Signifying the Autistic Sense of Self

Taking the narrative conception of self as my point of departure, the aim of this article is to critically evaluate the literature on impaired narrative ability and an impoverished sense of self in Autism, and to reorient these debates in light of emergent interpretations of Autistic embodiment. First, I consider the literature suggesting Autistic people demonstrate deficits in configuring symbolic, durational and intentional narratives and the implication that Autistic people lack self-other differentiation and a coherent sense of self. Second, with recourse to literary and rhetorical criticism in neurodiversity studies, I examine claims that this literature positions Autistic subjectivity as an unknowable excess and Autistic people as unreliable narrators of experiences that are, in essence, unnarratable. Third, I evaluate the importance and limitations of the literature on hermeneutical injustice in attempting to dismantle this positioning, and argue that, in privileging symbolic forms of signification, this research risks misrecognising Autism as a deficient rather than divergent form of being. Fourth, I examine recent developments in process philosophy, ecological psychology, enactivism, and critical phenomenology, which reconceptualise Autistic embodiment as a different way of being in the world, that gives rise to different ways of signifying the self. In closing, I consider how Autistic perceptual signification can be seen to give rise to an ecological sense of self that, far from being impoverished, reflects the complexity and heterogeneity of pre-reflective lived experience itself.