Authoring autism: on rhetoric and neurological queerness

Authoring Autism is part of the Duke University Press ‘Thought in the Act’ series edited by Brian Massumi and Erin Manning. Installments in this series strive to untangle the ways that philosophy and rhetoric shape research and creation. Melanie Yergeau has been tic-tactile-tackling, crip-creep-critiquing, and queer-quest-questioning the rhetorical labyrinth our culture has built around the autistic embodiment for many years (Heilker and Yergeau 2011; Yergeau 2009, 2013). Yet Authoring Autism should not be mistaken for a summary of past work. It is entirely, uniquely, and crip-queerly a new exploration – a work that defines, defies, and defiles the boundaries of rhetorical regimes of neurological oppression.

‘Involution’, ‘Intention’, ‘Intervention’, ‘Invitation’, ‘Invention’, ‘Indexicality’ – these alliterative chapter inscriptions invite us to index the invention of autistic involuntary (un)intention. This text is an intervention, a disruption, an eruption. Each chapter carries us through a binary space of power and powerlessness, of mechanism and organism, of human and dishuman. ‘[A]utism is typically characterized as that which contrasts – as that which contrasts with language, humanness, empathy, self-knowledge, understanding, and rhetoricity’ (2). Yergeau directs assemblage of all of this incrementum into the axes of a coordinate space in which this ‘Austerity of Representation’ (McRuer 2018) has been constructed.

In ‘Involution’, Yergeau outlines the extant landscape of rhetorical deceits that configure autistic subjects as being incapable of voluntary action, intention, and (rhetorical) expression. ‘Intention’ illustrates the mathematical machinations of this rhetorical trickery. Graphs and plots and bi-polar scales lock us within infinitely divided moments, none of which are true – ‘a profound flattening of the diversity of humanity one might find under the label autism’ (51). ‘Intervention’ describes more than historical and present abuses of autistic people in the name of ‘normative violence’ (McGuire 2016). In intervention, Yergeau adeptly redirects the power of normalizing therapies by demonstrating the peculiar circular logics at work in their protocols. If the autistic is arhetorical, then what does behavioral intervention work to overwrite?

‘Invitation’ expresses both the rhetorical power of autistic disclosure, and the ways in which medical gazes usurp this power as an ‘invitation to intervene’ (145). Yergeau inserts her own personal experiences throughout this work as a means of reclaiming some of the most profoundly dehumanizing tropes that allistic rhetorics wield against us. In ‘Invention’, Yergeau presents autism as ‘a negotiation between rhetorical and arhetorical worlds’ (205).

Authoring Autism maps the ebbs and flows of demi-rhetoricity through the autistic body. This demi-rhetoricity need not be a marginalizing space, but a space the autistic can occupy proudly and defiantly – neuroqueerly claiming and repelling rhetorical intention at will. Today, a meltdown can be a rhetorical act, tomorrow refusing its rhetorical power over autistic ontology is also a rhetorical act. Demi-ness is not a less than, it is liminal, flowing – a space to direct and redirect power, a space to become.

Anna Williams
Department of Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering, Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
[email protected]
© 2018 Anna Williams
https://doi.org//10.1080/09687599.2018.1457500