From Neurodiversity to Neurocosmopolitanism:Beyond Mere Acceptance and Inclusion

(Ethics and Neurodiversity. Eds. C.D. Herrera and Alexandra Perry. Cambridge Scholars Press 2013, 191-205.)

Neurodiversity has begun to receive its due. More and more

attention is being paid to the idea of neurological differences

as both a natural reflection of human variation and a complex, if

not paradoxical, boon—what one writer, speaking of bipolar

disorder, calls “a gift with a shadow side” (Antonetta, 2010, p.

73). My own co-edited special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly,

“Autism and the Concept of Neurodiversity,” presents some forty

contributors from different academic disciplines and indeed

occupations, each of whom argues in her own way for the need to

eschew a strictly pathologizing view of autism (E. Savarese &

R.J. Savarese, 2010.) Half of these contributors are on the

spectrum themselves--and not just the so-called “high-

functioning” end of the spectrum—and they include such self-

advocate luminaries as Amanda Baggs, Tito Mukhopadhyay, Ari

Ne’eman, Dawn Prince, Scott Robertson, Tracy Thresher, and

Melanie Yergeau.

Two contributors, Amanda Baggs and Dawn Prince, lay out the

conventional diversity argument while also gesturing at what I

have come to call neurocosmopolitanism. At the risk of impeding

the further acceptance of the concept of neurodiversity, I want

to suggest some of its limitations and to put forward this more

active, mobile, and participatory notion. If the shibboleth of

diversity has made room in the public sphere for all manner of

formerly marginalized peoples, it has also largely atomized these

groups, allowing them to co-exist anxiously and with relatively

little interaction. At my college, for example, where we

interpret our social justice mission as demanding, among other

things, a more inclusive faculty, staff, and student body,

representatives of these groups often uphold impermeable

enclaves. Take the dining hall: we may all eat under one roof,

but our “we-ness” seems to be a function of said roof, not of the

dynamic interplay of different perspectives underneath it.

Let me be plain: I support the idea of diversity; I just

don’t think we have gone far enough with it. It has become

something of a self-congratulatory platitude: a goal that can be

reached, and then celebrated, by pointing to hiring or admissions

statistics. This view of diversity will not sufficiently aid

people with disabilities, particularly neurological ones, where

stigma remains a substantial problem. My son, DJ, will enter

Oberlin College as its first non-speaking student with autism in

the fall of 2012; he worries about whether or not he will be

warmly welcomed and engaged, as opposed to simply “included.” In

an essay entitled “Communicate with Me,” he makes this point

starkly: “Last year Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN wanted to talk to me

so much that he flew me to New York and got me a room at the

fanciest hotel in the city, but ironically at my school, most

kids choose not to talk to me at all. Why is that” (Savarese,

DJ, 2010)?

How can we foster dynamic interaction when neurological

difference is so obviously embodied, which is not to say immune

to the forces of social construction but, rather, conspicuously

physiological and, even more, affecting the organ of

consciousness? In the aforementioned essay, my son instructs

readers to ignore his “involuntary gestures” when they meet him,

and yet he makes this plea in linguistically discernible terms.

But what about those autistics who cannot do so or who prefer to

communicate in some other way? What about those, like Dawn

Prince, who “can taste sound and smell colors” (2010a)? Or, like

Amanda Baggs, who organizes the world in elaborate, non-symbolic

patterns? Or, like Tito Mukhopadhyay, who flaps to know that he

has arms. That DJ, Dawn, Amanda, and Tito use language so

effectively doesn’t diminish their difference; rather it attests

to the work they have done to learn how neurotypicals operate.

That neurotypicals fail, in turn, to apprentice themselves to an

autistic neurology (including very different sensory processing)

points to the limits of neurodiversity as an emancipatory concept

and to the need for some kind of alternative.

Before discussing the articles I mentioned by Amanda Baggs

and Dawn Prince, I want to establish what postcolonial scholars

mean when they speak of cosmopolitanism. At its most basic, the

term signifies a belief in a single, transnational community, a

community whose shared values can forestall the often negative

effects of differences such as nationality, race, ethnicity,

class, language, and culture. The dream of a global citizenship,

even a global patriotism, has emerged at a moment when the planet

has never seemed so small and traversable--what with new

possibilities for travel (including space travel) and

communication. A cosmopolite embraces such possibilities,

comfortably moving back and forth from, and in between, local

sites of difference. In his book The Planet, Paul Gilroy advocates

a “methodical cultivation of a degree of estrangement from one’s

own culture and history” (2006, p. 67) as an antidote to what a

rigid insistence on difference often produces: namely,

diminishment, sometimes even hatred, of the other. Here the

pleasure of global mobility meets a kind of ethical imperative:

purposeful defamiliarization.

If cosmopolitanism is the idea of a transnational community,

the feeling of being at home everywhere in the world, then

neurocosmopolitanism is the idea of a transneuro community, the

feeling of being at home with all manner of neurologies. But how

to “travel” to autism, particularly to its most challenging

forms? How to purposefully defamiliarize one’s own neurology in

order to hospitably greet another? How, in short, to be at home

with autism? Whatever movement is required—and some movement is

most certainly required when people with significant disabilities

aren’t yet fully welcome in the public square—the task involves

both an openness to neurological difference and a willingness to

be educated about that difference by people with autism.

In his memoir of founding the National Theatre for the Deaf,

Bernard Bragg, who needed hearing people to see his plays if his

company was to be financially viable, writes of meeting a young

man whose program he had signed years before and to whom he had

communicated the need for deaf and hearing people to meet

“halfway” (1989, p. 146). Bragg didn’t recognize the young man

because he was now fluent in sign language. Upon learning who he

was, he exclaimed joyously, “Halfway!” Bragg’s notion of

“halfway” is akin to what I’m calling, in the context of autism

and other neurological differences, neurocosmopolitanism.

Amanda Baggs became famous for her 2007 YouTube sensation,

In My Language, which presents, initially without explanation, a

woman engaging in what medical professionals would term

perseverative behavior. About halfway through the video, the

phrase “A Translation” appears, and Baggs begins to unpack, with

the aid of a text-to-voice synthesizer, what the viewer has

actually just seen. Referring to such perseverative behavior as

her “native language,” she declares, “My language is not about

designing words or even visual symbols for people to interpret.

It is about being in a constant conversation with every aspect of

my environment” (2007). Although she lays bare the presumption

of intellectual disability with her keen sense of argument, Baggs

wants the viewer to appreciate her more natural way of

experiencing the world. The viewer can both hear and see her

playing with running water in a sink. “The water doesn’t

symbolize anything,” she explains. “I am just interacting with

the water as it interacts with me” (2007). “Far from being

purposeless,” she adds, “the way that I move is an ongoing

response to what is around me” (2007).

At this point in the YouTube, Baggs explicitly politicizes

the denigration of her kind of thinking: “Ironically, the way

that I move when responding to everything around me is described

as ‘being in a world of my own’ whereas if I interact with a much

more limited set of responses and only react to a much more

limited part of my surroundings, people claim I am ‘opening up to

true interaction with the world’” (2007). Rejecting what Erin

Manning calls “the primacy of the verbal” (2009, p. 39) and the

narrow engagement it affords, Baggs uses her senses in an utterly

dynamic and yet non-symbolic manner. She “call[s] forth a field

of relation rather than a static, interactive self” (2009, p.

40), a self that masters such sensation with meaning. “To

interact in a self-contained verbal way,” Manning contends,

“would involve parsing [the world’s] taking-form into a simple

activity” (2009, p. 40). Might neurotypicals, then, Baggs

implies, fit the definition of autism: people alone in the world,

unable to interact fully and appropriately with their (nonhuman)

surroundings?

Of course, this more holistic response to the environment

puts at risk the personhood of the autist. For one thing, being

so attuned to the relational field can render linguistic

distinction a baffling contrivance and make the autist seem

intellectually disabled. Baggs, argues Manning, “cannot easily

subtract from the hyper-relation of her synesthetic and cross-

modal experience to present herself as a unified verbal self”

(2009, p. 40), and yet she is capable of doing it. She simply

resents the privilege that attends to symbolic thinking and the

arduous labor necessary for her to be regarded as competent. “The

thinking of people like me is only taken seriously if we learn

your language,” she remarks. “I find it interesting that a

failure to learn your language is seen as a deficit, but a

failure to learn my language is so natural” (2007). Here Baggs

reveals the completely one-sided nature of cross-cultural or

cross-sensorial exchange: act like the majority, or you won’t be

recognized. Come the full way, or you won’t be judged to have

value.

In Finding Amanda (2008), the CNN documentary that Baggs’

YouTube inspired, my son, DJ, can be seen communicating with

Baggs via the internet. DJ speaks of organizing a summit for

autistic people so that they might begin to define themselves, as

opposed to being defined by others. When Dr. Sanjay Gupta asks if

autism should be treated, DJ types impishly, “Yes, treated with

respect.” In My Language constitutes a wonderfully instructive

example of respectful neurocosmopolitanism. As much as Baggs

vehemently contests neurotypical privilege, she still labors to

educate non-autistics. She still labors to create a space of

appreciated difference, modeling how a fully engaged

neurocosmopolite might act. That she must do all of the work (in

a second language), after enduring all of the prejudice, only

attests to her neurocosmopolitan commitment.

Such a commitment becomes even more apparent in her 2010

essay in “Autism and the Concept of Neurodiversity.” Entitled “Up

in the Clouds and Down in the Valley: My Richness and Yours,” the

essay elaborates on the alternative language conceit of her

YouTube video. Citing a remark by Jim Sinclair—“my unique

faculties are thrown back at me as hopeless inadequacies” (2010)—

Baggs wants neurotypicals to understand just how rich is her way

of experiencing the world. “My first memories,” she writes,

“involve sensations of all kinds. Colors. Sounds. Textures.

Flavors. Smells. Shapes. Tones. These are short words, but the

meaning of them is long, involved, and complex” (2010).

Sensations fuel what Baggs calls “patterns of perception” (2010).

“These sensory perceptions were repeated long enough for me to

become deeply familiar with them” (2010), she explains. “This

familiarity resolved into patterns that formed the basis for more

patterns, and—to this day—all of this continues to form the basis

for how I understand things” (2010).

But these patterns aren’t categories, Baggs insists. Baggs

is careful to distinguish between how conventional language

works, robbing entities of particularity and sensual immediacy

through a process of generalization and abstraction, and how

patterning works. “I mean perceiving connections without force-

fitting a set of thoughts on top of them,” she says, adding, “my

ability to fit words into familiar patterns outstrips my ability

to understand the words themselves” (2010). Baggs, when learning

conventional language, “was able to work out which words go with

which responses long before [she] was able to work out the

meaning of the words” (2010). She appreciated “the way strings

of words go together with other strings” (2010)—appreciated, that

is, whatever non-symbolic relation she had sensuously discerned.

Of course, the grammar that makes conventional language possible

is itself a pattern, as is, for example, the technically

meaningless rhythm that accompanies a well-crafted sentence.

Although Baggs seeks to underscore the difference between her

language and that of neurotypicals, the example reveals the way

in which the latter, particularly in poems, can be

neurocosmpolitan: trafficking in meaning while bedecked, say,

with sound jewelry. In fact, Baggs almost seems to intuit a

Bragg-like meeting ground or “halfway” point in symbolic

language.

Nevertheless, she says that “patterns and connections,”

which arise from “the movements of [her] body” and “the smells in

the air,” are “more [her] language than the words that appear on

the screen when [she] let[s her] fingers use the keyboard”

(2010). And she shows how autism can act like a pattern forging

accelerant, as differently expressive and communicative as

typical language:

I have a body language that some others—usually autistic

people—can under-

stand. I have the way I interact with things around me at a

particular time,

compared to how I usually interact with them. I have ways

of arranging objects

and actions that give clues about where my interest is

directed and in what

manner. I can tap out rhythms in general or those of my

favorite numbers. (I

really like the rhythm of seven, for example.) I can speak

Feline about as well

as anyone with my limited human senses. (2010)

This last remark reveals a pan-neurocosmopolitan impulse to

“speak” with all manner of beings and objects—to do so without

hierarchies or value judgments.

Of course, Baggs recognizes that patterns and connections

don’t “communicate everything that typical languages communicate,

but [she] do[esn’t] see any reason they should have to” (2010).

“They are rich and varied forms of communication in their own

right,” she contends, “not inadequate substitutes for the more

standard forms of communication” (2010). She calls for a truly

capacious understanding of what constitutes thought, reminding

neurotypicals that the “cognitive fanfare” (2010) they so cherish

actually interferes with experiencing the world. Responding to a

man who lamented that she “would never know the richness of the

life that he knows,” she writes,

I wonder if he is capable of looking around and seeing

shapes and colors

instead of objects and of mapping the patterns of those

shapes and colors.

I wonder if he understands my kind of beauty or only that

which comes from

a different sort of perception: more filtered—perhaps in

some ways more

efficient—but irretrievably blocking out many things before

they hit

consciousness. I wonder if he understands the dance of

waiting for “launch

windows” to line up to make actions possible, and all the

things that happen

while waiting on the ground for the next “launch window” to

open up. (2010)

Troping neurotypical perception as existing “up in the clouds”

and autistic perception as existing “down in the valley,” Baggs

exclaims, “This is about what is, not what is missing…. It is

about the fact that those of us who are viewed purely as having

had things taken away—as being essentially barren wastelands—are

not shut out of the richness of life by being who we are” (2010).

Once again, Baggs commits herself to respectful cross-sensorial

exchange, insisting on two kinds of richness, each coming at a

certain cost, while manifesting the neurocosmopolite’s ease of

cognitive movement from one operating system, as it were, to

another.

With Dawn Prince we see something quite similar. She, too,

presents a relational sense of engagement, but she views

conventional language as potentially less alienating than Baggs.

Indeed, for her, language, when sufficiently immediate and

sensorial—when sufficiently synesthetic—is more than up to the

task of expressing autistic perception. “I have always felt

everything: the too bright sun, the deafening loudness of

whispers. I can taste sound and smell colors. I was and am

permeable,” she writes in “My Grave and the Last Side Show Tent”

(2010a). While conceding that she is “no doubt…different in

some ways from other people,” she believes that her difference

“never lets [her] forget that [she is] part of everything…”

(2010a).

In the essay that appears in “Autism and the Concept of

Neurodiversity,” “The Silence Between: An Autoethnographic

Examination of the Language Prejudice and Its Impact on the

Assessment of Autistic and Animal Intelligence” (2010b), Prince

pushes back against the contrived estrangement of individual

words in the dictionary and, like Baggs, hints at how language

can behave differently, as in a poem, by soaking up whatever

resonance the relational context provides:

I remember learning the word “hippopotamus.”

“Hippopotamus,” I would

say, going by my grandparents’ bedroom, and the word would

become

infused with the security of their sleeping, the cedar of

the clothes chest

against the wall, my grandmother’s make up in muted colors.

“Hippo-

patamus,” I would say, as I skipped past the bathroom and

the word would

partake of the smells there and the joyful sound of running

water and the

warm bathing…. To me, it was a completely valid response

when someone

asked me, “Do you need to go to the bathroom?” to answer,

“Hippopatamus.”

(2010b)

From synesthesia comes a radically cross-modal approach to

existence: everything, from ostensibly discrete objects to

organisms to words, is processed through its neighbors. The world

itself turns out to be neurocosmopolitan when relationally

experienced. Being at home with oneself means being at home with

all manner of organisms and entities, for identity is always

mixed, fluid, and permeable.

It is precisely her feeling of “extreme connection”

(Savarese, R.J., 2010), to borrow Tito Mukhopadhyay’s phrase, the

force of her synesthetic understanding, that allows Prince to

communicate with the non-human world in what she calls “the

language of silence”:

When I was young I talked to animals in that language of

silence. I knew

what trees and streams were saying because they told me. I

knew what

sow bugs were saying because they molded me. I grew

together with them

because of the words of living together in a world where

everything needed

everything else. Sometimes my grandfather would ask me in

the garden,

“What are the worms saying today?” “Fine fine slither dirt

push good rotting

green,” I would answer smiling. (2010b)

Here again, the alternative language conceit strives to give

voice to the voiceless, if only to undermine the privileged

status that neurotypical humans grant themselves. Unfortunately,

this happy, animistic time didn’t last because Prince was

compelled to use language more conventionally--as a “weapon…that

cut up the world [and] also cut groups of people one from

another” (2010b). In this way, “autism” became a term denoting

pathological otherness and deficiency, not relational wholeness.

As Prince relates in Songs of a Gorilla Nation (2010c), she found

herself increasingly alienated from neurotypical society, even

becoming homeless for a while. Only by interacting with gorillas

at the zoo, by mimicking their behavior and language, was she

able to reaffirm her difference and eventually to return to

college and even to embark on a Ph.D. in anthropology. One day,

while in graduate school, she flew down to Decatur, Georgia to

meet Kanzi, a Bonobo chimpanzee famous for his acquisition of

human language through keyboard lexigrams and whom Prince calls a

“captive born man” to stress the way that neurotypicals enforce a

rigid and condescending distinction between our species and other

animals. “Naturally, I fell into the gorilla language I knew,”

she reports in “The Silence Between” (2010b). After she had

developed a relationship with Kanzi by “play[ing] chase up and

down the fence line, both of [them] on all fours, smiling in a

sea of breath” (2010b), he pointed to the word “gorilla” on his

word board and then made the American Sign Language sign for

“question,” though he himself had only seen a video of a gorilla

using ASL. Because Kanzi hadn’t seen any other gorillas, he

assumed that all gorillas communicated in this fashion. “Are you

a gorilla?” he was asking.

“There were so many miracles of language in that one

interaction,” Prince explains, “that I didn’t know where to start

writing about it within the rules: I couldn’t build on other

people’s ideas. I couldn’t cite previous research, I couldn’t

capture what had happened in terse and distant language. Even

the subject itself was taboo as ‘anthropomorphism’” (2010b). This

sort of “halfway” moment seems to mock the categorical division

upon which conventional language is based, to say nothing of the

tradition of disinterested investigation. If a bonobo chimpanzee

can call an autistic woman a gorilla, why can’t an autistic woman

call the bathroom a hippopatamus? Kanzi’s act of species

misrecognition—one might even say of species

neurocosmopolitanism--inspires Prince to imagine a larger

community of the unrecognized and disregarded:

All of these creatures the normal world imagines silent.

The autistic child,

the ape in the zoo or in the laboratory, the homeless, dogs

in cages. Thinking

their silence means they lack language, lack consciousness,

is convenient. We

are starting to speak the language of the masses, though,

and the time of silence without meaning is coming to a

close…. A language of the masses larger than

us--the world as it warms, the ground as it’s choked with

trash, the animals

saying goodbye—is either having the last word or the first.

It depends on our

conception of language. (2010b)

Call it revolutionary neurocosmopolitanism this frustrated and

semi-apocalyptic vision of the future. Learning the lingua franca

of the oppressor, the neurologically diverse, like some multiform

proletariat, seek to save the world through an insistence on

relation. Sadly, the world has only just begun to listen.

And yet, however frustrated Prince might be, like Baggs, she

reaches out to neurotypicals, using their form of language to

make her point. She clearly practices, in Gilroy’s phrase, “a

methodical cultivation of a degree of estrangement from [her] own

culture and history” (2006)—as she and Baggs make plain, using

language symbolically requires eschewing a more instinctive

orientation to experience. The concept of neurodiversity can’t

seem to capture this active striving for dialogue, this neuro-

mobility and mixing. If anything, it seems to preserve essential

differences—preserve them unimaginatively at a distance.

Having now encountered two examples of autistic

neurocosmopolitanism, we might ask, “What would its neurotypical

counterpart look like?” I haven’t sufficient space to lay out a

range of possibilities, but let me offer two examples after

briefly elaborating on what I have already intimated: namely,

that certain forms of art—poetry, for example—can behave in a

neurocosmopolitan manner. A poem uses language in both a

patterned and a symbolic way. It deploys words discretely while

undermining their discretion through the creation of a keenly

relational or connected universe. It revels in meaning while

insisting that meaning resonate diffusely. It delights in

ornament, appealing to the senses directly, while establishing

correspondences between its non-symbolic and symbolic intentions—

to the point that an element like rhythm can seem meaningful and

an element like logic can seem rhythmical.

Such correspondences themselves suggest a neurocosmopolitan

mixing—something analogous to what Jahan Ramazani calls “the

alienation of discourse from one place to another, a movement

that involves not only a one-way shift, but inevitably a

bidirectional hybridization” (2001, p. 73). We’re only just

beginning to fathom what an autistic/non-autistic hybrid might be

like. Both autism and neurotypicality must cease to be strictly

themselves in the participatory presence of the other; the

anthropologist on Mars must become, at least in part, a Martian.

The point is that we need not invent from scratch a hybrid space

of mutually hospitable cognition, even as we eagerly await a

neurocultural renaissance. This was brought home to me when I

conducted a villanelle-writing workshop with classical autistics

who positively delighted in, and quickly mastered, the form’s

perseverative lyricism.

Significantly, Baggs, Mukhopadhyay, and my son, DJ, report

that hearing poetry read aloud helped to lure them into

functional language. As a form of embodied knowing, poetry quite

literally spoke to their different brains. To put it too simply,

a poem’s attention resembled their attention. And as it lured

them into functional language, so it might lure neurotypicals

into a more immediate and relational engagement with the world.

Such an outcome would only be to the good—certainly, nonhuman

species and the environment would be aided by a less instrumental

conception of their value. For my purposes here, poetry

constitutes a linguistic meeting place, one that, however

hospitable, requires adjustment and accommodation on both sides

of the neurological divide.

The example that I offer of neurotypical

neurocosmopolitanism ironically takes place in a medical context—

specifically, a sensory integration clinic--and it very much

relies on a notion of the poetic. Indeed, it understands the

poetic in as broad a manner as possible. With the poetic,

according to Kenneth Burke, “the appeal of the form lies in its

embodied nature” (as cited n Park, 2010). Of course, to speak of

neurocosmopolitanism in a medical context is to risk re-

medicalizing autism, to risk undoing all of the work that the

neurodiversity movement has attempted to accomplish. I certainly

wish to honor my son’s response to Doctor Gupta’s question,

“Should autism be treated?”—“Yes, treated with respect”—but I do

not understand it to constitute a renunciation of any and all

medical interventions; rather, I take it to be emphasizing the

importance of respect as a starting point in the clinician-

patient relationship. And, as we shall see, the treatment must

be two-way: whatever healing occurs must occur mutually. If

respect is to flourish, it simply has to find a foothold in

medicine where, as Melissa Park, the scholar whose work I will

now discuss, puts it, “institutionalized forms of misrecognition

are as debilitating as disease processes or diagnostic

categories” (2010). Locating an ethos of neurocosmopolitanism in

an explicitly therapeutic arena not only combats “the biomedical

legacy of isolating deficits to components within particular

bodies,” but also “restore[s],” Park says, “the health of social

relatedness” (2010).

In “Beyond Calculus: Apple-Apple-Apple-Ike and Other

Embodied pleasures for a Child Diagnosed with Autism in a Sensory

Integration Based Clinic” (2010), Park, an anthropologist and

occupational therapist, presents an ethnographical study of a

child named Timur, a therapist named Eva, and a mother named

Julia as they “confound the isolation-alienation metaphor of

‘autistic aloneness’ through the creation of embodied pleasures”

(2010). These embodied pleasures, asserts Park, “are novel

associations between multi-modal, affectively laden, bodily

sensing actions and experiences that emerge…in dramatically

structured experiences in ways that afford mutual recognition of

the Other” (2010). The phrase “dramatically structured

experiences” is key, for how the clinician stages the aim of

social relatedness has everything to do with her success. For

Park, this staging must be keenly attentive to aesthetics or what

I have been calling the poetic. “A framework of aesthetics,” she

argues, “foregrounds the possible goods of the cultural forms

structuring the sensuousness of bodily-sensing of rhythm,

movement, tactility, hues of light and color, and nuances of

sound that organize intersubjective and joint actions” (2010).

Here Park explicitly alludes to Burke who understood that

poetry’s “organiz[ation],” its form, appeals as much to the

listener’s body as to her mind. Burke believes that rhythm

“enjoys a special advantage in that [it] is more closely allied

with ‘bodily’ processes.” “Systole and diastole,” he explains,

“alternation of the feet in walking, inhalation and exhalation,

up and down, in and out, back and forth, such are the types of

distinctly motor experiences ‘tapped’ by rhythm” (as cited in

Park, 2010). But whatever the particular formal aspect, he wants

us to see how “such arrangements of subject matter… produce

crescendo, contrast, comparison, balance, repetition, disclosure,

reversal, contraction, expansion, magnification, series and so

on” (as cited in Park, 2010). He wants us to see, that is, how a

poem’s non-symbolic and symbolic correspondences deliver the

holistic experience that is the poem. And, as I have taken pains

to point out, it is precisely these non-symbolic patterning

elements to which many autistics are drawn.

By conceiving of occupational therapy as fundamentally poem-

like, Park proposes, in effect, the kind of neurocosmopolitan

meeting place, or halfway point, that I have advocated. For her,

“a focus on aesthetics…reframes the psychosocial, neurological,

and sensorimotor terms that measure the outcome of biomedical

interventions toward those more sensorial and ephemeral outcomes

inherent in social relatedness itself” (2010). A “bodily-sensing

game of rhythm” (2010) “prepare[s] Timur’s bodily-sensing for

intentional attunement to Eva; that is, the rhythm and sequence of

their bodily-sensing, improvisatory game mutually attunes them…to

each other’s actions” (2010), which Parks believes is crucial for

learning. The game, interestingly enough, elicits speech from

Timur. “Apple, apple, apple, ike,” he says, but the words are

less important than the relational field, in Manning’s phrase,

that the purposefully shaped, sensory-rich encounter has made

possible. “This is a conversation of mutual recognition of the

Other as an equal partner,” writes Park. “It is not what is said,

but the mutuality of unfolding gestures, despite what words are

spoken. Timur’s “apple, apple, apple, ike” no longer evokes a

disability, but a partner in a conversational flow” (2010).

This flow, not unlike what happens at a poetry reading,

where the words wash over the listener as much as they are

decoded by him, moves both the patient and the clinician into a

space of embodied possibility—what Park calls a “mutual healing

of regard” (2010). Put another way, “a gaze of vulnerability and

respect transforms a biomedical discourse enumerating deficits

into a rhythm that cannot be calculated” (2010). Timur takes in

more of the human world and Eva takes in more of the nonhuman

one. She does so precisely by recognizing as valuable everything

that the habit of relentless categorization diminishes or

occludes. And, of course, she, too, is given the experience of

pleasure.

Lest this poetic process be thought of as just some pretty,

pie-in-the-sky corrective, I should emphasize that it produces

effects in patients that both caregivers and practitioners would

call “improvement,” even as these effects might not be explained

by standard evaluative criteria and even as the issue of

“improvement” might never be applied to the neurotypical actors

in this scenario. In her article Park argues for criteria as

relationally aware as the practice she follows, criteria that

recognize the “tight entanglement between intercorporeality and

intersubjectivity” (2010)—between, that is, movement, sensory

stimulation, affect, cognition, speech, and sociality. The

knowledge we create, Park implies, must be as dynamically

interconnected as the human body (and larger world) from which it

arises. Who knows what such innovative occupational therapy might

make possible for Timur. Perhaps he will end up being the next

Amanda Baggs or Tito Mukhopadhyay.

By way of conclusion, let me point to a second example of

neurotypical neurocosmopolitanism—this one in a laboratory

setting: the research team of Laurent Mottron at the University

of Montreal. Mottron became identified with the neurodiversity

movement by insisting that autistics were “just of another kind”

(Wolman, 2008). Reflecting on his own development as a scientist

in Wired Magazine, Mottron remarks, “I wanted to go as far as I

could to show that their perception—their brains—are totally

different” (Wolman, 2008). “Not damaged,” the Wired writer

clarifies. “Not dysfunctional. Just different.” Superior to

neurotypicality in a range of ways, this difference reveals

itself as “a higher prevalence of perfect pitch, enhanced ability

with 3-D drawing and pattern recognition, more accurate graphic

recall, and various superior memory skills” (Wolman, 2008).

What distinguishes Mottron from other progressive

neuroscientists—what makes his project neurocosmopolitan—is

exactly his willingness “to go as far as [he] could” in advancing

the concept of neurodiversity. Mottron has hired a number of

autistics—most prominently Michelle Dawson—to work alongside him

in his lab. Far from superficially inclusive and patronizing,

the gesture not only honors the old disability rights adage,

“Nothing about us without us,” but it also redresses the

intractable problem of unemployment for people with disabilities.

And it continues to be very productive. Dawson recently served

as the lead author for an important study entitled “The Level and

Nature of Autistic Intelligence,” which showed that rates of

metal retardation in the autistic population had been

dramatically overstated due to poorly suited testing vehicles.

Dawson had initially sought treatment at Mottron’s clinic but

quickly impressed him with “her gift for scientific analysis—the

way she can sniff through methodologies and statistical

manipulation, hunting down tiny errors and weak links in logic”

(Wolman, 2008). Indeed, she had spotted a problem with one of

his studies, something it hadn’t controlled for.

Once again, a meeting place or halfway point, this one

obviously very different from poetry, has been located and

exploited. The result? Better science, more dynamic

neurointeraction or exchange, and a mutual healing of regard.

“Healing,” Park suggests, “entails a type of existential border

crossing, a recognition of and movement towards the Other”

(2010). She speaks of “transforming institutional misrecognition

into moments of recognizing socially occupied beings—the doing

something with someone else that matters” (2010). Echoing Nancy Frazer,

she calls for a “parity of participation,” and we certainly see

that in Mottron’s lab.

In his essay “Communicate with Me,” my son declares,

The time has come…to get ready for college, so I am here to

ask you to help me.

What can you do to help me? The answer is to communicate

with me. Boldly

reach out to me, and together we will goldenly share our

views of the world

we long to greet. (2010)

“The world we long to greet”—let us all think of a thousand ways

to usher in such a neurocosmopolitan world.

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Ralph James Savarese is the author of Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption, which Newsweek called “A real life love story and an urgent manifesto for the rights of people with neurological disabilities,” and co-editor of “Autism and the Concept of Neurodiversity,” a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly. He teaches American literature, creative writing, and disability studies at Grinnell College in Iowa. The winner of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and a Humanities Writ

Large fellowship, he is spending the academic year 2012-2013 as part of the neurohumanities research group at Duke University’s Institute for Brain Sciences.