Nora Ziegler
I’m exhausted. I’m so tired I can’t speak. I can’t look at people or even heat up leftovers in the microwave. When I’m this tired I have a rare opportunity to find out what I’m like when I’m not masking. What things can I do? What do I enjoy? Which mental processes still work, and which ones are out of order for the time being? Like many autistic women, I have been masking my entire life and I’ve forgotten how to turn it off. I welcome these periods of exhaustion as a blessing.
I can still cook a meal if it’s something I’ve cooked a million times before, but I can’t multitask. I assemble the ingredients, I chop, I cook one dish at a time, washing up after each step, before moving onto the next. It takes ages but I am calm, my mind wanders, I hum a tune and laugh out loud at something funny I said to myself.
Why can I cook but not heat up leftovers? Maybe because it feels as if I am skipping too many steps. The process doesn’t make sense somehow. I don’t trust microwaves.
I can write down some thoughts and express what I’m feeling at this moment, but I can’t gather my thoughts together into a coherent argument. I’m supposed to be working on the layout of Bad Apple Issue 9, and I can do little bits. I cut out some images from newspapers to use as stencils, I paint some flowers, but I can’t think about where they will fit, or how it will all tie together as a final ‘product’.
I can’t make these bigger connections. Which is interesting, because I find I am very good at making other kinds of connections, which seem to elude other people while appearing glaringly obvious to me. The connections I make are not systematic or coherent. They jump about between seemingly unrelated things.
The first time I was asked to complete a screening test for autism, I was confused by the question, do you, ‘usually concentrate more on the whole picture, rather than the small details?’ First of all, nobody can see the whole picture, that’s just ridiculous. But also, there are many ways of seeing the bigger picture. One way is to use systems and concepts such as ‘woman’ or ‘intersectionality’. To me those can feel both too vague and too rigid. My preferred way of seeing the bigger picture is by looking for patterns between all the little details.
Seeing the bigger picture through connections between little pieces is what theorists call dialectics. Theodor Adorno described it as ‘subterranean passages’ between bits of knowledge, that illuminate the whole. I would argue that dialectics is not a theory, it is a tendency of thinking; a way of seeing the world as full of odd, quirky, and deeply meaningful relationships.
Dialectic theory is the attempt to translate this magical way of seeing and feeling the world into a method. When autistic theory bros do this, it is called masking. When neurotypical theory bros do it, we could call it appropriation. But I feel like the parts of me that mask also appropriate ideas from other parts of me without giving them recognition or love. Maybe this article is a step towards internal epistemic justice.
The results of dialectic masking/appropriation are increasingly dense and convoluted but never quite manage to grasp what they are trying to express. Something tickles my brain. I get out of bed and find the book, and this quote I underlined four years ago by Edward Said:
‘It is finally Western ignorance that becomes more refined and complex, not some body of positive Western knowledge.’
However, within that refined and complex tangle of theory, we can still see little glimpses of what they are trying to understand and communicate. There is a shadow of something radical lurking under the surface. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney speculate whether Karl Marx inherited his radical insights from ‘Hegel’s weird auto-eroticism or just being ugly and dark and fugitive’. Excuse me, but why is auto-eroticism weird? I get up and grab another book from my shelf. Audre Lorde says: ‘The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.’
Maybe G.W.F. Hegel, one of the famous dialecticians, was an autistic nerd trying to find a way to unify his mask and his inner self. Maybe he was able to reveal some of himself in his description of the ‘unhappy consciousness’ that knows itself to be split and contradictory, and longs for reconciliation. Maybe he was inspired by his school friend Friedrich Hölderlin, the bisexual poet, who is said to have gone mad through a devastating rupture between his ability to feel and his ability to express what he felt.
Audre Lorde says that poetry,
‘can help give name to the nameless so it can be thought’
and allows us to play with radical and dangerous ideas that would frighten us if they didn’t come through dreams and poetry. She says that, ‘there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt’. Poetry can be one of these ways, so can prayer, and painting flowers, cooking a meal with time to daydream and laugh at jokes I tell myself, and lying in bed writing prose when I’m exhausted.
I would like to propose a new diagnostic test. If you understand dialectics, not because you are a clever academic, but because it nibbles at your toes, opens little windows in your heart and sprouts out of your eyeballs, then you might be autistic. You can now use your powers to destroy your enemies and change the world.
Bad Apple Magazine 