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.
Anthropology has never really bought into the notion that the “self” is fundamentallyinterior. Anthropologists have challenged the notion that subjectivity emerges prior to social relations or inheres within individuals. On the contrary, anthropology has long shown how selves are produced, reproduced, and negotiated through subjects’ entanglement in larger symbolic and economic orders (Mauss 1985; Foucault 1988). The self is not simply what you are at your core; your sense of self emerges historically and contingently through particular arrangements, and it
cannot be disentangled from the material relations through which it comes to matter.
This relationship between subjectivity and materiality is perhaps nowhere stronger than in advanced capitalism. Capitalism, Marx taught us, organizes life not just economically but also materially: it extracts labor by reorganizing the conditions through which human activity—and therefore human experience—is made possible (Marx 1990). Labor mediates subjects’ relations to the world and, increasingly, to themselves. Capitalism demands that subjects don’t experience themselves as havens of interiority insulated from the vagaries of social demand. Subjects come to see themselves as projects: targets for intervention and improvement, forces to be optimized and capitalized upon. Contemporary selves are therefore thoroughly enmeshed in the demands of labor—they are at once the object of work and its product.
Put another way, we might say that the contemporary self is always already at work. The self is not organized around any attainment or idealized endpoint; it is not even that something you finish becoming. It is a work in progress—an assemblage that must be perpetually manipulated to keep pace with the demands of social and economic reproduction. We might therefore say that capital demands not just our labor but our work on the self: that the subsumption of life under capital is truly total when it has also subsumed subjectivity itself. One place we can see this operation happening in hyper-visible ways is autistic subjectivity. All subjects live relationally. All selves are assembled and articulated through complex matrices of social relation. But autistic subjects, like others who exist at the edges of social belonging, must do what we might call extra work to become (and to feel) human. What autistic individuals must translate, from one sensibility to another, are their own ways of thinking and feeling.
This work is hardly incidental. It doesn’t simply emerge in times of stress. It includes decoding facial expressions, remembering scripts, modulating affect, masking emotions, hiding thoughts, and monitoring oneself. The important work of masking and camouflage literature has shown just how pervasive and exhausting this kind of work is (Hull et al. 2017). At stake in this process is not simply fitting in. The autistic self must translate itself; its own ways of thinking and feeling must be reformulated into intelligible versions of thought and feeling.
The self of autism is worked on. Social life is a process of cognitive labor. The autistic subject does not simply live their self; they produce it in real time. To borrow from Marx once again, we might call this state of being the self-in-perpetual-work. By this we mean a state of being characterized by the requirement to labor upon, compile, regulate, and present the self over and above the simply cognitive work of making sense of oneself. The self-in-perpetual-work exists not only when something goes awry or during rare moments of introspection. It is a kind of second order processing that quietly underscores all action.
Of course, all work happens off-stage for the majority of the population. Most of us don’t think about how we construct a “self” when we are doing it. The autistic self, however, makes this labor visible. Neurotypical individuals can, for the most part, rely on social convention to take up the brunt of this work. Autistic individuals cannot. The self-in-perpetual-work must be reproduced over and over again—it must be tinkered with, adjusted, recalibrated.
But again, this is more than a fact about cognitive overload. The self-in-perpetual-work points towards something we take to be true of all subjects: you never get a break. The self you come to understand yourself as—the self you know in the world—is never complete. This is true of all subjects but it is made vividly apparent in autism. There is a space between autistic subjects and their environments that has to be negotiated. This space is typically collapsed through the shortcut of social convention. But when that space is magnified, when it’s not so easy to take things for granted, the work that goes into that self becomes all too obvious.
We are therefore suggesting that autistic people are always working on the self. But it’s more than that. Autism reveals that all people are in a state of perpetual work on the self. Difference just makes the work stand out. Difference is felt; and when cognitive patterns feel alien, translation is never complete.
References
Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the self. In L. H. Martin, H. Gutman, & P. H. Hutton
(Eds.), Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault (pp. 16–49). University of
Massachusetts Press.
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Anchor Books.
Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University
of California Press.
Hull, L., Petrides, K. V., Allison, C., Smith, P., Baron-Cohen, S., Lai, M.-C., & Mandy, W.
(2017). “Putting on my best normal”: Social camouflaging in adults with autism spectrum
conditions. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47(8), 2519–2534.
Illouz, E. (2007). Consuming the romantic utopia: Love and the cultural contradictions of
capitalism. University of California Press.
Marx, K. (1990). Capital: A critique of political economy (Vol. 1, B. Fowkes, Trans.). Penguin
Classics. (Original work published 1867)
Mauss, M. (1985). A category of the human mind: The notion of person; the notion of self. In M.
Carrithers, S. Collins, & S. Lukes (Eds.), The category of the person (pp. 1–25). Cambridge
University Press. (Original work published 1938)
Rose, N. (1999). Governing the soul: The shaping of the private self (2nd ed.). Free Association
Books.
