Tag: adhd

Review: Neuroqueer Heresies

I recently picked up this enjoyable and thought-provoking collection of essays from Nick Walker. The book consists of a diverse collection of essays she has written over the years, starting from questions of neurodiversity, and ending by exploring how queer theory can be brought to the neurodiversity movement. Some of these essays have appeared before, especially on Walker’s website, and some are newly written for this book. Given that the original essays appeared as far back as 2011, many of them come with a partner essay in the book, reflecting on the changes since first published and on the impact they have had.

The book is split into three sub-collections: The Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities.

Part I, The Neurodiversity Paradigm, deals with neurodiversity terminology and ideas. “Throw Away the Master’s Tools”, the first essay, sets the scene by raging against the pathology paradigm in neurodiversity, the idea that neurodivergence is “less than” neurotypicality somehow. She instead locates neurodiversity as natural, positive, and similar to racial and cultural diversity. Readers of this blog who are interested can read a lot more detail on this in my review of Chapman’s recent book Empire of Normality, where Chapman identifies possible explanations for the rise of this phenomenon. Walker argues that using the tools and language of medicalised approaches to neurodivergence are not going to lead to neurodivergent liberation. For Walker, using the right language is a key part (perhaps even the key part, given the prominence she gives it) of working towards self-empowerment of marginalised groups.

This sets the scene quite nicely for the next few essays, starting with Neurodiversity: Some Basic Terms and Definitions. These essays deal with definitional questions: neurodivergence versus neurodiversity versus the neurodiversity paradigm, neurotypicality, etc. Neurominority is an interesting term defined here by Walker – it seems to plug a hole in language I was looking for when reviewing Chapman’s work, when I was talking about “clusters”; it would be interesting to compare Chapman’s ideas on “serial collectives” to the “neurominority” definition of Walker.

In the essay Neurodivergence and Disability, Walker deals with the still controversial question of the relationship between these two concepts. I know autistic colleagues who strongly identify as disabled as a result of their neurodivergence, as well as those who shy away from the disability label. To my mind, Walker’s view on this makes perfect sense: to view disability in the social model, leading to the idea that disabled should be considered the opposite of enabled. When someone says they are enabled, we tend to imagine that someone or something outside of them (a mentor, a social structure, or even simply a mechanical tool) allows them to achieve something. Meanwhile, when someone says they are disabled, many people read that as a deficit in the individual, rather than the failure of someone or something outside of that individual to allow them to achieve something. It is also in this context that we first get a preview of Walker’s very strong rejection of “person first” language: “person with a disability” locates the disability with the person, whilst “disabled person” does not. To quote Walker, “if you ask me whether autism is a disability, I’ll say no, but if you ask me whether autistic people are disabled, I’ll say yes”.

Part I of the book finishes with an essay Reflections on Neurocosmopolitanism, which imagines a future in which the neurodiversity paradigm has been embraced by individuals and society. While I love the forward-looking nature of this, I feel it lacks the materialist grounding in class of Chapman’s work, which makes it feel somewhat disconnected from reality for me.

Part II is entitled Autistic Empowerment, and includes a diverse set of essays specifically focused on autism. This ranges from the short, accessible essay What is Autism? to the strongly-titled Person-First Language is the Language of Autistiphobic Bigots. One interesting claim made in this part of the book, in an essay entitled Autism and Social Trauma, is that autistic communication difficulties with allistics do not equally apply to communication with other autistics: that this is not an issue of autistic difficulty but rather of inter-neurotype communication difficulty. This claim is very interesting, but (in common with the other essays) a reference is not provided for evidence. If any of my readers are aware of evidence supporting or disputing this claim, I’d be really interested to hear more. Other essays are included on stimming, on parenting autistic children, on guidance for neurotypical psychotherapists working with autistic clients and a set of principles for those constructing a course on autism, amongst others.

The shortest part of the book, Part III, is called Postnormal Possibilities, and as I understand it takes a turn towards the application of queer theory to neurodiversity. This is my first exposure to queer theory, so my comments here need to be read in this context. Walker introduces the verb to neuroqueer (also, and less prominent in Walker’s thinking, is the adjective neuroqueer). To neuroqueer covers, for Walker, a wide variety of activities, broadly involving transgressing and defying neuronormative and heteronormative behaviours simultaneously. To my mind, Walker’s best illustration of this might be provided in the final, and most lengthy essay of the section, entitled A Horizon of Possibility: Some Notes on Neuroqueer Theory, in which she talks about the “policing of hands”; that neuronormative and heteronormative society insists (at least in the societies Walker and I live in), a certain acceptable way of holding and using one’s hands. As I understand it, to consciously free oneself to stim with one’s hands, or to hold them in a manner that might cause disapproval as it “looks gay” or “looks autistic”, would be a clear example of neuroqueering.

I would recommend this book to others. It’s certainly thought provoking, and there are parts of it that I have already found myself repeating to others, e.g. at work, I found myself in a meeting arguing that disabled is the opposite of enabled, and drawing the appropriate conclusions for inclusive practices. From an academic perspective, I find the lack of references to experimental literature or even other lived experience literature to be frustrating. Walker does herself talk about the problematic nature of academic literature in the field in this very collection, but I would love to see a version of some of these essays referencing other work, so I can build a more fully rounded picture of the evidence base for some of the claims. Having said that, I think it’s still a great jumping off point, perhaps including for researchers into neurodivergence seeking that very evidence base. Walker comes across as a passionate advocate for her community.

Review: Empire of Normality

Robert Chapman, a neurodivergent philosopher, published this book, “Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism“, in 2023. I have been reading this thought-provoking book over the last few weeks, and have a few comments.

A Historical Materialist Approach

The general thesis of Chapman’s book, as I understand it, is that the very concept of “normal human functioning” is intimately bound up with – and emerged from – the economic demands of capitalism. Their book takes the reader on a really interesting journey from ancient to modern views of disease and abnormality, taking in the rise and fall of eugenics, the anti-psychiatry movement and its cooption by neoliberal policymakers, Fordism and post-Fordist production and their impact on mental health, the rise of the neurodiversity movement, and Chapman’s views on neurodiversity and liberation. The book aims to take a historical materialist approach to these questions, emphasising the importance of material economic conditions throughout. I learnt a lot about the history of mental illness, disability, and neurodiversity.

Chapman makes the argument that modern capitalism is harmful to neurotypical and neurodivergent alike, with neurotypical workers facing extreme forms of alienation while neurodivergent potential-workers are often consigned to a “surplus class”. This term appears to be used to denote the idea that such people form a group which can be called on to re-enter the workforce during times of economic growth, akin to the traditional unemployed, but the mechanisms for this to actually happen are not fully drawn out. I’m familiar with the classical concept of a “reserve army of labour”, but not of “surplus class”; late in the book, Chapman cites Adler-Bolton and Vierkant for this concept.

Bodies as Machines, Measurement & Pathology

The metaphor of the body as a machine, and of both neurodiversity and mental illness as corresponding to “broken machines” is criticised heavily throughout the book. Yet I think the metaphor appears to be used in two ways by Chapman, one being machine meaning deterministic device which can be repaired or enhanced with appropriate technical skill, and a different one – machine as a mass-produced device with interchangeable parts and interfaces to the outside world. It is not always clear to me which Chapman is criticising, and I think sometimes arguments against the first view are used rhetorically to support arguments against the second.

There’s a very detailed and interesting discussion on the history of measurement and its link to identifying outlying individuals. What’s less well developed, in my view, is a clear understanding of the potential of clustering of certain traits. To my mind, labels like ADHD have meaning precisely because they define one or more clusters of observable phenomena. These clusters may themselves be very far from the mean, yet identifying such clusters as clusters, rather than as isolated atypical individuals can clearly be helpful. This point arises also much later in the book, where Chapman refers to “autistic customs”, when describing the rise of the neurodiversity movement; the very idea of “customs” seems to only apply to groups of individuals, so this focus on clustering rather than on individuals seems essential to any argument made on this basis, rather than solely around the need to accommodate each unique individual. A reference is made late in the book to Sartre’s notion of ‘serial collectives’, which may hold out a basis for further analysis of this point. “Far from the mean” is also often taken implicitly to correspond to “far below the mean”, and I think the explicit thesis of “the mean is ideal”, explicitly linked to middle-class values by Chapman, is missing a fleshed out discussion of where this leaves “far above the mean” in terms of valuation.

The “pathology paradigm” is introduced as a set of assumptions: that mental and cognitive functioning are individual (whereas, as Chapman convincingly argues, there is a clear social element), that they are based on natural abilities, and that they can be totally ordered (or, as Chapman states it, ‘ranked in ration to a statistical norm across the species’).

Chapman does an excellent job in explaining how modern production leads to separation and sorting by neurotype. The claim made that “increasingly, new forms of domination have less to do with social class, which now, to an extent, is more fluid than in the 19th century, and much more to do with where each of us falls on the new cognitive hierarchies of capitalism” seems weaker if – by domination – it is intended to mean that the separation is self-reinforcing, akin to the traditional Marxist view of capital accumulation. This conclusion is hinted at, but I don’t think the case is strongly made – nor am I sure it is correct.

Chapman’s Marxian argument is strong when utilising the concept of alienation in the “post-Fordist” service economies to argue that some traits that were typically relatively benign became associated with disablement as a result of this economic shift. What is less clear to me is whether the same could be said the other way round: are there traits we can identify that were disabling under a “Fordist” economy but are now relatively benign? I hear elsewhere, for example, much said about shift to home-working benefiting some autistic workers significantly, especially in the software engineering industries. Their linking of disability to capitalism’s historical growth is clear and well argued, though weaker I felt when looking to the future. For example, it is stated that “capitalist logics both produce and require disablement”; here I am unsure whether “require” is meant in the sense of directly flowing from commodification of labour or in the sense of requiring a disabled “surplus class”. I think the argument for the former appears much stronger. Similarly the term “physician class” is used at several points in the text, and I am not completely sure how physicians would constitute a class per se.

I found the discussion of the rise, and revision, of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) fascinating, especially the arguments for including – and then removing – homosexuality from the manual (it appeared in DSM-I and DSM-II but was eliminated under DSM-III) on the basis that it did not meet the new criterion that “the disturbance is not only in the relationship between the individual and society”. I also did not know that, according to Chapman, some 25% of the UK population has been prescribed psychotropic medication – a statistic I find extraordinary.

Some Thoughts to be Developed

I think that there is plenty that could be said about what I would describe as the scalarisation of value through the one-dimensional lens of price and how this potentially moves to limit and devalue variety, not only in neurotype but across political economy. The point hinted at here, via ideas around the commodification of labour, but perhaps Chapman or others could be convinced to develop it further.

Given my background in school governance, I was struck by the commentary around differences in development in comparison to one’s age group becoming increasingly salient during the Fordist period. There is, I suspect, a lot more to say also about the shift to ‘teaching-to-the-age’ in the education world, rather than ‘teaching-to-the-individual’, a trend that was in England markedly accelerated by the 2014 national curriculum.

I feel like I need to read more about behaviourism. As someone who has studied the behaviour of dynamical systems, there is a difference between the philosophical approach Chapman ascribes to Watson, “science should focus only on what can objectively be observed”, which strikes me as a call to extensionality, and the conclusions claimed to follow (whether the inference is by Watson or by Chapman, I am not clear due to my ignorance of the field), that behaviour can be usefully directly controlled (e.g. via Applied Behaviour Analysis, an approach with a very bad reputation in the autistic community). The first claim can hold without the second having any validity, in the presence of stateful behaviour.

Looking to the Future

In contrast to the history of neurodiversity, the history of the Soviet Union Chapman provides is weak and doesn’t really seem to follow the materialist approach set out in the earlier subject matter in the book. We are told that not being career politicians contributed to the Bolshevik failure. While much space is given to the ‘state capitalist’ nature of the early Soviet state, the almost absolutely discontinuity between that state and the Stalinist bureaucracy is not discussed, rather we are told that Stalin “gave up on shifting beyond state capitalism [and] simply declared that communism had been achieved”. The idea that Stalin inherited the post-revolutionary state whole seems very odd, and I am also pretty sure he never proclaimed that (full) communism had been achieved.

The arguments Chapman makes for liberation I find less convincing than their materialist analysis of the emergence of neurodiversity as a form of disablement. In particular, there appears to me to be a jump from the well argued case that capitalism brings about groups of disadvantaged neurodiverse, to the less well argued case that such groups can form agents of change by organising in those groups – as Chapman puts it, “neurodivergent workers organising as neurodivergents” and to “empower the surplus as surplus”. Despite the materialist approach taken to historical analysis of neurodiversity and disability, this materialism appears somewhat missing from the calls to “turn[…] everyday comportment and behaviour into forms of resistance” or the statement that “we [disabled] have collective cognitive power … that could be harnessed no less than the collective power of the working class”, or that envisioning the future requires “mass consciousness-raising, critique, and collective imagining”.

Overall

Despite my gripes above, I would recommend this book. I learnt a lot of history, and I think it’s great to see this being approached from a materialist perspective. I also get the sense of Chapman, a neurodivergent philosopher, being determined to live their philosophy, and this is definitely to be celebrated in my book.