Always More Than One: Individuation's Dance by Erin Manning

Author:Erin Manning
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780822353348
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
Published: 2013-01-09T05:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

An Ethics of Language in the Making

Any local agitation shakes the whole universe.

* ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

“As a child, everything was somewhat alive to me.”

“I hear the rocks and the trees.”

“My world is organized around textures. . . .

All emotions, perceptions, my whole world . . .

[has] been influenced by textures.”

“There was very little difference in meaning between the children next to the lake that I was playing with and the turtle sitting on the log. It seems that when most people think of something being alive they really mean, human.”

* MM AND DAINA KRUMINS

What is it we really mean when we say “human?” According to autistic Amanda Baggs, we certainly don’t mean “autistic.”1 We mean neurotypical, we mean oriented to interaction with other humans, we mean almost exclusively tuned to human language. “Most people attend to human voices above all else” (Krumins qtd. in Miller 2003, 23).

When the orientation toward the world does not privilege the human voice—or the human face—a diagnosis of “mindblindness” too often ensues. The concept of mindblindness is described by Simon Baron-Cohen as an “inability to develop an awareness of what is in the mind of another human” (1995; my emphasis). For Simon Baron-Cohen and his many followers, there remains the firm belief that when there is limited attendance to the human, when the parsing of the environment does not explicitly focus on the human, what is demonstrated is a failure to be truly human. He writes: “Imagine what your world would be like if you were aware of physical things but were blind to the existence of mental things. I mean, of course, blind to things like thoughts, beliefs, knowledge, desires, and intentions, which for most of us self-evidently underlie behavior. Stretch your imagination to consider what sense you could make of human action (or, for that matter, any animate action whatsoever) if, as for a behaviorist, a mentalistic explanation was forever beyond your limits” (1995, 1).

Baron Cohen’s argument is that the autistic cannot bridge the worlds of the physical and the imaginary. The reason the autistic cannot do this is that they cannot put themselves in the position of another to “imagine or represent states that we or others might hold” (1995, 2). This, because the autistic does not manage to convey the complexity of his or her perception to the attending psychologist, neuroscientist, medical doctor, or academic, within a controlled environment that in many cases does not even begin to attend to his or her needs. From this comes the still far too dominant assumption that the autistic is categorically incapable of relation and empathy, the assumption that the autistic cannot experience feelings or states that concern another human. And, as we well know, without empathy you are not considered truly human.

What those who uphold this approach refuse to understand is that in the theater of individuation that is the autistic spectrum, communication does not unfold in ways that make general categorizations about perception possible. Views such as those of Baron-Cohen are based

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