Interview | Empire of Normality

Robert Chapman’s book, Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism, explores the rise of the concept of neurodiversity and how ideas of what it means to be ‘normal’ are created and shaped by capitalism. Here they speak to Hazel Croft about neurodiversity and how we can challenge the capitalist logics of ‘normality’.

HC: Could you start by telling me about the book and what motivated you to write it?

RC: I got really involved in neurodiversity advocacy about 10 years ago. I was an undergraduate studying philosophy and I thought these were really interesting new theories. I ended up doing a PhD on neurodiversity and became one of the earlier academic neurodiversity theorists.

It increasingly concerned me that neurodiversity theories were very much based within a liberal paradigm rather than a radical or revolutionary one. This reflects the age the neurodiversity movement arose in, the 1990s through to the explosion of popularity around 2015 and since. A lot of that was in an era when it was felt there was no alternative to capitalism.

At the same time there was the anti-psychiatry movement. Some people seemed to think that the neurodiversity movement was an extension of the anti-psychiatry movement, which isn’t the case at all. I thought there were fundamental theoretical differences between the neurodiversity and anti-psychiatry movements. I was interested in distinguishing the neurodiversity movement from that tradition and trying to develop a more radical politics of neurodiversity, which was Marxist and in neither the liberal nor the anti-psychiatry tradition.

The book was an attempt to bring these different arguments together and also to lay out a narrative history of neurodiversity through a dialectical lens. I think of neurodivergence as forming a class in relation to capitalism, and one way of sharing that view was providing an historical narrative showing how the concept of neurodiversity emerged.

HC: How would you define neurodiversity and why do you think it provides a useful framework for understanding mental health or other conditions?

RC: The emphasis on the ‘neuro’ aspect, has often been helpful in that it overcomes the dualism, which sharply separates the body from the mind. As I explore in the book, the concept of neurodiversity emphasises the embodied nature of our problems and the similarities between bodily disability and mental disability. I think that’s a helpful way of conceptualising disability and for building solidarity between mental health activism and the broader disabled person’s movement.

In the past there have been quite a lot of attempts to distance these movements – for example, to say those with mental health issues are not really like disabled people, and so on. Anti-psychiatry, for instance, has tended to commit to an implausible mind-body dualism that I think mainly stifles recognition of how disablement cuts across this divide. I find the concept of neurodivergence helpful because it’s so inclusive and because it politicises a range of conditions in a way they are not usually politicised. For instance, I see dementia as a form of neurodivergence. That is not to say that I don’t think it’s an illness that can be medically treated in a way that’s helpful for people. But I also think that people with dementia face systemic ableism and various human rights abuses. Neurodivergence is a helpful framework that can politicise, for instance, dementia or intellectual disabilities as much as it can things like schizophrenia. Its inclusivity is part of the strength of the concept and connects many different groups of people who are all struggling in a system that doesn’t work for us.

HC: Could you expand on how you see the idea of normality as being connected with the rise of capitalism? In the book you specifically look at developments in the 19^th century – such as the rise of theories of eugenics and new methods of quantifying people, along with the rise of institutions of confinement, such as prisons and asylums.

RC: I was concerned to push back against a very popular way of thinking about the idea of normality, which views it as a cultural construct or just as a myth. You get bourgeois anthropologists, for example, who will argue that because people from different cultures have different conceptions of normality, that there is no normality. Of course, there is some truth in that but I was interested in how normality is, in a sense, objectively determined by certain historical and material conditions and economic relations. This doesn’t mean that normality is natural or timeless, but neither is it just a cultural construct. I was interested in how normality is determined ultimately, and in large part, by the rise of capitalism.

There is a fundamental logic of capitalism which means that we’re all pushed towards averages, to be the average worker, because we’re all determined in relation to our purported or apparent productive potential. We’re all forced into competition with each other, where have to constantly compete – firstly to get jobs and then, once you’re in a job, to be better than anyone else for promotion or just to keep your job. And in that situation, you have this huge pressure to ultimately be supernormal in terms of what’s counted as our productive abilities.

I start by looking at the Industrial Revolution because that’s the first place this really intensifies. You see that in the factories you have standardised pacing, standardised work days, and so forth. You have people who have to work in the same place rather than, say, working at home. These standardised expectations increasingly begin to lock out people with certain bodies and minds. In turn, machinery and so on, are increasingly built for an average person, and at the same time you get standardised education and so on. As this competition further intensifies, the technologies of normalisation also further intensify and you get an increasingly restricted norm.

Coming back to what I said at the beginning, I was interested in pushing back against this idea that normality is just culturally relative. Capitalism is now and for a long time has been a global system, and it enforces these norms globally. That is not to say that things are exactly the same in every place, but you will get someone struggling in a very similar way in Singapore, for instance, to the ways you will in London. There will be similar work pressures, even though there are important cultural differences. So you have this global system of normalcy and it’s not something we can break out of by just declaring that normality is a myth. We need to recognise how it relates to capitalism as a system and to its fundamental economic relations.

HC: What role do you see this concept of normality as playing?

RC: I would see it as a form of domination, which constantly ranks us into hierarchies. It is a system that tends to be more harmful for people for people who are considered more subnormal. So people with significant intellectual disabilities are harmed much more than, say, someone with a much milder disability. But it really does harm us in ways that people might not realise. Just to give one example, consider dyslexia. Dyslexia is often described as mild, but something I point out in the book is that according to several studies about 50 percent of people incarcerated in prisons have dyslexia. And when you take that into account, and of course there’s nothing inherent in dyslexia that means so many people should be incarcerated, you begin to see that it’s a really significant problem. People with dyslexia are really oppressed.

Unlike some neurodiversity proponents, I’m not saying that neurotypical people are oppressing those who are neurodivergent. Rather my argument is that capitalism is a form of neuro normative domination, which harms everyone. If you’re positioned as a neurotypical, what that means is that you are considered closer to being an ideal worker, but you are still exploited and are viewed as being even more exploitable. You are faced with increasing alienation at work and, eventually, you probably become neurodivergent too – either through burnout, depression or through cognitive decline later in life. And at that point, when you can’t work anymore, you’re not seen as productive, then capitalism abandons you. It is that dynamic I am trying to draw attention to.

HC: Earlier you defined neurodivergent people as a class. Could you explain what you mean by this?

RC: Some people think of neurodivergence as an identity and I don’t want to deny that people do identify and find that helpful. But underneath this, in a more important sense, neurodivergent people are a class in the specific sense that who falls into that class is determined by the workings, functioning and logic of capitalism. That is the primary driver, although there can be cultural factors too.

We have shared needs and shared interests from the way the system impacts upon us. I think it’s helpful to see this creating a specific class, with sub-classes relating to different diagnoses and so on. We might be different in some ways, autism is very different to depression, and each diagnosis encompasses many different people, but in an important underlying sense all those who are seen as unproductive and treated differently, are controlled and often abandoned by the capitalist system. You are affected by these things regardless of whether you identify as neurodivergent. Viewing neurodivergence in this way is my attempt to have a materialist analysis which recognises this underlying shared positioning of those who are neurodivergent, regardless of identification.

HC: You call your book Empire of Normality and deliberately link the development of concepts of normality to the rise of empire and colonialism. Can you expand a bit on this?

RC: Yes, ideas of normality and the early sciences of normality began arising around the 1830s. This is when you first get the idea of the ‘average man’ and was intimately linked not just with individual abilities across the workforce, but with white supremacy and colonialism and racism. The scientists who were trying to rank populations in terms of abilities were the same scientists who ranked races, putting white people at the top and black and indigenous peoples at the bottom. So there was lots of discourse within early psychiatry whereby colonial officers and psychiatrists were assessing people in deeply racist ways, and linking this with how they understood madness and disability. These systems very much developed together. I wanted to emphasise that they are still intertwined. Scientific normalisation in a sense begins in large part in the British Empire and then becomes global, partly through the ways capitalism is exported around the world.

HC: How do think this connection between capitalism and neurodiversity has played out in more recent decades? You have spoken, for example, of the way you think people experience alienation differently today. Can you expand on this?

RC: I was interested in why diagnoses have exploded in the decades since 1980. Often the explanation for this is just that psychiatry expanded because it wanted to make more money for pharmaceutical companies and so on. I don’t think that is the correct analysis, even if it is a small part of what’s happened. I think a better explanation is that the shift from Fordism to post Fordism from around 1975 meant there was a rise in the service industries and a rise in what some people called the attention economy or cognitive capitalism. Basically work, at least in much of the global north and certainly here in the UK, shifts more to emotional labour and to cognitive and attentive labour in specific ways. And if you think that Marx’s theory of alienation is plausible, which I do, that will mean we have become alienated in different ways to if you had been working on a factory line in manufacturing in the 19^th century. Marx himself wrote that alienation ruins the body and mind. Previously the body was more at risk, especially in dangerous factories, mines, and so on. But I think we are in an era where, at least in certain areas such as in the UK, we tend more to have our minds ruined than our bodies. Our bodies of course are still ruined as well, but there is an increasing pressure in the service industries for workers to always be happy, to be smiling. There are also increased sensory pressures with the way that modern lighting and advertising works. Algorithms are constantly diverting our attention to the various ways profit is being extracted from us. This impacts people in all industries, including factories where algorithmic neuronormativity is increasingly imposed, although the toil of emotional labour is more restricted to service industry norms.

This alienates us from each other, from ourselves and from our potential to grow emotionally. It is part of the reason why so many people are depressed or anxious in various ways, but also part of why so many of us fall outside the norms of functioning. The emotional and sensory and cognitive and attentive norms of capitalism have been restricted, meaning more of us are cognitively and affectively disabled.

When it comes to the explosion of diagnoses in recent decades, my explanation is that more people are unwell or disabled because of changes in how capitalism works. And for the most part, the explosion of diagnoses, such as ADHD, is a recognition of our increased disablement as life has become harder.

HC: In your book you are very critical of anti-psychiatry, such as the theories of Thomas Szasz who wrote The Myth of Mental Illness. I agree with you about Szasz, but what do you think of critical psychologists and psychiatrists today, such as Joanna Moncrieff, who argue that the proliferation of psychiatric diagnoses is also due to medicalisation, whereby social problems have been relabelled as medical ones?

 RC: It’s worth saying I don’t completely reject anti-psychiatry in the book. I distinguish between left and right wing anti-psychiatrists and their theory and praxis. For instance, I agree with and draw on a lot of Foucault and with the arguments of Franco Basaglia, who was a key figure in the closure of the asylums and the reform of the mental health system in Italy. I am sympathetic to those on the left of the anti-psychiatry movement and that is part of the synthesis I try to make in the book. But I was really interested in understanding how the most right wing version of anti-psychiatry had become dominant today. You mentioned Joanna Moncreiff and she openly supports the views of Szasz. Some have tried to put forwards a left wing Szaszarian approach, but I think this is a failed project. Szasz’s arguments on mental illness were to declare it a myth to justify and further his own neoliberal and hierarchical worldview, which is hyper individualistic and anti-state in a right wing libertarian sense.

Some have tried to combine this form of anti-psychiatry with a Marxist view, which explains the purported ‘myth’ of mental illness by blaming the pharmaceutical industry for creating illnesses that are not real, just to make profits. Now I am very critical of the pharmaceutical companies, but I think is wrong to think that so many people have just been tricked into believing they’re ill or disabled so that corporations can make money.  I wanted to develop an alternative analysis that helped to recognise and make sense of people’s experiences of unwellness, rather than rejecting them or saying that people have all simply been duped. We must resist very real cases of wrongful pathologisation while holding space for how mental illness has been recognised as illness in many societies worldwide for millennia.

HC: So how would you explain the situation today where there is a lot of talk in the press about a mental health crisis, especially during and after the pandemic, with particular worry about young people’s mental health?

RC: The pandemic has made many of us unwell physically and mentally – and again I want to reject that sharp distinction between mind and body. There are many of us, such as myself, who have Long Covid, which is affecting our bodies and our mental functioning in really significant ways. It’s totally unsurprising to me that people would have increased mental and bodily problems in this context. I think it’s more helpful to focus on the material conditions that give rise to this rather than focusing on, for instance, trying to find philosophical tricks to make out that there’s no actual increase in illness, as I don’t see that as part of a liberatory project.

HC: What do you think activists and socialists should be doing to address neurodiversity?

RC: I primarily wrote the book in dialogue with the neurodiversity movement, and to try to challenge them to go further into radical politics. But I did have this secondary implicit audience of people who were already on the radical left but maybe not taking neurodiversity seriously. I’ve occasionally come across people who either think everything is about class or think that neurodiversity is just a kind of liberal identity politics and not a serious problem. I would say to them that a correct Marxist analysis for our age would take neuro-normative domination into account and analyse how this domination is increasing in the kinds of ways I detail in the book.

We need to build neurodivergent liberation into our analysis of how we need to change the world and into how we think about possible socialist or communist futures. We need to recognise how the focus on productivism is part of an enforcement of neuro-normativity. The ways people are suffering or disabled today needs to guide how we imagine we want to change society.

I don’t have anything like a clear and final manifesto and plan – partly because I don’t think we yet have a collective class consciousness relating to neurodivergence. There is still much to do to both to reinvigorate Marxism through neurodiversity theory and to reinvigorate neurodiversity theory through Marxism as well as through decolonial, anti-imperialist and feminist theoretical approaches.

Robert Chapman, Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism, (London, Pluto Press, 2023)