Crowds and Party · 第 40 页

For Turkle, these new experiences are pathological.⁴³ Drawing from Erik Erikson’s work on personal identity, she argues that networked technologies inhibit the kind of separation necessary for maturation. Parents are always in reach, available, even if they are not actually present but themselves overworked, distracted, and overextended. Young people do not learn how to be alone, how to reflect on their emotions in private. Fragile and dependent, they fail to develop the sense of who they are that they need to have “before” they “forge successful life partnerships.”⁴⁴ Rather than inner-directed and autonomous (Turkle refers to David Riesman), the culture of mobile phones and instant messaging has raised other-directedness “to a higher power.”⁴⁵ The expectation of constant connectivity eliminates opportunities for solitude even as people are “increasingly insecure, isolated, and lonely.”⁴⁶ Turkle concludes, “Loneliness is failed solitude. To experience solitude, you must be able to summon yourself by yourself; otherwise you will only know how to be lonely.”⁴⁷

There is nothing surprising in Turkle’s account of contemporary “tethered selves.” From her diagnoses of narcissism to her worries about the constant and even addictive character of networked communications, she repeats well-known criticisms of teens, media, and contemporary culture. But the language Turkle employs when she speaks of solitude signals something more than an updating of the critique of cultural narcissism for a networked age. She uses the second person—“you must be able to summon yourself by yourself”—and shifts from a descriptive to an imperative mode: “you must” if you are to know something besides how to be lonely. Turkle relies on this mode because she has described the reflective individual as threatened by networked technologies. She wants us to join her in defending the individual from this threat. Directly addressing the reader, she insists that the reflective individual be shored up (even as she rejects technologically mediated forms of this shoring up as themselves pathological). For Turkle, a self that is less bounded, more expansive, less separate, more connected, is immature, at risk of loneliness. It needs to form its identity, separate itself from others, and go through the stages of becoming an individual.

What Turkle links to technology, Dany-Robert Dufour (in The Art of Shrinking Heads) links to the acceleration of the process of individuation more broadly, particularly in connection with the decline in symbolic efficiency or change in the structure of the symbolic.⁴⁸ The contemporary subject, he says, is called upon to create itself.⁴⁹ Dufour repeats in a Lacanian register findings we already encountered in the research of sociologists Silva and Lane, namely, the overloading onto the individual of previously collective responsibilities and expectations. By the end of the twentieth century, in a setting Dufour characterizes as postmodern and neoliberal, the “I” is completely self-referential, grounded in nothing external to it, dependent on the acknowledgement of no other. But where Dufour grapples with the impossibility of selfindividuation, locating the intensification of the injunction to be oneself in the alliance between the imaginary and the Real in the wake of the decline of symbolic efficiency, Turkle repeats the command: “you must be able to summon yourself by yourself.”

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