An Interview w/ Robert Chapman on Living in an Empire of Normality

neurodivergent marxism, let's gooooo

Recently I got to chat with the neurodivergent philosopher and researcher Robert Chapman about their new book Empire of Normality, which investigates the history of the pathology paradigm and argues that norms of cognitive functioning have actually been baked into the way capitalism works. It’s so good! Order it here!!

You can listen on Substack, Spotify, or Apple, but I learned from my reader survey at the end of last year that most of you don’t listen to my podcast episodes (🥲) which, honestly, makes a ton of sense now that I think about it — who signs up to get 2,000-word essays emailed to them?? Readers!

I like playing with audio and having a professional excuse to talk to interesting people, so I’m going to keep making them anyway, but as a compromise, I will lightly edit some select excerpts below for your reading pleasure.

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Jesse: The main idea that you're proposing in this book is Neurodivergent Marxism, and you describe it as ‘the first historical materialist analysis of the pathology paradigm.’ Could you explain, maybe for people who have not read a ton of political theory or philosophy, what that means?

Robert Chapman: Neurodivergent Marxism is my attempt to synthesize what I call neurodiversity theory — that’s the kind of theoretical framework and insights from the neurodiversity movement — with Marxism, to make sense of neuronormativity and neurodivergent oppression, and what neurodivergent liberation might mean and how we might get there.

Historical materialism is the theory of Marx, sometimes it's called dialectical materialism. It's really about making sense of our lives and our problems in a broader material context. It's materialist in the sense it takes us to be natural, material beings — we're embodied, we've got brains. We live in a world and we have various needs, shelter, food, and so forth, medicine.

And of course, we live in a social material world. There are various social material relations, at the moment, we live in capitalism — that's the most general system we live in, it’s a global system — and it's about making sense of our problems, not as individuals, but in relation to that.

A general thing historical materialists will do often is take things which we assume might be objective or timeless or just perfectly natural, and try and understand them as arising from certain contingent material conditions and relations.

Again, relating back to the political economy — that would be capitalism right now, because that's the global system, you can't really escape it. And finally, it's dialectical in several senses, but the most important one for my book was that there's a kind of search for contradictions, and then thinking through those contradictions for how to guide our actions, how to guide our praxis.

So, these contradictions might be between the system that we live in and the kind of needs we have, for instance, and how those needs can never be fulfilled within that system, and that will help us think about how to change that system and what we might do.

In the book, I identify various contradictions in relation to neurodivergence and capitalism to suggest that in various ways, we can't have neurodivergent liberation within a capitalist system, despite most neurodiversity activism seeming to, at least implicitly, commit to the idea that we could.

Jesse: Is that a big difference between the more popular liberal rights framework of neurodiversity?

RC: Yeah, so that's one of the main focuses of my critique in the book. I try to contrast what I call a liberal neurodiversity approach with a Marxian approach to help see the difference between these, and the shortcomings of liberal neurodiversity, and how neurodivergent Marxism might help us develop a more radical politics which can be more liberatory in the long run.

When I say liberal neurodiversity, I mean a kind of identity-based — that's in the sense of identity politics — reformist and often rights-based approach. This is, at least implicitly, what the majority of the neurodiversity movement has been since the beginning, in very early texts — one of the seminal texts of the movement was Judy Singer’s 1998 thesis, which precisely described the movement then as a kind of identity politics movement and a civil rights movement.

Her thesis gets some things wrong, but in that description, it's broadly correct, and it's broadly remained correct until today. Now, I want to be very clear that I'm not dismissive of the liberal approach — I think it's actually been really helpful in a bunch of ways. The main strategy has been to reinterpret what was seen as just individual pathologies into minority groups and to shift to a disability rights-based framework.

By making this shift, people have been able to demand rights in education, in the workplace, to demand accommodations and so forth, and I think that's been really helpful, especially along with a kind of pride-based conception of neurodivergence, of reclaiming diagnoses and so forth. You kind of need pride to be able to use your rights often, because if you're just ashamed of your neurodivergence, you aren't going to make those kind of demands for recognition.

There's been a real shift from just a deficit-based approach to a difference or even strengths-based approach. Instead of just seeing autism, for instance, as just deficits, people will often stress that it comes with some strengths as well. You know, attention to detail, logical thinking, those kinds of things, and that hopes to give a more balanced view. That has been helpful, it does help people reclaim some space in the world, in an individual sense.

For instance, I use this when I'm at work, I ask for accommodations. I say I'm disabled, I'm autistic, and so forth, and work is slightly less bad than it would've been otherwise, but there are quite significant limitations.

On the one hand, I was initially just concerned with really concrete things, looking at the statistics for how many neurodivergent people are in prison, for example. Almost everyone incarcerated in our prisons is neurodivergent, there's a very clear school-to-prison pipeline. We never hear about the sort of strengths or superpowers of those people, only mostly of like, you know, high-up CEOs and detectives and people like that, right?

[Those in prison are] mostly multiply-marginalized neurodivergent people, of course, it’s racialized, lots of Black men in particular — so lots of people get left behind from that approach, or at least seem to be, just judging by what we know about the world. And ultimately, I relate this in the book back to the fundamental logics of racial capitalism.

I argue that in the way capitalism enforces us to all to be in competition with each other — it's all about trying to extract the most productivity out of us that you can — we are constantly ranked into hierarchies of productivity. It stratifies these into new classes of people in neuronormative hierarchies that will change, depending on what the needs of the economy are at the time.

But when we look at it that way, then that's the basis of neuronormativity. That's the basis of discrimination against neurodivergent people, and rights can't really get us out of that. They can only be like a kind of band-aid approach.

They can help some of us, some of the time, fend off the worst parts of it, but all that stuff doesn't change the system.

Jess: You talk a bit about how a lot of it is focusing on like, language and changing the labels, [but] that's not really going to change what's actually going on underneath, specifically, how we think about what's normal and what's not normal, and how that is very much tied into how capitalism works.

RC: Yeah. I kept encountering various kinds of discourses in activism and scholarship and so on, people will say things like, normality is an illusion. We need to just recognize it's an illusion, and the idea is that will kind of free us from it. Or, if we can recognize that, say, mental illness isn't real illness, that will free us from thinking that we're all being pathologized, and then our lives will be a lot better.

I guess from a Marxian perspective, I think of that as what he would call idealist. It's assuming that the world is primarily made up of ideas, and that our domination is something primarily maintained through ideas. Whereas, if you look at it from a more materialist perspective, those ideas are the products of the system in a sense, and they won't go away just by changing ideas.

If we all decide that autistic people, for instance, really are normal, and everyone calls us normal and healthy, I think we would still be out of work. We would still be discriminated against. Many of us would still be in prisons.

And I just want to be clear, I'm not saying changing words and so on is not important. I do think it's important, and it is significant, but I think focusing on the material — I think we need to do that more in the neurodiversity movement.

There's so many arguments about whether we should use one term or another term and, you know, people are dying while we're having these arguments, so a focus on the material seems more important to me.

Jess: Yeah, I've also been frustrated by all of those kinds of debates about terms. You also said something, I don't know if it was in the book exactly, maybe you said it in another interview, you wanted to emphasize that it's not like, neurotypicals oppressing neurodivergents? 

RC: I think this was an idea I've kind of come across among other neurodiversity proponents who sometimes implicitly or explicitly think this, that neurotypicals are the oppressors and neurodivergent people are oppressed by neurotypicals.

And if you think of it like that, then you know, maybe neurotypicals need to change. They need to change their attitudes, they need to unlearn their ableism, and that kind of thing. Now again, that's important. Of course, I do think we all have internalized ableism and so forth, and it is helpful to unlearn that.

But, first off, the material problems would still remain after that. Second, I don't think that's actually an accurate analysis of the oppression of neurodivergent people. Capitalism is particularly bad for neurodivergent people, but the things which are bad for neurodivergent people are also bad for everyone, right?

This kind of emphasis on productivity and competition I noted earlier, for instance — in a sense, this creates who's counted as neurodivergent. It creates the norms that we fall into, and that's worse for neurodivergent people, because we're on the lower end of those rankings.

That means we are less likely to have a good job, more likely to not finish education, all those kinds of things, and again, to end up in prison and so forth. Neurotypical people, as it were, tend to function a lot better in that system and get more out of it, but the same things are harmful for them, right?

Neurotypicals struggle with lots of the things neurodivergent people struggle with. It's a temporary state. No one's neurotypical forever. We talk about being a burnout generation. Now, again, that relates to the conditions of work and so forth. Burnout can make you neurodivergent. It can change the way your brain or mind functions.

It can give you new impairments, or it might be that, due to your work conditions, you get long Covid and then you become neurodivergent. Capitalism will just kind of chew you up and spit you out, once it's made its surplus value from you.

I thought this was a more accurate way of thinking about it, but I also just thought it might be more helpful for generating solidarity. If we think of neurotypicality as a temporary state that people are in — and that's in relation to the condition of their own body and mind — but also, the norms of society could change at any given time, right?

It's very unlikely that they would change overnight, but sometimes they've changed quite drastically over a course of several decades, and then people who previously weren't disabled and who were more neurotypical then become neurodivergent because the norms have changed, because the economy changes.

I thought looking at it this way helps us see more fluidity between neurodivergence and neurotypicality, and there'll be more room to ground solidarity between a workers’ movement and neurodivergent people dealing with neuronormative domination.

Jess: There’s all this anxiety about rising rates of ADHD and autism diagnoses, and people will be like, oh, it's overmedicalization, or they'll be like, it's just better awareness now, doctors are noticing they missed some people when they were younger…but you kind of explain it as like, the goalposts are shifting, and that affects large groups of people as capitalism intensifies.

RC: Yeah, I was getting really frustrated with these debates, I guess, and it seemed to me for a long time, you could choose one side or the other. So you're either kind of, you know, ADHD and depression are real, and we're just getting better at recognizing them and that's really important. They might have a neurobiological basis, and that kind of thing.

Or on the other hand, these kind of like, oh, they're not real at all, we’re just pathologizing ordinary suffering. I think both of these views are unhelpful. The first one tends to naturalize what are often at least, in significant part, social and political problems, as just problems of the body, and it also tends to individualize them to a significant extent. 

But the benefit is that, it at least recognizes that people are disabled, and lots of people really, really require that recognition to survive. The second approach, I guess, has some benefit in that it seeks to politicize, but it denies the recognition of the disablement, so I thought that wasn't very helpful either. 

And it also was often just kind of, you know, ‘we're just medicalizing ordinary suffering,’ and ‘everyone wants a diagnosis these days,’ those kind of discourses. I mean, to me that is a slightly more intellectual version of this like, right-wing snowflake narrative. ‘Oh, everyone's a snowflake these days.’ They need these labels to—

Jess: They need clout on the internet!

RC: Yeah, that exactly, they say that too, right? Or that kind of, ‘everyone wants to be oppressed’, you know, that kind of thing. That's an often deeply reactionary narrative I think, and not helpful either.

The position I try to develop — I mean really, this is just the Marxian approach you get in disability studies applied to neurodiversity, but applying to specific concrete contexts that we live in. I say: it is real disability, and I think lots of people are ill as well.

I realize that illness, or mental illness, is a controversial concept. I used to be someone who didn't like that concept. I've come all the way back around to liking it now, but I want to be clear that when I say illness, I'm talking about something political. It can be biological and psychological, but it's always political. I see diabetes and dementia as illnesses, but they're also political. 

I was trying to come from an approach which recognized both disability and societal disablement and illness, but in relation to the development of capitalism, the intensification of capitalism, the expanding domain of capitalism further into our minds and our brains in ways that it hasn't been able to before, because of its new technologies, whether it's forms of like, behaviorist intervention, or through new kinds of algorithmic neuronormativity.

I want to very much say people really are disabled, but just who counts as disabled, who is disabled, changes in relation to the context — not just local environments, but the broadest systems of our society, ultimately.

Jess: I was digging around on your blog and I found this old post where you talked about executive function as ideology, and you described it as 'a list of skills someone would need to be an office manager,’ which I love, because I've been thinking about it in this way for a while. It's like looking at your brain as if you have a neurological CEO directing all of your actions. And I don't know if you have thoughts about how the logics of capitalism have shaped this idea that we have about executive function? I specifically think the chapter that you have on Post-Fordism as a Mass Disabling Event, I think there's some parallels going on in there.

RC: Yes. So, it was a while ago I wrote that blog. As far as I remember, I was interested in executive functioning because it's related to a lot of the diagnoses in the DSM, but also lots of other disabilities, whether Long Covid, Tourette's, autism, ADHD, dementia. And it's this concept which relates to, basically, your planning and organizing and working memory. It's about how well you can actually organize and plan your life basically, and then actually carry out the various things you need to do, and it's often seen as a symptom sometimes, or sometimes it's seen as the underlying cause. 

I was interested in how it became so important. It relates to so many of these different diagnoses. Almost every neurodivergent person in some sense or another has executive functioning problems, and the description usually given in the psychological literature to explain it says, well, imagine you are an executive, you're like a CEO or something. 

And if you're a good CEO, you've kind of got a big picture of how all the different parts of the company work and what they're all doing, and they can work together really well, and that's someone with good executive functioning.

And if you've got poor executive functioning, you're like a bad CEO who can't really see the big picture, and then the different parts of the company don't work well together, and that’s like, different parts of your cognition not working well together, so you can't actually function very well, and then you can't survive. 

The whole way we think of it is about how you can function in terms of occupation. It's about being a CEO, and being a CEO is like a good thing, of course, that’s the ideal. 

To link it to the book chapter, I argue that in the Post-Fordist era — so that's like, roughly from the mid 1970’s to today. In Fordism, it was more defined by stable jobs, hard work and high pay and lots of commodities, and you would go to the factory or whatever and you would do your work, and then you would go home, and then you've got your leisure time. 

Now in Post-Fordism, you get a kind of collapsing of lots of more traditional distinctions, like public and private, work and leisure, and in some sense, even employed and unemployed, right?

Lots of us are precariously employed or on zero hours contracts, lots of us are on very temporary contracts as well. The distinction between work and home, you know, we've all got phones. People can email you all the time. You might be in bed, you get emails, or your boss can reach you.

The collapse between the public and private, especially, you see this more in recent decades with social media and stuff like that. In this period, capital expands its domain into all these places which were previously more outside of the workplace. At the same time, various kinds of technologies and industries of management of children and so forth grow as well, so you have a restriction of neuronormativity in this period, as we need to be able to function more in all these ways. 

I used to work in various manufacturing roles and basic kind of labor roles, and they were hard in all sorts of ways, they were physically hard, but in terms of executive functioning, they were pretty easy, you know, I’m like, digging a hole or something, right? And I'm just doing that for hours, or I'm moving some bricks from one place to another or filling up a skip or those kinds of things.

You don't really need those kind of skills so much in that kind of role. But now, even in a lot of entry-level jobs, you need to be really good at everything. You need to be able to talk to people, to be always checking your emails.

You need to be organizing things or maybe speaking to customers, attending meetings, all these kinds of things. And of course, executive functioning is something you need for that. So in some sense, yeah, it's one of the key forms of disablement of our age, I guess.

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In the rest of the interview, we discuss how we might be realists about things like ADHD and autism without reducing neurodivergent people to their brain scans, why collective neurodivergent power is more liberating than having individual superpowers, and how the ideas of anti-psychiatrists like Thomas Szasz actually just made biological psychiatry stronger in the end.

You can find more of Robert’s work on their blog, Critical Neurodiversity, and get their book here.