intention

[Autistic children] are in continuous motion, never still.

— O. Ivar Lovaas, The Autistic Child

Where does rhetoric lie?

This question has many meanings, many potential interpretations. When I ask where rhetoric lies, I want to know both where it resides and where it deceives. Where does rhetoric live? What does rhetoric obscure? Whom does rhetoric fool? Where, what, and whom does rhetoric betray?

I am interested in looking at where rhetoric lies because such questions inform what we think of as symbolic or socially shared: In what ways is symbolism central to rhetorical action? Where does the symbolic map itself onto rhetorical terrains? Is symbolism ever true?

These are important questions for rhetoric, and they are likewise important questions for autism. Rhetoric has its own traditional quarters, but it redisposes itself when autistic bodies make themselves known. Autism's earliest meanings were psychodynamic in scope, referring to specific pathology as well as categorical self-absorption. Autism, Zizek once claimed, is the "destruction of the symbolic universe." (In Zizek's defense, it was the 1980s, and he modified the word autism with radical.) Frances Tustin, one of the predominant autism psychoanalysts of the twentieth century, figured autism as a traumatic refusal to differentiate self from other, in which the autistic child develops a "somatic allergy" for the "not-me." As a means of self-soothing, autistics partialize and self-absorb the human, remaking others' organs — such as others' breasts or hands — into autistic objects. Importantly, autism in these constructions is figured as a defusion of drives, as impulses that unfold rather than intend.

If autism results in the death of symbolism and the refusal to engage human others, then autism surely kills (at) parties. When I enter a social space, the electricity of the other, intervening bodies recedes in my presence. Dynamics have shifted, not to accommodate my presence, but to redirect the electricity elsewhere, toward the not-me. There is a certain awkwardness that inheres in rhetorical situations touched by the autistic. A clinical paradigm might locate that awkwardness in my autistic body, identifying the rigidity of my joints, my wayward gaze or monotonic speech, my lumbering body parts that paw their way through public spaces, as if my feet were unaware that objects existed beyond them. Under this framework, my body disrupts rhetorical situations because my body is rhetorically degraded.

Of course, I don't for a moment believe that autistic people are rhetorically degraded, nor do I believe us to be symbolically autpocalyptic. Rather, I believe that rhetoric's arrangements forcibly absent the autistic. That is, rhetoric builds spaces that occlude the autistic because the autistic supposedly represents the asocial edges of rhetoric. My modus operandi in this chapter is partial, partial in the sense that I break down rhetoric not into a definitional, or a matter of what rhetoric is, but rather what rhetoric privileges or obscures in its designs, what rhetoric refuses to traverse. Because rhetoric's topoi are many, my approach is associational at times, (de)constructing one cherished topos and bridging over to the next. Rhetoric's topographies shore up that which autistics are time and again claimed to lack: intentionality, symbolic capacity, sociality, and audience awareness, among other rhetorical means. In this way, claiming that autistics are arhetorical or pseudo-rhetorical seems a matter of principle or fact — on the level of a philosophical or natural law. If a given rhetorical tradition structures its theoretical body around intentionality, and if autistic people are said to lack intentionality, then autistic non-rhetoricity remains a logical condition of the syllogism. And, if autistic people have difficulty inferring or communicating an intention, does a nonautistic we really need to listen? Depending upon the rhetorical tradition from which we draw, we might replace intentionality with any number of darlings — pathos, reason, context, speech. For as many topoi as rhetoric proclaims to be central, there are as many deficits and symptoms that render the autistic as rhetorical antonym. In this way, the rhetorical degradation that attends autism is planar, multiple. Whatever the rhetoric of the week is, we are claimed not to have it.

Take, for instance, what we think we know about sociality. In many respects, sociality is the glue of this chapter, and, more broadly, this book. As Judy Holiday contends, rhetoric is firmly situated in the "realm of the social." Rhetoric is social, and neuroqueer people are purported to be sociality's nemesis. In calling upon the social, I am invoking Holiday's claim that "rhetoric both invents and is invented by humans, individually and collectively." Engagement, reciprocity, empathy — these things, and more, are configured as that which rhetoric requires in order to effect change. And, more importantly, each of these items is deeply connected to intentionality, which is itself multivariate. In linguistics, intention is typically configured around the social dimensions (or, pragmatics) of language, and is understood as invoking multiple cognitive phenomena. Intention, then, calls upon not only shared goal direction but also mobilizes complex relationships to time, place, and bodyminds (both one's own and others'). Bruno Bara and his coauthors assert that intentionality and sociality are implicated in one another. In order to be considered "communicative," they claim, an intention needs to "communicate a meaning to someone else, plus the intention that the former intention should be recognized by the addressee." In other words, intentionality only becomes rhetorical when it is social, when its effects are mutually recognizable. Intention requires a theory of one's own as well as other minds.

If we were to define intentionality rather simply, we might cast it as that toward which we turn as well as the action of turning-toward unto itself. Intentionality encompasses both the process of inference and the physical action of communicating or making that inference known. It is determined by both cause and effect, the latter of which is made recognizable on the body — through speech, through gesture, through gaze, through paralinguistic cues such as throat clearing, or feet shuffling, or kiss blowing. In this regard, intention can be strikingly normative. When intent is offered in conjunction with the neuroqueer, it becomes illegible: we only know what intent is when that intent is read via prosocial measures.

Autism, in its queerly contrastive ways, harbors different stories, stories of nonintention at worst and failed intention at best. Autism is less of a motive and more of a force. Mikhail Kissine notes that autistics behold their addressees less as humans and more "as a tool to attaining a certain goal." Kissine's approach, while reminiscent of psychodynamic fixations on autistic objects, is distinctly concerned with theory...