I was recently recommended Autism and the Predictive Brain by Peter Vermeulen by someone in an online autism community. I found the first few chapters of the book interesting, and mostly convincing, but thought that it went off the rails in the second half. Ultimately, it seems to fall victim to ‘when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail’ kind of logic.

The book starts by arguing that predictive processing is a far more realistic model of human cognition than post behaviorist models and that this model can give insights into understanding autism. First off, Vermeulen argues that the standard take on human cognition is wrong - the human brain is not a mostly passive entity that constructs ideas and concepts largely from sense data but that a lot of what we experience as sense data is the result of many constructs of the mind. This is where predictive processing comes in - the brain builds a model of the world and inputs from the senses notify us whether those models are fine or whether they need to be updated. In the PP theory, brains are trying to minimize surprise and thus act on the world through pre-constructed expectations. Much of our interaction with the world is checking whether our models fit in order to safeguard action.

This leads to other processes such as being able to easily separate signal from noise as well as to understand context and to flexibly alter one’s expectations based on the situations encountered. The senses give useful feedback to the brain where perception actually begins.

Vermeulen turns to autism and shows how researchers turned towards PP as a useful theory for autism around 15 years ago. The general conceit of the book is that autistic people have a notion of absolute thinking that is far too context-independent and this rigidity explains a lot of autistic experience.

A back and forth developed with other researchers (such as Pellicano and Burr) claiming that in fact autsitic models were too imprecise, that they in fact don’t weigh their models highly and therefore are too sensitive to external stumuali.Vermeulen tries to synthesize and summarize his own view:

The autistic brain takes prediction errors seriously, even when there is

no need to do so. Unexpected deviations from what is predicted that are

coincidental and exceptional, so that they can usually be ignored by people

without autism, are seen by people with autism as a reason for adjusting

the model and therefore the future predictions they will make based on

that model.

It seems that in certain situations, particularly when uncertainty is a

factor, people with autism trust their brains less than they trust the

input they are receiving from their senses. An autistic brain regards

sensory input as being more informationally correct than the models

of the world that the brain has at its disposal. Every prediction error

allows the brain to learn more about the world. However, an autistic

brain processes such errors in absolute terms, rather than seeing them

as being relative. All deviations from what is expected are regarded as

being important, at all times and in all places.

In Vermeulen’s view autistic brains are overly sensitive not to external stimulai but to the discrepancy between their models of the world and instances of when those models fail to be sufficently predictive of stimulai. This has some important implications which are spelled out later in the book. A large one is that autistic hypersenitivity isn’t to intensity but unexpectedness though I don’t think this quite works.

Vermeulen seems to claim that much of the discourse on autistic oversensitivity and overwhelm is about the amount of signal (loudness, brightness)…but this leaves out the far more talked about qualitiative differences (what kind of light, what kind of loud, what sounds, which smells etc). The book claims that training autistic people in context-sensitivity will reduce overwhelm but, again, this says nothing about the qualitatively specificity of stimulai. Vermeulen’s view seems far too coarse grained.

At another point Vermeulen says that the point is to train autistic people to accept variability and points out how the alternative cannot be a to do list that includes things like ‘eating breakfast’ because autistic people need that. This is very odd because many autistic people do do that and it also seems that the author is confusing predictability with structure. Writing down ‘eat breakfast’ is not about predictability (what you eat would fall into that category) but rather it is related to the fact that getting into flow states often exacerbates problems with interoception. For instance, I read a book for too long and forget to eat two meals. Having a spikey or uneven profile in this sense is not about predictibility it is about emphasis and compensation.

The closing chapters of the book keep hammering predictability in ways that make less and less sense (in the context of language and social skills). It also doesn’t help the author’s case that he cites Leo Kanner approvingly as well as Uta Frith both have done more harm than good. These references suggest that the author has a view of autism as something that must be cured and this is strongly implied when he says a happy autistic person doesn’t look autistic ie doesn’t display any ‘symptoms.’

At certain psychological and social shallows it would seem predictive processing might be helpful in describing autistic experience. When something central to an autistic' persons day to day life or when well constructed plans are disturbed this would fit well into a crisis of predictability it does not seem to offer much to a constructive view of autistic experience.

Come play

Come play is a mediocre or worse horror film about Oliver, a young autistic boy who is mostly non-verbal and is constantly accompanied by a smart phone or tablet. The troubles arises when a demon starts to haunt Oliver and his friends and family. Much of the film centers on his mother who wishes he was different, or tries to force Oliver to socialize with kids that actively bully him. The film has some decent terms and descriptions but in the end (without spoiling things) it celebrates the sacrificial autism mom figure and also suggests that autism is a thing that can be ‘cured.’

Please stand by is a feel good film (sort of) about a young autistic woman who enters a contest to write a film for Star Trek. The film badly dramatizes autism in many ways and confuses terms (calling meltdowns tantrums). The film is built around a schlocky and typical attempt to make neurotypicals feel good about an autistic person ‘overcoming things to have their dreams’ but there is no real attempt to look at the internal life of autistic folks but rather the typical behaviorist carnival.

Relative Fear might be the worst example of autsploitation. It is a sloppy remake of the Bad Seed, and uses autism as kind of ink blot for generally psychopathy. Adam is consistently abused and is thought to be a killer (though there is a twist on this at the end). But the film invokes the usual mashup of learning disability and autism, autism as trapping the ‘real child’ inside etc. Autism is a plot black box that is suggested as in some ways the same as any violent form of anti-social behaviors.

The Other Sister (learned about this one from this site.)

Like Gilbert Grape, The Other Sister does not explicitly say autism but loosely mixes learning disabilities with autistic characteristics. This combination is just another example of the ink-blotting of autism where an adult is made into a childlike character that amuses and helps all the neurotypical people along on their journey. These kinds of films seem to justify this exploitation because they claim to be giving voice to the voiceless no matter how stereotypical and inaccurate it is.

I tried to watch The unbreakable boy but it was so awful I would suggest you just watch Meg’s video here.

Concluding thoughts

The most consistent theme is that autistic people are macguffin’s for neurotypical audiences. Similar to white savior narratives or films that focus on children, there is a sense that audiences can learn from the ‘sweet innocence’ of autistic individuals especially infantilized autistic adults. At best these films are assimilationist in that they project a world where it is possible for autistic adults to fit in albeit at great cost for non-autistic people. It almost strains the imagination to even consider what a film for autistic people would be or at least a film that presents autistic characters for their own sake.

Typical Hollywood autism is usually built around the savant stereotype - the autistic person as a calculator (must famous in Rain man but also present in films like Cube, Mercury Rising, or The Accountant). You also get a bit of autistic supremacy in The Predator. While these films use autistic characters as a kind of trope films like Bless the Child and Silent Fall are built around an autistic character being something not quite human. There is also obvious cross-over with the creepy horror kid trope and eugenics which was discussed by Ember Green here.

Bless the Child is a horror-thriller that focuses on a young girl who is chosen by god but who is tempted by the forces of satan. The girl is abandoned by her drug addict mother at her sister’s house who ends up raising the girl as her own. Years later the girl is diagnosed as autistic but her adoptive mother thinks is something else. Children her age are being abducted and later found dead by a cult that is looking for someone who has magic powers.

The aunt (played by Kim Basinger) doubts the autism diagnosis thinking it’s something else but there is no other comment really on whether her divine existence is misrecognized as autism or whether autism is itself misrecognized divinity. It’s in this sense that the film fits into the contemporary attempt to separate high support needs autistic people from others and to be romanticized in Christian communities as a form of burden ( a trial given to one by god),. This dovetails horribly with many center-right and right wing autism parents who use the autistic trope of the ‘real’ child’s soul being caught in a environmentally or otherwise ‘cursed’ body.

The more telekenetic and godly Cody becomes the less autistic she seems which, as explicitly mentioned in the film, mirrors the right wing fantasy of an environmental cause suggesting autism is something that kids can be ‘cured’ of or can simply ‘grow out of.’ Autism, especially childhood autism, becomes an inkblot for those of faith to swing their conservative beliefs around with impunity.

Silent Fall is less supernatural but not necessarily more realistic. A double murder of a couple is witnessed by their mostly non-verbal son Tim who then has only his older sister to take care of him (played by Liv Tyler in her Hollywood debut). A controversial therapist Rainer (played by Richard Dreyfus) is called in to try and figure out what Tim saw. Rainer once ran a home for autistic children but lost one of his patients to suicide. His method of talk therapy and observation is opposed by another doctor who employs hypnosis and chemical treatments to try and find the truth for the police.

While Rainer is seen as the more moderate figure he seems to be modeled after Bernard Rimland as Rainer suggests that autistic children are trapped inside themselves. An early shot in the film shows that Rainer wrote a book called Stone Children which again emphasizes the ‘locked in’ notion. Rainer rants at one point that ‘no one understands autism’ but he knows how it works. The film also touches on the divinity-misrecognition noted above but more generally - Rainer states that autistic people were once worshiped as gods, than burned as witches, and now we give them drugs.’

The films goes off the rails (in many ways) but in terms of autism in showing that Tim can copy people’s voices perfectly (uh…ok) and when distressed exhibits super-human strength (tearing a door knob from a door). It’s here that the film is closest to Bless the Child as autistics become a stand in for the capacities of the mind…a non-denominational form of the holy child.

Molly (1999)

Another ink-blot take on autism being some mix of a person trapped inside a body and being collapsed with a very generalize notion of learning disability, Like Silent Fall Molly, who is suddenly forced to live with her brother, has super hero hearing. The film follows a basic Flowers for Algernon plot where Molly is given genetic enhancements to her brain. The neural changes start to become undone. Her brother Buck becomes determined to keep her ‘normal’ The film ostensibly defends the personhood of disabled people but only as a life lesson for the normies.

Alien Abduction (2014)

Alien Abduction is a found footage horror film about a family who encounters strange lights and then alien invaders in the mountains of North Carolina. The film is shot by one of the three children, Riley, who is identified as autistic. The film is quiet different from the others listed here in that his autism frames the film in the most literal sense of the word. The aesthetic and attentional form of the film is thereby based on an autistic way of seeing, Riley being autistic functions to explain why the camera is never put down.

This seems to instrumentalize autism in one sense (as the literal view of the film is a coping mechanism for Riley) on the other hand it is an interesting alternative to ‘autistic vision’ which is usually deployed in films and tv shows. The tropes of austic characters seeing the massive amount of information in their head as a cgi overlay (from The Good Doctor to Extraordinary Attorney Woo) seems like a short cut for allistics to perceive the perception of autistics as superhuman or technologically alien.

House of Cards (1993)

A young girl named Sally returns home from central America after her father dies in an accident. Upon returning to her home she ‘becomes autistic’ she ‘screams autistically’ she is essentially brain damaged according to the court appointed psychologist. Autism is reduced to a form of trauma response. It’s an incredible melange of bad ideas, throwing around ‘crack baby’, ‘retarded’ and all other kinds of fun 1990s terms.

Tommy Lee Jones forces shit ABA style therapy on Sally and the mother’s architectural interventions ‘cure’ Sally and in that sense autism is equated with catatonia, a temporary condition. On the one hand, the medical simplification of autism is elided but at the cost of supporting the spiritual stupidity of the autism mother. Like the film Molly this films plays with the ‘real child is trapped in there’ though while Molly tries to atone for this idea House of Cards unapologetic ally pursues it to the end.

To be continued…

I’ve mentioned this before that mixing up norms and rules is annoying. I then immediately feel annoying because it feels as if I am merely being a persnickety philosopher type…but well, that’s a job of philosophers, finding the right words to cut the world at the joints. But it’s not just a technical distinction, I think it informs a lot about social and political attitudes vis a vis things I’ve been talking about the last few entries.

So what are rules versus what are norms? They are both ideas that govern activities and behaviors but rules are prescribed and explicit whereas norms arise out of a community in a more haphazard manner. As an example the rules of chess have largely to do with how each piece moves, what is check, and check-mate etc. The norms of chess are much more squishy - they will differ between a private game and a game in a tournament ie you can probably talk in the former but not at all in the latter.

Many autistic folk talk about the ‘unwritten rules’ of society or social interaction but if these things are unwritten they are in fact norms. They feel like rules because of the reaction neurotypicals tend to give when autistics don’t behave as expected ie there is kind of a disbelief or offense. But it is, in part, an autistic way of thinking that wants to make norms into rules as many autistic people also train themselves into understanding norms as rules because they seem so non-intuitive.

Take Erin Phillips’ book Stuck on Hard Mode (which I heard about because it was recently featured on Autistic AF). The book makes social difficulties (and other things) legible through a DnD kind of logic…an autistic character build only has so much energy/points to distribute across capacities. I think this is helpful, it makes sense, but the conversion of norms into rules works only for a limited time. And, for the record, Phillips does talk about the importance of understanding norms especially in co-op activities so I don’t think the book is guilty of the equation of norms and rules but even the best attempts to avoid this may fall into certain traps. It’s a really nice book…I use it here mostly because it recently crossed my brain.

The use of game-logic can be useful if it emphasizes the arbitrariness of norms. This arbitrary nature is difficult to sell because norms feel like unwritten rules to so many neurodivergent folks (again because of how people treat them when they are being ‘weird’ or ‘cringe.’) Norms are culturally and historically plastic, they did not emerge only from certain assumptions about how social interactions should be, but also in response to certain material/technological conditions.

Some theorists and philosophers treat norms as a functional necessity for society to function. Basically, the notion is a kind of low-key version of the social contract - to get along and be able to get things done collectively we have to have a set of assumptions for how we interact. This is, in part, why autistic folks behavior in an ‘improperly’ constrained manner are seen to be selfish or indignant - causing trouble for the sake of it or for their own pleasure. But the question of why these norms and not others point to at least two things important for neurodivergent folks:

1-Should social norms only shift according to material conditions or does this attitude merely, or mostly, defend the status quo in terms of how social life and collective human activity should be from a limited perspective?

2-The functional take on norms just stated ignores emotional, psychological, and ability differences….it flattens individual needs not in the name of the greater good but just the greater function.

Both of these ideas amount to a ‘don’t rock the boat’ attitude - the first from a kind of capitalist realist perspective and the second from a conservative assumption about the inner life of people in general.

So taking norms as rules strengthens (often unintentionally) the don’t rock the boat attitude because rules seem like something difficult or impossible to change, something that requires bureaucratic revisionary procedures or something like that. It also encourages a defeatist or deflationary attitude which seems to be everywhere in online autistic communities (based on my experience of the last two years or so). Many autistic folks decide to withdraw and say they are doomed (as I’ve mentioned before there is also a worryingly high cross-over between incel/femcel communities and autistic communities). Importantly while tactical withdrawal is necessary for many ND folks and especially autistic folks to avoid burnout, it is not a strategy in and of itself to the extent that it accepts that norms cannot change.

Another related issue is that this rejection of the normies leads into supremacy. Ember Green’s video from last week is great on this. The fuck the world attitude can lead to some dubious uses of evo-psych or other means of naturalizing norms as biological such that autistic folks are ‘more evolved’ and should therefor move fast and break things. I’m obviously referencing the alt-right and tech-bro romanticization of neurodivergence as a tool or weapon which Robert Chapman wrote about here recently.

Norms can be changed but largely indirectly. If people do not see ND behavior it will continue to be judged harshly. There is a discrepancy between normative expectations and normative beliefs…people may not care about something ‘abnormal’ after they see it or vice versa. An awful lot of thinking about norms, unfortunately, seems trapped in a very old fashioned account of evolutionary game theory and reduces the effects of what is actually perceived as norms as affecting norms themselves. From the game theory perspective autistic and other ND folks would have ‘mutant norms.’ I think this is something to claim instead of doom scrolling ‘unwritten rules’ I’m gonna refine my mutant norms.

I recently watched Jarrett Moore’s “Clavicular and the Evolution of Incel Culture” which was very good. Though it didn’t tell me things I didn’t mostly know what I appreciated most was how it framed recent developments in the mano-cess-pool. I’ve written before about the incel/femcel to autistic pipeline and Moore’s video made the stakes of the problem clearer.

While he highlights the horrific depths of resignation were familiar one thing I particularly liked about his discussion of black-pilling is that what is often lacking is a narrative. So much of incel culture is an aestheticization of the quantitative or maybe an affective vomit of the quantitative (this is a fundamental to eugenics….;our biased statistics prove our bias is not a bias!’). The racist form is birthrates and IQ whereas the purely misogynist form is merely the internalized or individualized form (face ratios, return on investment, social value). Obviously these things are not neatly separated but they are just different sock puppets of lazy ‘quant’ thinking.

If clavicular is the avatar of the latter he is been open about his autism or neurodivergent traits using it to justify his war against the normies. He has the data, he has done the research, and his popularity ‘proves’ that he is right etc etc. But the problem seems obvious - rather than dealing the the social, sensorial, or affective difficulties of autism you decide everyone else is wrong and if I change my appearance I can change how I feel, perceive, and exist in the social world. Spoiler alert this doesn’t work…if it did you wouldn’t need to flood your system with chemicals to get through the day.

By focusing on appearance and then backing it up with bad socio-biology and evolutionary psychology one essentially doesn’t need to have a life story or any refelctive sense of who I am - you become a vehicle of evolutionary history seen through the dead dumb eyes of a Jordan Peterson etc….one’s supposed lack of self-awareness becomes advantageous in a social Darwinian way…ie ‘I don’t need social feedback because the social is rigged against me but I have data and all the normies are living in a delusion.’ But this falls victim to an old nugget of truth from Slavoj Zizek - the most ideological position in the world is to claim that one is beyond ideology. Likewise, being evolutionary clear minded allows one to never change.

This leads to a much bigger problem with the perception of the world as it is tape fed through the hellscape of the internet, namely, it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate between the desegregation of the old social order and the progressive change and improvement of the social order. If neurodivergence is the result of evolution (which is not progressive but simply contingent, if it is just chickens coming home to roost of old weird dna) then one has to do the (very difficult) work of pushing norms in a particular direction. To do this without burning out it has to be done collectively. This means building a different sense of sociality…if one merely rejects normie sociality as sociality in general then we are all at risk of going down the femcel/incel pipeline. I want neuro communism which is, ya know, just fucking communism. I want mutual aid with plushies and headphones…my god the trains can run on time but, ya know, without fascism this time.

The very terminology of autism is solitary (of someone trapped in ones own world) but this name was made by people who saw their world as the world….that is important to remember. A staple of the alt-right and the manosphere is what I’ve stupidly called the pleistocene cuck-chair - it is the notion that human behavior and human culture plateaued once we invented private property and job specialization….this is capitalist fantasy…this is misogyny retrojected into the past. It assumes every human culture has failed to change humans.

This is where narrative is important…because narrative interjects necessary breathing room between the self and the social. Without this how can the social be otherwise not because I am right and the world is wrong but because there are others like me that could make the world otherwise.

Peter (a la deonto) sent a message to an old twitter thread relevant to my last entry.

If I follow Pete’s argument there is a problem of distinguishing obligation and supererogation or between doing something because you should and doing things that exceed what you need or that demonstrate a kind of virtue.

This follows from the difficulty of articulating authenticity in relation to identity politics. The de-essentialization of identity accelerated it’s confessional/traumatic mode or the emphasis on personal experience to mean authentic. But this has certain political/ethical limits.

Suffering is not enough to guarantee identity especially if it is shared not but universal. Overemphasizing suffering also leads you into a cartoonish catholic like universe was oppression is formative because suffering is necessary etc.

Pete then writes: “Here then is the dynamic I’ve been sidling up to: an unfortunate tendency to treat essentially aesthetic disagreements about ‘authenticity’ in genres of living as tantamount to ethical conflicts over authority/solidarity in resisting oppression, trafficking in unnecessary blame.”

This I agree with. This cuts in multiple directions in the autistic community - the assumptions of ‘you don’t look autistic’ from the outside or policing of looking autistic in the right way from inside the community (also how this disadvantages people of color etc who are also autistic).

Pete then goes on to talk about neurodiversity:

“Though in the case of neurodiversity (‘odd’ rather than ‘queer’) things are complicated by the demand for precisely that sort of recognition the racialised reject: some perhaps poorly understood but tangible biological basis for categorisation and accommodation.

But insofar as the neurodiversity community has come to extend beyond simple demands for recognition and accommodation and to embrace certain cognitive styles as things that can both be identified with and cultivated on their own terms, it too is subject to the relevant dynamic.

Which is to say, getting caught up in arguments where who gets to count as belonging to ever more niche categories, where the pretence that these are crucial for emancipatory purposes plays proxy for our personal investment in them qua modes of self-cultivation.”

Because the tweets are from 3 years ago, I’m not sure Pete is strictly differentiating neurodiverse from neurodivergent. Because the project of self-cultivation does not quite work with neurodivergence having a biological ground…of physiological and perceptual spikiness.

Skipping a bit Pete then concludes the thread:

“In summary: one is ethically entitled to have one’s aesthetic self-cultivation respected, which also means having the specific ways it is disrespected acknowledged and ameliorated. But that doesn’t mean one is entitled to have one’s specific aesthetic respected *qua aesthetic*.”

I think I agree with the general upswing of things here but where it gets tricky with me is the questions of needs vis a vis self-cultivation.relative to neurodivergence having a biological ground i.e. especially in terms of accommodation etc. There is a difference in terms of ‘aesthetic tolerance’ for the odd versus spaces which cause discomfort, overload, meltdown.

But I think the political exportability of personal experience does not have a limit without collective or even pseudo-universalist ambitions. It is for similar reasons that I wonder about the best way to align neurodivergence politically as an identity or via some other means such as neuroqueer?

I think there is need to do more explicit linking of disability, critical autism studies, and collective thinking more generally. Just as people in the school system make the mistake of refusing to help neurodivergent kids because it’s a ‘waste of resources’ the point is rather to change the general rules so as to benefit everyone. Having quiet places in any school is a good thing, having things being more flexible does not need to be thought in a merely individualistic manner. I think this gets to the point of self-cultivation and the aesthetics of it being pragmatically separated. The more flexible the ground and context the less one will feel their individual expression is a defense measure.

I was actually thinking of something like neurocommunism but I see someone as already written about it here. I am sympathetic to the spirit but I am also trying to think things from a ground up (or not only, or mainly, in terms of political ontology). I think even at the level of online activism there is a huge problem in that so many neurodivergent spaces try to be apolitical…something which given the current state of the world seems absolutely bonkers. Ultimately, communism would be neuro without having to state it but getting there requires operative differences which can hopefully be dissolved. Trying to keep autistic spaces ‘apolitical’ will not help at all.

A small, but maybe not so small, point is that autistic folks often complain about being tormented by the unwritten rules of allistic or neurotypical social life. But I think they should be described as norms, not rules, because norms are less official but no less hardened by practice. In this regard self-cultivation has the responsibility of cutting into these norms by practices that are collectively orientated.

Hasan Piker has been in the news a lot lately - mostly because spineless liberals and various people on the right are trying to blame one of the few sane voices on the left for ‘instigating violence’ when no such thing has occurred. But he has defended himself perfectly well and I’m interested in well….norms again.

I started watching Hasan during the pandemic and, funnily enough, actually realized I might be autistic after he took the RAADS test on his stream at the insistence of Mya Higa (the so-called Gen-z jane goodall).

One thing, this is a very small thing, I’ve noticed is how Piker often tells people to ‘be normal.’ By this he doesn’t mean ‘don’t be neurodivergent’ or ‘don’t be weird,’ rather that there are reasons (in his case often political reasons) for not being too extreme while reacting with other people. This would seem, at least on its face, to be in contradiction to his own self-declared autism (as he jokingly says all the time that he has ‘political autism’ ie his special interest is politics). In part, the questions is whether self-expression (at least on the internet) is always tactical whether you want it to be or not.

But there’s actually, I think, a few interesting distinctions regarding ‘being normal’ as a weapon versus masking or being afraid to be weird. I don’t think it’s only a tactical thing rather it is more about finding a place where you are weird for yourself but where you also don’t forget completely that other people may have different norms, expectations. In other words, I think there is an importance place between acting normal for the sake of not upsetting people and acting normal as a kind of trojan horse.

In recent days this came up regarding trans issues via JK Rowling’s half-hearted (or maybe completely fake) retreat regarding her grotesque levels of transphobia. Piker made the claim that many people may not understand trans folks but they are also not transphobic and that what really ‘bricks the brains’ of transphobes is when they actually meet a real life transperson. (Importantly I am not equating the social pressures upon autistic and trans people as there is several differences especially at the level of visibility).

I suppose the issue here is being authentic to oneself (I hate the word authenticity but it seems to have intuitive clout for many people) while not being militant to the extent that you can be easily dismissed by someone who has drank too much oppositional kool-aid. This is not to fall into an assimilationist politics but to understand that intensive exaggerations by oppositional groups expect extremism in return and when they face actually living versions that do no confirm to that idea, but very importantly, don’t shy away from talking about their identity, this is in fact more affective opposition ie trojan horse style.

Obviously this doesn’t work in all situations and there is certainly a difference between individual and group situations, between survival mode and activist mode which are going to be highly context specific. But there is an interesting suggestion about the politics of the individual not overriding collective politics even if politics of the individual of some kind is tied to identity. In other words, the emphasis of the individual within political groups and across groups has to take a different form not to appease the larger group but for the sake of the inner group.

I don’t know if this is anything - but there is a real sense of exhaustion regarding a certain form of identity politics and any kind of universalism. I wonder if the internet accelerated exposure to differences and divergences while rewarding and monetizing the worst kind of collective reaction to them. It’s more about the how and where and not the what.

So many aesthetic categories born from the internet (like cringe) are lazy meta-norms ie ‘don’t do that kind of thing’…but without any of the relevant important context (like where and why and relative to what community…the entire internet is not a pragmatically reflective entity).

Will probably write some kind of sequel to this….

So teaching again. On too many different things.

I have one more week teaching my course Autism and Civilization. The first session is available for free on youtube here.

As of today I started teaching two more courses at TU Dresden (in person courses, you know, like the good old days).

One is entitled Brain Narratives which is basically literature and cognitive science course. We are reading only three novels - Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, Watts’ Blindsight, and Delany’s Babel-17.

The second course (more laid back and for first year students) is Fascist Futures.

We are reading two novels (Spinrad’s Iron Dream and Rumfitt’s Tell me I’m Worthless) as well as watching a few movies: Starship Troopers, Pans Labyrinth, Porco Rosso, and Neptune Frost.

In June I will be teaching another short course for the Acid Horizon’s teaching platform called Twisted Tree: Eugenics Historical and Contemporary.

Not sure I will write non-fiction anymore…I think I”m done with essays and maybe even with theory or philosophy books. Been writing lots of fiction though and trying not to crash out on a daily basis.

Nothing else good to say!

Been seeing the term neuro-futurism being thrown around in a few autistic spaces. It is being intentionally used against, or at least beyond, its association with a vague trans-humanist vibe i.e. that neuro-futurism is about taking seriously how human cognition will change because of technologies such as AI. It also sometimes appears in a corporate context of using neurodivergent people for their niche job skills etc.

Within autistic and other neurodivergent communities I have seen it used as an extension of neurodiversity (cognitive variation is a fact of nature) and neuro-queerness (we should abandon neuro-normality) in order to think humans as widely variable in terms of their brains.

Kathy Syn Tan’s book entitled Neuro-Futurism also comes up but I struggled to pull much from it….

What I like about the term Neuro-Futurism is that it points to something that I often feel lacking in a lot of autism discussions namely collectivity beyond an overly pragmatic use of the word community. This especially goes for online community which is important for advice, venting, and other forms of support. But I do think that so much of the autism content out there ultimately works around a rather atomized sense of things = it is mostly about survival rather than constructing things.

This also touches on the emphasis on autistic experience. Like community this is important and, in particular, it is important to help non-autistic people understand what it’s like to be autistic. But experience, even shared experience, is not sufficient to build something future oriented. The other big issue is to what extent can neuro-norms be changed, how bio-culturally evolved are they versus how much of them are a cross-cultural myth that has become self-reinforcing?

This is present in the David Gray Hammond essay linked at the start. Often I think this is another extension of communism…from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs. Sometimes I fantasize about autistics being bureaucrats in actually existing communism.

The internet seems increasingly more of a problem than a help here. For one community, as term, becomes distributed in way that I’m not sure works in the sense of identity formation towards even a semi-coherent political goal. I’ve wondered before about whether internet culture seriously damages the kinds of formation required by identity politics so that it can move on to something more universal and collective.

One thing that seems clear but probably will make people grumpy is that ‘lived experience’ is not enough. While it has mental health functions, and forms a base-line for community, it is not sufficient for collective community building especially one that has a far future horizon.

More worrying about the lived experience emphasis is that it can fall into the trap of capitalist realist individualism - simply buying treats to survive a world that there is no hope of changing.

Bottom line issue would be understanding neurodivergence as separate from the psychic costs of capitalist alienation. This in part requires understanding the difference between neural normativity (as a snapshot of social norms of homosapiens) as opposed to a properly evolutionary view of normativity flowing from the long time span of neural darwinism properly applied.

This follows a bit from the last post in terms of being about assumptions regarding the social (and neuronormativity). Of course there have been a millions things written about why the internet has been bad for social relations but I do wonder how this relates to autism in the since that it is a form of identity politics that has a large investment in getting around standard social rules and social relations (whatever standard means in a particular context).

Basically, the fact that so much activism, or at least content about autism, has risen with the internet I do wonder how much the internet (or really social media) has seriously impeded progress of autism acceptance and other related goals. One reason this seems particularly important for neurodiversity is that separatism takes on a particular valence in online space. It is very easy to fall into separate modes of socializing on discord, for instance, because one can have closed communities where people share and commiserate. Commiseration, especially in online space, can have a reradicalizing effect (while also being a respite for some) - it can lead to giving up on the world or, in more extreme cases, to black pilling, supremacism, or giving up on life.

Furthermore, in the case of autism, because masking is such a large part of existing in a neuronormative world, this already can lean towards an assimilationist politics offline combined with a separatist politics online which is a very poisonous cocktail. Many online commentators have pointed out that the online autism community can spread misinformation and weaponize supremacy (over neurotypicals). There is even an esoteric tik-tok stream of this that argues that neurodivergent people are starchildren, or indigo children, or other shit.

The practical or pragmatic thing that falls out of a lot of online discourse is the notion of shifting norms, of pushing the thick part of the bell curve of ‘normal’ behavior away from a place that is harsh for existence. If norms don’t move then one can fall into the black pill hole mentioned above or, as in the case of too many autism parents, fall into grievance politics (or a politics of resentiment for the Nietzsche fiends out there in the woods).

There is the obvious work to be done regarding diagnosis and language (including whether we should use the word diagnosis). There’s a good interview with Luke Beardon that address a lot of the problems with terminology. But a daunting question (which doesn’t only affect autistics) is whether the typical stages of identity politics still apply in the age of the internet?

The other political impasse here (which I want to write about next time) is the relationship with the sciences. Quite a few autistic people reject any attempt to analyze autism in terms of the life sciences arguing that this will only lead to eugenics. While the tendency towards eugenics (especially in the USA) cannot be disputed sadly, eugenics is a intentional manipulation of science and scientific data and ceding the authority of biology to the fascists is not a long term strategy.

Furthermore, too much of what is considered science when it comes to autism is all too often bad philosophy of mind masquerading as science. But more on that next time.

There’s some fun narratives out there that trans people and sometimes autistic people invented the internet. There is, also the old story that people who struggle to have community, perhaps because of the smallness of their real world community, have to make community online. But after the internet has been recognized as, maybe, I don’t know, a mistake, this takes on a different tone.

There is this word parasocial - you should go outside and touch grass, you should not have a real social relation (whatever that means) with a twitch streamer or a tik tok model etc. ‘The internet is not real life’ is a phrase that wobbles more and more as time passes. To take an extreme case, the recent politically motivated shootings in the US don’t make sense unless you understand the deep weirdness of online life. The left/right divide is not so clean online and it has fully entered reality.

But is there an adequate definition of the social anymore? What’s the social between the anti and the para….what happens once we talk about brains or identities being so far from the norm that they have to play a different social game altogether.

In terms of neuro-norms - how different does a brain difference have to be to be a difference in kind or what counts as neurodivergence? The relation between norms and normativity and between the internet and real-life seems simultaneously frozen and shifting at the moment. Neurodivergence touches upon queerness but is not the same. Many self-identified autistic people just withdraw from society and there is a troubling autism → incel/femcel pipeline. The ‘general norms’ of society (whatever that means and however those relate to online norms if those exist) seem too exhausting and painful and therefore we retire. But there is, I would hope, quite a difference between needing respite from overwhelm and saying that the world cannot change its norms, that accommodations cannot be permanent and apply wildly.

Two things seem to be entangled here - one that neurodivergence makes demmands on both NDs and neurotypicals to adjust unwritten norms about social interaction and two, these norms have been serious adjusted by online discourse. These streams can be crossed - highly online people can seem autistic to people of the same age who stay offline (which more younger people are doing) and online behavior can reinforce ND assumptions about the stagnant nature of social norms offline.

From this also sprouts the notion of embracing anti-social life (whether incel or femcel or whether a far tamer form) and whether this means against sociality in general, or again, against the dominant form of sociality. But can a dominate form of the social actually be global, can there actually be an established set of norms cross culturally (or sub-culturally) or does algorithmic life trick us into thinking this is the case?

The task would be to align ‘being social’' with neurodivergence and against the forms of anti or parasociality that is algorithmically encouraged for the sake of capitalist farming. This is being supercharged, at least in some countries, by the fascist history repeat. A key component of many forms of fascism is the normalization of the social body into some homogenous closed circuit. The book Asperger’s Children shows how autistic children and other disable children were deemed disposable because they lacked a kind of social instinct. In fact it shouldn’t surprise us that two cultures invested in social cohesion (one proto-fascistic germany and the other soviet commonality) are those that identified autism in children before anyone else. To be clear I am not equating these politics.

The current soft eugenics of the US seems to push toward pure pathologization - autistic children are seen as epidemic, talk of the spectrum is downplayed, the existence of autistic adults is maligned, and the goal seems to redirect resources towards environmental concerns which of course allows the condition to be pushed back into a moral failing of the parents (leaning back towards the discredited theories of people like Leo Kanner who argued it was cold-hearted mothers who caused autism).

Rather than some explicit T4 action program, a focus on environmental causes will allow for the aforementioned moralization as well as the capacity to cherry pick influences in the name of grifting and feeding special interests. Ironically ND folks are often seen as just being good consumers via limited identity politics but this is only the defeatist version. The question remains whether the social can actually transformed from its outside or whether the anti and para can be instrumentalized against the conservative core of ‘society.’

I recently read Robert Chapman’s Empire of Normality which ostensibly tries to combine Marxist analysis and neurodivergent politics. Most of the book is on point (according to me anyway) in how it connects the idea of normality to eugenics and fordism, essentially to a statistical way of thinking in league with power, capital, and the clinic.

The part of the book that I think is a bit limited is the chapter that deals with the anti-psychiatry movement. Rightly, Chapman attacks the movement in its north american form for advocating a kind of libertarian individualism against big pharma. Anti-psychiatry in its US form came out of the kind of post-60s thinking where social engagement switches to dropping out (finding one’s down medical soluitions, doing one’s own research etc).

At the beginning of Chapter 6 Chapman writes:

“Anti-psychiatry brought two contributions. First, a seminal analysis of psychiatric social control that helped resist certain manifesta­tions of psychiatric oppression. Second, it brought new grounds for a cultural denial of mental illness that helped provide the state with a way to save money by closing the asylums while shifting former inmates to other carceral systems.”

Recent discussions of autism have shown repetitions of this. The shrinking of the welfare state (such as it exists) by the current trump administration is simultaneously a eugenic and cost saving measure. At the same time members of the neurodivergent movement are treated as narcissistic individuals often by the parents of autistic children who want to justify torturing their own children with ABA.

But one huge piece of history that is missing from Chapman’s discussion of anti-psychiatry is the French version especially the well known work of Guattari and Deligny. Both were involved with La Borde, a kind of anti-clinic clinic in which the patients were involved in their own treatment. Against both post-fordist economy and capitalist individualism, Deligny attempted to let the patients figure out their own terms of communication something which Guattari also linked to a anti-Lacanian threat, namely, that autism in particularly had to be thought in terms of language. For Lacan, autistics were so seized by language that they couldn’t speak and suggested at one point that he thought they might not have an unconscious. But despite Lacan’s many other differences from psychiatry he seems to fall into the trap of seeing autism, especially those that are non-verbal, as being so radical different as to become aliens to thought.

Both Guattari and Deligny emphasize that the autistic children at La Borde absolutely had a language of their own but that one had to be quite patient to hear it, or really, see it.

But now, we enter the dumbest timeline….’the crisis of autism.’

Last night Trump flanked by moron extraordinary said that Tylenol causes autism based on absolutely nothing. Why, why is this the chosen target? Does RFK have some beef with Johnson and Johnson the company that makes tylenol? Autism is not an crisis, or a trend, or an epidemic.

This press conference was obviously aimed at conservative moms of autism and frequently spoke of it as a disease or in other catastrophic terms. They used the term ‘profound’ autism which signals allegiances to Autism Speaks adjacent figures (who were also involved in funding the two cherry picked studies they cited).

What seems less scary at first but is also scary is that the data initiative that they announced is over whelming geared towards researchers looking for environmental causes of autism and minimizing or ignoring genetic ones. The politics and organization around the initiative are likewise sketchy as was seen back in june. The admin will choose who they want to produce what kind of data without proper peer review. There have also been rumblings about making a national autism database. This, combined with the fact that so much of the funded research emphasizes data analysis often with the help of artificial intelligence is a easy recipe for eugenics - fudging the numbers to make certain ‘cures’ sellable is going to turn autism into something to be eradicated.

Autism moms of tiktok are about as far as you can get historically from the raft experiments of the autistic children at La Borde.

So based on some half a dozen tests and talking to two therapists (in addition to talks with my usual therapist) it seems I am autistic. It’s not a great time to say that because people think you’re simply jumping on a hypetrain due to watching too many tiktoks (to be attacked by fakedisordercringe etc), or it’s not great because brain-wormed fuckheads think you are just someone who drank too many chlorine/vaccine cocktails in childhood or whatever.

There’s many people who have written far more nicely about autism and coming to understand what it means (especially this one). But the one thing (or the most recent thing) that has been bugging me is the theory of mind (ToM) and social relation stuff as it applies to autism.

So for a long time it was thought that autistic people could not introspect nor could they relate to others (they were essentially thought to be mind-blind). Basically, this means that the assumption was that autistic people could not see other people as people, as having intentions and so on. Still, to this day, the Sally-Anne test (pictured below) is used to determine autism, autistic people are supposed to fail it:

This idea was (and still is) pretty wide spread as figures as different from Daniel Dennett (one of the creators of the test) to Oliver Sacks thought autistic people could not describe their own mental states (and both reported being surprised by Temple Grandin’s autobiography). But I’ve been wondering what is the theory of mind that is being posited as neurotypical exactly? If there is an assumption that humans are fundamentally social creatures, is the assumption that autisic brains are not social, or that there is something about autistic brains which reject sociality ‘later’ in life? Or is there something about personality which is not changed by social learning.

A particularly cruel (or absurd?) idea is that because autistic people are differently social, or seen as not social at all, it was seen that they didn’t have interior states following the assumption that sociality builds that interior state. Given this, autistic people ‘must’ experience other people as meat puppets. No really, here is an incredible quote from a very well respected (some how) psychologist named Alison Gopnik:

“Around me bags of skin are draped over chairs, and stuffed into pieces of cloth, they shift and protrude in unexpected ways. … Two dark spots near the top of them swivel restlessly back and forth. A hole beneath the spots fills with food and from it comes a stream of noises. Imagine that the noisy skin-bags suddenly moved toward you, and their noises grew loud, and you had no idea why, no way of explaining them or predicting what they would do next. (Gopnik, quoted in Baron-Cohen, 1995, pp. 4–5)”

As a horror fan I kind of love this but the human part of me, the part that isn’t a meat puppet, can’t understand how this person has a job at Berkeley. I feel that there’s a pretty big gap between not understanding social cues/intentions and thinking people are depowered Cronenburg puppets….I dont’ know. The thing that has made more sense is the question of different styles of empathy or autism as a different kind of cognitive operating system.

Anyway, what’s the point here? If there’s something about the autistic mind that is not normally social (or normative relative to a culture) then it might seem narcisstic or asocial to people who see autistic people as awkward or asocial. But such a diagnosis doesn’t preclude sociality but rather tweaks the baseline assumptions about normal behavior. Obvious point here - it is not so suprising that some of the people who tried to ‘cure’ autism also tried to ‘cure’ homosexuality.

I think what’s interesting about this is that it brings a neurological lense to a pretty typical fight between people who side with generally marxist theories and people who lean into some form of identity politics. It seems like neurodivergent marxism (that sounds silly I know) actually comes at an old problem a bit diagonally, namely, how to square the problem of desire and politics that figures like Marcuse or Deleuze tried to figure out and that we seem to be coming back to alot with the extra fun super growth of fascism lately.

So, yes, I suppose that’s it for now.

The world seems toast and we’re going into spring/summer…it’s gonna be a shit time. Hasanabi got me through the election…let’s see how long he can be my life support/coach.

Spent quite some time in Brussels and got to work on a piece that will appear as a textual accompaniment to Dani Bershan’s Gut Matters. My piece is about the connection between masculinity, digestion, and right-wing grifting.

My book on sci-fi and decolonial theory entitled Uninhabited will come out next week!! Do people still read books? I hope to have a book launch in Berlin and also Brussels if possible.

My book on F.H. Bradley is going through the final phases and should come out this year with Edinburgh University Press.

I’ve started seriously writing science fiction and horror stories. One micro short is here. But mostly I’ve been rejected about 50 times since November.

For those in the PAF universe I will be helping out July to August.

well I’ve been negligent again…but this time I have a real excuse - my entire personal life exploded completely over the last two months. But that is not for the internet. But looking for writing gigs if anyone has them. I am also trying to publish fiction at the moment and move away from academia.

Here is my first attempt at a short story.

That being said…

Have some essays coming out soonish.

One is for the Oxford Handbook of Trans Sci-Fi studies on Gretchen Felker Martin’s Manhunt.

One is based on a talk I have about cuteness and the animal human divide (especially in the racist appropriation of neoteny).

The last one is about my hero anti-Eugenicist Lancelot Hogben.

Wait there’s a fourth one - for a collection on the plant humanities on the work of Ann Atkins.

I have two books coming out this year but oops who cares.

For the PAF goers out there, or for those curious about the place, I will be there keeping the organizational fires burning July to August.

Trying to get some publishing going but who knows, the world is on fire and so on.

Trying to catch up on things I’ve done in the last few months.

Did a podcast as a follow up to a talk at UCL. Available here.

Taught the first half of 200 Years of Life for the New Centre, The first class is available here.

Spoke about F.H. Bradley for The Young Idealist.

I also gave a talk called “Mangling Mickey Mouse” for Shifting Natures, ICI Berlin.

Gave a talk at ROTORUB Bochum on Gould.

Will be teaching at PARTS in October called Colonial Futures in Brussels.

Will be teaching again for the New Centre in November.

Will be at PAF for part of December.

Whew.

«Spoilers ahead!!!»

I finally managed to see Longlegs (dir. Oz Perkins) and it’s maybe my favorite horror film of the last five years ( or perhaps even more).

I am a fan of Perkins’ other films (especially The Black Coat’s Daughter) and I think his work belongs in a category with Jane Schoenbrun (We are all going to the world’s fair and I saw the TV Glow) in that they are not simply ‘elevated horror’ in the sense of A24 films like Midsommar but rather are experimental horror films. While ‘elevated horror’ provides a richer narrative and more layers of subtext to standard horror plots, Perkins and Schoenbrun mess with the structures and tropes of horror to the point that people debate whether or not the films count as horror anymore. At times the work of experimental is dismissed as being about vibes or as too atmospheric (or as too artsy or academic) but this misses what they are both trying to do. To explain this point I need to make a digression about genre.

What makes a genre a genre?

I have a pocket theory of genre I have been using for a while. Namely, genres are defined by how emphasis is divided between affects, entities, and plots. All genres have these things but I think certain genres spend their ‘points’ on one or two far more than others. For the films discussed here, horror spends most of its points on affect - a horror film succeeds or fails depending on how well it invokes a small range of intense affects: fear, horror, dread, disgust, creepiness, eeriness etc. If it fails to do this it fails as a horror film. The upside to this is that horror can involve any kind of entity (killer clowns, psychos, cannibalistic trees, killer dolls, telekinetic car tires etc etc) and any plot (horror films can be set anywhere and have anything happen as long as it does its affective work). Comedies are almost as confined as horror with romance coming up alongside. Other genres are more restricted by entities. For instance, if you are watching a science fiction film and a dragon shows up that suddenly questions the kind of film you are watching. Or, in the case of plots, if there is a film with magic but no adventure or great evil (think Lord of the Rings) then we might question whether this is a fantasy film as well.

The downside of horror betting so hard on the affect table is it tends to rely on tropes and structural tricks (jump scares, cat scares, chair jumper, ‘lets split up’ etc etc…all the kinds of things that Scream lampooned). This is because these tricks are reliable to invoke fear and terror (the easiest affects of the horror game) whereas dread and creepiness are riskier bets - they require a different and more complicated economy of attention.

Back to Longlegs

This is why Perkins’ films are so divisive - he breaks these structural constraints in ways that piss off horror film fans who then doubt whether or not they are watching a horror film. His earlier film I am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House is a ghost story where we only see the ghost full on once and then the film soon ends. People said this ‘final scare’ was not scary but they are missing the point - the film tries to get us to appreciate how the main character is scared of everything and that the fright to her should frighten us. The film tries to make the viewers ghosts of viewing horror films. Whether or not this works is one thing but far too many people miss what Perkins is at least trying to do. Likewise The Black Coat’s Daughter makes us sympathize with a demon worshiper and so on and messes with our sense of time simply by changing actresses playing the same character.

Longlegs is even more complicated in that it explicitly makes you think you are watching a crime thriller and then it becomes a horror movie fully in third act (though the opening sequence can not leave any doubt that what we are watching is a horror film). But as Perkins himself has stated in multiple interviews - the crime thriller (and especially Silence of the Lambs comparisons) were explicitly meant to lure the viewer in (something which his previous films did not bother to do).

The film turns (at least at the superficial level) from a horror film, to a crime thriller, to a supernatural thriller, back into a horror film. Of course the viral ad campaign by Neon (which has been lauded as the most effective horror ad campaign since the original Blair Witch) made it very clear that this was a horror film and one with supernatural elements. There were downloadable scans of books on black magic and witchcraft (the longest discussion of these I’ve seen is in this video) as well as fake crime reports by a collaborating satanist.

I do not want to go into a plot summary here as there is plenty of that online, but one thing that I don’t see mentioned is the structural tricks the film does. There are few jump scares in the film (many that are there are done through jump cuts or sound not by anything jumping out or lurching from the darkness. But there is a constant sickly dread over everything - long shots with saturated light and filters of fog, or tape, or plastic sheets. Cage’s performance is unhinged (though not as unhinged as his work in Mandy) and also plays this sickly veil game as his face is a field guide to botched plastic surgery.

One of the most interesting things about the film is how it essentially stretches out or slows down the theme of demon possession. So many films about possession don’t spend too much time on how the infestation occurred, but on its removal. Longlegs is a film about the work that has to go into the possession and destruction of a family, that even the object to seed the possession has to be carefully constructed, delivered, and cared for for years in order to then have slightly more sacrificial material for ‘the man downstairs.’ Perkins’ uses other genres related to horror to justify slowing horror down while making the score, sound, and shots of the film within the constraints of atmospheric horror.

The devil succeeds not through simply being powerful but rather through being persistent, patient, and quiet and this far more disturbing than most religious horror. There are no religious authorities to intervene, there are no religious objects or prayers to project us. This is because of the intimacy of a form of religion (Catholicism in this case) that is close to home and made material.

Childish traps

Perkins has said that this is a film about how children are lied to by their parents, and how they justify this fact. He has said this is based on the fact that his mother was essentially a beard for his father (Psycho star Anthony Perkins) who was either gay or bisexual in a time where that was not acceptable in Hollywood. Likewise Cage has channeled his experience with his own mother’s mental illness to find the voice of Longlegs which shifts up and down in range. The child theme is most apparent in that Longlegs (the character) delivers dolls made partially of human matter to houses in order to drive the inhabitants to murder as a kind of possession transmitter. The use of ‘cuckoo’ as a call by longlegs also suggests this displacement of an animals young is possible with humans through black magic. But, again, possession or magic requires several stages of mediation and patience, longlegs is a serial killer who is working on a much slower timescale, decades rather than years. Longlegs plays with the police with coded messages (a la Fincher’s Zodiac) shows how the formal constraints of the thriller (rather than the horror film) are mostly killing for time. That is, we assume in crime thrillers that the killer will be caught but that it is a cat and mouse game of taunting and hiding and the question is how soon and how dramatically will the killer be revealed. Perkins has stated that the usurping of this expectation in Longlegs is borrowing explicitly from the end of Fincher’s Se7en.

Basement loser

Rather than saying that Longlegs is about ‘X’ I am more interested in how it can be read in a structural way. Longlegs is not really a serial killer, his letters do not lead anywhere, there is no explanation of who he is rather than just being evil who spreads evil. He lives in a basement and carefully crafts objects meant to resemble and in some way replace their children. What kind of thing manages to technologically drive a family mad by forgetting their own children and become obsessed with a thing that resembles their children? It is the notion that the image of the child can be separated from the actual child. The affects that one can pull from this abound: it speaks not only to the aforementioned ways in which adults lie to their children, or weaponize their children, it is also about how adults see their children as ‘theirs’ as something they can control or freeze in time when they wish to express their desires to be otherwise (to be trans or queer or to break out of any mold).

From the other side of things longlegs himself could easily be read as the cultural spew in the form of some kind of ancient, yet updated satanic panic, he algorithmically selects randow young girls and destroys their families through ancient ideas being placed in a beautiful package (the dolls delivered under the guise of religion). His self mutilation and obsession with angry rock paints him as a kind of incel, living in a basement, trying to get the right cheekbones, while keeping alive a old form of masculinity under the guise neutrality. Or, as Perkins put it in a interview at Inverse, the devil is a tool of Christianity in order to cover over the crimes it has committed (as Harker’s mother does in her nun habit).

This is why, and to return to the question of genre, Perkins’ films often annoy horror film fans. Perkins’ films disrupt the standard suite of affects and concepts slowing them down and involving the expectations of the viewer far more than horror films tend to. The effect is to invoke not only the standard affects of horror films but to invoke a secondary set of affects about the standard affects. Why do I want to be scared by satanism in this way when it has been used so falsely for so long? What if ‘family is everything’ is more horrible than a random murder?

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//Presentations//

“Flowers for Agouti” Keynote as part of the Lifelikeness project at U Aachen

“Mangling Mickey Mouse” for Shifting Natures, ICI Berlin, March 14-15

Potentially something slimy at diffrakt…?

//Teaching//

Chatelet Course February 2024 for New Centre for Research and Practice

Course on the history, politics, and philosophy of Biology August 2024 for New Centre for Research and Practice, August

//Publication//

Publication of Uninhabited by Zero Books

Publication of Bradley and the Divisions of Philosophy by Edinburgh University Press

//Organizing//

Conference in March at ICI in Berlin on Model Organisms, March 21-22

Conference in June in Berlin at ICI on Queer Waste (TBD)

Still preparing notes and lectures for two courses - one on Gilles Chatelet (for the New Centre) and the other on epigenetics (for the School of Materialist Research). The first will be in February and information is available here. The course on epigenetics will begin in October and information is available here.

More interestingly last month I (along with Louis Morelle) did a lecture at PAF on the political aesthetics of the alt-right. I made a kookyish argument about how Robert Heinlein’s major works (Starship Troopers, Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Stranger in a Strange Land) unintentionally lay out the possibility for a fascistic libertarianism. This is possible because it is a fascism of aesthetic and negation but without an agreed upon form of government. Louis did a genealogy of the shooter’s manifesto as a form of alt-right literature.

Also a conference I am co-organizing on Utopia will take place at the end of September in Berlin.

Maybe that’s all for now.