Crowds and Party · 第 32 页

On the one hand, insofar as he attends to a certain loss, Sennett signals the decline of the symbolic that subtends Lasch’s analysis of the change in paternal authority. With the vantage of two more decades, Sennett detects that this change is a loss. He analyzes this loss in terms of meaning and language: the absence of a place from which to narrate one’s life. On the other hand, because Sennett concretizes this loss as a loss of narrative rather than of symbolic authority, he overlooks the real changes to the individual form that Lasch already diagnosed. Sennett wants to shore up the individual. Lasch recognizes the form’s obsolescence. By emphasizing the missing narrative of adulthood, Sennett thus covers over the more fundamental disruption at the level of the symbolic.

For Sennett, the new economy has an upside. It allows for the emergence of new personal qualities such as “repudiation of dependence, development of one’s potential ability, the capacity to transcend possessiveness.”¹⁶ Accentuating the bright side of the post–welfare state technologized economy, Sennett tries to redeem the project of the New Left, making its critique of bureaucracy, cult of individuality, and celebration of emotional authenticity into not simply vanishing mediators of communicative capitalism but real achievements to be continued. He packages his recommendations for this continuation as the cultural values that individual workers require to sustain themselves in the fast-paced and volatile economy: narrative, usefulness, and craftsmanship.¹⁷

Sennett’s advocacy of a “cultural anchor” for an economy he recognizes as productive of extreme inequality and social instability puts Lasch’s critique of monopoly capitalism in stark relief: Lasch’s rejection of capitalism really is radical. More to the point, with his emphases on life narratives, usefulness, and craftsmanship Sennett increases the burden on the individual form. Instead of building up the collectivity and solidarity that might relieve some of the demands placed on individuals, his suggestions continue the turn in and on the individual, as if the cultural anchor were nothing more than the fetish to be held onto as we nevertheless acknowledge the impossibility of the command to individuate.

Jennifer M. Silva draws out an alternative to Sennett’s emphasis on a missing narrative of adulthood. The narrative isn’t missing. The narrative has changed, morphing into a more extreme version of the therapeutic self Lasch already identified in the collapse of its material and symbolic supports. What matters in the twenty-first century is individuation itself. “In a time when suffering is plentiful and work and family unreliable,” Silva writes, competent adulthood is defined “not in terms of traditional markers like financial independence, a career, or a marriage, but rather in terms of psychic development: achieving sobriety, overcoming addiction, fighting a mental illness, or simply not becoming one’s parents.”¹⁸ Silva’s alternative account of the pressures on contemporary adults draws from her ethnographic study of working-class adults in Massachusetts and Virginia. Her interviewees emphasize self-reliance, making it on their own. They can’t rely on experts or institutions. Other people are likely to fail or betray them. Individualism preserves and protects their own best thing, the only thing they can rely on, themselves. Their repudiation of dependence is a reaction to the loss of dependable others. Rather than an achievement, independence is a fetish barely holding together the fragile individual form.

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