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.
Works Cited
Antonetta, S. (2010). Dis. Seneca Review, 39-40 (2-1), 68-74.
Baggs, A. (2007). In my language. Retrieved October 8, 2012 fromhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc
---. (2010). Up in the clouds and down in the valley: my richness and yours. Disability
Studies Quarterly, 30 (1). Retrieved October 8, 2012 from http://dsq-sds.org/issue/view/43
Bragg, B. (1989). Lessons in laughter. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet U.P.
Finding amanda. (2007). Anderson cooper 360. CNN. Television.
Gilroy, P. (2006). Postcolonial melancholia. New York: Columbia U.P.
Manning, E. (2009). What if it didn’t all begin and end with containment? Toward a leaky
sense of self. Body & Society, 15 (3), 33-45.
Park, M. (2010). Beyond calculus: apple-apple-apple-ike and otherembodied pleasures for
A child diagnosed with autism in a sensory integration basedclinic. Disability Studies
Quarterly, 30 (1). Retrieved October 8, 2012 from http://dsq-sds.org/issue/view/43
Prince. D. (2010a). My grave and the last sideshow tent. Seneca Review, 39-40 (2-1), 47-63.
---. (1995). Songs of the gorilla nation: my journey through autism. New York: Three
Rivers Press.
---. (2010b). The silence between: an autoethnographic examination of the language
prejudice and its impact on the assessment of autistic and animal intelligence.
Disability Studies Quarterly, 30 (1). Retrieved October 8, 2012 from http://dsq-sds.org/issue/view/43
Ramazani, J. (2001). The hybrid muse: postcolonial poetry in English. Chicago:University of
Chicago U.P.
Savarese, D.J. (2010). Communicate with me. Disability Studies Quarterly, 30 (1). Retrieved
October 8, 2012 from http://dsq-sds.org/issue/view/43
Savarese, E. & Savarese, R.J. (2010). Autism and the concept of neurodiversity, a special
issue of Disability Studies Quarterly, 30 (1). Retrieved October 8,2012 from http://dsq-sds.org/issue/view/43
Savarese, R.J. (2010). More than a thing to ignore: an interview with Tito Mukhopadhyay.
Disability Studies Quarterly, 30 (1). Retrieved October 8, 2012 from http://dsq-sds.org/issue/view/43
Wolman, D. (2008). The truth about autism: scientists reconsider what they think they
know. Wired Magazine 16 (3). Retrieved October 8, 2012 from http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-03/ff_autism?currentPage=all
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
Top Related