Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Your last author you describe as an obscure Italian Marxist. This is Sebastiano Timpanaro’s On Materialism.
The puzzle that I was trying to work out in my mind, and still am really, is the relationship between the biological and the cultural. In the 80s and 90s and probably still now, social science is very much about language and ideas. A lot of the time sociologists argue about ways of talking about things rather than about things. And I find this tremendously frustrating.
Timpanaro talks about nature, meaning our body and the wider environment we live in. And he says nature determines us because it constrains us. This is a reminder that we are mortal and that we are frail. Disabled people are just one example of the frailty of the human condition.
All our cultural values and ideas are about the mind, but actually we are bodies. We try to ignore that and we try to ignore people with bodies that don’t function well. But instead we should take it into account. Timpanaro talks about not being determined by our biology but, also not ignoring it.
He has this wonderful image of the old-style Marxist as the inhabitant of the first floor, shouting to people on the top floor: ‘You’re all dependent on me, all you cultural people, you need an economic base.’ And yet there is someone on the ground floor saying: ‘Hang on a minute, I am the physical reality which you are dependent on as well.’
So how did his book make you a different sort of sociologist?
My father is a doctor, so I am very interested in biology. I think at the end of the day it isn’t just ideas that influence us but hormones and the whole physical foundation, whether that is a mental illness or paraplegia or male aggression. These are all rooted in biology. Early on in my career I read this book and it struck a chord with me and ever since then I have always wanted to understand biology as part of what makes us. We are not just minds but bodies as well. And the contribution that disability can make is to remind us about the ways that bodies impinge and to challenge us to make a world which can accommodate it.
Tom Shakespeare is a senior research fellow at Newcastle University and a consultant at the World Health Organisation, specialising in disability, bioethics and the arts. He writes a regular column at www.bbc.co.uk/ouch and is a member of Arts Council England.
