'The Human Spectrum: A Critique of “Neurodiversity”'by Douglas W. Maynard in (2024) Symbolic Interaction argues
This paper represents a sociological approach to autism spectrum disorder that critiques the terms neurodiverse and it obverse, neurotypical, because they promote a cognitive approach that mystifies what is actual and real about human activity in everyday life. It is in dynamic interactional practices rather than putative cognitive states that human diversity is manifest or observable. The empirical part of the paper, following Bleuler, defines and examines “autistic talk” as a turning away from the ordinary social world or commonsense “reality,” and engaging self-oriented practices and orientations. However, the range of participants who produce such talk is not confined to those on the putative autism spectrum. Rather, that range encompasses the entire human span. If so, then a question is raised about what autism is as a “condition,” which term individualizes social difficulties rather than appreciating that they are always about diverse social actions-in-interaction.
Although the history of the term “neurodiversity” is well-documented, a brief review is important to the purpose of this paper, which is to suggest a sociological approach to autism in which we can see how neurodiversity and neurotypicality are tightly connected in actual and real human experience and behavior, rather than contrastively in the brain as such. For understanding autism, neurodiverse and it obverse, neurotypical, overwhelmingly promote a cognitive approach that mystifies—removes or obscures—what is actual and real about human activity in everyday life. Accordingly, it is time to take social relations seriously and appreciate how it is in lively interactional practices and not by way of putative cognitive states, whether such states are of neural or genetic origin, that human diversity is observably, witnessably manifest. This paper draws from approaches in sociology known as ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA) and related areas such as symbolic interactionism to explore such a social and interactional proposition. This exploration raises a question about what Autism (ASD) is as a “condition,” a matter that is addressed throughout and in the conclusion to this paper.
In an early essay, Sinclair (1993) proposed that autism is a “way of being” that parents and others could appreciate rather than only grieve. Later in that decade, in an article for an internet mailing list called Independent Living (APA 1994; Dekker 2020), Singer (1999), a sociologist diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, coined the term “neurodiversity,” suggesting that the term “did not come out of the blue, but was the culmination of … experiences of exclusion and invalidation as a person.” From these origins, the thrust of “neurodiversity” usage in differing discourses relative to self-advocacy, social justice, parental groups, clinical orientations, and disability rights advocacy, has been to present “an alternative to the medical model” (Ortega 2009:74), and “to construe autism as a positive attribute” (Ortega 2009:427). However, rather than a generic alternative, critical stances relative to the medical model vary according to whether there is outright opposition, as with the “social model” of disability (Shakespeare and Watson 2002), bivalency, in which, for example, the relevance of “cure” may be accepted (although the more common attitude may be one that only embraces pharmaceutical treatment), or an orientation to autism as an identity that requires “person-first” articulation (“person with autism”)—although the latter orientation has become contested (Baron-Cohen 2017) and the current convention (Baron-Cohen 2017; Gernsbacher 2017; Vivanti 2020), followed in this paper, is to refer to the “autistic person.”
Neurodiversity, as Kapp (2020b:2, original emphasis) puts it, includes “both neurodivergent people (those with a condition that renders their neurocognitive functioning significantly different from a ‘normal’ range), and neurotypical people (those within that socially acceptable range).” However, a difficulty here is that we do not know what a neurological “normal range” is such that it is possible to be precise about what either “typicality” or “divergence” are or could be. Until we attend to what people do, as advocated in this paper, rather than what people have (a “condition” of one kind or another), it is impossible to be precise about a continuum, and what is divergent and what is typical. A further problem is the emphasis on “people” as fixed entities or as having defined identities or conditions, rather than on action and activity and their vibrancy. Indeed, the “neuro” prefix attached to “diversity” and “typicality” derives from orientations that reflect how neuroscience has come to predominate in society—across educational, marketing, psychiatric, media, and popular endeavors (Ortega 2013:73), with a resulting “reductionist assumption” that “contemporary neuroscience can provide fairly complete and convincing explanations of who and what we are” (Racine 2010:91). Or, as Rapp (2011:25, my emphasis) has put it, “… neurodiversity is increasingly engaged as a polysemic metaphor for the acceptance of human difference lodged in the physiological brain,” such that, as Pickersgill and Van Keulen (2011:xiv) observe, both “pathology” and “normality” are now “situated within a neurological rubric.”
Contrariwise, the field known as “critical autism studies” (Kapp 2020a; Orsini and Davidson 2013b) has developed an extensive set of considerations relating neurodiversity to issues of identity, normality, justice, uses of discourse, and possibilities for collective social action. Central to these endeavors is a challenge to “the deficit narrative autism” and any other “reductionist” approaches to autism, including those not only from a biological perspective, but also from social constructionist, cultural or other inquiry (Orsini and Davidson 2013a:13). My addition to such critical stances is to minimize what people have or are neurologically and draw further attention to an element that resides in the social things participants do and how they do them with talk and the body (cf. Maynard and Turowetz 2022; Turowetz 2015).
As Section 1 of the paper continues, I address (A) the “social interactional subject,” (B) the contrast between common sense and autism (including autistic talk), and (C) how to gain access to the orientations of those considered to be on the autistic spectrum. Section 2 commences by (A) considering ordinary talk and its “poetics,” including (1) sound- and category-related speech productions, (2) the “whistling” of one's experience, and (3) punning, all of which have properties related to autistic talk. Also, in Section 2, we explore (B) how autistic talk can be a resource in otherwise ordinary interactions via (1) punning, (2) the de-railing of an action, and (3) controlling an agenda. The Conclusion draws implications about the autistic continuum from the empirical part of the paper.