ABSTRACT
After briefly outlining a brief description of the history of how the senses have been conceptualised within sociology, the chapter develops a sociology of the senses that incorporates the interactions between pre-cognitive, symbolic and culturally inflected meaning making. This framework is then complimented by a pragmatist focus on habit and the balance between the creative evolution and repetitive mundaneness of habitual interactions. Autism is then rethought within this framework to show how a focus on ‘favourites’ can show how people, objects, places and spaces serve to anchor experience within distributed milieus of action and meaning. This distributed understanding of sensory experience is understood to operate between habitual quasi-objects that distribute notions of subject, object and environment depending on the specific situation being discussed. However, this process is never smooth and is accompanied by parasitic relations that seek to disrupt any steady notion of understanding. The chapter shall conclude by reflecting on how parasitic quasi-objects alter how we understand autism and how parasitic relations a part of all sensory experiences.
