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# Crowds and Party
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In sum, Lasch links changes in the individual form to changes in capitalism. The shift from the rugged individual of the frontier to the gamesman of the corporation is economic and psychic. As the struggle to survive becomes a drive to consume, the selfreliance of the frontier morphs into dependence on corporate and state bureaucracy. Frustrated individuals narcissistically strain against their traps, identifying with celebrities and searching for authenticity. They want to be unique, exceptional. The rules don’t apply to them, so they need not abide by them. They can focus on themselves, their own well-being, using others as means to achieve it.
A quarter of a century later, Richard Sennett suggests that deepening inequality and economic insecurity have further changed the contemporary individual. Where Lasch highlights the bureaucratic corporation for its cultivation of gamesmanship and dependency, Sennett considers the so-called “new economy” of temporary workers, technology workers, and entrepreneurs (before and after the bursting of the dot-com bubble).14 These workers aren’t dependent on bureaucracy. They aren’t locked into the banal security of the corporation and its internal machinations. Their lives and work are unstable, without guarantees, precarious. They lack a narrative for adulthood. Many work on short-term contracts. Companies want to be flexible—and to avoid providing health insurance and pensions. The critique of dependency has become itself an interiorized norm. Whether a firm employs the winner-take-all dynamic of internal markets, relies on subcontractors and temporary labor, or uses consultants and a revolving door of executives, primary business values are autonomy and self-direction. Workers worry about keeping their skills up-to-date, having the potential to learn new tasks quickly and cultivating easily transferable capacities such as “problem-solving.”
Surprising, though, is the resonance of Sennett’s account with Lasch’s. One might expect the enforced self-reliance of the new economy to induce a sense of purpose and direction along the lines of the rugged individualism of the frontier. Instead, Sennett’s sociological investigations into late capitalism suggest a self oriented toward the short term, focused on potential, and capable of jettisoning the past. This echoes Lasch’s highlighting of immediacy, flexibility, and a break with historical continuity. Like Lasch, Sennett emphasizes the separation of power from authority, the diminution of trust, and the growth of anxiety. But where Lasch presents the pressure confronting the individual as an effect of a corporate culture that breeds gamesmanship and dependence, Sennett attributes the problem to the loss of corporate culture and the unmooring of individuals from the intelligible patterns of everyday life that results. The corporation no longer provides a stabilizing point of reference for the narrative of working life. Sennett writes,
A shortened framework of institutional time lies at the heart of this social degradation; the cutting edge has capitalized on superficial human relations. This same shortened time framework has disoriented individuals in efforts to plan their life course strategically and dimmed the disciplinary power of the old work ethic based on delayed gratification. 15
Lasch of course observes that the Protestant work ethic eroded decades ago. Sennett, however, links its disciplinary effects to the corporate structuring of life patterns (even for those working outside the corporation).
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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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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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Likewise countering Sennett’s happy rendering of the repudiation of dependence, Carrie M. Lane’s research on white-collar technology workers in Dallas situates the emphasis on individual responsibility in the context of wide-scale layoffs and unemployment.22 Insecurity is a primary feature of the lives of these tech workers. Most alternate through contract positions of varying duration, unemployment, and selfemployment.23 Lane notes how the technology workers she interviewed embrace a “career management” ideology that casts “insecurity as an empowering alternative to dependence on a single employer.”24 They construe loyalty as a thing of the past: since everyone is a victim of economic forces beyond their control, neither companies nor employees owe each other anything. Owners and workers both want to make money however they can. No one should expect a company to provide employment security or opportunities for professional development. Such an expectation indicates a childish attitude of dependence. According to one executive, “To give my employees job security would be to disempower them and relieve them of the responsibility that they need to feel for their own success.”25 Laid-off and job-seeking tech workers adopt the corresponding individualist mindset: success comes from doing “whatever it takes” to get by, get through, get that next job.
The survivor is a compelling identity under conditions of extreme competition and inequality. It validates surviving by any means necessary. Survival is its own reward. Setbacks and lapses are new challenges, ultimately greater proof of one’s survival skills. Popular culture provides a wide array of survivors to emulate (as well as examples of those who have been unable to get themselves together): from Katniss in The Hunger Games, to the winners of uncountable reality television competitions, to games like Day Z and Fallout, to victims of illness or crime. Emotions of anger, suspicion, and defensiveness are justified—one can rely only on oneself—and potentially useful as the psychic weapons that can help maintain an impossible individuality.
The survivor is a figure not for a culture of narcissism but for a psychotic culture. If narcissistic culture is characterized by the dislodging of symbolic authority, psychotic culture is characterized by its foreclosure.26 In brief, Lacan defines psychosis in terms of the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father or master signifier. That the master signifier is foreclosed means that it does not stabilize meaning; the signifying chain lacks an anchor that can hold it together. The generalized loss of symbolic power impacts the subject such that he feels this now-missing authority to be all the closer, more powerful, and intrusive. In a psychotic culture, then, mistrust is pervasive, all-consuming. Each confronts power directly and alone.
To compensate for the missing symbolic authority, the psychotic turns to the imaginary. He positions himself in relation to a “captivating image,” perhaps of one whom he hates, admires, or fears.27 This imaginary other would then be a rival to defeat or destroy. The psychotic may try to mimic those around him, particularly as he grapples with intense fear and aggression. And he may also become captivated by an image of himself. Here the psychotic imagines himself not as anyone or anything in particular: I am my own worst enemy. What matters is persistence, survival, for its own sake.
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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.28
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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freedom.
At the end of the 1980s, Marxism Today, a CPGB magazine, made itself into a platform for debates on the British Left over Marxism, Thatcherism, the legacy of communism, and the future of socialism. At the heart of the debate was the question of “new times.” How could and should socialism adapt given the changes associated with post-Fordism and the political challenge of Thatcherism? For many writing in Marxism Today, the dissolution of the welfare state and the rise of information technology, and, later, the collapse of the Soviet bloc demanded the Left’s reconstruction. The question, then, was what this reconstructed Left would look like. For what became the dominant voice, it looked liberal, offering little more than capitalism with a human face.
Charles Leadbeater’s proposal for a “progressive individualism” emphasized putting individual interests at the center of socialist strategy: “If the Left stands for one thing, it should be this: people taking more responsibility for all aspects of their lives.”29 As a counter to Thatcher’s culture of “individual consumerism,” his Left would offer “individual citizenship.” The point of collective action would be fulfilling individual needs. Leadbeater formulates the idea in market terms, saying that the Left “has to renegotiate the contract between those who finance collective services, those who provide them, and those who consume them, to ensure they provide value for money, efficiency, flexibility and choice.”30 This is a vision of social welfare as consumer good, a vision possible through the evacuation of collectivity and the suppression of class struggle. Leadbeater couples his call for the Left to reorient itself around individual rights and responsibilities with one for collective provision. Nonetheless his analysis repeats key elements of Thatcherism, from the attack on the welfare state for its inefficiency and paternalism to the assertion of the role of the market in meeting individual needs.
Leadbeater’s language and values are neoliberal. Thatcherism establishes the place from which he sees the world. He says that Thatcherism encourages “aspirations for autonomy, choice, decentralization, greater responsibility.” The Left needs to accept these values and broaden them: “While Thatcherism confines individual choice within the market, the Left should stress the importance of wider social individuality, diversity and plurality in lifestyles which cannot be delivered by the market.”31 The state should be both player and platform, guaranteeing rights and providing alternatives in a larger field of choices. So not only does the market have a role—competition efficiently coordinates “lots of decentralized economic decisions”—but the public sector needs to become consumer oriented, the benefits office having the same “standards of the high street.” The devolution of common good into individual benefit goes unmarked, the assumption that public services be treated like private consumer choices unexplored. Leadbetter, with Thatcher, just assumes the market as the model for social relations.32 Not only do individuals need rights to consultation and participation in the workplace, but they have a responsibility to accept “reasonable offers of employment” as well as “reasonable measures of labor flexibility.”33 To adapt to the new times, the Left has to look like, see as, the Right. Rather than championing working-class values of equality, solidarity, and collectivity, in Leadbeater’s version the Left stands for capitalist ones of efficiency, flexibility, and decentralization, held together by a celebration of the individual as a rational, disciplined, and autonomous agent with the power to remake his world.34
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Rosalind Brunt similarly pushed a left individualism.35 For her, the “new times” demand a politics of identity. The examination of one’s personal history, a beginning from oneself, is what made sexual politics exciting and what the Communist Party needs to embrace. Brunt argues that identity politics should be at the heart of a transformative politics because it gives a sense of difference, of the many identities offered in and by contemporary culture. It helps people think about how they relate to others, how they live and directly experience ideology. Instead of the Party providing a critical perspective from which to look at the world, breaking from the hegemonic capitalist culture and installing a gap within it, lived experience would be the perspective brought to bear on politics. In Brunt’s version, which prefigures what would become a key feature of left thought for several decades, politics itself turns inward, the task of changing the world preceded by that of understanding oneself. Having listed the identities and relations important to belonging—race, class, gender, nation and colleagues, friends, children, lovers—Brunt writes, “And then there is the bedrock sense of the ‘real me’, the feeling that, however precarious these other identities, there is a secret hidden core, a completely unsocialised and essential self somewhere private and inside.”36 The implication is that this secret core should be the bedrock of a new politics of “unity-in-difference,” a Bolshevik principle reimagined through an identity politics that refuses talk of priorities and socialism as a greater good. The effect is a resonance both with capitalist society’s marketplace demographics and therapy culture’s emphasis on an authentic self. The result is a change in the focus of communist politics such that it contracts rather than enlarges.
Although they voice themes that will come to dominate the post-Marxist and poststructuralist Left, Leadbeater’s and Brunt’s are of course not the only positions taken in Marxism Today’s debate over the “new times.” Ellen Meiksins Wood, to use but one example, offered a powerful critique of the “new times” hypothesis, particularly as set out in the programmatic Manifesto For New Times. Wood rejects the premise of postmodern fragmentation underpinning emphases on personal identity, flexibility, and diversity. Such emphases give the impression that capitalism “has become infinitely more permeable, opening up huge spaces for people to carve out their own autonomous social realities.”37 The reality, she argues, is that capitalism has become more of “a total global system” than ever before. Subjection to the “expansionary logic of capitalism” and its coercive market forces is growing. Under Thatcher, class politics is more blatant, more extreme. Drawing from Michael Ruskin in New Left Review, Wood asks whose world-view is given expression in the Manifesto. The answer: those who attempt to manage capitalism in a project of modernization. The new times aren’t new: the Left in retreat always presents itself as capitalist managers. And the Manifesto’s perspective isn’t innovative: it’s capitalism’s own. Retroactively, no one can deny that Wood was right.
In step with the unleashing of the welfare state’s restraints on capital accumulation, views such as Leadbeater’s and Brunt’s came to characterize the “left realism” broadly shared across the Anglo-European Left, theoretically developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and buttressed by cultural studies and post-structuralism (Habermasian critical theory provided the framework for a similar accommodation). As I detail below, left realists accept the market as necessary. They reject revolution, prioritizing democracy and citizenship. In effect, they fear politics, outdoing the Right in their excoriation of twentieth-century communism for its crimes and their disavowal of its successes. Abandoned is anything like communism as a vision of justice. Confining themselves within a limited political field and accepting the state and market as given, left realists embrace the politics of identity: the individual is to be invested with the energy and attention formerly directed toward building the revolutionary people.
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At the moment when capital was acting as a class to break unions, dismantle the welfare state, privatize public services, impose information technologies, transfer industrial production to cheaper labor markets, and facilitate expansions in financial services and capital flow, Marxism Today was trying to figure out how to make socialism attractive rather than how to fight back. Proceeding as if socialism were nothing but another product in a political marketplace, Marxism Today’s perspective on the political and economic challenges facing the Left was determined by a capitalist rather than a communist horizon. It embraced the capitalist appeal to individualism at the very moment when it should have emphasized solidarity and collective strength. Tragically, this embrace helped to shore up the individual form that, as we learn from Lasch, was already self-destructing. It no doubt seemed necessary to many at the time, but this is part of the tragedy. Now we know.
The Pressure Is Killing Me
The intensification of capitalism amplifies pressures on and for the individual. These pressures are political: the individual is called on to express her opinion, speak for herself, get involved. She is told that she, all by herself, can make a dif erence. Her responses to ubiquitous demands for feedback take the place of collective action, rendered as either impossible or too repressive to constitute a real alternative. The pressures on the individual are also economic: even in the absence of significant social mobility, the individual is offered up as the most significant determinant of success or failure. In competitive labor markets, attracting buyers for one’s labor power is a challenge. One has to distinguish oneself to get hired or, for some of us, to maintain the fantasy of something like a fair competition (it would be horrible to think that all that debt was for nothing). No wonder that communicative capitalism enjoins us to uniqueness: we are the product we make of ourselves. At the same time, specialization supports marketeers’ interests in ever more granular access to customers, police efforts to locate and track, and capital’s concern with preventing people from coalescing in common struggle. Identification is inseparable from surveillance, personalization absorbed in commerce. Capitalism’s injunction to individuate is the most powerful weapon in its arsenal.
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The pressures are also psychological, as we have already seen. Franco Berardi highlights the “conquest of internal space, the interior world, the life of the mind” endemic to communicative capitalism.38 Informational intensification and temporal acceleration saturate our attention to “pathological levels.” Berardi associates panic, aggressiveness, depression, and fear with this saturation. He finds symptoms of it in waves of suicide, escalating Viagara use among those with no time for affection, tenderness, and sexual preliminaries, “millions of boxes of Prozac sold every month, the epidemic of attention deficit disorders among youngsters, the diffusion of drugs like Ritalin to school children, and the spreading epidemic of panic.”39 People respond to overload with drugs and technology, trying to do more, be more, keep up and on top, but the pressure is relentless. The more they do, the more they are expected to do. Swamped under the overproduction of signs, the human receiver is overloaded to the point of breakdown.
I agree with much of Berardi’s description, but I want to suggest an alternative approach to the psychopathologies he observes. Drugs, depression, ADHD, and panic are not merely pathologies. They are also defenses. The real pathology is the individual form itself. Drugs attempt to maintain it, keep it going. The individual is pathological in the sense that it is incompatible with its setting, incapable of responding to the pressures it encounters without pain, sacrifice, or violence (psychoanalysis stems from this insight, hence the primacy of castration). The problem of contemporary subjectivity arises not from the extremes of a capitalism that has merged with the most fundamental components of communicativity. It’s not that the saturated, intensified, and unbearably competitive circuits of communicative capitalism are making us depressed, anxious, autistic, and distracted and that we need to find ways to preserve and protect our fragile individualities. Depression, anxiety, autism, and hyperactivity signal the breakdown of a form that has always itself been a problem, a mobilization of processes of individuation and interiorization in a reflexive inward turn that breaks connections and weakens collective strength. The individual form is not under threat. It is the threat. And now it’s weakening.
In Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Sherry Turkle documents some of the ways social media provide relief from individualist expectations. To be sure, she does not describe her findings in terms of such relief. Rather than construing the individual form as a problem, she presents it as a vulnerability in need of protection. So she echoes dominant injunctions to individuality. Nonetheless, her explorations of “networked life and its effects on intimacy and solitude, on identity and privacy” open up paths she doesn’t follow, paths to collectivity.40
Reporting on her interviews with teenagers, Turkle describes young people waiting for connection, fearful of abandonment, and dependent on immediate responses from others even to have feelings. For example, seventeen-year-old Claudia has happy feelings as soon as she starts to text. Unlike a previous generation that might call someone to talk about feelings, when Claudia wants to have a feeling, she sends a text.41 Turkle reports the anxieties people express about face-to-face interactions as well as about expectations associated with the telephone, that is to say, about speaking to another person in real time.42 The multitasking inseparable from contemporary communication, the fact that people may be texting and talking simultaneously, looking at something else while ostensibly listening to their interlocutor, implants an uncertainty as to whether another is even paying attention. Combined with pressures for immediate response and the knowledge that the “internet never forgets” (most of us are unable to eliminate all traces of our digital identities after they’ve been uploaded, archived, and shared), our new intimacy with technology, Turkle demonstrates, is affecting the kinds of selves we become. We experience solitude, privacy, connection, and others differently from how we did before.
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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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