Smooth and Striated Spaces: Autistic (Ill)Legibility as a Deterritorializing Force

• In Event: Disability Identities and Cultural Repertoires in Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies

Abstract

Purpose
Scholars of Neurodiversity and grassroots activists in the U.S. and beyond have argued that Autistic culture is an exciting and vibrant cultural force (Author 1, 2018), demonstrating the significant contributions of Autistic people and the political and social gains of the Neurodiversity movement (Orsini, 2012; Robertson, 2009). Expanding on such contributions, this paper explores Autism and Autistic identity as a dynamic site of encounter, rich with liberatory potential.
Theoretical Frame
Critical scholars of Education, particularly Critical Race Theory (CRT) scholars, have put forth conceptual frameworks such as Culturally-Relevant Pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2009), Culturally-Sustaining Pedagogy (Ed. Paris and & Alim, 2017) and Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso, 2005) that challenge schools to consider the myriad assets students of color and otherwise marginalized students bring to the classroom. This paper surveys this literature in order to advance our argument that Autism is not easily captured epistemologically by “identity.” To do this we draw from Deleuze and Guattari’s (1972/2009) Anti-Oedipus and Cultural Theorist William Bogard’s (2000) “Smoothing Machines and the Construction of Society.” Bogard uses Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of smoothness and striation to discuss social relations of power and bodily inscription. He describes Deleuze and Guattari’s six models according to the distinction between smooth and striated space--technological, musical, maritime, mathematical, physical and aesthetic, and advances a seventh machine-a societalizing machine. He argues that social smoothing machines both generate “blockages and exclusions,” and zones of “inclusion, vitality and freedom” (Bogard, 2000, p. 271). Bogard’s addition to Deleuze and Guattari’s text is a useful analytic for thinking through bodily inscription as a form of social control and the production of subjects at the interstices of smooth and striated spaces -- outside of identity politics. Ultimately, we seek to further complicate postmodern narratives of subjugation through the lens of Bogard’s notion of incorporation, which he describes as the act of polishing and severing.
Methods/Data Sources
To exemplify and ground these processes in everyday life, we theorize various sites of attempted “smoothing” within education: “therapeutic” schooling and the special education machine, etc. authors’ individual visioning of what these lines of flight could look like, from two different perspectives-both within formal education spaces, outside of them, and where they interface. We use duoethnography to describe authors’ individual visioning of what these lines of flight could look like, from two different perspectives-both within formal education spaces, outside of them, and where they interface.
Results/Significance
Our purpose here is to describe the encounter between Autism and these “smoothing machines” as productive—productive of striated space, lines of flight, and potential liberation. That is to say—Autistic (ill)egibility is in and of itself a deterritorializing force. We offer a way to think about Autism as potentiality in order to produce a more expansive understanding of what “assets’ Autistic people (and Autism as an ontological process) may bring forth.

Authors

• Robin Rosigno

• Sara M. Acevedo, Bellevue College