Following the creation of the new Critical Psychology column, we present the first in-depth article on increasingly present terms and categories, such as neurodivergences, proposing a reading that can be critical of how certain categories emerge, and at the same time participatory, to the extent that it is narrated by agents that produce and are produced by the conditions in question.
On June 26 and 27, the Department of Philosophy at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice hosted one of the workshops in the series “Language in Minds, Machines, and Milieus: A Modern Perspective on AI,” part of the ERC Consolidator project AIMODELS, coordinated by Matteo Pasquinelli (Associate Professor of Philosophy of Science). Titled “The Mismeasure of Mind: Models of Intelligence and the History of Madness,” the third workshop in the series explores the contrast between the intellectual environment that gave rise to artificial intelligence and the critical theories and practices of mental health developed in the 20th century. What are the rights of people with mental disabilities and nonconforming minds in the age of AI, an age dominated by computational rationality?
Starting from this question, to outline possible horizons, a series of presentations of studies and works were held around the theme presented, with the presence of Franco Basaglia, Carles Guerra, Elena Vogman, Emanuel Almborg, Vladimir Safatle, Giorgi Kobakhidze and Robert Chapman. In particular, the latter discussed neuronormativity, disability and neurodivergent minds in the era of cognitive capitalism.
Neurodivergence and neurodiversity are terms that are heard more and more, in certain clinical areas, and increasingly through social media. In fact, while neurodivergence appears today often described as a vague clinical term, it was born as a political concept, which is inserted into the social movement for neurodiversity, which arose in the late 1990s from virtual spaces where mainly autistic people met. The concept of “neurodiversity” is therefore outlined, which means “variation in neurocognitive functioning”, and from it reflections are developed that are also rooted in the social model of disability and similarly to the politics of the Mad Movements.
An important note on language within this paradigm: neurodiversity indicates the variability of brains between humans; therefore, a neurotypical person is neurodiverse compared to an autistic person, as an autistic person is from another autistic person, and vice versa. The word neurodivergent is also a political term, later adopted by some professional figures, originally created by Kassiane Asasumasu, to indicate any neurotype that, for whatever reason, diverges from the norm. It can therefore be extended to people with ADHD, epilepsy, dyslexia, bipolar, personality disorders, etc., and is, by its nature, a dynamic concept. In other words, neurodivergent is born (the divergence in neurocognitive functioning therefore appears ascribed to the genetic order from birth) or becomes (following a change in the same functions throughout life for any reason, for example, due to an incidental change, concerning the material conditions or aging).
Robert Chapman, an avowedly neurodivergent English philosopher and Professor of Critical Neurodiversity Studies at Durham University, has long been involved in the theory of neurodiversity, insanity and disability. Their reflections can be found, as well as within their literary production academia, in their blog “Critical Neurodiversity”. The second day of the workshop, at Ca’ Bottacin, we assisted at the presentation of their book “Empire of normality: neurodiversity and capitalism”, published in 2023 by Pluto Press, a text that marks a revolutionary moment in the philosophical and political discussions on psychiatry and mental health.
Within their book, Chapman highlights how Francis Galton’s work in statistics, which influenced modern conceptions of normality and deviation, along with the rise of capitalism, imposed increasingly rigid norms on mental and physical functioning. This has contributed to the rise in various forms of disability, including autism and ADHD, as well as worsening mental health with increasing rates of depression and anxiety. Chapman argues that this increase is not an illusion or a simple pathologization of ordinary discomfort, as many critics seem to argue, but a real phenomenon shaped by socioeconomic and structural forces and inevitably linked to the contingent phenomenon of “cognitive capitalism”.
This last notion, which refers to the period that arose from post-Fordism, aims to underline the change from traditional industrial capitalism, based mainly on the enhancement of physical labour, towards a productive model that has its centrality in knowledge and information, thus creating a “cognitive” alienation.
The notion of cognitive capitalism is not without criticism, as identified by Tiziana Terranova in her essay “Psicopatologie ordinarie del capitalismo cognitivo”, contained in her book “Dopo internet: le reti digitali tra capitale e comune”. Focusing on the cognitive capacities of living work as a source of value entails an excessive emphasis on symbolic and linguistic dimensions, which risks underestimating the centrality of the affective and precognitive dimension in the processes of contemporary capitalism, as well as reducing the importance of the active role of technical machines.
A return to libidinal processes, subject to the rules of economics, seems therefore essential. As Chapman notes in their book, the distinctions between home and work, public and private, employed and unemployed have in fact collapsed as work became precarious while workers always became reachable by phone and email. Surfing online today means being constantly bombarded by advertising, constantly providing data and information, and publishing on social media creates content that is then turned into profit by the site owner (in this analysis Chapman refers to Franco Berardi’s remarks).
This kind of instability and fluidity contributes to a constant depression, anxiety and panic, all problems that became increasingly prevalent towards the end of the 20th century, and made a leap forward in post-Fordist economies after the turn of the millennium. And, as Terranova notes, during the early 2000s, investment in the “neurological breakthrough” undermined the typical life sciences of the 1990s to shift investment to brain sciences and artificial intelligence technologies. Not only that, the digital revolution, writes Chapman, has led to a consequent restriction of the definition of normality, triggering a chain process (p. 114): “The sensory cognitive intensification of capitalism meant that a great many more people were either shut out of education or work, at least to varying extents, and were thus harmed in a different way. Rather than being positioned as ‘ordinary’ workers with mental health problems, they were disabled, and pushed towards the surplus population, even if some did manage to work despite this. In this context, new disability diagnoses initially referred to as ‘shadow syndromes’ – milder versions of existing diagnoses – also began being increasingly applied during childhood as well as to adults. More people were harmed by, and considered unsuited to, the needs and organisation of the new economy and its sensory, cognitive, and emotional requirements. One key example is definitive of our age: autism. When it comes to the requirement for sociality, hyperflexibility, and emotional labour, it is not just that stress levels have risen among the general population. It is also that the autism diagnosis, which had previously been restricted to a relatively limited number of cases, was radically expanded. The broadening of autism into a spectrum was first tentatively suggested in 1979, the year Thatcher became Prime Minister, and began to expand over the following decade. Since the 1990s and 2000s especially, the spectrum has continually widened as an everrising percentage of the population fall short of the social, communicative, and sensory processing capabilities required by the new economy.”
Later (p. 115), they continue: “Highly relevant here is not just the emotional requirements of the services economy but the invasive sensory and information environments of the modern world, where economic relations require a constant bombardment of lights, advertising, screens, and so forth.”
The flexible and neuroplastic brain is therefore the new image of network capitalism. With their analysis, Chapman develops a vision of neurodivergent Marxism, offering an interpretation of the history and politics of neurodiversity through Marxist theory.
Before the beginning of the presentation of their book, I had the opportunity to talk with Chapman through a short interview.
MB: In your book, you are critical of some approaches commonly defined as anti-psychiatric thoughts, which you define as a “bourgeois critique” which aims to replace diagnostic labels with psychological formulations. While there are very valid reasons to criticize the diagnosis construct, you were, also in an article in “Psychology Today” focused on the biopolitics of diagnosis, underlining some issues of this paradigm shift. In recent years, some mental health professionals, such as psychologists, psychiatrists and critical psychotherapists, have questioned the scientific validity and usefulness of psychiatric diagnoses, proposing psychological formulation as an alternative. In particular, in the UK, this idea has gained traction, with major institutions such as the British Psychological Society promoting formulation as a superior option. Critics argue that psychiatric diagnoses are normative constructs decided by committees, often influenced by personal interests, and used to control dissent, depoliticizing mental discomfort to strengthen social control. In response, they propose psychological formulation, which seeks to understand discomfort in a broader, human context, as an epistemically liberating alternative. However, this criticism presents problems. In fact, all medical diagnoses, not just psychiatric ones, are normative and decided by committees, and are the result of a continuous process of co-creation influenced even by those who are classified. Moreover, the total rejection of diagnoses in favor of formulation could be harmful, as formulation empowers few practitioners more than the process of public review of diagnoses, which involves a variety of voices and minimizes bias. Finally, classifications such as autism or ADHD are crucial for the recognition and political organization of marginalized groups. Eliminating such categories risks negating the reality of the specific forms of discrimination and skill that these groups face. Thus, the total abandonment of diagnoses in favor of psychological formulation alone does not seem to offer significant radical or emancipatory potential. But where does this antipsychiatric tradition come from?
RC: Yes, those analyses were really developed mainly in the ’60s and’ 70s, starting from the work of Thomas Szaz, a right-wing libertarian doctor, who, in the end, argued that mental illness does not exist. An anti-psychiatry that had little if anything to do with the Italian Basaglia, who would never deny the reality of people’s suffering and was an anti-fascist. The problem is that today’s criticisms, mainly Anglo-American, inspired by Szaz, have remained almost unchanged, while the world has changed a lot. We now have disability rights, which have been hard-won by people with disabilities. These rights require official recognition to be effectively accessible. It is not an ideal situation, but it is the reality in which we live: without this recognition, people cannot access rights, make changes at work or in education, or reject the oppressive norms of capitalism. And who hates all this? Capitalists, who go to great lengths to deny the reality of these disabilities, because recognizing them would mean having to make accommodations that undermine their power. It is no coincidence that such an approach is supported by a lot of very wealthy right-wing politicians and journalists. Moreover, when these analyses were developed, disability rights were nowhere near in force, and that changes everything. The old dualistic view of the world, where either something is real and natural or it is a simple label, no longer holds, it is not that simple. In recent decades, critical and philosophical studies of science have shown how concepts such as gender and race are not natural or objective, but social constructs with a real impact on our lives. Denying these realities only reinforces the power structures that oppress us. The same applies to neurodivergent disabilities: they are not necessarily natural or objective or “innate” in the traditional sense, but are real disabilities produced historically and materially. Here’s the thing: denying diagnoses, while acknowledging that there are good reasons to criticize them, is a dead end. Diagnoses can be harmful and epistemologically violent, of course, but rejecting them altogether prevents, at this historical moment, collective organisation and access to rights. It is neither useful nor emancipatory to divide the world into rigid categories such as neurodivergent and neurotypical, but neither is it useful to deny the reality of disabilities. We must recognize these realities in order to fight them and change the world, otherwise we will only continue to perpetuate the status quo.
MB: In short, it can be recognized that diagnosis, or self-identification in it, is a contingent construct in time and space and not strictly empirical or ascribed to innate functions, and at the same time recognize its epistemological, material and collective usefulness. Regarding this, perhaps apparently rigid, neurodivergent-neuroatypical distinction instead, I wonder: in cognitive capitalism, who is the neurotypical? Is it, also here, a detectable organic neurotype, or more of a Galtonian ideal of functioning?
RC: There is no natural or universal definition of neurodivergence. It is a social construct that changes with cultural norms, not a fixed feature of the brain. Neurodivergence is primarily identified through deviant behaviors, and is clinically mapped to cognitive ability or disability through scientific methods, such as brain mapping, but is not relevant to this debate. However, all of this is inherently social, without a natural line of demarcation. For example, being left-handed could be seen as a minimal form of neurodivergence, because it falls slightly outside the norm, but not to the point of being considered a disability. Those with autism or ADHD are considered more prototypically neurodivergent. But these norms change: 100 years ago, being left-handed was much more stigmatized, so it would have been considered more neurodivergent. Nothing has changed in people’s brains, only social and cultural conditions have changed. Neurodivergence, therefore, is not a rigid binary concept, but a dynamic one, constantly evolving like social norms and definitions of disability.
MB: In essence, the “neuro” in neurodivergent, neurotypical, neurodiversity, does not therefore have a biologically essentialist character, on the contrary, it is an attempt to politicize that “neuro”. And being, in fact, dynamic concepts and in relation to the elements of our time, perhaps one day these same terms will no longer be used to outline a concept or a collective organization. Finally, I wanted to ask you, in your book I outlined that the neurodiversity movement, although it has led to a paradigm shift in the research and description of neurodivergent people, is still subservient to neoliberal logics. This is why, in your book, the need emerges for an outline of what you have called “neurodivergent Marxism”. How did this need emerge?
RC: The movement for neurodiversity emerged in a specific historical period, after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the idea that there was no alternative to capitalism dominated. In this context, political action has been limited to small reforms within capitalism, improving the lives of some groups without challenging the fundamental structures of the system. The neurodiversity movement has adopted these dominant assumptions, focusing on rights, which are useful but not sufficient to change the deep structures of society. Capitalism, I argue, is the main determinant of neuronormativity; therefore, one cannot get out of this condition without overcoming capitalism. The changes that can be made are limited and localized; true liberation requires a more radical approach. Moreover, it is crucial to discuss skillfulness in revolutionary leftist spaces. Eugenics, often associated with the far right and Nazism, is actually an ideology that has crossed the political spectrum, including liberals and socialists. For example, there are some Christian conservatives who are very much against eugenics because they have a certain kind of religious beliefs that contradict it. Even today, many people on the left unknowingly adopt eugenic logics. For example, to say that autistic people should not be subject to eugenics because they possess skills useful to society implies that those who are not useful should instead be. This kind of logic is eugenic, even if you don’t recognize it. Eugenics is still very present and pervasive, spanning the entire political spectrum, and is something we need to recognize as a current issue, not relegated to the past or a single political ideology.
In conclusion, the goal of neurodiversity is simply to help us understand another form of mastery, which concerns our capacity in terms of mental, cognitive, emotional functioning and everything related to it, such as our desires, affects and, sometimes by proxy, also our behaviors, because people read our minds through our behaviors. The neurodivergents are an emerging and ever-changing class of people slightly (or more) distinct, who reject a scientific paradigm and culture that imposes normalization and normality as ideals and that makes the natural and just normality, rather than something that is historically specific and socially and materially produced, towards a collective liberation.
References:
–Empire of normality: neurodiversity and capitalism, Robert Chapman, 2023, Pluto press
–Neurodiversity and the biopolitics of diagnosis, Robert Chapman, 2021, Psychology Today
–Dopo internet: la reti digitali tra capitale e comune, Tiziana Terranova, 2024, Edizioni Nero