Niche

To find a niche- not the limitation of a category of interest that one cannot go beyond. I mean an actual physical niche- something to work off- a foothold- a sticking point- some kind of jamming device- a choking reflex to the smooth run of affairs.


Autistic recursiveness is a kind of pondering around a selection of physical affects that begin to animate one another and so to redistribute the run of the affect. Like playing a riff on a guitar over and over again- that two bar section of a nursery rhyme- madness- infuriating.


To look in at that- of course it is self-referential going nowhere. But then there is a fault, a sticking point- a lull and pause for breath- a catchment in the fingering- the logical playing out of the rhythm is fractionally delayed- the conclusion obviated in the looped return.


A wavering. The notes pile up. Flavours that churn- salt and sugar. Jam mixed into porridge. The voicing samples itself as an imposition on the order of things. A glancing around. This sabotage. This is sabotage. But the tuning sticks, gathers weight- the lapsed return must work around that now. It catches and swirls, changing the river bed gradually, ponderously grinding into this groove, this catchment, making it so.


That is a making out of intensity that builds on its own limited affects at each turn, burrowing downwards to seize the ground- bouncing up out of that as a reflex spasm that is a shocked performance into the daylight and is then held there by the audience, the expectations, the collective focus, levitated and impossibly sustained. It is buoyed up by all surrounding. Its life is a triangulation of filaments holding it in place, making it perceptible- to be commended- “in spite of it all”, “the difficulties” “the disabilities”. But it is this riveting of attention on to a catchment that really gets it going. The disability a workable tool levering against behavioural consistency.



Innovation, the accident accounted for in the blanks of the program. The to-ing and fro-ing, the swaying and pondering, the walkabout and abrupt exits. The returns, the re-runs, the re-trials and a gearing back into the movement that was let up on. This is the engine that gets going with no point in mind- nothing to reach, except the limitation of its own perfect return again and again until something comes down- something is plonked in the lap of a “half-wit”. The inconsistency is made to count. A Message? No, a mistake.


We think and articulate around an infinity of such mistakes. No island of genius in a sea of limitation- the limitation is the catchment around which an idea- an idea of recursively thinking back to the idea of this warping event becomes useable rather than obviated. A point of stoppage around which something builds- congestion becomes rampant.


The public interest in autism of late is because in uncertain times we are all trying to work out this strange embrace between regularity and the jolting into innovation that we very nearly dump out with the rubbish- at least this has been the habit of certain ways of life for years. I hope the TV shows can get beyond magpie picking performance like a curatorial investor whilst leaving the repetition- the day to day living arrangements of these autistic “entertainers” as the separate conundrums of a freak show which the public stares at but never identifies with.


The performability organizes the gestures and repetitious manoeuvres which are continual. They are the backdrop, the context, the playable surface, the wealth of humus to be gone into. The regularity labyrinth of beat, melody, line, colour are the differential tools that begin to organize a flappable body- containing it in feedback that informs further output. Making the flap an extension – a kind of winged expanse- making the containment a useable energy source. Together enhancing the beat and working on and off that regularity, into a melody in counter point- a voicing that is channelled through these searing corridors, sharp bends and cuts. A tonifier in the body exuberance.


Facilitated communication can make the flapping work against a counter-point. Contact Dance can create body ligaments and jointing out of the wavering extremity of going outwards in an unstoppable motion or inwards into a turreted screw-driver drill. By linking opposites in bodily affects- physical points of hit, absorption, rebound- a vocabulary starts to evolve. A languaging is born on the brief of these opposed soundings. A change of direction mid-sentence is factored in. The factoring in of this point of traction that uses that feeling by continually seeking it out- becoming sensitive to that possibility as a working point of concern- something around which awareness takes hold-a fungus, a virus, a crystal formation- it evolves in the process not out of a mind set apart- set in advance. It could never know itself outside of the traction of its own felt moment of birth. Outside of its own arrival of immanence that keeps in mind that possibility- that space- at all times without knowing or trying to know the exact whereabouts or timed formula of how it will play out.