In appreciation of the doughnut
On the pains and practices of parsing an overwhelming world.
I call my cognitive style ‘abstract holism', where ideas arrive so immediately complex and abstract that they collapse into simplicity again. It's hard and occasionally wondrous brain work.
This might be conceived as a form of gestalt processing that is common for us autistics: the inability to distinguish, filter and hierarchicalise sensory information, perceiving everything as one thing. This can be a source of creativity, and of disablement. It has been hypothesised that this is a conceptual rather than perceptual feature of the condition; autistic individuals may have no issue processing a whole picture, but may have issues breaking it down into meaningful parts. This results in a paradoxical phenomenon: sensory information is received in infinite detail and holistically at the same time.(1) We can have gestalt processing for any sensory modality, and Buddhist psychology treats thinking as a sense just like any other. So I think I have gestalt processing not just for information that comes through my eyes, ears, or skin, but for concepts, too.
I have found that integral to bringing a semblance of form into this processing style is the doughnut. The doughnut is the abstract-hole in abstract holism. It is important, specifically, because it HAS a hole, which arises from the way the surface curves around two directions at once. This is what differentiates it from a sphere. A sphere is only beaming out. You need a hole in order to resolve, to come back, to have bi-direction.
The doughnut has a mathematical name; the torus. However, whether a mathematician would agree the shape is accurate to whatever notion it has been applied in my own mind, it is my shortcut shape, and I do not care if it is cheap. Everything, on every register, is doughnuts, and often, doughnuts function to bring multiple registers together in one shape. Without the hole, my mind would move outwards in all directions and never come back. The sphere would dissolve itself before anything coalesces (or convexes) into meaning.
If not for the doughnut, I'd live in the inertia of the more-than permanently - not a bad way to exist in and of itself, but the practicalities of living, thinking and communicating demand that things form at some point. And, it can become an affliction if the primordial prism-soup cannot be parsed with enough reliability. We all have a primordial prism-soup, and we all have to find ways to parse it. But that comes more efficiently, more automatically, more consciously, and more linearly, for some than for others. And, as the world becomes more complex, effective filtration systems become all the more important. Without both the abstract and the holism together, trouble arises.
My parsing is semi-reliable at best, but no one was so tortured by the limitations of the rendering process as artist Antonin Artaud, who details his predicament in The Nerve Meter (1925). He was frustrated by the recognition that the mind needs a form, needs some mediation, in order to process; that we could never have direct, unmediated contact with reality and each other. He leaned into Surrealist philosophy and practice as his way of getting further back in the subconscious, and preconscious, process. This allowed him a more open and attenuated contact with the world:
“I have always been struck by that obstinacy of the mind in wanting to think in terms of dimensions and spaces, and in fixing on arbitrary states of things in order to think, in thinking in segments, in crystalloids, so that each mode of being remains fixed at a starting point, so that thought is not in immediate and uninterrupted communication with things-this fixation and this immobilization, this tendency of the soul to construct monuments occurring, as it were, BEFORE THOUGHT. ... But I am even more struck by that inexhaustible, that meteoric illusion which inspires in us those predetermined, circumscribed conceptual structures, those crystallized segments of soul, which seem to form a great plastic page in osmotic relation to the rest of reality. And surreality is like a contracting of the osmosis, a kind of reversed communication. Far from seeing it as a lessening of control, I see it, on the contrary, as a greater control, but a control which, instead of acting, doubts: a control which inhibits contacts with ordinary reality and allows more subtle and rarefied contacts, contacts pared down to a cord which ignites but never breaks”.(2)
Artaud was stuck in potential perpetually unrealised; a sphere that wouldn't return. "I would have you imagine an arrested void, a mass of mind buried somewhere, become virtuality". Thoughts escaping themselves, unable to satisfactorily sift into concrete consciousness. For him, all words, if they come to be, are "waste products"; rendered pointless as soon as they arrive. Like Artaud, I am so constantly aware of language's inherent reductionism. The inarticulable volume of ideation and experience that goes by the wayside, with only a tiny part rendering itself capturable. The acute, neuronormative alienation of forcing us all to communicate solely within the representational order.
The late autism advocate Donna Williams, who came to process meaning very late, has a different relationship to the parsing process. She observed that most people experience the object before the art of it, whisking past the resonant and infinitely complex communication of the sensory and moving straight to the conceptual. In a world that denigrates sensing (despite sensing being the place that we all emerge from), we are taught, as soon as possible, to enter 'mind'. However, Williams viewed her 'system of sensing' as a spiritual state that she relied upon before she had any relation to language:
"People think of reality as some sort of guarantee that they can depend on. Yet, from the earliest age I can remember I found my only dependable security in losing all awareness of things usually considered real. In doing this, I was able to lose all sense of self. Yet this is a strategy said to be the highest stage of meditation, indulged in to achieve inner peace and tranquility. Why should it not be interpreted as such for autistic people? ... In the world the emphasis is on complexity, yet it is misleading to believe that complexity cannot be found in simplicity".(3)
Williams declares that she was born alienated from the world of language, but then self-alienated in her attempt to enter it. The process of reconciliation was long and arduous. But, she got there through a deliberate, cultivated doughnutting: by working to keep both systems in contact, allowing for more holistic and integrated processing. Taoism assisted her to make these processes artful and intentional, keeping respect for the 'unknown knowing' beneath mind, and embracing the fact that opposites often arise together. A different kind of ethic arises here; one which values the world and its more-than-human life on a resonant plane. She asks how might the world be different if our teachers, leaders and politicians hadn't already self-alienated from this place. If we didn't induct children into mind as soon as possible, without thought for whether that world deserves them in the first place.
I have learned to enter William's register of the sensing via non-dual practice, and the doughnut, incidentally, is the shape that I envision in order to get there. The moment when one is tasked with turning the gaze back on one's own seat of consciousness; consciousness becoming aware of itself. Opening the blinds and stepping out, but the blinds open back onto themselves. Mindfuck the cognition so that it dissolves. These are the kind of non-neurotic, non-conceptual, non-ecstatic meta-spaces, where the boundaries collapse, and you're just you and so is everything else. It all subtly sparkles and you are made of space. But, one has to return to the mediations of self and language soon enough - hopefully while retaining a sense of the experience as the ground of emergence, hopefully experiencing this as profoundly settling. The doughnut not only gets me there, but is what then allows me to stay with an anchor in each register simultaneously. Language feels ok because I can find an acceptable approximation of the thing by expressing it simply, but hopefully with the weight of things unrealised in its process of becoming. To go simple feels more respectful of the thing than trying to speak (and speak and speak) of it anyway. Whether the other can perceive the virtuality is never guaranteed, but I've definitely met some who can.
Of course, the doughnut has the added layer of referencing the arsehole. This is a double-edged sword. One personal positive is the glee when you can bring some dirt into the new age metaphysics that can be so maddeningly baffling, earnest and obsessed with purity. Referencing the arsehole at random seems to be a favourite philosophical gambit with which to meld the ineffable with predicament of living in a fallible, leaking body. Deleuze and Guattari invoke the arsehole as they collapse the distinction between man and nature as constantly producing effluencers. From an effluating point of view, we are one and the same,
"Not... man as the king of creation, but rather as the being who is in intimate contact with the profound life of all forms or all types of beings, who is responsible for even the stars and animal life, and who ceaselessly plugs an organ-machine into an energy-machine, a tree into a body, a breast into his mouth, the sun into his asshole".(4)
I appreciate this strategy. While I've railed against such prankster energy elsewhere as a horrifying immediacy of the hippie-MAGA kind, a couple of drops seem to be what ushers in the doughey about-turn integral to retaining some absurd lucidity, ironically preventing one from becoming an asshole to all one's family and friends post the existential braingasm of pseudo-self-realisation that promulgates like a virus in these spaces.
Languaging in this contemporary epoch is full of such pseudo-realisations, and they also happen to reference orifice with regularity. I am sympathetic to media theorist Anna Kornbluh's contention that Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical effluencing (in both form and content) from the 70's onwards helped lay the groundwork for the current condition of theory, which now, as much as the rest of our cultural enterprising, hungers for the real - the register of the unarticulatable, of wholes, of the more-than, of virtuality. She notes the insistence of contemporary autotheory to invoke genital realism in its attempt to enmesh with the unrepresentable as characteristic of the genre. Maggie Nelson's exceedingly popular The Argonauts (2015) is her exemplary. As Nelson is quoted: "I am not interested in a hermeneutics, or an erotics, or a metaphorics, of my anus. I am interested in ass-fucking"* .(5) Hear the resentment in even having to use words at all. But, the poetry with which she describes her disinterest in poetry reveals the contradiction between content and form. She just wants to fuck, but in describing her desire to do so, she evokes the cloudy metaphysical, even as she is negating the need for it. Going meta, in the neurotic sense, whilst veiling it in the aura of reality-speak.
In this, Kornbluh identifies the contradictory manifestations of contemporary immediacy-style in relation to language: it can at once seem exterior to language;
("putative solidarities like the body; indescribable enigmas like death; unspeakable gaps like trauma; the unthought unthinkables; the anti-negation of the unconscious")
or it can seem interior to language;
("the evasive chain of metonymy or the disturbing parapraxis of symptoms and desire").
We are all trying to escape whatever hellscape this is by reaching towards the hyper-effable (the literal f—able) or the utterly un-effable (you can't f— something you can't grab or articulate).(6) Autotheory, in a near-perfect distillation of the contemporary paradigm, does this simultaneously. But, contrary to the traditionally espoused values of theory, what is made "is not so much sense as ecstatic sensation".(7) And, in the same way that drinking Coke leaves one more thirsty, consuming immediacy-style paradoxically increases one's hunger for the real.
The issue with Nelson's veil of instantaneity is less that it is not true immediacy (since such a thing is impossible); it is that it mystifies its own functioning. As twentieth-century philosopher Theodor Adorno notes, this jargon "... sees to it that what it wants is on the whole felt and accepted through its mere delivery, without regard to the content of the words used. It takes under its own control the preconceptual, mimetic element in language--for the sake of effect connotations".(8) It wants to believe that a speaker can communicate itself simultaneously with its subject matter, which is only possible if we deny the existence of the negative space within. He prophetically connected the functioning of certain strains of existentialist philosophy to both the culture industry and to authoritarianism.
Such a confluence is, for me, embodied in the effluencing of the right-wing spiritual podcaster - an Adornian authenticity-wraith, spilling dissociatively and indiscriminately without concern for logic or theory. Abstract without the holism. An utter lack of multilevel conjugating, just shallow connecting, connecting, connecting, evoking, evoking, evoking, connoting, connoting, connoting. These figures take advantage of the neglect and overwhelm of an abstract, circulatory world which refuses to land or concretise, by affectually simulating being finally seen. But, while us leftists continue to bemoan their apparent lack of intellect, we are similarly addicted to the promise of raw presence, exalting the seeming radicalism in something all the more concerning: autofictional anti-bodying and anti-theorising. Work that, in an extra layer of meta-neuroticism, dramatises its own impossibility to the point that impossibility becomes form. What a perfect orientation for those of us who feel utterly adrift - a romanticised repose into the drifting itself. All the while we're further away than ever, all the more trapped on the surface but with the moralistic rationale that at least we're more aware of it.
The irony is, the real, by definition, is the gap left in any approximation of the more-than. As long as we live with mind and language, transparency of communication is a fantasy, as is internal fullness. Mind is a filtration system, so by its own nature, it can never capture it all. As such, we can never permanently merge with another, with life, with pure experience. Artaud felt this and was tortured by it, Williams had her sense of the more-than reconcile with its parser, but Nelson still fantasises (even while touting its impossibility). Fantasy is the realm of mind, of projection, and by leaning into fantasy, we reify it further. The more we consume things that carry the false aura of authenticity, the more we become trapped in the egoic "hall of mirrors", and the more we crave. The doughnut flattens and brittles; no longer spongy and three-dimensional. Rather than a fat, simultaneous circling out and returning, we are perpetually circling (and circulating) the drain.
Adorno wrote that language cannot ever become pure communication. Language works through thick assemblaging across registers; each word is different to the other words around it. Language is inherently ambient and unstable, never truly mapping onto its referent. Instead, everything is relational, and intelligibility of experience arises from being able to grasp the constellation through mediation; to stand back and find its contours. Best we can do is conjugate, weave, thicken it up, circumscribe it, and work deliberately with it.
One has to accept the need for translation as part of the innate existential alienations of being human. Where I perhaps diverge from Adorno is my personal ethic of "it should be safe to have fun". No matter how much the harms of immediacy-style are made apparent to me, I cannot exorcise my love for the wicked, my love for fantasy, and my love for brain-gasm. So what I take on is a healthy caution: that while it's ok to enjoy immediacy-style (and I do, regularly), anything that slips in smoothly and makes things spark is to be treated as sugar. Sugar is best when baked into something more substantial.
I think that autistic life holds so much knowledge about the myriad pains and practices of parsing a complex and overwhelming world. In a globalised economic system that renders us in polycrisis, where addictive info-commodities continue to circulate with increasing intensity, experience comes to feel like one big gestalt where everything is merging into a single inarticulability. A paradigm which mind struggles to adequately capture ("no words") and thus falls back into its safe zones of addiction, denial, fantasy and projection. Is this not our way of coping with a quintessentially autistic experience? In such an environment, what might it look like to shape the gestalt for better processing, rather than escape it? Resistance through working to keep the doughnut intact, to be in more artful relation to the hole.
*Gratitude to Kornbluh for including arsehole in the index for ease of reference.
(1) Bogdashina, O. (with Lawson, W., & Peters, T.). (2003). Sensory Perceptual Issues in Autism and Asperger Syndrome: Different Sensory Experiences - Different Perceptual Worlds. Jessica Kingsley Publishers. p. 46-8
(2) Artaud, A. (1988). Selected Writings (S. Sontag, Ed.; First California Paperback Printing). Univ. of Calif.-Press. p. 79
(3) Williams, D. (1992). NOBODY NOWHERE: The remarkable autobiography of an autistic girl. Doubleday. p. 185
(4) Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (with Foucault, M.). (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem, & H. R. Lane, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. p. 4
(5) Kornbluh, A. (2023). Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism. Verso. p. 84
(6) Ibid., p. 163
(7) Ibid., p. 57
(8) Adorno, T. (2003). The Jargon of Authenticity. Routledge. p. 5 (emphasis my own)
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