<<TRANSMATHOME

2.2 On the Edge of Faciality: Autism

2.2.1

The strategy that will now be followed  is to be one of putting these ideas into effect in relation to two other conditions, besides schizophrenia, which are also enigmatic from the point of view of the psychological assemblage. These conditions will be the two other  states which have already been mentioned - autism and Tourette’s syndrome. The reason for choosing these  conditions is that the question  of the abstract machine of faciality is as important (or more important) in coming to understand them as it is with schizophrenia. The ‘Faciality’ plateau just cited in fact makes the connection between tic phenomena and schizophrenia:

Dismantling the face is no mean affair. Madness is a definite danger: Is it by chance that schizos lose their sense of the face, their own and others’, their sense of the landscape, and the sense of language and its dominant significations at the same time? The organization of the face is a strong one. We could say that the face holds within its rectangle or circle a whole set of traits, faciality traits, which it subsumes and places at the service of signifiance and subjectification. What is a tic? It is precisely the continually re-fought battle between a faciality trait that tries to escape the sovereign organisation of the face and the face itself, which clamps back down on the trait, takes hold of it again ... (TP p.188)

Schizophrenia and tic conditions begin to come into focus as both involving kinds of crisis that are connected with the abstract machine of faciality (this is as much as can be said at this stage, the details will emerge in what follows). But what about autism? The situation is clearly very different with autism, in that although questions concerning the face are central to discussions of autism, this is because autistic people do not follow any conventional patterns of facial expressiveness, or follow these patterns to only a very limited degree. It is this issue – the question of autism – that must now be the starting-point.

2.2.2

It is not controversial that the conditions known as autism generally  involve low levels of engagement  in the directions of language, and of faciality. Although one of these problems might sometimes be less marked, it seems fair to say in fact that autism is the inter-section of low levels of engagement with respect to these two modalities. The first symptomatic category of one of the major  diagnostic manuals is ‘qualitative impairment in reciprocal social interaction’, with the first sub-heading for this aspect being ‘marked impairment in the use of non-verbal behaviours such as eye-to-eye  gaze, facial expression, body posture, and gestures to regulate social interaction’.[5] The second category (of three) is ‘qualitative impairments in communication’. For reasons that will become clear, the field of conditions that will be in question in what follows will consist of those conditions involving problems with language and with faciality, together with those where there is low engagement with language, but where a fluency in ‘faciality’ emerges, however idiosyncratic this fluency might be (the central sense of the term autism is retained through this, even if the analysis might cease to be appropriate in relation to uses of the term which are more vague).

It is also not controversial that autistic people occasionally have extraordinarily advanced or fluent modes of engagement in other areas. As is well known, these abilities are generally in the areas of drawing, mathematics, design and music. The autistic person can be a nexus of faculty-affects where there is a very high degree of thought in the case of certain fields of engagement (as with the distributive fields engaged in mathematical thought), even though there are difficulties in relation to other faculty-affects. This is the major ‘enigma’ of autism (it can be seen that it ceases to be an enigma if thought is understood differentially).

Having given the background, it can be pointed out in relation to faciality in autism that the autistic child not only does not respond fluently in relation to the micro-corporeal fields of other bodies, but also tends not to take up neurotic behaviours in the form of embarrassment,  worrying, competitiveness, and self-pity. What this means is that the autistic child does not tend to engage deeply with fields of relations of speed and slowness, and, partly in consequence, does not easily become subjectified. Overall, the autistic person not only does not respond smoothly to micro-corporeal states, but also does not enter into composition with them at the broad level of ‘taking them up’ or transducing them into aquired bodily modes (this means that there is a high degree of singularity to the voices and ways of moving of autistic people, even at the same time as there is a ‘woodenness’).

The autistic child starts out from an anomalous ‘place’ in terms of the economy or ecology of modes of engagement involved. The process of taking up initial stabilising (though ultimately damaging) rhythms and ‘refrains’[6] of activity or engagement does not pass by way of acquiring pathways of engagement attached to fields of linguistic sequences, or by way of acquiring customary bodily states, such as ‘celebration’ states, or ‘condemnation’ states. The child with autism has engagements that wander on courses that are not channeled by language or customary states, and initial stabilising rhythms emerge under pressure not in these areas, but in the ‘hand-tool’ areas of  arrangement of objects in the environment, and repetitive whole body movements, and limb movements (etc.). The ‘refrains’ of autism can take the form of repeated drawing of the same shape, or of repeated movements of the arms, or of compulsive ordering of objects. It seems to be the case that in autism the faculty-affects of language and faciality fail to pass over an initial threshold (even if there can be emergences in these domains later) in a way that involves other modes of engagement becoming central, and which involves everything passing along different lines. Instead of the ‘face-language’ couple being central, it is the hand-tool pole which passes alone over a threshold, and the result of this is an economy of engagements that at one and the same time leaves the autistic person radically and very disturbingly separated in terms of their lines of creativity, and leaves them predominantly free from the rigidifying and de-intensifying processes of two of the major modes of human stratification.

It can be seen that certain human  modes of stratification are ‘exposed’ in autism. In the case of faciality what is not taken up in the initial process is the field of subjectified modes that other children take up, play with, and turn into habituated modes. These are the ‘rhythm fields’ of triumph, contrition-dejection, embarrasment, elated-anger, condemnation, etc.  Inseparably, at the level of language, what is not taken up are the engagement-connections and language-sequences of subjectification: the whole non-pragmatic or non-intensificatory world of condemning judgements, sliding self-reflexive determinations, bad conscience, and vanity (I have done X, and therefore I am good; P said I amY, and therefore I am Y). The autistic child does not get drawn into this terrible world of grave, secretly frightened judgements, and of neurotic contemplation (you can either be the judge or the victim). This is a main reason why autistic children are often experienced as being ‘alien’: confronted with a different starting-point, and involved in a different, singular process of initial stabilisation, they not only do not learn the customary or conventional  refrains (‘once upon a time, there was someone who wanted to rule, marry, and settle down’), but they do not enter the dark workshop of judgement or subjectification. One major aspect of the pathos of the situation of most autistic children is that a relative freedom which has befallen them as part of an initial difficult situation is  liable generally to be experienced as disturbing by those around them. It is not that they are outside human stratification (even the occasional emergences of extraordinary gifts are liable to be reterritorialised or ritualised, so that they decline rather than developing), but that they are a potentially perturbing  outside  of a particular anthropological stratificatory domain. This is the ‘flip-side’ of the fact that the phenomenon of autism can help to clarify the nature of anthropological stratification.

Subjectified states are not simply learned by engagement with human modes of being a body. The process of engagements travelling in neurotic or agonised circuits is always a  particular affect or field of relations of speed and slowness (a being-affected by the abstract machine of order-words or of judgement), and this  emerges out of a situation which triggers a passion in the form of a ‘personalised’ process or circuitry of damaging, non-pragmatic engagements, rather than the state intrinsically being acquired through engagement with the micro-corporeal fields of bodies. However, it is important to see that engagement with human micro-corporeal fields is not simply secondary, but is an element pertaining to an aspect or attribute of an overall process. To live with people whose laughter is bound up with  a ‘lightness’ responding to the astonishing intensities of the world – where the laughter recurrently is in connection with the stupidities or stupors of stratification – is to enter into composition with modes of being a body which are not strictly separable from the fields of engagement involved, so that the laughter is a pathway to the engagements (in the same way as the engagements are a pathway to the laughter).

In one way or another autism involves  an initial low relative level of engagement with the plane of micro-corporeality – a lower level of entering into composition with the speeds and slownesses (and movements and rests) of bodies.  Autistic children do not readily take on  vocal and bodily colorations of those around them. At the same time they do not readily enter into composition with other micro-corporeal fields.Dance is not one of the freely-emerging autistic talents, and it seems to be the case that autistic musicians do not work in depth in relation to rhythm, and would find it difficult to improvise rhythms along with other musicians. And an autistic artist painting a landscape or a person will engage with the morphographic field involved (occasionally with a very high level of ability), rather than trying to make dynamic differentials pass into expression. For the schizophrenic artist a human is an overwhelmingly teeming field of dynamisms, tics and impacting forces, whereas  for the autistic artist it is pre-eminently a world of topography.

 The engagement with micro-corporeality can develop to some extent in autism. For instance, it seems that occasionally a talent for mimicry can appear.[7] However, the crucial point in this context is that this remains a micro-corporeality which is primarily beyond the abstract machine of faciality. Even when engagement with  language has also improved there will not be a movement over a threshold into subjectification, with its world of depressive and elated states. The different starting-point of autism means that the abstract machine of faciality (together with the connected abstract machine of order-words) carries on being high-lighted in the human field beyond the autistic, even – and maybe particularly - when a degree of fluency has emerged at the level of micro-corporeal engagement.

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