Autism, Posthumanism, Becoming Nonhuman: Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures
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Temple Grandin’s autobiographical work, Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism (1995) is woven, roughly in chronological order, of the story of the author’s own life with high functioning autism. What is most important and distinctive in Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures is that she challenges the stereotype of the autistic mind and body as lacking, inferior, subhuman, animal-like, and non-agential, by suggesting a posthumanist vision, which dismantles and deconstructs the ontological divide between human and nonhuman that is founded upon the western Enlightenment humanist conception of the self. Grandin’s autistic world, built upon a non-anthropocentric, interspecies vision, is inhabited not only by people and animals, but also by things, which seem to have an existential position in their own right. That is, Grandin’s autism serves as a medium that enables other ‘abnormal’ modes of non-linguistic communication and dynamic interaction with her environment and different kinds of subjects such as animals and objects. Considering this, in this paper, I will first examine the inside narrative of autism that the author offers to us, dismantling the medical dogma surrounding autism. I will then discuss how the author, based on her lived experience with autism, embodies non-anthropomorphic conceptions of humans and becomes posthuman. Locating this study within posthumanist philosophy, I will conclude that in Thinking in Pictures, Grandin helps us challenge and criticize the stability, inherency, and centrality of the human form, disable normative conceptions of the neurotypical subject, and remap/reimagine subjecthood without privileging the human.
Abstract
Temple Grandin’s autobiographical work, Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism (1995) is woven, roughly in chronological order, of the story of the author’s own life with high functioning autism. What is most important and distinctive in Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures is that she challenges the stereotype of the autistic mind and body as lacking, inferior, subhuman, animal-like, and non-agential, by suggesting a posthumanist vision, which dismantles and deconstructs the ontological divide between human and nonhuman that is founded upon the western Enlightenment humanist conception of the self. Grandin’s autistic world, built upon a non-anthropocentric, interspecies vision, is inhabited not only by people and animals, but also by things, which seem to have an existential position in their own right. That is, Grandin’s autism serves as a medium that enables other ‘abnormal’ modes of non-linguistic communication and dynamic interaction with her environment and different kinds of subjects such as animals and objects. Considering this, in this paper, I will first examine the inside narrative of autism that the author offers to us, dismantling the medical dogma surrounding autism. I will then discuss how the author, based on her lived experience with autism, embodies non-anthropomorphic conceptions of humans and becomes posthuman. Locating this study within posthumanist philosophy, I will conclude that in Thinking in Pictures, Grandin helps us challenge and criticize the stability, inherency, and centrality of the human form, disable normative conceptions of the neurotypical subject, and remap/reimagine subjecthood without privileging the human.
참고문헌 (17)
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