oh god help me! I am currently doing a pretty damn good course with the Open University on autism. its a first presentation and its in the health sciences department. On this course are a few very vocal people keen to share their previous social science/philosophy background with the rest of us oiks. I am going to paste below 3 sample posts from a thread i hastily stopped posting in when i realised they were lost causes. I have taken to reading this site to make myself feel better : http://www.badscience.net/category/postmodernist-bollocks/

Evidence Base
Colin Bowman - 2 November, 11:30

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bren says:

But.... do you think that experimental methodology will remain flawed in the case of autism, since from the moment we are born our trajectories are changed by our individual environmental conditions?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yes I do think that the 'knowledge of autism' which is come to across an experimental methodology will tend to remain flawed, and be in tension with the experience and understanding of those who 'are autistic'.

But, that knowledge which is come to experimentally, works well for a non-autistic mainstream society: so it becomes the empowered and privileged knowledge of that society; so the autistic and 'autism' are generally seen and understood in terms of this knowledge.

What SK124 appears likely to be able to present, is the ground for a conversation about the autistic and 'autism', that a mainstream society can live with. So something of an 'as good as it gets' circumstance.

The knowledge and understanding which an autistic population are variously likely to possess and voice, is fundamentally different from this experimentally come to knowledge. My understanding is that this is because experimental knowledge looks for generalities, while autistic understanding is come to by people who are seeking to sustain singularity.

It then proves fundamentally difficult for the autistic individual to prevail against society and its knowledge. Seeking to sustain singularity across a society grounded in generalisation, is an extreme activity. The autistic individual tends to be isolated and dealt with. In my view 'autism' is the developmental outcome of being 'dealt with' in this way. Perhaps the 'wise' autistic learns to adapt, learns to morph to the mainstream drum, learns to fit in well enough to get by.

Why I love working with the children I support/teach/care-for, is that they remain strong autistic rebels, so strong and rebellious that mainstream education cannot meet their needs. These children are, strong enough to demand that they be engaged with across their singularity, strong enough to shrug of arguments about generalities and established knowledge. So their is great hope for the future, across the matter of the flaws in experimentally produced knowledge about 'autism': just as long as we can educate a current autistic generation to better sustain their singularity across such knowledge; and that in the hope that they can then more robustly rebut such knowledge than we can currently.

That being said, experimentally-produced knowledge about 'autism' is important: because it allows a non-autistic constituency to come to a conversation about the autistic; albeit their understanding of the autistic remains flawed, to the extent that they remain dependent on this knowledge about autism. Its a 'best case' current outcome, an 'as good as it gets' current circumstance.

colin
___________________________
Victoria Cleaton - 2 November, 12:18

ok I'll bite. what on earth is "singularity" and how does one "sustain" it . and how it this relevant to a person with severe autism and learning difficulties who refuses to wear pants, bath, brush teeth, or eat anything but toast? It seems to me that his "sustaining his singularity" will lead to serious health problems.

______________


Colin Bowman - 2 November, 14:10

Hi Victoria.

Singularity is just a word and an idea I reach for, as I try to make sense of my own personal experience (of having 'my tent' inside the autistic landscape as Bren puts it), and my own professional experience of supporting autistic children.

The notion of sustaining singularity speaks to, my own struggles to be who I sense I should be, and to what seem to me the struggles autistic people find themselves involved in.

It seems to me that Bren and Gail stand out as individuals who demonstrate sustained singularity. An autistic friend expresses their own sustained singularity in terms of them being a 'world power': so there's the USA and Russia, and science and society, and peoples and cultures throughout history, and suchlike; and there is themselves, absolutely on a par with all these things, working out everyhting from their own centre of occurrence, in no way dependent on any one or any thing else for their own understanding. So the 'autos' idea that Kanner/Asperger worked into their naming of 'autism': absolute self-referencing; absolute self-dependency.

Then there's society, which is organised on an entirely different basis. Sustained singularity is a problem for society. Society tends to act to repress and supress sustained singularity. Society may determine that having your hair the (red) colour you want, somehow conflicts with what society must be and do. The school-phobic children I have supported, seem to me to have been unfortunately subject to school's inflexible demands, as to what a child must be and not be; so an inverse of singularity. Society may fail to employ amazing splinter skills which are grounded in sustained singularity, because society demands more generalised self presentation. Society may frown on the sustained singularity that some find in being Goth.

If an autistic person was software, then that software would be crucially inward-turning on its own digital processing, concerned with that processing as whole, orientating to that processing as primary horizon, concerned with the dynamic patterns of that processing, concerned with the consistencies and inconsistencies of that patterned processing, developing across adjustment of those consistencies and inconsistencies. How will that person then interface with input and output devices? Will the keyboard-input interface with this intra-processing? Will the intra-processing drive an output-monitor: or rather go to printer; and will what is out-putted be understandble in conventional terms? Whatever the case across inputs and outputs (and both are very important), the autistic-like intra-processing, will continue as person, and can be understood across its own parameters of sustained singularity (sorry about the jargon).

We may continue to seek to adjust input and output conditions across autistic sustained singularity: but above all we must respect and nurture the sustained singularity of intra-processing; and if we fail to so respect and nurture, then the autistic person may deny to us their cooperation, and may indeed even fight us.

My experience, private and personal, is that the autistic person 'comes towards us' and in cooperation, to the extent that we succeed in respecting and understanding (in whatever small way), the absolute singularity of their occurrence.

That being said, I am a paid-practitioner and not a parent. I've worked with classically autistic and asperger adults and children in different settings. There are so many things, in such settings, which release the paid-practitioner from the sometimes overwhelming demands which a parent faces. It may be that my perspective is more relevant to the settings in which I work, than it is to the circumstance of a parent having to do so much on their own.

Singularity can also be usefully considered in terms of what it means in mathematics and physics. "A gravitational singularity or spacetime singularity is a location where the quantities that are used to measure the gravitational field become infinite in a way that does not depend on the coordinate system." Here, for all practical purposes, a frame-of-reference becomes effectively dysfunctional. It serves well, until it encounters singularity. Across the autistic, this would have conventional (social) frames of reference, serving well: until they encounter the autistic singularity; where around this singularity, and because encountering infinite readings, the conventional-frame just churns out 'misleading' deficit-tickertape. The practical point here, is the argument that the conventional frame of reference becomes dysfunctional in its encountering the autistic.

Other people express all this much better, when they say; "my autistic child must be respected and loved as the absolutely unique person that they are". All the complex wordy stuff has to do with what perspectives we should develop, to see that parent's wishes abided by.

colin