Language and the Autist
I encourage everyone here to take a moment and watch the following video by Amanda Baggs. Titled "In My Langauge", the video itself is split into two parts, the first a sort of evocative display of the experience of autism, the second, Baggs's own "interpretation" of what's happening in the first part. The first part may seem a bit jarring, if not confusing, but it's worth the wait.
I've always been curious about with the rhythmic quality of the movements of those who we tend to consider mentally disabled. You tend to see it quite often, a certain continuous rocking or gentle swaying exhibited by those like Baggs, which can seem, to those of us not so affected, to be aimless or wandering. Yet I've always wondered if there is in fact a particular significance to such rhythms, rhythms which might, perhaps, help with maintaining a certain bodily integrity by capturing a duration of space and time in a comforting cadence without which a sense of self might begin to unravel, or at least feel less concrete.
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Baggs's video, I think, articulates something similar in a far better way then I could have. Especially interesting is her specification of her movements in terms of language. "The previous part of this video", says Baggs, referring to the three wordless minutes that precede her 'interpretation', "was in my native language." For us neurotypicals, the idea that Baggs's rhythmic bodily repetitions could constitute language might come off as particularly strange. Language, as we are used to thinking of it, is matter of 'symbolizing', of being something to interpret and understand. Yet for Baggs, her language works differently: "My language is not about designing words or even visual symbols for people to interpret. It is about being in a constant conversation with every aspect of my environment, reacting physically to all parts of my surroundings". In a voice over a clip of Baggs running her fingers through flowing water, Baggs says, "the water doesn't symbolize anything. I am just interacting with the water, as the water interacts with me".
Language for Baggs is not a matter of communicating between one person and another, but between a person - in this case Baggs - and their environment. Importantly she notes that "far from being purposeless, the way that I move is an ongoing response to what is around me." So how are we to understand the manner in which Baggs can be said to be communicating or responding to her environment? Baggs helps to clarify this by noting that the difference between neurotypical communication and the sort of communication she is detailing is a matter of scope: "Ironically, the way that I move when responding to everything around me is described as 'being in a world of my own'. Whereas if I interact with a much more limited set of responses and only react to a much more limited part of my surroundings people claim that I am 'opening up to true interaction with the world'." Neurotypical communication is in fact a communication that proceeds by way of certain constraints - that of grammar, social convention, vocalization or graphic , inter-subjectivity, etc; while Baggs's own manner of communication is a communication undertaken with far looser constraints.
What interests me here is not just what this says about autistic experience - although this fascinates me too - but also what it says about so-called normal communication. What Baggs's experience allows us to do is rethink what we traditionally understand as the 'normal order' of communication; Autistic experience is often taken to be a sort of degraded form of experience, wherein normal experience is taken to be standard which the autist has failed to reach. What Baggs's experience shows however, is that autistic experience is in fact a type of experience with it's own standard of consistency and specificity. Baggs, who can only speak though typed words on a computer, is clearly an articulate, thoughtful and insightful person. Her ability to think and communicate however, is not a degraded form of experience so much as an experience that belongs to a different order. As she herself writes, "the way that I naturally think and respond to things looks and feels so different from standard concepts or even visualization that some people do not consider it thought at all but it is a way of thinking in its own right".
By underscoring the difference between autistic and neurotypical communication as a matter of scope, Baggs essentially places both experiences on a continuum that runs from a highly constrained manner of communication to one far less so. Interestingly, it is precisely the constraints placed on neurotypical communication that make it so highly varied and capable of semantic precision. In any case, this allows Baggs to draw a certain equivalency between the two, as she does when she complains that "we are... viewed as non-communicative if we don’t speak the standard language but other people are not considered non-communicative if they are so oblivious to our own languages as to believe that they don’t exist." Philosophically speaking, Baggs forces us to reconsider our complacencies with respect to the scope of what does and does not count as meaningful, as well as the boundaries we draw between self and other. Baggs's own take-away is at once both ethical and political, a takeaway that reminds us of the responsibilities we have when engaging in what we may think only of as abstract thought.
Comments (31)
This makes sense to me, both from a phenomenological perspective - Baggs writes alot about overload on her blog - and in terms of the language of constraints that I've tried to employ above. When Baggs writes of how people tend to only engage with a limited part of the world, these limits are themselves derived from an ability to parse differences amongst an environment. One can put this in terms of background/foreground relations. It's possible to say that our engagements with the world largely take place by backgrounding a great deal of the environment around in order to engage with specific, foregrounded elements; this book, that computer screen, this path, that noise. For those like Baggs, this relationship is reversed; the primary experience is one in which the background is in some sense foregorounded, as when she says that she is in "a constant conversation with every aspect of my environment, reacting physically to all parts of my surroundings."
In some sense, Baggs's self-experience is not one which separates her from her environment as an agent-acting-in-an-external-surrouding, but one in which is she is part and parcel of the environment. Erin Manning, the philosopher whose writings lead me to Baggs's video, writes of how "autistics do not tend first and foremost to abstract themselves - their "self" - from the emergent environment... it is this intensive relationally, the video suggests, that often makes it difficult for autistics to interact with others." In one of her blog posts, Baggs describes the perplexity she is faced with when she is asked what she is thinking, and the inability for alot of people to appreciate her answer: “The dark behind my eyelids. The sensation of pressure on my arms. The sound of rustling.” To which the reply is: "[But] that’s a feeling. What were you thinking?". For Baggs however, "As far as I’m concerned, processing sensory input, including emotional responses from inside my body, are part of thinking. They are the main part of my thinking, at that. Yes, I do have the kind of thoughts that everyone calls thinking, but not all the time. Not most of the time... That kind of thought takes work and work takes energy... So that’s yet another common assumption: That everyone uses that standard kind of thinking. So much so that many people (including many people like me) decide that my predominant way of thinking isn’t thinking."
Yet just as her language is of another order, so too is her thinking. Like her language, her thinking also constitutes a positive modality which, to a large degree, we do not have access too. The primacy of background is not something we tend to experience. Autistic 'overload' is what takes place when this residency amongst the background is broken, when too much is foregrounded and the relation to the background is broken. Again, the point is to be careful with instituting a hierarchy of experiential categorization. Baggs's experience breaks the sort of input/output model of sensory experience that we tend to take for granted. The demarcations that would make a division between an inside and an outside are not necessarily present until certain exigencies make them arise. Manning for her part writes thus of the way in which Baggs's rhythmic movements don't take place in an environment so much as with an environment, co-emerging along with it.
:) You'd get boo'd off the stage for that at Autscape! For many autistics, myself included, NT interpersonal communication seems dysfunctional and degraded. On so many occasions I have written an email to an NT person containing, say, three questions. They answer none of them, and ask me a question instead. This seems like a straightforward communication disability, and it is the norm. Heck, this shit was routine on PF and drove me nuts. You just can't have a proper conversation like that. On the other hand, my email communication with other autistics is crystal clear. I ask three questions, and I get three answers, even if all three answers are 'I don't know' or 'I don't know what you are asking'. This is first class interpersonal communication.
And in the case of a philosophy discussion, there's a reason the Socratic method is a thing. With the right questions you could get your interlocutor to agree with you of his own accord.
A common occurrence in my life is asking a client if they want A or B and they answer with "Yes".
For you it is.
Here's what this sounds like to me bert. Imagine a community of people called the lefters who have only one arm, the left one, and they walk around wearing capes so that nobody can see their disability. One of them says...
It is not always good communication to answer every question that is asked, and a response that ignores the questions completely may still be a good way of taking the conversation forward, allowing the questioner to see that the questions were misplaced, or trying to tackle things from a different angle. And from the questioner's standpoint, a response that doesn't directly answer their questions but nevertheless shows a deep insight into what they have said can be more satisfying; I often find point-by-point responses pedantic and facile. Granted, this way of responding may not work for everyone, may be difficult for some people to understand, and is sometimes open to abuse, but that doesn't make it "second class".
I'm sorry if this would get me boo'd off the stage at Autscape.
These are all common strategies in any discussion forum across the net. Often times questions are asked in an attempt to force a poster to answer a certain way. But most posters are smart enough to see through that.
Even if it's just performance, though, it works as a way of expressing the notions that gesture, movement, sound are all of a piece, and might make sense in a way that is often disregarded.
What is odd though is that in the video only an indifferent dog is visibly in 'the audience'. Language as communication with the environment strikes me as having its narcissistic side. I didn't see a claim in her video that her non-verbal 'language' communicated to or with her fellow-autistics.
People are always going on about speaker-meaning and much more rarely about hearer-meaning. For me language makes sense in that it's understood by someone other than the speaker. Otherwise it would be making a 'private language' claim, wouldn't it?
Sure. This shows that there are two groups of people with different cultures, needs, abilities, etc. The narrative is that autistics are deficient on NT terms, which is true. The opposite narrative is also true, that NTs are deficient on autistic terms. Consider this:
Neurotypical syndrome is a neurobiological disorder characterized by preoccupation with social concerns, delusions of superiority, and obsession with conformity.
Not with philosophy. You can do both, answer questions and change the subject if you want. Not answering questions is just rude. Also, saying "That's the wrong question" is extremely offensive. Questions can't be wrong. It's implying that the questioner doesn't know what they are themselves interested in. A question defines what someone wants to talk about, and can't be wrong.
Again, you can do both. You can respect the questioner by answering their question, and then you can go on to make whatever deep point you like. Or if there really is no mileage in answering the question, or you don't know how to answer it, you can say so. At least that isn't completely ignoring someone's interests.
I don't think it would as long as you acknowledged that there is an equally valid autistic culture.
In which case they are not doing philosophy and have no business on a philosophy forum.
Well, that's just psychotic, or at least rude.
But we can address that while answering the question. Good philosophers would welcome questions that favour an opinion contrary to their own. It gives them something to argue about.
Well if they are smart enough to see through that they are smart enough to answer the question and make the points they want to make. Non-engagement is anti-social, and anti-philosophical. It might be appropriate on a forum dedicated to sophistry, but not on a philosophy forum.
If we think non-answering of questions is OK, we get a situation in which people fail to philosophically interact.
I have some sympathy with mcdoodle's take on it.
Maybe you miss the part where people like to argue.
"What constitutes winning?"
Which you ignored. This is classic NT behaviour.
So, lets try again,
What constitutes winning?
What are we doing here? Feuding, arguing or sophistry?
Was it? How do you know?
I already gave you an answer. You don't like it, okay. *shrug*
So you expect people to be different just because the topic is philosophy? (That's a rhetorical question).
Quoting bert1
Is it? Is that what professional philosophers do? Or do they also advance their own positions?
An exchange of information is wikipedia or SEP.
Easy. You tell the person they asked the wrong question, or phrased it incorrectly.
Really? That's answering a question with a question.
So many questions! Personally, I like to argue topics that interest me. Feuding happens sometimes with certain posters as a result. Particularly if you're always arguing opposing views.
It's still informative, and sometimes I'm forced to reevaluate my thinking. Also the shock a Landru or a TGW gives the system can be enjoyable.
Actually I have a better answer. You can think of it as verbal sparring. People sharpen up their positions going toe to toe with each other. And in the process, they learn.
I expect people to do philosophy, and be philosophical, on a philosophy forum. Whether that's the same or different from the rest of the web is of no relevance.
Quoting Marchesk
No, it's only partly that, you're right. It's also critical evaluation of those views, identifying inconsistencies, fallacies, suggesting repairs to arguments, making implicit assumptions explicit, and so on.
Quoting Marchesk
At their best, yes, (assuming my revised statement above).
Quoting Marchesk
They do that too. In the process of doing that they critically evaluate their own view as well as others, if only to be seen to be playing the game.