linguistic capacity becomes increasingly articulated into the character of labour, a diagnosis that identifies a perceived pathology in one’s linguistic capacity would see a growth in the frequency of its diagnosis.

This study hopes to enrich the Foucauldian understanding of the shift from sovereign power to bio-power by illustrating how the constitution of the two-headed body—the individual and the population—also had the effect of producing a new diagram of the human. A diagram that, in it’s mapping of human flesh, went beyond the capabilities of the human eye producing a variety of technical devices to view bodies through making visible a field that was simultaneously microscopic and panoramic in its character; a field of vision that made possible the ‘the plotting of man by a thousand numbers’. If Nikolas Rose, Ian Hacking, Peter Miller and others have augmented Foucault’s understanding of the shift from sovereign power to bio-power by providing further historical evidence for a shift in the style of government, then this study intends to focus upon a diagnostic category that is made possible by the emergent diagram of man. A re-imagining of human flesh that can occur after the diagram of the human begins a process of immaterialisation.

The research that develops from these concerns will endeavor to identify the political, economic and historical reasons why dyslexia emerged as a potential area of investigation, and how the diagnostic category of dyslexia became legitimised over the course of the twentieth century; how it became entwined with the rise of a new industry of educational psychologists and educationalists geared towards identifying dyslexics and providing for their needs. This is a historical study that investigates how the problematisation of a particular set of characteristics took place and how this became legitimised through disciplinary practices. To address these wider concerns the following specific questions will underpin the discussion that follows in the forthcoming chapters.

• How did it become possible to diagnose congenital reading disabilities from the 1890s onwards?

• What socio-economic, legislative and policy developments can be linked to the formation and development of such diagnoses? For instance, did the introduction of compulsory education from the 1870s onwards, or the emergence of a knowledge economy, help to establish the conditions of possibility that facilitated the diagnosis’s formation?

• Did the diagnosis of dyslexia as we know it today develop from a single category, or did it develop as different administrative, medical, psychological and educational categories. Moreover, do different groups utilise different definitions of the same ‘diagnosis’?

• How did the different groups who deployed this diagnosis category interact; did they clash or compromise, or was a consensus achieved?

The strategy that has been developed to answer these questions utilises a wide variety of documents to analyse the relations of power that have crafted our bodies, describing the political, economic and technological rationalities that entwined to form particular practices and values. A particular elaboration of this strategy is provided later, in the section entitled ‘Genealogy’. Studies of bio-politics and work using a genealogical method are deployed to aide the description of how the characteristics that the diagnosis of dyslexia illuminates became problematised by particular social, technological, economic and political processes. The discussion of these accounts allows the description of relations of power that is advanced within these pages to take on a diagonal character, as dyslexia is situated, as a component, or perhaps a cog, in a machinery of government concerned with performing a multifarious array of operations.

My research problem developed out of an engagement with Foucault’s historical studies on the one hand and questions that were being raised through my engagement with disability studies on the other. A number of historical studies that have drawn extensively on Foucault have also be mined for methodological insights, concepts and historical analysis. From reading this literature it became apparent that a shift in the style of government³ and the rising prestige of disciplines like psychology and the invention of technologies like the norm were events that may have facilitated the invention of dyslexia as a diagnostic device. I have attempted to synthesise the arguments made in a variety of these studies to provide a background for events that were taking place during this period that I think are particularly pertinen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Bio-politics, Normalcy and the Numerical Plotting of the Population
• 3  Governing Readers from Limitation to Proliferation
• 4  Reading Difficulties Become a Medical Concern
• 5  The Technological Operation of Congenital Word-blindness: Marking Some Differences as More Deserving Than Others
• 6  Psychological Explanations of Congenital Word-blindness
• 7  The Problem of Producing Literate Subjects: Education and Specific Reading Difficulties
• 8  Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index