Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age

by Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer

Developing a cybernetic model of subjectivity and personhood that honors disability experiences to reconceptualize the category of the human

Twentieth-century neuroscience fixed the brain as the basis of consciousness, the self, identity, individuality, even life itself, obscuring the fundamental relationships between bodies and the worlds that they inhabit. In Unraveling , Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on narratives of family and individual experiences with neurological disorders, paired with texts by neuroscientists and psychiatrists, to decenter the brain and expose the ableist biases in the dominant thinking about personhood. 

Unraveling articulates a novel cybernetic theory of subjectivity in which the nervous system is connected to the world it inhabits rather than being walled off inside the body, moving beyond neuroscientific, symbolic, and materialist approaches to the self to focus instead on such concepts as animation, modularity, and facilitation. It does so through close readings of memoirs by individuals who lost their hearing or developed trauma-induced aphasia, as well as family members of people diagnosed as autistic—texts that rethink modes of subjectivity through experiences with communication, caregiving, and the demands of everyday life.

Arguing for a radical antinormative bioethics, Unraveling shifts the discourse on neurological disorders from such value-laden concepts as “quality of life” to develop an inclusive model of personhood that honors disability experiences and reconceptualizes the category of the human in all of its social, technological, and environmental contexts.

Genres: Disability, Nonfiction

331 pages, Paperback

Published October 20, 2020

Reviews

[FluffyNyctea]

Wolf-Meyer emphasises disliberalism at the heart of liberalism, and argues that when disabled people ‘perform their deservingness of recognition by demonstrating their nonnormative capacities within the context of normative identity categories’ (pp. 18), they are performing a kind of disliberal personhood. The performance of disliberal personhood can be read in terms of value: the inclusion of certain disabilities by social criteria of value such as verbal capacities and labour abilities. One of the implications of this disliberalism, Wolf-Meyer argues, is the legitimisation of claim-making (by anyone other than normative institutions such as the hospital, the school, the prison) on the condition of one’s membership to a specific community. That is, following disliberalism’s performative script, one’s identity can be essentialised and consequently incorporated into a seemingly natural community, which is often based on a diagnosis, such as the autistic community, the Usher community, etc.; then and only then, one is entitled to ‘represent’ matters ‘of’ that community.

Disliberalism offers a narrow imagination of connections: connections are connections only through identity categories, which encode socially valued criteria of personhood, which include while excluding. Excluded are those less than persons, or rather, the more-than-human beyond disliberal humanism, such as those who cannot language or perform labour in socially valued ways, or such as seaweeds, clouds, quicksand.

Symbolic subjectivity, Wolf-Meyer writes, ‘posits that access to a shared language is the basis for the elaboration of the self and the basis of personhood and subjectivity’ (pp. 63). Symbolic subjectivity assumes a hierarchy where certain kinds of languaging, such as speech that uses a codified symbolic repertoire, are privileged as languages that enable personhood and subjectivity. For example, spoken English is ascribed the status of a language, while a ‘home-sign’ used between members of my family is ‘only’ communication. Following Henner & Robinson (2023), I take that ‘[l]anguage is communication; communication is language’ (pp. 8). Wolf-Meyer offers a theory of animation, where language/communication can be ‘animating social connections’ such as movies and TV shows ‘through which [communicating subjects] are facilitated and by which they facilitate others’ (pp. 165). Animation builds on a materialist understanding of subjectivity. More-than-human materialities that an individual interacts with can become part of language/communication and all shape the individual’s affects of subjectivity.

Genuinely inspiring to my current fieldwork!

[Tami Lynn]

" But the possibility remains that people may be lost not simply because of their disorders but because of the lack of facilitation provided to them as a result of the institutional logics of neurological disorder and care that rely on reductive neurological and symbolic models of subjectivity." pg 234

[Harley Quinn]

2023 DNF, 3/14: GOT TO 14% (OR 46 PAGES). Not at all what I was expecting. Very academic/science-y.