LatinX and the neurologization of self

José, “said to be hopelessly retarded,” meets Dr Oliver Sacks (1998: 214), revered British neurologist for a consultation on a Sunday evening after a ferocious seizure described as a “fit” of “rage of a sudden, unprecedented, and frightening violence … in which objects were smashed” (p. 222) require the 21-year-old man be rushed to the hospital (p. 222).

During this initial visit reported in Sacks’ 1985 case study, “The Autist’s Artist,” Sacks asks José to draw a pocket watch he routinely carried. This was in keeping with Sacks’ practice of asking patients “if it is possible for them, to write and draw, partly as a rough-and-ready index of various competencies, but also as an expression of ‘character’ or ‘style’” (p. 215). Sacks describes José’s drawing as one of “remarkable fidelity.” He’d put in

every feature …, not just “the time” (though this was faithfully registered as 11:31), but every second as well, and the inset seconds dial, and, not least, the knurled winder and trapezoid clip of the watch, used to attach it to a chain. The clip was strikingly amplified, though everything else remained in due proportion. (p. 215)

Upon closer inspection, he noticed that the figures were of different sizes, shapes, even style (see Figure 1):

some thick, some thin; some aligned, some inset; some plain and some elaborated, even a bit “gothic.” And the inset second hand, rather inconspicuous in the original, had been given a striking prominence, like the small inner dials of star clocks, or astrolabes. (p. 215)

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Sacks’ pocket watch on left and José’s rendering of Sacks’ pocket watch on right.

José’s seizures continued throughout the weekend but were brought under relative control thanks to the anticonvulsants Sacks had prescribed. Despite the fact that Sacks was no longer technically needed for his neurological advice, he nonetheless felt an urge to see José again: “… I was still troubled by the problem presented by the clock and felt an unresolved mystery about it. I needed to see him again” (p. 216). Throughout the case study, Sacks presents José as an enigma, a mystery, a conundrum, an ontological and epistemological question. “What then was José, I had to ask myself. What sort of being? What went on inside him? How had he arrived at the state he was in? And what state was it—and might anything be done” (p. 220)?

I would like to borrow Sacks’ preceding questions in order to ask them of “LatinX.” Specifically, I would like to think about the explosive emergence of “LatinX” in concert with the ascendance of the neurosciences and in the context of the neurologization of contemporary notions of self and of the subject. Let me first begin by reminding myself of a question that remained unanswered (at least, in a satisfying way) to a few students in my recent Spring 2016 seminar, “Brains, Everywhere” regarding the seminar’s topic’s relevance to “LatinX Studies” and to “LatinXs” given that the seminar had been cross-listed with The Program in Latino/a Studies of the Global South. Here are a few sentences that I pulled from the course description:

Over the course of the last 3 decades we have witnessed the spectacularly speedy rise of the “neurosciences,” an historical event characterized by some critics as a “neuro-revolution” that has, in turn, given rise to a “neuro-society” and “neuro-cultures” and “neuro-subjects.”

In this seminar we will track this history and ask ourselves precisely what kind of change in meaning might “neuro” effect in the disciplines that were previously “neuro”-free. If there is a neuro-turn in the humanities and social sciences, what is it that’s “turning”? The “brain” has played a special role in this. … Relatedly, we will consider how the brain has also become the point of discussion creating opportunities for different fields of study to potentially engage each other’s research to ask broad questions about “personhood/subjectivity,” knowledge, “mind/body,” “self/ego,” “emotion/affect.” Along with the Director of the Program in Latino/a Studies (who approved the cross-list), I thought the reasons for the seminar’s relevance to Latino/a Studies was obvious. Why wouldn’t this, what some call, “neuro-revolution” and the production of “neuro-subjects” or “the neuro-consolidations of selfhood” (Bassiri, 2016: 45) be importantly relevant to those of us working in Latino/a Studies? What the students, who posed the question to me in terms of “LatinX”—this was the term employed—appeared to want from me was an explanation whose alibi for relevance shed light on some specific, substantive content about “LatinX” that made this course, “Brains, Everywhere” worthy of the cross-list. Given that I wanted to avoid as much as possible invoking and deploying “LatinX” as if it were simply an extension of “Latino/a,” I found myself virtually bereft of speech as I had to first consider in the students’ questions what “LatinX” is or does prior to considering what the “LatinX” relevance of the material might be. There is an element of the Lacanian Real in the “X”; it cannot be made to make sense and it dissembles attempts at fixed meaning; it is the trauma that cannot be delivered in speech. I don’t think it makes much sense for us to fail to consider that “LatinX’s” ascendance is taking place concurrently with the ascendance of the neurosciences. I don’t want to suggest some causal relation between the two, although I think the notion of the “neurological self” currently circulating and the emergence and circulation of a term like “LatinX” are both signs of the general indeterminacy that marks the moment with respect to conceptualizations of the human subject. I would like, nonetheless, in what immediately follows, for us to consider, to put it rather blandly, the notions of self and subjectivity implied by the term “LatinX” and how “LatinX” might, for example, either illustrate, challenge, or ignore “the neurological consolidations of selfhood” that are allegedly becoming dominant today. In this article, one might say that I am proposing we track the signifying labor “LatinX” can be imagined to perform in the affective neuroscientific work on the brain. In many ways, I am trying to open up the conversations regarding the “neurological consolidation of subjectivity” to questions of race. As it stands, the brain as an object of study in this research goes unmarked with respect to sex, gender, race, ethnicity, and so on.

Let me describe what currently is characterized as the “neurobiologization of the self” by turning briefly to the very excellent Neuro by Rose and Abi-Rached (2013). Rose and Abi-Rached attempted to illustrate the idea shared currently by a number of affective neuroscientists and neuroscientifically informed philosophers, that the “self is an illusion created by our brain” (p. 200), by turning specifically to German philosopher, Thomas Metzinger (2010) and his The Ego Tunnel:

… nobody has ever been or had a self: conscious experience is a creation of our brains, an internal construct in what he terms “the ego tunnel,” which also creates “an internal image of the person-as-a-whole,” which is “the phenomenal ego, the ‘I’ or ‘self’ as it appears in conscious experience.” But “you are constitutionally unable to realize that all this is just the content of a stimulation of your brain … not reality itself but an image of reality … a complex property of the global neural correlate of consciousness.” (pp. 1–12, 201)

They sharply capture the questions this view of selfhood is seen to raise for the social and human sciences: many

regard this neurobiologization of the self as the most challenging feature of contemporary neuroscience. It seems to threaten the very conception of the human being that lies at the heart of their work: the idea that personhood is a matter of internal mental states—consciousness, intention, beliefs, and the life—existing in a uniquely human psychological realm of mind, embodied in a self-conscious subjectivity, and created in a world of meaning, culture and history. (Rose and Abi-Rached, 2013: 201)

What would a LatinX Studies critical approach look like here? Can LatinX Studies carry the “neuro” prefix? What would it mean for it to be subject to the “neuro” prefix in the first place?

Brain imaging has been, claim Francisco Ortega and Fernando Vidal (2011), absolutely crucial for the “neurologization” of the human and social sciences and of our cultures, more generally. The development of “electroencephalography” in the 1930s convinced some brain researchers that the recorded waves would offer direct insights into mental life (p. 13). Where is the LatinX subject to be possibly located in this? As Claudia Milian (2017) importantly reminds us in the stirring introduction to this collection, “The LatinX horizon hits up against so many daily uses in a way that Latino/a does—or did—not” (p. 4). The signifier called up here—what is hit up against—“x-ray” creates an associative link between “LatinX” and “brain imaging,” not to mention, then, notions of for what constitutes truth, evidence in a regime of the scopic. The eks I think I feel the same unease that Nicole Guidotti-Hernández, cops to; she struggles “with the easy and uncritical transition in discourse” that the term appears to perform and that most put into the service of performing. What amounts to policing, once again, the borders of this term, I would like to propose for now that LatinX not be understood as a term marking a transition from a previously known and agreed upon substance, “Latino/a.” I don’t want to deny that it emerges in complicated ways from “Latino/a” but it also kills off its maker. At least, it should. Ideally, anyway. The “eks’” aural reconfiguration of “Latino/a” challenges the primacy accorded the visual register in the cultures where it reigns: one hears LatinX; one cannot say that one sees LatinX: “kill yr. idols/sonic death” (Sonic Youth, 1983). One might say the angle of vision changes with “LatinX” and so it makes possible quite literally, new ways of seeing but as a term it does not make a substance miraculously appear that would definitionally represent it. Some have noted rather woefully that the term seems to have a built-in dehumanizing effect. That’s not quite right. It has, to be more precise, a built-in other-than-humanizing effect. In this volume, R. Galvan (2017) writes, “Its verbal texture distorts the established rhythm and sound of Latin in favor of eks making audible and consequently visible unseen bias created by the revised expression” (p. 5). We need to be alive to the explosive plasticity of the term. It is, or should be, for antipsychologistic uses; it announces gaps and fissures and breaks and splits. LatinX is not ego psychological and is an illustration of the irreducibility of the brain to the mind. Rather than think “LatinX” has got it right—made a space for every subject—we should understand it as the impossibility of doing so, even in the very attempt to do so. “LatinX” is to “Latino/a” what “psychoanalysis” is to “psychology.”

Although we were not reading any material that could be said to contain “Latino” or “Latina” content, we encountered somewhat late in the semester “José,” the autistic young man whose case study I opened with and that closes neurologist, Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. Was “José” going to stand in for the previously noted lack of LatinX content? We had paved the way for his arrival in some ways through our readings of Catherine Malabou’s (2012), What Should We Do With Our Brain? and The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage. The term “new wounded” was bandied about; we felt like we could think with it:

Who are they? They are, as the term indicates, victims of various cerebral lesions or attacks, head trauma, tumors, encephalitis, or meningoencephalitis. Patients with degenerative brain diseases such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s also fall into this category. In addition, we might think of the patients whom psychoanalysis has attempted to cure without success: schizophrenics, autistics, victims of Tourette’s syndrome. The “new wounded” constitute an emergent phenomenon, then, to the extent that this category also refers to subjects who suffer from disturbances that had yet to be identified during Freud’s time. (Malabou, 2012: 10)

The figure of the “immigrant” emerged in our discussion as a potential member of Malabou’s “new wounded” contingency when we considered Malabou’s later, more capacious definition of the “new wounded” that would include all disenfranchised subjects who are victim to trauma and systemic violence and mistreatment:

It is possible to name these traumas “sociopolitical traumas.” Under this generic term, one should group all damage caused by extreme relational violence. Today, however, the border that separates organic trauma and sociopolitical trauma is increasingly porous. This affirmation tends to generalize and enlarge the concept of brain damage opening it to types of harm that do not initially pertain to neuropathology. … This is precisely the point that makes it possible to construct a paradigm for all the “new” wounded. (pp. 10–11)

Although Malabou is critical of classical psychoanalysis’ ability to treat subjects who have suffered brain trauma, she is generally supportive of neuro-psychoanalytic treatment, of approaches to trauma that understand neuronal disturbances at the same time they understand “neuronal disturbance in other terms than pure and simple physiological lesions” (pp. 10–11). Oliver Sacks represents precisely the approach Malabou privileges and I would like to return to his case study and walk the reader through his treatment of José, one whose narrative of progress is contingent on Sacks’ particular interpretations of what José’s drawings mean. In their conceptualization of “LatinX,” Fiol-Matta and Gómez-Barris (2014), “the ‘x’ turns away from the dichotomous, toward a void, an unknown, a wrestling with plurality, vectors of multi-intentionality, and the transitional meanings of what yet to be seen” (p. 505). I see the analytic work in my reading of Sacks’ case study below as an attempt to track what the “X” points us toward, which is to say, among other things, the moments of rupture, silence, sociopolitical and ethnoracial familial trauma.

Sacks wanted to review José’s entire chart given that he’d only been given a “consultation slip” the first time that was not very informative. Upon their second meeting in a clinic at the same hospital, Sacks reports that the “dull, indifferent look, the mask” José had previously possessed was gone. This “indifference” (along with “disaffected,” “blank”) routinely appears in the affective neuroscientific literature’s description of patients with severe brain damage. “‘I have been thinking about you, José’, I said. … ‘I want to see more drawing’—and I gave him my pen” (Sacks, 1998: 216). He hands José a copy of Arizona Highways, “… a richly illustrated magazine which I especially delight in, and which I carry around for neurological purposes, for testing my patients” (Sacks, 1998: 216). He asks José to draw the cover image—an “idyllic scene” of two people canoeing on a lake at sunset with mountains in the background (see Figure 2).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Canoe scene on cover of Arizona Highways.

Once again, Sacks is impressed by José’s rendition (see Figure 3). For Sacks, it offered strong evidence that José was not merely copying the image but providing “the dramatic quality not present in the original”: “The tiny figures, enlarged, were more intense, more alive, had a feeling of involvement and purpose not at all clear in the original” (Sacks, 1998: 217). Sacks’ description of José’s version of the canoe scene captures a general approach on the part of Sacks in describing all of José’s drawings whereby everything José draws is always a more profound version of the original; whatever the original image appears to do or want to do, José’s versions do more of it.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

José’s version of canoe scene on cover of Arizona Highways.

Then, Sacks, turning to another page in Arizona Highways, asks José to draw a trout (see Figure 4).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Trout image in Arizona Highways on left and José’s version of this trout image on right.

After these drawings, Sacks felt like he now “had something to go on” (p. 219):

The picture of the clock had startled me, stimulated my interest, but did not, in itself, allow any thoughts or conclusions. The canoe had shown that José had an impressive visual memory, and more. The fish showed a lively and distinctive imagination, a sense of humor, and something akin to fairy-take art. Certainly not great art, it was “primitive,” perhaps it was child-art; but, without doubt, it was art of a sort. And imagination, playfulness, art are precisely what one does not expect in idiots, or idiots savants, or in the autistic either. Such at least is the prevailing opinion. (Sacks, 1998: 219)

Sacks is still, up to this point, at a loss for precisely how to diagnose José. Sacks asks himself, “What then was José, I had to ask myself. What sort of being? What went on inside him? How had he arrived at the state he was in? And what state it—and might anything be done” (Sacks, 1998: 220). At this point, the case study begins to feel a bit like a detective story:

I was both assisted and bewildered by the available information—the mass of “data” that had been gathered since the first onset of his strange illness, his “state.” I had a lengthy chart available to me, containing early descriptions of his original illness: a very high fever at eight, associated with the onset of incessant, and subsequently continuing, seizures, and the rapid appearance of a brain-damaged or autistic condition. (There had been doubt from the start about what, exactly, was going on.) (Sacks, 1998: 220)

Again, mystery, uncertainty, doubt provide the affective framework for Sacks’ experience of José. Given that his spinal fluid had, during the more acute stages of the illness, been abnormal, the consensus was that he had “suffered an encephalitis of sorts” (Sacks,1998: 220).

Sacks is trying to understand why José would excel the way he does in drawing but cannot seem to produce speech. One wonders at the form of sociality that could be possible here and it is certainly on Sacks’ mind who feels he is both communicating somehow through the drawings with José while simultaneously feeling shut out. Sacks begins to ask himself questions about the violent seizures and what they might mean and reasons that “they are invariably associated with disorder in, or damage to, the temporal lobes, and severe temporal-lobe disorder, both left-sided and right-sided, had been demonstrated in José by innumerable EEGs” (Sacks, 1998: 220). Sacks reminds the reader that the temporal lobes are classically associated with not only the auditory capacities of a person but also the perception and production of speech. Citing another doctor’s assessment of the matter, that José was not only considered to be “autistic” but that he had also likely a temporal lobe disorder that caused a “‘verbal auditory agnosia’”—“the inability to recognize speech sounds that interfered with his capacity to use or understand the spoken word” (Sacks, 1998: 220). What remained to be explained, an explanation that psychiatry and neurology could not offer, was José’s loss or regression of speech. Up until the age of 8, José had been “normal” (p. 220) but had then become “mute” (p. 220) and stopped speaking to others altogether. There is an interesting parenthetical comment included after Sacks’ statement that José had been “normal” up until the age of 8: “(or so his parents avowed).” This comment captures Sacks’ implicit criticism of the family, a criticism that becomes more explicit later. Sacks does not trust the family’s account. José’s family, in the end, is made to carry the lion’s share of the blame for José’s condition.

Despite this loss of speech, one capacity “was apparently ‘spared’—perhaps in a compensatory way enhanced: an unusual passion and power to draw” (Sacks, 1998: 220). We learn at this point that drawing was a skill possessed by several in the family and that José had shown a talent for it from a very young age. His father was an avid sketcher; his older brother was a successful artist. With the onset of his illness, José suffered 20 to 30 major seizures a day, innumerable “little seizures,” falls, blank and dreamy states. His loss of speech combined with a general emotional and intellectual regression put José in a “strange and tragic state” (Sacks, 1998: 221). He was taken out of school, returned to the family permanently with diagnoses of “retardation,” “aphasia,” “epileptic,” and “autistic.” By the age of 9, José had dropped out of school, society, and, to use Sacks’ term, “reality.”

There is an interesting error in the calculation of years that José spent allegedly sequestered in the private familial space, the cellar, in fact. Sacks (1998) writes that “for fifteen years he scarcely emerged from the house” (p. 221). Earlier we are told that what brings José to the hospital where Sacks will see him for the first time are the violent, destructive seizures he suffered at 21 years of age. Either José is 24 years when Sacks first sees him or there are some miscalculations made as to the number of years José spent at home or his age when the illness first set in. This makes the first object Sacks asks José to draw—a pocket watch—particularly interesting. One might say that the case study itself gets the time wrong or doesn’t know how to tell time or that something about José’s case scrambles a certain temporal order. Getting back to the details of the family’s sequestration of José, details are scant; it is as though José had disappeared from the world, from society. Sacks reveals that José had been living in the cellar of the family home and would have remained there if not for the violent attacks that landed him in the hospital. The case study takes a slightly odd turn at this point as Sacks appears to use as a point of departure the scene of José’s admission to a state hospital in order to discuss the benefits of hospitals and asylums for some subjects:

José had suffered from confusion and chaos—partly organic epilepsy, partly the disorder of his life—and from confinement and bondage, also both epileptic and existential. Hospital was good for José, perhaps lifesaving, at this point in his life, and there is no doubt that he himself felt this fully. (p. 222)

Then, Sacks begins to describe his third encounter with José, a meeting whose details are meant to illustrate the benefits of José’s treatment at the hospital (as opposed to the family home where he was sequestered in a cellar, as Sacks intimates). Unlike the other visits, this time Sacks appears unannounced, “without warning” in José’s admission ward. Once more, a drawing is produced. It is the symbolic currency of these drawings that sustains whatever social bonds forged between Sacks and José might exist. I am including all of the drawings here because I would like the reader to see the kind of narrative Sacks appears to intend to provide with them, a somewhat linear, developmental narrative that displays in the end a better outcome for José, evidence of the fact that he’s getting better, and that each drawing supersedes the previous one in its evidentiary status as a sign of improvement. In this third encounter, a reader is also it appears to me encouraged to ask after the form of sociality between these two subjects. The second meeting amounts to a kind of fishing trip between father and son out on a canoe. Sacks wants José to return to the trout he had drawn earlier, asking him to do it from memory:

What would he draw now? He closed his eyes for a moment—summoning an image?—and then drew. It was still a trout, rainbow-spotted, with fringy fins and a forked tail, but, this time, with egregiously human features, an odd nostril (what fish has nostrils?), and a pair of ripely human lips. I was about to take the pen, but, no, he was not finished. What had he in mind? The image was complete. The image, perhaps, but not the scene. The fish before had existed—as an icon—in isolation: now it was to become part of a world, a scene. Rapidly he sketched in a little fish, a companion, swooping into the water, gambling, obviously in play. And then the surface of the water was sketched in, rising to a sudden, tumultuous wave. As he drew the wave, he became excited, and emitted a strange, mysterious cry. (pp. 223–224)

Has José imagined here for the first time the possibility of a kind of sociality, the existence of an other, if not an Other. Sacks proceeds to ask some questions about what the symbolism might mean. In fact, he asks himself first if these fish can be read symbolically. What he considers to be most important about the drawing, in the end, is the fact that José drew it on his own initiative, impulse, not on Sacks’ suggestion.

What happens next reveals Sacks’ fear of José’s potential aggression, of, as it sometimes appears, José, himself as always already a subject of aggression. Sacks asks a question about the possible meaning of the waves, “In his drawing as in his life hitherto, interaction had always been absent. Now, if only in play, in symbol, it was allowed back. Or was it? What was that angry, avenging wave” (Sacks, 1998: 224) (see Figure 5).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 5.

Rainbow trout drawn from memory by José.

So, Sacks introduces the possibility that this “drawing” may represent José’s real attempt at a form of sociality and attempt to address an other but he’s not sure—”or was it?”—and it is the existence of the waves in the drawing that appear to make Sacks question his original assertion. It is Sacks obviously who thinks to characterize the waves in the drawing as “avenging” and “aggressive.” We won’t right now expound upon all of the different ways we might read not only the waves but the fish (gulping, in a panic, in play, etc.) On the heels of the sentence ending with “angry, avenging wave,” Sacks reports that he chose to end the “free association”:

best to go back to safe ground, I felt … I had seen potential, but I had seen, and heard, danger too. Back to safe, prelapsarian Mother Nature. I found a Christmas card lying on the table, a robin redbreast on a tree trunk, snow and stark twigs all around (see Figure 6). I gestured to the bird, and gave José the pen. (pp. 224–225)

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 6.

Christmas card.

José draws the robin, using a red pen for its breast (see Figure 7). Sacks notices that the robin’s feet seem to be “gripping” the branch, perhaps done so by José in order to underscore the “grasping power of hands and feet.” But, what most strikes Sacks about the drawing are the flowers that José has added. The scene on the on card was a wintery one, the branch a “dry winter twiglet” (p. 225); José draws blooms at the end of these winter twigs effectively for Sacks turning “winter into spring” (p. 225).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 7.

José’s version of robin on Christmas card.

Let us think about what these drawings are said to represent by Sacks. The 2 spotted trouts immersed in water crowned by an “angry, avenging wave” bespoke of an attempt to forge a social bond of some sort, but the wave that Sacks quite literally reads as another character in the picture board story raises a question for him as to whether this question about sociality and the existence of an other is even a credible one for Sacks to raise in relation to the drawing. The drawing of the robin, in the end, for Sacks is important because of the transformation of seasons that José magically effects with the inclusion of blooms—from winter to spring—with the inclusion of blooms. One cannot help but think here of the, what to call it?, agency and autonomy of the artist here. In the first drawing that José will be allowed to create from his own memory, Sacks experiences something threatening, José’s anger, and so stops the exercise and asks that José draw instead an image Sacks provides, here, the opening flap of a Christmas card. It’s precisely the details José adds that are his own that cannot be tolerated and they are details that are read in a very exaggerated way, it seems. Take a look at the waves. Are they so threatening? Angry? Why would José have had reason to have drawn anything to connote “avenging” and wouldn’t it be important to hear him tell us why. I have been at pains to imagine how this case study metaphorizes something about LatinX. I will risk offering here that the “X” represents what needed to go missing in Sacks’ account of the first drawing that, to Sacks, is not present in the second, replacement drawing, as it were: violence, aggression. Virtually every dictionary definition of bloom will include among its first five entries, “a rapid and excessive growth.” José’s drawings can never, it seems, be read as communicating anger, protest, anything that’s not affirming. There is discernible break in the narrative of the text at this point as Sacks moves on to tell us that the medical treatment that José received in the hospital “… had improved, it could not be doubted, his physiological potentials for speech.” For José, there had always been two issues to content with: both the fact of speech impairment due, ultimately, to frontal lobe damage and also the refusal to speak, a fact that could not be rationalized either neurologically or psychiatrically. “A double malignancy of disease” is the phrase Sacks uses to characterize the coupling of the two.

In the final section of the case study, Sacks moves from the specificity of José’s case to more general claims about “autistic” subjects and their relationship to the “particular” versus the “universal.” First, we are told that on what amounts to the fourth and final encounter between Sacks and José that José had been moved to a “quieter ward.” Sacks goes to meet José and is taken aback at what seems like José’s transformed demeanor, “… he waved his hand lustily as soon as he saw me—an outgoing, open gesture. I could not imagine him having done this before. He pointed to the locked door, he wanted it open, he wanted to go outside” (Sacks, 1998: 228). Sacks tells the reader that José led the way downstairs and into an “overgrown, sunlit garden” (p. 228). Sacks reports that this is likely the first time José has “voluntarily” gone outdoors since the age of 8, since the onset of the still only mysteriously explained “illness” and that upon entering this garden takes out a pen he had brought himself and not acquired from Sacks and begins drawing a dandelion. “This, I think, is the first drawing from real life that José had done since his father took him sketching as a child, before he became ill” (Sacks, 1998: 228) (see Figure 8).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 8.

José’s drawing of a single flower.

Sacks (1998) thinks it’s a “splendid drawing, accurate and alive. It shows his love of reality, for another form of life” (p. 228). Sacks’ interpretations are at times a bit fanciful, something I don’t entirely not appreciate, but he’s a bit too willful in his need to read certain images for what can only be called its “good” content, its positive, affirming content and the evidence is often dubious. How is this flower, singular as it is, not a sign of a kind of regression from a previously symbolizable sociality that Sacks saw illustrated in the drawing of the two trout. The single flower also might be read as divorced from reality. Previously, Sacks read José’s rendering of the robin and the blooms at the end of wintry twigs as transforming the seasons. Here we have a single flower floating in space, unmoored. Sacks tells the reader that the flower is reminiscent of those one finds in

medieval botanies and herbals … even though José has no formal knowledge of botany, and could not be taught it or understand it if he tried. His mind is not built for the abstract, the conceptual. That is not available to him as a path to truth. But he has a passion a real power for the particular—he loves it, enters into it, he re-creates it.

Sacks proceeds to make some comments about the “autistic person” that may sound outdated to readers in 2017, like “the abstract, the categorical, has no interest for the autistic person—the concrete, the particular, the singular, is all” (p. 229). Finally, the end of the case study finds Sacks comparing José to Borges’ character, Ireneo in Borges’ famous story, “Funes the Memorious” (published in the English translation of Borges short story collection, Labyrinths in 1962; the story was first published in La Nación of June 1942, it also appeared in the 1944 anthology Ficciones part two (Artifices). The first English translation appeared in 1954 in Avon Modern Writing No. 2.).

The case study ends with an appeal of sorts, regarding what it would take to make José a proper laboring subject. Before this is made more explicit, Sacks hones in on what he considers the final questions:

is there any “place” in the world for a man who is like an island, who cannot be acculturated, made part of the main? Can the “main” accommodate, make room, for the singular? … Specifically: what does the future hold for José? Is there some “place” for him the in the world which will employ his autonomy, but leave it intact. (p. 231, emphasis in the original)

The closing question is interestingly worded. Sacks’ term “employ his autonomy” hardly needs “employ” to be italicized as it is in the original to still create the impression that Sacks understands the fact of alienated labor. However, the phrase, “but leave it intact” where “it” refers to “autonomy” (of the laborer) makes one wonder why it might be specifically with José that this be left intact, and what that would mean in terms of labor and alienation and capitalism. The questions of labor, work, and employment are often front and central in case studies on brain-wounded subjects. Descriptions in case studies always take up with the topic of the labor the brain traumatized subject in question can no longer perform. Sacks’ parting words on José inform us that

he has carved exquisite lettering on tombstone. He is current “job” is hand-printing sundry notices for the ward, which he does with the flourishes and elaborations of a latter-day Magna Carta. All this could do, and do very well. And it would be os use and delight to others, and delight him too. He could do all of these—but, alas, he will do none, unless someone very understanding, and with opportunities and means, can guide and employ him. (p. 232)

José, I might have informed the reader earlier, is never identified in this 1985 case study that was originally published in The New Yorker as “Latino” or “Hispanic” or “Latin American.” The family, instead, one might say, seems charged with signifying some species of ethnoracialized, cultural otherness. Some of us may recognize in the family’s eventual turning away of a social worker, a tutor, and state hospital medical attention other distancing, life sustaining strategies practiced by immigrant families. What remains shrouded in mystery, in addition to José’s diagnosis, are the 15 years he spent sequestered in the family home. Again and again, Sacks tells us of the missing documentation of these years in the medical chart. One could say that José himself is a partial document from the perspective of the medical gaze. I had hoped to employ Sacks’ case study in order to metaphorize some feature of “LatinX” and I have been drawn to the void, the gulf separating Sacks from José. I don’t think Sacks knows what to do with the anger he’s willing to concede is perfectly understandable for José to feel. As the “new wounded,” to return to Malabou’s term above, José’s case must be interpreted in light of both the wound that attends the brain damage and also that which attends the experience of sociopolitical trauma as a disenfranchised ethnoracialized subject. Sacks inability and refusal to metabolize José’s anger, in effect, can be read as a refusal to fully document José’s history. Sacks in some ways perpetuates the failures of documentation which are failures, let’s be clear, to historicize the subject’s life starting the moment he tells José to stop “free associating.”

While collecting my name badge for a “Neuroscience and Emotion” workshop I was attending at Duke in the fall of 2015, I came across a huge bowl of pins on the registration table that read: “I Love Brains” (see Figure 9).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 9.

I Love Brains pin from Duke Institute for Brain Sciences.

In the pin below that began to circulate sometime at Duke University in the spring of 2016, the heart shape when interpreted in Spanish takes on, as we likely know, additional meaning, which is to say that the heart shape is able to call up the signifier, “desire” (see Figure 10).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 10.

Yo Quiero Cerebros pin from Duke Institute for Brain Sciences.

The English language version seems clear enough to most, “I Love Brains.” In Spanish, the heart shape is roughly analogous to “quiero” and could mean “love” or “want.” There are some of us who still remember the racist Taco Bell advertisement campaign featuring a chihuahua (1997–2003) who would mouth the words, “Yo quiero Taco Bell.” I am one of those people and so I can’t help but read “Yo quiero cerebros” as announcing the appetite one might have for brains, “frituritas de ceso.” This is a pin for brain-eating agents. Perfect. In my essay (Viego, 2013), I have claimed that the Latino/a subject as characterized in contemporary psychotherapeutic and epidemiological literature is somewhere between life and death, a zombie, too alive in the health studies literature, too depressed and anxious in the psychotherapeutic literature. Zombies, you might have noticed, are partial to brains.