Embodied Consciousness: Autism, Life Writing and the Limits of the Cognitive Paradigm

Abstract

This paper argues that the autistic condition necessitates a reimagining of consciousness. Consciousness has been understood to be dependent on language. In so far as autism involves deficits in verbal communication, the individual with autism could, according to the classical model of consciousness put forward by the cognitive sciences, be understood to be impaired in or even lack consciousness. Far from showing any deficiency in their authors’ consciousness, autistic life writing – from case studies by Oliver Sacks to Robert Hughes’s caregiver narrative Running with Walker to the personal narratives of Amanda Baggs, Temple Grandin, and Daniel Tammet – provides a very different idea about consciousness, an idea only recently taken up in the study of consciousness. What autism emphasizes, this paper proposes, is the important and necessary role of the body in the formation, production, and maintenance of conscious experience. Beginning with a consideration of the absence of the body in cognitive scientific thought, this chapter then shows how autistic life writing represents not a lack of consciousness, as found in cognitive scientific thought, but rather the embodiment of consciousness, with the different sensory experiences resulting from autistic forms of embodiment allowing for a more comprehensive mode of relating to the material and social world.