Autistic Institutions (Part 1 Double Contingency)

Edvard Munch ‘Self-Portrait in the Garden at Ekely’ 1942

I shall now discuss the resemblances between institutional and autistic obstacles to functional social interaction, and also the resemblances between institutional solutions and autistic ways of overcoming or compensating for social interaction deficits. I will not be claiming that “we are all autistic” in our relations with and through institutional subsystems... not yet at least. Nor is this exploration of overlapping concepts a sly effort to prepare the ground for a subsequent claim that those clever institutional designers of the 17th and 18th centuries were classifiably autistic. Goodness, no! 

Rather the purpose is to explore some intriguing organic parallels between individual and institutional functional cognition systems, and to ask whether observed correlations between cognitive deficits and strengths of high-functioning autistic individuals may offer avenues for improving existing ways of thinking about correlations between institutional uncertainty and the solutions promoted by high-functioning institutional designers. 

The obvious commonalities between these separate levels of analysis (institutional blind spots on one hand, individual mind-blindness on the other) are the action-oriented and system-oriented dimensions of ‘not knowing’, which I have recently been exploring here.

As indicated previously, ‘not knowing’ is a characteristic of all social interaction. From a government modernisation perspective, ‘not knowing’ is a highly problematic feature of the critical relations between institutional subsystems. 

I offered examples of how the problem is partially or sufficiently solved using discovery procedures. Indeed, in most simple everyday non-perilous, non-institutional, and non-economic personal relations -- friends, family, community -- surrogate discovery procedures combine with the extraordinary processing capacity of the evolved human brain and usually do suffice to keep relations repeating on an even keel. When push comes to shove there is no alternative to ‘not knowing’.

The machines of neuroscience...

The day may come when everyone carries about their person the ultimate discovery device of modern neuroscience, a miniature brain scanner capable of detecting activity in all the interconnected brain regions of targeted persons, whose built-in algorithmic computations will produce instantaneous viewable results purporting to reveal true goals and meaning of other people’s actions in social interaction. 

Recent writings in neuroscience have both boldly implied and vehemently denied the possibility of a future where “secrets of the psyche” are revealed by machines. We should assume that, were such a device made available, someone would promptly invent a counter-communication jamming or blocking device to protect us against unauthorised examinations of our social brain activity by counterparty imaging devices. I predict, also, that new privacy laws would be passed to prevent routine neural imaging without consent. 

So, for the foreseeable future the fundamental problem of ‘not knowing’ in social interaction will persist. But this is not obvious to everyone. Even in the best scientific literature on autism one encounters statements which if taken out of context could suggest to you or to me that normal functional humans can know the thoughts of others. 

For example, this definition from a state of the art book on autism: “Empathy is our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion”. In fact the author is only saying that most people are able to identify signs and expressions that reveal probability of meaning, whereas a minority of people -- those who are autistic -- cannot do so as easily. 

Double-mindedness...

Ability to empathise lies on a spectrum, and a clear deficit in empathy is said to be a defining characteristic of autism. So it is important to take note of the second part of the same author’s definition of empathy, which serves to introduce the issues I wish to focus on: 

“Empathy occurs when we suspend our single-minded focus of attention and instead adopt a double-minded focus of attention … Single-minded attention means we are thinking only about our own mind... Double-minded attention means we are keeping in mind someone else’s mind at the very same time... When empathy is switched off, we think only about our own interests. When empathy is switched on, we focus on other people’s interests too… Double-mindedness can be used not just to think about how others feel or what they might be thinking, but also to think about how you may be perceived by others. Imagining yourself from another person’s vantage point is what we mean by self-awareness.”  [emphasis added, Zero Degrees of Empathy]

The phrases “thinking about” or “imagining yourself” clearly temper the earlier suggestion of certainty in the “ability to identify”. The author has now acknowledged persistent uncertainty. It remains true, nevertheless, that in the course of their upbringing and early attachments neurotypical (more or less normal) people display and develop considerable ability to read meaning into people’s communications, facial expressions, and movements. 

This development is delayed or prevented in (more or less) autistic people who maintain, to a greater or lesser degree, the difficulty of understanding people’s meanings and communications. The mind-blindness may be mirrored in introspection too. Autistic trouble in understanding one’s own mental process can be manifested, for example, in lack of awareness of one’s lack of empathy. Autistic people might also be puzzlingly unaware or mistaken about how other people view them. All in all, autistic individuals display unusual problems of ‘not knowing’ in social interaction.

Double contingency... 

From a sociological viewpoint all people normally experience problems of uncertainty which -- in psychiatry -- might conceivably fall into the category of autistic difficulty with mindreading. “Double contingency” is the technical name that sociologists have given to what I am describing as ‘not knowing’ in an interaction, and which seems to suggest the improbability of neurotypical double-mindedness. 

Double contingency was first identified as such in the 1950s by the sociologists Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils:

“There is a double contingency inherent in interaction. On the one hand, ego’s gratifications are contingent on his selection among available alternatives. But in turn, alter’s reaction will be contingent on ego’s selection and will result from a complementary selection on alter’s part. Because of this double contingency, communication could not exist without generalisation from the particularity of the specific situations (which are never identical for ego and alter) … First, since the outcome of ego’s action (e.g. success in the attainment of a goal) is contingent on alter’s reaction to what ego does, ego becomes oriented not only to alter’s probable overt behaviour but also to what ego interprets to be alter’s expectations relative to ego’s behaviour, since ego expects that alter’s expectations will influence alter’s behaviour. Second, in an integrated system, this orientation to the expectations of the other is reciprocal or complementary.” [emphasis added, Toward a General Theory of Action]

The concept of double contingency was further explored years later by a brilliantly provocative and intellectually elusive student of Parsons, the neoliberal sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann’s initial reaction to the theorem of double contingency was this:

“Parsons begins with the fact that action cannot take place if alter makes his action dependent on how ego acts, and ego wants to connect his action to alter’s… No action can occur without first solving this problem of double contingency, because any possibility of determination would then be lacking… Situations with double contingency require a minimum of reciprocal observation and a minimum of expectation grounded in knowledge to initiate communication. At the same time, the complexity of such situations rules out the participants' reciprocally fully understanding each other… Highly complex meaning-using systems that are opaque and incalculable to one another are part of the infrastructure presupposed by the theorem of double contingency.” [emphasis added, Social Systems]

This is the action-paralysing ‘black box’ problem. People’s interiors, their minds, are opaque to one another. The observable perceived elements are on the exterior (gestures and words). The interior goals, motives, or meanings and intentions can only be guessed at or judged and evaluated using artificial and natural discovery procedures. In interpersonal relations eye contact and facial expressions will be important for the decoding of meaning, and of course language. We can talk together about how you perceive you are being perceived (if there is time!). 

In impersonal social relations, as in modern institutional and economic transactions, we find surrogate routes into the interior, methods of partial transparency (white boxes) and interpenetration. I previously mentioned the discovery procedures. Nevertheless, 'the box' is never made of glass. It never becomes completely transparent. In reading their intentions and motives, it is still as if we are looking at other people with a dummy glass eye. 

Parsons believed that shared value consensus (culture and cultural norms that have been embedded in laws) is the only realistic solution to double contingency. In fact he said that culture is the “precondition” of action, and communication is the “precondition” of culture.

In my recent essays on this site I generalised about two alternative perspectives. The neoliberal regards the problem as insoluble by instrumental or cultural means. The best that can be done is establish conditions of freedom allowing the system spontaneously to solve its problems, creating transparency each time by chance (non-instrumental coordination) through continual pressure of communication. The ordoliberal, in contrast, views the problem as soluble by instrumental transparency-creating rule-predictability of the rational kind. 

The limits to empathy...

A meaningful reliable capacity for empathy or mindreading may be a product of biological evolution and in some respects innate or genetic. Neuroimaging does in fact confirm that some key ‘social’ zones of the brain display comparative deficits of relevant activity in people who have been diagnosed as having autism. 

However, I am inclined here to take a neoliberal-ordoliberal shortcut by dismissing empathy as an unreliable particularistic discovery device. In practical respects empathy is an intuition based on imitation and trial-and-error which relies on learning and experience acquired during a lifetime of a single person. In the absence of reliable real-time confirmation by flawless neuroimaging technology (which, as yet, is unavailable), empathy remains a skilful pretence to ‘know what is going on' in an interaction. 

In practical terms, therefore, empathy is not well suited to the means-end transactional calculations implied by the double contingency scenario. Empathy is not the most direct or active device for me to employ to reduce uncertainty in achieving my ends. Empathy is more likely to be a passive roundabout device to help me to help someone else by placing myself in their position and doing my utmost to try and understand their feelings. 

The friendly double-mindedness discussed in autism literature is not quite instrumental enough for my purposes. In my day-to-day encounters with institutions I need a more accurate device than empathy for understanding all of the imperative interactions. 

What I am trying to get at in a doubtlessly crude sort of way is the idea that the term ‘empathy’ is neither linguistically nor rationally and conceptually good-enough as a facilitating feature of interaction in the inherently conflictual and competitive hustle-and-bustle of institutional and economic subsystems, where single-minded and group-minded concerns predominate over friendlier double-minded concerns. Double-mindedness looks utopian in harsh crisis-infused contexts of economic history. 

Without questioning the fact that clinical deficits in empathy and mindreading are a measurable manifestation of autism among humans, I find that other (equally empirical) autistic characteristics bear a greater similarity to the institutional characteristics. 

Autistic deficits and strengths...

We are discussing individuals at the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum. And when we observe linkages between their autistic cognitive ‘deficits’ and ‘strengths’ we remain cautious and think in terms of correlation rather than causation. 

I’m in no position to claim that the autistic strengths do result from or require the autistic deficits in the same way that institutional solutions are a causal outcome of either ordoliberal or neoliberal responses to institutional ‘not knowing’. It is, nevertheless, not beyond the bounds of possibility that autistic deficit is the reason for autistic strength, and/or vice versa.

One clear difference between autistic and institutional contexts can be noted in passing. In autism ‘not knowing’ affects a single-mind unequally, whereas in institutions two or many partners all equally experience reciprocal uncertainty in interaction (double contingency). 

The problem of interpersonal ‘not knowing’ is so great for autistic individuals that they will often avoid people and withdraw from social interactions. Socialising can be confusing and a struggle. The discomfort, disorientation, exhaustion, or fear produced by repeated failure or repeated pretence and make-believe to solve humdrum cognitive-interaction and relational puzzles becomes intolerable.

Nevertheless, the autistic person may function sufficiently well without social interaction, especially if they have manifest and compensating non-social strengths that can be exercised (alone!) through an all-absorbing interest, and which displace, replace or perhaps in some way even ‘solve’ the social interaction predicament. 

Social interaction which has to be ‘faked’ is not worth the effort, whilst surrogates for social interaction, or compensatory objectifying interactions, might be deeply fulfilling.

The theory of autistic systemising...

I have been extremely interested to find, in Simon Baron-Cohen’s pathbreaking empathising–systemising (E-S) theory, elements of micro-individual responses to uncertainty that are intriguingly congruent with both ordoliberal and neoliberal macro-institutional solutions. E-S theory sets out to move beyond mind-blindness theory which focused almost exclusively on deficits of autism. 

Baron-Cohen emphasises exceptional “nonsocial”, “functional”, “highly purposeful”, “positive” features of autism such as “attention to detail”, “skill in systemising”, the “preference for predictable over unpredictable motion”, the “preference for patterned over unpatterned information”, “obsessions in terms of systemising”, “emotional pleasure at the predictability of the world”, and an unusual capacity for “treating all information as potentially relevant in the search for repeating patterns” coupled with an unusual capacity for “ignoring extraneous information”. 

These strengths -- in combination and over time -- can produce, in the minds and occupations of autistic individuals, acute “understanding of a whole system”. Baron-Cohen’s “contention is that the autistic brain, being highly tuned to systemise, is the ultimate pattern-detector and truth-detector.”

Key words or phrases associated with autistic people’s cognitive strengths appear throughout Baron-Cohen's E-S theorisation of low empathy with strong systemising. Repeatedly he points out the single-minded psychological requirement for, or sheer pleasure in, “rules”, “truth”, and “predictability”. 

These needs can be seen frequently manifested in obsessive efforts to systematically record and give order to information. High-functioning autistic individuals show unusual potential to discover systems and to recognise the repetitions or sequences that reveal “lawful change or patterns” in all types of information. 

The corollary of the strength, unsurprisingly, is a deficit. People with autism typically do not cope well with “unlawful” (i.e. unexpected) change, and may be “disabled” by it. Instead they create or gravitate towards routines and rules-based environments. 

Autistic individuals are likely to have “super-developed moral codes… the moral system they have constructed through brute logic alone”. They can be unusually “intolerant of those who bend the rules”. It is evident that extreme systemising emphatically places autistic individuals among “the law enforcers, not the lawbreakers”. 

Individuals with autism tend to treat people as if they are objects. Even without wishing to they unilaterally depersonalise their social interactions. On the deficit side, they may become “trapped” in self-focus. On the credit side, these good authentic people are blunt, truthful, and unusually critical of dishonesty, inconsistency, imprecision. They will appear to be as superficially disinterested in emotion as they are shocked by deception and deeply interested in logic, truth, and fairness.

Part 2 coming up…

Next week I will reveal how the conceptualisation of so-called ‘autistic’ deficits and strengths among exceptional individuals remarkably resembles a new and productive line of inquiry for the historical analysis of depersonalising and objectifying institutional change. 

Curious and unexpected parallels will be drawn with the sociological interaction problem of ‘not knowing’, which in historical institutional environments has been demonstrably a primary motivator of lawful procedural-system solutions that create order in society. 

Three levels of entry for a productive exploration of conceptual social scientific overlap between institutional and autistic deficits and strengths are to be introduced in Part 2: 

1. a system narrative of brains and societies; 

2. a history narrative of the systemising institutional actors; 

3. a narrative of the systemising observers of institutions.

Sources:

Simon Baron-Cohen, 2009, ‘Autism: The Empathizing–Systemizing (E-S) Theory’, The Year in Cognitive Neuroscience, New York Academy of Sciences

Simon Baron-Cohen, 2011, Zero Degrees of Empathy, Penguin Books

Niklas Luhmann, 1995, Social Systems, Stanford University Press

Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils, 1951, Toward a General Theory of Action, Harper & Row

Michael G. Heller ©2014