{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","uuid":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","normalized_title":"crowdsandparty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","isbns":["9781781686942","9781781686720","9781781687666"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":183,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Crowds%20and%20Party","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/search"},"page":{"printed_page":27,"pdf_page":26,"physical_index":26,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"41e9b232df0b9304ccf4787cdc4f8efeee02cc6a1b36a61da64233089edeae7c"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign likewise takes individuality as its theme, targeting a demographic the company presents as preoccupied with the assertion of personal uniqueness.\n\n“For teens and Millennials, personalization is not a fad, it’s a way of life,” explains the press release announcing the campaign. “It’s about self-expression, individual storytelling and staying connected with friends.”<sup>3</sup> Launched in Australia in 2011 and expanded into some fifty additional countries, the campaign alters the Coke iconography by replacing the Coke logo with personal names. It encourages young consumers to finds cans and bottles with the names of themselves and their friends, photograph them, and share them online.\n\nIn the campaign, personal names take the place of the brand. Consumers aren’t called on to show their individuality by wearing the brand. The brand comes to them, taking on their individual identities, letting individuals see themselves in it. The icon becomes abstract enough to carry individual identities while nonetheless transcending them. The appeal of the campaign arises not just from the personal name but from the personal name in the place of the known and popular. The social media dimension of the campaign testifies to the continuation of the place of the brand. The Coke icon is still there, now riding on and circulating through individual uploads of personal selfexpression, less viral marketing than free product placement in the intimate moments of everyday life.\n\nWhen the Left echoes injunctions to individuality, when we emphasize unique perspectives and personal experiences, we function as vehicles for communicative capitalist ideology. “Left” becomes nothing but a name on a bottle, the shape of which is determined for us and which relies on us for its circulation. Making individual difference the basis of our politics, we fail to distinguish between communicative capitalism and emancipatory egalitarian politics. Even worse, we strengthen the ideology that impedes the cultivation of politically powerful collectivities. To call on people to ground their politics in the personal experiences that differentiate them from others is to reinforce capitalist dynamics of individuation. Offering the fantasy of customizable politics, such a call says: look at yourself from the specific position and interests given to you by capitalism and do what you want. In so doing, it pushes away from the collectivity on which left politics depends.\n\nIndividualism without Individuals\n\nThe injunction to individuality is so ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget its histories and modulations.<sup>4</sup> The research of sociologists such as Christopher Lasch, Richard Sennett, Jennifer M. Silva, and Carrie M. Lane treads a path through this history as it attends to the pathologies accompanying capitalist processes of individuation. As I detail below, key sites along this path—rugged individual, corporate gamesman, flexible temp worker, and sole survivor—open up the ways economic turmoil, changes in the structure of authority, and the loss of self-sufficiency give a tenuous quality to personal identity. The shifts from one site to another demonstrate moreover how the competitive pressures of capitalist processes become increasingly displaced onto and concentrated in the individual. The forces enjoining individuation undermine it. The more the individual, that fictitious subject of capitalism, is glorified, the more strained and impossible it becomes.\n\n27","previous_page":26,"next_page":28}