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53 2 Autism and the Posthuman Stuart Murray Outhumaning the Human In Not Even Wrong (2004), his book on the history of autism inspired by his relationship with his autistic son Morgan, Paul Collins pauses for a moment during his wider argument to note a particular way in which the condition interacts with an idea of the human: Autists are described by others—and by themselves—as aliens among humans. But there’s an irony to this, for precisely the opposite is true. They are us, and to understand them is to begin to understand what it means to be human. Think of it: a disability is usually defined in terms of what is missing. . . . But autism is an ability and a disability: it is as much about what is abundant as what is missing, an overexpression of the very traits that make our species unique. Other animals are social, but only humans are capable of abstract logic. The autistic outhumans the humans, and we can scarcely recognize the result. (161; emphasis in original) What might seem like a straightforward statement here in fact contains a number of complexities. The autism-alien association is, as Collins observes, one that has become standard when discussing the condition . Inspired in large measure by Temple Grandin’s comment to Oliver Sacks that having autism made her “feel like an anthropologist on Mars” (Sacks 1995, 295) and Sacks’s subsequent use of the phrase as the title for his 1995 collection of case studies, the idea of a “natural” link between autism and alien, as an account of the experience of life, has developed to a point where the combination of the words can appear to offer a straightforward description of the condition. As such, a text such as Jasmine Lee O’Neill’s Through the Eyes of Aliens: A Book about Autistic People (1998) offers O’Neill’s understanding of verisimilitude and is not a title that conveys, say, prejudice through its idea of autism as 54 STUART MURRAY “otherworldly.” Neil Badmington has referred to contemporary fascination with aliens, in relation to questions of the spectrum of humanity, as “alien chic” (2004), and Ian Hacking, who has written on autism and the idea of the alien, notes that as a culture “we seem to hold up aliens as mirrors to teach what is best or worst in us or in the human condition” (2009, 45). Hacking’s insight here catches the idea of range in Collins’s other observations: that those with autism “are us” and form the platform for an “understanding” of nonautistic humanity, but also that, in the processes of “outhumaning” ideas of a human norm, they move beyond core categories of humanity to suggest wider possibilities. Collins’s idea that autism is absence, supplement and excess, or humanity and nonhumanity, all at the same time, is one that is increasingly gaining purchase in critical thinking on the condition that stems from disability studies, bioethics, and philosophy. The idea that “we can scarcely recognize the result” of such thinking works subsequently as a signpost toward an unformed future in which autism might further be discussed and theorized. In part, the fact that discussion of the condition has arrived at this point is the culmination of efforts to achieve a more subtle and nuanced understanding of autism; knowing that we no longer routinely label those who are autistic as “subhuman” and do not automatically deem them of no worth and consign them to lives of brutal institutionalization is a tribute to processes of education about the disabled that have sought to develop a language of rights and inclusion understood by all. Such productive measures can only be welcomed. Nevertheless, it should not be denied that Collins’s positioning of autism in relation to a broader category of humanity is not without its problems. In its desire to capture a sense of full engagement with the nondisabled majority, it threatens to render autism diffuse to a point where it loses any specificity in its interaction with the notion of “the human.” If autism is somehow less, more, and something else when discussed in the context of the ways in which we think about the broader category of humanity, then where exactly does it stand, and how precisely is it constituted? This essay makes a specific intervention into this debate through a concentration on autism and the posthuman, and aims to think through the multiple and often confusing arguments that come...

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