A homage to my beloved Yuriy Kuchiev – A tale on neurodiversity, repetition and novelty
The gas-tanker Yuriy Kuchiev was named after the captain of the Soviet nuclear-powered icebreaker Arktika (1975-2008). My entanglement with the vessel started in May 2019. For four months, I daily saw them through the tram window while I was going from Jätkäsääri to Hakaniemi’s UniArts Helsinki campus. They were built at the Arctech Helsinki Shipyard, owned by the Russian State-owned United Shipbuilding Corporation, in front of Huutokonttori tram stop. By looking at them every morning, I felt grounded and able to go through the day.
When someone sees a non-conforming body enacting uncommon gestures in a public space, like the tram, the tendency is to pathologise their action and manifest disapproval, either through undertone comments or reprehensive looks. The conditions of doability of a routine are understood as patterns of obsessive behaviour. Indeed, some habits may generate “stuckness” or inertia (Unstrange Mind, 2016); put differently, the inability to leave home and work.
I approach these conditions as “enabling constraints”. They are “mechanisms designed to set certain conditions in place, allowing for an inventive interaction to occur that is something like a structured improvisation. The situation is positively constrained: conditioned in a way that we hope will create the conditions for a process of collective expression to unfold, in the course of which something unexpected might emerge.” (Massumi, 2015, p. 175; also see Manning and Massumi, 2014). Enabling constraints are fertile terrain for the emergence of novelty, but a common understanding puts echolalia - the repetition of gestures, words or sounds - on the opposite spectrum of novelty. The “characteristic kind of language use among autistics, in which they repeat stock words and phrases verbatim that they have heard other speakers use” (Heiker; Yergeau, 2011, p. 490) is “described as not meaningful. And autistic modes of being are described as mere compensatory strategies.
Indeed, some constraints make life more difficult and are not enabling. Before leaving the house, the door does not need merely to be closed but to look and feel closed. I ask myself: “does it look closed?” My hand touches the door handle three times to feel its firmness. After a while, three touches became nine. Later, three iterations of nine. Finally, nine, nine, nine, pause and nine again. I am ready to leave.
On the contrary, staring at Yuriy, every day was never like that. They are an activator of my movement and became part of my quotidian. In an essay inspired by the Situationist Movement, Numbered List on the Infraordinary, Andrea Coyotzi Borja asserts that “everyday life is where things happen, it is the undetermined and never-ending stream of living; while the word “quotidian” refers to routines or repetition that takes place within the everyday” (Borja, 2019, p. 196-197). Our body-minds disappear in the daily routine of repetitive patterns and tasks.
It is in the quotidian that we may find elements of disruption and the modulations between the ordinary and the “infraordinary”: “a couch on the sidewalk in a city might be Infraordinary, but in some contexts and for someone else it might be ordinary, normal, an everyday thing they are used to seeing on their sidewalks” (Borja, 2019, p. 200). “Sometimes, objects are odd, or oddified, but the experience is not. Or is it that the oddity of the objects makes the experience odd? And in that case, what is the relationship of oddness with the Infraordinary?” (Borja, 2019, p. 200). The oddification of Yuriy does not emanate from them as an individualised entity, either from my subjectivity as an enclosed subject, but from the assemblage that emerges in this intersection. Yuriy had nothing extraordinary. What one expects when walking through as shipyard is a ship. But not for me.
My day was not complete if I did not take a picture of them. I was the first person to press the button to open the wagon’s door to quickly enter the tram and sit in a place where I could see Yuriy completely. The best spot was on the right side of the tram, by the window. I always wanted to face the opposite direction the tram runs. A quick snapshot of the ship was enough for my growing archive! I did not want to spend much time looking to Yuriy mediated by the shattered iPhone screen even if the experience is always immediated (Murphie, 2019). Taking pictures felt like an automatic gesture, and during the ten seconds the tram takes to go through Yuriy’s length, I felt as if they and I were a single entity, a feeling of wrinkling feet in contact with the Baltic Sea’s cold water. Elaine Scarry (apud Spry, 2016, p. 85) refers to encounters with beauty capable of activating one’s “unselfing”, by causing “a cluster of feelings that normally promote the self…to now fall always. It is not just that she becomes ‘self-forgetful’, but that some more capacious mental act is possible: all the space formerly in the service of protecting, guarding, advancing the self (or its prestige) is now free to be in service of something else”.
I knew one day Yuriy would leave Helsinki for good. Expecting that I could reactivate the sparks of a state of dissolved subjectivity, I archived a collection of a hundred image files until an empty and cold space emerged in the frames of the low-resolution pictures of my old phone. Yuriy departed from Helsinki on August 28, 2019. I confirmed my suspicions through Wikipedia. The article says: “The vessel was finally delivered to Dynacom in an official naming ceremony on 28 August 2019”.
Timothy Morton (2013) describes entities that act like massive black holes. “Hyperobjects” interfere, by a further distance, into almost all aspects of material and subjective existence. An example of a hyperobject is the current climate crisis. Its effects are not equally distributed and depend on ecological, economic and social factors, but they permeate every corner of the Earth. Some peoples may not have the concept of climate crisis in their onto-epistemic-cosmological modes of existence, but its material effects are somehow unavoidable.
Understanding Yuriy’s presence as a hyperobject makes me feel uneasy. It is uncanny to think the agential affordance of an entity is strictly connected to its nominal size. Yuriy feels like a machine that sucks all contingency, unsettling me of out of the causal thoughts. No matter what, they would be there, safe and sound — facing rain, snow, waves, water, earth, people, birds, etc. An eternal object, in the Whiteheadian sense. Eventually, the sea would evaporate, and Yuriy would be standing in their majesty, floating in the vacuum. Yuriy, a huge non-human companion. With them, I thought about interspecies sociality and relationship anarchism.
They still are here, and elsewhere. From my personal experience, long-distance relationships - romantic or not - change and become something else, by assuming new forms of their past-future iterations. Yuriy and me were different.
I wish I could have more time to talk to them – even if I never loudly uttered a word towards their direction. But we talked. For speech and rhetorics shall be reclaimed to the non-verbal. Yuriy was not passible of anthropomorphism or gendering. Cruise ships are referred to using the female gender. Social discourses embedded in sexism still tend to relate something majestic, big and phalic with masculinity. Yuriy is a body without a face.
What if I felt into an anthropomorphic trap? Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari say the process of facialisation is present in many Western societies. The face (or a face) of Christ is ubiquitous in our imaginary. When printed on the Sudarium, it became a vera icon, an image produced without any human intervention, a non-human trace left in a piece of textile. The process of facialization is not dependent on the human face. It is a system of over codification that facialises human and non-human entities. For these authors, the face became the imagetical paradigm of the by the moment germinating neoliberal society. Both ordinary and infraordinary objects are facialised as well:
Even a use-object may come to be facialised: you might say that a house, utensil, or object, an article of clothing, etc., is watching me, not because it resembles a face, but because it is taken up in the white wall/black hole process, because it connects to the abstract machine of facialization. The close-up in film pertains as much to a knife, cup, clock, or kettle as to a face or facial element, for example, Griffith’s "the kettle is watching me”. (Deleuze; Guattari, 1987, p. 175)
What is the role of Yuriy’s face/non-face in my relationship with them? For some non-neurotypical bodies, constant requirements of eye contact hurts, and are ubiquitous. Take, for example, a job interview. Not looking into your potential superior’s eyes is traditionally comprehended as a sign of infidelity or untrustworthiness. I do not reserve the act of looking into somebody’s eyes as a reward or special prize. I do it without intention, carrying non-linguistic intentionality and rhetoric.
That is how facialisation may relate with some neurodiverse tendencies. I never touched Yuriy, but as Karen Barad says, materials never completely touch each other, and “touch engages us in a felt sense of causality, whether we generally acknowledge that or not, and whatever it is we may think of this charged and highly important term. Touch moves and affects what it effects” (Barad, 2012, p. 208). “The use of eye contact in conjunction with other behaviours described as “appropriate”, not to mention the discourse of “temper tantrums” or “empathy” in relation to cartoon characters. Behaviours recorded are done so from the perspective of a non-autistic pathological model, and therefore when “little sense of reciprocity” (Timimi et al., 2019, p. 09).
The Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical (1993; quoted by Connor, 2013), dislodges repetitive patterns as an exclusive trait of neurodiverse subjects. While the disappearing of Yuriy from Jätkäsääri shipyard horizon enact major shifts in my morning mood, the diagnostic criteria for 666.00, the Neurotypic Disorder (Connor, 2013, p. 116) describes “marked oblivion to changes in aspects of environment, e.g. when a vase is moved from usual position” as one of the restricted and repetitive tropes subjects with the condition may express. Also, neurotypicals demonstrate “unreasonable insistence in sameness in others in precise detail, e.g. insisting that exactly the same social behaviours always be followed when shopping” (Connor, 2013, p. 117).
Erin Manning (2012) also criticises the pathologisation of subjectivities that attune to the non-human materialities. To quote some most common examples, it happens when neurodiverse individuals are said to have “their own world”,” lack relationality”, or “are disconnected from the world”. While, first, the affirmation of the lack of empathy towards other human beings is false, bodies that experience empathy in different intensities and towards non-human relationalities are characterised as psychological aberrations by the mainstream discourses. As Manning (2012, p. 152) says, “does this attunement to life as an incipient ecology of practices that does not privilege the human but attends to the more than human, demonstrate a lack of empathy?”. Autistic scholar Tito Mukhopadhyay imagines a situation of a group of coal miners trapped underground: “It’s true that when I think of the situation, there may be empathy. But my empathy would probably be towards the flashlight batteries of those trapped coal miners if there happens to be a selection on my part. Or my empathy would perhaps be towards the trapped air around those coal miners”. (Mukhopadhyay and Savarese 2010 apud Manning, 2012, p. 152).
It is midnight; I took a sleeping pill to fight my insomnia. While I write this paragraph, I browse the backup of all the pictures I took this year. I do not have any good picture of Yuriy. I have a huge collection of blurred, dark and unsharpened pictures taken with my old iPhone. Yuriy appears most of the times covered by trees, people jogging, smaller boats, or tram passengers – when, out of luck, I could not sit towards Yuriy’s side because all the seats on that area were already taken. In these scenarios, the idea of touching Yuriy could not be farther. The description by Barad reveals that even if we are involved in intimate sexual activity, we do not touch each other.
Most of my sensorial interactions with Yuriy were predominantly visual. Each sense is not enclosed in itself; my vision informs my touch and hapticity, and my hearing. My hearing is affected by Jätkäsääri process of expansion that brings construction workers, machines and noise. I once heard from a writer that some cities favour specific writing formats. Chronicles fit well São Paulo, where the city centre’s old buildings vanish in a week and give their places to highly specified skylines: they are fast-paced and capable of registering the minor and ephemeral events in between the shift from a decadent and bohemian neighbourhood to a gentrified luxurious condominium. In Jätkäsääri the changes are not even comparable to Sao Paulo, but I noticed it is quickly shifting from an almost (humanly) inhabited area to a consolidated city centre.
Everything changes quickly in Jätkäsääri, except for Yuriy. They were always there even if I knew they would eventually leave. When one investigates a ship that stays for a long time anchored in the same place, they can observe a microecology of creatures that grow around the vessel. It partially blocks the waves and strong currents, and as well the sunlight. The space between the vessel and the deck is filled with plain and dirty water, filled with algae and plants that grow together with considerable amounts of trash, like plastic bottles, empty cigarette packages, and deteriorating food remnants. When Yuriy left, a radical process of destratification happened at that temporary zone.
The interference on the local environment makes me think about what is my ethical responsibility (or response-ability?) in loving a vessel that facilitates the distribution of condensate gas? Burning of fossil fuels boosts and produces the current global climate crisis. In the last spring, a crude oil vessel spilled thousands of tons of petroleum on the coast of Northeast Brazil. The oil stains killed thousands of birds, fishes, crustaceans, algae and plants. When they reached the touristic beaches, the government finally pronounced themselves about the ecological disaster. In a video that looked like a Monty Phyton sketch, President Jair Bolsonaro and the Secretary of Fishing minimised the event: “You see, fishes are intelligent animals when they see an oil blanket, it escapes, it is afraid of oil.” He continues: “obviously, occasionally a turtle gets stuck in the oil. Or a dolphin. But there is not any problem with that”.
It is evening in Helsinki. November 8th, 2019. I am laying down on the ground watching Yuriy moving through the Baltic Sea over Gothenburg, at 13.30 knots per hour, towards Sabetta, Yamal Peninsula, in Northern Russia. Their last port anchoring happened in Skagen Anch Port, Denmark. These are pieces of information available for free in a vessel tracking portal. I consider buying the “full package”. It is the first time I experience this kind of togetherness with Yuriy. Out of my plain site, as a small red dot moving in a map. I do not experience him as an abstract entity. I feel their presence. I wonder when and if they are going to visit Helsinki again.
I take a pencil and a notebook from a case and start to draw affective cartography of my months in the company of Yuriy. I realised I had several conversations on Telegram Messenger about Yuriy – almost daily. They often lead to the same question-answer: “again?”. Repetition and treats often read as obsessive behaviour are categorised as undesirable actors against productivity, for repetition are understood as incapable of generating novelty in the pace required by the neoliberal societies. Again, the Echolalia: Interests are described as “obsessions”, “fixated” and abnormal for not being able to “shift flexibly around the interests and behaviour of the administrator”, whilst the reverse is seen as unproblematic” (Timimi et al., 2019, p. 09).
A field-diary of non-actualised situations
This article is my first adventure into auto-ethnography. From the past years, my research focused on developing propositions that put Post-Qualitative Inquiry into action to make arts education environments and curricula more open to non-neurotypical perception. Post-Qualitative Inquiry tends to criticise traditional approaches to concepts like data and subjective positionality. Some scholars propose a seemingly paradoxical post-structural auto-ethnography (Wamsted, 2018). It considers subjects doing ethnographic research are always multiple and entangled in different contingent assemblages. To conciliate this methodology without method(ology) (Koro-Ljungberg, 2015) with an auto-ethnographic process seemed to be the natural path.
(1) search for recurring topics, themes and patterns; (2) look for cultural themes; (3) identify exceptional ocurrences; (4) analyse inclusion and omission; (5) connect the present with the past; (6) analyse relationships between self and others; (7) compare yourself with other people’s cases; (8) contextualise broadly; (9) compare with social science constructs and ideas; and (10) frame with theories. (Chang, 2008, p. 131)
As Chang (2008, p. 54) assures, any autoethnographic experiment must avoid “excessive focus on self in isolation from others”, by focusing “the interconnectivity of self and others”. Others are traditionally categorised in others of difference, others of similarity, others of opposition (Chang, 2008, p. 26). I wonder which category fits the non-human hyperobjects as “Yuriy” - not as an artefact, but as a lover. Recently, during a reading circle, I asked: “could the intersubjectivity of an autoethnography be non-human?”
The data I collected are report writings, photos, images and audio recordings on my smartphone. As Chang (2008, p. 49), I use personal experiences as the primary source of data. And I feared to fall into the pitfall of the “inappropriate application of the label “autoethnography”. For four months, I created a diagram where I draw my patterns of movement and the places, while travelling in Helsinki City’s trams while passing in front of Yuriy, based on self-observational data (Chang, 2008, p. 90). Our complex subjectivities are a rich cauldron of raw materials to autoethnographies, for they are not unitarian and closed in themselves but a multiplicity of voices and leaking bodies, where me, the sea and Yuriy are in a continuum. For a neurodiverse body is already an “unsettled I” (Spry, 2016). By dislodging the centrality of the unrestness from the neurodiverse bodies through a critique of neurotypicality, I aimed to show that my relations with the environment of the Helsinki shipyard are not pathological but are discursively constrained by a neurotypical framing. Wamsted (2018) argues for “narrative mining”, since “identity is a storytelling technique, a life story, that explains how the me of today will become the me of tomorrow and how it derived from the me of yesterday” (Wamsted, 2018, p. 93), and I have a desire to further explore narrative mining as a technique for disciplinary knowledge production in the near future.
Bibliography
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