Open Society

Because autistic culture is a unique phenomenon, it is constantly in the process of exploring itself, defining itself, and generating itself. Unlike holistic (non-autistic) culture, it is deeply relational. For many autistic people there is no strict boundary between self and environment, or self and other. We tend not to see things in hierarchies, but in relational ways that are in constant flux. “Neuro-Holographic” is an emergent idea that our group has embraced. Neuro-Holographic, as a concept here, refers to the idea that every small bit of energy and information, whether an atom or the universe, reflects every other part of itself in a seamless and meaningful way.

This has led to the awareness that, despite common misconceptions, we are very much empathetically connected to the things around us. Because our sensing mechanisms are super sensitive and often synesthetic (cross-sensing — for example, tasting colors or seeing sound) we often feel a part of the things around us. We don’t tend to see in hierarchies, but rather in “holograms,” as described. Always looking for connecting patterns in an overwhelming ocean of sensory, emotional, and energetic information, our relational culture focuses on how things go together and function. Because of these innate talents, insights, and a tendency toward invention, out of the box thinking, and an enthusiasm for combining patterns, autistic/Neuro-Holographic people have been responsible for many important developments in the larger cultures in which they find themselves. Being extraordinarily sensitive and seeing things in new ways is foundational to autistic culture.

“Raise The Roof” features Chin sans accompaniment as the intensity of her words captures the stark and harrowing reality of the pervasive racism we cannot seem to escape: “It must be in the fucking water being force-fed to the police, the prosecutor and the politicians who care nothing for Black bodies falling like leaves in late August…in Ferguson…in Cleveland…in Staten Island, only minutes away from where my own child sits, watching The Muppets take over Manhattan.”

[This is] a time … when something awful is happening to a civilization, when it ceases to produce poets, and, what is even more crucial, when it ceases in any way whatever to believe in the report that only the poets can make. Conrad told us a long time ago…: “Woe to that man who does not put his trust in life.” Henry James said, “Live, live all you can. It’s a mistake not to.” And Shakespeare said — and this is what I take to be the truth about everybody’s life all of the time — “Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.” Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion. In this sense, all artists are divorced from and even necessarily opposed to any system whatever.

• Predictive processing shows how seemingly pointless actions like fidgeting in fact can serve an uncertainty-reducing function. • To resolve mounting uncertainty about the world, agents perform simple and precise actions, confirming their self-model. • This proposal is extended to autistic stimming, which can be understood as a form of fidgeting.

Stimpunks