Mobility Disability: Langan, Celeste

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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


http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pc/summary/v013/13.3langan.html

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Mobility Disability
Celeste Langan

T T

o think about mobility disability is to think about norms of speed and ranges of motion; perhaps also of desired ends. Rousseau long ago declared in The Social Contract that the cripple who wants to run and the able-bodied man who doesnt 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 environmentsocial practices and material infrastructurescan create mobility disabilities 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 decisions . . . have, since 1964, quietly but effectively restricted the mobility

I would like to thank Carol A. Breckenridge; the editorial board of Public Culture and its manuscript 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 brilliantly helped me to make the essay better than the one he read.
Public Culture 13(3): 459484 Copyright 2001 by Duke University Press

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of poor African-Americans and other disfavored minorities who do not own cars. Meanwhile, these same ofcials and citizens have simultaneously 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 discrimination takes place under the sign not of race but of modernization: the homogenization and amplication of speed. Responding to (but also stimulating) the massive urbanization and mobilization of its population, Turkey has built new multilane highways with lowered gradients that allow trafc to move with greater efciency. All sorts of trafc 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 disqualied 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 amplied norms of mobility alter the spatial dimensions of peoples lives. Two Hollywood lms 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 passengerwhether 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 lm, of the extent to which even our visual experience of space has been transformed by speed not only by the twenty-four-frame-per-second speed of lm projection, but by the rate at which cameras usually move over the landscape. The deliberately slowed pace of the lm creates the illusion of real time, and the return to a human scale implied in the title reinforces the lms thematic suggestion that autonomy gured as escape from the immobility implicit in mass-mediated consumptionis still possible. As Straight painstakingly repairs his mower, builds his trailer, and buys his prosthetic grabber, he seems to tap an interior resourcefulness talents and industrysufcient to restore the capacity for what might be termed automobility to his aging body. In its offbeat way, The Straight Story enshrines the appearance in the discourse of freedom and in the public sphere of a new political cate-

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gory: the individuals with wheelchairs recognized by the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). But the lm partly undermines, or at least complicates, its celebration of Straights independence in two scenes about failed automobility. On his rst try, Straight gets barely ve miles out of town before his mower breaks down. After having it towed home and nding it irreparable, he takes his shotgun and blows the defective mower to bits as 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 from his Social Security check to pay for repairs. There are, in other words, two aspects of Straights mobility disabilityphysical and economic; and two necessary conditions for the recovery of automobilityequality of opportunity (wheelchair- or lawn moweraccessible highways) and sufcient 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 lms sensibility provides a counterpoint to that of Lynchs. Yet it too brings attention to what we might call prosthetic travel. The lms 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 xed route, whereas the conventional chase scene of action lms represents the superior agency of the hero as the greater speed at which he or she negotiates the world. The frisson of Speed depends on the injunction (courtesy of the disabled villain, played by Dennis Hopper2) that the buss speed must not drop below fty 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 characters clearly identied as infrequent users of mass transit take over its navigation after the bus driver is shot. The character played by Sandra Bullock is heard frequently to declare I love my
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 constructed to create the misleading appearance that beneciaries 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 lm represents villains as physically disabled, and Speed is no exception: Hopper plays Howard Payne, a cop who was forced to retire as a consequence of having sufferedon the joba disabling and disguring 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 requisite rescue. Keeping the speedometer above fty requires them to perform all sorts of off-route maneuvers, including, in a climactic scene, the achievement of ight.3 But the lm 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 lm, 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 lm implies. The status of passenger and the status of hostage are virtually conated. And if the bus is abnormally forced by a villainous demand to go above fty, the lm suggests that going below ftythe threat posed by congested highwaysrepresents 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 way not just because it might make the lm 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, conned to a wheelchair) might capture the ideological contradiction that Speed exposes. Although the passengers have freely chosen even paid to ride the bus, the suggestion is that the bus (or mass transportation in general) is an imperfect form of mobility in its evident connement of passengers to a xed route and a speed regulated from elsewhere. And despite the contrast between bus and automobile on which the lm depends for its originality, Speed suggests 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 cannot now even stop for trafc lights or pedestrians. The demand to pause in consideration of others is represented as life threatening.
3. This achievement is not as otherworldly as it might appear. See, for example, Neferti X. Tadiars (1993) ne essay on Manilas yovers, or highways that bypass urban decay and crowding.

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The solutions the lm 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-unnished 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 lm). Subways, presumably, have the virtue of keeping slower citizens mass-transit users out of the public 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 controversial redirection of transit funds from the bus system to subway and xed rail has been much in the news. It is as if this social stratication of transportation options is necessary to release the privileged minority in this case, Reeves and Bullockfrom 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 stratied transportation 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 political subject than the ADAs individuals with wheelchairs: the mass-transit dependent. Now, the segregation of transportation is widely deplored by the disability rights movement; perhaps one of the most familiar signs of that movements success has been the wheelchair lift on buses. The other familiar signthe parking space reserved For Handicapped Parking Only is more controversial. The two sites of conjunction the wheelchair and the bus, the wheelchair and the (space of) the automobile bring into focus two common attitudes toward disability 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 parking spaces are greeted with far more ambivalence; to some they represent a denial of equal opportunity, an unwarranted afrmative action even a quota system and a distributive injustice. These attitudes also align in certain ways with the two lms I have described. The Straight Story represents mobility disability 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 lms so potentially illuminating for disability criticism is the fact that their two representations of prosthetic travel the wheelchair as (individually enabling) car, the wheelchair as (socially constraining) buscall attention to a larger ideological conation: 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 certain 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) mobility. The other term in the dialectic, liberty, tends to be imagined as an attribute of natureof the unimpaired, unassisted body. The location of liberty in individual bodies (or selves) is what is used to explain the different outcomes of supposedly 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 their feet. . . . 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 human is 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, reied, and commodied in the automobile. In the rest of this essay, I explore the implications of this metamorphosisthe ideology of freedom as automobility recoded as the freedom of the automobile for disability studies. I suggest that the object of restoring automobility to individual 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 articial form of the citizen a prosthetic subject, whose capacities for liberty depend on the built
4. See also Tribes (1988: 143638) discussion of two interpretations of equal protection generated by the opposing principles of liberty and equality: equality of treatment and treatment as an equal.

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environment of the public sphere. I therefore wish to undertake a deconstruction of mobility disability not 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 reduction 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 alliance a 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 journey, from William Wordsworths liberal/Romantic representation of a traveling cripple in The Prelude to a trio of documentary lms by contemporary U.S. lmmaker Haskell Wexler. This series grouped retrospectively under the title Bus Trilogy has no immediately obvious relevance to disability criticism; indeed, hardly a single visibly disabled person is seen in the rst two lms, at least in part because neither of the buses on which the lms focus is wheelchair accessible. Moreover, since the buses transport social activists to a mass demonstration a marchthey might appear to sustain the long history of representing walking as the exercise of democratic freedom and agency, a representation that Wordsworths poetry (along with Rousseaus political theory) helps to install. But the lms undermine the simplicity of that association by foregrounding one precondition 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 sufce. Political agency is now exercised by a newly collective version of that prosthetic subject whose rst appearance in the public sphere was, as the case of Wordsworth will suggest, coincident with the development of democratic 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 recent Sight 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 of alliance under such conditions.

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The Nineteenth-Century Background

Wordsworths emphasis on freedom as automobility, legible throughout The Prelude, is an important context for understanding a contrast he develops between two imaginings of the bourgeois public sphere that London represents. His own childhood imagining of London as a distant site of innite possibility is contrasted with another vicarious experience, narrated in the following passage: in our ock 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 nd 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 atter 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 visitor whose 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 gure 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 representative of those masses whose increasing accumulation in cities seems less the product of autonomy than automatization; they move but are unmoved unchanged by the experience. On the other hand, the inference that the boy cannot travel to London and back under his own power that he is physically transported importantly reinforces an all-too-common assumption in representations of disability: that a particular physical impairment here, 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 deciency, 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 mobility as if the trafc in moveables of wonder (7.706) for which London is remarkable includes a trafc in mobility itself. And it is just possible that this last supposition is partly true; at least when Wordsworth nally 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 gures with a fairly conventional mixture of antipathy and fascination, his identication of the source of that antipathy and fascination seems to me more unusual. Because his gures of impaired 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 countryside 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 correspondence, after all, between Wordsworths traveling cripple and his description elsewhere of the wealthy who roll in chariots (Wordsworth 1949: 2.99), a correspondence that foregrounds the relevance of capital to the concept of disability. For Wordsworth, both kinds of amplied mobilitythe privately owned chariot and the broad causeways of (the) capitalthreaten to make traveling cripples of us all. Precisely because Wordsworth associates the traveling cripple with a metropolitan trafc in moveables, the latter is a guration 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 trafc in moveablesin mobilitysignies 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 freedoms including 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 a New York Times ad, opines that in a democratic 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 suggesting that speech is a prosthesis enabling the citizen to participate in the public sphere. By contrast, Justice John Paul Stevenss almost nostalgic (and Wordsworthian) 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 assumption 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 amplication not only of speech, but also of mobility have so altered social being that even the unimpaired (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 homogenization spawned by mass industry and the mass mediathe forces that dene the culture and constitute the economythe 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 eld of political justice, but rather to abandon liberalisms dream of the autonomous subject. It is when we add to Tribes list the development of mass transportation including the mass transportation system of highways for cars that we notice how Wordsworths traveling cripple, like the familiar blue-and-white wheelchair symbol, is a gure that both threatens and promises to extend the concept of the political subject with rights beyond the supposedly natural boundaries of the
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 gure of the traveling cripple and the condition of the mass-transit dependent is, I realize, a potentially controversial move, since my object is, primarily, to use disability studies to reconceptualize 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 afnity 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 of identity 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 prosthetic subject has two signicant advantages. First, it properly marks mobility disability as a contingent rather than an essential aspect of identity. What distinguishes 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 coincident with your class identity in the act of distancing yourself from it, as Pierre Bourdieu (1984) argues. Class therefore offers a powerful tool for imagining an identity 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 dissolve 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) identies in her critique of the Habermasian 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 vilied 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 delegitimate the category of class altogether by appearing to eliminate the most stubborn remainder of inequality bodily difference.7 But for that very reason, the ADA sets the stage for a radical program of justice, since the calcication of economic subordinations their resistance to abolition suggests 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 citizenship. 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 sufciently remind us of why it would not be wrong to call liberal political efforts to extend the vote from the Reform Bill of 1832 to the Freedom Rides of the 1960sforms of disability activism. But insofar as these legal disabilities were justied, however erroneously, by reference to bodily difference, the history of the elimination of political disabilities can still misleadingly suggest that the solution 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 denition 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 reimagining of the public spherea reimagining that recognizes the public sphere as a built 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 reections on formal justice and as an occasion to produce feelings of responsibility or charity in political arguments defending 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 gures for class. But more recently, as disability schol7. Oddly, in their Genealogy of Dependency essay, Fraser and Gordon (1997) fail to consider the category 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, the elision 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 Silvers 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 constrained by discriminatory practices, or does it seek to equalize mobility disparities? 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 retrotting the built environment from any redistribution of economic resources: To illustrate, although public transportation systems must be made accessible, 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 disabilities cannot drive and thus do not have the mobility equivalent to nondisabled 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 compensate those whose residual transportation burden is due to their impairments, but not those for whom poverty, lack of language skills, or other decient circumstances impose a similar degree of burden, is to privilege disability over other disadvantages without justication. 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 incidence 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 intensied during an era of pro-

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nounced welfare retrenchment she 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 institutional vehicle for decentralized decision-making. But as we reect 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 discrimination, as a necessary retrotting of the public sphere without excluding the rights of access to this retrotted public sphere of the economically disabled? The question is important, I maintain, because it is one of the great contributions of disability studies to blur the difference between the two categories. Take Silverss 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 homogenize communication and so facilitate the civic and commercial transactions 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 characteristic 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 (and gradually 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 persons but in each case, we note that it is changing norms for participation in the public sphere that create the deciency or disability that might lead to dependency.

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As Wasserman points out, the issue of disability rights raises two central problems. First, as noted above, the problem is deciding among competing claims for the redistribution of resources. The second problem is the possibility that securing the right of people with disabilities to live in the world demands an indenite 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 retrotting of the public sphere to make it fully accessible to the disabled is not a one-time expenditure. Wasserman (1998: 179) quotes one judge distressed 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 xed-route systems remains low. It is difcult 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 xed-route service, with complementary paratransit acting as a safety net for people who cannot use the xed 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 xed

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route expansion, as transit systems admit limiting the expansion of xed 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 consideration is the far larger public funding of automobility for the (ostensibly) nondisabled. We do not frequently consider federal spending on new or retrotted highways 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 privileging 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? Or do 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 classied not in terms of race, gender, or physical disability, 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 the continued attempt to diminish disparities in relative mobility, rather than (as Silvers and others would have it) merely maintain disparities of class across disabled and nondisabled populations. Otherwise, the problem of segregationwhich disability activism makes the cornerstone of the claim for redress from discrimination will not have been fully addressed. Even Silvers (1998: 21) suggests that paratransit fails to fulll 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 efciency 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 attention 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 identication of citizenship with physical mobility is somewhat inevitable. But there is, as I have suggested, a split in that identication: the notion of freedom attaches to the automobile, symbol of privacy and relative social mobility, while mass transportation represents the bottom limit, or oor, 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 gure of the bus, generally 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 Bill the great reform omnibus moves but slowly as 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; during the July Revolution, the Annual Register (1830: 188) reported, A barricade was 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 transportation a traveling cripple, one might almost say, when compared to other forms of mass transportation or even the automobilebecause it has more interests to serve. Having usually a greater number of points for access and departure along its xed route, the bus is more irregular in keeping its appointments; it is this openness to contingency that makes it, nally, not only a portion of the public sphere, but also a gure for the transitivity or progressive aspect of that public sphere. Or that is the lesson, I hope to show, of the remarkable series of documentaries by the lmmaker Haskell Wexler.
The Bus Trilogy

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What Wexler calls his Bus Trilogy consists of three lms made over the course of nearly forty years, each of which correlates the gure of the bus with a particular social movement. Each of the three Bus documentaries is, of course, an independent artifact with specic formal features and values as well as a distinct subject. 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 rst lm, The Bus, documents a bus trip from San Francisco to the March on Washington in August 1963. In the national imaginary, that march is remembered chiey for Martin Luther King Jr.s I Have a Dream speech. Wexlers documentary, on the other hand, foregrounds the preconditions for the achievement 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 choice but it is access to mass transportation that has enabled the marchers to exercise political 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 immediately. The Bus begins with Wexler and his assistant arriving at the family residence of one of the participants in the bus ride, a California teenager. Her mother tells the lmmakers that as far as walking for causes is concerned, its nothing new with our family. I remember my grandfather, who was reared in western Virginia 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 as among 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 trafc by statute. Even where pedestrian trafc 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
8. Cf. Tribe 1988: 1378 83. Many such assertions date from 1964 an 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 suggests 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 fty-two-mile Selma-to-Montgomery march to proceed.9 Given that The Bus documents a historical moment whose extraordinary optimism was driven by a faith in the ability of civil rights legislation to eliminate social injustice, it is perhaps unsurprising that the lm 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 landscape seem to contribute to the possibility of such conversions. There is even room for disagreement, as when a young black man angrily complains that people froze in their seats rather than disembarking with him as he tried to buy cigarettes at an obviously hostile rest stop in Hagerstown, Maryland. Wexlers intuition that the gure of the bus can be used to imagine social progress has radical implications that go beyond this liberal fantasy of bus-asspace-of-democracy, however. Not only does the ght about cigarettes suggest that the fantasy of interior consensus is sustained only by bracketing the world exterior 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
9. In deciding the case of Williams v. Wallace, the presiding judge cited a conictbetween reasonable accommodation and economic efciencythat disability scholars will nd 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 trafcked highways exist principally to facilitate travel and commerce, not speech activities. The decision on their behalf held that the wrongs they had suffered were sufciently grievous to justify any inconveniences to commerce that a peaceful march might entail. See Krotoszynski 1995: 6970. 10. Surely we are meant to attend to the irony of the fact that the bus is chartered from the Greyhound 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 territory. 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 eet 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 nd 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 reduction of political freedom to the freedom to buy; it is also evident in its capitulation to the ideology of automobility. Wexlers lms, by focusing on the discomforts of bus travel as the price of democratic deliberation, resist such a capitulation. Bus II, at rst glance, has even less to do with disability issues, and might even appear to disrupt the rich analogy that could be developed between the quasiFreedom Riders depicted in The Bus and wheelchair activists. Filmed twenty years after the rst 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 crosscountry trip. The passengers seem less culturally and racially diverse than the riders on The Bus; moreover, the chief drama of the trip is generated by the inghting 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 interest actually express the character of democratic rights. This understanding is brought home in one extended conversation that takes place between the bus riders and an ofcial 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 University

of 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

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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? And I might make a mistake, whereas, I mean, if a bomb goes off ten miles, or twenty 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 decisions to 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 rst by the Los Alamos spokesperson, suggests that the amplication and reication of agency both terms represent mean the imminent demise of the space of publicity. Bus Riders Union, the third lm, makes explicit the suggestion of its predecessors 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 category of the mass-transit dependent.11 Whereas the earlier two Bus lms focused on interstate travelthe form of mobility most strongly protected by constitutional guarantees the subject of Bus 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 of ve 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 disabled becomes
11. A thirty-minute segment of Bus Riders Union can be downloaded for viewing at http://www. slickpictures.com. Other information about the lm 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 satisfactory. The groups lawyers initially capitulate to the MTAs demand for a means test a test of economic disadvantage for the proposed monthly bus pass. 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 transportation segregation and inequity the Bus Riders Union seeks to end. I hope the analogy to disability rights is clear: the Bus Riders Union rejects the identication of (auto)mobility disability with bodily lack, individual abnormality, and disadvantage and instead calls attention to the social policies and social constructions constructions truly material in naturethat, 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 in Bus Riders Union. Indeed, one of the most important differences between this lm and the earlier Bus documentaries is that the buses that serve as the narrative vehicles of the lm are, for the rst time, wheelchair accessible. Moreover, disabled people are part of the coalition experiment; 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 difculties as Salaams are seen to be different 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 dependency, we learn, was occasioned by her decision to become a caregiver to her eighteen-year-old son, disabled by leukemia: The two years bout ghting 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 decient but there was a greater deciency 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 distinguishing between physical and economic disability, since the sign of the latter her public-transportation dependency is 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 difculty 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 minimum of three times that Id be told that the lift equipment is not working. Shortly after interviewing Salaam, Wexler captures just such a moment on lm. 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 t 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 of this. You know theyre not going to keep having me late, and theyre not going to pay my bills, and you know, then what? Can I sue them? Im sick of this. The indeterminacy 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 overburdening of the concept of formal justice by substantive demands. It is the goal of the Bus Riders Union, on the contrary, to expose how the organization of the public sphere by corporate capital the disproportionate investment in transportation accommodations to facilitate commerce and the mobility of the carowning 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 sensitive to 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 innitely more accurate, after all, to say that people are born almost equally immobile; infancy is a condition of mobility deciency 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 of equality 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 distinction made evident in his description of the generalized disability of the prosthetic 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 transportation system. . . . He believes that the level of democratic process correlates 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 representation of mobility as the foundation of equity: Citizens of a society founded on the notion of equity will demand the protection 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 enclosure 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 wheelchairs allow a richer understanding of the forms of mobility that democratic justice requires. It is only within such an alliance a nonessentialist alliance that recognizes both potential conicts 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

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at Berkeley. She is the author of Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (1995) and currently is working on representations of bodily and national sovereignty in post-Napoleonic Europe.
References

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