Monotropism

Speech, Language and Power

Cover of the book this chapter is from, edited by Damian Milton and Sara Ryan.

Dinah Murray (2021, published 2022 in The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Autism Studies*)

Speech is obviously energetic and impactful.  People use it to draw attention to themselves or the messages they wish to be heard will not be heard; they thus have an impact on other people’s thoughts and deeds.  Its capacity to do that collectively depends on being part of a shared speech community, with a substantial overlap of word meanings and sentence structures – i.e. a language.  This chapter will analyse the way that works in terms of interests – from fleeting and personal to long term and global.  All living beings have interests and most form communities of interest with others seeking to survive in a complex and changeable universe.  The discussion here focusses on individual hugely varying human beings and their multiple and shifting communities of interest, embedded within the scope of vastly powerful interests such as those of profit-seeking corporations and control seeking governments and other forces.  

This chapter aims to give an informal, naturalistic account of minds and meanings, based on a slightly expanded commonplace concept of interest.  It is an account of humanity that accommodates a wide range including monotropic – single attention – focussed autistic dispositions which tend to give atypically much processing resource or attention to their leading current of interest and little or nothing to extraneous stimuli.  (Murray, Lesser, Lawson 2005; Murray 2018, 2020; Woods 2019; Leatherland 2019)

This interest based model is a thoroughly embodied and environmentally attuned account of thought and action.  As in natural language, interests are conceived here as being informed, aroused, shared, expressed, and an impact in the world which also has an impact on them; they vary in duration, in strength and in emotional valence.  Some interests are selfish, but that is not a default: it is far from true that all interests are self-serving.

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Physically the force of speech is expelled, moist, processed air, travelling out of one person’s body and expanding and diluting, plus sound waves that have order and meaning they retain as they travel, which endure after the sounds have stopped and the waves dissipated.  The written word harnesses other physical forces as it comes into being, is stable and lasts longer, and is much more detached from the particular moment it is encountered.  These differences are sometimes highly significant, but for now, the key commonality of relying on a shared language will be the focus and I will use saying and speaking to refer to both spoken and written words unless I ‘say’ otherwise.

So, how does the order and meaning of speech provide opportunities for mutual engagement between speakers and what is the nature of the engagement that ensues? The story here will not focus on syntax and formal definitions, but will consider meanings as pragmatic, with linguistic meanings being the most reliable subset for purposes of sharing meaning – with very low maintenance costs, as all co-speakers actively, at low individual cost, contribute to the process.  This means that not only can language be used expressively but also to rather precisely get into other people’s heads and alter their directions and flows of thought.

In this respect, language is a brilliant tool for manipulating interest systems, ie aligning them as far as possible with one’s own.  That is a necessary survival capacity for all of us complementarily different beings.  Personal interest  – personal allocation of processing resource –  does not equate with selfish interest.  Any interest system is a value system on some scale, shared interests and values are the foundation of social alignment.

One main point of this chapter is that languages and linguistic subsystems such as slang, cant, and jargon emerge from interest groups, some more sustained than others, and language meanings always follow currents of interest.  There is a self-reinforcing circularity built in as those currents are partly themselves channelled by the vocabulary which expresses them.   So members of a community of interest frame the world in roughly the same way, often with an in-group / out-group boundary patrol function.

The other key point is that monotropic (ie autistic) people naturally tend NOT to give processing resource to this ongoing negotiation for position – which gets absurdly called ‘Mind reading’ in the privileged world of researchers and practitioners.   This is because social positioning for an autistic person will [a] be assumed by them not to need work, because it is a given (either 100% in or 100% out?) [b] will not include regular hierarchical comparison of self with others and [c] will tend to run counter flow to other thoughts, be uncomfortable, uphill work with uncertain outcomes, and be avoided or never become an attractor at-all.  This much vaunted practice of constantly playing to and positioning oneself in relation to others’ comparative values has little or nothing to do with either fellow feeling or ‘mind reading’.  Not engaging with it may make someone awkward or draw unfavourable attention, but it does not make them ‘mind blind’ – having thoughts others can’t hear or read unless I choose is a vital part of my human autonomy, not a defect in relating.  

While all concerns or desires are interests, not all interests are goal oriented concerns or desires.   Concerns, aims, plans are interests with preferred outcomes – people say things like “my main concern is to save lives” or “I’m concerned to be fair”: something is sought, an outcome is desired.  In my PhD (Murray 1986) I contrasted ‘concerns’ with the goal-free activity of gazing at the aurora borealis and experiencing wonder and awe.   The word ‘autotelic’ – which I didn’t know then – I think captures that extra realm of awareness, with its intrinsic rather than extrinsic values ; it is defined as an important concept in the work of Csikszentmihalyi (1990). who sees some people as more likely to have this as a general disposition.  

He writes:

An autotelic person needs few material possessions and little entertainment, comfort, power, or fame because so much of what he or she does is already rewarding….., They are more autonomous and independent because they cannot be as easily manipulated with threats or rewards from the outside. At the same time, they are more involved with everything around them because they are fully immersed in the current of life

Snippets from Dara's book, written in pen in all-caps, cut out and arranged by Dinah Sudden fit of excitement Urgency Fierce joy Intensely excited Walk in a trance Transfixed Things that nobody notices The landscape our place of worship Mesmerising & hypnotic We don't have to control ourselves here Unbridled excitement We run & run Crackling excitement Unfettered joy Giddy amazement Dazzled by delicacy Senses popping like corn kernels Anticipation & fascination Reverence & awe

The words ardent young autistic naturalist Dara McAnulty (2020) uses about how he relates to nature refer again and again to this happy immersion, and support the analysis of McDonnell and Milton (2014) that this is a natural autistic attitude. Much of what Csikszentmihalyi writes about this way of relating to life, positions it as a realistic option which will naturally benefit those blessed with it.  That could be true for people in a world where survival was less harried and hurried, but in the current world a blend of autotelic opportunities with externally motivated practicalities of life seems the best hope for all but the most privileged.  Retaining one’s autonomy and integrity in such a world is an achievement in itself.

Some general features apply to that whole range of interests from the fleeting to the entrenched.  Interests are about the adaptive flow of attention and movement through the world, using and intelligently distributing an energetic processing resource.  The more highly aroused an area of interest is the more likely it is to be expressed as the more energy will be marshalled to this end; at the same time, the higher an interest’s profile the more likely we are to see it as involving ‘paying attention’.  

This process occurs within an n-dimensional system created from past possibilities explored, enacted or ruled in or out, in-forming future possibilities as yet unexplored and offering past ones as occasions arise.  (If I understand right, the technical concept of a Markov blanket  described in Clark 2017 captures these key features.)  A great deal is typically going on that is below awareness; at any given time, only a small part of it can sharpen into clear awareness.  The fewer dimensions are channelled the more clearly any stream can emerge into expression – simplification occurs.   Meanings are constantly being refreshed, recreated, and exchanged in this way.  Common directions and flows harmonised by same resonances are integral to social alignment.  They are channelled by serial inhibitions or exclusions creating distinctions between flows and excluding the extraneous.  How they are channelled may often be determined by much larger interests which have very different ends in view.

An occasion is a moment for action; concerns seek such moments.

The energetic processing resource, that can be thought of as interest or attention, infuses a subset of dimensions, amplifying their signals, ‘highlighting’ some and excluding the rest, making them distinct so directions of thought can be perceived and relevant expressions can occur and have their own distinct impact.  Words and grammars do this job with supreme efficiency: for any individual, to acquire linguistic competence is to acquire a sustained mechanism of resource distribution at minimal personal cost, continually refreshed and maintained by other people’s use.   The more abundant a directed flow within the system, the less evenly spread and widely distributed the processing resource will tend to be and the more focussed the attention will feel.  Becoming more aware can be thought of as shedding enough dimensions to allow the mind to ‘formulate’ = create a little form. The form in the mind’s eye cannot be n-dimensional; stripping the dimensions makes awareness possible; it’s about leaving out almost everything, then ‘it’ can begin to become action, including speech.  This is how an interest makes itself felt within its owner’s awareness as well as in the outside world if uttered.  

The brilliance of language creates a whole new world of potential error and illusion with the spoken word’s implicit claims to truth and precision and stability, and its apparently neat overlap of meanings between same speakers.

Language is a tool for manipulating interest systems

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The verb ‘manipulate’ is used here with neutral valence: it is just what happens because a language’s expressions activate and resonate with a set of the same restricted dimensions for all speakers of that language. It can be used for benign or malign ends; it can be used honestly and transparently or to hide and distort the truth.  It is important to remember that, for any given individual, the meaningful expressions of a language’s lexicon resonate beyond their own boundaries every time they are used.  Resonating, ie amplifying signals, activates overlapping potential.  The energetic flow of processing resource goes where the boundaries and branches and gradients take it. Those can be thought of as the accessibility cascades Kahneman (2011) ascribes to his ‘System 1’.  He sees those as the ‘quick and dirty’ background to more rational thought in the more conscious and time consuming ‘System 2’ which enables reflection and considered evaluation – yet also potentiates fantasy and self-delusion.  The model here notes that this system cannot escape being an expression of the interests that animate System 1: ’System 2’ introduces time: it is the expressive output of System 1; expressions have dimensions pared right down so they can be grasped and noted – and shared through overt expression.  Thus one person’s interests and meanings can mingle effectively with those of others, and shared happy flows and flappy hows can happen – along with much else.

There are many pleasant alternative ways of creating a degree of this necessary alignment with others’ interests; by shared experiences, e,g .via music making or listening,  dancing, rowing a boat, climbing a mountain.  What we find in these contexts tends to be mutuality and cooperation often with an autotelic character, creating happy shared and complementary resonances and rhythms.  Language has wider scope and adds refined manipulation to interactions, including vulnerabilities and misdirections.

Autistic people I believe tend to prefer autotelic pursuits to self interest, and of course many others share a concern re the selfish greedy interests that have been seen as driving ‘progress’ during recent decades.  That has been thanks to Adam Smith’s historical baker (1770) who bakes the bread to make a profit for himself, rather than because the bread needs baking or because people need food or because there’s nothing to beat the smell of baking bread.  It is all simplified and dismissed through the lens of profit.  

As Philipsen (2020) puts it, 

“Around the world, the free market rewards competing, positioning and elbowing, so these have become the most desirable qualifications people can have. Empathy, solidarity or concern for the public good are relegated to the family, houses of worship or activism. Meanwhile, the market and private gain don’t account for social stability, health or happiness. As a result, from Cape Town to Washington, the market system has depleted and ravaged the public sphere – public health, public education, public access to a healthy environment – in favour of private gain.”

It’s time for the common good to be restored as a fundamental and worthwhile project, and community of interest to be valued as the basic context for all rightful action.

The idea that every human is a gift to the world has begun to seem quaint in itself and has stopped shedding its warm light quite generally, in the most business oriented cultures. For autistic infants the situation is even harsher, as they are actually seen as a risk to their parents from the moment of conception and a catastrophe for sure. So the way autism is framed narrows its meanings into pathological channels and loses its humanity in the process. For people whose assets are not visible in the market place, the scope for leading a valued life depends on luck and chance against some rather steep odds. Yet it is surely true that humans, autistic or not want and need to feel they are a contributing part of a larger whole.

The words and sentences I have strung together above have hopefully got into your head dear reader, and done things there in the process, arousing and altering and connecting a range of different interests as you read them.  They did that via resonances, enhancing specific signals and setting off cascades of effect within your personal connectome (that is, your interest system as embodied in that body whose eyes take in these words).  

Creating such resonances is a human power that is constantly acting upon other humans (and other species too), with an appearance of neutrality and objectivity, of clarity and truthfulness, of containment and precision that is always, necessarily, partial.  

Knowing the jargon is part of getting and keeping the authority of expertise within any community of interest.  For example, it is obvious that medical talk is framed to show expertise and strengthen the boundaries so that communication within those bounds is exclusionary, and the person diagnosed is an object whose ignorance reinforces the contrast between inner and outer.  When all of this is set in a framework in which measurable profit is seen as a moral good in itself, the commodified person who suffers – i.e. the patient – seems to have very little power.  Patients are positioned as faulty, powerless and sometimes needing their autonomy to be trampled on.   This is cited here as a well-known example that is obviously highly relevant to the pathologising of autistic and other atypical strands of human nature, while also showing a general human trend to demonstrate inclusion and exclusion, and/or hierarchy based relative positions.  

Linguistic power play is pervasive and way broader than the medical realm. It is about subtle power lines that enmesh us all by direct and indirect use of language to construct and reinforce attitudes and expectations.  We can too easily internalise and adopt those normative expectations and the judgements they encode, and judge ourselves to be defective – a possibly self-fulfilling understanding that can destroy personal hopes.

Dear reader, if you have not yourself been given the autism label, try and imagine how a person feels who supposes everyone else *can* read minds.  Please set aside this misleading idea and consider that mismatched interests or salience  – different ideas about what matter – are the underlying cause of most misunderstandings, whosoever those are (Milton 2012; Lawson 2010).

A study of employment projects for autistic youths by Wolgemuth and colleagues (2017) shows how varied attitudes play out in real world settings in which efforts are being made to ease autistic young people into employment.  They divide the studies into those which are or are not, ‘assets based’ and into those which are simple or complex.

Wolgemuth and colleagues (2016) quote Rigsby-Eldredge and McLaughlin (1992), “Autism is an organic neurological disorder that interferes with normal development of reasoning, social interaction, and communication skills … The prognosis for treatment of such children and youth remains quite poor “.  This is a classic instance of simplistic and non-asset based thinking about autism.  Pejorative words abound, that is words that set the valence or evaluative attitude of interpretation: disordered, disrupted ‘normal development’ – in three vast areas of life that human’s cherish as central to their humanity.  Apparently, the supposedly scientific ‘autism’ label comes with an authoritative pronouncement that an autistic person is defective in everything that matters: there is a natural order, and we don’t fit.  This is not just about being pathologised – “they are sick poor things” –  it seems to be about failing as humans.  Yet the other part of the equation is always society (see every edition of the US based Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals and the European equivalent, the International Classification of Diseases in which social deficits are always part of the criteria for identifying autism; see also extensive relevant discussion in ed Kapp 2020 and ed Milton et al 2020).

A neutral translation would read like this: “Autism is a natural variant that leads to unusual or atypical development of reasoning, social interaction, and communication skills”.  Young people who have received the label have to cope with heavily loaded and stigmatising accounts of their nature, which they may well internalise.  That means that the identity that is offered can provide a harmful and personally damaging framework for interacting with the world.  That it is a false picture that can damage both other people’s perceptions of an actual person and that person’s own idea of self.  Exclusion from full humanity seems to be authorised and legitimised  (Hobson 2011).   

There is something ‘different’ about us that is signalled by the diagnosis but cannot be understood without understanding the social context that highlights this difference and supplies the mismatch of salience (Milton 2012, 2014).   It is important that every autistic individual is given access to a positive way to think about who they are – yet the odds are against that balancing out the amplified signals of rejection which can pepper our daily lives.   How can autistic people bring our gifts and let our light shine on the world when judged so dismissively?

When autism is medically framed and simplified with individuals posited as defective, individuals are seen as maladaptive and ‘failure’ and ‘success’ are judged by neoliberal standards and expectations.  Wolgemuth and her co-authors (2016) say, even of researchers who count as having a non-medical and relatively complex perspective,

“Although Burke and colleagues’ comments on ‘people with ASD’ were asset oriented, their skills and abilities (e.g. attention to detail) were only considered assets to the extent they were valued by employers.“  

Interests from the market place are informing both the practice and the values of most of the researchers Wolgemuth et al (2016) scrutinise.  Even when viewed as being potential genuine assets, not just as commodities, autistic people’s worth – the criteria for being a true asset – is judged to be about learning how to be a competitive transferable cog, which is sometimes described as ‘being independent’.  Being independent is construed as an ability to cope, handle challenges, survive without being a drain on anyone else.  The idea of contributing to a common good has been reduced to playing a profitable role with minimal nuisance value.   Yet I would argue that this is the antithesis of human beings as mutually sharing and socially attuned, with each bringing to the whole their capacities and care (see discussion in Bervoets, 2020).  Contributing to a common interest on the basis of equality and intrinsic human value is a joyful and affirmative experience for anyone, autistic or not.   It creates a shared flow that is self-replenishing and sufficient in itself.  That nobody is truly independent of others is a fact the current pandemic has vividly highlighted. Perhaps that distortingly individualistic and selfish notion of human relations can finally be put to rest, along with the absurd idea that ‘normal’ people read each others’ minds.  This is about powers of influence, direction and support that play out in daily encounters.  Can we rebalance the powers?  Can we harness our strengths and change the culture from where we are?  If we can, How?  Generally, I believe, the argument rests on the common interests of all humanity and ultimately all living things, of which we are but one special case among thousands.  

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Some of the most unlucky people are those who have wound up in so called “Assessment and Treatment Units” As Duffy says (2017) “it is important to note that the term Assessment and Treatment Unit (ATU) is misleading. ATUs do not provide assessment or treatment, they provide containment and imprisonment.”  A use of language that is not only false and intended to deceive, but also even thus dressed up as benign is stigmatising and belittling of the needs of the young people who enter the locked doors.  The – negative, pejorative – assessment happens before entering and among other things, means having your view of yourself set aside in favour of the view of experts who will decide your needs for you.  In my view that is a major harm in itself, though less so than the incarceration and actual loss of autonomy.  Just by being contained in such a place one has received an assessment as a failed human,  with no opportunity to show otherwise.  Worst of all is that the humans caught in this trap have become commodities, out which others are making profits – an issue that also applies to everyone receiving paid care in our privatised system (Brown, James, Hatton 2017).

For those who are lucky enough to escape that particularly grim fate, what powers can we access to protect our well being?  Given the disparity of actual powers between any individual and the forces at work in society that, as Duffy (2017) puts it, “promote institutionalisation and undermine effective community support”, how can we get our case heard?  Ie the case that we are “fully human, fully here” (Postgate, 2010)?  Can we reclaim the language as has happened in other liberation movements?   Unfortunately, unlike say Gay Liberation or Black Lives Matter, autism’s moral authority is subverted by its disordered definition, which is logically inconsistent with its recognition for being as much an asset for humanity as any other human.   Identification as disordered by the psychiatric profession is alas authoritative.

We also have the Public Relations problem that it is very hard work for us to bear reputation management in mind at all times and we are likely to forget to give the strokes others may expect – so as it were ‘from the ground up’ autistic people experience rejections and barriers despite any amount of good will we may be bringing to the social discourse. 

A perverse barrier to a fulfilling life is that to be supported outside of paid employment, the reputation management skills of a successful person must be inverted in favour of those of a dud.  If one is not demonstrably a dud, the current welfare system in the UK (and many other countries) will offer little or no support.  So we could actually die because we can’t play the game according to rules that harm us as they tell us to hide our light and maximise our hopelessness so the boxes get ticked – we are able to survive only by embracing stigmatisation (For arguments that Basic Income is a rational and viable approach to this issue see Murray 2017).

So in reality we are all enmeshed in enormous and extensive power structures that in many ways curtail our scope and dominate our opportunities.  However, I suggest that our distinctive autistic power is that we are not in an obligate state of dual processing in which issues of status – hierarchical or inclusive/exclusive – are constantly affecting our flow of interest, creating shared subjectivities and strengthening some positions at the expense of others, regardless of the facts.   This power of straight thinking can be truly effective when that integrity is combined with the most general power that everybody who speaks has, namely the power to get into other people’s heads and do some (partly precise) things there: language is a tool for manipulating interest systems.  If what we express meets interests that align with ours then a resonating signal may be amplified again and again and acquire great power thereby. 

Language is to some extent always recklessly deployed in active (unritualised) speech, while being the best we’ve got for sharing truths it is also a vehicle for any number of interests to find expression, ‘directly’ or ‘lexically’ or in many other ways, playing on shared meanings and flows.  

This is a true power that anyone who can make themselves ‘heard’ possesses.   Its resonances can have extraordinary reach and longevity.  Of course it’s a very limited power – but it can have ramified and long lasting effects: even, say, from the lips of an overpowered black man in the USA, dying at the hands of four white police.  To the everlasting shame of those police officers, his words :“I can’t breathe” didn’t have the power to save George Floyd’s life; but they did have the power to reach the whole world – where their meaning and meanings are still causing ripples worldwide.

The power of those words of course depended on them being heard so widely, along with the video image of armed and uniformed brutality they packed a huge punch.  It equally crucially depended on the humans who were reached – if there had been indifference ie no concern – in the witnessing world, neither the words nor the images would have had that power; their power depended on reaching people with value systems where justice, fairness and compassion are priorities.   

So the words went straight to core values about the worth of human life and the shocking failure by those damned uniformed thugs to let their victim breathe.  This is a particularly clearcut case of shared meaning being unlocked and unleashed by words expressed, because of a pre-existing and tenacious moral concern that met the words and their story with passion: a passion for justice which takes common humanity as basic and, I postulate, is felt at least as much by autistic people as by anyone. The version of ‘empathy’ deployed in othering and demoting autistic people may be more about being able to gauge people’s roles as customers than as citizens.

The extraordinary reach of George Floyd’s words, “I can’t breathe” was significantly boosted by individual acts of sharing.  Those in turn were only possible because of social media and the capacity to record and disseminate which technology confers.  The words alone would have just hung in the air while the man died, instead millions of channels to pass them on became passionately active.   From a completely different pathway we have seen the words of a schoolgirl similarly winging out to the whole world, again because the means exist and the concern that amplifies the words is a passion for many.  Greta Thunberg’s sharing her knowledge and passion have woken many people up to urgent issues we must all tackle.

Many or most people care about injustice, profiteering, greed, callousness despite living in a market dominated society in which those ills are seen as an inescapable part of life, and even pointers to success.  The argument I’ve been making here calls for injustice to be exposed as widely as possible, in order to create the passion that is needed for truly different attitudes towards people who are not positioned to speak for themselves.  As well as the young people in ATUs, tens of thousands of others have no means to fight or even expose the slights and cruelties and injustices that can be perpetrated on vulnerable people behind locked (pass-coded) doors.   For attitudes to change, effective communication from behind the locked doors must be enabled.     Media people like Ian Birrell of the Mail, Victoria Derbyshire of the BBC and John Pring of Disability News are vital assets, as are campaigners like the Rightful Lives group [and AIMS see references].  In the UK, the National Autistic Taskforce is working with an English NHS Trust, to develop an easy to use ‘signposting’ app for distribution to those who are still on the wrong side of the digital divide. 

Together we can empower the people who are locked up and hidden to have as a supported and acknowledged right, access to the social media the rest of the world enjoys and which can be fertile ground for a passion for justice once the awareness is there.  Then the speech of the disempowered will be heard and can become a real force in the world.

References

* This chapter was originally published under the title Dimensions of Difference, which is the name of Dinah’s chapter for The Neurodiversity Reader – presumably due to human error. Its originally intended title is restored here.