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Nothing Personal
Jodi Dean
The era of communicative capitalism is an era of commanded individuality. The command circulates in varying modes. Each is told, repeatedly, that she is unique and encouraged to cultivate this uniqueness. We learn to insist on and enjoy our difference, intensifying processes of self-individuation. No one else is like us (like me). The “do-it-yourself” injunction is so unceasing that “taking care of oneself” appears as politically significant instead of as a symptom of collective failure – we let the social safety net unravel – and economic contraction, in a viciously competitive job market we have no choice but to work on ourselves, constantly, just to keep up. Required to find out, decide, and express it all ourselves, we construe political collectivity as nostalgia for the impossible solidarities of a different era. The second-wave feminist idea that the “personal is political” has become twisted into the presumption that the political is personal: how does this affect me?
Individualism has not always been so intense and unmitigated. As Jefferson Cowie (2010) details in his history of the United States in the 1970s, “reformed and diversified individualisms” undermined class-based approaches to economic rights over the course of the decade.1 This chapter takes up the assault on collectivity. Looking at shifts in commanded individuality from the 1970s to the present, I highlight the enormous strains placed on the individual as it becomes the overburdened remainder of dismantled institutions and solidarities – the survivor. I revisit Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979), marking the ways capitalist processes simultaneously promote the individual as the primary unit of capitalism and unravel the institutions of solidaristic support on which this unit depends. Putting later sociologists in conversation with Lasch, I draw out the limits of Lasch’s account. Even as Lasch’s descriptions of celebrity culture, competition, and consumerism still resonate, individualism is today less an indication of narcissism than it is of psychosis. The last sections of the chapter find possibilities of collectivity in the ruptures of the fragile individual form. With help from Elias Canetti’s (1984) indispensable study of crowds, I introduce the power of the many and the relief it provides from the unbearable demand for individuality. This chapter aims to dislodge from left thinking the individualism that serves as an impasse to left politics.
Two commercials illustrate the celebration of personal uniqueness characteristic of communicative capitalism. Both are for soft drinks. Both, in different ways, engage the limits conditioning the very individuality that they command.
On January 9, 2012, Dr Pepper announced a new advertising campaign, “Always One of a Kind.” The campaign’s first commercial features hundreds of people in red T-shirts with white lettering converging in a crowd to march down streets and through a park. The T-shirts have slogans like “I’m One of a Kind,” “I’m a Cougar,” “I’m a Fighter,” and “I’m a Pepper” (one of Dr Pepper’s earlier slogans). The accompanying music is a cover of the 1968 Sammy Davis, Jr. hit “I’ve Gotta Be Me.” According to the press release accompanying the campaign’s launch, the red T-shirt wearers are Dr Pepper fans “proudly showing off their own original expressions on T-shirts describing what makes them unique and different from the rest of the crowd.”2 In the optimistic words of the company’s director of marketing, the campaign “should serve as a catalyst for expressing originality and being authentically you.” Dr Pepper also offered fans the “opportunity to express their originality by ordering their own ‘Always One of a Kind’ T-shirts on DrPepper.com.”
Putting aside the designation of customers as “fans,” the targeted demographic appears to be people who want to express their uniqueness. The commercial hails them as individuals, inviting them to identify with particular slogans and identities. Within Dr Pepper’s commercial imaginary, going to the streets isn’t collective rage; it’s individual self-expression, an opportunity to assert one’s individuality and stand out. Crowds are that against which individuals define themselves. The Dr Pepper Brand, in this imaginary, is a natural continuation of primary urges to establish unique identities, a helpful, vital supplement for the crucial task of distinguishing oneself from others.
The commercial’s presumption that people need support in expressing their originality – an authenticity catalyst of the kind a T-shirt might provide – gives it an ironic inflection. Augmented through the retro turn to Sammy Davis, Jr., the irony of expressing one’s authenticity via a branded soft drink invites another identificatory twist: are you like the crowd of those who really think that Dr Pepper T-shirts make you unique, or does your capacity to get the joke, to recognize that originality necessarily exceeds any branded media image, make you different from, even superior to, the rest of the crowd? The fact that some of the slogans are reappropriations of offensive labels – “cougar” and “mamma’s boy,” for instance – opens up this alternative. The wearers of these shirts are unique in their strength, confident enough to assert the labels, to own them. Thus, a further irony: their courage is amplified by the crowd. The energy of the commercial, its feel, comes less from what’s written on the T-shirts (the majority of which can’t be read) than from the sea of red that carries people along. The celebration of difference and creativity comes from the enthusiasm of a crowd where people march shoulder to shoulder, pumping their fists and taking confidence in their collectivity. Even as collectivity as a trope is coopted into the service of amplifying individual courage, the fact of, the need for, this amplification cuts through the individualist message as it acknowledges the power of the crowd.
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.
“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” (Moye 2014). 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 find cans and bottles with the names of themselves and their friends, photograph them, and share them online.
In 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 self-expression, less viral marketing than free product placement in the intimate moments of everyday life.
When 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.
Individualism without Individuals
The injunction to individuality is so ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget its histories and modulations (Seigel 2005). 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.
Lasch’s influential book The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations presents an individualism that has self-destructed. Appearing in 1979, the book highlights the rise of a therapeutic sensibility. The economic man of the nineteenth century “has given way to the psychological man of our times – the final product of bourgeois individualism” (Lasch 1979, p. xvi). For Lasch, the preoccupations with self, authenticity, and personal growth that became prevalent over the course of the 1970s are symptomatic of an individualism collapsing in on itself as commanded individuality struggles to realize the ever-increasing expectations coming to burden it.
Lasch describes his critique of the therapeutic individual as “radical,” even as he shares conservative concerns with the weakening of the family and the rise of dependency. This overlap is worth noting. Not only does it point toward an increasing convergence among critics of the basic institutions of the welfare state, but it also indexes the common object of their concern: the fragile individual. The difference between Lasch’s analysis and the conservative critique of welfare liberalism consists in their targets. Where conservatives attack the bureaucracy of the welfare state, Lasch attacks the bureaucracy of the corporation. He expands this attack into a full assault on the broader impact of corporate culture on American life. Lasch’s innovation stems from his diagnosis of the “me decade’s” preoccupation with psychic health as a symptom of the more fundamental intellectual and political bankruptcy of welfare state capitalism’s liberal paternalism. The end of the individual in narcissistic hedonism and aggression is the outgrowth of capitalism, inclusive of and exacerbated by the liberal welfare state. Capitalism’s own injunctions to individuality overburden and undermine the individual form.
Locating changes in the individual in the context of political and economic change, Lasch contrasts the narcissistic personality of the twentieth century with the rugged individual of the nineteenth century. His vision of the nineteenth-century American psyche (clearly an ideological figure or organizing motif) comes from the settler colonialism of the frontier. The pioneer fights to tame the West, to subdue nature, and eliminate the native threat. This fight requires an attendant internal battle: domination over more immediate appetites and impulses. Lasch writes:
Through compulsive industry and relentless sexual repression, nineteenth-century US Americans achieved a fragile triumph over the id. The violence they turned against the Indians and against nature originated not in unrestrained impulse but in the white Anglo-Saxon superego, which feared the wildness of the West because it objectified the wildness within each individual.
(p. 10)
He continues, “Capital accumulation in its own right sublimated appetite and subordinated the pursuit of self-interest to the service of future generations.” The frontier American is egoistic and brutal, this brutality tied to a self-constraint on behalf of civilized community. Violence is channeled, put to internal as well as external use.
Lasch positions the corporation as the twentieth-century parallel to the frontier. In contrast to the fierce and rugged pioneers fighting for survival, seventies Americans are stuck in a boring, ordered, and banal society. Because the struggle for success has replaced the struggle to survive, they have lost the capacity to desire. Nonetheless Americans in the seventies seethe with an inner rage that bureaucratic society and its injunction to cheerful getting along prevents them from expressing the violent forces of the id, now lacking an outlet.
Lasch uses the “executive” as a figure for twentieth-century narcissism. Unlike the “organization man” associated with mid-century American anxiety about conformism, Lasch’s executive is the bureaucratic “gamesman.” Seeking competitive advantage, the gamesman wants to get ahead of everyone else. He values quickness and mobility. He construes power in terms of momentum. He replaces craftsmanship with socials skills that involve seducing, humiliating, and manipulating others. The gamesman doesn’t interiorize rules as socially valid norms; he experiences both work and personal relations as power struggles. Bureaucratic emphases on rules and cooperation couple with personal exceptionalism – rules don’t apply to me. The gamesman thus looks for ways to exploit conventions for his own benefit. “Activities ostensibly undertaken purely for enjoyment often have the real object of doing others in” (p. 66). A friendly demeanor, an air of compassion, and an open, participatory approach to decision-making all conceal a power game that the majority will lose.
The sense that a game is being played extends beyond the corporation. The lower orders, Lasch writes:
internalize a grandiose idea of the opportunities open to all, together with an inflated opinion of their own capacities. If the lowly man resents those more highly placed, it is only because he suspects them of grandly violating the regulations of the game, as he would like to do himself if he dared. It never occurs to him to insist on a new set of rules.
(p. 186)
The “lowly man” acquiesces uneasily to expectations of friendly cooperation, suppressing dissatisfaction into a growing emptiness.
Lasch’s psychoanalytic explanation for the rise of the narcissistic personality highlights changes in the paternal function. Unlike the materially self-sufficient frontier family, the family in the second half of the twentieth century depends on help and advice from experts. Whether as medical and therapeutic child-rearing guidance or educational and juridical intervention in the domestic sphere, expertise dislodges symbolic patriarchal authority. This dislodging continues broader patterns associated with industrial development, more specifically with the separation of production and reproduction, the distancing of children from labor, and the diminution of opportunities for fathers to teach the technical skills associated with their work directly to their children. The father’s absence “encourages the development of a harsh and punitive superego based largely on archaic images of the parents, fused with grandiose self-images” (p. 178). The child doesn’t identify with parents; it introjects them, holding itself up to idealized standards and punishing itself for failing to achieve them. Put in Lacanian terms, the change in the paternal function is a decline in authority such that the symbolic law can no longer provide a site of relief from superegoic demands (Žižek 1999, pp. 322–334).
The decline of symbolic authority in liberal therapeutic society induces cultural narcissism. Welfare capitalism’s bureaucratic rationality replaces the previous era’s hierarchy with administrators, technicians, and experts. The struggle to succeed within the confines of the corporate bureaucratic game takes the place of survival under frontier conditions. Rather than having symbolic authority, experts and administrators have knowledge. This knowledge is generally contestable and provisional: experts disagree; what a bureaucrat knows may not be useful. The culture of technocratic expertise and management absolves individuals of responsibility, making everyone a victim of sickness or circumstance. More broadly, narcissistic culture infantilizes by promoting dependence on the paternalist bureaucracies of welfare liberalism (corporation and state) and at the same time encouraging the pursuit of pleasure. The narcissistic person admires the strong and rich – celebrities – for their independence, their capacity to do and have whatever they want. Mass media encourages the fascination with celebrity, amplifying the narcissist’s tendency to divide society into two groups: winners and losers, the great and the crowd. Self-fulfillment and hedonism are celebrated, yet unsatisfying and, increasingly, unattainable. In response, people absorb themselves in a search for authenticity, their skepticism toward the falsity of mass culture’s manufactured illusions manifesting as an ironic detachment that further distances them from meaningful connections with others.
What Lasch diagnoses as pathological or secondary narcissism is a reactive individuality that accompanies changes in capitalist society associated with mass production and consumption. When consumption is a way of life, work need not be meaningful, fair, or morally necessary (as a previous generation held). Instead, the purpose of work is acquisition. Consumption solves all problems, fills all needs. Rather than postponing pleasure, consumerism enjoins gratification now. The concomitant growth in management and proliferation of technicians, experts, and knowledge professionals presents “new forms of capitalist control, which established themselves first in the factory and then spread throughout society” (p. 235). Having lost its role in production, the family is stripped of its role in reproduction as its social tasks either become matters in need of expert intervention or reducible to problems solved by the right commodities. The effect of these developments is a realization of the logic of capitalism such that “the pursuit of self-interest, formerly identified with the rational pursuit of gain and the accumulation of wealth, has become a search for pleasure and psychic survival” (p. 69). The result, which Lasch says was already foreseen by the Marquis de Sade, is ...
