The dominant discourse around autism in the public is centered around topics like cure, treatment, social issues, financial costs of care, and autism as a disease. On the flip side, much of the discourse within the neurodiversity movement seeks to ameliorate external perceptions of autistic bodies and lives through offering counter narratives to those in the general public discourse.
While the counter narratives and clarifying information coming out of the neurodiversity movement do important work to offer an alternative perspective on autistic experience, they don’t do much to push the public and private discourses on autism off of this violent and time consuming circular path. I’m proposing that there is a lot to be gained from trying to imagine beyond this binary discourse and connect the autistic experience to those of other marginalized groups.
Philosopher and theorist Erin Manning proposes one way that we might begin to step out of this vicious cycle is to imagine a different way of responding to the stereotypes and stigma that surround autistic bodyminds.
She proposes that instead of talking from the perspective of neurodiversity, we instead use language that highlights the dominant paradigm of neurotypicality.
She writes that: “I’m a little bit uncomfortable with the vocabulary of neuroatypicality because of the way it centers typicality. In the environment of neurodiversity, the most common term is neurodivergence, which I also don’t use. My reasons are more philosophical perhaps, than anything else. What I’m concerned about when we speak of neuroatypicality or neurodivergence is that we frame the difference from the angle of typicality (divergence from the norm) and we see this difference as tied to a person, rather than seeing it as a mode that cannot be reduced to something someone “is.” When we reduce the person to something they “are” in contradiction to a norm, what we are doing is imposing a pathological logic. To do so is to accept a normative baseline. Neurodiversity is a different logic, in every sense, than neurotypicality which also can’t be reduced to a person. Neurotypicality is a systemic baseline according to which modes of self-presentation and modes of knowing are policed.”1
After hearing Manning explain her choices in this way, I also became less comfortable using the term neurodivergence because as she point out it re establishes our identity as autistic as something perpetually not normal, instead of advocating for the recognition of the validity of our non-neurotypical logics and ways of knowing. This concept connects to that of Wendy Brown’s Wounded Attachments and ressentiment which I cover in this other post.
Manning understands neurotypicality as a specific logic of valuation that she calls “the representation of the useful” which is where “categories are already deployed and we are expected to fit ourselves into them”.2
She also theorizes that whiteness is a racialized extension of neurotypicality, and that together they form the normative baseline which devalues everything else outside of the baseline. This theory lays the groundwork for understanding how multiple dominating power structures intersect within the discourse of autism, shaping how we approach autism from social, emotional, affective, and environmental frameworks.
With this framing of neurotypicality as a monolithic system of logic and value which presupposes what and who is valuable, we begin to understand neurotypicality and neurodiversity as different logic systems for determining value instead of an inherent attribute of a particular person.
For example, while autistic people are identified as having nervous systems that shape the way they experience and value the world, it is still possible for autists to participate in a neurotypical system by using the discriminating (as it is racialized and gendered, among other things) logic of the neurotypical system to determine and assign value instead of questioning it. This is what it means to engage in the neurotypical.
Alternative to “the representation of the useful” is what Manning names the “pragmatics of the useless.” She defines this concept as “this uneasy interstice where value hasn’t yet shaped the event. Valuation is an emergent process for me, it happens all the time, it happens the minute you open your mouth and you put a bite of food in it and you go Urgh!!… that’s valuation!”3
To not assume or prescribe the value of an event or a thing before experiencing it is part of what it means to engage in a neurodiverse logic of valuation and knowledge creation. “The commitment to a pragmatics of the useless is a call for those kinds of openings we might not otherwise be sensitive to”.4 Here, openings are spaces between thinking we know the value of something before experiencing it and then experiencing it and solidifying it’s value.
It is between these two things where we briefly are without our ability to recognize (to fit an experience, a person, a place inside of a categorical box) and we are forced to begin imagining new ways to describe our experiences that go beyond the categories set up for us by neurotypical methods of value and knowledge creation.
Manning observes that “If we assume we know where value resides, we will always recreate ourselves in the image of its representation. What else might matter in the process?”5
Indeed–what else might matter in the process of valuation? The neurodivergent logic might offer imagination and by extension, creativity, as an answer, with these concepts being practices for conceptualizing beyond the neurotypical.
- Manning, Erin. 2024. In Conversation With Erin Manning: A Refusal of Neurotypicality Through Attunements to Learning Otherwise Interview by Vivienne Grace Bozalek. Qualitative Inquiry. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10778004241254397. ↩︎
- Manning, “In Conversation…” ↩︎
- Manning, “In Conversation…” ↩︎
- Manning, “In Conversation…” ↩︎
- Manning, “In Conversation…” ↩︎
The Art of Autistic Joy 