Examiner Report: M. Remi Yergeau

Dissertation: Sheena Bernett, Composing with the Event—Moving Toward Neurodiverse Perception/Sensation

10 January 2023

Comments:

Composing with the Event is a project that refuses form. It shuffles across discursive boundaries, effecting a critique of normative convention through its very composition. Among its primary interventions is to elucidate how neurotypicality manifests as a discursive regime. One of Bernett’s most crucial claims is that any discursive regime is a neurotypical one. The concept of the neurotypical — as it unfolds across pages, multi-mediated propositions, and surrounding entanglements — is one that demands languaging. As Bernett compellingly echoes
(literal-material echoes), neurotypicality is not a state or identity, but rather an obliterating force. It is an obliterating force precisely because to neurotypical (in the verb sense) is to reduce. These reductions, Bernett shows us, are the reductions that attend representation, symbolicity, categorization, and filtering — the sorts of motions that languaging depends on in order to effect
its norms.

In Composing the Event, neurodiversity is always-emerging. As with neurotypicality,
neurodiversity is not a property that one holds or a thing or object that can contained/be contained. Rather, the neurodiverse is an expansive mode of relation. Importantly, Bernett notes, neurotypicality cannot exist without neurodiversity: these terms are not polar opposites, but are rather co-constituted. Playing with and simultaneously rejecting form, the thesis lurches, spits, pauses, and digresses. For instance, Bernett draws our attention both to the footnote as a digressive form as well as the potentiality of citational practices as modes of activation rather than neurotypical norms for social-academic discourse. This sideways movement, to use a term from Jay Dolmage, works to expand the multi-sensory features of the project, such that digression is a neurodiverse feature rather than a neurotypical bug.

During the defense, there are some questions that I would be eager to learn Bernett’s thinking and perspective on. For example, I am interested in Bernett’s continued reflections on clarity (p. 9) and clustering (p. 41), among other moves that are described as being (wholly) neurotypical. I wondered, at times, if there might be room or possibility for conceiving clustering or clarity as having neurodiverse iterations. (In this, I am wondering about tics and spasms, which cluster and ripple; or perseveration, which might be thought about as a clarity without recognition or audience or meaning or purpose?) 

There is so much to praise in this project: As a neurodivergent reader, I feel seen. The prose activates a form of languaging that draws from autistic repertoires of co/composing. (As I read, I often wondered whether de/composing might serve as another mode for thinking through dis/relation and life!) Bernett’s amethodology and critiques of neurotypical empiricism resonates with other moves within (and without) critical disability studies in the arts and humanities, especially scholars, artists, and activists who advocate that disability is neither subject nor object but rather a way of sensing. 

The propositions in the thesis complicate, revise, and undo what comes before. There is a pronounced commitment to composing with the event throughout the thesis, which is an incredible feat.