Subjects of Technology: An Auto-Archeology of Attention Deficit Disorder in Neoliberal Time(s)

Abstract

This essay (re)presents my own experiences living with attention deficit disorder (ADD) as a child and adult to provide a radically historical, contextual, and critical autoethnographic conceptualization of this “learning disability.” Specifically, by building upon Ragan Fox’s “auto-archeological” method, a critical perspective that “unite[s] autoethnography and Foucault’s theories of discourse,” I draw upon institutional artifacts, psychiatric diagnoses, and interviews with close family members to show that ADD is a “technology of the self” that economizes the body in accordance with a distinctly neoliberal temporality. This temporalizing process, I show, is reinforced by a range of other neoliberal technologies of selfhood and ultimately cultivates the very “deficit framework” that ADD diagnoses are aimed at healing. The conclusion questions the legitimacy of ADD outside of the various technological interfaces that make the disability visible as a public problem and considers the intimate connections between neoliberalism, ableism, and the contemporary university.

Keywords

neoliberalism affect technologies of the self auto-archeology attention deficit disorder

At the age of 8, I was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD), a “learning disability” which, in conjunction with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), is said to presently afflict over 11% of the U.S. population (Visser et al., 2014). At the time of my diagnosis in the mid-1980s, however, ADD diagnoses were much less common. With symptoms said to include irritability, unpredictability and impulsivity, disorganization, and forgetfulness, ADD became both a curse and a blessing for my suburban middle-class family (Hallowell & Ratey, 2005).¹ As a curse, my diagnosis corroborated feedback from teachers and family friends that my “lack of motivation” and “lack of self-control” were genetically inherited traits that were not going to disappear any time soon.² Yet, as a blessing, my diagnosis enabled my parents to treat my behavioral patterns as signs of a biochemical imbalance, enabling my early “deficits” to be understood as objects of institutional, interpersonal, and pharmacological intervention. Through the identification of ADD as a learning disability that could be managed with proper medical and behavioral techniques, my unique disposition could now be accounted for in relation to a malleable network of ideals, norms, and targets, offering my parents hope that I could become “high functioning” within their increasingly anxious and high-stakes middle-class culture. This was a culture guided by dreams of entryway into Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) during elementary and secondary education and, ultimately, acceptance into a prestigious institution of higher education upon the completion of high school.

Today, as an associate professor at what some might consider a “prestigious” private university, it appears my parents’ wishes have come true. While lovingly referred to by them as “the absent-minded professor,” I imagine that, to the public, I appear relatively productive, and relative to what people who knew me as a child would have expected I must appear immensely productive. When interacting with me today, no one knows that at age 10, I repeated fourth grade or that from seventh to eighth grade I attended Thorton Academy, a private school dedicated to “bright children who learned differently”. No one knows that when I returned to public school at the start of ninth grade I was expelled after only one semester, or that for the remainder of high school I was “home-schooled” in conjunction with an institution that taught me very little. Nor do they know that from age 8 to 13 I was regularly placed on stimulant medications, or that in graduate school I returned to them as a way of coping with lifelong feelings of being undereducated, underresourced, and undervalued.

No one knows all of this, yet it is important that they do. As an “invisible disability,” ADD carries with it lifelong psychic and social ramifications, affecting the very capacities for individual expression and identity formation (Blum, 2015). As the number of ADD diagnoses increase, and ADD becomes an increasingly acceptable, even banal, cultural form, it is important to think critically about this learning difference and to pose difficult questions: Why, for example, has ADD only recently become such a pervasive cultural phenomenon? Whose desires do ADD diagnoses actually express, and whose desires are excluded? How much “choice” and “free-will” does an individual have in accepting or rejecting an ADD diagnosis? What would people’s lives be like had they never been so diagnosed?

As one attempt at engaging with these questions, this essay (re)presents my own experiences living with ADD as a child and adult to support a radically historical, contextual, and critical autoethnographic conceptualization of this learning disability (see Madison, 2011). Specifically, by building upon Ragan Fox’s (2010) “auto-archeological” method, a critical perspective that “unite[s] autoethnography and Foucault’s theories of discourse” (p. 140), my aim is to show how one way of conceptualizing ADD is as a “technology of the self” that aims at inculcating the everyday “folk sensibility” of neoliberalism (see Mirowski, 2013, p. 89; see also Brown, 2015; Foucault, 2010). As a “political rationality” that has become increasingly widespread since the late 1970s, neoliberalism is a paradigm of government that promotes market-based solutions to all social, political, and economic problems.³ From international trade agreements emphasizing borderless trade to social policies emphasizing the privatization of prisons, social security, and public education, neoliberalism believes that no state or sovereign entity can solve the world’s problems as efficiently and effectively as the “free market.” Yet the effects of neoliberalism are felt not only at the social scale of the state and civil society but also at the precognitive and prepersonal scale of affect and the body. Indeed, as Maurizio Lazzarato (2012), Brian Massumi (2014), and Martjin Konings (2015) all argue, a defining feature of neoliberalism is its tendency to invest desire with power in ways that are unconscious, intuitive, embodied, and prior to the socializing effects of disciplinary institutions (e.g., schools, prisons, factories, hospitals, barracks, etc.). My conceptualization of ADD as a technology of the self is, thus, an attempt to emphasize the material substrate between neoliberalism and the everyday performance of subjectivity. As a “governing apparatus” that guided my incommunicable childhood desires toward the calculative ends of productivity and efficiency, I will show how, for me, ADD helped inculcate a neoliberal social imaginary from the bottom up, encouraging me to freely choose a market-oriented subjectivity through the modulation of my body’s affect (Chaput, 2010; Greene, 1998; Swenson, 2013).

To communicate this narrative about ADD, I have organized what follows into three sections. In the first section, I discuss in more detail my methodological perspective, which builds upon Ragan Fox’s “auto-archeological” method and makes a theoretical case for reading disciplinary power, technologies of the self, affect, temporality, and ADD, as nodal points intersecting a more pervasive and diffuse neoliberal political rationality. The two remaining sections (re)present periods in my life when the role of ADD in disciplining my sense of selfhood felt particularly prominent: my involuntary introduction to ADD, which began in preschool and culminated with my enrollment at Thornton Academy in seventh grade, and my voluntary identification with ADD during college and graduate school. When (re)presenting the former period, I stay true to Fox’s auto-archeological method by combining autoethnography with diagnostic material produced by my psychiatrists and interviews I conducted with my parents, Seymour and Regina Hanan.⁴ I regard these “sovereign” institutional and parental voices as central to my own early account of ADD given how young I was at the age of my diagnosis and the role they played in my own “discovery” of ADD. When focusing on the latter period, I reflect critically on the stimulant medications I took and self-help books I utilized as a graduate student to gain traction over “my disability.” In this primarily autoethnographic section, I show how the diagnosis that led me to feel separated from my bodily rhythmicity as a child later became a freely chosen “technology of the self” for grappling with the economic pressures that characterize the contemporary neoliberal university. I conclude by discussing the importance of neoliberal technologies to materializing ADD as a public problem as well as the intimate connections between neoliberalism, ableism, and the contemporary university.

Auto-Archeology Meets Technologies of the Self

Ragan Fox’s (2010) “Tales of a Fighting Bobcat” is a powerful example of how the power analytics of Michel Foucault and autoethnography can be brought into conversation with one another. Reflecting on his experience as a gay student at Cy-Fair High School during the early 1990s, Fox develops an “auto-archeological” method to demonstrate how “the school’s discursive structures inhibit and promote different identity positions” (p. 124). He is particularly interested in depicting how Cy-Fair disciplines and regulates the performance of gay identities. As someone who endured repeated acts of ridicule, bullying, and humiliation—both inside and outside the classroom walls—Fox demonstrates, through tales from his own lived experience, how gay bodies are subjected to uneven treatment based on their performative deviation from dominant heterosexual standards and norms.

At the theoretical and methodological level, Fox’s auto-archeological project hinges on a consideration of how spatial arrangement sutures the discursive performance of identity and subjectivity. In his account, we learn how the architectural design of Cy-Fair—from its hallways to its particular configuration of bodies and objects of knowledge in the classroom—provide opportunities for some students to thrive and other students to suffer violence and dehumanization. At the other end of the spectrum, his consideration of Cy-Fair’s physical layout brings attention to what Kendall Phillips (2002) terms “spaces of invention.” Through a description and diagram that depicts the way Cy-Fair restricts the movement of its students, we learn that Fox moved in relationship to oblique pathways at school both as a means of survival and as a way to express his unique lived experiences.

By combining the power analytics of Foucault, institutional artifacts from Cy-Fair, and autoethnography, Fox’s project produces invaluable insights. Too often, Foucault is interpreted as a systems theorist who emphasizes the top-down effects of power on the “molding of docile bodies.” In Fox’s account, by contrast, we learn about the performative and psychic dimensions of disciplinary power. Through Fox’s autoethnographic narratives, which position his lived experiences in relationship to the heteronormative spatial arrangement of Cy-Fair, it becomes clear that disciplinary power works upon the individual body in a way that is always contingent, material, historical, affective, and discursively unstable. At the same time, because he conceptualizes discipline as a primarily spatial manifestation of power, his auto-archeological perspective limits our appreciation of the important role played by temporality in the performative and psychic enactment of disciplinary power. If, as Foucault (1976/2012) argues, discipline is a “technology that . . . targets individuals right down to their bodies . . . [and] behaviors” (p. 9), then it is important to conceptualize this modality of power not only in relationship to space and institutional enclosure but also in terms of the more immediate, vital, and affective logic of temporality and rhythmicity (see Binkley, 2009).

One way of accomplishing this task, I argue, is to shift the focus of auto-archeology away from spatial enclosure and toward a different disciplinary problematic that Foucault (1988) terms “technologies of the self.” As the techniques, processes, and rituals that bodies perform on themselves to gain traction on themselves as autonomous, self-sufficient, and unique individuals, technologies of the self facilitate an auto-archeological consideration of power at the affective register of bodily rhythmicity. In contrast to a socializing and spatialized conception of power, which exercises discipline through institutional prohibitions and juridical constraints, bodies performing technologies of the self provide a vector for discipline that is immanent to the pulsations, intensities, and affective flows that comprise the body prior to its territorialization by symbols and society (see Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987). While technologies of the self always materialize in relation to other technologies—such as those concerning sign systems, economic and biological (re)production, and political sovereignty—they are unique in the emphasis they place on the body’s own unconscious and autopoietic desire(s).

Technologies of the self is a particularly valuable framework for an auto-archeological perspective that seeks to appreciate ADD in the context of neoliberalism. Although Foucault’s (1988) classic examples of technologies of the self are from the Greco-Roman period and include techniques such the stoic practice of journal writing and the Christian confessional, it becomes clear in texts such as Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1975/1977) and the first volume of The History of Sexuality (Foucault, 1984/1990) that technologies of the self multiply and proliferate in modern, liberal society. As an architecture of power that coheres around the “instrumental rationality” of the capitalist mode of production (see Adorno & Horkheimer, 1944/1997; Arendt, 1958/1998; Heidegger, 1954/2013; Marcuse, 1964/2013; Weber, 1905/2013), liberal society requires technologies of the self for the management and economization of human passions and desires. Through its cultivation of a secular environment that affectively disavows the promise of eternal afterlife, liberal society has traded in practices of religious and spiritual asceticism for cultural technologies of selfhood that generate surplus-enjoyment out of finite time and temporality (Kordela, 2013; Žižek, 1989).

This technological and temporalizing articulation of reality becomes particularly clear in the secular context known as neoliberalism. As Foucault argues in the Birth of Biopolitics, a key aim of neoliberalism is to produce a subject that relates to herself as “human capital.” As an affective gaze, or orientation toward society, that seeks to “entrepreneurialize its endeavors, appreciate its value, and increase its rating or ranking” (Brown, 2015, p. 36), human capital speaks to a capitalist epoch where all aspects of human life—from genetics and marriage to education and nationality—can be quantified and measured in economic terms (Greene, 2004). Whereas the Fordist-Keynesian regime of power that preceded neoliberalism required “paternal” disciplinary institutions (e.g., the school, the factory, the hospital, the barracks, etc.) to inculcate the instrumental rationality of capitalism, neoliberalism is able to bypass this logic through the everyday circulation of technologies of the self that (almost) instantaneously temporalize affect and bodily rhythmicity. From the cell phones we carry (with fertility planning apps such as Choice and navigational apps such as Google Maps—both ultimately aiming to increase the efficiency and predictability of cyclical movement via the standardization and economization of time) to the social media websites we visit (which use algorithms to order, sort, and profit from our hobbies, interests, and passions) to the self-help books we read (to “make the most” out of our finite time on earth), we reside in a condition where myriad technologies of the self freely circulate with the aim of producing an economizing subject (homo œconomicus) “whose interest is such that it converges spontaneously with the interest of others” (Foucault, 2010, p. 270).

Based on my lived experiences, ADD is a powerful example of how this new technological articulation of selfhood can manifest. Despite appearing discursively as a “learning disability,” I conceptualize ADD, from an auto-archeological perspective, as a neoliberal technique of power that disciplines the body through the management and modulation of affect. As an example of what Mitchell Dean (1996) has termed a “reverse salient,” I show how my ADD diagnosis served to inculcate a larger neoliberal social imaginary from the bottom up by allowing me to economically order and structure aspects of my subjectivity that deviated from economic order and structure. Through the affective and mnemotechnical introduction of a “deficit” that became “the focus of [my] attention and innovation” (Dean, 1996, p. 57), ADD worked in tandem with a range of other neoliberal technologies of selfhood (e.g., familial narratives, psychiatric evaluations, stimulant medications, self-help books, etc.) to generate a freely chosen market subjectivity.

Narratives of Order, Narratives of Deviation, ADD, and the Chaos of Correction

12 October 2005

It hurts looking back on all this documentation.

Seeing my childhood as wrought with malignancy.

Why don’t I remember all this evil?

All of this negativity that has haunted my psychic life.

It sits with me now like a puzzle.

Myriad narrations yet none my own.

Why am I so removed from these experiences?

All I feel now is a certain form of theft and robbery.

Who Is Joshua Hanan?

I was born in Grand Junction, Colorado, to two of the most loving parents: Gina and Seymour. Gina, a 4′11″ kindergarten teacher, with short, sandy blonde hair, a petite frame, and a small ski-sloped nose, had waited her whole life to have a child. Just like her own mother, Gina’s life revolved around the distinctly American and middle-class dreams of her progeny: the vision that her children would achieve more (economic and social) recognition in their lives than she herself had achieved. So, after reading countless books on “effective” parenting, talking to other mothers and friends about their experiences raising children, and, of course, teaching kindergarten for the past several years, Gina felt prepared for her “biblical prodigy,” Joshua.

Seymour, on the contrary, a 5′6″, petite-framed man with a Mediterranean complexion, mustache, and short, curly hair, had a different take on childhood. Still a child himself in many ways, Seymour knew that having a family meant he would finally have to be settled. Seymour was a very loving father, a quality evidenced by his wonderful 15-year-old daughter, Jennifer, from a previous marriage. Nonetheless, when informed of my mother’s pregnancy, Seymour notoriously asked, “how did that happen!” (S. Hanan, Personal interview, October 3, 2005).

Things were relatively stable during the first few years of my life, and when I was three, my family and I moved to Bellevue, Washington, so that my father could take a job at Boeing. Yet, as my mom notes in one of our first interviews on the topic of ADD, there was something different about me from the start:

I had always felt like you were a little anxious as a child . . . I remember showing up one day 20 minutes late to pick you up from Montessori school, and you were crying hysterically. This, of course, was not a one-time incident; you often worried about your family. Still though, it wasn’t until we moved to San Diego that things became complicated. (G. Hanan, Personal interview, September 24, 2005)

On Things Becoming Complicated

In preschool Joshua was identified by his teacher as being somewhat hyperactive and having limited attention. (Learning Difference Center, 1991, emphasis added)

He had few friends . . . little interest in workbooks, and was noted to be toe walking. (Wiseman, 1990)

We moved to San Diego in 1987, and you started kindergarten at Jerabek; you also went to the preschool next door, which was run by that lady Jan Atley. She had a lot of trouble with you. She was sending me notes all the time telling me how you were disruptive . . . She said there was a time after class when they had circle time, and you were constantly bothering other kids. . . . I always thought I could talk with you . . . [but] Jan Atley said what you needed was a good spanking. (G. Hanan, Personal interview, September 24, 2005)

There is little I recall of preschool even though I’ve been driving by that old Victorian building for over 30 years now. Naturally, Dr. Wiseman and my mother know much more about my experience there than I do. Letting them speak for me, therefore, is in a sense speaking for myself. All I have to ground these early childhood experiences are fragmentary narratives from my family and behavioral diagnoses from my psychiatrists that, in a sense, have become my own contested identity. I do not like what Dr. Wiseman says about me, particularly the connections she draw between my “toe-walking,” hyperactivity, and lack of popularity. Yet my sense of selfhood is entangled with her narratives, and the decisions my family made to “develop a plan of attack” that could “help Josh function better” (Learning Difference Center, 1991).

An Introduction to Discipline: Kindergarten

In kindergarten work was sloppy. . . and [he] continued to be very distractible. (Wiseman, 1990)

Now in kindergarten class your teacher didn’t have a big problem with you. But she felt you read slow. I said to her I thought you were very bright and maybe even gifted. But she said oh no, if he was gifted he wouldn’t be reading so slow. (G. Hanan, Personal interview, September 24, 2005)

Ms. Evergreen, the kindergarten teacher. Another name etched into what has come to feel like an increasingly plastic and amorphous identity. I sense the classroom faintly; the smell of crayons and a dark stale ambience. Yet, like Dr. Wiseman, I approach Ms. Evergreen from a detached distance. Who I was at this time in my life seems guided more by the regimes of selfhood that my family and I were “prescribed” by these various authority figures than any “authentic” inner voice laying hidden behind a secret curtain. As I listen to this narrative, it, in a sense, becomes part of my lived experience. How can a kindergartner have an identity anyway? Are these narratives not the very “folding of the exterior” that generated my ADD identity? (Deleuze, 1988, p. 97)

The Pill Pusher: First Grade

Day care [sic] tantrums, school call-outs, and concentration problems continued in first grade, resulting in consultation with Dr. Zoro. (Wiseman, 1990)

At Miramar Ranch Elementary [which you transferred to in the first grade]. . . you actually did pretty well. But you were still having a little difficulty. . . focusing so we took you to get a diagnosis for Attention Deficit Disorder [which] is right around when . . . [the] disorder was kind of coming in vogue. We saw a psychiatrist named Dr. Zoro, and he had us do a history on you . . . I told him how there was depression on my mothers’ side . . . and he thought maybe you had some mild depression [as well]. He suggested that you take [the anti-depressant] Imipramine. And we figured we’d try it. So you took Imipramine in first grade, and it was kind of a mixed bag. We weren’t really sure of the results. It seemed like a hit or miss. (G. Hanan, Personal interview, September 24, 2005)

Dr. Zoro—now this is where I start to feel some immediacy. I can remember what he looked like, too, his thin black beard, penetrating eyes, and angelic white medical garb. I remember sitting in his office cubicle, taking one diagnostic test after another. He would show me pictures with parts of the image missing and ask me to arrange the images in a particular order that told a story about myself. I remember how he spoke to me with incredulity and what felt like a layer of disrespect. Through his “medical gaze,” I recall feeling like a prisoner, some disobedient criminal who needed to correct and reform his ways (Foucault, 1963/1994). Well fuck you, Dr. Zoro, and your sterile pills, too!

Citizen of the Month: Second Grade

This year there have been increasing concerns regarding poor peer relations, insensitivity and selfishness, lack of motivation, and progressive aggression and lack of self-control. (Wiseman, 1990)

So then came second grade and you started out on the Imipramine, but . . . it seemed like you were having a hard time focusing again. And you were doing some really weird things like irritating other kids, making weird noises, and doing all sorts of other crazy things at school. So I wasn’t sure if the Imipramine was making things better or worse at this point. So we went and saw another psychiatrist named Dr. Wiseman in second grade and she suggested you try a different kind of medicine. She said maybe you should try Dexedrine . . . a stimulant. Then, we also had you tested by the resource specialist and she found something that might have contributed to your strange anti-social outbursts . . . she determined you had a really big deficiency between your verbal ability and your performance ability. . . . So . . . she worked with you [also]. (G. Hanan, Personal interview, September 24, 2005)

October 3, 2005

As I stand here in front of the closed orange door of Room 221, peering at the entryway of what I believe was my second grade classroom, memories flood my mind. Mrs. Winters, with her short, curly, orange hair, seemed so kind to me. She always complimented me and made me feel special. She even gave me a “citizen of the month” award at the end of the year, a modern sacrament of recognition that my mom had been waiting for her entire life. Yet, I suspect these very acts that made me feel “special” actually reinforced my feelings of detachment from my early educational experience. Between the resource specialist, the foul tasting Dexedrine that I’d leave the classroom to take throughout the day, the physical exercises Dr. Wiseman routinely asked me to perform, and the overly kind words of Mrs. Winters, I could feel, in my sinews, that primary education was a space where I did not belong. How I long to repeat this grade over again, and show my mother, Mrs. Winters, and Dr. Wiseman that I can succeed without the medications, mechanical techniques, and strategies that were hoisted upon me.

Becoming Goofy: Third Grade

Currently, Joshua is perceived as a bright child with excellent reasoning and verbal skills, with difficulties with impulsivity, inattention, and unpredictability of moods. He has no friends, fights constantly with his [younger] sister, and when angered, slams the door, becomes verbally abusive and [throws] tantrums. He tests discipline and responds to it with manipulation or tantrums. (Wiseman, 1990)

Then we get to third grade and you had Ms. Stanley as your teacher, and again you were doing pretty well academically, but you were displaying kind of goofy behavior and you were kind of turning the other kids off . . . . And at this point the kids were getting meaner, and they were starting to notice that you were acting a little strange and they were picking on you. You were still on Dexedrine. So we weren’t sure if it was making matters better or worse. Then you had fine motor tests done, and they determined that you had a hard time writing. (G. Hanan, Personal interview, September 24, 2005)

I’m getting to the point now where I feel a little movement and autonomy coming back. The amnesia is slowly eroding. But all these “crazy,” “strange,” and “manipulative” behaviors that Dr. Wiseman and my mom talk about feel like a puzzle to me. I was just being “me,” right? I do recall some of the outbursts I made such as “bazumbah” and “willie watcha.” I think I just enjoyed getting attention from my funny antics and had a lot of energy I wanted to express. And truth be told, I just didn’t feel like keeping my mouth shut. I mean, in all honesty, why should I? To this day, I have never felt like the classroom should be a place of restriction and discipline. I always wanted its doors to be open to “noise” rather than just communication (see Ballif, 1998).

Repetition and Absence: Fourth Grade, Two Times

Then, in fourth grade we thought we’d put you in a private school because we thought you’d get more specialized attention. So you went to the Jewish Academy. Yet instead of making the situation better, it actually made it worse . . . A lot of the students there didn’t like you. You were irritating them, and they wanted to do really good work . . . So then we put you in this place called the Accelerator Academy for the next six months, and they didn’t believe in any kind of medication. So I believe you were off medication at this time. But it still was not working very well. You were still acting weird. You had outbursts and didn’t want to cooperate with them. So they would constantly try to manipulate your behavior, and it wouldn’t work. So by the end of the year, you were asked to leave. Then when you went back to Miramar Ranch [the following year], Ms. White [the principal] said we should put you in a fourth grade GATE class. She wasn’t sure how much school you missed, so you repeated the grade. And you actually did really well in that class . . . I think you were back on Dexedrine again at that point. (G. Hanan, Personal interview, September 24, 2005)

As Dr. Wiseman’s medical narrative wanes and subsides, my own story comes into focus a bit more. I recall the fourth grade quite vividly. I remember the Jewish Academy, where I was attacked and bullied regularly. I recall being labeled a “moron” and an “ass” simply because I asked “weird” questions when most of my peers sat silently and consumed the teacher’s information. I still have a scar on my arm from Randy, that jerk at the Jewish Academy who pushed me onto the concrete for being a “whiner” and a “girly.”

Oh and then there was the Accelerator Academy. What a nightmare! I remember the day I was expelled:

“Joshua, please read your Worldly Wise passage out loud for the class.”

I don’t want to, I’m tired of reading. I don’t understand the story. Why doesn’t Eric get to go to the zoo?

“Joshua, I don’t even want to deal with you today! Get out of my class, and go back to the Principal’s office where you belong.”

[Jumping under the table and hiding] NOOO! I won’t go there again. You send me there all the time. [Crying.] I hate that place! All they have me do there is lick envelopes that they use for marketing purposes! Just leave me alone. . . .

The Secret Is Out: Fifth Grade

In fifth grade, I believe you continued to be on Dexedrine. You were in Mr. Kipling’s class, and I don’t think it was as good of a year for you because the kids were becoming cliquish. And they were making fun of you because you were acting goofy. I don’t think they liked you very much. (G. Hanan, Personal interview, September 24, 2005)

You don’t think they liked me very much? You can say that again. I still remember the tension in that grade like it was yesterday. I got into my first fight that year and also went completely unnoticed by my first childhood crush. This was the first time I think I really wanted to fit in; to feel the frictionless travel and movement around the school that my fellow classmates seemed to be experiencing (Fox, 2010). Yet I remember feeling very rejected and marginalized. God it was painful. And that FUCKING medication, which I can still faintly taste in the back of my throat. I would leave class every day at 1 p.m. so I could go down to the nurse’s office and take my second dose of stimulants. It felt like everyone knew what was going on; that they all knew I was the “ADD child.”

The Last Straw: Sixth Grade

Then, sixth grade was a disaster. That’s when you went to Eastside [Middle School] and again you were acting really goofy, and the kids once again didn’t like you. And if you’re asking me what I mean by goofy, I’m not sure what that means, but you weren’t a very serious, focused student. You would make outbursts, and the kids didn’t really like you. So by the end of the semester, I filed a grievance with the school district because I didn’t feel like your needs were being met. And, I won the grievance, and then you went to Thornton for two years. (G. Hanan, Personal interview, September 24, 2005)

Looking back, sixth grade truly does seem like one of the most negative years in my life. I still remember Gregory calling me a “faggot” in the locker-room and whipping me with a towel. I also remember being physically assaulted on the playground by Melissa, one of the most attractive and popular girls in my class. I wonder whether things could have been different. It is hard to say whether all the therapy, pills, and special treatment I received from my teachers made my experience better or worse. As my dad notes about my sixth grade teacher:

And then there’s that stupid thing that lady [teacher] said when you were in sixth grade. She tells the whole class you have to be sensitive to Joshua. . .he has ADD, and you have to realize he’s a misfit or something like that. She didn’t use that word, but that’s what she implied by that. You had this thing where you didn’t fit into this category. And most of the kids didn’t like you . . . I really felt like you were rejected by a lot of friends and family growing up. (S. Hanan, Personal interview, October 3, 2005)

A Natural Attraction: ADD Meets the Discipline of Rhetoric

As I reflect upon the narratives surrounding my childhood diagnosis of ADD, it is difficult to make sense out of the experience. Certainly, there are emotions that linger with me up to the present. But what is most startling to me, as I revisit the voices of my mother and father, as well as the various psychiatric documents used to (over)determine my ADD diagnosis, is the absence of my own voice. I vividly remember as a child moving through various institutional spaces—from classroom, to the psychiatrist’s office, to family dinner table—but what sticks out most is a certain temporality, an affective pulsation of fear, unease, and uncertainty that something was not right with me. I recall a desire to resist, to reject the regimes of selfhood that felt foisted upon my body. But I also recall, over time, settling into my ADD diagnosis—not necessarily as a way to “improve” or “correct” my behavior, but as a way of concluding that the normal pathways of society were not for me. As teenager, for example, I found identification through non-normative activities. I became a vegan, anarchist “crust” punk and involved myself with unconventional activist groups such a Food Not Bombs and Earth First!. Rather than try to become accepted by the “popular” crowds, who had continually rejected me since kindergarten, I came to embrace cultures and experiences that stood on the fringes of society.

What stands out as particularly troubling and difficult to reconcile in the present, however, is the stark contrast between how I reacted to my ADD diagnosis as an adolescent, and how I came to freely embrace the “learning disability” as an adult. What felt like an incomprehensible punishment and imposition that I sought to resist as a child and teenager became, in my adult years, a vehicle for self-empowerment and self-expression. This shift in perspective seems particularly vivid around the time I transitioned to college. Unlike elementary school, which disciplined my body for thinking and acting against the norm, college felt open to a variety of cognitive dispositions and world-views. In fact, in some of my humanities classes, thinking critically and participating in activism seemed to even be encouraged.

Nowhere did this sentiment become clearer than during my third undergraduate year at Humboldt State University. I was enrolled in a required major class called “Introduction to Rhetorical Theory,” and I was expecting to have minimal interest in the topic. Yet, after only a few class sessions, I became intrigued by the subject matter. Part of this enthusiasm, I can still recall, stemmed from the way “the subject of rhetoric” aligned with my subjectivity as an ADD-diagnosed child and teen. Rhetoric gave me the vocabulary to think critically about my early encounters with my diagnosis, turning this ostensibly genetic “neurochemical imbalance” into a technē of power, persuasion, and coercion. Whatever the particular details of the alignment were, by the semester’s end I knew I wanted to further study and ultimately teach rhetoric. The “weird,” “goofy,” “crazy,” and “strange” child who “didn’t fit into a category” now had a queer and disabled language of his own called “rhetorical theory” (see Dolmage, 2016).

By the time I began working on my master’s degree in rhetoric at San Diego State University, however, I quickly learned that a life dedicated to the study of persuasion and power was not immune from its own institutionalized manifestations of power and persuasion. In addition to instilling in me an insecurity that my troubled educational experience as a child and teenager put me at an intellectual disadvantage relative to my peers (who, at least on the surface, seemed to have chosen an academic career partly because of their previously successful educational experiences), pursuing a Master of Arts in Communication Studies taught me that, to secure a job as a professional rhetorician, I would have to publish my ideas in “peer-reviewed” journals. As a technology aimed at the production and dissemination of “expert” knowledge, publishing in journals felt terrifying to me given that they appeared, in many ways, as concerned with “measurement” and “assessment” as the diagnostic tests I was forced to take as a child—both at school and in the psychiatrist’s office.⁵

My anxieties around academia became even further intensified when I began working on my Doctorate in Rhetoric and Language Studies at the University of Texas. I had a passion for studying rhetoric, that much was certain, but, as one professor said to me over Facebook (in an act that reminded of the institutionally sanctioned elitism and bullying that I endured during middle school), my “cards were stacked really low.” Hence, in what can only be described as a painful and ironic twist, it was upon working through cruel affects of failure and insecurity during my Doctorate program in rhetoric that I decided to get re-diagnosed with ADD. Realizing that, without a network of self-help resources, I would be vulnerable to the “market discipline” of securing a tenure-track job, I began voluntarily meeting with a psychiatrist and seeking out ways I could become a more “productive” and “efficient” graduate student. I was confirmed during my first psychiatric visit as having “Adult ADD” and was immediately prescribed Adderall, a stimulant medication similar to the Dexedrine I had previously taken as a child. Initially, the drug provided a powerful boost to my focus and productivity. Whereas my childhood experimentations with similar medications are clouded by memories of peer judgment, a bitter taste in my throat, a racing heart, and the inability to fall asleep at night, during graduate school, I felt the Adderall was an “edge” that could help me economically compensate for my lack of education as a child and teenager. As a medication (molecularly similar to cocaine and methamphetamine) that produced feelings of concentration and euphoria, Adderall acted as a pharmacological “technology of the self” that buttressed and supported the “technology of the self” that was ADD. Through its capacity to help me bypass the usual feelings of fear, dread, and doubt surrounding academia, Adderall not only assisted me in working more efficiently but for longer and more prolonged periods of time. Who needed rest, relaxation, or even sleep when I could take Adderall and work like a well-neurochemically-lubricated-machine all the time!

My enthusiasm for Adderall, however, soon waned. Whereas initially, a 10-mg dose supplied clarity, confidence, and focus throughout the day, my tolerance increased exponentially after several months. A 10-mg dose was now required simply to sustain my previous “base-level.” I also found myself increasingly detached from social surroundings as I became interested exclusively in work and productivity. With the neurochemical bathing in dopamine that the Adderall provided, my world materialized through a lens of cost-benefit analysis. Any deviation from graduate studies and the pursuit of publications was a waste of valuable time, and if I did take time off to go to a concert or go on a date, they needed to provide the biggest possible “bang for my buck.” Under the influence of Adderall, my sense of temporality radically shifted. I transitioned from someone who valued a range of work and non-work activities into someone who valued productivity and efficiency “around the clock.”

Realizing that this legally endorsed activity seemed unhealthy for my long-term psyche and mental health, I read books on ADD to learn about the pros and cons of long-term stimulant use. Most of the books were proponents of medication use, and virtually all of the books communicated that long-term usage of Adderall was “safe” and “normal.” Consider the following endorsement of stimulant medication found in one the first books on ADD that I read as an adult:

From a medical standpoint taking [stimulant medication for ADD]. . .is not a difficult decision. Stimulant medications, the main group of medications we prescribe to treat ADD, are as safe as penicillin or aspirin when they are used properly. First used in 1937, they have been around for more than 60 years, so we have extensive research data on them and decades of clinical experience. (Hallowell & Ratey, 2005, p. 241)

Safe, so they say, but in what sense? While it is one thing to be safe from the impartial standpoint of a “medical gaze” (Foucault, 1963/1994, p. 9), it is quite another to be safe in a way that respects the “singular rhythms” of my body (Muckelbauer, 2009, p. 33). While I cannot speak for others, in my experience, taking stimulants as an adult was anything but “safe.” Although it reinforced a view popular since Francis Bacon’s day (i.e., that science can be used as a form of power to extract excess energy and value from nature and the body), stimulant medications left me feeling physically and emotionally depleted. At the time, however, I was unable to value the voice of my body over the voice of experts. Thus, when it came time to either quit Adderall or request an increased dosage, I chose the latter.

In addition to reinforcing my decision to remain on stimulants, in spite of the increasingly toxic affect that they cultivated, these popular books on ADD provided me with “self-help” strategies to assist me in being a more successful graduate student. While some strategies were indeed helpful, I found that, as with the medications, they also led me to feel increasingly robotic, mechanical, and economizing. These self-help strategies essentially indicated that if I wanted to make my “life go smoother and easier . . . [I needed to] identify a problem, something that makes our lives more difficult and less productive, . . .[and] come up with a strategy to help” (Puryear, 2012, p. 15). The irony was that in identifying these “problems” aimed at making my “life go smoother and easier,” I had created an economy for aspects of my life that were formerly off-limits to market discipline. Thus, if taking Adderall was not enough motivation to work like a machine “day in and day out,” the self-help strategies ensured that any remaining “downtime” would best be used in “preparation” for success during my marathon working days. The temporality that, as a child, led me to despise authority figures and want to avoid the classroom at all costs was now infusing my body with a new internalized (and paternalizing) authority figure who sought to formulate “everything, everywhere, in terms of capital investment and appreciation” (Brown, 2015, p. 176).

As shameful as it feels to admit, and as difficult as it is to commit these words to paper, I maintained this masochistic regimen for the remainder of graduate school, throughout my 2-year appointment as a non-tenure-track assistant professor at Temple University, and well into my current tenure-track position at the University of Denver. Eventually, as the ups and downs of Adderall-fueled-workaholism took an increasing toll on my physical and mental health, I concluded that I must give up my investment in being a rhetoric professor in order continue professing rhetoric. Since my first “introduction to rhetorical theory,” my desire was to teach and research rhetoric no matter what the “cost.” But the paradox was that to study “the art of persuasion” I had unconsciously persuaded myself that productivity was all that mattered.

For over 4 years now, I have been free of Adderall and, interestingly, feel more in touch with my voice as a rhetoric scholar than at any time during my ADD regimen. I still likely work far more than I should. And I still subtly crave the feelings of focus and euphoria that initially came with taking Adderall. But I know I can never go back. I know now that neither the institutional sanction the drug enjoys nor the psychiatric voices that spectrally haunt my own adolescence and adulthood know what is best for me and my body’s singular rhythms.

Conclusion: On Neoliberal Detachment

This essay has explored my involuntary and voluntary identification with ADD as child and adult. Using a revised version of Ragan Fox’s auto-archeological method, I have shown that one way to conceptualize ADD is as a technology of the self that aims at inculcating the everyday folk sensibilities of neoliberalism. Through a consideration of how my own affect and bodily rhythmicity fueled my early and late diagnoses with ADD, I have shown that the disciplinary power exercised by this “learning disability” can be conceptualized less in terms of spatial enclosure and more in terms of the everyday imperative to economize time. While institutional enclosure (such as the psychiatric and educational spaces that I moved through as a child and adult) undoubtedly played an important role in my encounter with ADD, what seems exceptional about the diagnosis was the way it took on a life of its own by wounding, and then economizing, my body’s unconscious and prepersonal affects and desires (Brown, 1993).

As a consequence of these insights, I draw two conclusions. First, there is the distinct possibility that “learning disabilities,” such as ADD and ADHD, are co-constituted by the matrix of practical reasoning that makes the disability “measurable” as a public problem (Greene, 1998, p. 31). While I do not presume to speak for others struggling with ADD and ADHD—many of whom I’m sure benefit significantly from diagnosis and medication—this essay shows that, in the case of my own lived experiences, AD(H)D is entangled with a neoliberal social imaginary that governs bodies through the vital management of affective energies (Chaput, 2010; Swenson, 2013). Whereas previous manifestations of capitalism required paternal disciplinary institutions to inculcate the instrumental rationality of capitalism (a reality first illustrated by Marx [1867/1990] more than 150 years ago), neoliberalism is a political rationality that seeks to immanently harness the energy, dynamism, and vitality of life itself (Foucault, 2010, 1976/2012; Rose, 2009). As my own narrative about ADD shows, the affective imperative to economize life was an encounter that began prior to my entryway into preschool and organically evolved into a technology of selfhood that lives on in me today as an associate professor of rhetoric at the University of Denver. In a world where the “invisible” pressures and forces of the self-regulating market have become the quintessential expression of discipline, AD(H)D diagnoses strike me as an ideal way to produce imminently governable neoliberal subjects who perceive themselves to be autonomous from any particular historical context or apparatus of power.

The second conclusion to be drawn relates to the often-overlooked relationship between neoliberalism, ableism, and the critical humanities. If my localized experience is at all indicative of how other academics with learning differences feel, the critical humanities have failed in creating an inclusive academic space for what Silberman (2015) calls “non-neurotypical” bodies. While the performances of gender, sexuality, class, and race are rightfully receiving increased attention in the critical humanities (see, for example, Calafell, 2012), we should be equally reflexive about the implicit and explicit ways these disciplines perform ableism (Dolmage, 2017). Writing for and getting articles published in academic journals is not a feat that comes with equal ease to everyone, and yet, in today’s neoliberal academy, it has never been more central to “measuring” one’s academic size, virility, and prowess (Gunn, 2008, pp. 85-86). This economizing of critical humanistic scholarship is not only symbolic (and regularly exploited as a form of “cultural capital”) but also material. As an integral component of neoliberalism, the critical humanities participate in the competitive ordering and sorting of scarce resources (Chaput, 2008; Harney & Moten, 2013). They determine who earns “secure” tenure-track positions and who remain laboring precariously as instructors and adjuncts. They decide who shall tell their stories and who shall not. They inadvertently encourage some of us to consume stimulant medications, and others to simply break down, in the never ending pursuit of “doing what we love” (Tokumitsu, 2014).

The critical humanities needs to be more reflexive about their perpetuation of ableism as well as their participation in neoliberalism’s political economy of knowledge. Neoliberalism is not an ideological superstructure that scholars can transcend through the cultivation of reason and a thriving public sphere. Nor is it a cold and austere market logic they can comfortably critique from the sidelines. Neoliberalism is warm to the touch. It is embodied through the air that we all breathe. It is an everyday folk sensibility that must be combated at an equally affective, corporeal, and immanent level if we are to resist its poison.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

ORCID iD

Joshua S. Hanan

Author Biography

Joshua S. Hanan is an associate professor of rhetoric and communication ethics at the University of Denver. His scholarship examines the biopolitical function of institutions, technologies, and economic rationalities in the governance of public communication.

References

Adorno

T. W.

Horkheimer

(1997). Dialectic of enlightenment. London, England: Verso. (Original work published 1944)

Arendt

(1998). The human condition (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1958)

Ballif

(1998). Writing the third-sophistic cyborg: Periphrasis on an [in]tense rhetoric. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 28(4), 51-72. doi:10.1080/02773949809391130

Binkley

(2009). The work of neoliberal governmentality: Temporality and ethical substance in the tale of two dads. Foucault Studies, 6, 60-78.

Blum

L. M.

(2015). Raising generation RX: Mothering kids with invisible disabilities in an age of inequality. New York: New York University Press.

Brown

(1993). Wounded attachments. Political Theory, 21, 390-410.

Brown

(2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Calafell

B. M.

(2012). Monstrous femininity constructions of women of color in the academy. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 36, 111-130. doi:10.1177/0196859912443382

Chaput

(2008). Inside the teaching machine: Rhetoric and the globalization of the U.S. public research university. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

10.

Chaput

(2010). Rhetorical circulation in late capitalism: Neoliberalism and the overdetermination of affective energy. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 43, 1-25. doi:10.1353/par.0.0047

11.

Dean

(1996). Putting the technological into government. History of the Human Sciences, 9(3), 47-68.

12.

Deleuze

(1988). Foucault ( Hand

, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

13.

Deleuze

Guattari

(1987). A thousand plateaus ( Massumi

, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980)

14.

Dolmage

J. T.

(2014). Disability rhetoric. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

15.

Dolmage

J. T.

(2017). Academic ableism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

16.

Foucault

(1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison ( Sheridan

, Trans.). New York, NY: Pantheon. (Original work published 1975)

17.

Foucault

(1988). Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault ( Martin

L. H.

et al ., Eds.). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

18.

Foucault

(1990). The history of sexuality: An introduction, volume I ( Hurley

, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage. (Original work published 1984)

19.

Foucault

(1994). The birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medical perception. New York, NY: Vintage. (Original work published 1963)

20.

Foucault

(2010). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979 ( Senellart

, Ed., & Burchell

, Trans.). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

21.

Foucault

(2012, September 12). The mesh of power. Viewpoint Magazine, 2. Retrieved from https://www.viewpointmag.com/2012/09/12/the-mesh-of-power (Original work published 1976)

22.

Fox

(2010). Tales of a fighting bobcat: An “auto-archaeology” of gay identity formation and maintenance. Text and Performance Quarterly, 30, 122-142. doi:10.1080/10462931003650153

23.

Greene

R. W.

(1998). Another materialist rhetoric. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 15(1), 21-40. doi:10.1080/15295039809367031

24.

Greene

R. W.

(2004). Rhetoric and capitalism: Rhetorical agency as communicative labor. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 37, 188-206.

25.

Gunn

(2008). Size matters: Polytoning rhetoric’s perverse apocalypse. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 38, 82-108. doi:10.1080/02773940701779744

26.

Hallowell

E. M.

Ratey

J. J.

(2005). Delivered from distraction: Getting the most out of life with attention deficit disorder. New York, NY: Ballantine.

27.

Harney

Moten

(2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study. Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School of Business. Retrieved from http://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/5025

28.

Heidegger

(2013). The question concerning technology. In Scharff

R. C.

Dusek

(Eds.), Philosophy of technology: The technological condition (2nd ed., pp. 305-317). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. (Original work published 1954)

29.

Konings

(2015). The emotional logic of capitalism: What progressives have missed. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

30.

Kordela

A. K.

(2013). Being, time, bios: Capitalism and ontology. Albany: State University of New York Press.

31.

Lazzarato

(2012). The making of the indebted man: An essay on the neoliberal condition ( Jordan

J. D.

, Trans.). New York, NY: Semiotext(e).

32.

Learning Difference Center. (1991). Speech and language evaluation. San Diego, CA.

33.

Lemke

(2015). Foucault, governmentality, and critique. New York, NY: Routledge.

34.

Madison

D. S.

(2011). Critical ethnography: Method, ethics, and performance. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

35.

Marcuse

(2013). One-dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. New York, NY: Routledge. (Original work published 1964)

36.

Marx

(1990). Capital, volume 1 ( Fowkes

, Trans.). New York, NY: Penguin. (Original work published 1867).

37.

Massumi

(2014). The power at the end of the economy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

38.

Mirowski

(2013). Never let a serious crisis go to waste: How neoliberalism survived the financial meltdown. London, England: Verso.

39.

Muckelbauer

(2009). The future of invention: Rhetoric, postmodernism, and the problem of change. Albany: State University of New York Press.

40.

Nauert

(2010). Socioeconomic link to ADHD. Psych Central. Retrieved from http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/06/02/socioeconomic-link-to-adhd/14238.html

41.

Phillips

K. R.

(2002). Spaces of invention: Dissension, freedom, and thought in Foucault. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 35, 328-344.

42.

Puryear

D. A.

(2012). Your life can be better. Minneapolis, MN: Mill City.

43.

Rose

(2009). The politics of life itself: Biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

44.

Silberman

(2015). Neurotribes: The legacy of autism and the future of neurodiversity. New York, NY: Avery.

45.

Swenson

K. A.

(2013). Lifestyle drugs and the neoliberal family. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

46.

Tokumitsu

(2014). In the name of love. Jacobin. Retrieved from https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/in-the-name-of-love/

47.

Visser

S. N.

Danielson

M. L.

Bitsko

R. H.

Holbrook

J. R.

Korgan

M. D.

Ghandour

R. M.

. . . Blumberg

S. J.

(2014). Trends in the parent-report of health care provider-diagnosed and medicated attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: United States, 2003-2011. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 53, 34-46.

48.

Weber

(2013). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. New York, NY: Routledge. (Original work published 1905)

49.

Wiseman

D. D.

(1990). An evaluation of Joshua Hanan. San Diego, CA.

50.

Žižek

(1989). The sublime object of ideology. London, England: Verso.