To be clear, in offering OCD and autism as disabled ways of moving, I am not suggesting we are all neurodivergent in some way. Norms gather some of us and repel o/Others. Nor am I suggesting that academics should endeavor to simulate neuroqueer experiences, or to play with literal fire. This webtext is not a simulation exercise. This webtext is and is not itself. It wants more than it wanders, and it wants to signify that compulsions, intrusive thoughts, triggers, tics, stims, flashbacks, dysphoria, and stutters—all means and manner of disabled and queer rhetoricities—do and do not signify. That is: When is dog shit symbolic of something? When (and what) does dog shit want? Where does dog shit wander? If there is no purpose to dog shit, does that make its rhetorical presence, its affectivity, its negotiations with function and form, any lesser of a force? If dog shit is deserving of burning, is there some (fiery) center fixing that value in place?

As we consider the elisions of disability from rhizomatic canons, I think it instructive to return to Deligny. In particular, Deligny strategically differentiates between wandering and wanting. He asks whether one precedes the other, ultimately deciding that they can exist independently of each other: If you want something, you cannot wander. “The network,” he notes, “is not about doing or making; it is devoid of anything that would serve the purpose, and any excess of purpose leaves it in tatters at the very moment when the excess of the project is deposited in it” (41). Intention, then, defies wandering. Wandering cannot hold onto a center; its primary aim is to defy aim. In this way, the rhizome is a complicated dance between movement and purpose, reinventing itself when one or the other rears its head. It is an always thing in motion. Deligny at many junctures attempts—and admittedly fails—to reconcile this disjuncture, this pat opposition between what wants and what wanders. But in this grappling, Deligny shows us much that is at stake in disability rhetorics, in neuroqueer drifting. In considering what it means to think of himself and autistic children as “authors,” for example, Deligny takes us through all of the motions and embodied spittle that converge in the name of tracing. In claiming we author, where and how are we crediting our hands, our lips, our mediating surfaces, our tremors, our ancestors, our grievances, our mistakes? (136–138). Why is an author “intentional”? Why is an autistic child “nonintentional”? Topos is the realm of wayward bodyminds. We need only look to Haas and other cultural rhetorics scholars to remember that claiming topos primarily as the domain of communication is one among many violences of empire and ableism: Enter the good man speaking well. Enter the shudder.

As a field, we clearly value rhizomes. But (when) do we clearly value wandering lines? When are the lines we imagine working in service of norms? How is it that disabled movement and cognition have become fetishized as descriptively normative? In this I am calling to mind Gunther Kress's work on synaesthesia, which he likens to the process of transduction or remediation—the “inherent” multimodality of any text, embodied tendencies to (re)process sensory information into other modalities. For example, we may read writing from a book, but we may simultaneously hear words or visualize images or taste copper. This multimodal processing—transforming one modality into another—is Kress’s synaesthesia. But Kress’s synaesthesia is not synaesthesia in a neuroqueer sense, or in a neuroqueer way of sensemaking. He makes this quite clear: the synaesthesia he relates is a “usual” and “constant” process, one that precludes what he terms “severe pathologies” (184). In other words: synaesthesia is described in relation to nonlinearity and multisensory signification, but these transmodal facets only acquire their transformative potential when they are divorced from disability. This is especially ironic when one considers the simple fact that synaesthesia-per-unusual is a disabled, neuroqueer mode of experience. When Kress says synaesthesia into being, what do synaesthetes become through that saying?

Beyond digital rhetoric, we might also observe this valorizing-but-not-really-valorizing in recent clinical discourse on wandering, which marks the wandering behavior of neurodivergent people as symptoms in need of surveillance and remediation. In 2011, the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-9-CM) added a wandering code, intended to “promote better data collection for and understanding of wandering” in people with dementia as well as autistic people (CDC, 2017). Wandering, in these constructions, is purely conceived as safety risk, and its ICD designation has contributed to surges in wearable surveillance gadgets and technologies of restraint. The wandering code is also notable for its demonstrable racialization, wherein disabled children of color have been subject to increased policing and segregation at school. Agents of the state, much like agents of the clinic, are charged with preventing disabled children from moving around.

What do we lose when we intend and only intend? Who stands to benefit from our interruptive prose, and who stands to lose? What might we gain from neuroses? Where might compulsions take us? What of the tic, the stim, the misunderstood gesture? How to sense without sensemaking, to way without wayfinding in/via/through/despite digital rhetoric?