ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the idea of ‘sensory subjects’ who are not defined by their capacities in using symbolic language but by distinctive patterns of perceptual and affective responses to other bodies. This enables us to capture the agency and distinctiveness (or ontological agency) of neurodivergent individuals through facilitation that supports their unique habits, patterns, and rhythms of response, including those that are currently described as ‘hypo’- or ‘hyper-sensitivity’, synesthesia, apraxia, and dysnomia. With reference to essays, blogs, and vlogs by non-speaking and speaking autistic narrators, I describe how facilitation – specific modes of communicative support provided by technology or the interaction of another human or with an environment – can either support a range of responses that confer the appearance of normative symbolic language skills or allow us to counter-narratively resist master narratives about autism and enable the expression of a practical identity. Drawing on a wider range of cultural understandings of selfhood, agency, and communication, I explore how an ‘autistic sensibility’ can allow us to express our uniqueness in relation to other human selves and unsettles the binary logic that maintains an artificial division between the affects, agency, and intentionality of life and non-life.
