Diagnosis and the Procession of Extinction: The Subversive and Instructive Attenuations of Being/Nonbeing Within the School

Introduction

How does diagnosis condemn the individual within/of the determinable limits of being (recursively producing/maintaining the aberrant/cripped as the very limits of being/nonbeing)? What is this confused register/determination of the diagnosed: this simultaneous existence/nonexistence of the cripped that maintains the Rights of Man as productive and delineatory (Kafer 2013; Thorneycroft 2020; Wynters 2003)? Moreover, how do the diagnostic processes within the school operate to define the diagnosed, the disabled, and the cripped into recursive insinuations of nonbeing as a means of producing the aberrant/inhuman as instructive? Within the educational landscape, the process of diagnosis occupies a pivotal role, acting as a guiding framework that categorizes, classifies, and delineates students as determinable/definable entities. This article will grapple with the intricacies of this diagnostic paradigm, aiming to unravel its significations, its multifaceted purposes, and its enduring effects within and without the confines of the educational space, playing at the limits of sense and what is determinable.¹ By adopting a unique vantage point rooted in postfoundational theory, critical studies, and crip studies (Agamben 1998; Deleuze 1990; Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 1987; Kafer 2013; Mbembe 2019; Yergeau 2018), my argument will delineate diagnoses as mechanisms of extinction (Adams 2020)—processes that orchestrate the subtle and subversive attenuation of certain individuals’ existential presence within educational contexts as instructive. Moreover, I will argue that the extincting of the cripped/aberrant via diagnoses within educational spaces also offers important insights into more aberrant possibilities/impossibilities of the cripped and the othered, gesturing toward animal studies, posthuman studies, and more radical possibilities/impossibilities for cripped politics that imbibe the extincted locution/dis-locution of the aberrant (Bailey 2019).

In the article, moreover, I will be interrogating diagnoses within/of a transdisciplinary framing of critical studies, postfoundational theory, and crip studies. In particular, crip studies consistently and continuously challenges/rebels against normative apparatuses of being, knowing, existing, and thought (Kafer 2013; McRuer 2006; Thorneycroft 2020). This framing/non-framing of crippedness intimates the queer theoretical challenge to heteronormativity and therefore interrogates compulsory abled-mindbodiedness as constituted by and constituting reality: how compulsory abled-mindbodiedness forms the foundation on which we construct reality (McRuer 2004). Even more so, by invoking a postfoundational framing, I will interrogate the normative productivity of reality, being, thought, and existence within/of the regimentations of discourse/sense (Deleuze 1990, 1994; Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 1987)—thereby locating the determinations of being/nonbeing and extinction within/of the discoursal/sensical play of diagnosis (the determinations of normative and abnormal existence). My central question navigates the enigmatic interplay between diagnosis and nonbeing, interrogating how diagnosis operates as a conduit for extincting students who bear specific diagnoses or persistently perceived conditions. Finally, I will integrate postfoundational theories with critical studies by engaging with the works of Mbembe and Agamben alongside Deleuze and Guattari. In a manner akin to a schizoanalytic intervention, I will more enfleshedly bridge and play with their sensical machinations. While both schools of thought, critical theory and postfoundational theory, offer unique ways to interrogate reality qua language/discourse (Agamben 1998) and reality qua materiality/flesh (Mbembe 2019), I will bend both schools to complement my cripped argument and the livable dimensions/non-dimensions/anti-dimensions of cripped experience as extinct-ed beings. As I delve deeper into this exploration, moreover, my focus—though inclusive of various manifestations of disabilities—will look toward intellectual and cognitive disabilities specifically, aiming to unveil the nuanced dynamics that underlie the classification and treatment of such conditions within educational contexts: their diagnoses (Smith 2012; Thorneycroft 2020), their segregated educations (Ferri and Connor 2005), their indocile bodyminds, the punishments inflicted upon them (Sullivan, Van Norman and Klingbeil 2014), and their made-unintelligible nonbeing (McRuer 2004).

In educational institutions, the process of diagnosis is endowed with a dualistic power of discoursal production and enfleshment, delineating nonbeing via the diagnosable and being as the as-of-yet undiagnosed. Moreover, while the conventional notion of extinction often conjures images of disappearance and annihilation, my exploration reveals a more intricate understanding of extinction. I posit that extinction, within the context of diagnosis, is a performative act—an ongoing, ritualistic performance that plays out within and without the boundaries of the educational realm and the classroom. Thus, extinction is accompanied by layers of violence, perpetuating a social and metaphysical annihilation that categorically situates disabled beings outside the boundaries of normative existence. This performative extinction is a discursive and semiotic discursion that extinguishes these individuals in a representational and visceral sense (Butler 2015, 2004; Jagger 2008); however, at the same time, such an extinction bends the dialectical productivity of being/nonbeing and casts the crip into an indeterminate space which will be interrogated later in the article as an immanent nonspace of potentiality (Bailey 2019; Kafer 2013).

By delving into this intricate interplay/intraplay amongst diagnosis, nonbeing, and extinction, I want to challenge the conventional understandings of extinction, being, politics, and education. My postfoundational and critical theoretical frameworks draw inspiration from the works of Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2004) and Achille Mbembe (2019), who conceptualize the concepts of homo sacer, bare life, the living dead, and necropolitics. Building on their insights, I will argue that diagnoses relegate livable aberration and irrationality to non-states of nonbeing and beyond the determinable limits of being/nonbeing (an in-between space/un-space that challenges the linguistic sensicalizations of Deleuze and Guattari, thereby speaking toward their immanence of immanence and the embodiments/enfleshments of new materialisms). Thus, this diagnostic process, akin to casting a spell, transmutes what was once perceived as normative beings into nonbeings and un-beings. Ultimately, I want to play with this embodied nonsense of un-being and crippedness from my own experience to gesture toward more radical impossibilities/possibilities via the cripped undead (de Sousa Santos 2014).

To organize the piece, (1) I will first ground my argument around the extinction of the cripped-nonbeing within the classroom space and the school. Therefore, I will argue that diagnostic processes determine/define the cripped-being as outside of being qua being—an interstitial determination of being/nonbeing or as the very limits of the human, the rational, and the agentic—discoursally and viscerally producing the nonbeing via diagnoses. (2) Second, I will ground my conceptual assemblages via Agamben and Mbembe. I will argue that diagnoses make-extinct the cripped viscera toward in-determinable categories of the living dead and homo sacer (Agamben 1998, 2004; Mbembe 2019). Moreover, I will complement the more critical theoretical positions from Mbembe’s works alongside the more postfoundational theoretical frameworks from Agamben’s works to more viscerally and intimately play with the immaterialities and materialities of cripped, extincted-being. For instance, I will use Deleuze and Guattari’s works, complementing and deforming/mutating all of their insights crippedly, to grapple with this connectivity betwixt critical theory and postfoundational thought as productive/anti-productive qua the cripped-being/nonbeing (a livable in-determination—a visceral immateriality of discourse). After these interrogative movements, (3) I will also introduce a differentiated theoretical/anti-theoretical locus as my final argumentative thrust to engage within/of this conversation via critical theory and postfoundational theory. However, unlike more normative theoretical frameworks, I will suggest that self(s)-theory (a theoretical/anti-theoretical impulse distending from crip theory and auto-narrative work) assumes a more critical and anti-normative position/dis-position in order to enliven my very arguments foundationally/unfoundationally (Yergeau 2018). For instance, as I play with self(s)-theory, I will refuse to speak beyond the immanence of my experiences as a means of producing a normative category of existence; moreover, given the intimacy of my experiences, I will gesture toward my own viscera/enfleshments of extincted-being and my location/locution of nonbeing² as a more radical means of producing/anti-producing cripped politics and knowledge (Deleuze and Guattari 1983). In other words, as my final argumentative thrust, I will preliminarily and experimentally reject the logics of diagnoses and attempt to remain indeterminable via crippedness, locuting/dis-locuting (gesturing toward) more aberrant impossibilities and possibilities for cripped politics, aberrant knowledges/dis-knowledges, and more in-determinable notions/non-notions of beings/becomings/nonbeings.

Extinction within the School

The concept of ‘extinction’ can be understood in various ways, encompassing both literal and more discursive dimensions. On one hand, it refers to the physical disappearance of groups or species, but on the other, it delves into the more abstract realms of discursive erasure—where ideas, identities, and ways of being are rendered invisible, irrelevant, and/or instructive as such. In education, extinction can be seen as functioning across multiple layers. First, there is the ever-present fear of physical extinction—the actual loss of lives or communities, which evokes a visceral response. But more subtly, there is an onto-epistemic extinction: the systematic erasure of certain types of knowledge and identities, particularly those of marginalized or disabled groups, that threatens their very existence as substantive (Adams 2020; Bailey 2019; de Sousa Santos 2014; Taylor 2023). This erasure often takes on a discursive form, where society or institutions, such as schools, actively refuse to recognize disabled positionalities as livable, valuable, and/or worthy of inclusion. These discursive acts of extinction are not immediately visible or violent in a traditional sense, but they do immense harm by denying the existence and legitimacy of disabled lives within educational frameworks and beyond, thereby limiting the ways in which education/mis-educations can be imagined and lived (Tilman 2022).

Within the context of education, moreover, these forms of extinction often operate in insidious and subversive ways. Rather than only overt violence (thought overt violence does take place), extinction within/of the school manifests as the gradual erasure of certain perspectives, knowledge systems, and ways of being. When only dominant voices, identities, and epistemologies are recognized as valid, the knowledges and experiences of marginalized groups—particularly disabled people—are systematically excluded—made to be extinct. This leads to what can be called a discursive extinction, where certain lives and ideas are pushed to the margins and ultimately disappear from collective recognition. These processes reinforce the idea that only certain forms of being and knowing are legitimate, maintaining a rigid and narrow understanding of what is considered productive or meaningful in educational spaces. As a result, the extinction of disabled ways of being and knowing is not just a side effect but a core feature of many educational systems that center the normal or able-bodied as the only meaningful/livable way of being.

To begin this particular interrogation, I will argue that the diagnostic processes within/of educational contexts, far from being a neutral endeavor, are harbingers of discursive, visceral, and onto-epistemic extinctions (Bailey 2019). As the diagnostic lens is turned upon students, for instance, their cognitive, emotional, psychical, genetic, and intellectual differences are carved into distinct categories that, in turn, dictate their educational possibilities and their experiences (Slee 2019). Diagnostic processes quite literally define cripped folks within the school as othered-nonbeings that flail at the edges of normative rationality, normative emotionality, and normative social adhesion (Bailey 2019). Moreover, the extincted-being of the cripped, as an instantiation (a performative erasure/affection) of nonbeing/extinction, is forced to endure physical and social violence, segregated realities and classrooms, ostracization more broadly within the school, and onto-epistemic eradication (Voulgarides, Etscheidt and Hérnández-Saca 2023). Cripped folk’s experiences within the classroom and school, as informed by diagnostic processes, include various forms of disappearance and disappearing, such as attempts to maintain/construe the extinction of the cripped-being toward disabled categories of nonbeing and extinction. Students with disabilities, for instance, face increased and more severe discipline (Sullivan, Van Norman and Klingbeil 2014); they are erased in segregated classrooms and schools (Ferri and Connor 2005); they face intensified and more violent peer-to-peer bullying (Devries et al. 2018); they are continuously and regularly ostracized within and without the school (Slee 2019); and their knowledges (their livable onto-epistemes) are ignored and/or repudiated as nonsense/irrational (de Sousa Santos 2014).

Even more so, such extinction of disability remands being/nonbeing as dialectically productive (a combinatory affair of discursion, materiality, and immateriality), remonstrating the disabled-nonbeing as a means of recursively producing the manufactures (the means of producing/maintaining) of their own extinction (Butler 2015; Jagger 2008). The cripped, through the processes of diagnosis, moves from an indeterminable notion/non-notion of being/nonbeing (an indefinable otheredness) toward a determined understanding of disabled-nonbeing. The diagnostic process, therefore, makes-extinct the cripped from the school/classroom and excludes their presence/viscera from the realms of knowledge-production, sociality, discourse, and materiality, literally removing their bodyminds from classrooms and segregating their diagnosed-nonbeings from any and all adherence to humanity, being, and/or rationality. While some students are rendered visible within educational systems/spaces (as apparently normative), others (cripped folks) are defined, othered, and made extinct within the categorizational apparatuses of diagnoses and disablement. Cripped individuals, bearing diagnoses within/of educational institutions, are systematically pushed to the periphery as instructive/informative. Their bodyminds are made to disappear to propagate and recursively produce their own othereding. In other words, diagnoses, rather than unconstrained tools for liberation or empowerment (Butler 2015), also become mechanisms of exclusion/definition (McRuer 2006)—a consistent declaration that diagnosable entities inhabit/un-inhabit a realm of nonbeing (that cripped folk as indefinable are relegated to extinction habitats of special education classrooms), summarily and recursively adjudicating the boundaries of being/nonbeing. These diagnosed individuals are rendered anomalous or inhuman, always already falling beyond the purview of what is deemed normative within the educational context; their knowledges are ignored/erased, their very presences are removed from social construction, and their visceral bodyminds are tortured via carceral punishment, solitary confinement and otherwise (Butler 2015; Devries et al. 2018; Sullivan, Van Norman and Klingbeil 2014).

Moreover, this performative and visceral extinction of the disabled via diagnostic processes (the removal of the indeterminable cripped toward the disabled-nonbeing) (Butler 2015), does not unfold in a single cataclysmic event but through a series of decisions, interactions, and acts of violence (social, onto-epistemic, and physical) within the classroom and the school. Students who fall (perform) outside the parameters of what is defined as ‘abled’ are denied access to opportunities, resources, and interactions that shape their educational experiences—or their very disappearance from such experiences/spaces (Ferri and Connor 2005). Their presence is effaced from the collective consciousness of the educational realm, resulting in a form of social and discursive erasure that parallels Agamben’s bare life (1998, 2004) and a visceral violation/exclusion that mirrors Mbembe’s (2019) living dead. As I pivot my gaze toward Agamben’s and Mbembe’s conceptual frameworks, I will delve into the philosophical underpinnings that shed light on this notion of extinction qua being/nonbeing. While I have suggested that diagnoses within/of the school and classroom inform/conform processes of extinction—removing the indefinable cripped from the normative space of education (propagating discursive, social, onto-epistemic, and visceral violence against the cripped/disabled), I will continue to refine such an argument by pulling on Agamben’s exploration of bare life (1998, 2004) and Mbembe’s invocations of necropolitics and the living dead (2019). Thus, I will complement and mutate the critical theoretical impulses from Mbembe’s work and the more postfoundational theoretical works of Agamben to mirror my arguments that diagnoses within/of education extinct the cripped toward/of the productive notion of the disabled (the determinative notions of nonbeing, the living dead, and the homo sacer). Even more so, I will grapple with such mutational work via crip studies and the vital materialisms (the transcendental empiricisms) of Deleuze and Guattari’s works (Adams 2020; Bailey 2019; Mercieca and Mercieca 2010).

Diagnosing Disability: Extincting Aberrance

In the realm of education, the process of diagnosis simultaneously illuminates and shadows the trajectories of individuals marked by cognitive and intellectual differences. While ostensibly a tool for understanding, diagnoses interrogate/delineate particular students and orchestrate their extinctions (Vakirtzi and Bayliss 2013). Such processes, moreover, render an indefinable/indeterminable crippedness (disabledness) that refuses sense toward a consignment of disabled-nonbeing—thereby substantiating segregated classrooms, greater and more violent realms of discipline/punishment, wholesale ostracization, and onto-epistemicide against the disabled.

The solitary madness of desire that still for Hegel, as for the eighteenth-century philosophers, plunges man into a natural world that is immediately resumed in a social world, for Sade merely casts man into a void that dominates nature in a total absence of proportion and community, into the endlessly repeated nonexistence of gratification. (Foucault 1988, 283–84)

To tease out these discursive and material mechanisms through which diagnosis drives the extinction of aberrant individuals, I will now more directly turn to Giorgio Agamben’s (1998, 2004) explorations of bare life and subsequently to Achille Mbembe’s (2019) insights on the living dead—necropolitics. By traversing these philosophical landscapes—incorporating critical theory’s visceralities with postfoundational theory’s discursive insinuations—I will illuminate the profound effects of diagnosis as a means of relegating certain students (certain non-being-beings) to the margins of existence within the educational sphere.

Giorgio Agamben’s (1998, 2004) concept of bare life serves as a compelling framework for dissecting/interrogating the dynamics of diagnoses within educational contexts, albeit with a critical eye toward its complexities via discursive and legal-juridical frameworks. Agamben’s premise regarding bare life revolves around the idea of existence stripped down to its elemental forms (its viscerally made-independent from its social inclusion)—a life that is excluded from the protective veil of law and reduced to its mere biological essence or its non-essence given that it remains unsignifiable (Agamben 1998). Bare life and the homo sacer represent a form of life/non-life that is excluded from the realm of political recognition and subjected to the sovereign power’s ability to determine life’s value and worth outside of such conventions: ‘What is “bare” about the life of homo sacer is that it can be taken by anyone, and that this is to be done without sacrificing that life’ (Fitzpatrick 2001, 1).

It is the sovereign who, insofar as he decides on the state of exception, has the power to decide which life may be killed without commission of homicide, in the age of bio-politics this power becomes emancipated from the state of exception and transformed into the power to decide the point at which life ceases to be politically relevant. (Agamben 1998, 83)

While Agamben’s framework provides an illuminating lens herein, I want to carefully navigate the intricate interplay between bare life and the lives of those who are diagnosed within/of educational institutions—the cripped becoming deemed politically irrelevant and thus disabled.

In educational contexts, moreover, diagnoses (distended across legal, political, and cultural frameworks) delineate which bodyminds will take up spacetime within the polis of the classroom/school and which will be relegated to the indistinct space of zoe (the segregated/ostracized spaces of extinction) (Agamben 1998). The diagnoses, therefore, engenders a biopolitics akin to how Agamben pulls on Foucault’s work within the realm of the school as a microcosm of a larger social reproduction/procession: ‘the politicization of bare life as such—constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical thought’ (Agamben 1998, 10). Agamben’s homo sacer, the individual who can be killed without the killer being regarded as a murderer, finds a troubling parallel in the realm of the diagnosed. Thus, the diagnostic and curricular label applies a legal/juridical and discursive framework that recognizes the cripped as a means of extincting—to purport a sensical framing of political life that depends on such extinction/exclusion: the homo sacer ‘who may be killed and yet not sacrificed, and whose essential function in modern politics we intend to assert’ (Agamben 1998, 12).

The diagnosed student, thus, becomes akin to bare life (the homo sacer), existing in the juridical and legal-economic order solely to be excluded from it as a means of producing sensical frames of determining rationality, humanity, and normalcy. In this manner, the educational system—as well as curricula—enacts its own form of sovereignty, deciding whose intellectual and cognitive differences will be integrated into the social body and whose will be marked by an exclusion that is at once absolute and invisible (Butler 2015; McRuer 2006). This is the essence of Agamben’s postfoundational critique. Much like the sovereign’s decision in Agamben’s theoretical discourse, diagnoses in education become the threshold at which the value of life is defined/determined, rendering bare, stripped of its political significance, and reduced to its barest form—a homo sacer in the classroom, the disabled-nonbeing.

One poignant manifestation of this procession of diagnosis and extinction (this constant and continual manifestation of the homo sacer qua the disabled-nonbeing within the classroom) lies in the realm of segregated educational practices—a phenomenon facilitated by legal frameworks like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Thus, I want to complement the work of Agamben by invoking legal/juridical frameworks that have come to constitute and be constituted by the extinct-ing of disabled-nonbeings within the classroom. While these legislative frameworks purportedly promise inclusion and accommodation for individuals with disabilities, such systems inherently perpetuate exclusionary practices that summarily cast diagnosed folks within educational spheres into the non-domains of nonbeing (Davids 2019). Such processes disappear/extinct diagnosed students from normative classrooms and utilize their mindbodies as continual performative measures to demonstrate the bounds of being/nonbeing (Pennington 2010). Thus, diagnoses within educational contexts are continual processes that use the made-aberrant mindbody to delineate the boundaries of being/nonbeing via legal/juridical frameworks that recursively construct and maintain cultural discourse as sensical. Pulling on Agamben’s work, the cripped being-defined as the diagnosed-nonbeing within the realms of legal, educational, and performatively discursive frames instantiates the very foundations of politics: ‘the production of bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty’ (Agamben 1998, 53; Bailey 2019; Mitchell, Antebi and Snyder 2019).

Even more so, in addition to the challenges posed by discursive extinctions and exclusionary practices, students with disabilities also frequently encounter alarming escalations in various forms of violence that Agamben lays out as indicative of the homo sacer: ‘an exclusion that is clearly hopeless; at one extreme, the total, state of integrated and sovereign citizens, and at the other, the preserve—court of miracles or camp—of the wretched, the oppressed, and the defeated’ (Agamben 1998, 100). Peer-to-peer violence, as well as coordinated physical/emotional torture, become unfortunate realities for many diagnosed students in schools/classrooms (Devries et al. 2018). The school itself becomes a spacetime of institutional and organized violence (as necessarily instructive) perpetuated through neglect, isolation, carceral/psychical punishment, and the denial of existence. The diagnostic process exacerbates the punitive measures wielded against these students and continues to delineate the disabled-nonbeing alongside the homo sacer (Agamben 1998; Sullivan, Van Norman and Klingbeil 2014). In this way, the legal, discursive, and educational processes made-inherent in such diagnostic processes subject those with disabilities to increased forms of violence within the educational system as instructive and determinative. Thus, such processes effectively cast disabled-nonbeings within the bounds of law and policy and outside livable terrains (Devries et al. 2018; Ferri and Connor 2005; Slee 2019; Sullivan, Van Norman and Klingbeil 2014).

Following, Achille Mbembe’s living dead and necropolitics can further enhance our understandings of the consequences of diagnosis within educational contexts (Mbembe 2019). In other words, I want to juxtapose and play with how Mbembe’s more critical theoretical works with viscerality/embodiments and places/spaces mirror and expand Agamben’s work with discourse and legal/juridical frameworks. Mbembe’s concept of the living dead draws attention to the precarious existence of individuals who, though still biologically alive, are cast into a state of (non)existence that lacks full recognition and agency: ‘The perception of the existence of the Other as an attempt on my life, as a mortal threat or absolute danger whose biophysical elimination would strengthen my life potential and security’ (Mbembe 2019, 72). Moreover, what Mbembe’s analysis of the living dead offers us, especially in relation to my framing of crip theory, is a critical invocation/evocation of embodiment/enfleshment as mutationally productive/instructive within educational contexts; thus, they argue, ‘It is a matter of co-composition, of opening onto the over-there of another flesh, of reciprocity between multiple fleshes and their multiple names and places’ (Mbembe 2019, 28). The diagnostic process, moreover, is not only definitional in the sense of pure discourse but also engages the bodymind of the cripped, mutationally bending and manipulating the disabled-nonbeing along lines of tissue-maneuvering and embodiments (manipulating the discursive as embodied and vice versa). Mbembe’s necropolitics is an enfleshed and visceral co-composition that is subsumed within coordinations of power yet remands limited/limiting accesses to agentic manifestations that are perpetually in contest/evolution (Voulgarides, Etscheidt and Hérnandez-Saca 2023). Mbembe’s critical analyses offer my exploration a more complex understanding/dis-understanding of the enfleshed/embodied aspects of diagnoses (diagnoses as enfleshed parameters/incursions that intend to conform the cripped bodymind) and the intimacy of embodied refusals (Bierdz 2022). Thus, I want to suggest that the autistic guttural groan, echolalia, and stimming are means by which diagnosed-nonbeings within educational spaces negotiate and make-livable their own extinctual contexts, viscerally responding to and manipulating their own extinctions.

Moreover, building upon the groundwork laid by Agamben, Achille Mbembe’s exploration of necropolitics further deepens my critique of educational diagnostic processes, emphasizing how space and place become instrumental in the (de)valuation of cripped lives/experiences: ‘This new form of the government of bodies, conducts, and affects is alleged to have led to the pacification of social spaces’ (Mbembe 2019, 6). This precarious and enfleshed (non)state of the disabled-nonbeing, therefore, is not an abstract condition but is embodied in the literal, concrete, and material spaces of education—special education classrooms, the isolated corners of playgrounds, and the segregated spaces within schools that become the tangible manifestations of necropolitical power (Bierdz 2022; Mbembe 2019; McRuer 2004). Within these confines, the cripped bodymind is not merely categorized but is sculpted by the violence of exclusion, its viscerality reshaped and confined. Such enfleshed/visceral wounds ‘are painful and hard to forget because they attack the body and its materiality’ (Mbembe 2019, 58). As Mbembe posits, power inscribes itself onto bodies and spaces, casting diagnosed individuals into the margins of the educational landscape, where their presence is at once vital (given its relational productivity qua politics, ethics, and knowledge) and yet disregarded. Thus, Mbembe’s works locute/locate how diagnoses within the educational system do more than define discursively or legally; they determine the physical and psychic contours of enfleshed existence, pushing diagnosed individuals toward a life at the brink of visibility and recognition; the diagnosed are akin to Mbembe’s living dead.

Ultimately, the insights of Agamben (1998, 2004) and Mbembe (2019), while distinct, converge in productive ways to underscore the disconcerting effectiveness of extinction catalyzed by the diagnostic process within educational contexts. Agamben’s bare life illuminates how diagnosis demarcates certain individuals as legal/discursive beings while relegating others to nonbeing (or even a state in between being and nonbeing). Mbembe’s concept of the living dead and necropolitics, moreover, accentuates the perpetual liminality experienced by those consigned to the margins by diagnosis, further demonstrating the social and political utilization of disability’s and diagnoses’ coordinations with nonbeing as enfleshed and embodied positionalities (Mbembe 2019). Together, their theories juxtapose the profound ways in which diagnoses become tools of biopolitical and necropolitical power (Mbembe 2019): mechanisms that orchestrate a dance between existence and nonexistence within the realm of education, legal frameworks, embodiments/experiences, and timespaces. The discursive/enfleshed extinction enacted through diagnosis is not a singular event, but an ongoing performance that perpetuates a cycle of nonbeing/being as instructive and determinative (Bierdz 2022; Mbembe 2019). By rendering certain students as living dead—existences suspended on the peripheries of recognition—diagnoses cast a long shadow over their own educational trajectories and summarily utilize the nonbeing of the disabled as categorical devices, demarcating the limits of political, enfleshed, and social participation within/without educational spacetimes.

Self(s)-Theory: Challenging Normative Theoretical Sense via Crippedness

Following, rooted in crip theory—as articulated by Yergeau (2018) and resonating with echoes of Derrida’s (1994) insights from the Specters of Marx—self(s)-theory challenges/transgresses normative theoretical constructs. Such invocations crip the ways we construct and maintain theoretical sense via the constant and continual delegitimizations and dehumanizations of the irrational, the incoherent, and the disabled. Self(s)-theory presents a distinct departure from traditional theoretical frameworks by centering its gaze on the multiplicitous self(s) as the locus/dis-locus of exploration/interrogation that eschews normativizing its own ‘conclusions’. For instance, in stark contrast to conventional theoretical approaches that seek to comprehend experience as a normative array—as a means of framing experience qua normative lenses of understanding or making sense of the other—self(s)-theory rejects externalizing or objectifying its own interrogations beyond its own immanence or immediacy (Deleuze 2005; Deleuze and Guattari 1983). Thus, self(s)-theory complements and continues my challenge against humanistic, rationalistic, and theoretical frameworks that maintain normativity, objectivity, and anthropomorphic delineations (Wynters 2003) by enlivening the distinctions that are continually perpetuated as non-existent, nonsensical, and/or extinct-ed.

To further distinguish self(s)-theory, I will gesture to three central aspects of self(s)-theory. First, self(s)-theory departs/refuses the trajectory of theoretical continuity/normativity that extends beyond individual exploration of the interrogation itself as self(s)-ing. Unlike more normative theoretical approaches that intend to extend their reaches/affectivities toward others as a mechanism of theoretical continuity (the process of defining and maintaining norms to construct communal sensical machinations), self(s)-theory refuses to project hierarchicalizations/determinations of knowledge, being, and/or reality beyond itself(s). It dismantles dialectical, oppositional, and delineatory frameworks that intend to define the self–other, other–other, self–object, and object–object relationships as determinative or illustrative. Second, self(s)-theory enfleshes multiplicitousness, shattering the confines of linear narrativizations inherent in conventional theoretical paradigms. By interrogating the diverse facets of self(s)hood, my invocation enfleshes the multifaceted nature of being and the intricate interplay of experience within the processes of self(s)-ing. Third, self(s)-theory disrupts the constructions of sense/sensicality as a means of normativization, limitation, and even violence in theoretical works. Rather than upholding the pursuit of sense or constructing new regimes of sensicality, self(s)-theory beckons toward a disruptive engagement with the sensory realm via the cripped autistic sensorium (Mitchell 2023; Yergeau 2018). Thus, non-sensicalities of self(s)-theory mutate dynamically, oscillating between the known and the unknowable, reshaping understandings of what it means to sense, be sentient, and engage with the world qua crippedness rather than definitive/determinative lines of inquiry/sense. Ultimately, this theoretical/anti-theoretical approach enfleshes an alternative to the normative quest for sensical apprehension within theoretical work. Self(s)-theory eschews normative theoretical works as necessarily violent and oppressive. Thus self(s)-theory gives us more intimate, immanent, and mutational ways of interrogating self(s)-ings and experiences without necessarily projecting analyses beyond the very precipice of others’ mindbodies and materialities. Self(s)-theory allows us to commit to the intimacies of transdisciplinary and intersectional work within/of cripping the self(s) without externalizing such analyses outside of the immanent, immediate, and visceral bounds of the disabled/cripped.

Self(s)-Theoretical Lines of Flight

My first experiences with diagnosis were in the first grade. I had just moved schools from kindergarten to first grade, and my new teachers were concerned about my classroom engagement. They began to attach particular categories of diagnostic procedures to my mindbody: lack of engagement, lack of eye contact, non-communicative, distant, and aversive to social situations. After a few weeks in my new classroom, my new teacher, accompanied by a school psychologist, walked me to my mom’s car at the end of the day. They briefly explained what they thought was wrong with my mindbody and suggested that I see the school psychologist during the day to get a better picture of my diagnosis. My mother politely declined the suggestion; however, within the next couple of weeks, my mother took me to see various child psychologists and psychiatrists. She wanted an external perspective, and after our few visits to various doctors’ offices, my mindbody was inundated by diagnoses and determinations of otheredness—notions that attempted to locute/locate my mindbody toward a disabled-nonbeing. I was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and obsessive–compulsive disorder. Even more so, while my mother refused to disclose my diagnoses to my school, my teachers did not cease to diagnose my bodymind within/of their own classrooms as a means of dislocating/dis-locuting my experiences. Within various classrooms, my mindbody was differentially determined and understood—or rather refused to be understood. In some, I was segregated to particular parts of the classroom or completely removed altogether. In others, I garnered pieces of inclusion, and yet, such inclusion was always already diminished by the violence that was perpetuated onto my bodymind in the forms of peer-to-peer physical and psychological violence, discriminatory disciplinary measures, segregation, and social and intellectual ostracization.

In other words, as part of my continual and consistent experiences of informal diagnostics, my mindbody was juxtaposed outside the immediate confines and determinations of being. In these early experiences of diagnosis, my mindbody found itself subjected to the intricate web of diagnostic procedures that sought to attribute specific categories and labels to my possibilities of being and nonbeing. These processes initiated and continued a trajectory that intimately interwove the themes of Agamben’s bare life (1998, 2004) and Mbembe’s living dead (2019). The continual and consistent determinations of diagnosis and diagnostic procedures within and without the classroom defined my mindbody as aberrant, and as such, my bodymind was intermittently placed in relation to disabled-nonbeing as necessarily productive and instructive. My existence was thereby defined through a discursive and material process that situated my mindbody along the periphery of normative human existence, and summarily, such categorizational efforts were constituted by and constitutive of the very determinations of education qua rationality, insidious humanisms, and determinative knowledge(s). Throughout my experiences in elementary school, for instance, I was beaten in various classrooms because my refusal to speak; I was placed in solitary confinement in empty classrooms when I exhibited an outburst; I was socially and intellectually ostracized from my fellow classmates continually; and I was physically as well as psychologically harassed by my classmates and teachers.

My initial and continued encounters with diagnosis introduced me to the very essence (the livable determinations of legal-juridical discursions) of Agamben’s concept of bare life (1998, 2004). As my teachers and medical professionals diagnosed my mindbody with various disorders, I became increasingly reduced to a series of diagnostic categories and legal/administrative terminetrics that defined/reified my possible experiences as dispensable flesh. Thus, as intimately interwoven within my educational experiences, the diagnostic process stripped away the complexity of my subjectivity and my being, reducing me to a mere accumulation of symptoms and deviations from the norm. In other words, my crippedness as an indeterminable figuration/enfleshment was refused, and I was delineated/defined as disabled—an irrational and interminably non-thinking thing, a disabled non-being of the school. In line with Agamben’s arguments, my mindbody was positioned on the threshold between life and nonlife, where my educational existence was reduced to a form of life that existed outside the protective realm of the law and the classroom yet intimately entwined within its expansive grasp: a bodymind that ‘may be killed and yet not sacrificed, and whose essential function in modern politics we intend to assert’ (Agamben 2004, 12). I was stripped of any attenuation to normative being and thereby defined as disabled—a non-thinking thing that was perpetually cast into determinations of nonbeing as a performative and educative measure (as a constant means of redefining my bodymind as aberrant/othered and disabled) (Bierdz 2022).

Furthermore, the more enfleshed and visceral processes of my diagnosis also intertwined with Mbembe’s necropolitics (2019), wherein the diagnostic process intimately violated my own bodymind. My labeled/diagnosed (continually re-diagnosed) mindbody existed within/of a state of perpetual vulnerability and visceral incarceration/banishment. As part and parcel of my diagnosis, moreover, my mindbody was subjected to performative and more visceral aspects of definitional work; thus, I was segregated, confined, bullied, beaten, and refused. The school environment (the intimate and material space of concrete walls and metal desks) became an enfleshed, intimate performance where my bodymind was continuously utilized to maintain and uphold the embodied logic(s) of a necropolitical context. Thus, my diagnosis not only shaped my interactions with teachers, educators, and peers but also the more embodied and enfleshed materialities/visceralities of my experience continued to establish/re-establish the conditions under which my disabled-nonbeing would be subject to disciplinary measures that further stigmatized and alienated my mindbody—my own extinction within/outside of the classroom.

Ultimately, these experiences with the diagnostic gaze laid bare the mechanisms through which the undefined crippedness within educational contexts is systematically extinguished, much like Agamben’s bare life and Mbembe’s living dead. Yet, there remains a sliver of potential within the undefined/in-determinedness of the cripped (the un-diagnosed and the un-extincted). Thus, the cripped (the undiagnosed/in-determined) resists categorization and challenges the foundations of biopolitical determinations. The indeterminate cripped, therefore, disrupts educational narratives that seek to confine and define (managing the production of knowledge qua normative notions). By resisting categorization/diagnoses, cripped folks challenge the onto-epistemic systems that attempt define/confine them, opening up newer and more non-determinative ways to imagine/re-imagine/de-imagine education beyond normative notions/locutions of power and knowledge. Beyond the rigid and normativizing binaries of able-bodied rationality and the disabled-nonbeing (beyond the processes of extincting the aberrant beyond the determinable limits of discursive rationality and the material/visceral classroom), educators may be ‘more able’ to move beyond the limitations of traditional biopolitical frameworks and toward more aleatory, nonsensical, and radical notions of education, mis-education, and de-educations.

Concluding Remarks

In this article, I have suggested that the processes of diagnosis and its own machinations/embodiments move beyond mere medical categorizations in the context of education and/or the school. From theoretical explorations of Agamben’s bare life (1998, 2004), Mbembe’s necropolitics (2019), and intimations of Deleuze and Guattari’s works (1983, 1987) alongside my own experiences with diagnosis (Abrams 2017), I have argued that diagnostic processes within/of education, the school, and the classroom form embodied/visceral as well as discursive/political/legal extinctions—machinations by which the cripped is transformed into the disabled-nonbeing as a way of perpetuating notions of rationality/irrationality, humanity/inhumanity, and the rights of Man (Wynters 2003). By interrogating diagnosis, I argue that such processes move beyond the act of labeling, classification, categorization, or definition. Instead, it is a multifaceted force that resonates through discourse and reverberates viscerally in the lives of cripped folks and those around them (Mbembe 2019; Mitchell, Antebi and Snyder 2019). Moreover, while this form of extinction of the cripped is incomparable to genocide or other more severe forms of extinction, it is a distinct kind of violence/oppression—one that operates within the realms of discourse, power, virtuality/actuality, viscerality, and the material/immaterial (Adams 2020; Bailey 2019; Deleuze 2005; Deleuze and Guattari 1983).

Moreover, the critical lenses I have applied to diagnosis within and without educative realms offer a renewed/deformed perspective on its implications and its livabilities. By contextualizing diagnoses as mutable forms of casting cripped existence toward the determinations of nonbeing, inhumanity, and irrationality, I have suggested that we must confront the violence intrinsic to such a procession as well as the very onto-epistemic limitations inherent in such determinations/determining. However, the significance of this discourse goes beyond theoretical deconstruction or the more discursive insinuations of postfoundational theory. The becoming-nonbeing perpetuated by diagnosis is not confined to the abstract domain of language or discourse; such processions manifest via flesh and materiality, thereby mutating relationships, bending bodyminds, limiting economic opportunities, perpetuating physical violence, and fomenting psychical/emotional torture. These violent machinations and processes operate subtly but persistently within/of education, perpetuating subjugations/brutalities that transgress mere verbal representations or discoursal regimes.

Finally, I want to continue to simultaneously argue that the lack of definition—the refusal of the diagnostic and the determinative (the refusal of signification, the refusal of objectivity, the refusal of rationalism, the refusal of humanism and the logics of liberal politics (Zembylas 2017) stimulates a space/non-space/un-space where the cripped exists and refuses existence as a determinable being/nonbeing—living dead that refuse life (Mbembe 2019). By embodying a non-state of in-definition and in-determination, I want to suggest that the cripped opens up possibilities/impossibilities that educational realms and pedagogies necessarily exclude within our contemporary context, given the conventionally normativizing functions of the educational institution. Thus, via crippedness, we, as researchers and practitioners, may be more able to realize/un-realize thought/dis-thought, aberrance/non-normativity, and learning/mislearning/anti-learning outside of diagnostic and/normative means of definition, signification, and education. Ultimately, this analysis of diagnosis also holds immense promise for the realm of crip studies and its intersections with posthuman studies, plant studies, mad studies, and animal studies (Abrams 2017; Braidotti 2019; Goodley, Lawthom and Runswick-Cole 2014; Taylor Montford and Jenkins 2020; Thorneycroft 2020). By situating the persistent cripped beyond/outside of the determinations of nonbeing/being (beyond the definitional/normative notions of the educational or the significatory—the extincted), I want to enflesh an autistic nonverbality as a challenge. For instance, I will argue that the autistic grunt/groan, as nonsensical, challenges the biopolitical, the sensical, and the normative. Taking the extincted disabled-nonbeing as intimately livable, therefore, embodies/enfleshes more anti-normative immanences that necessarily challenge and re-imagine/de-imagine normative projections of thought, reality, and being (de Sousa Santos 2014; McRuer 2006; Wynters 2003).

In conclusion, by reframing/unframing diagnosis as processions of extinction, the cripped that refuse determination enflesh bodyminds, thought(s)/dis-thoughts, and realties/unrealities toward blackholes of mutation and transgression. These critical and deterritorializing lines of flight (these immanences of immanences (Deleuze 2005)—these enfleshed cripped-livabilities) allow us to more critically engage with and interrogate the regimentations of discourse and the material enfleshments of abnormality that shape/delineate normative understandings of reality, being, and thought beyond the productivities of being/nonbeing, human/inhuman, rationality/irrationality, and sense/nonsense (Bailey 2019; Reynolds 2021). Looking toward future praxis, I want to continue to beckon us, as researchers and practitioners, to engage with the transdisciplinarity of crip studies, postfoundational theory, and critical theory. By delving into the interplays of nonbeing/being, diagnosis, necropolitics, bare life, discourse, and materiality/immateriality, for instance, cripping can play with the non-dimensions/un-dimensions/anti-dimensions of human/nonhuman/object experience, dismantling normative boundaries and ushering in more transformative possibilities/impossibilities for existence/unexistence/nonexistence within black holes (Agamben 1998; Bailey 2019; Mbembe 2019).

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.