Unsettling Idiopathy: Performativity and the Queer Brain

• In Event: Creative Misfits - II: Creating Categories: Disability, Agency, and Identity

Abstract

Despite the gradual accumulation of scientific knowledge that purports to “know” the brain, it remains a slippery and enigmatic thing; its arrangements and activities simultaneously proliferate knowledge and stop it in its tracks. This presentation explores the various enactments of the term “idiopathic,” approached as a diagnostic technology with explicitly neurological connotations. Idiopathic describes knots of slippery symptoms that provisionally adhere in events and/or bodies. I propose that the linguistic and material indeterminacy embedded in the term is productive of a neurodiscourse that seeks to harness that which remains just out of reach.
The never fully successful marking of the unknown allows for a relational analysis of a dynamic, queer brain, where the actions of idiopathic brain matter complicate the diagnostic paradigms that set the terms of intelligibility for idiopathic bodies. Diagnosis assumes that symptoms can be captured in descriptive language; this is what idiopathic brains challenge. What does it mean to enact an “idiopathic” brain that can only be articulated in strings of incoherent descriptive statements and metaphors that never quite hit the mark?
The notion of idiopathic neurosubstrate describes the queer materiality of brains: queer in that it challenges binaries and other boundary-making projects, radically shifts the terms of identity and subjectivity, and resists categorization. It paves the way for a distinctly idiopathic analysis of brain matter: a way of meeting and conversing with neurosubstrate on its own terms.

Author

• Sydney Neuman, York University