Autism: Schizo of Postmodern Capital

Hans A. Skott-Myhre and Christina Taylor

Abstract

Brock University

This article follows Deleuze in investigating the ways in which the symptom as a form of representation can be collapsed into immanence. Exploring the symptoms of schizophrenia and autism, it examines what implications such a collapse may have for the production of the symptom in its double articulation as representation and immanent production. The argument follows Deleuze and Guattari in asserting that symptoms hold an implicit limit for the social forms that deploy them. Arguing that schizophrenia, as one such limit, has been successfully appropriated and deferred by postmodern capitalism, it is proposed that the proliferating symptom cluster of autism may indicate a new form of limit and that becoming autistic thus may have potential as revolutionary practice. Keywords: symptom, schizophrenia, immanence, Mary Baggs autism, becoming, limit,

The previous part of this video was in my native language. Many people have assumed that when I talked about this being my language that means that each part of the video must have a particular symbolic message within it designed for the human mind to interpret. But my language is not about designing words or even visual symbols for people to interpret. Its about being in constant conversation with every aspect of my environment. (Amanda Baggs, diagnosed autistic). The Good or healthy life . . . is an overowing and ascending form of existence, a mode of life that is able to transform itself depending on the forces it encounters, always increasing the power to live, always opening up to the new possibilities of life. (Smith 1997: xv)

Deleuze Studies 5.1 (2011): 3548 DOI: 10.3366/dls.2011.0004 Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/dls

36 Hans A. Skott-Myhre and Christina Taylor

If you want to look at the moon dont look to the nger that is pointing at it. (Zen proverb)

To express the world as metaphor or simile is to produce the world as separated from itself. That is, to produce the act of expression as separate from the thing expressed. While this is certainly one function that expression can perform, we are interested in another kind of expression here: the act of expression as immanent production. What is the act of immanence expressing itself? It is the communal production of the world as a mutually constitutive act founded in the relation of the material and the virtual. Immanent expression blurs the boundary between experience and articulation opening them both to an innite eld of extensive connectivity. In other words, what is at stake in rejecting metaphor and simile is the founding of an investigation into the ways in which representation can be collapsed into immanence. In this, the exploration of what implications such a collapse may have for the production of the symptom in its double articulation as representation and immanent production becomes of interest. Deleuze describes the symptoms double articulation as both the states into which we fall when the process [of life] is interrupted, blocked or plugged up. Illness is not a process but a stopping of the process (Deleuze 1997: 3) and as an articulation of a certain kind of domination. However, this articulation of domination is simultaneously a blockage and an indicator of an oppressed bastard race that ceaselessly stirs beneath dominations, resisting everything that crushes and imprisons (Deleuze 1997: 4). It is this relation of the symptom as both the order word and the password beneath the order word that is of interest here.1 In this sense, the symptom holds no binary relation to an outside. As Spinoza would have it, there are differences but no oppositions (Spinoza 2001: IIP11C). There are transcendent and transcendental forms of the symptom, but not as binary formations of opposites. Rather, the symptom functions in terms of difference, logic, function and effect. In this formulation, the logic of the symptom holds the possibility of being incomplete or, in Spinozist terminology, inadequate (Spinoza 2001: IIP11C). Such inadequacy does not constitute an outside world of fantasy or illusion. Nor does the inadequacy of any given symptom mitigate its capacity to have profound material effect both functionally and constitutively. Any symptoms inadequacy lies in its inability to become more than an effect, a function, representation, repetition or conclusion. That is to say, the symptom is a thoroughly abstract form distinct from the life upon which it is inscribed.

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With this ontological distinction between the symptom and life itself we enter into the central thesis of our exploration of the role of the symptom within the realm of postmodern capital: life itself as the revolutionary force expressed through subjectivity as consciousness. This consciousness, however, is not the consciousness of the modern individual with its repressions, dreams and agonies. It is, rather, the full eld of immanent expression expression as unmediated bios, the realm of the modes of life. This is the terrain of the Lacanian Real, the Reichian unconscious, Spinozas conatus, Foucaults power, Deleuze and Guattaris desire, Whitmans grass and Baudelaires owers, as well as the force which ceaselessly stirs below, through and in the clusters of symptoms delineated as schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder. In Marxs Grundrisse, this life is the ghost in the machine that may be glimpsed in fragments between the lines and moments of unspoken terror, and sensed only partially formed at the edge of awareness. The expressions of immanence in this sense hold the possibility that the absolute force, which is life itself, will not respond to the reasoned entreaties of the dialectic. It is the moment of unpredictable creation in which life is liberated in humanity (Negri 1999: 103) and simultaneously the moment of the savage violence of the mob, the horde, the mass, the crowd. It is that which destroys what has been, without any certainty of what will come. If one is to argue from the inside that current subjectivity at its limits contains modes already fully engaged in the transition to a postcapitalist lived community, then it becomes critical to examine the question of virtual tendency. Given that the current mode of sovereignty promotes and sustains an experience of the world that denies any form of subjectivity outside the sophisticated apparatuses of capture deployed by late-stage capital, it is critical to be able to go beyond such experience.2 This is not to say, however, that one can escape to an outside. Indeed, one must, quite specically, turn towards the inside and the very conditions that account for things, states of things and their mixture (Boundas 1996: 87). These conditions hold a parallel form of actuality that contains simultaneously, within each moment, the thoroughly material instantiated form of being and the innite virtual production of all its attributes and alternative forms. This is not the world of ideal possibility. Rather, it is the actual simultaneous production of multiple material worlds, in each moment, perceived selectively through the contingent conditions of any given event. In other words, each perception of materiality is incomplete and contingent upon the capacity of temporal extensity or diachronic time to include such

38 Hans A. Skott-Myhre and Christina Taylor

perception. When we move towards the inside, we enter the realm of intensive temporality or the time of the virtual in which all events exist within the same time or, put another way, in which all that has been produced exists but has not yet fully extended itself in time. Temporal extensity is built upon the capacity of experience to be continuous. Ruptures in that continuity produce fractures and schisms of intensive temporality within which the full force of virtual production of that which has not yet been fully expressed exists. As Negri points out:
It is obvious that scientic attention will have to be focused more on the discontinuities (be they ruptures or innovations) than on the continuities: in effect, the continuities are nothing other than discontinuities or ruptures which have been dominated . . . every innovation is a revolution which failed but also one which was attempted. (Negri 1999: 158)

This then is the tension of the symptom in its function as a moment of a particular capacity of perception contingent upon the ruptures and fractures in extensive time; a placeholder that marks a disruption in the deceptively smooth fabric of dominated life. Symptoms are always innovations that mark a limit and an attempt at containing the virtuality of a failed revolution. Deleuze and Guattari outline a clear connection between socioeconomic systems and socially constructed denitions of pathology in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. They assert that the social category of schizophrenia marks a limit condition for the socio-economic system of capitalism, and that the primary mode of schizophrenic thought is that of decoding dominant language systems rendering them problematic as systems of control. Capitalism shares this trait in the ways that it decodes social and cultural systems and recodes them into monetary terms. However, Deleuze and Guattari argue that capitalism cannot afford to thoroughly decode the social without losing its capacity as a system of social control. In this respect, schizophrenia as a social mode of absolute decoding serves as the limit condition for capitalism, that is, as the line it cannot cross without risking its own integrity as a system. As an assemblage of possibility for capital, schizophrenic thought functions as a model of immanent production that exceeds the limits of industrial capital and offers the possibility of opening all elements of the social to infections and parasitic engagement. In this sense, it serves as a symptom simultaneously in both registers of the symptom as we have dened it above. That is, it serves as a blockage to lan vital that hopes to control and maintain the force of life turned to the ends of the parasitic form. At the

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same time, it functions as an inimitable force of resistance that stands to dissemble the force of the parasite itself by provoking a mutation in the social body that will produce that body as toxic to the parasite. However, Negri (1996) has suggested that, in fact, capital has already crossed the line into a completely decoded system of absolute appropriation in which there is no real capacity to effectively recode. Baudrillard (1995) makes a similar argument in his theory of contemporary society as a simulacrum or a copy of a copy. Michael Hardt (1995) also traces this in his work on The Withering of Civil Society in which he says that capitalism has decoded our social forms such as the family, the church and government into empty copies of themselves. These are social forms that look like the originals, but have ceased to function except as extensions of capital. In this sense, the symptom of schizophrenic thought, which might signal an autopoetic immunity on the part of the social body, has entered into a co-evolutionary process in which the parasite has taken on the characteristics of the host immunology and produced itself along similar registers of becoming. If this is correct, and capitalism has indeed exceeded the limit capacity of schizophrenic thought proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, then the question remains: is there a limit capacity for capitalism and what are its symptoms? One possibility is autism. Autism is here proposed as a limit on three grounds: 1) it was initially thought to be a form of schizophrenia and so has both an afnity with and a difference from schizophrenia; 2) it became a central focus of psychiatric control and concern under the previous regime of industrial capitalism and is now the focus of behavioural and psychiatric attention under the new regime of global capitalism; and 3) the escalating prevalence rate of autism indicates an emerging and compelling social coding that calls for deconstruction. Leo Kanner rst identied autism as a psychological disorder a little over 50 years ago (see Kanner 1943). Kanner focused on the case histories of 11 children aged between two and eight. Initially, it was thought that perhaps these children, who exhibited behaviours such as obsessiveness, stereotypy, echolalia and social remoteness, had some form of childhood schizophrenia. However, Kanner argued that they had a unique cluster of symptoms that warranted a unique diagnosis that he called autism. In terms of our interest in the function and deployment of the symptom, autism constitutes a very interesting case. First, lets note that it is premised within the symptomatological taxonomy of schizophrenia. That is to say, it was initially perceived as a subset made up of symptoms

40 Hans A. Skott-Myhre and Christina Taylor

that fall within the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia. However, schizophrenia itself has a rather uncertain relation to its symptoms:
The problem with both psychiatry and psychoanalysis is that these negative symptoms [of schizophrenia] are dispersed and scattered, and are difcult to totalize or unify in a coherent clinical entity, or even localizable mode of existence: schizophrenia is a discordant syndrome, always in ight from itself. (Smith 1997: xx)

This diagnostic imprecision and lack of an agreed-upon aetiology continues to mark schizophrenia to this day, although it is frantically covered over by pharmaceutical and psychiatric discourses. What is of interest for us, in relation to the development of autism as a symptom, is determining what set of social and historical conditions called for a new constellation that separated itself from schizophrenia. In terms of our description thus far, we might wonder in what way autism is necessary as a new kind of blockage. Is it needed in order to support emerging forms of dominance in response to new deployments of the blockages of schizophrenic process, or is it needed to promulgate the failure of these forms as a blockage? The concomitant reading is that autism emerges in dominant discourse as a placeholder for a subject to come for an emerging form of subjectivity on the horizon of the social as virtual event. In either case, the emergence of autism out of schizophrenia is anything but an objective act of scientic taxonomic clarication. It is important to note, in this regard, our earlier assertion that the symptom is to be read in terms of difference, and in terms of logic, function and effect. Clearly, autism signals a difference in the symbolic register of the social signicance of schizophrenia. What then is its logic, function and effect? To approach this question, we can turn to Luhmanns explication of the relation between logics of communication and their effects on social systems. Luhmann suggests that the current social formation consists of communications between functionally differentiated systems (see Luhmann 1995). He argues that these communication systems are separate from life and operate purely according to the logic of their differentiation from other systems. Put another way, they are purely transcendent linguistic codes that function according to their own logic. Living forms and other function systems can perturb them, but they are closed off from anything but their own function logic. Anything that does not fall within the linguistic code of the function set constitutes the environment for that set, which, of course, is not the set itself. Luhmann posits that once these function systems are initiated, they auto-poetically

Autism: Schizo of Postmodern Capital 41

proliferate. One such system is the psychiatric function system, and symptoms such as autism and schizophrenia are modalities by which it auto-poetically proliferates. It is important to note that these systems are not hierarchical, but at systems differentiated by function. This is, of course, a particular form of immanence as a self-producing system whose conatus is the persistence of its becoming. In this regard, the diagnostic codes associated with psychiatry and its relation to symptoms form a uniquely compelling case. This is in part because the linguistic codes of diagnosis are thoroughly dependent on the perturbations of living bodies. As a system whose coding is premised on the binary medical code of this is illness and this is health psychiatric diagnosis must premise its symptoms on the observable acts of the body. That is, its premise of difference is dependent on the functional distinction between disordered and ordered behaviour. The proliferation of this distinction is the basis of its continuation as a function system. Indeed, the function of psychiatry in this respect has nothing to do with healing mental disorders. Instead, its function is to proliferate through distinguishing a panoply of symptom clusters and diagnoses that produce research, treatments and interventions that produce more symptom clusters, etc. Because such a functionally differentiated system is closed off from its environment, and because the environment upon which it is dependent for its perturbations and extensions is life, it by denition constitutes a representational blockage to expressions of life that would exceed its functional capacity. It is for this reason that Deleuze and Guattari state that the problem of schizophrenization as a cure consists in this: how can schizophrenia be disengaged as a power of humanity and of Nature without a schizophrenic being produced? (cited in Smith 2007: xxi). In this sense, we should note that it is imperative to the function system of psychiatry that a schizophrenic is produced in such a manner as to block the force of the alternative immanent system of life itself. Clearly, the emergence of any new symptom cluster signals a shift in the environment that is constituted by life itself. Autism, in this sense, holds the dual function of the symptom we have delineated thus far. Indeed, since Kanner developed his diagnosis in the early 1940s, autism has proliferated both demographically and descriptively. While the denition of infant autism has remained fairly stable, as found in the current DSM-IV-TR, the disorder itself has become increasingly complex and includes a spectrum of behaviours and ages ranging from infant to adult (see American Psychiatric Association 2000). In fact, the DSM IV has now expanded to include ve disorders clustered under the term

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Pervasive Developmental Disorder; namely, Autistic Disorder, Retts Disorder, Childhood Disintegrative Disorder, Aspergers Disorder, and Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specied. These diagnostic categories have both similarities and differences across subjects. In terms of differences they include variations in age of onset, aetiology, associated conditions, and epidemiology. As to similarities, there are signicant variations from developmental norms including impairments in three key areas: reciprocal social interaction, communication skills and behavioural variability.3 We might note the ways that the symptom cluster identied as schizophrenia has morphed within the proliferating discourse that comprises the symptom cluster of autism. According to current diagnostic practices, schizophrenia comprises at least two of the following: delusions, hallucinations, disorganised speech, grossly disorganised behaviour, and absence of affect or initiative. In this regard, it is specically the way that schizophrenic thought produces a uid recoding of the dominant cultural structures that marks the possibility of a limit for Deleuze and Guattari. Indeed, in some respects, it is within the realm of expression in literature and philosophy that the schizophrenic can be delineated from schizophrenia as process of life that is, the moment at which the uid recoding of experience enters the ow of innite process. By contrast, the autism spectrum is not premised on the disruption of thought or speech, nor are its behavioural variations responsive to internal systems of belief on the part of the autistic subject. Instead of the active expressions of schizophrenia in delusions, paranoia, hallucinations and disorganised speech, in autism we have a turning away from the entire eld of representation. The symptom constellation of autism is founded on a perceived and socially ascribed inability to engage with others, an inability to communicate, a reduced capacity for empathy and affect, and repetitive and compulsive behaviours. Where schizophrenia in some ways engages the unconscious as a rupture of the conscious social self, autism refuses the conscious self and turns inward. In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari address autism peripherally in their discussion of schizophrenia, since at the time of their writing the relevant symptom cluster was still considered within the domain of schizophrenia and they simply read it as an extreme blockage akin to catatonia. We would suggest that now autism might be read in a more signicant register as the current schizo of postmodern capital. That is to say, as the new limit condition for capitalism. Our argument proceeds along two main lines: 1) postmodern capitalism

Autism: Schizo of Postmodern Capital 43

has appropriated psychosis and produced its own transcendent schizo social system complete with all the symptoms of schizophrenia: delusion, paranoia, hallucinations, disrupted and disturbed speech. It is important to note, however, that this schizo does not originate in a body, but through the perturbation of bodies on a series of abstract function systems. As a result of its production as a copy of the representation of the acts of bodies dened as schizophrenic, the schizo of capital is a simulacrum of schizophrenia. This new schizo simulacrum is distributed on a daily basis as reality through the mass media in its representation of global events and in particular in the medias analysis of the economy. 2) Autism represents, as did schizophrenia, the possibilities inherent in the current production of the social subject within the regimes of capital. We would argue that the current social production of the subject cannot help but be responsive to the schizo simulacrum and its thoroughly delusional representations of itself. If, as Laing argued, the schizo is simply a more obvious manifestation of a thoroughly mad society, then autism is indeed the premier example of the radically alienated subject whose very life has become a copy of a copy (see Laing 1983). To develop this more fully, however, we need to take a closer look at the notion of the subject. For this purpose we will dene subjectivity not simply as a philosophical concept or affect, but also as a certain kind of consciousness. Because we are interested in the modes of consciousness involved in autism and schizophrenia we will leave the dominant form of consciousness, the conscious rational self, behind and turn to the form of thought delineated as the unconscious, and in particular to the concept of the unconscious found in Deleuze and Guattari. We describe this form of the unconscious as the constitutive property of the opportune moment. That is to say, the unconscious in this formulation is contingently constituted in each moment out of all the experiences of the body and the thoughts produced by those experiences. This means that the unconscious is produced simultaneously in extensive and intensive time as pure virtuality. And this formulation, of course, takes us into the eld of immanence. As Deleuze and Guattari point out in Anti-Oedipus: The unconscious poses no problem of meaning, solely problems of use. The question posed by desire is not What does it mean? but rather how does it work? . . . [The unconscious] represents nothing but it produces. It means nothing but it works (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 119). The unconscious, as an immanent function, simply produces. We might ask, however, what are the conditions of its production as immanent function?

44 Hans A. Skott-Myhre and Christina Taylor

In Freuds General Psychological Theory, the chapters on repression and the unconscious suggest one possible beginning for a description of the unconscious within the logic of immanence (Freud 1963). Freud lays out the three psychic forms he is investigating conscious, unconscious and preconscious as though on a plane. In his account, there is no space comprised by their construction and no interiority. They are rather dynamic forces that can be mapped onto psychic planes. The unconscious is portrayed as a psychic apparatus through which sensation initially passes. Freud describes it as a eld of latent conceptions. In our terms, a consonant description would be as a eld of innite potentials. Subjectivity, in this sense of the immanent unconscious, is central to our understanding of autism as the new limit condition for capital. If schizophrenia functioned as a limit condition for capital in its production of the unconscious as a proliferation of expression, then autism produces a limit condition in its limitations to expression. A limit condition that operates both as a disregard for the regimes of the symbolic and meaning that are deployed by capital in its schizo simulacra and through an immersion into the ow of time and event. The subjectivity of autism is specically non-linguistic, although it sustains a form of thought. This is the placeholder for a people to come out of the catastrophe of the current historical moment. However, autism, as a symptom constellation, is both a production of a limit within the current system of domination as well as a mark of its pathology. In this regard, the symptom is produced by what Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus delineate as the molar line. This is the rigid line that territorialises, regulates, orders and segments space, bodies and social relations through the either/or logic of binary oppositions. The binary logic of molar segmentation is foundational for identitarian practices: a body becomes identiable in rigidly molar structures in ones identity as mad or sane, as psychiatrist or patient. It is, ultimately a logic of containment and capture. The production of the autistic is a product of this line. It is the either/or logic of the functionally differentiated system of psychiatry that produces the blockage of the immanent unconscious as the autistic that must be behaviourally induced into participating as an integrated member of the existing social order. Indeed, applied behavioural analysis is the preferred and often mandated method of treatment that relentlessly seeks to reconnect the immanent unconscious subjectivity of autism to the schizo simulacra. Interestingly, one of the common tasks taught to autistic individuals in these types of treatment is the ability to recognise and deploy the value system of money.

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Deleuze and Guattari, however, offer us another way to understand the production and function of the autism symptom through their description of the molecular line. This is a more uid and exible line that forms relations and establishes connections beyond the rigid segmentation of molar structures. In contrast to molar lines, which form and stabilise identities, molecular lines operate by introducing instabilities or openings into the fabric of molar unities and as such map the potential for movement, destabilisation, and transformation. It is a peculiar and serendipitous aspect of the systems of domination and limit that each apparatus of capture inadvertently sets up the conditions for resistance and ight. Autism is no exception. The psychiatric function system has as its primary impetus the proliferation of its function. In order to expand, it must apply its binary logic to an ever-widening eld of subjects. In terms of autism, this has meant the production of an ever-expanding range of bodies identied as having specic sets of symptoms associated with autism. This is commonly referred to as the autism spectrum. As the range of bodies has proliferated, there has been a concomitant extension of capacities for self-advocacy as some bodies on the highly functional edge sustain a form of subjectivity that allows for a certain kind of border dwelling between modes of consciousness and affect. Similarly, with the development of tools that allow for translation between previously non-verbal subjects and the dominant normative population, such as computer-mediated speech systems, there has been the developing ability of subjects to advocate what they have termed neuro-diversity. In short, the molecular line of disturbance has produced the unintentional development of a minoritarian voice for autism that has begun to call for its self-valorisation as a viable alternative form of consciousness and subjectivity. Whereas the molecular line simply establishes a clearing for a potential move beyond rigid segmentations, the third line proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, the nomadic line (the line of ight) takes us to places beyond the territorialising reach of molar unities. Lines of ight are, by denition, forces of deterritorialisation, mutation and release. Where molarity presupposes the submission of the line to the point (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 293) the destination to the path lines of ight constitute passages away from, or even the breaking of, points. Here we return to the voice of Mary Baggs from our opening epigraph. Mary speaks to us in translation in a video she produced on YouTube entitled In My Language. The rst part of the video records Mary singing somewhat tonelessly (but reminiscent of Tibetan Buddhist chanting) and interacting with various objects in her environment. Her interactions

46 Hans A. Skott-Myhre and Christina Taylor

are unconventional. For example, she rubs her face into a book rather than reading it. Following this, there is a note on the screen that reads Translation. Mary begins, in a computer-mediated voice, by informing us that her denition of language is going to be radically different from what we are accustomed to. She states: My language is not about designing words or even visual symbols for people to interpret. Its about being in constant conversation with every aspect of my environment. Reacting physically to all parts of my surroundings. This is a very peculiar denition of language. To say that her language is not symbolic or available for interpretation is clearly a line of ight along the same line as Deleuzes call for the creation of vacuoles of non-communication (Deleuze 1995: 175) as a response to the predatory nature of capital in the realm of the symbolic. Her language is that of the act rooted in what Spinoza would term the collision between bodies. It is a direct challenge to the realm of functional differentiation in drawing its constituent force directly through an encounter with the environment. As she moves her nger back and forth through a stream of water, Mary says: In this part of the video the water doesnt symbolize anything, I am just interacting with the water as the water interacts with me. There is a ow between Mary and the environment that is mutually constitutive and contingent. There is no meaning to the act; there is simply the act as interaction between bodies. This, she says, is a native language. Such action and interaction with things and experimenting with unique body movements are common within autism, and although we seek to apply meaning to and give a reason for them, they often do not, and are not intended to, translate into the dominant vernacular. In a profound moment, Mary reects on the fact that her ongoing response to everything she encounters in her environment is often interpreted by the dominant culture as being in a world of her own. Here she challenges one of the central assumptions of the symptom constellation of autism that non-response to dominant codes of interaction constitutes a withdrawal from social reality. What Mary seems to be proposing is that, far from being a withdrawal from society, her language is an expression of profound engagement with and production of a non-anthropocentric social reality. She goes on to further challenge the terms on which her existence, awareness and personhood are judged. She repudiates this judgement as being falsely premised on valorising what she terms a tiny and limited part of the world. Her thought, in its expansive responsiveness to everything, is so radically different that some people do not consider

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it thought at all. But, she goes on to assert, it is a way of thinking in its own right. However, she says she can only be taken seriously if she learns the dominant vernacular. She says it is only when she types something in our language that you refer to me as having communication. She calls for a mutuality in which those of us in the dominant social reality learn her language and take it seriously. The connection between thought and personhood is so rmly bounded in that dominant reality that, she says, her personhood is invalidated unless she thinks within the frameworks prescribed by it. Quite clearly this discourse qualies as a profoundly minoritarian mode of thought and action. We might ask, however, in what ways does it serve as a possible limit condition for capital? In partial response, we would argue that it extends the lines of ight of the schizo into the terrain of The process of Life as a non-organic and impersonal power (Smith 2007: xxi). The terrain of postmodern capital as an array of functionally differentiated communication systems is premised on the obverse form of the process of non-life as a non-organic and impersonal power. Both life and capital operate as immanent systems that creatively produce themselves. However, only the immanent eld of life as force can produce itself without reliance on anything outside itself. The line of ight in autism, as explicated by Mary Baggs, lies in her denition of language as an impersonal expression of collision with all bodies. It is a refusal of the mediation of the symbolic not through an act of will but through the biological capacities of a specic array of bodies to directly engage the world in a communication composed of acts. The schizo simulacra is irrelevant to such a subjectivity because its currency is the symbol and that currency holds little value in the world of autism. In this way, the symptom implodes into itself as act rather than meaning. It is no longer to be read but to be lived. We argue that this form of living constitutes a direct challenge to the codes and functional differentiations of postmodern capital. It marks a subject to come, not in the form of the autistic subject per se, but in the becoming autistic of all of us. This becoming autistic can be found historically in the disciplines of Taoist, Buddhist and Hindu practice and thought. In the Western tradition, it is to be found in the lineage of Spinoza. However, until now, this becoming autistic was a ow on the margins of the dominant social reality, disturbing it at the edges. That it is now ever more prevalent signals the immanent possibility of an impersonal subject extending nally beyond the bounded shell of humanity into an encounter with life itself.

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Notes
1. We are referring to Deleuze and Guattaris assertion in A Thousand Plateaus that there are always lines of ight within the ordering structure of language. 2. For a description of the apparatuses of capture see Luhmann 1995, Hardt and Negri 2000, and Deleuze and Guattari 1987. 3. Aspergers and PDD-NOS do not necessarily have issues in the latter two areas and Retts and CDD have slightly more specic features within these areas than autistic disorder.

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