Why Aspies ARE disabled, and we should embrace that.

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This past semester, I had a student who used a wheelchair. At the end of the semester, she thanked me. When I asked why, she said that most other professors did not give her any time consideration for having to wheel herself from one lecture hall to the next.

Any imagined power possessed by disabled persons is largely abstract and has little relevance to the day-to-day struggles which are experienced.

I just don't understand the mentality most neurotypicals I've encountered have about Aspergers. Neurotypicals view it as an illness, to be medicated and cured. Aspies see such as simply who they are, and only want a little bit more understanding from other people about what it means. Given a choice, I would still want to be an Aspie. The trade-off works for me.
I prefer scientific and technical ability over social instinct. Of course, that preferance could be tempered by my life with such so far. Given the other path, would I have elected to become an Aspie over a neurotypical? As I say often, perspective is relevant according to experience.
As a person with Aspergers, I understand and appreciate it. If I weren't, then would I still?
But, then, I think; is it really me? Can I really take credit for my abilities, should I? I suppose I should, in a way - certainly, the Aspergers gives me the ability to perform as I do, but does it give me the capacity to exploit my talents? Not really. My older brother is heavily Autistic. Socially inept, yet can work very well designing web pages. Still, he can't make that work for him - he hasn't the ability to deal with business and society in the world. He doesn't have the ability to exploit the talents given him by Autism. Talents is, though, a simple way to put it.
Really, it's just a method of thought that is, I'm oversimplifying here "compatible" with the general design of computers. A linear, almost mechanical thought process enables him to happily sit down and logically apply string after string of code, without prevailing bugs or errors as is common in typical work. But, he is definitely disabled. He cannot survive without aid. He is just not capable. That is where the definition lies, as far as I am concerned. I am not disabled. I have difficulty in social situations, motor control, speech, etc; but I can function independantly.

Ok, now we're getting somewhere. I should give you a little background. Like most english majors, I went through a pomo phase in college, so I am familiar enough with the SMD prior to this discussion that I feel competent to argue for or against it from that perspective. You’re not talking to someone who’s never heard these ideas before.

However, as a rationalist, when I’m talking to pomo types I can’t help feeling like a prizefighter trying to battle a ninja in a shadowy bamboo forest. I have to follow the rules, while pomo obeys ninja physics. Pomo lets you turn backflips, alight on distant treetops and throw heat seeking ninja stars from the cover of shadow. And then just as I start to get the upper hand there is nothing to stop you from throwing down a smoke bomb and disappearing in a cloud of semiotics.

At the risk of seeming crude, according to the rule of thumb that “ideas cannot be exposed to the light of reason unlesss they are first made distinct,” I’m going to try to nail you down a little bit here so I know what we’re actually discussing.

Is this, or is it not, a fair way to state your position: Disability is entirely a social reality and does not exist outside of a social context.

Last edited by beautifulspam on 09 Jan 2008, 7:51 am, edited 2 times in total.

Some autistics, like your brother, have savant abilities, but most don't. On the other hand, there is a world full of NTs who have both social skills and savant abilities. Since savant abilities can and most often do exist independently of autism, how can we treat autism as anything other than an absence that is occasionally compensated by savant abilities?

This isn't, in my mind, proof that autistic people aren't disabled (which is how I'd argue it, rather than "autism being a disability," and no, I'm not a post-modernist, that crap drives me nuts, but you don't have to be a post-modernist to think something's wholly or partially determined by a society, people have been noticing that for time immemorial), but here's a theory that does not require savant skills, but claims autism is caused by a strength (a perceptual/cognitive strength, not a strength on the order of "can calculate numbers") that then leads to difficulties in specific ways:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16453071

Either way, however, I see autistic people as disabled, and disability being the interface of society and a person's body, not just a person's body alone. I don't have to hear abstract postmodernist theory to believe this, I have relatives from rural areas where it was considered part of the realm of normal, they were not considered defective versions of normal (where they had things that in the current societies you and I probably live in, they would be, and not just "mildly"), and they were enabled, just like other normal people, to live their lives out the way everyone else did. I've met some of them, and their relatives, myself. I've heard the stories. I know that disability depends on both, because I've seen it there and spoken to other people whose relatives lived in places where people weren't considered specially deficient for being what in mainstream American society would definitely be considered that. So, I've seen this stuff in action, it's not theory to me.

Then you were privileged. !I did not, and I have found the kind of analysis which post-structuralism has made serious and acceptable a useful, and liberating, mental prosthetic device/tool to make up for my environmentally, (or perhaps genetically), produced lack of understanding. Something that was disabling me in my approach to life.
Calling it crap is oddly hostile.

Especially as it is one of the things that helped feminism and gay rights movements amongst others achieve serious status in the eyes of many others blinded like i was by societys prevailing desire to not take any responsibility for peoples experience in it. Far from being noticed for time immemorial , this perspective has been for many long periods in human history completely obscured.

Not really hostile, I just don't believe in it, and I use the word crap a lot. I prefer ways of thinking about things that incorporate (and believe in) reality a little more often. Post-modernism has always struck me as one of those kinds of theories that bats things about up in the sky and never comes down to the ground where I happen to live. And as I said, you don't need post-modernism to think outside the particular society you were born in. Lots of immigrants, travelers, people who sit around listening to foreigners, and people aware of the variances within their own countries, can do that more directly and without any need of all that.

I wear glasses, -3 and -4, my eyes are - in your words - "damaged". But should I therefore not celebrate that I can see, should I not enjoy a sunset or the delicate colors of a frostbitten morning? Should I rather stare at the pavement and mourn my damaged eyes?

Perhaps they can. That is debatable. But I know that I can not, not without help. I might be able to listen, but i can't "hear". I could listen all my life to other people and not understand a thing. But when i first came across poststructuralism it was as if my IQ went up by at least 10 points, or 20. As if I suddenly heard and saw things i had not been able to see or hear before.
You might be lucky enough to be able to understand lots of things without that tool/device/aid, but me no.
I do not see in what way poststructuralism does not incorporate or believe in reality? I went from being blind and deaf to reality to seeing and hearing as a result of using it. Scales almost literally fell from my eyes. You may have trouble realising this if you have always been able to understand other peoples experience. I haven't, and it was like having an operation to restore sight. I suddenly realised what my brain could do. I was getting information in at last.
But I do remember that on first exposure to it i threw the book across the room i found it so ludicrous, ridiculous, far fetched, exaggerated, made up, etc. I thought it was rubbish. But then a day later, after a nights sleep, i went and picked the book up again, and began to see a whole new world.

Foucault, and the thinkers of poststructuralism, invented ways for "idiots" like me to "see". Please don't diss so dismissively something you apparently have never needed.

Last edited by ouinon on 09 Jan 2008, 5:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

shivanataraja

cutting a potentially long reponse very short: nope, I do not have to accept that I am 'disabled'. What I need to understand is how society throws up such massive barriers to my ability to function well.

But I think you said as much in your OP.

I question "reason" as a foundationalism. Reason, inductive or deductive, is impossible without making presuppositions.



Not exactly. I would post my view here, but, because of Wrong Planet policies on copyright, I would rather refer you to it. If you would like to read my view, go to this page:

http://narrative.neurelitism.com

Then do a page search for (control f): Deconstructing Neurelitism

If I tried to rephrase it here, it would not be as precise as I would like.

Last edited by nominalist on 09 Jan 2008, 5:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I am not embracing anything! I will be pro cure til the day I die!
I used to think speaking my mind like that would scare people off
but who cares, no one has ever taken any real interest in me

And there goes the smoke bomb.

Allow me to be even more crude and simplistic than before.

You argue that

A- reason is invalid
B- an argument from an invalid premise is untrue
C- therefore arguments from reason are invalid

Major premise, minor premise, conclusion. You say that reason is invalid, yet you use reason to make the argument that reason is invalid, thereby implicitly accepting the validity of reason. You contradict yourself, but I suppose the law of non-contradiction is a foundationalism as well?

This is purest nonsense, but I really don't care. Why? Because if we cannot even agree upon reason to structure our discussion, it would seem to me that fruitful conversation is impossible. You will simply assert your theory and demand that it be true, and if I attempt to disprove your theory using reason you will deny the validity of reason. My theory is equally true to yours, and we can all float around happily in our solipsistic bubbles spinning theory-speak out of ether.

Sorry, but that's not a game I am interested in playing.

You seem to be willing to have a reasonable discussion. I will think about this and get back to you, probably tomorrow. Looking forward to it

Personally, I have no problem with people wanting a hypothetical cure. I would have felt that way as a child (and probably a teen). My concern is that people do not impose their supposed cures on those who do not want them and who value their neurodiversity. IMO, that would be eugenics.

Anbuend, to just add onto what i said before

I think what it did/does is en-able me to "see through" words. They're no longer quite so much of a screen/veil before my eyes. I think that post-structuralism is perhaps very strangely and particularly relevant to "autism/aspergers" experience. I think it may be truly be like a sign language for certain kinds of brain. To help them see/hear better.
I think it's possible for example that the women who found post-structuralist feminist analyses most liberating may very often have been those with AS type brains, for whom words are essential scaffolding for their selves, and so constitute a prison when the framework says for example that women are such and such, in which they were constricted and tied up, so long as they believed the words/the system, so long as the socially dominant system of thought encoded in that system was intact, unchallenged.