“Today, disability has the same meaning for the individual as a conflict had in the first half of the 20th century.”


(Alain Ehrenberg)

Since the UNESCO-Salamanca Declaration of 1994, supported by the PISA-Studies since 2000 as well as by the UN-Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (enacted in Germany in 2009), inclusive education has become an explicit topic of global human rights policies. This positive development in education contrasts to the development of working conditions under neoliberal governance with their high level of segregation, flexibility, insecurity and social inequality. The pursuit of inclusion under the conditions of economic precarisation (Marchart, 2013a; Marchart, 2013b; Castel and Dörre, 2009, pp.11-18) stimulates new questions in the field of historical research and history education. The need to arrange inclusive learning processes arises not least from contradictory experiences of people in their actual living environments. As some might see insecurity as a positiv challenge, the credo of success out of individual effort has widely been questioned. Especially the fact that exhausting working conditions affect individual health and well-being is critically observed. Sociologists like Richard Sennett, Luc Boltanski, Ève Chiapello, Robert Castel and Ulrich Bröckling — to stick to the French, American and German context — have questioned the subjective effects of neo-capitalist working conditions. Arguing with Albert O. Hirschmann (1970; Offe, 2007, pp. 197-200), people react to stress at work either by withdrawal (exit), efforts to improve (loyalty) or political opposition (voice). Whereas loyalty mostly passes unperceived, exit and voice indicate fissures and fractures in the process of subjectivation. The Burn out-syndrome as a reaction in the field of health mostly expresses unperceivable for outsiders and even for the people affected it is difficult to become aware of their situation. Although in counseling contexts or in medical or psychological treatment it is widely consensual to work with psychosomatic or systemic approaches, the scope of analyses is rarely extended to a neoliberal achievement society (Neckel and Wagner 2013).

In German-speaking historiography, Jürgen Kocka (1990; 2013), Marcel van der Linden (2012; 2008), Rüdiger Hachtmann and Adelheid van Saldern (2013) as well as Klaus Dörre (2015, pp. 231-250) are well-known for their analysis of the capitalist development in the 20th century. Their approach was lastly completed by the studies of younger scholars like Timo Luks (2010), Thomas Etzemüller (2009), Lars Bluma and Karsten Uhl (2012) who work with a posttructuralist, Foucauldian approach which allows them to grasp the subtle qualitative changes of the postmodern working cultures more precisely. As a representative example of a discoursive approach in European historiography, the historical study of José Martínez Pérez and Mercedes Del Cura (2013, pp.191-211) on disabling the working bodies in Spain at the beginning of the 20th century has to be mentioned. Subjectivation — which in this context means being socialised by way of disciplining the working body and internalising a mechanical (digitalised) rationality — is at the heart of this paradigmatic shift of research in contemporary history (Luks, 2012, pp. 251-282). This methodological transformation also affects the curricula of historical learning towards an inclusive society.

Insofar, a didactics of history usually poses problems as laypeople often do not feel capable of asking adequate questions and are not familiar with historical theories and methodologies. To bridge this gap between historical science and history learning, practices are helpful that start with cultural artefacts and enlarge skills and expertise by self-directed research and contextualization (Biggs and Tang, 2011; Biggs, 2003). Usually, subjects enlarge their knowledge by connecting new information — in one way or the other — to subjective experiences, including media socialisation. A kind of learning defined as the acquisition of competences aims at enlarging the subject’s capacity to act mindful in social and political responsibility. The integration of unknown knowledge fragments into the existing mindset broadens the understanding of past and present as well as it enables to interconnect personal experiences and political frames of living conditions. This mind-mapping-network-procedure supports historical knowledge formation, although at first sight it might run risk of not adequately historicizing phenomena, actors and events. Insofar, first interpretations always have to be deepened by the reflection of historical background knowledge in a spiral learning arrangement.

Studying working conditions as we find them represented in our cultural imagination is a good starting point for knowledge acquisition, at the same time allowing for perceiving ourselves as historical subjects. It enables the bearers of knowledge to present history in a coherently understandable way and to participate actively in present day political contexts. The ability of narration, as Swiss history educator Peter Gautschi (2013; 2011) underlines, is one of the main competences we need for orientation in past and present political realms, from every day practices via social relations to political commitment, from personal morality via value-setting to cosmological insights (Bruner, 1996). A methodology and didactics that enables learners to prove their constructions of knowledge is especially relevant for inclusive learning processes (Barsch, 2014).

Disability History as a rather young historiographical discipline supports inclusion by investigating the contingency of historical constructions of disability. Starting with the assumption that our understanding of disability is coined by medical and social practices as well as by dicoursive representations, a historically informed academic movement was found useful to provide cultural tools for decoding the disabling power structures of past and present societies (Bösl, Klein and Waldschmidt, 2010). The corresponding learning practices aim at transforming mental habitus and institutional traditions. Such learning arrangements should base upon meta-cognitive strategies that are knowledge-informed, power-critical, self-reflexive and theoretically grounded. With the help of the toolset of cultural studies, historical knowledge becomes accessible to everybody. An inclusive didactics has to work on a popular, minimalist, decisive and multimodular basis. Informed by the idea of heterogenous learner groups, practices have to be very sensual and learner-oriented by addressing special needs, imaginations and experiences. The reduction of barriers and an interaction on an eye-to-eye-level are the necessary implications of such inclusive educational settings (Ackermann, 2014).

This article is meant as a contribution to the field of Disability History with the focus on inclusive learning processes following two questions: What can we learn about work-induced disabilities by studying the interrelatedness of work and health? How can we make the cultural turns fruitful for research and learning about disability at work? The guiding thesis of the article is also twofold: On the one hand, I want to prove that actual conflicts at work are experienced as expressions of individual non-functioning and weakness, whereas historical examples show that work-induced disability can also be interpreted as a political statement. On the other hand, I want to show that the cultural turns provide an appropriate methodology to access the construction of disability at work in a historical perspective. Chapter 1 of the article presents a survey on empirical health data, interpreted from the perspective of Disability History. Chapter 2 follows the theoretical frame of the study based on an existentialist/phenomenological/poststructuralist view of subjectivation. In Chapter 3, the empirical and theoretical insights are applied to a learning example based on two film-sequences of the popluar Chaplin movie “Modern times” (USA 1936) and the anarchist cult movie “Themroc” (France 1972). The epistemic potential of the visual turn (Chapter 3.1.) is fathomed by direct references to the film scenes. The spatial turn (Chapter 3.2.) helps to explain why the working place — besides its socialising effects — also has to be denoted as a non-lieu. By help of the linguistic turn (Chapter 3.3.), the speechlessness of the film protagonists is interpreted as an apathetic powerlessness that directs our attention to the ephemere expressions of body language. The conclusion (Chapter 4) evaluates the study as an inclusive learning unit that can contribute to the democratic transformation of society towards an acknowledgement of disabled subjects, their will to know and their right to participate.

According to data of the Federal Statistical Office of 2014, half of the German population is at work.1 On average, male persons retire at the age of 61, women at the age of 62.5.2 It can be thouroughly stated that German people are spending most of their lifetime with paid work. Aditionally, one can find indicators for the thesis that since the 1970s and especially, since the neoliberal globalization in the 1990s, working conditions have continuously been deteriorating. Between 2002 and 2012, the rate of the unemployed has dropped from 9.8 to 6.8 per cent.3 But in the same period of time the number of employees in atypical working conditions — which means subcontracted labour, part-time work or fixed-term contracts — has increased to 30.5 per cent.4 Mostly young people at the age of 15 to 24 are affected; with a rate of 39.2 per cent, more often than other age groups they work under atypical working conditions.5 When asked for the reasons for the assignment of part-time work, 77 per cent of the employers indicate the possibility to cancel the contracts whenever they want.6 Hence, the social security of employees is fundamentally threatened.

Insecurity as well as a general increase in stress and strain heightens the vulnerability of the working population and negatively affects their health and well-being (Jackson, 2013). More than one third (35.9 per cent) of all sick-reported employees are chronically ill. Of 865.000 chronically ill employees in 2004, nearly 60 per cent were registrated as sick for one year or longer. Besides elderly people, industrial workers as well as women and low-paid workers are worst affected; in comparison to white-collar workers, they show a higher-than-average illness rate. Most stress effects are not visible on first sight because workers are no longer physically impaired or handicapped, as we know it from the time-period of industrial revolution.7 But the body was brought back into disability discourse as representing a power matrix of society that mirrors the structural pressure of work on the individual (Hughes and Patterson, 1997; Tremain, 2005, pp.1-26). Bodies are performing indicating implicitely or expressing explicitely the inner world of the subject (Tichkovsky and Michalko, 2012, pp. 127-142). Bodies offer a chance to read and understand subjective perceptions, sensations and emotions. As Disability Studies-researcher Dan Goodley (2009) underlines, bodies also bring the psyche back into the discourse. Without thinking, they react directly to an outer stimulus like a “strategy without stragist” (Foucault, 1978, p. 132). Bodies are innervated, enlivened, enspirited and influenced by their environment. Gender and ethnographic studies have shown that the formation of bodies depends on working experiences and cultural habitualisations (Butler, 1993; Thomas and Ahmed, 2003). In a deductive reasoning, bodies adjust themselves to postfordist working conditions by producing visible and non-visible states of disability (Bänziger, 2013).

According to the statistics of the German pension scheme of 2008, the number of early retirements because of anxiety disorders, depression or stress consequently increased between 1993 and 2006. In 2009, thus justified retirements made up to 30 per cent and are thus number one of stated illness reasons.8 Statistics from other sectors underline that the pressure felt by individuals does not appear in form of a clear-cut symptomatology. In 2009, seven million people were approved as “schwerbehindert (severely disabled)”9 in Germany, two million more than in 1985. Six million of them suffer from unspecific illnesses.10 The second most indicated diagnosis is an unclear symptomatology without medical label; more than 760.000 persons are affected. Only around 250.000 (of seven million) disabled people are legally acknowledged because of severe illnesses that can be described in clear-cut clinical patterns.

The mentioned statistical data provide an insight into the “new politics of disablement” (Oliver and Barnes 2012). Western people live in a society with a relatively high living standard but they are under strain at their workplace. Applying the definition of the World Health Organisation (WHO), health means even more than the pure absence of illness. The International Classifications of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) of 2001 is based on an understanding of health as a relational multidimensional concept that integrates individual, institutional and social dimensions in curtailing personal functioning and well-being (Bickenbach, 2012).11 This broad definition of health has to be understood in the context of the capability-approach which lies at the core of a justice concept referring to ressources “that a person has that is the substantive freedom he or she enjoys to lead the kind of life he or she has reason to value.” (Nussbaum and Sen 1993, p. 87). The medical statement is no longer crucial for diagnosis, but rather the individual’s narrative of well-being or malaise. As the international expertise shows, this qualitative evaluation shifts the demarcation line in the definition of “health” and “illness”. The insight that every-day states of deviance and non-functioning cannot be defined by the expertise of the medical model corresponds to theory-led conceptualisation of the cultural model of disability that is comprehensively discussed in the context of Disability Studies/History (Waldschmidt, 2005).

A good example of a transboundary, diffuse symptomatology is the Burn out-syndrome that reflects a state of exhaustion, a subjective feeling of senselessness, often also diagnosed as prostration, dementia or depression. The German sociologists Sighard Neckel and Greta Wagner (2013) have analysed this phenomenon in the context of the expansion and destabilization of working conditions. Their observation underlines that the actual transformation from Fordism to Postfordism leads to an amalgamation of work and privacy, together with new digital strain on private communication and social life (Christopher and Ash, 1994). The internalization of the “entrepreneurial self” (Bröckling, 2007; Bröckling, 2013) generates a functional habitus which means a lack of personal commitment, a negative irritation of cooperation among workmates and hierarchies and a general feeling of bleakness and dissatisfaction. The sociologist Richard Sennett (2012) observed such an erosion of social relations in his interviews with white-collar workers and managers from the finance sector. The interviewees could well remember that over a long period prior to the banking crises in 2008 a transition in working networks had taken place. The fading responsibility of authorities as well as the loss of confidence and solidarity between workmates had become obvious, contributing — so the argument of the interviewees — if not to the crisis itself but to the foreboding of its approach.

In historical perspective, Stefan Kury (2012; 2013) has observed the emergence of a Burn out-discourse in the context of work since the 1970s. This evidence of an individualized reaction to labour stress corresponds to the voices of trade unionists who deplore the lacking readiness to analyse problems at work as social phenomena that demand solidarity and cooperation. It is stated, that trade unions have an unrealistic idea of working conditions and that their political analysis has become anachronistic. Sure enough, potential members seem to be hardly motivated to support the organization of workers’ interests. The German sociologist Robert Lorenz (2013, p. 54, p 168) observed a lack of “reliable organizational loyalty” and “steadfast social morality” essential for collective action.12 Although trade unions have different positions in Western democratic nation states, this tendency can be generalised. To take France as an example — a country that after World War II was wellknown for its militant workers actions — , since the mid-1990s the percentage of trade union members has dropped to eight per cent and nowadays is the lowest rate in all OECD-states.13 One might argue that anyway it is a long way from workingplace-cooperation to political organisation, but research in civil engagement and democratic citizenship shows that social interaction and political consciousness are closely interlinked and that paid work is essential for political participation (Bartels, 2008; Bödeker, 2012; Schäfer, 2010, pp. 131–156).14

In his founding documents of existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre (1938; 1943) presented an impressive psychological analysis of the prevailing fascist mentality in Europe. Based on an observation of intimate feelings, he formulated a subtle but radical social criticism. According to Sartre’s implicite message, totalitarian cultures try to undermine the development of individual personality in binding deep emotions like fear, love or shame to their ideologies. To create authentic encounters in a context of authoritarian hypocrisy, he claimed to acknowledge human beings by their freedom and self-will. Sartre was especially interested in working out the necessity to take into account the prereflexive cogito. A spontaneous gesture, a gaze or an avoidance, a cry or smile, an illness or suffering, a wrenching and stumbling, a paralysis or laughter — all these phenomena represent, according to Sartre, the truth more than verbal/rhetorical expressions.

This existentialist approach to subjectivity can be completed by an understanding of culture that Michel Foucault developed in the context of his governementality studies. His observation, that powerful knowledge orders and social practices historically generate specific forms of subjectivation underlines the potentiality of culture as initiating and promoting social change (Waldschmidt, Klein, Tamayo Korte and Dalman-Eken, 2007; Bröckling, 2013, pp. 155-172). Historical moments when event and discourse meet can produce irreparable irritations and erosions in until then stable power knowledge orders. Foucault places the birth of subjectivity in the center of these conflicts by asking which specific discoursive formations provoke which forms of subjectivation, how power articulates in its discrete and concrete forms and which truth emerges from specific historical constellations (Borgards, 2010, p. 173). As a fist definition of critique, Foucault (1992, p. 12) suggests the art of not being entirely governed. Whereas criticism focusses on potentiality, resistance is more decisive and takes “life as a political object […] as face value and turned back against the system which that was bent at controlling it.” (Foucault, 1978, p. 145). Foucault demonstrates that current political fights no longer aim at gaining rights. What now serves as an objective is “life, understood as the basic needs, man’s concrete essence, […] the ‘right’ to life, to one’s body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs, and beyond all the oppressions or ‘alienations’, the ‘right’ to rediscover what one is and all that one can be.”

Similar to Sartre, but more implicite, also Foucault connects cultural change to existentialist subjective expressions. Other than loyal forms of subjectivation, authentic cultures irritate hegemonial knowledge orders. Thus, legitimity and credibility become powerful transmission belts of historical change. Whereas the Foucauldian toolbox is adequate for a theory-based analysis of culture, Sartre offers a better approach to the prereflexive cogito of subjects. At the heart of both theories, we find the idea of border-transgression and anti-essentialist ambiguity that is close to the deconstructivist impulse of the cultural model of disability (Mitchell and Snyder, 2006). We can challenge this configuration of culture and subjectivity by adding the question of representation and visibility. Postmodern reflections on the body elaborated on the bases of Merleau-Pontys’ phenomenological theory transcend the Cartesian body/mind dualism. Locating consciousness in the body means to transgress the dichotomy of visibility and invisibility, thus exposing pain, fear or exhaustion by forms of embodiment to the eyes of the observer (Iwakuma, 2002). Studys on bodies in technical and technological sourroundings show that materialist structures and practices become a second nature of human habitualisation (Meyer-Drawe, 2000). Seen as such, bodies can also become a prison of the soul as well as the soul can become a prison of the body (Montag, 1995).

With the following learning modul, I want to prove that Burn out as a chronic work disability can be perceived by taking into account the structural complexities of subjectivation. In order to integrate the knowledge on work-caused disabilities (chap. 1) and on the casual signs of subjectivation (chap. 2), film scenes seem to be helpful. The modul is based on the cultural model of disability and works with the toolset of cultural turns. It facilitates theoretical reflection, historical contextualization and the practice of reading bodies as a source (Turner, 2000, pp. 252-266).

Film as a central medium of cultural representation offers a good learning opportunity to train knowledge deconstruction, background research and cultural orientation. Films stimulate the motivation of learners. Actors, encounters, emotions and conflicts on the screen represent celluloid “lived” experiences that can be deciphered, interpreted, contextualized and discussed. Didactic opportunities are diverse. Without being educational in themselves, even documentaries, motion pictures and artistic films provide learning opportunities for visual literacy (Stokes, 2002; Orgeron, Orgeron and Streible, 2012). Films are especially important in history education because they open a window into the past thus addressing the impliciteness of historical imagination. The same parameter an be stated for education in the context of Disability Studies/History (Mitchell, 2012) that also aims at deciphering and analysing cultural representations of disability in a critical way (Mitchell and Snyder, 2001; Mitchell and Snyder, 2006; Hall, 2013; Longhurst, Smith, Bagnall, Crawford, Ogborn, Baldwin, McCracken, 2004).

In this chapter, film sequences are analysed through the lense of three cultural turns (visual, spatial, linguistic) with the aim of highlighting their potential for knowledge formation in the field of Disability History (Markotic and Chivers 2010). I have chosen the two films “Modern Times” (USA 1936) and “Themroc” (France 1972) for three reasons. First, their specific attraction lies in their use of image, sound and the plain, direct performance of the protagonists, easy to understand and therefore most suitable for inclusive learning processes. The theatric film language stimulates a distanced, self-reflexive problematisation on the side of the spectators. Dissatisfaction at work expresses in a metaphorical body language that has to be deciphered. The visual impression encourages the spectator to interprete affective reactions as providing information on yet unperceivable states of maladjustment at work. Second, the movie protagonists demonstrate an uneasiness and reluctance that appear through the lense of the cultural model of disability as a political expression. Thus, the film scenes can help to enlarge the spectators’ insight into their own individualized reactions to working pressure. Third, the scenes provide an historical insight through two time windows (1930 and 1970) into working situations in two different countries (USA and France), thus motivating the spectators to learn more about the social history of work, the disabilities of the working subjects and its global entanglements.

Media didactics understand film as a language that transports meaning and has to be and can be deciphered. The following discussion is based on a method developed by the French film historian Alain Bergala (2006, p. 10), called Fragments mis au rapport. This elaborated didactics works with selected film scenes that reduce the complexity of the film to some chosen aspects relevant for the plannend learning arrangement. Like in semiotics, specific passages — in our context subjective reactions to work in the 20th century — are of interest for interpretation and knowledge acquisition. In the following three sections, the toolbox of the visual, the spatial and the linguistic turn is used to explore possible ways of reading the chosen film scenes that well be presented only in a short outline within the scope of this article.

A historical research agenda informed by the parameters of the cultural model of Disability History offers a new interpretation of the contingent conflicts of the working subject. It has been argued, that strain-caused discontents and indispositions at work rarely appear in the form of political protest but are usually expressed as feelings of unwillingness, suffering, pain and distortion. Thus it becomes obvious, that bodies are heavily structured by production technologies and their space- and time-arrangements. For making the embodied effects of work visible, an interpretation of film sources by the toolset of the cultural turns seems to provide an adequate learning approach. As the interpretation of film scenes from “Modern times” and “Themroc” has shown, that the formation of historical knowledge can also be helpful to identify actual work burdens. The popularity of the medium supports the educational message. In addition, research and teaching the history of work out of a Disability History-perspective generates also new knowledge on disability as an unstable category (Davis, 2013). Until now, this is a desideratum in research and education: On the one side, studies on work that use the tool set of cultural studies rarely exist. On the other side, in the field of Disability History there is a lack of research on unclear health reactions of working subjects.

French social historian Robert Castel (2000, p. 13) has introduced the term “social vulnerability” into the debate on postfordist working conditions to bring into focus the sujective consequences of economic pressure, precarisation and social inequality. Castel also speaks of negative discrimination (Castel, 2007), negative individualism and individual fragility (Castel, 2008, p. 401). He suggests to differentiate between the zone of inclusion, the zone of risk or vulnerability and the zone of exclusion. Even subjects who work in the zone of inclusion are not secure. This perceived dependency evokes fear and anger on the subjects; the lack of souvereignty weakens the individuals and make them feel powerless, maladjusted and ill. The hope for a better future is easily abandoned and let individuals fall into anger and depression, as qualitative interview studies have shown (Sutter, 2013). At the same time, the working subjects feel bereft of the possibility to take their lives in their own hands. For the sociologist Alain Ehrenberg the social paradoxies of present capitalism can be conceived by this incapacitation at work (after a historical phase of emancipation!) with its severe mental and somatic effecs that remind of a collective Burn out-syndrome (Ehrenberg, 1998; Ehrenberg, 2010).

The aim of this study was to contribute to the field of Disability History by highlightening the ways of historical knowledge formation on working conditions and disabled subjectivation by deconstructing cultural icons of impairment and discrimination. This knowledge-oriented approach (Schützeichel, 2007) works on the basis of cultural artefacts like film scenes that seem especially adequate for competence oriented learning processes in inclusive settings, for example with members of the deaf community or people with learning difficulties. Epistemological inquiries, critique of sources as well as processes of interpretation and definition play a crucial role for this empowerment-oriented, educational strategy. With a strong focus on the analysis of cultural representations of disability, such a historical research and learning process is supposed to fullfill the requirements of democratic partipication.

The article also showed how the cultural turns can be rendered fruitful for research and didactics in the context of Disability History. Such a poststructuralist approach analyses the body as a power matrix. Doubting essentialist categories of normativity and normalization, it sympathises with disability and imperfection (Deutsches Hygiene Museum Dresden, 2001; Barsch, Klein and Verstraete, 2013). Studying modern narratives of subjectivity, Alain Ehrenberg (2010) has observed that affects as ephemere signs of the body/mind-centering play a decisive role in analysing the postfordist transformation. The Burn out-syndrome as a nearly unperceivable social pathology transgresses the diagnostic possibilities of the medical and the social model of disability. Research and education on the basis of the cultural model of disability focusses on these pitfalls of Western working culture. Representations of body and space, visuality and linguistics have to be concisely perceived, analysed and deconstructed in order to write Disability Histories on work and subjectivation in the 21st century.