“Precarity and Cross-Species Identification: ASD Cognition and Non-Species-ism”
David T. Mitchell, English Department, The George Washington University,
Washington, D.C. 20052; dtmitchel@gwu.edu
Introduction: Neoliberal Novels of Embodiment or, The Anti-Normative Novel of
Disability
This paper is an excerpt from chapter seven of a new book titled, The
Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment,
to be published in early 2015 by the University of Michigan Press. In this analysis
Sharon Snyder and I discuss alternative representational systems developing in
novelistic portrayals of disability during neoliberalism. As a response to liberal
disability representational strategies born in the wake of the civil rights era,
portrayals of people with disabilities under neoliberalism have increasingly tended
to approach “deviant” bodies as sites of invention rather than individuated instances
of deviance, trauma, or tragedy. In opposition to rehabilitating disability on the
basis of social constructivist claims that disability is in the environment and not in
the person (the founding insight of the U.K. disability social and the U.S. minority
models), neoliberal novels of embodiment (that which we call instances of “the antinormative novel”) explore disability as a site of radical human mutation wherein
much of the creativity of the species lay.
By applying our methodology of non-normative positivisms we theorize
these surprising representational reversals of disabled peoples’ embodied
innovation in contemporary novelistic enplotment strategies. We call these
alternative novelistic approaches to formerly devalued concepts of disability “the
capacities of incapacity.” In anti-normative novels, portrayals of alternative
1
embodiments demonstrate ways in which a material engagement with disability
may offer ways out of social constructivist impasses: i.e. not only are bodies
imprinted by environments, but also that environments are, in turn, imprinted by
bodies as well.
At the fore of this argument is the anti-normative novel’s challenge to
disability rights movements as complicit in neoliberal homogenization processes at
work in late Capitalist practices of inclusionism – namely, those aspects of marketbased fetishizations of difference that threaten to rid more radical formulations of
disability of the promise they hold for fashioning alternative lives. Through
examinations of anti-normative novels of embodiment such as Richard Powers’s The
Gold-bug Variations (1992) and The Echo-Maker (2007), Stanley Elkins’s The Magic
Kingdom (1985), and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the NightTime (2004), we analyze ways in which disabilities are transformed into productive
experiences of difference in the world. These are not politically correct spins
employing more positive rhetorics of disability; instead, they effectively argue that
disability is better apprehended as markers of innovation operating at the
materialist edge of species creativity. In these novels disability represents the
dynamic responses of embodiment to haphazard evolutions of corporeality, diverse
genetic systems, and increasingly toxic environments.
Consequently, all of these novels take devalued forms of subjectivity based
on normative beliefs about disability as a productively dysfunctional locus of
critique. Their plots of ironic reversals where incapacities result in surprising,
unexpected capacities demonstrate creative moments in the mutational life of the
2
species: those variations that expose the false foundations of normative functioning
to which neoliberal orders cling as universally desirable. In contrast the antinormative novels examined here turn to the more deliberative disciplines of
biological diversity developing in the field of neurobiology, molecular genetics,
nanotechnology, and cybenetics.
Like Okapi in the Jungle: ASD’s Diagnosis of Normative Cognition
To give the audience a sense of what I mean by the anti-normative novel’s
alternative representations of disability, I want to analyze Mark Haddon’s novel, The
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Told from the perspective of an
individual on the autistic spectrum, Curious Incident provides Disability Studies an
opportunity to analyze why the ability to imaginatively inhabit non-human
perspectives results in productive ways of re-thinking non-normative cognition
processes as a value rather than deficit. The novel’s narrator, Christopher Boone,
“over-identifies” with a dog named Wellington who is killed in his neighbor’s yard
one night. This “severity” of cross-species attachment enables readers to experience
alternative ways to think Autism as a productive example of non-normative
cognition.
To accomplish this re-valuation of ASD, the novel effectively reverses the
diagnostic pathologization of developmental disability by critiquing normative
orientations to the animal world as exercises of domination (i.e. mastery over nonhuman others). Here my analysis draws upon ways in which Disability Studies
theorists have critiqued long-standing historical practices of distancing disabled
3
people from the slander of their associations with forms of regressive animality.
Instead Curious Incident offers readers an opportunity to pursue cross-species
identifications that afford us ways of better reckoning with the alternative potential
represented by non-normative positivisms. Particularly in regard to a radical openness toward identifications with non-human animals that Martha Nussbaum refers
to in Frontiers of Justice as our necessary commitment to practices of “non-speciesism.”
In his running commentary on the ruses of normative cognition, Christopher
Boone explains his experience of consciousness as an “overattentiveness to small
details.” For instance, the narrator tells us that going into a field of cows results in a
level of observation which cannot be accommodated by normative models of
“rational” description:
there were 31 more things in this list of things I noticed but Siobhan said I
didn’t need to write them all down. And it means that it is very tiring if I
am in a new place because I see all these things, and if someone asked me
afterward what the cows looked like, I could ask which one . . . (Haddon,
142).
In a sense, Haddon’s representation of alternative cognition patterns for those on
the Autistic spectrum reveal a process of navigating “excessive diversity” if I may
use the phrase in a more productive sense. One where loss is revealed as residing in
those clinging to reductivist principles of normative consciousness; a form of
knowing perhaps best described as ways of not knowing.
4
At one key point in the novel Christopher diagnoses this problem in those
with normative cognition capacities as “glancing”: “But most people are lazy. They
never look at everything. They do what is called glancing, which is the same word
for bumping off something and carrying on in almost the same direction, e.g., when a
snooker ball glances off another snooker ball. And the information in their head is
really simple” (140). So in one respect this attention to an abundance of details
marks one aspect of the capacities of incapacity involved in autist cognition; in
another respect the need to reduce one’s susceptibility to overstimulating situations
also fuels ways to imagine alternative disability universes.
Myriad examples of locating more hospitable ecologies in order to wall off
excess detail occur throughout the novel as when Christopher puts his hands over
his ears, closes his eyes, and rolls forward until hunched up with his forehead
pressed onto the grass when accosted by another (4); or when he crawls into the
corner between the wall of the shed and the fence and the rainwater tub and covers
himself with a fertilizer sack to hide after discovering his father is the murderer of
the neighbor’s dog (127); or when he escapes from a policeman by stowing his body
on a shelf during a train ride to London to live with his mother. These acitivities of
stimming and self isolation in tiny places demonstrate the extent to which
Christopher actively shrinks the circumference of his interactions with humans in
order to protect himself from normate onslaughts and interruptions.
Further Christopher pursues a variety of cross-species identifications in his
pursuit of alternative ecologies within which he might flourish in his alternative
capacities of being. Throughout the novel he likens his existence to other animals
5
that enjoy being alone in order to identify asociality as a viable option for one who
experiences interactions with others as a barrier: “And eventually there is no one
left in the world except people who don’t look at other people’s faces . . . And they
like being on their own and I hardly ever see them because they are like okapi in the
jungle in the Congo, which are a kind of antelope and very shy and rare” (Haddon,
198-199). The queer/crip poet Eli Clare (a trans-gender man with cerebral palsy)
declares similarly in the film Self Preservation: The Art of Riva Lehrer: “I don’t like
being around people. I’ve always led a somewhat willful existence where being
alone in Nature is preferable to interacting with other humans” (Snyder, 1996).
Such expressions of alternative pleasures found in isolation from humans expose
other ways of being that would find inclusionism a source of oppression rather than
liberation.
A Productive Failure to Meet Normative Expectations
The anti-normative novel of embodiment privileges disability as a failure of
realizing expectations of normalcy; a source of innovation that runs consciously counter
to sociality’s insistence on the all-encompassing power of stigmatizing cultural
inscriptions. To be clear, this alternative approach to disability is not a story of
overcoming where the limited body exceeds its social expectations in an approximation
of normative modes of relating to the world; nor is its representational mechanism one
that uses disability as a metaphor for ailments that prove social rather than bodily (as
does the story of female hysteria, for instance, in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The
Yellow Wall-Paper”); and, perhaps most liberational of all, these are not inclusionist
6
stories of the ways in which disabled people are rescued by their similarity to some
abstract majority of others.
The anti-normative novel of embodiment surfaces in its employment of a nonnormative positivism that proves more innovative for its truthfulness to the imperfections
of organicity than its more culturally performative normative cousins. In turn these
works also locate an overlooked creativity – the skilled labor – required of living with
disabilities as the realization of forms of subjectivity that expand alternatives for living in
the world.
Whereas social constructionist based theories suppress the innovation
supplied by corporeality in the name of anti-essentialism, anti-normative novels of
embodiment revel in the degree to which fiction can deploy disability to
demonstrate the insufficiency of social investments in normative stasis – a defining
feature of a desire for sameness residing at the foundation of neoliberal social
domains. The capacity of incapacity to which we are referring as an alternative,
corporeal-based methodology, turns for its insight on a form of biological
materialism reinterpreted as a critique of pathology’s normative referencing frame.
An immanent materialist approach that depends upon reimagining life as life as that
which can never be stable, where it must undergo change both in itself, at the level
of individuals, as well as over generations, at the level of species or populations. In
Elizabeth Grosz’s poetic explication of alternativee materialities that might well be
applied to lives such as Christopher’s and others occupying center stage in antinormative novels of embodiment:
7
Matter is organized differently in its inorganic and organic forms; this
organization is dependent on the degree of indeterminacy, the degree
of freedom, that life exhibits relative to the inertia of matter, the
capacity that all forms of life, in varying degrees, have to introduce
something new. This something new, a new action, a new use of
matter, a new arrangement or organization, is brought into existence
not through complete immersion in matter but through the creation of
a distance that enables matter to be obscured, to be cast in a new light,
or rather, to have many of its features cast into shadow. (167)
We would end by offering this explanation of Grosz’s paraphrase of Darwin’s
evolutionary method as a means for understanding the radical literary history of
embodiment offered up by anti-normative novels of embodiment. An historical
outcropping of narrative experiments within neoliberalism’s insufficient embrace of
disability as diversity. The anti-normative novel of embodiment emerges in a PostFordist fetishistic expansion of the marketing of difference made available by
neoliberal biopolitics in late liberalism. Such strategies of inclusion effectively
undermine the material alternatives that queer and disabled bodies actually
provide. The anti-normative novel of embodiment’s most radical critique develops
in an interim space, that which queer narrative theorist Ross Chambers’ refers to as
oppositional narrative’s tactical exploitation of “room for maneuver,” disability’s
revelatory capacity to reveal incapacity as a viable alternative to the reification of
the value of normativity.
8