I reject the autizmophrenia spectrum. The general idea, as presented by Jreg (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHuFSnhKG9I), is that it consists of a spectrum of two types of madness. Autism is seen as a kind of hypermonotropism, while schizophrenia is understood as hyperpolytropism. The former digs deeper, penetrating concepts with a rigorous concept-drill. The latter does not dig; it explores outside and beyond established concepts—it is a sweeping airship that rather crash-lands than finds its place in the desert. At both extremes they meet; they do not exclude each other’s madness.
If anything, these are both expressions of the same thing. Schizo-autism is an ADHD-autism. The spectrum should be one of monomania versus polymania; that is, schizo-monotropism versus schizo-polytropism. In favor of the argument, I will distort the tropism. The definition will not be based on Murray, Lesser, and Lawson’s theory of attention in autists (https://monotropism.org/murray-lesser-lawson/). Instead, I will use the concept plastically.
What is attention, anyway? The starting points of phenomenology come in two kinds: intentionality versus being-in-the-world. Husserl’s starting point is that attention is a function of consciousness; a modification of mental intention. This premise assumes that attention is the same as a mental orientation towards a mental object (Bégout, B. (2007). “Husserl and the Phenomenology of Attention”. In: Boi, L., Kerszberg, P., Patras, F. (eds) Rediscovering Phenomenology. Phaenomenologica, vol 182. Springer, Dordrecht). In contrast to this view is that of being-in-the-world; here, attention is instead a way of engaging with the world, with being as such. It is not a mental mode, but an event in the world where attention gathers being and its “object” (Berger, Lawrence. “Attention as the Way to Being.” Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual 10 (2020): 111–156. Print.).
I abhor both of these premises. Just as subjectivity is, attention is an assemblage. It is a complex weave of desiring-machines that connect and disconnect from one another in a process through time. Attention is a commodity: perhaps it is even the new oil. In our postmodern society, everything has been transformed into advertisements. Our screens force us into this state of advertisement-becoming precisely because our attention has become a commodity. Our attention is broken down into information, over-coded into flows directed in chains of capital.
Attention is a residue of desiring machines. It emerges from the factories of our bodies, in an impending presence where its existence is needed to arrange itself before the prevailing flows of desire. Thus, attention is constructed in harmony with the social and internal forms of production. When we speak of schizotropism, we are referring to the attention of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizophrenic subject. This subject arranges itself in a way that goes beyond all forms of organization. ADHD is a break with the social orders that demand its attention. It is a schizo-polytropism in that it accelerates its own production of attention. This results in a break in the production chain of the socius, which tries to mold an attention suited to its own desiring production; advertisement-becoming. Schizo-polytropism refuses to engage itself in the banal; it directs itself in all directions and builds its own machines. Your eyes remind me of the sea; Poseidon’s crime against Medusa; I want to eat gods for breakfast. It is a chimera-becoming where opposites are merged, leap from one to the other, and become a catastrophic mass that risks swallowing the surrounding structures. This becoming is polytropic by nature in that it is horizontal; it does not seek to descend to Hades, but rather to Hermes.
Schizo-monotropism is not its opposite: it is its cousin. Both are expressions of the same thing; a neurodivergence that produces another kind of attention to free its own desire. Both are Stirnerite egoists in the sense of their way of annihilating all that is sacred; the downfall of all higher causes. Schizo-monotropism is vertical, which differentiates it from schizo-polytropism. Autism is a maelstrom: a vortex that devours concepts around it into a singularity. If you move one node, you have created an entirely different structure. Tilt the chair slightly and the whole room becomes a new space. The autist’s attention accelerates its intensity; it is a way to shut out machines, to streamline its own desiring production. A reverberation of desires in tightly sealed surfaces. It should now be clear that both tropisms are part of the same thing: the former seeks escape routes, line of flights, the latter intensities, both in a schizophrenic acceleration. They are thus part of the same spectrum and deviant in their way of being schizophrenic; to be neurodivergent, for they refuse to adapt their machines to that of the socius. Sabotage; they put a wrench in the machinery. They refuse to be reduced to abstractions, ones and zeros in a chain of capital.
Thus, neurodiversity must be understood in a lens of schizoanalysis. There is no cure for us neurodivergents; there is no flaw, only a fountainhead of revolutionary creativity. Our refusal to adapt our attention to the attention economy of this techno-fascist socius is a testament to the impossibility to make the human universalized. Instead, I heed you, we must find each other. For our own survival’s sake, we must reimagine reality itself. Freedom is a doing; an ever changing act of resistance against the assemblages that seek our destruction for its own profits. I call for a union of schizotropism.