Ombre Tarragnat

To finish this month’s series, let’s ask the big question: In what worlds do autistics live? Is there such a thing as an autistic Umwelt – a world of meaning created by the autistic subject? Or should we rather speak of autistic worldings – practices of worldmaking where the boundaries between the subject and the world dissolve?

In the first blog post from this series, I examined the autism metaphor for the Umwelt – a concept developed by theoretical biologist Jakob von Uexküll (2010) to designate the perceptual-behavioural world created by a living organism. I suggested that, while Uexküll’s conception of the Umwelt is relatively static and almost essentialist, the metaphor of the Umwelt bubble – or the autistic bubble – could be subverted. By exploring the physics of soap bubbles, I showed that soap bubbles are much more precarious than we might imagine. All sorts of external elements are at play, such as the intensity of the human’s blowing to form the bubble, the amount of soap available, the physical forces pressuring the bubble, the possible encounter with other bubbles and bodies, etc. With this metaphor, it appeared that the Umwelt – including the autistic Umwelt – actually depended on all sorts of human and more-than-human encounters.

To speak of an autistic Umwelt, then, would mean to explore not only the ways autistic people orient themselves in their surroundings by creating meaning, order, and structure, but also how these worlds of meaning are often destabilised and, sometimes, driven to extinction. With this idea, I envision a posthuman phenomenology of neurodivergence – a kind of theoretical project that recognises the importance and complexity of lived experience without buying into a solipsistic, rationalist, or exceptionalist view of the human. In this approach, it is clear that the autistic Umwelt is precarious and vulnerable, because its persistence relies on a variety of external and internal factors.

There is therefore nothing new with the idea of an autistic Umwelt. Not only does the autism metaphor for Uexküll’s Umwelt make the idea of an autistic Umwelt almost tautological, but autistic people themselves make regular use of this kind of phenomenological vocabulary. In a world that is often too intense, autistic people need to deploy all sorts of existential and material strategies to acclimatise.

However, posthumanist theory, including posthuman feminist theory, has sometimes expressed scepticism vis-à-vis phenomenology and the concept of being-in-the-world. Stacy Alaimo (2016), for instance, explicitly steers away from phenomenology: she judges that ‘[t]he immediacy of phenomenology, for example, does not enable trans-corporeal mappings of networks’ (p. 3). This critique targets the way phenomenology tends to focus on the internal experience of a subject, thus backgrounding the agentic capacity of external beings and forces to affect the subject. We are not in the world, posthuman feminists would argue, but we are of the world.

In her book on Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, Astrida Neimanis (2017) offers figurations of human bodies as Bodies of Water. In this work, Neimanis is not only interested in how we subjectively experience the journey of water in our bodies, but also in the pre-subjective experience of watery embodiment and in the transcorporeal (Alaimo, 2010) relations between our bodies and larger bodies of water like seas and oceans. With this approach, she argues ‘that dispersed embodiment is also lived embodiment’ (Neimanis, 2017, p. 25).

Similarly, Christine Daigle (2023) examines the dual nature of human existence, at the same time constituted by subjective entanglements (transsubejctivity) and material entanglements (transobjectivity or transmateriality). Posthuman feminist phenomenology therefore attempts to hold both aspects at once: we are transjective beings who experience the world subjectively but are also constituted of and by more-than-human agents of all sorts.

What does this mean for those, like me, who are interested in understanding the nature of autistic worlds? In more radical posthumanist approaches, for instance those inspired by Deleuzo-Guattarian ontologies or process philosophy, concepts like being-in-the-world are often substituted with others like worlding. But while ‘Heidegger [developed a] concept of “worlding” to indicate a process of world-making, or becoming-world (Heidegger 1927/1962), [Karen] Barad describes matter as “worlding in its materiality” (Barad 2007, 181, emphasis added)’ (Neimanis & Loewen Walker 2013, p. 569). In other words, the kind of worlding that interests posthuman feminists often bypasses the plane of subjectivity to examine the transversality of affects and movements that run through bodies. On this view, ‘[e]verything seems to start in the milieu’ (Bigé, 2023, p. 53, my translation).

While I am personally attached to phenomenology and resistant to a complete bypassing of subjectivity, I am sensitive to the idea of autistic worldings. The latter could be understood as processes of worldmaking based on autistic modes of perception (Manning, 2013, 2016) and movements – like stimming. These ‘ontological choreographies’ (Thomson cited in Haraway, 2003, p. 8) materialise minor worlds where autistic people can coexist with other human and more-than-human critters.

References

Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Bigé, Emma. 2023. Mouvementements: Écopolitiques de la danse. Paris: La Découverte.

Daigle, Christine. 2023. Posthumanist Vulnerability: An Affirmative Ethics. London, New York, and Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic.

Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Manning, Erin. 2013. Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Manning, Erin. 2016. The Minor Gesture. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Neimanis, Astrida. 2017. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Neimanis, Astrida, and Loewen Walker, Rachel. ‘Weathering: Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of Transcorporeality.’ Hypatia, 29(3), 2013, p. 558-575.

Von Uexküll, Jakob. 2010. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans. With A Theory of Meaning. Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press.

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_{This blog post is partly inspired by a forthcoming publication, ‘“Queer Ethologies and the More-Than Potentials of Animality’. in Nick Walker (ed.), Neuroqueer Theory and Practice. Fort Worth: Autonomous Press.}