Whether rendered as caring for oneself or looking out for number one, the captivating image of the individual enjoins its own maintenance. For all their emphases on self-reliance, Silva’s interviewees nonetheless want to be recognized. They want someone else to hear their stories, validate what they’ve accomplished. Communicative capitalism supplies the necessary infrastructure, the crowd of many who might view, like, or share.
Lasch’s diagnosis of cultural narcissism has lost its currency: communicative capitalist society is less narcissistic than it is psychotic, oriented via an alliance of the imaginary and the Real in the wake of the loss of the symbolic. Rather than enduring a surfeit of expertise, we are awash in multiple, conflicting, irreconcilable opinions. Unable ever fully to determine which is right, we have to decide for ourselves. Algorithms and data render social science obsolete. Power is backed by neither authority nor knowledge, appearing and manifesting instead as violence. Therapy offers neither justice nor cure. Militarized policing—arrests and shootings without accountability or cause—takes the place of the former; a wide array of pharmaceuticals takes the place of the latter, and when these fail there is depression, incapacity, addiction, and suicide. Finally, precarity, competition, and social networks supplant the antagonistic cooperation Lasch associates with the internal life of the corporation. Aggressive impulses need not be repressed under a veneer of cheerfulness. In the extreme inequality of communicative capitalism, multiple channels encourage their expression: hate and outrage circulate easily in affective networks.<sup>28</sup>
Nevertheless, Lasch’s attention to the forces that simultaneously command and undermine individuality remains compelling for the way it opens up the growing weight placed on the individual form. As subsequent sociological research attests, the interiorization of this weight continues to unburden corporations and the state from social responsibilities, intensifying concentration on already stressed individuals. An effect has been the diminishing of expectations such that survival itself becomes the achievement worth celebrating.
Left Individualism
In the very moment when capital as a class was mounting what would come to be recognized as a deadly onslaught against unions, the welfare state, and suppositions of collective responsibility more broadly, commanded individuality appears in a surprising place: the communist party. More specifically, enamored of the apparent freedom and creativity offered under the guise of a network society, leftists in and around the Communist Party of Great Britain appealed to individual responsibilities and capacities in terms much like Sennett’s. The individual, rather than the class, would be the locus of
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