On autism (redux)
A piece I wrote in late-2021, and which I would like to re-rewrite, but which still bears the weight of its composition.
On autism
A useful way of illustrating the logic of misogyny rests with the following analogy: picture a seated customer in a restaurant. One will readily presume on the very fact of his being ‘a seated customer in a restaurant’, he will have a specific set of expectations of how to be served and treated. He expects the waitress to be obedient and courteous in taking his order. He does not expect to have to ask her to take his order; she is expected to come over on her own accord, to serve him. Nor does he expect the waitress to explicitly revile at his order, or to refuse it: she is expected to comply, thank him, and communicate the order to the chef – all with a selfless grace. It’s a ritualistic procedure which requires no great exegesis. Some would go as far to fall it ‘costumery’, a feature of a traditional social system: waiters and waitresses are, by tradition, deferential, passive, and submissive in the face of a customer they are duty-bound to ‘serve’.
Society in general, but men in particular, hold a similar set of expectations when it comes to women. This perspective is equally saturated in the residue of custom, as arising from traditional, patriarchal society. Women are expected to conform to a particular set of roles and to act in a certain way, all with a passive, altruistic demeanour. They are expected by men to be submissive and lovingly deferential, to accommodate their vulnerable ‘ideal’ of masculinity: one cannot be properly masculine in the absence of a female object over and against which their masculinity may be actualised, but never totally. Masculinity rests, therefore, on the assumption of female passivity, or their natural submissiveness. When a women transgresses – intentionally or not (‘intention’ implies situational consciousness) – these established lines or abrogates her customary duties, animosities arise – which we would describe as misogynistic. The fact that ‘women’ (broadly conceived) live in a ‘traditional man’s world’ cannot be overstated, because it is the truth; they live in its shadow. It also happens to be true that a neurodivergent person lives in a neurotypical world; they also must adhere to a set of customary rules set by and to accommodate the neurotypical majority, and are socially ostracised when they fail to adhere to them, their obligations in the context of quotidian social interaction – because of their fundamental inability to adhere to them, as neurodivergent people. Our purpose here is to illustrate this claim.
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2021 was a year of revelation, levity, and pain. For myself, personally, it was probably the most significant of my life thus far, while simultaneously the most arduous and difficult. Many of my aspirations were dashed or frankly rebuffed, with little remittance or for-closure. I felt lost for much of it, with few to turn to: few to listen to me, let alone understand me. This was exacerbated by a stark reality of physical and mental loneliness which at times became palpable, if not unescapable. I had previously attributed this to my own personal and social ineptitude. People didn’t like me; people never really liked me. Self-deprecation and dismissal seemed as though appropriate paths to follow. I retreated into myself for years, since about the time of turning 18, and expressed myself in what I read, the essays I wrote, and the high-grades I received. This was it, nothing else. The fact that I wasn’t living at all, but merely passing the time, revealed itself too me gradually, occasioning a breakdown. 2021 saw me do battle with this, to what may appear to be a successful resolution. I started to emphasise the fact of my autism, and how late-capitalist society and culture is preconfigured in opposition to people such as myself: making it almost impossible for us to assimilate unnoticed; to be accepted for what we are; to fit in without being singled out as ‘different’, ‘unusual’. I’m not good at following the rules of social convention or reading people, specifically concerning their motivations and intentions. But is this such a bad thing?
One might suggest that the autistic perspective, in its incompatibility with the ‘system’, allows one to step outside of it: providing a view that many would envy – what, after all, is the purpose of goth, punk, or jungle subcultures? As Deleuze and Guattari said of the schizophrenic: he may be mad from our perspective, a perspective made superfluous through its inability to expand beyond the neo-liberal ‘box’ within which it was formed and by which it is constrained. The schizophrenic may be the only free and sane person there is, given that he lives outside the ‘box’, owing his basic incompatibility with it. He can see beyond; we can only peer back within. Whatever merit there is with this powerful argument, one would be wrong to make a comparable formulation substituting autism for schizophrenia. This would be to misunderstand the nature of autism entirely, as too the nature of late-capitalist society: there is no escaping it, and there is no alternative. The core anthropological assumption underlaying neo-liberalism – that of the individual as an atomistic ‘social being’ willing and able to engage in the market on an equal standing with everyone else – fails to account for the anti-social individual: someone who is either mentally or physically disadvantaged in their quest to engage with people and establish themselves in society.
‘Autism’, of course, is an umbrella term. It is more accurate to refer to Autistic Spectrum Disorder, in consideration of the plethora of conditions which fall within its parameters. There is a major difference, for example, between a severe form of autism (such as when I child cannot talk or express themselves) and a light to moderate form, such as what I have. In many case (though not as often as the media-driven stereotype would have you believe), a light variant of autism can be beneficial and assiduous. Ludwig Wittgenstein is one prominent example; and I’m fairly sure that I would not now occupy my privileged position if I did not have a form of ‘high-functioning’ autism. It gave me an edge in the area in which I chose to specialise, history. I was very lucky for this, but it was not necessary. What of the person with comparable gifts for mathematics, whose family was unable to afford the high fee for attaining a diagnosis and was therefore unable to study it because their mark was continuously dragged down by subjects at which they were less skilled – such as English, French? This fate very nearly befell me, as I’m sure it has for innumerable people before me. The basic point is that a form of ‘high-functioning’ autism (of which I can only speak, and will thus limit myself) may well allow you to circumvent the system in one sense. It may make you especially capable of operating within one narrow subsection, but not within the totality. For the advantages, the person with ‘high-functioning’ autism must make a number of trade-offs.
I make recourse to my own experience for the purpose of illustration: I have always found socialising extremely difficult. It has been the one consistent feature of my life since pre-school, aged 5. During my first two years of secondary school, I usually spend my breaks ‘doing laps’ of the school (it was structured like a square), trying my best to avoid bullies: meaning that I often forced to take refuge in a solitary stair-well. ‘Friends’ gradually accumulated, but more so from sympathy than genuine admiration. It was a rough school; there was little stopping me from falling in with a rough crowd – the pernicious disorder of my home life didn’t help. College saved me, and I was acutely aware of this. I rejected my past life, which meant submerging myself in learning and abstaining from anything that subtracted from this. I sacrificed a social life; though in reality I was too anxious to try and start one, as a consequence of persistent rejection, as arising from my difficulty with reading people and conforming to conventional modes of social conduct – the rules that should be self-evident, though not to neurodivergent people.
I was well aware of this; but powerless, it seemed, to do anything about it. One way of conceptualising it would be to imagine a transparent pane of class coming between you and the exterior world: you see the world and everyone in it, but you cannot engage with it as they do. When you try to, on the knowledge that you are not living in the world as you should, as everyone else is, you walk straight into the pane of glass. My social life has been defined by this dynamic, hence my ingrained tendency to avoid social occasions: to my ultimate detriment – leaving me feeling that I’ve wasted, and continue to waste, my youth; as evidenced by the fact of my now having zero photos of myself, or of myself with people, from 2018, 2019, and 2020, and only a handful from 2021. The enforced solitude of the pandemic has forced me to reckon with this failure in the face of life. I’m clearly not alone in this. The moderate nature of my autism does, however, allow me to act and improve things; though within very stringent limits: one cannot not but operate within late-capitalist society, which is set against autistic people and disabled people more generally. The solution – for my form of high-functioning autism – lies with experience: the failures of the past demonstrate what not to do in the future; past success illustrate what to keep doing in order to arrive at similar results, within the same context. It is a learning process, of coming to grips with how to live in a world that isn’t structured to accommodate you – therapy would have helped, if only I could have afforded it. Meeting the right people is also essential. If only they were easier to find.