Affect

Now's the time to link together the experience of fluctuating affect in auditory, light, touch and speed perception and the ritual practises and repetitions important for people on the autistic spectrum. The sensory alteration is key to why some movements and practises become important. It's the shifting landscape in the perceptual field that calls for a space of ritual mediation. This becomes a benchmark against which the fluctuation intone and colour each change. Therefore it is not the core interest or attentional field that needs to be curved or enlarged in order to give a greater scope of experience; and autistic people will fight tooth and nail against this, but rather the context in which this practise operates. If the context or atmosphere can begin to act like a looped resonance; that layers into different qualities of affect through duration and accumulative intensification or in a paring back down of input, then the attentional zone within the parameters of a given activity will alter and the relative ritualistic or story-board quality of this version will start to play out into a wider field of possible "Takes".

Autistics are said to lack imagination or an awareness that the activities they and others partake in are make-believe or relative. They are said to lack the ability to play. This is because they are triggered so totally by the rapid affect-response of contact that there is no or little patterning in or out of this momentary excitation which flares up and dies away again without a trace. And when it is repeated it is as if it starts up for the very first time.

Timing responsiveness through mediated touch and sound and light as a way to modulate environmental affect is therefore a key way to work into imaginative play. Because without this work into the conditions of affect, there is no chance for the framing of practises as a ritual space or for acknowledgement of this framing.
This is key to imagination and playfulness. So if the neurological problem is about stimulation and mediated receptivity, this must be addressed as the foremost area of interest and concern, rather than a prescribed technique and/or program of social skills or behavioural normative control mechanisms learnt as if they could be imposed on any situation as a blue-print.. Only when a person has the practical skills to physically time their responsiveness and the degree in which an affect meets with their reception can the practises themselves become areas for symbolic interpretation or psychological meaning.
         
Because foremost  the manifestations- whether lining up automobiles, singing a song, swaying and rocking or composing a sophisticated diagram, are directed as affective stabilisers or enhancers/depressors and engaged with as a way to manage and/or record fluctuations in conscious sensory receptivity. They are not in other words objects in themselves and only seem that way to outside observers who judge them either as genius or deeply troubled trace elements of the autistic "Mind". But they are rather barometers of  the streaming of many fluctuating frequencies of light, sound, temperature, velocity that become conduits through the autistic person's body and into their ritual practises. These practises then are like transducers or conductors that earth these streaming affects through the body practise. It's worth really following and staying true to these practises because they will guide a shared awareness into the affects that have brought them forth and so shared activity can be built up  like a threshold conversion as the trigger-affects are played out differently as a compositional practise between practitioners weather autistic or not. These compositions tell of unseen currents, weather systems, untraceable auditory buzzes and the culminating affects of minor compressions and releases through out the body as it adjusts. Working at this level of body integration the practises even as they appear to remain the same, become part of a demarcated ritual or play space rather than the only reality playing out over and over again as if for the very first time.

In the garden, (An Autistic arts project called Memory Gardens that I ran in Highbury, London between 2002 and 2009) autistic people would line up bricks and found objects and sometimes build them upwards into dense constructions or aerated hive-like breathing vessels. Air flowed through the bricks and even in their very real form that occupied a certain space on the ground of this outdoor practise space, there seemed to be a spaciousness in these sculptures that simply let the wind through rather than being knocked down by it. This was a construction modification that came out of this outdoor garden practise over time and was developed out of the conditions of weather and ecology and the recycling of waste products from the neighbouring children's charity whose land this was. All these factors and the political implications of our presence on that piece of land- an informal and mostly ignored arrangement- was all a part of this environment. The practise was not therefore a thing in itself. It was a cross-section of velocity shifts including people, animals, plants, debris and discarded objects, pollutants and weather fronts. Whether the constructions stayed upright or fell down swiftly or by degrees was part of the circumstances of these interacting currents and either outcome in itself was not that important.

Autistic people in the same way as every other living being, are the cross current of various affects gathering momentarily in the muscle, nervous and visceral potentialities of that life-form. They are compositions made from all the missing affects that may convert into hyper or hypo tension, agitation or relaxation, embracing in and bouncing out again.

Rather than seeing this outlook of co-involvement as justification for indulging autistics in inappropriate repetitions, demarcating a ritual space of operation allows for this key gauge between fluctuating affect and stable translation to play out. This becomes an important area for building up the rhythms and intervals on to which symbolic and imaginative play can later take hold. The processes of up/down, in/out , movement and pause are a micro reading device that can become manifest in infinite varieties of sound and form. And so whatever the special interest or tone of activity engaged in by an individual or group of individuals these polarities can begin to play into a deeper affective resonance within a wider field of contrast and difference. This is the shared affective field that is not only received by the nervous system but is actually co-created in order to pace our involvement and coordinate our experience as one.

I talk as one who has a strong experience of these fluctuating affects in day to day life and where art practises have become important ritual spaces that absorb, reflect and transduce these variable dancing and shimmering affects. Being a therapist marks out another practise space or ritual space of operation. A space then of co-creation that is pertinent to that particular place at that particular time and in relation to who is present at the time. How people are placed dynamically and in interaction with one another whether physically at close range or at intervals where sound variation and fleeting episodes of movement and stillness like flashes of light and shade, a pattern begins to shape itself. This becomes a living diagram enacted through this living ritual space telling of spatial and time realignments, in the varying confluences, delays and fluctuations of their showing. How interest and attention play out and drift or migrate across areas, occupations and resting points becomes the drama at the heart of which a sense of quietude may or may not gradually emerge.