Empire of Normality

The first [change accompanying the rise of neoliberalism] is the mass rise of reliance on emotional labour. This regards what the sociologist C. Wright Mills termed the ‘personality market’, whereby ‘personal or even intimate traits of employees are drawn into the sphere of exchange, become commodities in the labor market’. While this has always been the case to some extent, it has become much more central in economic relations following the shift from manufacturing economies to service economies. In a modern services economy, ways of feeling and relating, for instance in kindliness and friendliness, ‘become aspects of personalized service or of public relations of big firms, rationalized to further the sale of something’.⁸

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Cognitive labour is equally important to consider alongside the services economy and rising reliance on emotion labour. Around the same period, new technological innovations, most notably, the personal computer, the internet, and the digital revolution more broadly, led to the rise of what has been termed post-Fordism or ‘cognitive capitalism’. Traditional industrial capitalism was based on ‘the accumulation of physical labour’ and material production, but since around 1975, ‘the object of accumulation consists mainly of knowledge, which becomes the basic source of value, as well as the principal location of the process of valorisation.’¹³

The cognitive alienation of this era and how it harms mental health has been examined by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi in his penetrating 2009 book The Soul at Work: From alienation to autonomy. As Berardi notes, architects, travel agents, solicitors, computer programmers, and so forth all use relatively similar machines – mostly computers, mobile phones, etc. – but have different specialist knowledges with specific cognitive contents that produce surplus value. Because of this, much capital is currently created by countless solitary individuals, sitting in front of screens, typing, scrolling, calculating, and using different cognitive contents to produce an endless variety of cognitive contents from which capital can be mined.

Within this phase of capitalism, Berardi documents the rise of a form of societal organisation he calls the ‘factory of unhappiness’. In the Fordist era, jobs had tended to be stable, and to require being one small part of a manufacturing process that could be left behind at the end of the day. The worker would then return to their private life where they could relax or pursue their personal interests. By contrast, in the post-Fordist era, distinctions between home and work, public and private, employed and unemployed collapsed as work became casualised and precarious while workers became always reachable through phones and emails.

At the same time, our relationship with capital and production has increasingly spread beyond work, and into the weekend and evening, in other ways. Browsing online means being constantly bombarded with advertisements; posting on social media creates content that is then turned into profit by the owner of the site; and use of an app may be granted only after filling in a brief survey. Any moment we are online or using an ever-growing host of apps, we are constantly yet subtly guided by algorithms designed to direct our attention, document our behaviours, stoke our emotions, and influence our desires in the service of capital.

The result of these combined factors, in Berardi’s words, has been that mental health deteriorates as our ‘desiring energy is trapped in the trick of self-enterprise, our libidinal investments are regulated according to economic rules, our attention is captured in the precariousness of virtual networks: every fragment of mental activity must be transformed into capital’.¹⁴ Thus for Berardi, post-Fordism brings a new form of alienation ‘marked by the submission of the soul, in which animated, creative, linguistic, emotional corporeality is subsumed and incorporated by the production of value’.¹⁵ According to his analysis, this kind of instability and fluidity contributes to constant depression, anxiety, and panic – all problems that became increasingly prevalent towards the end of the twentieth century, and skyrocketed in post-Fordist economies following the turn of the millennium.

The other source of the ‘diversity’ in ‘neurodiversity’, which is more relevant for understanding the most original contribution of neurodiversity theory, was the shift towards viewing biodiversity as a vital part of what sustains broader ecosystems. This had emerged in the 1960s as more scientists and activists became concerned with how capital’s need to constantly consume natural resources for profit had not just led to the depletion of finite resources but the destruction of ecological equilibrium. By the 1990s the idea that biodiversity should be valued and conserved had entered the more progressive elements of public consciousness – and it was this that Singer and Blume extended to theorise the concept of neurological diversity.

We see this when we consider how the term ‘neurodiversity’ was first used in print by Harvey Blume in 1998. (While Blume helped develop the concept in email conversations with Singer, he was able to publish first.) Blume framed the concept precisely as a challenge to the concept of the normal brain. In his words:

The common assumption in cognitive studies these days is that [in] the human brain [...] the occasional bug is inevitable: hence autism and other departures from the neurological norm. [Autistics are suggesting] another way of looking at this. Neurodiversity may be every bit as crucial for the human race as biodiversity is for life in general. Who can say what form of wiring will prove best at any given moment.⁷

On Blume’s understanding, the shift was from viewing mental functioning as either normal or abnormal – with the norm privileged as superior – to viewing different minds as having different cognitive specialisations within a broader cognitive ecosystem. For instance, ‘computer culture’, he wrote ‘may favor a somewhat autistic cast of mind’. In stark contrast to the Galtonian tradition, the idea is that neurological diversity is vital for dealing with the complex problems that humanity will encounter in a constantly changing environment. From this view, then – even if we put aside ethical issues for a moment – it does not make sense to seek to eliminate neurodivergence, since this would impede our collective functioning.

It was this that Singer’s thesis brought together with insights from autistic activists and disability studies. In her thesis she grounded the idea of neurodiversity in critiques of the notion of the ‘normal’ body as well as the social model of disability. Although the constraints of the thesis didn’t allow her to clarify the underlying theory in great detail, she suggested that the neurodiversity movement would work towards an ‘ecological’ society that would foster inclusion by constructing cognitive niches to accommodate autistic people. The more general idea was that for humanity to flourish, we need to both conserve diversity and to support divergence. Hence in stark contrast to the Galtonian tradition, which suggested the abnormal needed to be systematically pushed towards the norm, Singer sought to suggest that divergence itself was part of what constituted ‘healthy’ neurological functioning.

[...] Neurodiversity advocacy has also tended to assume, at least implicitly, that neurodivergent liberation is possible under capitalism. This can be seen in so far as most neurodiversity activism has been geared towards attaining justice within capitalism rather than directly working towards a post-capitalist future.

At the same time, perhaps especially in the past five years, new neurodiversity industries have arisen, while existing industries have rapidly changed their branding to present themselves as neurodivergence-inclusive. What we are seeing is capitalism adapting to neurodivergence inclusion in so far as this can help capitalists profit. For instance, in the United Kingdom, airports now increasingly include sensory rooms, designed to make airports more accessible for children who are autistic or who have similar sensory processing disabilities, while supermarkets increasingly have ‘autism-friendly’ hours with reduced lighting. But we only see such changes in so far as they allow the consumer base to be increased. They do not lead to deep, systemic change.

We are also seeing the increased capture of neurodiversity advocacy by elites who are invested in maintaining the dominant system. For instance, the previous Conservative Member of Parliament and Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, has recently launched a neurodiversity charity that has made headlines in major UK papers. Despite this, Hancock and the government he served in have pursued austerity policies that are exceptionally harmful to neurodivergent people. His political commitments are inherently at odds with neurodivergent emancipation.

The rise of neuro-Thatcherism, whereby neurodiversity advocacy is turned into a business-oriented programme for unearthing neurodivergent strengths or ‘super powers’ and then mining those with these strengths may be useful for those neurodivergent people it helps into jobs. One possible by-product of this worth bearing in mind is that the more neurodivergent people who are recognised as vital for the workforce, the more potential power those people will have to organise as workers in unions. This could then have some utility for a politics of neurodiversity. Yet overall, neuro-Thatcherism does nothing to fundamentally challenge the deeper structures of society I have identified throughout this book as underpinning neurodivergent oppression. What’s more, to the extent that neuro-Thatcherism becomes the dominant neurodiversity discourse, it will drown out the more radical and emancipatory modes developed by grassroots activists.