Ombre Tarragnat

It is not uncommon for neurodivergent people to explain their ND traits or experiences of disability by saying ‘my brain is just wired that way’ (Able Magazine, n.d.; Melina 2023; Slaton 2021). While the neurodiversity paradigm was historically based on neurology, this neurocentrism is perhaps no longer the emancipatory move it once was.

Indeed, the neurodiversity concept was developed in the late 1990s, primarily for political reasons, and initially centred on autistic advocacy. The neurological approach was developed in the 1960s (Rimland 1964) as a way to avoid the psychoanalytical understanding of autism as the result of the coldness of ‘refrigerator’ parents, most often mothers (Kanner 1943; Bettelheim 1967).

But the idea that autism and other neurodivergences are hard wirings of the brain poses new problems for neurodivergent advocacy. First, not all neurodivergences are of neurological origin, and it is not clear that the neurological scale is always the most relevant to describe neurodivergences like depression, OCD, or plurality.

Besides, the idea that my brain’s particular wiring simply enables or prevents me from carrying out certain tasks, or that it exhausts the description of the lived experience of autism, depression, or obsessive-compulsive disorder, is tantamount to denying the role of the individual’s social context and subjectivity in the expression of their neurodivergent traits. It constitutes a form of neuroreductionism (Manning and Massumi 2013).

Neurocentric accounts indeed tend to reduce lived experience (including sensory perception, affects, behaviours, etc.) to physicochemical processes in the brain. The problem with this neuroreductionism is that it often dehumanises neurodivergent humans at the same time as it animalises nonhuman animals. Indeed, it comes dangerously close to the risky territory of mechanistic thinking, which, from Descartes on, reduced animals – human and nonhuman – to machines. Mechanistic understandings of embodiment have pervaded biology until today, so much so that neurocentrism tends to portray neurodivergence as unintentional, that is as less-than-human. In this sense, neurodiversity studies’ anthropocentrism is reinforced by its neurocentrism.

This being said, it is important to bear in mind that scientific paradigms do not have any ethical or political value in themselves but are epistemological tools used to advance sometimes antagonistic political interests. Neither fundamentally innocent or guilty, liberating or conservative, they tend to adapt to the dominant logic of their field and the uses to which they are put.

Thus, rather than advocating for a complete rejection of neuroscientific perspectives in neurodiversity studies, I am calling for a more-than-neurological turn. Neurobiological accounts, if they are to be preserved in the discourse of neurodiversity, should be decentred. First, we need to recognise that neurology encompasses not only the brain, but our entire nervous system, central and peripheral, including its autonomic, somatic, and visceral parts.

What’s more, to talk about neurology better, it is sometimes necessary to talk about it less. New descriptions and figurations of embodied difference are needed to highlight the diversity of forms of being-in-the-world: neurological, cognitive, emotional, somatic, ethological, etc. Decentring neurology may require other prefixes than ‘neuro-’, like ’emo-‘, developed in Virgil Murthy’s emoatypicality theory (Green 2024), or ‘etho-’, which stems from ethology. In another blog post, I will introduce my concepts of ethodiversity and ethodivergence.

References

Able Magazine. ‘Neurodiversity: Is your brain wired differently? Mine is.’ Media release, no date. https://ablemagazine.co.uk/neurodiversity-is-your-brain-wired- differently-mine-is/.

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism of the Birth of the Self. New York: The Free Press, 1967.

Green, Laurie. ‘AFFECT [again].’ February 23, 2024. Accessed January 14, 2025. https://lauriegreen.substack.com/p/affect-again.

Kanner, Leo. ‘Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact.’ Nervous Child 2 (1943): 217– 250.

Manning, Erin, and Brian Massumi. ‘Against Neuroreductionism: Coming Alive in a World of Texture: For Neurodiversity’. In Dance, Politics and Co-immunity, edited by Gerald Siegmund and Stefan Hölscher, 73–96. Zurich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2013.

Melina. ‘My Brain is Wired Differently and That’s Okay, by Melina’, NVLD Project, January 19, 2023. https://nvld.org/my-brain-is-wired-differently-and-thats-okay- by-melina/.

Rimland, Bernard. Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior. Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1964.

Slaton, Jen. ‘Are You Neurodivergent? Understand How Your Brain is Wired.’ Witi, February 7, 2021. https://witi.com/articles/1879/Understand-How-Your-Brain-is- Wired—Neurodiversity-is-the-New-Normal/.

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^{This blog post is based on a forthcoming paper, ‘Biodiversity, Neurodiversity, Ethodiversity: Towards a More-Than-Human and More-Than-Neurological Turn in Neurodiversity Studies’ for Trace: Journal of Human-Animal Studies.}