Fish In the Afternoon

Content note: Discussion of filicide, ableism, anti-autistic violence, and gender dysphoria.

Whenever I see a picture of myself I am unsettled. This unsettling is sometimes gender dysphoria, a bursting-out of gender-energy against the backdrop of cisheterosexism. But other times it is a neuroqueer dysphoria, an autisticky dysphoria, stimming-out against the ghost-image imprinted on my body. In this image I glimpse how others see me: crumpled in queer contortions, my body appears as a fidget ball, a tangle of steel strings, a spiked lanyard spread across a mess of moving thorns. In these glimpses, a gap appears between how I appear to myself and how I appear to others, between my internal neuroqueer shimmering and the abject fiction that others ascribe to me.

I am at home in my autism, in the tics and wobbles and stims and spins of my supersensory, suprasensory self, the sound sound sound of skin and sun and song. However, glimpsed through the allistic image, I see a body in asymmetry, a non-human non-subject, an objectified body too awkwardly alone to be a partner to emotional, romantic, sexual, and communal love. My body is experienced as asocial and arhetorical, lacking features of the human self, the citizen-subject of the colonial metastasis. This imaging deepens my sense of loneliness and isolation, the nothingness of autistic being-in-an-allistic-world. The hell of the autistic image is to be auto- everything, to be a lack pushed inward, divided from friendship and relationship and love and sex and care and belonging. To be autistic is to be in auto-totality, to have “by oneself” inscribed into your neurology, a mess mess mess of loneliness, of mis-and-non-interpretation, of non-understanding and non-recognition, of being lost at sea.

This isolation is at the heart of the autistic image, the ghost-figment ascribed to us, glimpsed through the stare of the allistic. Over and against allo-, the other-appearing, the other-approaching, the other-interpreting, the social, autism is forever auto-, the self-appearing, the self-approaching, the self-interpreting, the asocial. Autism is both isolated to the self and lacks a self, both the auto- and its negation. The pseudo-scientific works of Simon Baron-Cohen and Uta Firth, prime imagers of the autistic bodymind, characterize autism as the inability to understand or replicate the minds of others, collapsing into a lack of sociality and intention. This also implies that, in being unable to replicate the minds of others, we lack what makes us human, what allows us to communicate, and so also lack a self, only mirroring the selves of others as appearance without content. We are reduced to a fidgety, stuttering, acompositional self, a fetish of mismatched parts taken from other people, no more real than the accumulation in a junkpile. The auto- of autism ceases to be self-approaching and instead turns back on itself, becoming absolute nothingness.

It is this dynamic that I witness in seeing pictures of myself. I am not revolted by my body, but in witnessing my body I also witness the system of allo-subjectivity that casts aside my body as asocial, arelational, and aintentional. This allo-subjectivity, this internal allistic specter, the autism parent within, reduces my selfhood to pathology, rendering me relation-less, subject-less, identity-less, a jittery ghost locked in a vessel of sharpened glass. Viewing myself through an allistic gaze impresses on me that I am separate from the interpretive and social world of those around me, divided from relationship with myself, with others, and the world through being perceived as a not-us, an alien from another realm. In an allistic cosmos, the autistic appears as death, a walking corpse whose mentality has dissipated comfortably into wretched invisibility. Starving for liberation from the body, the allistic shapes themselves into a micro-god, a “rational animal” whose rationality negates its animality, electric icons fucking in digital mimicry. The autistic body, however – stimming, repeating, vibrating, motioning, contorting, gasping, wiggling, flapping – is irreducible, an un-mentionable, un-spoken, un-speaking corporeality reminding the allistic of their own unwanted flesh.

“Health” for allistic capitalism is the annihilation of the body, the therapeutic erasing of the flesh, an escape into image, specters with sweat-bands pretending (only pretending) to touch. In allistic capitalism, the authentic self is not found in the thisness of being, but in jumping-out into virtuality, retreating into gnostic bliss, separating the spirit-as-consumer from the body-as-raw-being. This authentic self is a reflection of the commodity form, the circulatory system of exchange and accumulation that reduces everything to units of comparison, measure, and consumption. The autistic body, however, cannot be reduced to this spectrality, for it appears as a rupture in the virtual, the real peeking in from the outside. The autistic appears to the hegemonic gnosis as a living death, an abject horror that threatens the collapse of this hellish heaven. This is why anti-vaxx parents will risk horrific, painful death for their child over an imagined “risk” of autism – because dying from measles preserves this virtuality, this imaginary semblance of parent and child with the demands of gnostic capital. This is why fathers, mothers, siblings, friends, caretakers, etc. will abuse and murder their autistic “loved ones.” It is an attempt to save both themselves and the autistic from the horror of autistic enfleshment. Murder hides the body behind a corpse and so hides the corporeality of being behind the silence of death. No longer does the autistic have to live with being that and no longer does the caretaker have to live with being with that. Because who could love being autistic?

People like me, just as with many other marginalized communities, are killed, beaten, abused, isolated, and tortured for having a body, a brain, a way-of-being-enfleshed that is other to allistic, virtual capital. When I stim happily, when I flap my hands, when I echo, echo, echo – alalia, alalia, alalia – I express something that cannot be consumed, that can’t be digitized and de-sacralized into a medium of exchange. These stims are instead suppressed, held, isolated, rendered asocial and abject. God forbid I express myself as an equal, joining together with others like me, communicating my experiences and styles-of-the-flesh. God forbid I love, laugh, write, dance, cry, scream, or fuck. God forbid I express myself as a subject, as a human being worthy of dignity and community and belonging. Virtuality, the demiurge of capital, responds to such expressions through commodification, infantilization, and destruction. Autistic life is commodified through being stolen from us and sold as the experiences of others, of autism parents and caretaker narratives and light it up blue parades. Autistic life is infantilized through talking-around our subjectivity, through imaging us as thoughtless, joyless, sexless blank slates containing nothing but non-being. And if neither of these work, autistic life can always be destroyed through restraint, through suffocating, beating, burning, drowning, depriving, torturing, murdering, silencing, vengeance. When an autistic body (an autistic corpse) is found at the bottom of a river, killed by a caretaker or passerby or doctor or educator or police officer, the allistic can then intone “who could blame them?” There is no body with quieter hands than a dead one.

I am a blood disease in the body politic. My autistic being is an act of theopolitical resistance against virtuality, against allistic capitalism. I am a reflection of enfleshed and incarnate Sophia, the Holy Wisdom that vibrates through the becoming of creation. I am a reflection of Christ, spirit joined to flesh, beaten, abused, and killed, the infinite enveloping suffering. I am not a babbling child, a “poor thing” to be talked-over or ignored, to be silenced, destroyed, or discarded. I am a blood disease in the body politic, a limit that arises from the same standards of communication and sociality that form the conceptual ground of capitalist modernity, the limit of the human, of the colonial citizen-subject. I am a wound in the allistic gnosis and I will stim happily.

Image: Composition VI by Wassily Kandinsky (1913)