Nothing Personal
The era of communicative capitalism is an era of commanded individuality. The command circulates in varying modes. Each is told, repeatedly, that she is unique and encouraged to cultivate this uniqueness. We learn to insist on and enjoy our difference, intensifying processes of self-individuation. No one else is like us (like me). The “do-ityourself” injunction is so unceasing that “taking care of oneself” appears as politically significant instead of as a symptom of collective failure—we let the social safety net unravel—and economic contraction—in a viciously competitive job market we have no choice but to work on ourselves, constantly, just to keep up. Required to find out, decide, and express it all ourselves, we construe political collectivity as nostalgia for the impossible solidarities of a different era. The second-wave feminist idea that the “personal is political” has become twisted into the presumption that the political is personal: how does this affect me?
Individualism has not always been so intense and unmitigated. As Jefferson Cowie details in his history of the United States in the 1970s, “reformed and diversified individualisms” undermined class-based approaches to economic rights over the course of the decade.<sup>1</sup> This chapter takes up this assault on collectivity. Looking at shifts in commanded individuality from the 1970s to the present, I highlight the enormous strains placed on the individual as it becomes the overburdened remainder of dismantled institutions and solidarities—the survivor. I revisit Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, marking the ways capitalist processes simultaneously promote the individual as the primary unit of capitalism and unravel the institutions of solidaristic support on which this unit depends. Putting later sociologists in conversation with Lasch, I draw out the limits of Lasch’s account. Even as Lasch’s descriptions of celebrity culture, competition, and consumerism still resonate, individualism is today less an indication of narcissism than it is of psychosis. The chapter continues by considering a left example of the off-loading of responsibility onto the individual: the debate over the “new times” in Marxism Today that took place at the end of the 1980s. Against the background of the sociologists’ conversation, the emphases on individual responsibility and identity in this debate appear as what they in fact were: the fragmentation of a collective perspective under the weight of reasserted capitalist class power. The last sections of the chapter begin an inversion that will be more fully developed in chapter two. They find possibilities of collectivity in the ruptures of the fragile individual form. With help from Elias Canetti’s indispensable study of crowds, I
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