Disability? Or, Cerebrodiversity?
Admittedly, Ryan’s pathway was more complicated. He did not speak of feeling set up for failure; instead he felt that his exceptionally high IQ buffered him throughout high school and college. His attention deficiency precluded him from choosing and sticking to, one particular field. He changed his major at school seven times. The parenting mantra “you can be anything you want to be” did not prove an asset to Ryan who thinks that he would have liked help focusing on a field that would have been well suited for him. Ryan, Kim, and Kathy would have appreciated Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome and becoming, as so well elucidated by Goodley. The latter posits that we need to look at the "dis/abled learner as a tree rooted in a particular soil giving rise to a distinct form of arborescent growth, the rhizome pitches the learner in a rich terrain a ginger or weed: multiply rooted, expansive, difficult to put down, potentially everywhere." Thus, a "dis/abled learner is no longer a lacking subject nor a fixed entity (Goodley, 2007b). S/he is ever moving. A body no longer embodied. A learner always plugged in to relationships with others. As Smith (2013) suggests, the dis/abled learner is ever becoming. S/he is a rhizome" (106). The multiplicity, non hierarchical growth, multidirectional acquisition of knowledge, lack of duality, and ability to grow from any point, infinite connections, that is inherent in the botanical rhizome make it a remarkable “object-to-think-with” (Keller, 305). Much like Deleuze and Guattari use the rhizome, Evelyn Fox Keller used the slime mold as the “object-to-think-with,” and her cautionary applies to both:
Slime mold may be equipped with a program for adapting to the scarcity of food, but the developmental programs of higher organisms must deal with a far larger range of variability, and evolution has equipped them with an extraordinary repertoire of ways of adapting to such variability. The world challenges them anew each and every day and in ways that could not possibly be met with a single tool, or even a few, or perhaps not even a finite number of tools (306).
The human adaptability and notions of ever becoming reverberate in Kathy Ferguson’s account of dyslexia in her own sons, a state of being that she thinks through with Haraway and Connolly. Of her journey with her sons she says, both “their struggles have taken us into an awesome, ominous world of body-brain zones of discernibility, life-changing techniques, and struggles to cherish difference while still living successfully in the world at hand" (Ferguson, 234) Ferguson talks about her own becoming as she teaches her sons to read and write saying that the process "resituated her relation to language and politics in ways requiring interdisciplinary assistance" (234). Musing on how Connolly and Haraway typically "theorize outside the reach of political and feminist theory," she credits evolutionary biology and neuroscience with "resources to think usefully about "learning disabilities" and the need to recognize “cerebrodiversity" (234, 236). Citing Sharman and Cowen, Ferguson notes, adopting the "wide-angle lens of evolution… dyslexia exists as a 'disability' only in the context of today's society, a fleeting moment in geological time." Sharman and Cowen celebrate cerebrodiversity as an "evolutionary asset" reflecting our "collective neutral heterogeneity." Dyslexia is a product of a writing culture; dyslexia can also be written, its neural contours rewritten with powerful techniques" (236). In the same vein, to what extent is ADHD a product of ‘attention’ culture? What is attention?
To lean on Gill-Peterson again, she differentiates between "hyperattention" and "deep attention" and questions what make the latter more desirable than former? She traces the history of attention saying the Western and European training of minds and bodies began in the "Greek city-states with the simultaneous foundations of the physically disciplined phalanx army and mental academies of philosophy" (200). This was followed by Foucault's work on "care of the self in early Christianity" but deep attention got its exalted status only after the "advent of capitalist modernity and colonialism" (200). Overall, she asserts, "rather than continuing to have to decide the veracity of ADHD, the enabling or regulatory effects of pharmaceuticals writ large, or whether attention ought to be deep- or hyper- in organization, a neurofeminism affirms the complexity of the neurobiological, mental, and pharmacological in a system without efficient causality” (201) once again, harking back to Comstock and new possibilities of behavior and identity by changing the ethical relationship” humans have with themselves (67).
To this, I would add, why don’t we look at ADHD as activist Jim Sinclair articulates autism, as “a way of being” (qtd in Massumi, 6)? Like autism, ADHD (irrespective of where one is on the spectrum), “is pervasive; it colors every experience, every sensation, perception, thought, emotion, and encounter, every aspect of existence. It is not possible to separate the autism from the person—and if it were possible, the person you’d have left would not be the same person you started with”(6). Ryan for instance gives up on medication when he seeking his creativity while Kathy cannot access academic thinking without her medication.
Referring to Deleuze and Guattari's "notions of becomings, machinic assemblages and rhizomatic connections" again, Goodley observes that schools engage with the "misfitting potential of children engaged with the dis/ability complex" (105). Before I address the “dis/ability complex,” I would like to look at schools as “apparatus, ” a notion proposed by Barad, as an integral “part of the phenomena produced,” in this case, the phenomenon of ADHD (819). To extend the notion of phenomenon further, Barad observes, in the context of “agential realist elaboration, phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of “observer” and “observed”; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components”” (815). The complex network in the ADHD field—parents, teachers, doctors, mental health professionals and peers, currently resides in the domain of “interaction” which, as Barad asserts, “assumes the prior existence of independent entities.” That could be interpreted in the context of ADHD as distinct entities—abled, disabled, those in a position of power versus those without, that is, hierarchical, gendered, raced and classed positions—a status quo that could benefit with the conceptual shift to intra-action. One way to enact this shift could be to view seats of education as “apparatuses” that are dynamic reconfigurations of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted” (816). Fittingly, Barad notes, “apparatuses are themselves phenomena” and are “always in the process of intra-acting with other phenomena” (817). Further, in light of Barad’s concept of intra-action, we may not all experience ADHD but we will intra-act with the phenomenon of ADHD in society.
Certainly this conceptual shift, and formation of new relationships are easier said than done. Dan Goodley acknowledges the difficulty of constructing a new vision; speaking through a genealogist’s framework that cautions that “those structures and processes that we take to be thoroughly liberating will also be constraining” he says, "when disabled people (or non disabled people for that matter) become solely objects of study, are reduced to fetishized products of professional or academic knowledge, are fixed as untroubled entities, are conceptualized only as social actors caught up in the processes of oppression, then we risk limiting not only the lives of these individuals fixed in the gaze but also the possibilities of the study of dis/ability" (Ferguson, xiii). However, this is precisely where Barad’s “agential intra-actions of the world” become important: to replace the “Cartesian cut—an inherent distinction--between subject and object” with “agential cut effecting a separation between “subject” and “object,”” that Barad says “provides the condition for the possibility of objectivity” (815).
Barad defines objectivity as “being accountable to marks on bodies” (824). Agential intra-actions, Barad reminds us are “causal enactments” wherein cause and effects occur within the phenomenon, the cause “effecting or marking the other” (824). Barad distinguishes between “absolute exteriority” and “agential separability,” the latter holding “exteriority within the phenomenon.” To put it simply, and I take from Barad, to share with the social field of ADHD: ““We” are not outside observers of the (ADHD) world. Nor are we simply located at particular places in the (ADHD) world; rather, we are part of the (ADHD) world and its ongoing intra-activity” (828). Needless to say, the intra agential nature of the world would do well to inform that of the “dis/ability complex” (Goodley, ). I turn to Kim Q. Hall and, once again, to Susan Wendell, author of A Rejected Body, for an understanding of the same, through a feminist lens.
