Neurodiverse Economies
Before splitting into value
ErI Linsker
Here is a condensed transcript of a reading of Anne Alvarez’s paper “Levels of Analytic Work and Levels of Pathology: The Work of Calibration” with the Paraontological Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Clinical Examples course at the Psychosocial Foundation this past April, amidst the surround of the Gaza Solidarity Encampments. In the paper, Alvarez values her ontological work with her child patient Robbie, interpellating him into being by way of what she calls reclamation. But interpellation is traumatizing, calls Robbie into subjecthood, into the illusion of separability, into what Alvarez calls the human family. At one moment in earlier writing on her work with Robbie, Alvarez mentions another way of working, a way of being with, which she likens to echolocation. It’s this paraontological work of echolocation, a sociality resonant with Robbie’s refusal of individuation, that this reading celebrates. With gratitude to the course participants, including Hannah Black, Pauline Park, and Shervin Ravan.
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Erin Manning says that in a manuscript review of her book The Minor Gesture, Moten wrote, “all black life is neurodiverse life.” Manning had been writing a lot about autism and about what she calls autistic perception. But this comment from Moten, “all black life is neurodiverse life,” changed the course of her work. She now talks about neurodiversity as what she calls the refusal of the executive function that values separability. This neurodiverse refusal has a lot to do with what Moten says is blackness’s refusal of what’s been refused it. He says, blackness refuses what’s been refused it. And Manning says that there’s a neurodiverse refusal of the executive function that values separability. They share a refusal of separability, like Ferreira da Silva’s difference without separability, of individuation, of being a subject or even of being. This also gets a bit at what Hannah mentioned last time: she used this phrase about the image of care that these analysts might be providing or meeting. I do think there’s an image of care in this paper that Manning might say has to do with a neurotypical image and a white image. Manning says that if neurodiversity and blackness go together, then neurotypicality and whiteness go together. Part of what can be at stake in this paper is how much Alvarez is trying to pull Robbie into a neurotypical, white image and how much she’s trying to be with him in another way.
The experience is Robbie’s late or the trains are late, but Alvarez doesn’t link to that experience. She simply says, “‘You are very upset today.’” She amplifies the whatness, the isness, the being. Then she says, “Note, however, that I was still attempting to locate the experience in him by saying ‘You.’” She notices that she’s speaking with Robbie as if there is an “in him,” as if he has insides. We’ve discussed this with Kyle, Grossmark’s patient, and with Eekhoff’s patient and with Edward, Markman’s patient, where there’s a real question of insides and of having them at all. Robbie has only just recently entered into spacetime, what can seem like insides of the surround.
Now Alvarez is asking him to have insides as well. I’m also thinking about the surround with the encampments, the surround that is always there: the blackness of the surround that is always there before being, as Eekhoff’s patient said, is emerging within what Moten and Harney call the enclosure, the containment. On October 7th, the surround that is always there emerged through the fence. From the river to the sea. Maybe I’ll pause there.
Grossmark talks in an interview about how complicated it can be to say to a patient or ask them, “How do you feel about that?” He says, this can be extremely complicated and confusing. To expect there to be a you means that you have to be and you have to be a you and to have a you, and to have an inside and to have an inside that has feelings and processes them, feelings you can reflect on, and to have reflections you can voice. That’s a lot. Not enough. The a lotness of it is something Alvarez comes into contact with with Robbie. She’s changed by that contact, I think.
“Another few months later, I happened to say, not looking at him but into a space somewhere between us but off to one side: ‘It is very upsetting when trains don’t run on time,’ or, simply: ‘It’s so upsetting to be late.’” This looking not at Robbie but into a space somewhere between us but off to one side and Alvarez happens to find herself working this way. This paraontological moment, Manning’s minor gesture, emerges in the midst of the more ontological insistence on being, on you as an individuated subject. Suddenly there’s a space between us and there’s a space between us off to one side, that besideness of the para, and Alvarez finds that it really reaches Robbie, creates a space or an attention or an it, a shared reference she and Robbie can look at together.
Still she says, “I now want to return to the autistic patient, Robbie, at an earlier phase of his treatment. He was a child who differed considerably from other children with autism I had seen.” In terms of her saying “with autism,” Alvarez, in this paper and elsewhere, explicitly takes up autism as an illness, an illness that can be attempted to be more or less cured, that one can at least to some extent recover from, excluding what the analyst Leon Brenner calls a mode of being. He says a singular mode of being that’s actually structured by refusal, like the neurodiverse refusal Manning describes, and maybe not just autism as a mode of being, but autism as a mode of what we’ve been calling para being. That being might be refused by being beside, like that space Alvarez found between but off to one side.
“Robbie seemed more undrawn than withdrawn, more lost than hiding. I gradually came to the conclusion that his passivity was not the result of a defensive retreat.” To be undrawn rather than withdrawn has to do in part with having one’s objects, to the extent that one has objects, internal objects at all, one’s objects are not devalued, as Alvarez says later. She says they’re not devalued but unvalued. Rather than there being a devaluing of objects as might be described in other states, like borderline states, paranoid-schizoid states, this is something else. This is, here objects, if they exist at all, are unvalued. Here is something like what Eekhoff’s patient called before being, before splitting into value, into valued and devalued. Robbie’s story is not for Alvarez a story of aggression or a story of doing things to one’s objects or of projecting and projecting into one’s objects or even of feeling persecuted by feeling projected into by one’s objects or having something taken out of one by one’s objects. Instead, like for Eekhoff and her patient, it is that story of before being, where the aim of this analysis—even if it’s informed by Klein’s epistemological psychoanalysis, and something like the depressive position—wouldn’t primarily be trying to get to a place of acknowledging what one’s done to one’s objects and then out of that guilt, that knowledge, making repair.
This is much more ontological. This is a psychoanalysis of—Hannah, as you said at the end of last time—being born into aliveness, or what Alvarez calls vitality and interest. Here one doesn’t withdraw because one doesn’t at least at first have the space and time or the spacetime from which to withdraw. Alvarez says it took six years in the analysis for Robbie to develop a sense of space and time enough to take the train. But before that, and we’re with Robbie earlier than that here now, and before that with Kyle there’s something more like falling and what Alvarez in an earlier paper on Robbie calls falling through limitless space. If you’re falling through limitless space, you’re not withdrawing. You have to exist to withdraw.
For Alvarez, this takes a specific form, a form that she and Robbie create together. Robbie “eventually termed it,” this undrawn state, “‘a net with a hole in it’—not a very human, containing, nor, for that matter, attractive or interesting object.” Here we’re back with the human and later Alvarez will talk about calling Robbie “into the human family.” I’ll try to save some comments about the human for then. I just want to say right now that this question of an interesting object, an attractive, interesting object. I thought of Sianne Ngai, the interesting as an aesthetic category. I thought this mattered partly because there is a question of aesthetics here and aesthetics, etymologically, goes back to perception by the senses. There’s a question of the senses or even of the sensory and Alvarez talks elsewhere in the paper about fanning a little interest in an object.
Creating a little sort of aesthetic or sensory interest or shared attention. Interest going back to inter between esse being. Again this question of between being. I just wanted to say that Robbie has, or I think I should have waited to say more about this later also, but Robbie has interests and Robbie has aesthetics and certainly Robbie has perception by the senses and sensory experience, but those sensory experiences might differ from Alvarez’s. In fact, Robbie might have, Ngai might say that Robbie might have different aesthetic judgments than Alvarez. This is in the same sentence where Alvarez and Robbie may be referencing an aesthetic object, I don’t know, but it might be at least that in Alvarez’s education she would’ve been exposed to this Thomas Wyatt poem from the 1500s. I’m thinking where she says that Robbie had this phrase, a net with a hole in it. Wyatt’s speaker’s chasing after someone and he’s not reaching her. And he says, since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
“I despaired for years about how I was to become dense enough, substantial enough, condensed enough to attract his attention and concentrate his extremely flaccid mind.” Density is also an aesthetic and sensory value, and poems, say, can be more or less condensed. Alvarez has a sense that it’s this kind of aesthetic, this kind of sensory experience that Robbie needs. She feels that there’s a sort of ontological failure on her part. She can’t be dense enough. Black holes like in Eekhoff are also dense and, as in Eekhoff, perhaps Alvarez feels a hollowness. There is a way that whiteness and neurotypicality emerge for Alvarez in the midst of her heightened despair with Robbie. Because I think what she does. So what does she do? She finds herself moving her face in front of his face and saying, Robbie, Robbie, Robbie.
Not speaking with an it to a space between them that’s off to one side, but in his face, saying his name. Kind of what Louis Althusser calls interpellation, which is this brutally dyadic thing where one of his examples being a cop on the street calls out to someone in front of the cop like, hey, you there. And this person maybe turns around having been called. Though Moten says, who turns? And then Althusser says interpellated, which I’m hearing back to Moten’s interdiction, interpellation, interpellated into being Althusser says, into being a subject. And then people say, and then Judith Butler says, this can happen and happens in different ways. It doesn’t just have to be with the voice. It doesn’t just have to be because the cop’s calling out with the cop’s voice like, hey, you there. But with Alvarez there is a calling with the voice, and something with the face. A frontality. Manning talks about frontality as being at issue with autistic perception. The ways we’re facing each other right now, say.
Here in this paper, in 2010, Alvarez foregrounds this moment of interpellation. But actually in previous papers, when she writes about Robbie, she first writes about him in 1977. Althusser’s paper came out in 1970. In her 1977 paper and 1980 paper about Robbie what Alvarez instead foregrounds as the major reclamatory move is the move to five times a week. She says second to that is the family’s move to, once Robbie has this breakdown in the wake of the interpellation. So just to follow the steps. So in this way that I’m telling it, in the dyad, in Alvarez’s countertransference, she experiences a desperate urgency. Out of that urgency, she becomes someone who, as she says elsewhere, is trying to pull Robbie to the surface, rather than be with him in his surround. The frontality of her face and the calling of her voice. Actually I think this is traumatic for him. He becomes like a subject in this moment. Not that he hasn’t already, and Althusser says that everyone always already has become a subject. Though it’s a question. But at least in this moment in the analysis Robbie becomes like a subject. Separability, or the illusion of it, is imposed. That could also mean the illusion of a body is imposed.
So, Pauline, this would be one of those moments of being, as you said, caught in the flesh. In the Wyatt poem it’s a deer who’s then later chased, and this deer has a diamond necklace that says don’t touch me, for Caesar’s I am, and wild for to hold though I seem tame. So Robbie’s got this diamond necklace that says don’t touch me, for wild, and wild for to hold, though I seem tame. He’s touched in this individuating way, and it’s traumatic, as all impositions of separability are. But then something happens, and perhaps since he’s become like a subject, he’s now legible to his parents in a new way. Alvarez says in one of the earlier papers that his mom, so Robbie goes home after this interpellation and into the vacation, the separation from Alvarez, non-proximity, and he is in bed for a week, sobbing.
At one point early on, his mom is going to go out for groceries. She’s just going to go for like 20 minutes. But Robbie says, please don’t go. And this time, unlike previous times, she senses that it’s important not to go. He’s legible to her in some new way. She stays, and the father stays, by Robbie’s bedside for a week, Alvarez says, and Robbie speaks about an earlier traumatic separation from when he was two, non-proximity, when the mother’s father was sick, and the mother was very upset and with her father both physically and psychically, and Robbie was sent off to the country where there were really scary dogs. Robbie recounts this and is able to recount this to his parents. They stay beside him and then he returns from the vacation. Not only is Alvarez still there, she offers five times a week from once a month, from once a month to five times a week.
This might be part of how a lot of analysis works. That the analyst, one way or another, interpellates, creates a subject, or the illusion of one, the illusion of one, in the treatment. That’s a traumatizing move. But analysts are trained to treat traumatized subjects. So they now have their person to work with. And are moving, Manning might say, toward individuation and neurotypicality and whiteness. It seems there’s a traumatized subject now who can be repaired, who exists to be repaired, and who can be brought further along a spectrum toward neurotypicality, always asymptotic, but further along. This sequence, from interpellation to repair, might be part of how a lot of analysis works.
Like we came to with Grossmark, by way of Ferreira da Silva, it’s not just that to treat people as separable beings could be to re-traumatize them. It’s that what trauma is, is the treatment of people as separable beings, is the forcing of the illusion of separability onto subjectless being. Like Grossmark said, “an analyst’s very humanity can be traumatizing.” The illusion of separability can be traumatizing and humanity can be traumatizing. They are.
And, Shervin, I think it’s really interesting what you’re saying. I think on one level it goes like this for me, that Robbie is as Alvarez says, well, she says he “died psychologically.” But even apart from the emphasis on the psychological, that Robbie is with the deadness, not disavowing it. Disavowal is not even a functioning defense. That out of that place is where Alvarez makes the first of these reclamatory moves. That what makes it reclamation for her is that she had to go first, she had to initiate it, she had to experience the despair, but not identifying with it the way the therapist identified with Jill when tied up with sellotape in the chair, or the way the therapist identified with David as they coughed along together and didn’t say poor baby, which would have been that epistemological moment, the, poor baby we’re coughing together because in the womb and once you were born you experienced such and such. That it wasn’t a projection that Robbie was dead. Robbie’s deadness, Alvarez feeling in the countertransference an urgency that doesn’t arise out of identification but arises out of. And this is sort of the mystery in a way. What you’re bringing up, Shervin. Arises out of what, I mean.
It might be that what drives the urgency or makes it possible is what Alvarez in a moment in earlier writing likens to echolocation. She has this book Live Company, which is the book that Grossmark and Eekhoff and Markman all cite. She describes her work with Robbie at greater length there. And in the last paragraph of her description of her work with Robbie she says there’s reclamation, but then there’s also this other thing, echolocation. And she doesn’t go into what that is, but we can say after Kelly Merklin’s paper on the non-object-relational resonance, and actually Alvarez talks about resonance in her paper, that there is a paraontological resonance with the pulse or the sound or the vibration that emerges.
“And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.”
In her book Undrowned, Alexis Pauline Gumbs says that “echolocation is not the same as mind-reading.” Echolocation might be with/out mind, to use Ferreira da Silva’s slash, where the imposition of interiority Moten and Harney trace to the Enlightenment has been refused, where what Alvarez calls deadness is an absolute allegiance to vitality, a vitality Brenner says can’t and won’t be denied in order to adopt signifiers from the Other, allegiance to what Gumbs calls “the complexity of being a mammal alive in sound,” calls “making a whole world of resonance,” what we could say echoes the earth. From the river to the sea.
I think in that moment, Shervin, down in that well together like Hannah said, even if it’s not quite identification down in that well, or even as Eekhoff says with her patient, Eekhoff’s doing all that introjective identification, but she says one thing she can’t do is she can’t abort herself like her patient. She can’t become dead, or rather she can’t have never existed. But through echolocation she can pick up on non-existence. And that’s what Alvarez says. Alvarez says that echolocation could be required precisely to pick up on the patient’s, the dead patient’s state, their “mood-signs,” not mind, at all. Precisely, to feel. So, yeah, Alvarez does in a way say, yeah, precisely, to feel this urgent despair. Not from embodied intersubjectivity but from enfleshed entanglement, Spillers, Ferreira da Silva, we renew our habits of echolocation. To sort of echo Moten echoing Callahan that could be our next question.
With your question, Pauline, after Winnicott. Are we discovering the object or are we creating the object? And that part where Winnicott says, about the violation of being found too soon, before one’s there to be found. That matters here with Alvarez and Robbie. That this first move of reclamation, moving her face and using her voice to call his name, that part of what’s traumatic about it could be that he’s dead and she’s not finding him. He’s not there to be found. She’s on some level, or if all the levels exist at once, on some level he’s there to be found. But on some other level he’s not. And she’s creating him. She’s calling him into being as a subject. She’s interpellating him. And that violation then gets recruited as, or named as, calling someone into the human family. She says, “I believe that Robbie needed to be recalled both to himself,” which might be more like finding-refinding, discovering, “and to the human family,” which I think is more like creating. That brutal creation of a subject, and where the human family, like Frank Wilderson talks about, is constituted by antiblackness. And Moten and Manning might add, by the exclusion of blackness and neurodiversity, and by the exclusion of the neurodiverse refusal, and of blackness’s refusal of what’s been refused it.
We have to stop in a minute, but I think this question of interests and of the interesting that Alvarez keeps raising, of creating or discovering an interesting object for and with Robbie, this question of what’s interesting for Alvarez and what’s interesting for Robbie, this question of aesthetic judgment. Robbie isn’t interested in individuation. Not just that. Robbie has an aesthetic judgment about individuation. It’s not that attractive to him. It’s not that interesting to him.