The Social Context of Autism
From Can Pariahs Change the World?
Our culture is built around a dualism, the contradiction between the Subject and the Object. When a human being embodies the Object, they will be called “the Other.”
What interests me is a Foucauldian concept of the Subject, where it is relational and defined by the power it wields within a modern capitalist society. This Subject is formed through a vast network of institutions that need to control the population and knowledge, classifying them into binaries (this is how the power of psychiatry over mental illness, medicine over bodies, etc., is maintained).
The Subject is the protagonist of reality, the model with which the individual must identify. The Other is something strange and unknown, but the Subject can only exist insofar as this Other exists. The Subject needs the Other to constitute itself, and, moreover, it needs to be able to dominate this Other.
The existence of the Subject is proven by its capacity to think and to form society through thought; therefore, the Other is irrationality, the lack of thought, Nature.
From each individual’s perspective, everyone is a Subject. But not all Subjects are equal: certain categories of individuals receive greater subjectivity, one might say, they are more recognized as Subjects by society.
Certain categories of individuals embody the Other in particular: women, Black people, homosexuals, etc. This division begins with the division of labor and expands throughout history, crystallizing within the framework of a class society. That is to say, depending on one’s position in the social division of labor, one can more fully embody the position of Subject.
In truth, the Other-Subject is the internalization of the oppressors and the oppressed. The Other does not have the benefit of thinking about their own reality; they are a subaltern, their consciousness is that of a failed version of the main Subject: women think through the man (and spectator) they have introjected, proletarians vote like bourgeois, etc.These ingrained habitus cause people to act based on this pattern, mostly remaining within their categories.
In other words, the Subject-Other is the conceptualization of the two sides of a social relation. These social relations are governed by the commodity fetishism which subordinates every aspect of society to a fixation on things, to the objectification of the human being. And for this reason, the Other is assimilated to the Object.
In today’s world, it is not possible to literally possess another human being, but the flip side of this is that it is possible to possess a human being in all other aspects of life by conceptualizing them as mere commodities to be possessed, which is what allows the status of the Other.
This means that when the Subject relates to the Other, it is based on wanting to obtain something, to acquire possession. In their interactions, the Subject seeks to mold the Other into a commodity.
What does this have to do with autism?
The autistic individual is particularly compelled to assume the position of the Other, literally failing to interact socially in a normal way. The Species decrees that certain individuals cannot easily assimilate into the social fabric. There are two layers to autistic alienation: original alienation and social alienation.
Mexican author Berenice Vargas García refers to the cultural artifacting that serves to place autistic individuals in a position of being seen as “pseudo-human mentally ill” as the “autistic reason”. The author points out that we should be critical of stereotypes that autistic people are inherently unempathetic and isolated, noting that this construct is part of a certain conceptualization not only of the subject itself, but of the idea of humanity.
But for the moment, autistic people cannot even form a group to create their own subject parallel to the hegemonic one of society: autistic people have no shared history, class, or culture. They barely share a common experience, since each person sees autism differently. It would be impossible to create an Autistic Party.
Under these circumstances, How can autistic people free themselves, break free from the mold of the Other, without being able to constitute themselves as a group?
Read this essay on Substack
