In Diminished Faculties Jonathan Sterne offers a sweeping cultural study and theorization of
impairment. Drawing on his personal history with thyroid cancer and a paralyzed vocal cord
Sterne undertakes a political phenomenology of impairment in which experience is understood
from the standpoint of a subject that is not fully able to account for itself. He conceives of
impairment as a fundamental dimension of human experience examining it as both political and
physical. While some impairments are enshrined as normal in international standards others are
treated as causes or effects of illness or disability. Alongside his fractured account of
experience Sterne provides a tour of alternative vocal technologies and practices a study of
normal hearing loss as a cultural practice rather than a medical problem and an intertwined
history and phenomenology of fatigue that follows the concept as it careens from people to
materials science to industrial management to spoons. Sterne demonstrates how impairment is a
problem opportunity and occasion for approaching larger questions about disability
subjectivity power technology and experience in new ways. Diminished Faculties ends with a
practical user's guide to impairment theory.
