Beyond the Performance Principle: Autistic Singularity in Perfect Days
Quique Autrey
4th March 2025
Many of the teenage students I encountered seemed to be in a state of what I would call depressive hedonia. Depression is usually characterized as a state of anhedonia, but the condition I’m referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as it is by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that ‘something is missing’ – but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle.
Mark Fisher[1]
Perfect Days
Perfect Days (2023), a film by Wim Wenders, tells the story of Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho), a middle-aged man in Tokyo employed as a public toilet cleaner. He commences each day at dawn, brushing his teeth, cultivating his plants, and selecting cherished cassette tapes for his daily commute. Hirayama treats cleaning public restrooms as an art form, approaching his work with pride, precision, and meticulous attention to detail to make each space spotless and inviting.
Outside of his work, Hirayama enjoys the simple pleasures of life: reading Faulkner, photographing trees, and basking in moments of solitude. He is a man of routine, few words, and sparse human connections.
As I watched Hirayama’s life unfold before my eyes, I could not help but think of my autistic clients. I work as a psychotherapist, focused on helping autistic men and women navigate the complexities of modern existence. Like Hirayama, my clients thrive on routine, prefer solitary activities to socialization, and develop special bonds to treasured objects.
Hirayama’s refusal to align with societal expectations resonates with the way my autistic clients value strict routines, find deep satisfaction in solitary pursuits, and prefer authentic self-expression over social conformity. Like my clients, Hirayama fashions a life that aligns with his internal sense of order and meaning, rather than succumbing to external pressures.
Hirayama’s quiet defiance of societal norms, just like my autistic clients, highlights the radical embrace of his singularity and serves as a foil to neoliberal[2] self-optimization.
A Poetics of Being beyond the Performance Principle
Mari Ruti and Gail M. Newman describe the pitfalls of neoliberal subjectivity in The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism[3]. The authors claim that for the individual in a neoliberal society, self-optimization is the normative mode of being for work and personal life. Self-optimization refers to “the attempt that many people make to constantly improve their performance and efficiency[4]”.
Ruti labels the cruel optimism of perpetual self-optimization the performance principle. Under the performance principle, neoliberal subjects exhaust themselves by constantly seeking to improve and achieve.
Instead of leading to satisfaction and fulfillment, life under the performance principle leads to what Mark Fisher labels depressive hedonia. This is not depression where one cannot experience pleasure, but a depression where one cannot stop pursuing pleasure. And the pleasure being pursued in neoliberal society has more to do with a restrictive individualism than a pleasure that feeds an expansive individuality.
Ruti draws on philosopher Frederich Nietzsche to sketch a vision of subjectivity beyond the performance principle. According to Ruti, “many of us are looking for a meaningful, imaginative, creative, and possibly slower way to live—that we want to actively participate in the fashioning of our destiny[5]”. In Nietzsche, Ruti draws out the need to become the poets of our own lives. To engage in this poetics of being means that we attempt to steer our lives in a meaningful direction, even if we do not know where we will end up.
This poetics of being, “accentuates the uniqueness of our being- our inimitable ‘style’- even when this uniqueness defies conventional social dictates[6]”. There is a danger, Ruti warns, of interpreting Nietzsche’s call to become “what one is” as another form of the neoliberal self-optimization project. One of the key differences would be that a Nietzschean poetics of being incorporates the failures and shadowy dimensions of life into a person’s sense of self. Neoliberal optimization is allergic to a lack in being and responds with a demand for toxic positivity.
Another shortcoming of the Nietzschean approach to self-fashioning is the absence of a robust notion of the unconscious in the subject. Ruti worries that without a strong emphasis on the unconscious, people will be fooled into thinking they have more agency than then they do. Ruti states:
As psychoanalysis has taught us since its inception, we have less power over the parameters of our lives than we would prefer: the existence of the unconscious—let alone of the kinds of powerful bodily drives (jouissance) over which we have little control—makes it impossible for us to master our destiny to the extent that Nietzsche would like[7].
Ruti turns to psychoanalyst Marion Milner to help flesh out Nietzsche’s poetics of being.
Marion Milner and the Pursuit of Singularity
Marion Milner (1900–1998) was a British psychoanalyst, psychologist, and writer known for her pioneering work in exploring creativity, self-expression, and the inner life. She combined psychoanalytic theory with personal introspection, producing influential works like A Life of One’s Own and On Not Being Able to Paint, which delve into the nature of creativity and the search for individuality.
Ruti mines Milner’s work to uncover an alternative mode of being to the one on display in neoliberal society. Miler’s alternative is tethered to solitary moments where treasured objects, moments of contemplation, and experiences of perception open a window to a worldly transcendence.
Ruti reads Milner’s search for worldly transcendence in light of Jaques Lacan’s understanding of sublimation. According to Lacan, sublimation is the raising of an ordinary object to the dignity of the Thing. The Thing, or das Ding, refers to the abyssal mystery of the Real before symbolization. The famous example is the way that Cézanne paints apples. Lacan believes that an apple painted by Cézanne is no mere depiction of the fruit but rather contains an aura of a sublimity that viewers respond to. While we never have direct access to the “Thing-in-itself”, it is possible to taste a morsel of the Thing’s sublimity.
Milner’s poetics of being is motivated by this pursuit of worldly transcendence in the quotidian moments of life. One of the great obstacles to this pursuit is the subject’s ego. For Milner, the ego is a bridge between the internal and external worlds of the subject, serving as a channel through which messages from the outside reach our psyche. The ego tends to be socially compliant, linking us to collective demands of normal, acceptable behavior.
For us to experience the dignity of the Thing, we need to find ways to dissolve, or at least marginalize, the ego and the way it filters our experience to conform to the dictates of the social order. When the ego reigns in our psyche, our capacity to live a creative life is severely stunted. Lacan too believed that an encounter with the Thing- and the jouissance that tethers the subject to the sublimity of the Thing- is antithetical to the demands of the ego.
How do we sidestep the demands of the ego and open up an opportunity for a partial encounter with the Thing? For Milner, it entails evading the ego and dropping down into what she calls her “private sea” of being. Ruti refers to Milner’s private sea as an, “oceanic, watery, and and at times even swampy space beneath her ego that is populated by water reeds and 'the swaying weeds’ of her body’s ‘inner darkness’[8]”.
This private sea of being, according to Ruti, accords with Lacan’s amorphous domain of jouissance. This is a realm beyond the ego and the symbolic order that seeks to control the ego. Whereas the neoliberal project demands a self that can continually improve and achieve, Milner’s poetics of being encourages the release of control and a a confrontation with the void at the heart of existence. This journey into our private abyss is riddled with uncertainty, doubt, and possible danger. But it is also the only way to discover what we really desire, apart from the demands of the Other.
If neoliberal self-optimization results in an egoic individualism, the vision of a creative self sketched by Ruti (through Milner and Lacan) is much more interested in a fecund individuality or singularity. Ruti’s model of singularity is diametrically opposed to the individualism that demands instrumentalist conformity to social convention. For Ruti, the “creative self facilitates the flourishing of the subject’s singularity as a function of its jouissance[9].” Singularity refers more to our unique encounter with our bodily drives, jouissance, and the quirks of our unconscious than any fantasy of a happy or rational self.
Singularity, for Ruti, is cultivated in the space of solitude. Solitude provides a temporary respite from the unrelenting demands of upholding a socially intelligible individuality. Living in society requires that we shuffle through various masks, personas and façades. This can be exhausting for many of us who are introverted and find the social order a tremendous burden to bear.
It is in the experience of solitude that we can broach our singularity, sublimating ordinary aspects of life, a favorite record, a sunset, or a new film, and taste morsels of the Thing.
Autistic Singularity in Perfect Days
While Perfect Days does not explicitly describe Hirayama as an autistic man, I think it’s possible to interpret his mode of being as resonant with stereotypical autistic traits. Here are just a few that I picked up from the film:
Hirayama chooses to live alone
His strict and predictable routines
A special relationship with inanimate objects (e.g., trees, his analog camera, cassette tapes, etc.)
A paucity of verbal communication with others
A prioritization of solitude and imaginal reverie
A refusal to confirm to societal expectations around family and career.
I first discovered Perfect Days when an autistic client of mine shared Thomas Flight’s video essay on the film. This particular client is perfectly capable of verbal communication but chooses to share his thoughts and feelings through video essays during our sessions together. Since I have a television in my office, he can grab my remote and find a video that best describes what he is thinking or feeling that day.
My client is a very talented artist. One of his ongoing struggles is comparing his art to more prominent artists on social media. My client desires the approval and admiration of other artists. This is not necessarily a problem except when it blocks his creative potential. By seeking to make art that others will praise rather than art that emerges out of his own jouissance, my client stagnates.
The video essay he shared that day highlighted Hirayama as a counter to the ambition and self-optimization that characterizes the neoliberal subject. The video introduced the Japanese concept of komorebi, which roughly translates as “sunlight filtering through trees”. Throughout the film, Hirayama takes time out of his day to appreciate the beauty of the sunlight breaking through the trees in Tokyo.
This appreciation of the transient beauty of nature connects to Hirayama’s love of analogue technology. During his daily lunch breaks, he snaps a photo of the komorebi to help him treasure the fleeting moment. This is Hirayama’s desire to elevate the ordinary object to the dignity of the Thing.
Hirayama’s singularity is a celebration of creative living as an antidote to the normative demands of neoliberal society. In his solitary and quiet existence, he connects with his private sea and there finds deep joy as well as sorrow and unrequited love. Although he is poor and alienated from his well to do family, he seems to experience a level of contentment that is foreign to many of us stuck on the treadmill of self-optimization.
Could the autistic singularity of Hirayama be a model for those of us who are introverted, neurodivergent, and exhausted by the demands of the social? Some will no doubt interpret Hirayama’s life as apolitical or a retreat from the demands of pursuing a more emancipated society. While there may be some truth to that, I must agree with Ruti’s sober admission:
The fact is that many of us cannot afford—or do not know how—to undertake revolutionary acts that would completely disengage us from the collective systems that provide us with a modicum of social, psychic, and affective continuity[10].
Hirayama, like all of us, still lives and works in an unrelenting, capitalist society. He is not a hikikimori or nature hermit. His resistance is a form of bypassing neoliberalism’s crushing demands rather than striving to completely defeat them. He intentionally lives simply, slowly, and quietly as a way to dive deep into his private sea of being, pursuing a morsel of jouissance. In this sense, Hirayama helps us understand that resistance rooted in a commitment to one’s singularity can be more of a gradual erosion of the status quo than a total dismantling or rebellion against it.
Footnotes
Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Zero Books, 21.
Neoliberalism refers to the transactional and instrumental nature of Western societies, driven by economic imperatives. While originally tied to the free-market policies of the 1980s, it now broadly describes the individualistic, narcissistic, and opportunistic ethos shaping social life since World War II.
Ruti, M., & Newman, G. M. (2025). The creative self: Beyond individualism. Columbia University Press.
Ruti and Newman, The Creative Self, 2025, 2.
Ruti and Newman, The Creative Self, 2025, 49.
Ruti and Newman, The Creative Self, 2025, 50.
Ruti and Newman, The Creative Self, 2025, 52.
Ruti and Newman, The Creative Self, 2025, 75.
Ruti and Newman, The Creative Self, 2025, 119.
Ruti and Newman, The Creative Self, 2025, 124.
