Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I would like to welcome you to the one hundred and twelfth installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and exclusion, as well as personal and structural gaslighting in philosophy in particular and in academia more generally; resistance to ableism, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.

The land on which on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional ancestral territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabeg nations. The territory was the subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and the Ojibwe and allied nations around the Great Lakes. As a settler, I offer these interviews with respect for and in solidarity with Indigenous peoples of so-called Canada and other settler states who, for thousands of years, have held sacred the land, water, air, and sky, as well as their inhabitants, and who, for centuries, have struggled to protect them from the ravages and degradation of colonization and expropriation.

My guest today is Cal Nelson. Cal recently graduated with his M.A. in Philosophy from Duquesne University. In a forthcoming chapter entitled, “In the Margins of One’s Own Life: A New Theory of Masking ADHD,” he discusses his social experiences with ADHD and how ADHD changes the constitution of the self. Cal’s current work involves mobilizing his experiences with ADHD as critiques of phenomenological accounts of the united self with a continuous experience. In his free time, Cal trains in martial arts, consumes Star Wars media, and makes handmade books.

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Cal! Please tell us about your background and how it led you to the philosophical work that you do.

I was born and raised in the Dallas-Fort Worth Area of Texas, where I also got my undergraduate degree in philosophy at the University of Texas at Dallas. I was always a very intellectually engaged child and teenager, both in spite of, and due to, my ADHD. From the fifth grade to the eighth grade, I went through a period during which I broke more than 7 bones, had 4 soft-tissue injuries, and caught a mutant strain of whooping cough. This, frankly, sucked, but it gave me a lot of time to exercise my mind and explore my interests online through whatever articles or YouTube videos I could find on my central interest at any time.

[Description of photo below: Surrounded by trees, Cal, who is looking off in the distance, stands near a body of water in a park of green grass and cement paths.]

My first serous intellectual interest―which I first developed in middle school thanks to the internet―was in theoretical physics. I got interested in philosophy via Nietzsche later in high school when I started grappling with the religion in which I was raised and the existential issues that followed. Coming from a Catholic upbringing, Nietzsche’s critical remarks on religion and morality broadened my horizons so radically that it was impossible to go back to the comparatively narrower world of Catholic theology. I also explored the French Existentialists at this time; but, in my mind, they were only interesting to the degree that they agreed with Nietzsche.

I originally sought my undergraduate degree in physics, not philosophy, but I signed up for an intro to philosophy class in my first semester. After that semester ended, I quickly switched to philosophy, with a brief stint in psychology in between: I had expected to learn about psychoanalysis there and was quite disappointed. Nietzsche remained the most important influence on me for the latter years of high school and the first couple years of my undergrad; then, a feminist philosophy class taught by my first mentor Dr. Katherine Davies totally shifted my perspective to focus on liberation, which led me towards anarchism and radical politics.

My interest in anarchism brought me to the work of the egoist anarchist Max Stirner, whose notion of the self as the “unique” struck a chord with me and prompted some important ontological questions about the nature of individuality. This questioning constituted an ontological/metaphysical shift in my thinking, which lead me to Deleuze and 20^th-Century French Philosophy, where, for the most part, I remain today. Once I got to Duquesne for my graduate degree, I started seriously engaging and experimenting with phenomenology, which has been both a positive and negative influence for my thinking about ADHD.

Although I was diagnosed with ADHD in the fifth grade, I fully realized the central role that it plays in my life only recently. I resisted using medication in middle school because I was not aware enough to really notice the positive effects that it had on me, and I was resistant to the idea that I had to change myself to conform to the expectations that others had of me.

I rediscovered the positive effects of my meds when I joined my professor’s reading group in my junior year of my undergrad. Reading was naturally difficult for me, so I committed to heavily annotate to help keep me on task. I scheduled out enough time for me to read 10 pages a day to finish the sections for our next meeting. It took me about 2 hours each day to read those 10 pages. But there was one day when I noticed my meds on my desk and figured that I might as well try them to see if they helped. I was not optimistic that they would, but I very quickly proved myself wrong. I read those 10 pages in 30 minutes, which motivated me to read another 10 pages to finish the chapter. From then on, I have done at least 4 hours (which is how long my meds lasted) of reading every day, almost without exception or breaks. This event made me realize that my ADHD actually had a pretty significant impact on my life, but I still did not know much about it. I mostly thought of it as a problem with reading and focusing rather than a holistic condition.

I realized how much ADHD permeated every aspect of my life a little over a year ago, after I had a breakup and was having a lot of trouble controlling my emotions. Previously, I had seen something online that talked about executive dysfunction and emotional dysregulation, and some dark recess of my mind remembered that ADHD is an executive function “disorder.” I did some research and I discovered that the difficulty with my emotions and my ADHD were connected, along with a long list of other things that I just considered weird aspects of my personality. Since then, I decided to shift my focus to talk about ADHD philosophically. At some point in the future, I plan to discuss the pervasive and marginalizing invisibility ADHD has in our society―which only recognizes it in a caricatured form―and the kind of epistemic injustice done to diagnosed and undiagnosed ADHDers.

Cal, as you describe it, your current work focuses on the ontological implications of ADHD for subjectivity and consciousness, drawing in part on your own experiences of ADHD. How would you describe this work? Have you encountered resistance to this work in your department, such as scepticism about the category of ADHD?

My approach to employing ADHD experiences in philosophy is in some ways pseudo-phenomenological, at least in method. I start from one specific experience or kind of experience that I have―usually one that is frequent enough in my daily life to be normalized to me―and I do an analysis and interpretation of the dynamic logic of the experience. I say “pseudo-phenomenological” because I’m not at all interested in the essential structure or eidos of the thing in question; rather, I am trying to carefully describe what is happening/what my consciousness seems to be doing, which is necessarily process-oriented for me. In doing this, I try as hard as I can to draw out the ramifications of this experience to its fullest extent.

For example, I recently wrote on the experience of working-memory failure from ADHD, arguing that this kind of collapse of the organization of time in my experience presents me with an instant of experience that lies beneath and resists its temporal situation. I describe it as sub-sisting time, rather than ex-isting within the structure of time. The ontological implications on which I want to focus arise from the basic question: “What does this experience say about the being of this instant such that it can behave in this way?” To continue with the example, what does this experience in which I encounter a subtemporal instant say about my being (and in this case, being generally)? The natural conclusion in this case is that the being in question does not have a necessary relation to temporality, that there is a distinction or separation between them that enables being to exceed time. Thus, we cannot transcendentally ground being in time like Heidegger (who I object to in the work that I am describing) wishes to.

Fortunately, everyone in the community at Duquesne University has been very supportive of my work. Several of the professors have really gone above and beyond in helping me get it started, and the grad student community has been very accepting and inclusive in their willingness to learn more about the difficulties that ADHDers face. Once I started learning more about ADHD and my own experience with it, I began to notice all the little ways that ableism seeps into conversations and influences where people draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable kinds of social behavior. There are instances where it can be dismaying, and even hard to be around, but I’m very lucky that everyone is for the most part willing to learn when you point out this ableism to them.

Since I finished my chapter on masking and the harm that it has caused me, I have been making intentional efforts to increase people’s awareness of my ADHD and to not mask in regular social situations. So, even if there were some people with doubts about ADHD as a category, I would like to think that my constant obsessive pacing and my generally mentally scattered demeanor has given them some concrete evidence in favor of its legitimacy.

How in particular does your work on disability interact with your work on Max Stirner’s egoist anarchism?

In my opinion, Stirner is an underutilized figure for empowering marginalized voices. Stirner’s philosophy is based on the idea that what we are as unique beings is fundamentally non-identical; so, no essential or fixed determinations of what we are in abstract can speak to us as individuals. This anti-essentialism allows Stirner to critique nationalism, gender and racial essentialism, biological determinism, religion, all forms of morality, and much more. He was a surprisingly progressive dude for a German man in the 1840s. His commitment to non-identity and the lack of fixity to our abstract determinations allows us to discuss, in much the same way as Foucault, the historical production of these identity categories that we find ourselves using. However, Stirner does so while maintaining a resistance to our own historical determination.

For Stirner, there is always an excess to possible determination―the unique―and this unique pervades all that we treat as stable and fixed in order to destabilize it. So, we can understand the ways in which disabilities are products of a given historical context, while also recognizing the way in which our determination by that historical context is “false” or illusory, despite having real concrete effects. We are simply the one who causes these effects due to the influence of an ideological apparatus that structures the ways in which we encounter things in the world in terms of certain ideas rather than concrete reality.

With my own disability of ADHD, oftentimes its very easy to feel like even my thoughts and feelings, which neurotypical people typically identify as parts of who they are, are alien and hostile to me. It feels like the exterior can invade the interior, but that there is a qualitatively different form of interiority where “I” am that recognizes this lack of control enough to break through to understand that this external determination is not mine. I can distinguish myself from what I feel or think because I know that there first must be something here that is the condition for this feeling and thinking. I am not determined by my brain, even if the way my neurodivergent brain is structured determines and conditions all that is given to me in experience. Stirner would say that my brain and what it gives to me simply constitute my property which I can determine and use how I please, even if I have to deal with countervailing forces to do so.

My work on Stirner grants me many insights that I bring to my work on disability and neurodiversity. For example, I’m working on an article/presentation that critiques how the notion of a neurominority ossifies a sense of a self as a kind of essential determination of one’s identity. But my work with Stirner goes much deeper into my ontological interests too. Stirner shows me how to break apart the dome of consciousness to see the underlying creative contingency upon which it is based.

In our preliminary discussions about this interview, Cal, you indicated to me that you are a third-degree black belt in karate and have been a martial artist and instructor for more than twelve years. In mainstream philosophy, more attention has in recent years been paid to the philosophical dimensions of martial arts, for example, with the publication of Barry Allen’s Striking Beauty: A Philosophical Look at the Asian Martial Arts. How does your training in karate inform your work in philosophy? Does this training in karate, as well as philosophical engagement with it, inform or shape your work on disability?

Karate has been a very positive force in my life and has shaped my perspective on a variety of personal, philosophical, and pedagogical issues that all have their own ways of dovetailing with disability. On the most personal level, it is one way in which I feel like I can come to a kind of accord with a body that I spend the rest of my day in a constant battle to exert my will over. Karate gives you a way of moving with your body to understand how it exists in the world and how you can build bridges from our world of intentional temporally oriented consciousness to its world of immediacy and activity.

This relation may sound very mind-body dualistic, but it is such only on the most surface level. The relation is much more akin to activity (body) and self-reflexive activity/reactivity (mind). Both are forms of action, but self-reflexive actions have a certain way of perpetuating themselves to create a kind of internality that pure activity does not have. Here ADHD would be a breakdown of self-reflexive activity and its ability to perpetuate itself across time to provide one with a sense of a united self, which also has the consequence that there is no agent capable of grounding actions of sustained effort, like focus or working memory.

In line with this personal way of attuning myself with my body, karate has also had a philosophical influence on me insofar as it confronts me with a practice that resists conceptual intelligibility. From my experience as both a practitioner and an instructor, there is a very defined pattern to how people progress in sparring practice. Everyone first spends a couple belts (each one equating to roughly 10 weeks of instruction and practice) learning the basics to a sufficient level that they will be ready to spar. Once it comes time for them to put on some gloves and duke it out, they find it is extremely difficult to approach the sparring in a headspace in which you conceptually think out and plan each move, explicitly notice patterns and plan responses, and are aware of your footwork and moderate your distancing. This sounds like a lot to keep in mind in the moment, and it is a lot to track, but the problem is not with the quantity of information.

The problem is rather that you are approaching a thoroughly physical and corporeal activity in an abstract conceptual way. Every student will struggle in sparring if they are locked within this approach. The way that students progress is to learn to not think about what they’re doing, but rather just do it. You learn that all the ideas that you have about fighting are just a distraction for the actual practice of it. The final step in this progression―after one learns to reinvent all their prior ideas of fighting in their bodily actions―is to take those concrete practices of fighting and bring them into an explicit conceptual framework that they can use to navigate a fight in a more systematic and strategic manner. To talk about a concrete practice such as a fight in a meaningful way requires that one throw out all such ideas to work through the practice of fighting to create the ideas for themselves. You must learn to drop an abstract way of looking at the world in order to invent a concretely bound linguistic register that remains tied to the practice in question.

As you mentioned, Cal, in a forthcoming chapter you develop a new understanding of neurodivergent “masking,” in part by distinguishing neurodivergent masking that is based on ADHD experiences from neurodivergent masking that is based on autistic experiences. Cal, please explain this new understanding of masking and what distinguishes it from ideas about masking that are widely accepted in communities of autistic people.

Generally, the definitions of masking that you will find in autistic communities or conversations are attempts to describe a conscious effort that one makes to control how they are perceived by neurotypical people, that is, to not appear as autistic. On this understanding of masking, these attempts require regulating one’s autistic traits to hide or channel them into some other socially acceptable behavior. The problem with this understanding of masking as a general definition of the term is that ADHD is in many ways a “disorder” of the ability to regulate yourself, which includes the regulation of one’s emotions and one’s attention. One aspect of regulated attention is the ability to direct your attention back on yourself to produce what we call “self-awareness” or self-consciousness. So, if we take this definition of masking as conscious self-regulation, we immediately see that masking should be impossible for those with ADHD in the instances in which they “need” to be masking. However, we ADHDers very demonstrably do mask, so the question then becomes how is this masking possible?

For ease, I refer to this autistic definition of masking as “transcendent masking,” because it has an implied transcendent structure in which I look down on myself to actively make decisions about what impulses or desires that I express. I contrast this to a form of immanent masking/self-regulation, which is a kind of internalization of one’s personal history of scorn, punishment, and exclusion on the basis of traits/symptoms that one cannot control. I argue that the internalization of these acts of exclusion constitutes the self as devalued in relation to the other, which causes one to defer to the other’s desires.

The self’s constitution as “lesser” than the other poses a problem for how the self can meet the other’s expectations, because the self’s contributions are never on the same level as these expectations and thus can never fully satisfy them. The devalued self can only fulfill the desires/expectations of the other by providing the other with the response implied in their initial demand. To go beyond what is given to the self would be to dissatisfy the other and risk punishment or rejection. Thus, the self is not in a position in which it can express itself as an equal to the other; it can only express a repackaged version of what the other gives it. This total deference to the other hollows out the self, which prompts an existential crisis when this devalued self attempts to reflect on itself. Self-reflection reveals that this hollowed self exists only as a reference to the other, having no sense of personal identity to fall back on.

This chapter is largely an attempt to understand the kind of masking in which I engage. I have seen a fair few ADHDers online confess to similar practices. It’s a kind of masking in which you lose all sense of who you are as a person out of this deeply ingrained deference to the expectations of others. It’s a feeling that you are valued as lesser than others and, because of it, you are never able to meet the expectations that mold you from moment to moment. It’s the fundamental question that you must ask yourself when, after others have hollowed you out for your entire life merely for the sake of their own comfort, you are finally confronted with the fact of your individuality. You finally must ask yourself, who am I? What do I want? And you realize that there is not enough “you” left to answer because a lifetime of pain has taken up its residence inside yourself.

I develop a strategy to break out of this destitution. Drawing on Stirner’s notion of the insurrection, I articulate an ethic/tactic of the “micro-insurrection,” which is a way of strategically breaking the expectations that others have of you in different contexts with transgressive humor. When done well, humor acts as a great tool to break social expectations in a joyous affirming way. Humor can also be a means to make those around you explicitly aware of the implicit expectations that you are breaking from, even doing so forcefully by making someone laugh about these expectations and simultaneously feel a sense of guilt over doing so. That is, humor allows people to become aware of the internal dynamic that enforces those expectations upon them: shame and guilt.

Cal, how would you like to end this interview? Are there topics or concerns that we have not discussed that you would like to address? Would you like to recommend some books, articles, blogs, or videos that readers and listeners can seek out for more information about the issues that you have addressed?

Firstly, I would like to thank you for inviting me to discuss ADHD issues. ADHD is in a very paradoxical position in our society; there is very high awareness that it exists but almost no knowledge of what having it is like and what struggles it entails. I greatly appreciate you giving me a platform on which I can help to set the narrative straight. In this respect, I would like to encourage everyone to do research on ADHD. Russell Barkley and his YouTube channel is a great source for the scientific side of the issue. I would recommend watching How To ADHD on YouTube and browsing online ADHD communities like r/ADHD on Reddit to learn more about the day-to-day social and institutional issues ADHDers face.

I would also like to direct people to my YouTube channel where I house the recordings of the first two Max Stirner Symposia. As of now, I plan on holding the third symposium next Spring. The theme will very likely be “Max Stirner and Marginalization,” which is intended to include the intersection of his work with any marginalized perspectives, including with respect to disability. We post the CFAs for the symposium on PhilEvents, but if anyone wants to ensure they do not miss the next posting, they can follow us on Twitter (@UnionOfStirners) or fill out the form to join our email list here. Finally, if anyone would like to get in contact with me to discuss my work, my email is CalNelson1923@outlook.com.

Cal, thank you so much for your incredibly interesting responses throughout this interview. I found them fascinating. Your work holds a lot of promise.

Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Cal Nelson’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted.

The entire Dialogues on Disability series is archived on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY here.

From April 2015 to May 2021, I coordinated, edited, and produced the Dialogues on Disability series without any institutional or other financial support. A Patreon account now supports the series, enabling me to continue to create it. You can add your support for these vital interviews with disabled philosophers at the Dialogues on Disability Patreon account page here.

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Please join me here again on Wednesday, August 21, 2024, for the hundred and thirteenth installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at s.tremain@yahoo.ca. I prioritize diversity with respect to disability, class, race, gender, institutional status, nationality, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews.