Autism as a serial collective

wtf is autism? I argue that defining autism as a serial collective helps autistic people and puts us in a eustasian location with regards to affecting revolutionary change

I’d like to share some of the insights that I gained through the work of the neurodivergent philosopher Robert Chapman. Their 2020 paper ‘The reality of autism: On the metaphysics of disorder and diversity’ had a big impact upon me during a period of great confusion and self-doubt for me.

How do you conceptualise autism? Do you agree with my conclusion, or is there a logical error somewhere? Do we need to move beyond the concept completely - is it too stained?

My diagnosis, and autism as isolation

I self-diagnosed as autistic in 2019 and received clinical confirmation in March 2020. This latter event coincided quite inauspiciously with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as a move from London to a village outside of Bristol. Isolation and withdrawal ensued, on a global scale in the form of lockdowns and border closures, and personally as I suddenly found myself with a new identity that simultaneously felt welcoming and isolating.

I left my part time project coordinator position at a small non-hierarchical charity, feeling unable to maintain connections made by my heavily masked former self. I stopped using telephones to escape the discomfort that they brought (bring) me, and I refused to appear on video calls. For months the only social contact I had was with my partner. I experienced a kind of social death that felt inextricably linked to ‘being autistic’. Autism felt like a state of separation, defined by the absence of social relations and connection to the society around me.

The academic and social discourse around autism contributed to this sensation. I had read all about it — it’s how I self-diagnosed. Psychological, psychiatric, and psychoanalytical theories felt like observations made from the outside by self-interested and arrogant observers (eg Baron-Cohen). I learned that there were no biomarkers for autism and attempts to identify specific genetic code related to autism seem doomed to fail (Fletcher-Watson and Happe, 2019).

“No clear biological markers” in Fletcher-Watson and Happe, 2019

Obtaining a diagnosis felt like living the discourse. I had to become the observed medical subject. It was a painful experience that didn’t give me the position to inhabit within society that I hoped it might. The trained professional sitting opposite me asking binary questions designed by the aforementioned Simon Baron-Cohen, fumbling with clumsy linguistic attempts to translate my mindbody, seemed to have very little understanding of my experience.

I second guessed myself the whole way — had I created this diagnosis through my own desire for belonging and identity? Was I just answering the questions the way I thought they wanted me to answer them in order to receive what I wanted from them? I answered as truthfully as possible and received a letter and a report that stated I was a disordered human being. And not much more. Reading between the lines, the message was: ‘help yourself if you can — but you probably can’t because you’re autistic.’

Extract from the cover letter of my diagnostic report

I instinctively rejected the notion of functioning labels. Claiming to be ‘high functioning’ felt like an attempt to align oneself with the ‘undisordered’ as much as possible, making a distinction between more-human and less-human types of autistic people. It seemed like attempted conformity and self-subjugation at the expense of solidarity and collective liberation. I read about the history of autism; how it is tied up with eugenics, the holocaust, and the harmful medicalisation of natural human bodies (see ‘Asperger’s Children’ and ‘The Kaiser’s Holocaust’ for example).

My readings and observations stained autism, the term, and the identity. But at the same time, autism felt like a home. I recognised myself immediately in autistic people and felt a sense of community and kinship for the first time in my life. Here was a group that I could join, be a part of, and contribute to. It seemed like it had political utility as well, as a group for whom rights could be won and a space carved out in society.

This group also had a culture. Now I could identify writers, researchers, thinkers, healers, artists who felt like I felt, shared models of reality, and could provide advice, guidance, moral support, and creative inspiration. This was a population with high levels of revolutionary potential energy. Perhaps there would be people who shared my perspective on the dominant culture, and my desire to create a different and less disabling world.

Autism as a Serial Collective – Robert Chapman’s insight

I read Robert Chapman’s paper arguing that autism is a serial collective shortly after it was published in April 2020. It helped resolve the tensions I felt about autism and my place within the collective autistic body.

“Serial collectives are defined in light of shared external material factors that mutually affect each member of the collective, regardless of whether they would actually identify or not” (pg 12).

Social class and gender can both be classified as serial collectives as their members share a particular relation to material and social conditions. These interpretations avoid biologically essentialist conceptions — leaving space for trans people for example. The people within these groups share some, but not all, similarities. People will attempt to draw conclusions about these similarities as universal and defining characteristics (like the transphobic and illogical argument that all women have wombs, for example), but what makes them categorizable as a serial kind is their relationship to social reality.

“Womanhood as a serial collective arises in light of, amongst other things, representations of gender ideals (e.g., gendered clothing), sexual divisions of labor, enforced monogamy, and so forth” (pg 13).

Following the social model of disability, Chapman shows that whilst autistic sensory sensitivities are unique to each individual, autistic people are affected by common disabling factors in the human environment (e.g. brightly lit open plan office spaces) and in social etiquette (e.g. loud clapping applause). The mechanism and extent to which these things become disabling in each autistic body will vary; but the disabling outcome — sensory overload — can be characterised as an autistic experience.

Chapman goes on to explain how autistic people can be distinguished from neurotypical people through the comparison of clusters of psychological characteristics and how they are treated by society at large. Autistic people are defined not by a fixed set of bioessentialist traits with natural unity, but by fluid characteristics that are contingent upon the social context.

“[Autistic clusters] have no natural unity but … are unified with respect to their contingently perceived positive economic or social utility, as well as their relationship to external structures and norms.”

That is to say: socially and economically useful psychological and behavioural clusters of characteristics that are supported by external structures and norms define neurotypicality; whilst a fluid set of socially and economically ‘un-useful’ psychological and behavioural clusters of characteristics that are unsupported by external structures and norms define autism.

ADHD has another pathologised and unsupported cluster of psychological and behavioural characteristics which are distinct-from but overlapping-with autistic psychological and behavioural clusters – and I would warrant that other neurodivergencies inhabit similar distinct-but-overlapping positions.

Autism and self-exploitation

The division of humanity according to social and economic utility occurs within a society that values people in accordance with their social and economic utility, augmented by an economic model that requires (and recursively supports) a particular range of human characteristics and social norms. These conditions exist within the neoliberal capitalist economic and social framework.

As Byung-Chul Han argues in ‘Psychopolitics’, people are now expected (in service of capital) to auto-exploit through self-optimisation; marketing themselves dishonestly, exhibiting constant personal growth, acting with hypersociality, and compulsively achieving. We become our own panopticons – constantly observing and enforcing self-exploitation for the benefit of capital.

“The body no longer represents a central force of production, as it formerly did in biopolitical disciplinary society. Now, productivity is not to be enhanced by overcoming physical resistance so much as by optimising psychic or mental processes. Physical discipline has given way to mental optimisation“ (pg 25).

The sigma male grindset is an example of auto-exploitation ideology

At this moment in history, in the society that I live within, neurotypical people are those who exhibit clusters of psychological and behavioural characteristics that enable more frictionless mental optimisation in accordance with psychopolitical capitalism; and conversely, autistic people are those who exhibit a set of clustered psychological and behavioural characteristics which make mental optimisation and self-exploitation more difficult. Neither group exists in a bioessentialist way; both are contingent on material social and economic conditions in any given time and place, and at the present moment, referent to the self-exploiting human.

Autistic clusters of characteristics are more precisely defined because there have been efforts made to do so continuously, both by external pathologising forces (agents of the dominant culture) and from within by autistic people engaging in culturing practices. On the other hand, neurotypical clusters appear largely to be those residual traits left over after divergent humanity has been identified. Neurotypical people have a huge range of behavioural and psychological traits; the unifying force is that these traits provide them with “contingently perceived positive economic and social utility”. Neurotypical people still suffer under the alienation and exploitation of capitalism; but they are simultaneously useful and valued - and therefore their (wide range of) bodyminds valorised as human.

Autistic psychological (usually placed in the autistic nervous system) characteristics are real and part of the autistic phenomenological reality. Assertions that autism isn’t real or that it is a purely constructed notion without materiality that can be collapsed completely into the wider human experience therefore don’t ring true and feel invalidating of selfhood to many autistic people. Of course, everyone suffers under capitalism. But autistic people suffer differently, because social and economic norms and developments are specifically not oriented toward supporting us.

So what?

Here’s what I wrote in October 2020 in email correspondence with Robert Chapman:

“[The paper] has helped me begin to resolve the tension in my mind between autism as an appealing and relatively welcoming political identity that I have begun to adopt since diagnosis, and the difficulties that I have with accepting autism as a pathologised biomedical concept associated with harmful medical practices. Thinking about autism as a serial collective begins to address this antagonism for me. It also gives me a place within a group at least partially defined by its external social relations/material conditions. Without this concept I felt like an individual defined by my absence of social relations, and therefore in no position to affect or engage with society.”

Autism as a serial collective is a plausible and feasible metaphysical claim (read the paper for more on this). I believe it is also a useful conceptualisation for autistic people. I personally found solace in the resolution of seemingly antithetical aspects of autism — autism as a welcoming identity that provided utility, and autism as an oppressive construct officially defined by the dominant culture that enables further subjugation of people like me.

Practically this allows me to observe myself (and others) as autistic through recognition of my own experience of social reality. As such, I argue that self ‘diagnosis’ and community ‘diagnosis’ are both eminently possible and part of a process of self-recognition (in self or other) that is liberatory on an individual and collective scale. There is no need for a medical professional to confirm something that I and others like me are best positioned to see, and there is no need for me to feel limited or constrained by dominant culture perspectives on autism. In this way it is possible for autistic people to access the utility of the identity without acquiescing to pathologisation of their bodies. My self can emerge in embodied form from the ground up as I experiment with reality, from a position within a group of people who share a social reality. I do not need to feel defined by the DSM’s top-down account of my body.

I believe approaching diagnosis with this mindset can make the potentially traumatic and emotionally difficult process less risky for autistic people. ‘Official’ diagnosis can provide utility in for some, but it need not be an identity-defining and traumatic process of submission to the pathologising gaze. Were I to go through it again, I would not be concerned about whether I was second guessing myself or coming to the assessment with the outcome already determined in my mind. Indeed, I am currently seeking a clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria with this mindset. The diagnosis is a hurdle that I must clear in order to reach an outcome that is desirable for me, and not an external validation (or invalidation) of my transgender non-binary self.

Chapman also argues that autism as a serial collective “allows us to recognize the legitimacy of the autistic voice and account for all the political benefits that come with the identity account of autism — yet without the automatic exclusion of those who do not or cannot identify as autistic.”

We can make this recognition and fight for collective and inclusive change without conceding that we exist in inherently less-than-human bodies. We are different in a particular set of ways that disables us because of the way in which society is ascribes value and is organised to support some and not others — not because of an inherent fault within our own bodies.

These differences actually place us in a eustasian position with regards to affecting societal change.

Revolutionary autism

- All Bodies are unique and essential;
- All bodies have strengths and needs that must be met;
- We are powerful, not despite the complexities of our bodies, but because of them;
- All bodies are confined by ability, race, gender, sexuality, class, nation state, religion, and more, and we cannot separate them.

Sins Invalid, Skin Tooth and Bone

Following the disability justice principle that bodily complexities are a source of power, I would like to conclude by suggesting that the unsupported and undervalued fluid clusters of psychological and behavioural characteristics that position autism as a serial collective are inherently revolutionary.

They are revolutionary because they are identifiable in opposition to the norms of society as it currently exists. We are not of particular economic utility to the capitalist system that we live within, and we are not supported by social developments and norms. We inherently engage in ca’canny, the labourer’s tactic of working slow and limit output.

What we ARE of utility and value to is the creation of alternative non-dominating cultures, where people are NOT assigned value according to their relationship to capital, and are supported and valued according to our basic humanity.

By creating autistic networks and systems and carrying out culturing practices utilising and reflective of those non-supported and non-productive autistic characteristics, we will inevitably create greater human interdependence. These practices are the prefigurative acts that will create an alternative non-dominating culture.

If we fully embrace and exhibit the traits that position us in relation to the rest of society and allow us to self-recognise as autistic — those clusters of psychological and behavioural characteristics that are unsupported by social and economic norms — we become agents of change rather than nodes of dominant culture propagation. By becoming our embodied selves and unlearning or refusing to adopt imposed dominating models of reality, we contribute to a new paradigm of humanity that allows all to thrive. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.

We live in a society. It is often necessary to act in certain ways that cover up psychological and behavioural characteristics in order to survive within the system that dominates and oppresses us. But we have some agency here. We can choose when to enter stealth mode, when to don costumes and perform ‘normality’ under a mask. We can choose to perform a version of what is expected of us when it is beneficial for us to do so. We can make this a voluntary and subversive act. Likewise, we can choose to utilise our inherently revolutionary positionality as agents of change, adorning and exalting ourselves in weird autistic regalia, dancing to our own non-chrononormative rhythm, playing with naive wonder and curiosity, and allowing new networks and structures to emerge from within us and inhabit the spaces between us.

When society no longer values people in accordance with their economic utility, and we do not live in an economic model that requires and recursively supports a limited range of human characteristics; perhaps autism will cease to exist. A less dominating and oppressive culture may no longer create the ‘disordered other’ that autistic people are one example of. We will still have those same clusters of neurological, psychological and behavioural characteristics because our bodies will still be our bodies – but they will be supported by interdependent systems of kinship, rather than discarded as less-than-human.

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With love and solidarity