You’ve been hunting Kurtz for weeks. You’ve lost a few good men, a few pounds of sanity and a gallon of sweat in this jungle. Before you is the groundwork for a forest of vines and thin, shrubby trees which just so happens to be shaped into long dead Gods. Crawling through this stone jungle are some animals which appear to have the ability to make promises but their humanity stops there, each one is as much a part of the jungle as the flora and fauna.



The year is 1995, you’re sitting in a Warwick university office breathing in the already weed thick air threatening to choke your lungs. Your head hurts reminding you that you’re still recovering from last night’s rave. You wince hoping that’ll make the pain go away, it almost does and, giving into your anal masochism, you think that you should get back to writing.



“Meat: How to Kill Oedipus in Cyberspace” is the title as visions of Cambodians slaughtering an already dead rat, laughing at the spectacle race through your head. The Cambodians were different from the Vietnamese, different from the Vietcong. They didn’t believe in any fantastic dream of Marxist national liberation, such thought was totally beyond their register. Nor did fight using the standard guerrilla tactics of attempting to blend into the jungle like a coo-cook bee, the Cambodians were part of the hive, they integrated themselves into the very infrastructure as if their bodies perfectly aligned machines with no opposition between the organism and the machinic whole. From a distance it looked schizophrenic, but it was all different. Willard was a schizo for sure, journeying into the heart of an inhuman, detteritorialised darkness and identifying with it, finding the darkness within himself cutting him open at the chest, splitting him between to regimes of signification as the ego collapses preventing any narcissistic identification of himself as a US solider soaking up each intensity as if they were pumped up through well oiled pipes. But the Cambodians… they were born in the dark, moulded by it. Your arm injects another sip of monster energy into your mouth as you try to think about something more productive. The Cambodians are beyond your understanding for now, there’s other things to write about, like a body without organs.



The Kurtz gradient is a schizophrenia spectrum. Starting with capital as a quiet little machine employed by small trading families it reached it opened up to the outside that was other nations, but never could it reproduce itself. Catholic decrees against interest and usury served as a medieval equivalent of Turing cops, making sure machinery didn’t self-expand and stayed totally under human control. As soon as lending for interest is allowed, as soon as old commons are enclosed for ground-rent extraction- we begin down river, destination: Cambodia.



Autistics are already as inhuman as it gets. Our libidinal investments are never in people, never collective and social, but are in the molar shapes of matter. Our desiring machines whirl with commands to chew, squeeze and stroke without care for their acceptability. Embodied techno-capital excites us more than social functions or recognition. Trains, machinery, code; all so fascinating…



Present day, present time. You sit on the bed of a dark room covered in teddy-bears dressed in a teddy bear onesie. Your mother calls you down for tea. You’re frightened. The noise of the landing light bursts through your ears and the smell of cucumber for dinner reaks.



Lain was always autistic; lacking friends, obsessing over teddy bears and disturbed by noise. If schizophrenia is a journey into techno-capital, and autistics are natives to technocapital’s cyber-jungle, why did Lain split? Why wasn’t didn’t she become right at home, properly integrated and adjusted to her territory?



The answer lies in the body-without-organs. The wired isn’t just cave-twitter, the u/acc blogosphere and a few obscure chan threads. The wired is an assemblage of copper wires, satellites and power plants. This is the body-without-organs which is one half of the two bodies Lain is split between, the material world of production of the wired humming with noises of wires- and its product. The wired relies on human maintenance, human builders construct human telegraph poles to transmit human tweets from a Shanghai apartment to a New York based hyper-racist transsexual Gen-Z with a bad pun to subtweet. This infrastructure is what Lain is separated from, splitting her into her meaty and metalic configurations. A new dualist mode of thought begins to form, separating the wired and the real world coming straight from the mouth of the father. Lain ignores him, she has no desire for her mother anyway. The inclusive disjunction conjuncts the material-extended and material-intense wired into a thick soup that is quite literally embodied in Lain. Her body is connected to eating, breathing and drinking machines which each connect to the functions of websites and infinite blocks of code. Pornography, the most profitable venture of the internet, couldn’t exist without the perverted reproductive drives of human animals, as well as capitalism’s sexual sublimation of all desire. Oedipus lives in cyber-space, every one of his possible perversion perfectly met a thousand times over. He isn’t dead yet, but autism is what will kill him.

Telecommunications infrastructure serves as a body-without-organs for the wired, constantly causing psychosises and interrupting the systems whenever a tree falls on a cable or the tower is down for maintenance. This is the site of the autistics journey of detteritorialisation from the wired, an environment most hospitable to autistics and most like our homeland, to the depths of the wires of the wired itself. All the creative conjunctions of schizophrenia are present as production and anti-production blend at the molecular level into a perfect soup. Its the Vietnam to our Cambodia. Alice skims the surface of schizophrenia, but never goes deep into the heart of darkness. Williard embraces the jungle, his comrades become more Vietnamese or Cambodian than the Vietnamese and Cambodians. Autistics online have the same split, fractured between the intense wired and the intense extention of meat-space. Schizophrenics journey into the wired, but never quite reach autism.



Ultimately, autistics aren’t all the same, and the spectrum is like an RPG stat graph. Autism manifests itself as a collection of traits that seem to come hand in hand: Obsession, sensory sensitivities, poor motor skills, high perceptive ability and poor language/social skills.







Gender works similarly, its not a 1 dimesional spectrum of masc/femme, its a poly-rhizomatic madness



The problem in studying the pathology of autism is the heterogeneity of these traits. No “developmental disorder” is so somatic, affecting sensory and motor skills so much. With schizophrenia its the same, schizophrenia doesn’t want to be recognised and pinned down, like a Vietcong guerrilla. Autism however, is a pure, definable and recognisable set of difference in itself. But one is driven to wonder: where do autistic people come from?



Modern day psychology is functional, not differential. It prefers to ask “how?” than “why?”. Psychoanalysis has few answers, the idea of a child that doesn’t love their mother is totally beyond their calculations of possibility. Autism can be reliably diagnosed in babies, through testing if they, in the exact reverse of nuerotypical babies, deliberately look away from images of faces. Psychoanalysis speculates this is due to a torment by the mouth-object, but this has the same issue as nuero-scientific explanations for depression. Why is there a serotonin imbalance? And why are autistic babies tormented by the mouth-object?

Schizophrenia is an investment in the minorities, the enclave and remnants on the outside of the pack of molar and social organisms. In the patchwork, in the outside, it cuts through any pack, any organism, any assemblage. But most importantly, it makes every signified, it shows the material, a-signifying real of every repressed represented. This has the ultimate effect of reconstituting the world of signs into a world of material things. Autism works the same, but doesn’t bother with cutting, skipping investments in enclaves and patchwork. Why bother, when you can just invest in matter and intensity itself?

Language becomes difficult, just as it is for schizophrenics. Focusing on the right things to build a whole image of a scene becomes difficult with each sensory stimulus being desired in and of itself. The shape of extended and molar objects becomes important, difference must be produced correctly, with repetition for itself.



In the end, autism will kill Oedipus through nonchalantly, without concern for the symbols of The-Name-Of-The-Father or mommy the air raid shelter, which it doesn’t understand nor care about. Autism is the dissolution of these human regimes of signs, transforming the world into an alien landscape, foreign to the body-of-the-Earth. It makes schizophrenia seem like a half measure.