Worlds of Autism: Across the Spectrum of Neurological Difference

3. Cerebralizing Autism within the Neurodiversity Movement

73 3 Cerebralizing Autism within the Neurodiversity Movement Francisco Ortega We are a world of funny brains, and neuroscience will help us to understand and appreciate the new mix. —Larry Welkowitz, creator of the audio post Asperger’s Conversations Cerebral Subjectivization The 1990s were officially launched by then–U.S. president George H. W. Bush as the “Decade of the Brain” (Bush 1990), and some believe that the first hundred years of the new millennium will be its century (Dowling 2007). Such gestures support the drive to solve the puzzle of human consciousness and unravel the secrets of an organ described as the most complex of the universe. But proclaiming a decade or a century of the brain also signals the omnipresence of the brain as a major icon of contemporary culture—from literature and the plastic arts to medicine and the human sciences, theology and spirituality, politics and marketing; from emerging research areas such as neuroeconomics, neurotheology, neurolaw, neuropsychoanalysis, or neuroeducation to an expanding universe of neuropractices. Since the Decade of the Brain, there has been a steady increase in the hybridization of neuroscience with education, marketing, and psychiatry . Coupled with the wide circulation of portrayals of the brain in the media and health literature, popularized versions of neuroscientific “facts” about mental processes, human diversity, and clinical conditions have in this way begun to reach a number of audiences. Recently, several scholars have suggested that the resultant incorporation of neuroscienti fic language into popular self-understanding reflects the “impact ” of neuroscience on society (Illes 2005; Martin 2000, 2007, 2010; Ortega and Vidal 2011; Rees and Rose 2004; Vrecko 2006). This effect has been deemed likely due to the authority of neuroscientific facts 74 FRANCISCO ORTEGA in contemporary biomedicalized societies (McCabe and Castel 2008; Weisberg et al. 2008). Much recent research has pointed to a growing “neurorealism,” a belief in the truth of the visual images of the brain and, linked to this, an increasing “neuroessentialism,” that is, the equation of subjectivity with the brain (Racine 2010). Contemporary cognitive neuroscience research has been attempting to unravel “brain-based evidence” of hardwired human capacities to make rational choices, understand other minds, and achieve goals. More recently, research in cognitive neuroscience has been characterized by an increasing preoccupation with the study of human differences. Brainimaging studies, for example, are used to detect structural and functional differences in the brain between genders, cultures, and sexual orientations , and increasingly they strive to differentiate people diagnosed with mental disorders as well (Hyman 2007). With the constant popularization of these theories in the media, and not least the strongly encouraged public-engagement work of neuroscientists and neuroethicists (Illes et al. 2010; Morein-Zamir and Sahakian 2010), individuals find increasing opportunities to come into contact with versions of “brain stories” and to fashion themselves with and through such cerebral vocabularies. Neuroscientific theories, or their popular representations, as a consequence , have begun to be incorporated into people’s commonsense ways of understanding themselves and others. As cognitive neuroscience steps up its focus on neurological distinctions between different “kinds of people,” researchers in the social sciences and humanities have begun to investigate the role of neurological vocabulary in the constitution of identities. Metaphors such as the “neurochemical self” (Rose 2007) and the “cerebral subject” (Ehrenberg 2004; Ortega and Vidal 2007, 2011; Vidal 2009) have been used to capture the “anthropological figure” underlying the neuroscienti fic theories that have diffused into popular culture and that continue to fuel the expanding genres of brain-based practices, technologies, and therapies.1 When I speak of the “cerebral subject,” I do not mean to reify the notion. It obviously differs from the transcendental subject of Kantian philosophy and Husserlian phenomenology, as well as from the subject that, from Descartes to Husserl and beyond, has been understood mainly as self-awareness and self-consciousness. The cerebral subject is an “anthropological figure” that has no reality prior to its performative embodiments (Ortega and Vidal 2011). In other words, CEREBRALIZING AUTISM 75 the process of subjectivization has ontological preeminence, and that is why, to analyze the cerebral subject, one should focus on its formation and the practices of self-constitution through which individuals fashion themselves in cerebral terms. This process can be understood as involving “technologies of the self” (Foucault 1988) and the diffusion of expert knowledge in popular culture. “Making up people,” as Ian Hacking calls it (2002...