Be weirdly normal

Peter (a la deonto) sent a message to an old twitter thread relevant to my last entry.

If I follow Pete’s argument there is a problem of distinguishing obligation and supererogation or between doing something because you should and doing things that exceed what you need or that demonstrate a kind of virtue.

This follows from the difficulty of articulating authenticity in relation to identity politics. The de-essentialization of identity accelerated it’s confessional/traumatic mode or the emphasis on personal experience to mean authentic. But this has certain political/ethical limits.

Suffering is not enough to guarantee identity especially if it is shared not but universal. Overemphasizing suffering also leads you into a cartoonish catholic like universe was oppression is formative because suffering is necessary etc.

Pete then writes: “Here then is the dynamic I’ve been sidling up to: an unfortunate tendency to treat essentially aesthetic disagreements about ‘authenticity’ in genres of living as tantamount to ethical conflicts over authority/solidarity in resisting oppression, trafficking in unnecessary blame.”

This I agree with. This cuts in multiple directions in the autistic community - the assumptions of ‘you don’t look autistic’ from the outside or policing of looking autistic in the right way from inside the community (also how this disadvantages people of color etc who are also autistic).

Pete then goes on to talk about neurodiversity:

“Though in the case of neurodiversity (‘odd’ rather than ‘queer’) things are complicated by the demand for precisely that sort of recognition the racialised reject: some perhaps poorly understood but tangible biological basis for categorisation and accommodation.

But insofar as the neurodiversity community has come to extend beyond simple demands for recognition and accommodation and to embrace certain cognitive styles as things that can both be identified with and cultivated on their own terms, it too is subject to the relevant dynamic.

Which is to say, getting caught up in arguments where who gets to count as belonging to ever more niche categories, where the pretence that these are crucial for emancipatory purposes plays proxy for our personal investment in them qua modes of self-cultivation.”

Because the tweets are from 3 years ago, I’m not sure Pete is strictly differentiating neurodiverse from neurodivergent. Because the project of self-cultivation does not quite work with neurodivergence having a biological ground…of physiological and perceptual spikiness.

Skipping a bit Pete then concludes the thread:

“In summary: one is ethically entitled to have one’s aesthetic self-cultivation respected, which also means having the specific ways it is disrespected acknowledged and ameliorated. But that doesn’t mean one is entitled to have one’s specific aesthetic respected *qua aesthetic*.”

I think I agree with the general upswing of things here but where it gets tricky with me is the questions of needs vis a vis self-cultivation.relative to neurodivergence having a biological ground i.e. especially in terms of accommodation etc. There is a difference in terms of ‘aesthetic tolerance’ for the odd versus spaces which cause discomfort, overload, meltdown.

But I think the political exportability of personal experience does not have a limit without collective or even pseudo-universalist ambitions. It is for similar reasons that I wonder about the best way to align neurodivergence politically as an identity or via some other means such as neuroqueer?

I think there is need to do more explicit linking of disability, critical autism studies, and collective thinking more generally. Just as people in the school system make the mistake of refusing to help neurodivergent kids because it’s a ‘waste of resources’ the point is rather to change the general rules so as to benefit everyone. Having quiet places in any school is a good thing, having things being more flexible does not need to be thought in a merely individualistic manner. I think this gets to the point of self-cultivation and the aesthetics of it being pragmatically separated. The more flexible the ground and context the less one will feel their individual expression is a defense measure.

I was actually thinking of something like neurocommunism but I see someone as already written about it here. I am sympathetic to the spirit but I am also trying to think things from a ground up (or not only, or mainly, in terms of political ontology). I think even at the level of online activism there is a huge problem in that so many neurodivergent spaces try to be apolitical…something which given the current state of the world seems absolutely bonkers. Ultimately, communism would be neuro without having to state it but getting there requires operative differences which can hopefully be dissolved. Trying to keep autistic spaces ‘apolitical’ will not help at all.

A small, but maybe not so small, point is that autistic folks often complain about being tormented by the unwritten rules of allistic or neurotypical social life. But I think they should be described as norms, not rules, because norms are less official but no less hardened by practice. In this regard self-cultivation has the responsibility of cutting into these norms by practices that are collectively orientated.