Hey everyone,
Here is my first attempt to theorize my project. This is a long post (7 pgs) that incorporates both Michaela and Marie's posts. I tried to make the post less cumbersum by trying to use the "hide/show" function for Blogs, but could not figure out the html. If anyone knows how to do this please show me so I can lessen the immediate size of this post. Anyways, I know it is long, so bear with me and when you have time please comment.
In response to both Michaela and Marie, I would also like to intervene with my own project and demonstrate how the pathologized subject further complicates these political/ethical intersections. In this post I argue that a simple return to abstract ethical thinking forecloses the possibilities of seeing how the subject, specifically the pathologized subject of autism, is formed through the political appropriations of our material State. As an example, I contend that the shared discourse between doctors and teachers creates/defines the limits for understanding the subject of autism. They perpetuate a social discourse of what autism “is” or “looks like” by outlining distinct, linear pathologies. These pathologies become fixed over time (usually through the DSM) and in turn create an abstract, fixed subjectivity that forecloses possibilities for seeing autism’s actual living differences. Although this medical discourse begins with an abstract ethical consideration that attempts to incorporate a static subject of mental illness through medical/political strategies of social incorporation, the actual speaking subject of autism is still overlooked in the process. The difference of the actual speaking “I” of autism is flattened and turned into an abstract concept of mental illness in the process of creating our social institutions and understandings of autism. In recent years, the discourse surrounding the public understanding of autism has come under criticism, because authors such as Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron (both subjects of autism) wrote books that outline a speaking, self-reflective “I” of autism that conflicts with classic medical understandings of autistic pathologies.
I will show that it is precisely this gesture of returning to the abstract ethical subject formations of medical science that perpetuates misunderstandings and produces programs that unintentionally foreclose possibilities and avenues of social development for people with autism. When society (Western society) attempts to be ethical towards an opaque and dependant subject of autism, it usually begins with flattening the subject by creating an abstract concept of fixed pathologies that doesn’t anticipate difference. Therefore, it will always be necessary to engage the amalgamation of the ethical/political divide that exposes both the weakness in our medical appropriations of autism with the actual living difference of the autistic life. I will begin with outlining Marie’s and Michaela’s positions on the ethical/political divide and then introduce my object: the autistic subject in relation to social constructions of mental health and its questions of what, relationally speaking, constitutes ethical subject formation. I argue that if we are truly to be ethical towards the autistic subject, we must also be political; we must constantly challenge what autism “is” and what we think it will be; we must routinely engage the ambiguity of the ethical/political intersection and be open to a changing subject of (anti) pathological life.
Marie’s response to Michaela indicates that we should rather think politics and ethics as separate formations, where the political is external to the subject and acts violently upon the subject through misrecognition of a normalizing power such as the State. She suggests via her example of the embassy that recognition and sovereignty for the subject are always, already in conflict because the subject is formed at particular political intersections where the State assumes a universalizing ethics that forecloses individual difference. I understand this through Marie’s statement, “For isn’t it the nation state’s responsibility to worry that its political program echoes the millions of individual subjects who constitute the nation state as a whole?” Marie seems to be suggesting a theoretical practice that emphasizes a return to the ethical, where we will be able to clearly expose the weaknesses of our political projects, or as she puts it, to think “…of politics and ethics separately as [is] precisely necessary so that we are able to distinguish where our responsibilities lie.”
Michaela theorizes this strategic intersection somewhat differently in her theoretical framework towards “Queer Hospitality.” Michaela claims that these two concepts should be seen as an ever-changing amalgamation: a desired amalgamation that is necessary for the two concepts to implicate each other in their theoretical practices. In her view, Queer Hospitality enacts a constant process of queer politics; a politics/ethics that emanates from a risky, ever-changing hospitality. Michaela is suggesting that Queer Hospitality is an ethical discourse that anticipates the risks of a political practice that assumes an unstable/changing subject of “queer” life. In Michaela’s theoretical model, when one enters the female bathhouse a form of exclusion is paradoxically at work even in counter-public spaces that are created to include those who are marginalized by social norms. In Michaela’s example of a Lesbian/Trans bathhouse door policy, a queer identified person may still be excluded by the normalizing power of a particular lesbian/feminist ideology enacted within the space. Thus, the door policy at Lesbian/Trans folk bathhouses is an example of Queer Hospitality already at work by implicating the ethics of those who are already excluded by social norms while simultaneously attempting to create a politics for the bathhouse organizers who determine who will be recognized as actually being female, trans, queer, etc. Therefore, it is not simply a matter of seeing the ethical/political as separate, but rather seeing them in a knot; where each instance of practicing Queer Hospitality will always garner an ever-changing queer politics that regulates who can enter “queer spaces”- or an impossible task of providing unconditional hospitality.
The difference Marie seems to be suggesting is that while the ethical and the political are imbricated in each other, it is rather a return to the ethical that should be considered if we are to understand how the political is operating. For Michaela, however, this return is perhaps just one aspect of her argument: namely, how does a queer community provide an ethical hospitality that doesn’t foreclose the possibilities of an ever-changing politics. I understand that a return to the ethical will not simply undo the political, though such a gesture undoubtedly raises questions about the political and creates avenues for further recognition and agency. However, it seems to me, if we only consider the ethics of inclusion and recognition, we thusly risk creating abstract subjects that can only be considered to be trapped within the political and thus we only theorize about subjects and their lack of political agency. In returning to the abstract ethical (as the case with medical science demonstrates), we foreclose the possibility of political situations that can arise and change how we think about the ethical as such. In so doing we overlook how the individual is a byproduct of conflicting ethical and political subject formations. This means, if we only focus on theorizing the ethical, we overlook how we come to embody the political in our ethical thinking.
I would like to consider the political/ethical divide should always been seen in tandem with each other, always an amalgamation, where the reduction of the one side of the equation necessarily forecloses difference on the other. I am not arguing for a better theory, but rather I would like to show through the pathologized subject of autism that a simple return to the ethical will not foster a self-reflexive and appropriate politics. I would therefore like to turn towards this challenging subject that resists, complicates and further demonstrates why a return to the ethical cannot be thought without the political and vise-versa. For the remainder of this post, I would like to continue to use the strategical value of Marie’s division of the ethical and the political. As Butler states, such a position can demonstrate that “theoretical positions are always appropriated and deployed in political contexts that expose something of the strategic value of such theories.” (ES pg. 20) I will therefore continue with a definition of the ethical as an appropriation of the abstract consideration of self-reflexivity in relation to social norms and the political as the embodiment of these social norms in material or concrete institutions that shape ethical thinking: i.e. State laws, schools, doctors, and teachers that all define what is a recognizable subject of value and ethics.
In 2005, Dr. Temple Grandin and Sean Barron coauthored a book entitled The Unwritten Rules of Social Relations (UWRSR) or how to understand the immergence of social norms through the unique perspective of autism. Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron have decided to become Butlerian social theorists by demonstrating a larger “political/ethical” project that shows how interactions of everyday people, teachers and doctors (whom they refer to as “neurotypicals”) with people who have autism creates a conflict of misconception about what, in actuality, autistic children need/want for their social development. In creating delicately constructed oeuvres, Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron demonstrate how the subject of autism emerges as a conflict with the political/ethical of the “neurotypically” constructed social sphere. Although their book is written in a narrative form that is not theoretical, their book could be read as an ethical/political deconstruction that, when outlined in academic terms, demonstrates to its readers a return to an abstract ethical encounter. Through descriptions of their personal accounts of growing up with autism, Dr. Grandin and Barron locate a form of misconception that has developed by doctors, teachers and parents who assume and treat only the social effects of autism, or a public consciousness that only sees awkward, “bad” behavior. Their book explicitly demonstrates how children with autism learn how to interact with social norms and continually point-out that simply seeing the autistic child as an effect of a strict pathology further forecloses the emergence of seeing an actual thinking “I” of Being. I would like to add that Sean Barron’s first book was entitled There’s a Boy in There, where his title indicates how society sees autism as a lack or a mask that must be uncovered to reveal a coherent thinking “I” and his book shows how the autistic thinking “I” communicates and produces a coherent subject of value.
Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron show that there is no clearly defined, linear subject of autism, but rather a set of pathologies that change and develop over time (indeed, autism is not a fixed subjectivity). Dr. Grandin and Barron reconfigure the autistic child (subject) into two metaphorical categories that describe “paths,” or two schematics of autistic personalities that emerge from the medical definition of “classic autism.” Path A children, demonstrate high mental functioning and “their sense of connection to the world, their happiness may always stem from a logical, analytic place of being…”(emphasis mine, UWRSR introduction pg.xii). Path A children are usually non-verbal in their adolescence and pull away from social interactions because they are caught in loops of analytical thought where words have therefore abandoned them. Dr. Grandin tells how she would take comfort in looking at sand falling between her fingers for hours without words to express her obsession. Her behavior was seen as inherently anti-social and since Temple was non-verbal in her childhood she was therefore considered to be a subject that was deprived of a coherent thinking “I” of being. Ethical and medical norms dictated that she be “left alone,” allowing her to retreat from interacting with social norms and unable to express an external ego. It wouldn’t be until her later teens, when she would come into contact with highly analytical academic discourses, that she would develop the language to describe her inner thoughts as a child. Since Temple was seen as being inherently anti-social and uncommunicative, high-functioning analytic thinking and language were denied to her until she latter acquired the language of “neurotypicals” to actually see and express herself as a literal, scientific thinker.
In contrast, Path B children are described as “feeling emotional-relatedness right from the start…they ‘feel out’ their world through their sense of social-emotional connection and are deeply affected when they and their world are out of sync with each other.” (UWRSR, pg. xiii). In giving an account of themselves, both Dr. Grandin (Path A) and Sean Barron (Path B) use the language of the established medical discourse on autism to reconfigure the discursive limits of their own intelligibility and agency. In so doing, they recreate a language of autism that is at once part of their own making and simultaneously constructed through an external social world (or the political world) of “neurotypical” doctors and teachers. From this perspective, we can thusly see how Marie’s conception of returning to the abstract ethical creates a literary voice of autism that reveals how the political subject of autism is formed and how their voice of agency comes into contact with a world that is not their own. In order to do this both Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron require the political language of everyday “neurotypical” doctors and teachers that have defined and pathologized their social intelligibility in advance. Therefore, their book is only possible because Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron create an abstract ethical subject that is simultaneously dependant on a social/medical discourse that exceeds and precedes them. Their book is meant to demonstrate to the reader, if one is going to be ethical towards a subject of autism, one must not solely consider the medial discourse that establishes their intelligibility to the world. The reader must also assume an open, and unconditional “motherly” ethics, or an unstable politics, which will assume autism’s discontinuities and reformulations throughout social development and time.
In Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, he first introduces his theory of the subject (Butler’s theoretical starting point in Chapter 3 of Psychic Life of Power) as an effect of discourse. In this seminal work, Foucault shows that there is no linear ‘subject’ of madness throughout the genealogy of psychology, only discourses that treat and “cure” mental diseases through the creation of the pathologized patient. While much advancement has been made in Psychiatry and Neuro-chemistry, it is still true that the pathological subject is always an effect of discourse: one enters the clinic, learns of their pathological subjectivity and seeks therapy. In this sense, psychological treatment thus works on two levels of understanding: on the one level it is a psychological conditioning, where the patient self-reflexivity states, “Yes, I am sick/depressed/Bi-polar…” and on another level, the patient confirms/refutes the medical discourse of subjectivity by saying, “Yes, I feel better or No I don’t feel better because of this or that therapy.” Yet, the process for determining a ‘subject’ of psychological treatment and the correct medication requires a system of checks and balances (an economy of mental health) that underlines the ethical/political intersection.
In this sense, the analyst must determine pathology based not on the literal appearance of a “disease,” but rather paradoxically through a performance of an opaque speaking “I”. An analysand’s subjectivity (i.e. pathology) is then measured against a fixed understanding of mental illness and a medication is prescribed that may or may not work. Today, we can understand how psychiatry sees mental illness as a controllable “disease,” complete with the experimentation of a clinic, as trial and error, and the effects of an incomplete science that attempts to treat an ever-changing subject of Being. Thus, if mental illness is truly a “disease,” in the same sense as cancer, then a corresponding pill is all that is needed for all fixed and pathological illness. However, we also know this is not always the case, as mental illness may not have a single origin and is always bound to a complex material and psychic thinking “I” of Being—a being that grows, changes and is always in flux, never stable or completely pathological. All problems of the ethical/political intersection of mental health would be resolved if a wonder pill actually existed that “cured” all forms of autism, but sadly, no such pill actually exists. **(Please note, I am not arguing that there is no value to psychiatric medication;I am simply pointing to its inconsistencies, not the value of its successes or its failures)**
In this brief sketch of medical subject formation, I contend that the abstract ethical is already embraced in the practice of political medical science. The political/ethical intersection evolves in the clinic of mental health, where the patient learns and becomes a “subject” of the clinic. The clinic thusly becomes a space where a discourse of mental illness precedes the subject and in turn forms an abstract conception of the patient that seeks its theoretical treatment. If the subject is, as both Butler and Foucault maintain, an effect of discourse then it will be necessary to enact and question the ethical/political divide in each context of medical subject formation. I would now like to return to the subject of autism and focus solely on Dr. Grandin’s narrative as a non-verbal, highly gifted, autistic child (Path A). Dr. Grandin gives an account of herself as a child and lavishes much praise upon her mother for much of her success as a professional today.
Temple Grandin was born in the early 1950’s, at a time when psychotherapy and clinical psychology was in its “infancy” in America. This is a time when autism was not understood as it is today and was often treated by removing the child from the family, placing them in an institution and enforcing harsh behavior modification techniques (We all might share this “classic” image which has been depicted constantly throughout the arts). Dr. Grandin contributes much praise to her mother who refused to let her young and quite different/gifted Temple be sent to any institution. Temple’s mother was very critical of the doctor’s description and evaluations of her daughter’s autism, which determined that she would never develop social skills because she had a mental illness. The doctor’s evaluations, based on strict pathologies for autism, foresaw Temple as never being able to overcome her pathological “illness.” The abstract ethics of doctors and teachers in the 1950’s prescribed Temple to be put into an institution and removed from society altogether. This however was unacceptable for Temple’s mother, who insisted that her daughter could learn to become a functioning adult. Dr. Grandin reveals that through her mother’s persistent affection and care, she developed an open, “motherly” ethics that allowed her autistic, non-verbal daughter to grow into a professional PhD.
Dr. Grandin specifically credits her mother for creating a delicate system of discipline that would engage and incorporate her autism in innovative ways. She gives credit to her mother for her “…acute understanding of my boundaries and [knowing] when and how far she could push me.”(UWRSR, pg.5) Temple’s mother saw and engaged Temple’s autistic gifts of analytical thinking by catering and reinforcing the behaviors that already gave Temple pleasure. She would buy erector sets, complex puzzles, model airplanes and rockets that would feed Temple’s analytical gifts. She simultaneously refused that her child be left out of the classroom. She advised teachers and created reward programs that would force Temple into social interactions with other children. Her plan was successful because it functioned on two levels, first it allowed Temple’s gifts to blossom and become a source of inspiration and praise, while simultaneously putting Temple into “neurotypical” encounters where she could learn how other kids think and see themselves in relation to social norms. By refusing to adhere to the ethics of the doctors in the 1950’s, Temple’s mother created the social situations that Temple needed to be able to create a social personality for herself. These situations were also necessary, yet uneasy for Temple, but today she praises her mother for refusing to give-in and let her child fail as a social person.
In this sense, Dr. Grandin speaks of her mother as operating from a position similar to Michaela’s Queer Hospitality. Temple’s mother comprised an “ethics” that saw the need for a persistently open, ever-changing social discipline in relation to the subject of autism, where a new realm of hospitality could be possibilized by accepting her daughter’s changing autistic differences and by not foreclosing her social emergence by considering both her non-verbal social behaviors and her analytical thinking. Therefore, a “motherly” ethics/hospitality was constantly enacted for Temple, where her autism could find release in personal pursuits and take flight in learning from the necessary interactions of “neurotypical” life that included doctors, teachers and other children. Her mother became a bridge that could translate a world created by neurotypicals for neurotypicals, into controlled interactions that could support her throughout a world that would constantly misconstrue her autism and foreclose her social agency. It is precisely because her mother was positioned in between the discursive limits of a medical discourse that allowed her to see a new path for children with autism. While her plan for her daughter was not a public, “political agenda,” Temple’s mother demonstrates why just returning to the abstract ethical would have foreclosed possibilities for her child.
To simplify in three points: A) If Temple’s mother only accepted the abstract ethical reasoning of cognitive medical science in the 1950’s, she would only come to embody the abstract politics of medical science in her disciplinary thinking. Temple’s mother would only embody the ethics of an abstract conception of the medical subject as a strict patient and not see her daughter as a child with autistic difference. This is to say, if Temple’s mother only reasoned through an abstract medical discourse, she would have accepted her daughter’s non-verbal condition as fixed. She probably would have not let her child go to an institution, but she would have only “treated” her daughter’s anti-social behavior while overlooking her analytical gifts. B) Similarly, had Temple’s mother not questioned the social politics of autism at the time, she would not have been able keep her child in the classroom, a social space necessary for all children’s development. C) Underlining both A and B, and most importantly, if she was not also open to seeing Temple as thinking, changing and speaking subject of value, she would have not been able to praise her, love her and allow her to blossom. Strictly speaking, without her mother’s constant engagement and struggle with the ethical/political divide of powerful social norms, she would have continued to see and accept her daughter as a fixed, strictly pathologized, non-verbal subject that would never be able to become a functioning adult.
Her mother’s position was therefore constantly embracted in the ethical/political double bind, since it is also, paradoxically, this same abstract medical discourse of cognitive medical science that pointed out particular pathologies that Temple actually displayed. If her mother had never learned that her child was, indeed, autistic, she wouldn’t have created a special plan that catered to her special interests and needs. Therefore, the abstract ethical of medical science is always a necessary position to consider while simultaneously being open to a critical discursive political position. Without an amalgamation of the ethical/political discourses of Temple’s mother with the medical doctors and teachers, Temple would have never become Dr. Grandin. Temple’s mother had to straddle this ethical/political divide of social norms of the 1950’s and create an “ethics” that changed and allowed Temple to speak back, where she was able to interact with a speaking “I” of autism and form a self-reflexive plan that encouraged Temple’s social growth and praised her analytic being. Because her mother was positioned at this discursive limit between doctors, teachers and the limits of understanding her own daughter as autistic, she was able to deploy a strategic politics that could maneuver her child through an “unethical” medical and social world of neurotypicals.
Here is my first attempt to theorize my project. This is a long post (7 pgs) that incorporates both Michaela and Marie's posts. I tried to make the post less cumbersum by trying to use the "hide/show" function for Blogs, but could not figure out the html. If anyone knows how to do this please show me so I can lessen the immediate size of this post. Anyways, I know it is long, so bear with me and when you have time please comment.
In response to both Michaela and Marie, I would also like to intervene with my own project and demonstrate how the pathologized subject further complicates these political/ethical intersections. In this post I argue that a simple return to abstract ethical thinking forecloses the possibilities of seeing how the subject, specifically the pathologized subject of autism, is formed through the political appropriations of our material State. As an example, I contend that the shared discourse between doctors and teachers creates/defines the limits for understanding the subject of autism. They perpetuate a social discourse of what autism “is” or “looks like” by outlining distinct, linear pathologies. These pathologies become fixed over time (usually through the DSM) and in turn create an abstract, fixed subjectivity that forecloses possibilities for seeing autism’s actual living differences. Although this medical discourse begins with an abstract ethical consideration that attempts to incorporate a static subject of mental illness through medical/political strategies of social incorporation, the actual speaking subject of autism is still overlooked in the process. The difference of the actual speaking “I” of autism is flattened and turned into an abstract concept of mental illness in the process of creating our social institutions and understandings of autism. In recent years, the discourse surrounding the public understanding of autism has come under criticism, because authors such as Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron (both subjects of autism) wrote books that outline a speaking, self-reflective “I” of autism that conflicts with classic medical understandings of autistic pathologies.
I will show that it is precisely this gesture of returning to the abstract ethical subject formations of medical science that perpetuates misunderstandings and produces programs that unintentionally foreclose possibilities and avenues of social development for people with autism. When society (Western society) attempts to be ethical towards an opaque and dependant subject of autism, it usually begins with flattening the subject by creating an abstract concept of fixed pathologies that doesn’t anticipate difference. Therefore, it will always be necessary to engage the amalgamation of the ethical/political divide that exposes both the weakness in our medical appropriations of autism with the actual living difference of the autistic life. I will begin with outlining Marie’s and Michaela’s positions on the ethical/political divide and then introduce my object: the autistic subject in relation to social constructions of mental health and its questions of what, relationally speaking, constitutes ethical subject formation. I argue that if we are truly to be ethical towards the autistic subject, we must also be political; we must constantly challenge what autism “is” and what we think it will be; we must routinely engage the ambiguity of the ethical/political intersection and be open to a changing subject of (anti) pathological life.
Marie’s response to Michaela indicates that we should rather think politics and ethics as separate formations, where the political is external to the subject and acts violently upon the subject through misrecognition of a normalizing power such as the State. She suggests via her example of the embassy that recognition and sovereignty for the subject are always, already in conflict because the subject is formed at particular political intersections where the State assumes a universalizing ethics that forecloses individual difference. I understand this through Marie’s statement, “For isn’t it the nation state’s responsibility to worry that its political program echoes the millions of individual subjects who constitute the nation state as a whole?” Marie seems to be suggesting a theoretical practice that emphasizes a return to the ethical, where we will be able to clearly expose the weaknesses of our political projects, or as she puts it, to think “…of politics and ethics separately as [is] precisely necessary so that we are able to distinguish where our responsibilities lie.”
Michaela theorizes this strategic intersection somewhat differently in her theoretical framework towards “Queer Hospitality.” Michaela claims that these two concepts should be seen as an ever-changing amalgamation: a desired amalgamation that is necessary for the two concepts to implicate each other in their theoretical practices. In her view, Queer Hospitality enacts a constant process of queer politics; a politics/ethics that emanates from a risky, ever-changing hospitality. Michaela is suggesting that Queer Hospitality is an ethical discourse that anticipates the risks of a political practice that assumes an unstable/changing subject of “queer” life. In Michaela’s theoretical model, when one enters the female bathhouse a form of exclusion is paradoxically at work even in counter-public spaces that are created to include those who are marginalized by social norms. In Michaela’s example of a Lesbian/Trans bathhouse door policy, a queer identified person may still be excluded by the normalizing power of a particular lesbian/feminist ideology enacted within the space. Thus, the door policy at Lesbian/Trans folk bathhouses is an example of Queer Hospitality already at work by implicating the ethics of those who are already excluded by social norms while simultaneously attempting to create a politics for the bathhouse organizers who determine who will be recognized as actually being female, trans, queer, etc. Therefore, it is not simply a matter of seeing the ethical/political as separate, but rather seeing them in a knot; where each instance of practicing Queer Hospitality will always garner an ever-changing queer politics that regulates who can enter “queer spaces”- or an impossible task of providing unconditional hospitality.
The difference Marie seems to be suggesting is that while the ethical and the political are imbricated in each other, it is rather a return to the ethical that should be considered if we are to understand how the political is operating. For Michaela, however, this return is perhaps just one aspect of her argument: namely, how does a queer community provide an ethical hospitality that doesn’t foreclose the possibilities of an ever-changing politics. I understand that a return to the ethical will not simply undo the political, though such a gesture undoubtedly raises questions about the political and creates avenues for further recognition and agency. However, it seems to me, if we only consider the ethics of inclusion and recognition, we thusly risk creating abstract subjects that can only be considered to be trapped within the political and thus we only theorize about subjects and their lack of political agency. In returning to the abstract ethical (as the case with medical science demonstrates), we foreclose the possibility of political situations that can arise and change how we think about the ethical as such. In so doing we overlook how the individual is a byproduct of conflicting ethical and political subject formations. This means, if we only focus on theorizing the ethical, we overlook how we come to embody the political in our ethical thinking.
I would like to consider the political/ethical divide should always been seen in tandem with each other, always an amalgamation, where the reduction of the one side of the equation necessarily forecloses difference on the other. I am not arguing for a better theory, but rather I would like to show through the pathologized subject of autism that a simple return to the ethical will not foster a self-reflexive and appropriate politics. I would therefore like to turn towards this challenging subject that resists, complicates and further demonstrates why a return to the ethical cannot be thought without the political and vise-versa. For the remainder of this post, I would like to continue to use the strategical value of Marie’s division of the ethical and the political. As Butler states, such a position can demonstrate that “theoretical positions are always appropriated and deployed in political contexts that expose something of the strategic value of such theories.” (ES pg. 20) I will therefore continue with a definition of the ethical as an appropriation of the abstract consideration of self-reflexivity in relation to social norms and the political as the embodiment of these social norms in material or concrete institutions that shape ethical thinking: i.e. State laws, schools, doctors, and teachers that all define what is a recognizable subject of value and ethics.
In 2005, Dr. Temple Grandin and Sean Barron coauthored a book entitled The Unwritten Rules of Social Relations (UWRSR) or how to understand the immergence of social norms through the unique perspective of autism. Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron have decided to become Butlerian social theorists by demonstrating a larger “political/ethical” project that shows how interactions of everyday people, teachers and doctors (whom they refer to as “neurotypicals”) with people who have autism creates a conflict of misconception about what, in actuality, autistic children need/want for their social development. In creating delicately constructed oeuvres, Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron demonstrate how the subject of autism emerges as a conflict with the political/ethical of the “neurotypically” constructed social sphere. Although their book is written in a narrative form that is not theoretical, their book could be read as an ethical/political deconstruction that, when outlined in academic terms, demonstrates to its readers a return to an abstract ethical encounter. Through descriptions of their personal accounts of growing up with autism, Dr. Grandin and Barron locate a form of misconception that has developed by doctors, teachers and parents who assume and treat only the social effects of autism, or a public consciousness that only sees awkward, “bad” behavior. Their book explicitly demonstrates how children with autism learn how to interact with social norms and continually point-out that simply seeing the autistic child as an effect of a strict pathology further forecloses the emergence of seeing an actual thinking “I” of Being. I would like to add that Sean Barron’s first book was entitled There’s a Boy in There, where his title indicates how society sees autism as a lack or a mask that must be uncovered to reveal a coherent thinking “I” and his book shows how the autistic thinking “I” communicates and produces a coherent subject of value.
Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron show that there is no clearly defined, linear subject of autism, but rather a set of pathologies that change and develop over time (indeed, autism is not a fixed subjectivity). Dr. Grandin and Barron reconfigure the autistic child (subject) into two metaphorical categories that describe “paths,” or two schematics of autistic personalities that emerge from the medical definition of “classic autism.” Path A children, demonstrate high mental functioning and “their sense of connection to the world, their happiness may always stem from a logical, analytic place of being…”(emphasis mine, UWRSR introduction pg.xii). Path A children are usually non-verbal in their adolescence and pull away from social interactions because they are caught in loops of analytical thought where words have therefore abandoned them. Dr. Grandin tells how she would take comfort in looking at sand falling between her fingers for hours without words to express her obsession. Her behavior was seen as inherently anti-social and since Temple was non-verbal in her childhood she was therefore considered to be a subject that was deprived of a coherent thinking “I” of being. Ethical and medical norms dictated that she be “left alone,” allowing her to retreat from interacting with social norms and unable to express an external ego. It wouldn’t be until her later teens, when she would come into contact with highly analytical academic discourses, that she would develop the language to describe her inner thoughts as a child. Since Temple was seen as being inherently anti-social and uncommunicative, high-functioning analytic thinking and language were denied to her until she latter acquired the language of “neurotypicals” to actually see and express herself as a literal, scientific thinker.
In contrast, Path B children are described as “feeling emotional-relatedness right from the start…they ‘feel out’ their world through their sense of social-emotional connection and are deeply affected when they and their world are out of sync with each other.” (UWRSR, pg. xiii). In giving an account of themselves, both Dr. Grandin (Path A) and Sean Barron (Path B) use the language of the established medical discourse on autism to reconfigure the discursive limits of their own intelligibility and agency. In so doing, they recreate a language of autism that is at once part of their own making and simultaneously constructed through an external social world (or the political world) of “neurotypical” doctors and teachers. From this perspective, we can thusly see how Marie’s conception of returning to the abstract ethical creates a literary voice of autism that reveals how the political subject of autism is formed and how their voice of agency comes into contact with a world that is not their own. In order to do this both Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron require the political language of everyday “neurotypical” doctors and teachers that have defined and pathologized their social intelligibility in advance. Therefore, their book is only possible because Dr. Grandin and Sean Barron create an abstract ethical subject that is simultaneously dependant on a social/medical discourse that exceeds and precedes them. Their book is meant to demonstrate to the reader, if one is going to be ethical towards a subject of autism, one must not solely consider the medial discourse that establishes their intelligibility to the world. The reader must also assume an open, and unconditional “motherly” ethics, or an unstable politics, which will assume autism’s discontinuities and reformulations throughout social development and time.
In Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, he first introduces his theory of the subject (Butler’s theoretical starting point in Chapter 3 of Psychic Life of Power) as an effect of discourse. In this seminal work, Foucault shows that there is no linear ‘subject’ of madness throughout the genealogy of psychology, only discourses that treat and “cure” mental diseases through the creation of the pathologized patient. While much advancement has been made in Psychiatry and Neuro-chemistry, it is still true that the pathological subject is always an effect of discourse: one enters the clinic, learns of their pathological subjectivity and seeks therapy. In this sense, psychological treatment thus works on two levels of understanding: on the one level it is a psychological conditioning, where the patient self-reflexivity states, “Yes, I am sick/depressed/Bi-polar…” and on another level, the patient confirms/refutes the medical discourse of subjectivity by saying, “Yes, I feel better or No I don’t feel better because of this or that therapy.” Yet, the process for determining a ‘subject’ of psychological treatment and the correct medication requires a system of checks and balances (an economy of mental health) that underlines the ethical/political intersection.
In this sense, the analyst must determine pathology based not on the literal appearance of a “disease,” but rather paradoxically through a performance of an opaque speaking “I”. An analysand’s subjectivity (i.e. pathology) is then measured against a fixed understanding of mental illness and a medication is prescribed that may or may not work. Today, we can understand how psychiatry sees mental illness as a controllable “disease,” complete with the experimentation of a clinic, as trial and error, and the effects of an incomplete science that attempts to treat an ever-changing subject of Being. Thus, if mental illness is truly a “disease,” in the same sense as cancer, then a corresponding pill is all that is needed for all fixed and pathological illness. However, we also know this is not always the case, as mental illness may not have a single origin and is always bound to a complex material and psychic thinking “I” of Being—a being that grows, changes and is always in flux, never stable or completely pathological. All problems of the ethical/political intersection of mental health would be resolved if a wonder pill actually existed that “cured” all forms of autism, but sadly, no such pill actually exists. **(Please note, I am not arguing that there is no value to psychiatric medication;I am simply pointing to its inconsistencies, not the value of its successes or its failures)**
In this brief sketch of medical subject formation, I contend that the abstract ethical is already embraced in the practice of political medical science. The political/ethical intersection evolves in the clinic of mental health, where the patient learns and becomes a “subject” of the clinic. The clinic thusly becomes a space where a discourse of mental illness precedes the subject and in turn forms an abstract conception of the patient that seeks its theoretical treatment. If the subject is, as both Butler and Foucault maintain, an effect of discourse then it will be necessary to enact and question the ethical/political divide in each context of medical subject formation. I would now like to return to the subject of autism and focus solely on Dr. Grandin’s narrative as a non-verbal, highly gifted, autistic child (Path A). Dr. Grandin gives an account of herself as a child and lavishes much praise upon her mother for much of her success as a professional today.
Temple Grandin was born in the early 1950’s, at a time when psychotherapy and clinical psychology was in its “infancy” in America. This is a time when autism was not understood as it is today and was often treated by removing the child from the family, placing them in an institution and enforcing harsh behavior modification techniques (We all might share this “classic” image which has been depicted constantly throughout the arts). Dr. Grandin contributes much praise to her mother who refused to let her young and quite different/gifted Temple be sent to any institution. Temple’s mother was very critical of the doctor’s description and evaluations of her daughter’s autism, which determined that she would never develop social skills because she had a mental illness. The doctor’s evaluations, based on strict pathologies for autism, foresaw Temple as never being able to overcome her pathological “illness.” The abstract ethics of doctors and teachers in the 1950’s prescribed Temple to be put into an institution and removed from society altogether. This however was unacceptable for Temple’s mother, who insisted that her daughter could learn to become a functioning adult. Dr. Grandin reveals that through her mother’s persistent affection and care, she developed an open, “motherly” ethics that allowed her autistic, non-verbal daughter to grow into a professional PhD.
Dr. Grandin specifically credits her mother for creating a delicate system of discipline that would engage and incorporate her autism in innovative ways. She gives credit to her mother for her “…acute understanding of my boundaries and [knowing] when and how far she could push me.”(UWRSR, pg.5) Temple’s mother saw and engaged Temple’s autistic gifts of analytical thinking by catering and reinforcing the behaviors that already gave Temple pleasure. She would buy erector sets, complex puzzles, model airplanes and rockets that would feed Temple’s analytical gifts. She simultaneously refused that her child be left out of the classroom. She advised teachers and created reward programs that would force Temple into social interactions with other children. Her plan was successful because it functioned on two levels, first it allowed Temple’s gifts to blossom and become a source of inspiration and praise, while simultaneously putting Temple into “neurotypical” encounters where she could learn how other kids think and see themselves in relation to social norms. By refusing to adhere to the ethics of the doctors in the 1950’s, Temple’s mother created the social situations that Temple needed to be able to create a social personality for herself. These situations were also necessary, yet uneasy for Temple, but today she praises her mother for refusing to give-in and let her child fail as a social person.
In this sense, Dr. Grandin speaks of her mother as operating from a position similar to Michaela’s Queer Hospitality. Temple’s mother comprised an “ethics” that saw the need for a persistently open, ever-changing social discipline in relation to the subject of autism, where a new realm of hospitality could be possibilized by accepting her daughter’s changing autistic differences and by not foreclosing her social emergence by considering both her non-verbal social behaviors and her analytical thinking. Therefore, a “motherly” ethics/hospitality was constantly enacted for Temple, where her autism could find release in personal pursuits and take flight in learning from the necessary interactions of “neurotypical” life that included doctors, teachers and other children. Her mother became a bridge that could translate a world created by neurotypicals for neurotypicals, into controlled interactions that could support her throughout a world that would constantly misconstrue her autism and foreclose her social agency. It is precisely because her mother was positioned in between the discursive limits of a medical discourse that allowed her to see a new path for children with autism. While her plan for her daughter was not a public, “political agenda,” Temple’s mother demonstrates why just returning to the abstract ethical would have foreclosed possibilities for her child.
To simplify in three points: A) If Temple’s mother only accepted the abstract ethical reasoning of cognitive medical science in the 1950’s, she would only come to embody the abstract politics of medical science in her disciplinary thinking. Temple’s mother would only embody the ethics of an abstract conception of the medical subject as a strict patient and not see her daughter as a child with autistic difference. This is to say, if Temple’s mother only reasoned through an abstract medical discourse, she would have accepted her daughter’s non-verbal condition as fixed. She probably would have not let her child go to an institution, but she would have only “treated” her daughter’s anti-social behavior while overlooking her analytical gifts. B) Similarly, had Temple’s mother not questioned the social politics of autism at the time, she would not have been able keep her child in the classroom, a social space necessary for all children’s development. C) Underlining both A and B, and most importantly, if she was not also open to seeing Temple as thinking, changing and speaking subject of value, she would have not been able to praise her, love her and allow her to blossom. Strictly speaking, without her mother’s constant engagement and struggle with the ethical/political divide of powerful social norms, she would have continued to see and accept her daughter as a fixed, strictly pathologized, non-verbal subject that would never be able to become a functioning adult.
Her mother’s position was therefore constantly embracted in the ethical/political double bind, since it is also, paradoxically, this same abstract medical discourse of cognitive medical science that pointed out particular pathologies that Temple actually displayed. If her mother had never learned that her child was, indeed, autistic, she wouldn’t have created a special plan that catered to her special interests and needs. Therefore, the abstract ethical of medical science is always a necessary position to consider while simultaneously being open to a critical discursive political position. Without an amalgamation of the ethical/political discourses of Temple’s mother with the medical doctors and teachers, Temple would have never become Dr. Grandin. Temple’s mother had to straddle this ethical/political divide of social norms of the 1950’s and create an “ethics” that changed and allowed Temple to speak back, where she was able to interact with a speaking “I” of autism and form a self-reflexive plan that encouraged Temple’s social growth and praised her analytic being. Because her mother was positioned at this discursive limit between doctors, teachers and the limits of understanding her own daughter as autistic, she was able to deploy a strategic politics that could maneuver her child through an “unethical” medical and social world of neurotypicals.
No comments:
Post a Comment