Crowds and Party · 第 33 页

Silva’s account of a transition to adulthood marked not by “entry into social groups and institutions but rather the explicit rejection ofthem” provides a poignant rejoinder to Sennett.¹⁹ One man tells Silva that “the hardest part about being an adult is finding a real fucking job.”²⁰ People aren’t lacking a narrative for adulthood. Capitalism presents adulthood as an individual project. For the young working people Silva interviewed, individualism equals dignity. They tell heroic tales of self-sufficiency, turning inward as they manage feelings of betrayal, accept flexibility and flux, and buttress their sense of being utterly alone. Although the dependencies of the welfare state and corporate bureaucracy that Lasch associates with the therapeutic sensibility have been dismantled and replaced by a harsher, more competitive capitalism, therapeutic language remains the vocabulary through which to account for individual success and failure.

Instead of the jettisoning of the past that Lasch and Sennett observe, Silva’s subjects embrace the past as they narrate the challenges they have had to overcome in order to realize their authentic selves. Understood in terms of familial and personal experiences, the past provides an open field of explanations for hardship, failure, and the diminution of what they see as success. Unlike Lasch’s empty narcissists, Silva’s young adults have lives of inner purpose—surviving on their own in a context where the odds are against them. They struggle with illness and battle with addiction. They overcome dysfunctional families and past relationships. The fight to survive is the key feature of an identity imagined as dignified and heroic because it has to produce itself by itself.

Silva’s young adults point to an imaginary identity beyond the rugged individualist and the narcissistic gamesman: the survivor. Unlike the symbolic identity of institutions (the place from which one sees oneself as acting), imaginary identity is the image one adopts of oneself. Since so many of Silva’s informants feel they have had to do it all by themselves, in contexts of poverty and diminishing opportunity, they take the fact of their survival as the morally significant fact: making it on one’s own is what bestows dignity. Some of the white survivors Silva interviews resent “socialists” like US President Barack Obama for trying to take away their last best thing, the special something that is all they have left, namely, the dignity they have because they are completely self-reliant. The black survivors, too, narrate their experiences in individual rather than collective terms. They, too, seek to hold on to the only person they can count on—themselves. Betrayed by schools, the labor market, and the government, Silva’s working-class informants in general feel “completely alone, responsible for their own fates and dependent on outside help at their peril.” For them, surviving means internalizing the painful lesson that “being an adult means trusting no one by yourself.”²¹

What Sennett lauded as a repudiation of dependence appears in Silva’s account as a deep skepticism of solidarity. Reliance on other people requires acknowledging one’s insufficiency as an individual, one’s inability to survive alone. The hostility to the needy expressed by some of Silva informants suggests a defense against their own need. Hostility lets them displace their need onto others and thereby shore up a fragile and impossible individuality. Having learned that they can’t rely on anyone, these young working-class adults try to numb their sense of betrayal by affirming the worst cultural scripts of individualism, personal responsibility, and self-reliance, hardening themselves to the world around them. Their hostility to various forms of government intervention, particularly affirmative action, makes them ideal supports for neoliberal capitalism. Incidentally, those of us who write and circulate critical exposés—stories of governmental corruption, university failure, and corporate malfeasance—may not be helping our cause. We may be affirming what some in the working class already know to be true: they are being betrayed.

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