I encourage everyone here to take a moment and watch the following video by Amanda Baggs. Titled "In My Langauge", the video itself is split into two parts, the first a sort of evocative display of the experience of autism, the second, Baggs's own "interpretation" of what's happening in the first part. The first part may seem a bit jarring, if not confusing, but it's worth the wait.

I've always been curious about with the rhythmic quality of the movements of those who we tend to consider mentally disabled. You tend to see it quite often, a certain continuous rocking or gentle swaying exhibited by those like Baggs, which can seem, to those of us not so affected, to be aimless or wandering. Yet I've always wondered if there is in fact a particular significance to such rhythms, rhythms which might, perhaps, help with maintaining a certain bodily integrity by capturing a duration of space and time in a comforting cadence without which a sense of self might begin to unravel, or at least feel less concrete.

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Baggs's video, I think, articulates something similar in a far better way then I could have. Especially interesting is her specification of her movements in terms of language. "The previous part of this video", says Baggs, referring to the three wordless minutes that precede her 'interpretation', "was in my native language." For us neurotypicals, the idea that Baggs's rhythmic bodily repetitions could constitute language might come off as particularly strange. Language, as we are used to thinking of it, is matter of 'symbolizing', of being something to interpret and understand. Yet for Baggs, her language works differently: "My language is not about designing words or even visual symbols for people to interpret. It is about being in a constant conversation with every aspect of my environment, reacting physically to all parts of my surroundings". In a voice over a clip of Baggs running her fingers through flowing water, Baggs says, "the water doesn't symbolize anything. I am just interacting with the water, as the water interacts with me".

Language for Baggs is not a matter of communicating between one person and another, but between a person - in this case Baggs - and their environment. Importantly she notes that "far from being purposeless, the way that I move is an ongoing response to what is around me." So how are we to understand the manner in which Baggs can be said to be communicating or responding to her environment? Baggs helps to clarify this by noting that the difference between neurotypical communication and the sort of communication she is detailing is a matter of scope: "Ironically, the way that I move when responding to everything around me is described as 'being in a world of my own'. Whereas if I interact with a much more limited set of responses and only react to a much more limited part of my surroundings people claim that I am 'opening up to true interaction with the world'." Neurotypical communication is in fact a communication that proceeds by way of certain constraints - that of grammar, social convention, vocalization or graphic , inter-subjectivity, etc; while Baggs's own manner of communication is a communication undertaken with far looser constraints.

What interests me here is not just what this says about autistic experience - although this fascinates me too - but also what it says about so-called normal communication. What Baggs's experience allows us to do is rethink what we traditionally understand as the 'normal order' of communication; Autistic experience is often taken to be a sort of degraded form of experience, wherein normal experience is taken to be standard which the autist has failed to reach. What Baggs's experience shows however, is that autistic experience is in fact a type of experience with it's own standard of consistency and specificity. Baggs, who can only speak though typed words on a computer, is clearly an articulate, thoughtful and insightful person. Her ability to think and communicate however, is not a degraded form of experience so much as an experience that belongs to a different order. As she herself writes, "the way that I naturally think and respond to things looks and feels so different from standard concepts or even visualization that some people do not consider it thought at all but it is a way of thinking in its own right".

By underscoring the difference between autistic and neurotypical communication as a matter of scope, Baggs essentially places both experiences on a continuum that runs from a highly constrained manner of communication to one far less so. Interestingly, it is precisely the constraints placed on neurotypical communication that make it so highly varied and capable of semantic precision. In any case, this allows Baggs to draw a certain equivalency between the two, as she does when she complains that "we are... viewed as non-communicative if we don’t speak the standard language but other people are not considered non-communicative if they are so oblivious to our own languages as to believe that they don’t exist." Philosophically speaking, Baggs forces us to reconsider our complacencies with respect to the scope of what does and does not count as meaningful, as well as the boundaries we draw between self and other. Baggs's own take-away is at once both ethical and political, a takeaway that reminds us of the responsibilities we have when engaging in what we may think only of as abstract thought.