The notion of existence involves the notion of an environment 
of existences and of types of existences. Any one instance of 
existence involves other existences, connected with it and yet 
beyond it. This notion of the environment introduces the 
notion of the ‘more and less’, and of multiplicity.¹ (Whitehead)


More and Less (Multiplicity)


“There was very little difference in meaning,” says autist Daina Krumins, “between the children next to the lake that I was playing with and the turtle sitting on the log. It seems,” she continues, “that when most people think of something being alive they really mean, human.”²


What is it we really mean, when we say human? According to autism activist Amanda Baggs, we certainly don’t mean “autistic.”³ We mean neurotypical, we mean expressing oneself predominantly in spoken language, and most of all, we mean immediately focused on humans to the detriment of other elements in the environment.⁴ “Most people attend to human voices above all else.” (Krumins)


“I hear the rocks and the trees.” (MM)⁵


For autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen, to hear the rocks and the trees on an equal footing with the voices of children is a sign of what he calls mindblindness. He defines mindblindness as an “inability to develop an awareness of what is in the mind of another human.” To have mindblindness, he says, is to lack empathy. It is to be generally unrelational. He says that this is what defines autists.⁶


Yet from the autist, we hear neither a rejection of the human, nor a turning away from relation. What we hear is an engagement with the more-than-human: “I attend to everything the same way with no discrimination, so that the caw of the crow in the tree is as clear and important as the voice of the person I’m walking with.” (Krumins) And an engagment with a more textured relating: “My world is organized around textures. […] All emotions, perceptions, my whole world […] [has] been influenced by textures.”⁷ (Krumins)


To experience the texture of the world without discrimination is not indifference. Texture is patterned, full of contrast and movement, gradients and transitions. It is complex and differentiated. To attend to everything the same way is not an inattention to life. It is to pay equal attention to the full range of life’s texturing complexity, with an entranced and unhierarchized commitment to the way in which the organic and the inorganic, colour, sound, smell, and rhythm, perception...