Thoughts on Postmodern Critical Theory, Political Theology, and Skepticism

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Before I jump into it, I'm going to include a citation for an article about the burden of proof. For those of you interested in debate, this article is a non-debater's take on where burden of proof comes from. Read it here. You'll need library access.

I'd like to discuss a few concepts that have come up during my time in my master's program. While looking into criticisms of Applied Behavior Analysis I ran into an article I found familiar. During my debate career in high school and college I encountered a lot of critical theory in debates. Most of the time the critical theory was used to negate some sort of policy proposal by the United States federal government. In fact, most of the debates I was in involved some sort of contest between critical theory and a federal government policy. Admittedly, most of the time I was defending the military and demonizing Russia and China in debates, so that's fertile ground for criticism.

As I moved on and grew tired of defending the military and American hegemony, I found my arguments about solar power, single-payer healthcare, and offshore wind also faced the critical theorist. It was inescapable. Critical theorists are excellent rhetoricians. Truly, they are the best, and I'd like to draw attention to three writings from Dr. Robin Roscigno, who has applied the critical lens to Applied Behavior Analysis.

I write all of this out of respect for Dr. Roscigno's work. I have been fascinated and moved by the articles I've read and I simply want to add my two cents.

Roscigno, R. (2019). Neuroqueerness as fugitive practice: Reading against the grain of applied behavioral analysis scholarship. Educational Studies, 55(4), 405–419. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2019.1629929

In “Neuroqueerness as Fugitive Practice” Dr. Roscigno argues Applied Behavior Analysis serves the biopolitical function of identifying children worthy of life and those worthy of death in the Foucauldian sense.

Roscigno's critique is formidable. It is excellent prose, approaching poetic rhythm, that weaves together an incredibly wide range of critical theorists. The paper is organized to the word. Not a single beat is missed.

For example, Roscigno states:

Essentially, I am interested in resistance in the most impossible of situations — the everyday fugitivity of children who occupy seclusion rooms, clinics, segregated special education classrooms, prisons, etc.

The proximity between special education classrooms and prisons, and the word “segregation,” demonstrate a unique arrangement of words, deliberately chosen and assembled to create maximum emphasis.

It also threatens to flatten and essentialize the fugitive experience. The prison is not the special education classroom. In one you go back home. In the other, you go back to your cell. Yesterday I asked my middle schoolers, “what's the difference between school and jail?” and they said “they're the same.” I won't even try to pretend that I understand what's going on here.

The comparison uses metaphor to draw the reader closer to an expansive reading of fugitivity that simultaneously opens it to semantic meaninglessness. This is not a criticism of the word “fugitive,” but it is a criticism of the linguistic indeterminacy and overextension of meaning. I don't blame academics for writing this way — it's catchy, and fun, and provocative — but I will remind everyone that it's just marketing.

The concept of the teacher as a “biophilanthropist” who conditions students to further participate in the accumulation of wealth is an obvious dog whistle to the Marxist critique of capital accumulation. It discourages the use of ABA to help a student find gainful employment because, under Roscigno's theory, it results from the biopolitical drive to create new neoliberal subjects.

What follows is not a critique of Roscigno's article, but it is a critique of the University Industrial Complex, which utilizes critical theory to market and generate the next generation of consumers and producers of academic papers.

The closest alternative offered is “fugitive queerness,” which at worst offers no roadmap to community life in the workplace, and at best requires conformity to an identity category defined by refusal of the neoliberal world.

We can test refusal as a community market. There's epistemic refusal at the personal level and communal refusal as a political strategy.

As a community, refusal is nothing short of a workers' revolution in favor of communism. There's no point in delaying the inevitable conclusion.

At the personal level, refusal is a Che Guevara T-shirt or the latest Giroux book.

I ask for practical suggestions.

Is neuroqueer fugitivity consistent with private property? Is teaching a student with autism to respect the property of others biopolitical management? How does fugitivity encourage those with communication and social needs to participate in the workers' union? When I teach my students to be fugitives, how should I model that? Can I prompt it? How will I know when my students are neuroqueered? Should I expect a decrease in turn-taking when everyone has become a fugitive? Is neuroqueer fugitivity a personal commitment or a community one?

I've seen the power of words. I've seen what happens when a summer camp of graduate students at a flagship research university exposes young hearts and minds to trendy words like “neuroqueering” or “fugitivity.”

I've seen what happens when the teenage anti-institutional spirit and pubescent rebellion latches on to critical theory. The whole world falls apart. Nothing is spared from the vengeance of teenage angst.

The children are hungry. They are thirsty for meaning and purpose. The destruction of tradition in favor of identitarian buzzwords like “queer” or “trad” or “left-wing” or “eco-marxist” or “effective altruist” requires an us-versus-them ideology divorced from an observable empirical reality that begets unity between friends and enemies.

So I ask myself. Why do we write critical theory? Why do we read against the grain? What do we want to teach our students? Our children? Who was the audience of this paper? Other graduate students? A teaching faculty?

Is this scathing indictment of ABA supposed to improve the lives of people with disabilities?

The second article I found was “Your Autistic Child Can Have A Great Life. Here's How” (Roscigno, 2021). It's a short piece that is actually the script of a TED Talk.

The conclusion states:

No one benefits from your fear of Autism except the people who want to sell you the antidote. The REAL antidote is accepting your Autistic child for who they are & then getting them the support they need. Schools can work to create more inclusive, accepting environments for Autistic students. Governments can enact policies that benefit Autistic people across the lifespan — not just as children. We can all work to unlearn ableist, limiting beliefs about Autism. You don't need to pay for hope when it's sitting right in front of you.

I love this idea. An autistic friend is hope, not fear, and a gentle special educator is as much an advocate as they are a teacher.

Lastly, if you made it this far, you get to fall down an even deeper rabbit hole: Dr. Roscigno's 2023 PhD dissertation at Rutgers University.

Roscigno, R. (2023). The history and development of applied behavioral analysis in the treatment of autism: A critical perspective [Doctoral dissertation, Rutgers University]. https://doi.org/10.7282/t3-dj63-cg42

The concept is the Autism Industrial Complex, which borrows from the Military Industrial Complex.

In this dissertation we find a history of ABA as a market. As a debater would say, it is historical materialism, textual psychoanalysis, and postmodern geography all rolled into one big book.

To me it seems as if it is a logical extension of the critique forwarded by Richard Foxx and James Mulick in the textbook Controversial Therapies for Autism and Intellectual Disabilities. Foxx and Mulick argue many of the fads and pseudoscientific treatments we find today are also products of market failures.

Here is my take.

The rise of postmodernism in education fractured teaching tradition in favor of critical rediscovery. The resulting confusion evolved into a market to fill the void left behind by radical refusal of any pedagogical method wedded to “the old ways.”

Unfortunately, this disposal of thousands of years of collective wisdom, passed down through generations of struggle and experience, reproduces the very problems tradition resolved.

The postmodern skeptic toward “archaic” spiritual truths is the same one who manufactures trendy and marketable ideologies in the university to fill a market gap created by godlessness.

The deconstruction of old-school political rights in favor of trendy and marketable buzzwords based on the aesthetic of identity are the stickers a teacher buys at Target to reinforce learning. When those reinforcements become the end, the marker, the identity, then the model has truly succeeded in creating biopolitical automatons.

This is not the time for skepticism. The postmodern project approaches completion with the dissolution of empiricism, authority, and institutional credibility.

ABA is under attack from both sides. From the right for its “expensive and unproven treatments,” and from the left for its “trauma and disenfranchisement.”

Special education is under fire from both sides. From the right for “indoctrinating children in left-wing ideology,” and from the left for “perpetuating status quo hegemonies.”

The persecution of the science-based special educator is linked to postmodern spiritual neglect. The ideologies that replace liberatory, tolerant community life demand the sacramental sacrifice of spirit to the idol of marketable refusal.

A child needs a spiritual education. Otherwise, they will fill that need with ideology. When ideology fails or ceases to amaze, nothing is left except dissatisfaction and the urge to bite the teacher and taste the echoes of the flesh of God.

ABA can't replace the authentic expression of spirit, but it is much closer in proximity than skepticism. Aestheticizing the progress made by insurance providers, special education advocates, laborers in congress, and parents to correct the failures of human relationship and markets teeters on the knife's edge of semi-constructive criticism and nihilism.

The fear used by the Autism Industrial Complex is a deep, primordial, and ancient enemy. Today, it takes many forms: ableism, heteronormativity, racism, sexism, xenophobia. Postmodernism has given it many names. Fundamentally, however, it's the same force humanity has battled since time immemorial.

The solution is also ancient. It is older than fear itself. It is hope. Not in the romantic sense of the word, but in the old-school sense of the word. It's the hope that requires a daily commitment. The hope that requires a choice on a day-by-day, hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute basis.

Postmodernism has given hope many new names: “ancestral lifestyle,” “neuroqueer fugitivity,” “swiftie,” “normative resurgence,” “ethic of care,” “queer suicide terrorism” (<3, Puar), “eco-socialism,” or “alterlife.” Each one demands a commitment to a politic, identity, or music category by which “ethics,” “subjectivity,” or “pedagogy” are formed. But it all inspires the same classical force. When truly thrown into the praxis of debate and politics, each one of these alternatives regresses into a political theology — a vague shell of the thousands of years of spiritual development we've inherited.

The creation of a “new” industrial complex creates the problem (supply). Now, we face the question, “what do we do about it?” (demand). Fortunately, the solution, though highly demanded, has infinite supply. Best of all, it's free.

You don't need to pay a professor, spiritual guru, ABA therapist, debate coach, whatever, to teach you what you've always had inside you.