October 8th 2025
Dan Ruiz
danruiz@berkeley.eduDan Ruiz is a Mexican born undergraduate transfer from Stanford double majoring in Psychology and Anthropology with focus on Medical Anthropology and Clinical Psychology. He has mixed interests. On the side of Anthropology he is interested in subjectivity and its construction, power, capitalism and social disparities. In Psychology he is interested in the underpinnings and new methodologies in treatment for ASD, OCD and BD. He follows the academical principles of philosophical materialism and his end goal is to be a clinical psychologist and apply anthropological models for curation.
As a discipline, anthropology has never conceived of the study of the “self” as the analysis of an exclusively private experience. On the contrary, its traditional object has been the modalities by which forms of subjectivity are produced, transformed, and negotiated in relation to wider social, economic and symbolic orderings. From Marcel Mauss’ (1985) classic works on the person as a social category to Michel Foucault’s (1988) reflections on the techniques of the self, anthropology has shown how the self, in its different cultural and historical manifestations, is a thoroughly historical and contingent product, intricately interwoven with the material conditions of its production. In advanced capitalist society, this articulation between subjectivity and the socio-material realm becomes exacerbated: the self is no longer a domain of interiority — a sanctuary, a reserve — but a site of permanent intervention, a project to be continuously updated, made and remade in line with the market’s requirements for productivity and efficiency. It is in this sense that we will speak of a self in perpetual work, a self to be no longer defined by a final state, nor in terms of an unattainable ideal, but in terms of a work in progress, an assemblage that is continually re-elaborated, drawing on and submitted to the logics of labour and the institutions and institutions that support it.
In the previous chapter we will make a point of focusing specifically on autistic subjectivity. It is important to note, as a starting premise, that — unlike neurotypicals — autistic people not only construct their sense of self relationally. They must literally work at transforming their cognitive experience into the terms that society demands them to (try to) present. This self is made to translate — often through constant and arduous cognitive work — its own experience into culturally valid forms: decoding facial expressions, memorizing scripts, training “appropriate” emotional reactions, checking and re-checking their own behaviour, and so on, which involves an extended cognitive effort, as extensively described in the literature on camouflage and masking (Hull et al., 2017). In other words, the autistic self is not simply lived — it is constantly managed in order to respond to the requirements of the environment.
In light of this, we can advance a new concept for this thesis: self-in-perpetual-work. By this we mean the specific cognitive condition in which autistic individuals must invest a never-ending amount of resources on the building, regulation and presentation of their identity, not only in order to internally make sense of themselves, but to be understood and accepted by others in social situations and contexts that privilege neurotypical ways of being. This is a concept that is in contrast with that of the “self” in classical psychology, for whom the work on the self is an intermittent and punctual condition, that only has to be made explicit when crisis, anomalies and reflective moments are reached: whereas the autistic self in-perpetual-work is a constant, invisible and exhausting work, which functions as a second level of processing that accompanies every social interaction, and every act of autobiography. This self-in-perpetual-work therefore becomes a crucial axis in understanding how autistic cognition articulates the personal with the social: a self that is not only constructed, but must be reproduced day by day, over and over again, as a constantly fine-tuned project, in which the labourious dimension of subjectivity is revealed as its subjects are forced to translate their difference into deficit.
The self in perpetual work is not, however, just a cognitive category for the overload described above, whereby autistic individuals must continuously work their identity. It is also, more structurally, a condition in which the self is never experienced as something fully given, or completed, but as a process that is always to be continued, an assemblage that is always to be made to assert itself, in relation to the other. It is a characteristic that becomes especially clear in autism, in which the distance between the subject and the environment is exacerbated by their distance from the social conventions taken for granted by neurotypicals.
References
Foucault, Michel. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.
Hull, Laura, et al. “Camouflaging Autistic Traits: The Complex Nature of Masking in Autism.” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, vol. 47, no. 7, 2017, pp. 2519–2534.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes, Penguin Classics, 1990.
Mauss, Marcel. “A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person, the Notion of Self.” The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, edited by Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes, Cambridge UP, 1985, pp. 1–25.
