The New Individualism

The Emotional Costs of Globalization REVISED EDITION

Anthony Elliott, Prof Charles Lemert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415560696
• eBook ISBN: 9781135260347
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This is a new and revised edition of a book which has had a major impact upon the social sciences and public political debate. Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert's THE NEW INDIVIDUALISM inspired readers with the dramatic suggestion that 'the reinvention craze' - from self-help and therapy culture to management restructurings and corporate downsizings - is central to a 'new individualism' sweeping the globe. Giving particular attention to the narratives of people seeking to define anew their lives in an age of globalization, the authors contend that an endless hunger for instant change and relentless emphasis on self-reinvention is fundamental to grasping the disorientating effects of the new individualism.

This edition contains a substantial new Introduction in which Elliott and Lemert reply to some of the standard criticisms made of the theory of the new individualism, and also addresses the escalation of new individualist thinking in the wake of recent global crises.

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Individualism for beginners

When Caoimhe met Annie somewhere in global space

We who come together in the writing of this book are similar only in superficial aspects. Crudely put, we are both white men of sufficient age and cultural capital to be university professors. As things go in this world that turns out to be a not insignificant degree of similarity. Yet, otherwise, we are astonishingly different. We were born ages as well as continents apart—the one in America, the other in Australia. Even more, the American still lives in the land of his birth, while the Australian lives and works in Britain. These are real differences that in an earlier time would have made the writing of a book together improbable if not impossible. Yet, as it turns out, thanks to the efficiencies of travel and electronic communications, it is neither strange nor especially difficult to join this work.

As it happens, the differences between us, like the similarities, are on balance relatively unimpressive when we compare ourselves to our daughters who are both lovely and of roughly the same young ages. Neither yet is in regular school. Though, by accident of their births, they live an ocean apart, these two little girls know each other, have played and had lunches together, and long after their week together they speak of each other. Yet they are different, or so we suppose, in some basic ways that people of our older generations are unlikely to have thought possible. Caoimhe is the daughter of an Australian father and an Irish mother who met in Cambridge, England. Already before she could utter words with a lovely trace of the Gaelic of her given name, Caoimhe had passed a good many months of her life in Dublin, as well as England, and of course in Australia too. Anna Julia, the older of the two (and the one who never finished her lunch) has been away from America but once—and this on the occasion when she got to know Caoimhe; and this by virtue of a plane trip of such unbearable duration that her parents have since vowed never again to attempt such a thing until Annie is able or willing to sit still for more than a few minutes. Anna Julia, thus, would be a bit of a homebody by contrast to her young friend, were it not for the fact that Anna Julia has as many parents as Caoimhe has grandparents and familiar countries. Anna Julia, it happens, is beautifully browned as a result of having been born to a very white birth mom and an obviously quite black birth dad. She will never know her bio-dad, or so we assume, but she will know her bio-mom whose photo she keeps in her room. Yet her parents—those whom she calls mom and dad—are Charles and Geri, both quite white, as well as quite taken by their daughter. As a result of the beautiful accident of her birth and adoption, Anna Julia may turn out to be no more a homebody than Caoimhe. Both girls will have to travel many miles over the course of their lives in order to discover and rediscover, then to decide how to feel about, their oddly disjointed places and occasions of origin. It may be that they will travel by different means—the one more by air across the global surfaces, the other on some interior plane across the emotional life. Both will take both kinds of trips, even if one logs more discount miles with the airlines.

How different, then, are Caoimhe and Anna Julia from their parents, much less from each other? In all times and places, parents have asked themselves this question. The answer, if it can be found at all, is not of course in the once exceptional, but now common, experiences of being brought up English to an Australian dad and an Irish mom, in Caoimhe’s case; or of being brought up African-American by two American whites, in Annie’s. Though once less common than today such international or interracial families, whether formed by adoption or the old-fashioned way, are not all that unusual. Certainly, they are not so beyond the pale of human understanding that their parents, or even their grandparents and other elders of the tribe, could not conceive of the circumstances of the unions and rearings-up that brought them into being. If the children just now coming into the world turn out to be different from any other previous generation of children, it will not be because of the exceptional arrangements that gave them life. Whatever else makes them different from other animals, human beings seem more able than the rest of their biological kingdom to vary, sometimes oddly, the particulars of their arrangements for birth and life, not to mention death. Exceptions always abound.

So, then, what causes two white men of professed if not proven intelligence to think that the generation of these two girls of the newest generation just might be different from children of all or most other generations of the species? The answer is that they, like a good many of their generation of experts on the human conditions, think it is likely that, in some basic ways, the world into which today’s children are born is different in kind from any other recent world of human experience. At first, this may sound like a well-worn truism of little compelling value. Hardly anyone who thinks about it, whether parent or expert or otherwise, can fail to see that the speed of travel, the ease of communication, the multicultural politics of the world, the new transnational economic markets, and much more, have made the world either compellingly better or tragically worse (this accordingly to differences of experience). What we, as parents of small children, trouble ourselves with is not this, so much as something vastly more urgent—a something so different that, at the least, we wonder if it is possible any longer for our daughters to become individuals of the albeit different kind their fathers have become. And if not that, strange as it may seem to put it this way, will our daughters still become human beings in roughly the same way that previous generations of human beings have been what they supposed they are meant to be?

The simple, if scantily remarked upon, fact is that who and what we are as individuals is always, and necessarily, a consequence of the worlds in which we grow up. To be an individual is to be the product of experience with a generous company of other individuals. Individualism, if such a basic fact of life can be an ‘ism’, is never utterly the effect of what one does with oneself. Individualism, in other words, is not a ‘private matter’ or a ‘personal dilemma’, since what millions of men and women discover daily is that fashionings of the self cannot be performed outside of relations with others, who, given that they too are preoccupied with themselves, are remarkably cooperative.

If you are indeed a proper member of the European diaspora—of, that is, those social groups that are often called the ‘West’ and those parts of the world influenced by Western culture—you might want to say at this point: ‘So what’s new about individualism?’ Complicated perhaps, but obvious. We are both individuals and social at the same time. We live and work in the day time with any number of rude, kind, sloppy, neat, appealing, obnoxious people; yet at the end of the day we fall asleep alone, even when there is someone beside us. And even during the waking hours, we spend a good bit of time in our own reveries—daydreaming on the subway, thinking of how we’d like to look while shopping, taking note of what others see when we are walking down the street alone, and more—even then we are preoccupied with our ‘selves’ while contending with others and what they, even strangers, may be thinking of us. We may be wrong to overestimate the extent to which anyone else, even those we live with, actually and truly care about us. But we are not wrong to take note that how we feel about who we are is very much caught up with what others just might think of us, were they paying attention. Still, turn over the coin of the obvious and you’ll see something else. If the individual is somehow a product of his relations with others, then it stands to reason that whichever others in whatever kind of social combinations makes all the difference in the world as to whom we might be or become.

Why people think of themselves as possessing an enduring core of being—a ‘Self’, with a capital S—is a matter of history. When moderns felt that the doctrine of the Soul was a bit too religious for secular company, the idea of Self came into being. And, as people once thought of themselves as having an eternal Soul, so too did modern individuals in the West come to think of themselves as having a unique Self with all the qualities that once were attributed to the Soul. But if individuals admit that their Selves are somehow a result of their social interactions, then it stands to reason that a Self can never be a once-and-for-all thing. This because it is obvious that societies change over time (even in the time of individual lives), and that individuals move from place to place and thus expose themselves to different social influences. Moderns travel. And travel involves new social encounters, which in turn are liable to affect us deeply. More than a few middle-aged people take a weekend in the Cotswolds or the coast of Maine and decide to give up life as a stockbroker and become an innkeeper. More than a few students travel to Africa during college and decide to quit their economics studies and become sociologists of international development. More than a few lonely housewives fall in love with someone down the street, travel emotionally into another emotional world, and decide to give up the husband to go live with somebody else. On it goes.

So, the question we ask is simply: Since everyone seems to think the world as we knew it once is passing away, then how does this affect who we are as individuals (or whether or not it is possible to ‘be’ an individual at all)? We dare to write of our daughters, not because we are preoccupied with them (which we are) but because it is evident that, as the world turns in time, they were born to a day when their futures will present very different social challenges than those either of us encountered when we, at different times, were young.

Are the emotional costs of the new individualism already upon us?

Kelly’s attempt to negotiate the culture of our new individualism, sketched in the Introduction, gives a very powerful indication not only of the potentially severe emotional costs of globalization but equally of the future-orientated mentality demanded by this method of living. How do I look today, and how might this measure up to how I will be judged according to my looks tomorrow? Fortunately, it will be a while before our daughters begin to worry about their looks in quite this way—about, that is, how they wish they would be seen as women in the world that will have already told them how a woman ought to look. They may or may not be caught in the vicious circle that led Kelly from a doubt about her already fine feminine figure to a series of tragic remakings of her body that had the effect of an addiction that had the further and ever more tragic effect of cutting her off from the very world from which she drew the odd conclusion that an already beautiful woman ought to look somehow different—better according to an impossible-to-achieve bodily perfection.

Will Annie and Caoimhe become Kellys? As fathers we hope not. As fathers who think about what the worlds are becoming, we cannot be sure. At the time of our retelling of her story, Kelly was 23. At the time of their first encounter in Bristol, Annie and Caoimhe were more or less twenty years younger. In the course of their generation into womanhood the global worlds will, we presume, continue to spin and turn in many of the same directions as they were shortly after the beginning of a new century. What will happen in the course of those two decades in the lives of all people, young and old, alive when the planes crashed into the Twin Towers, is no more than a larger version of the question we ask of the futures of our children. Or, more directly said, the way people wonder about their futures is not so much in the abstract as in the concrete of their feelings and concerns as to what the future will bring for them and those they love. Let the philosophers worry about the meaning of time and its futures. Let parents worry all the more seriously about what the world holds for those dear ones they hold when, years from now, we can no longer hold them as now we do.

It is possible to know the past, even to have a confident idea as to what is going on in the present. But the future is beyond us in more ways than one. To the extent that we think about it we think about it with feelings. The future is a space of hopes and fears—thus the only human space that is filled less with facts and events than with our emotions. In a hard-headed culture where people are taught to think and speak in respect for the facts, it is sometimes difficult to accept that the emotions are every bit as real in their effects as are the facts. If anything they are more real, not less, because facts must be argued and proved, while emotions just are what they are. To have a child at any time is to be filled with emotions that sustain life—the love we feel for them (a love that dwarfs the power of the fabled romantic love that may have brought forth the child in the first place) can be ever renewing. Parents are brought to life by it even when they are weary from feedings in the middle of the night or troubled by children’s cuts and bruises. Though it sometimes works otherwise, children are born to the parents who bear them and who in turn are reborn. Such a feeling when it is available and embraced is an emotional state that pays benefits again and again.

But, sadly, there are as many occasions when the emotions are costly. Sadder still is the fact that the same children who give us life compounded out of the life we give them can be the occasion for emotional debts so grave as to take it all away. We refer here not so much to the extreme cases of parents who turn abusive because they were abused or, even, to other of the routine examples of depression and violence that occur all too often. Rather, we have in mind the ways that beneficial love can be decimated by a terrible turn in the global facts of human life. Love of children (or any other beneficial emotion) must always be measured against the risks that could take away the worlds in which our emotions are structured and made possible.

‘Globalization’ is a word for the worlds the final nature of which we will not know until our girls are themselves full of figure. But to the extent that we use it now we ought to use it cautiously as a way of talking about a change in the larger, perhaps the largest, social structures in which and against which all of us must live. If there is any universal us it is the us of those who, today, and for the foreseeable future, must face uncertain prospects brought on by the speed and unpredictability of global transformations. What in 20 years time, any 20 years from any now, will turn out to be risks or promises of life with the mass of social others is a prospect about which we can only feel—feel with information to be sure, but feel. And, in this regard, as the we of the all that must live on the globalizing island have good reason to feel that we and our children—all those we love and all those we loathe—face as many risks as we do assurances. The very prospect of so uncertain a prospect is itself costly. The one great advantage of the modern world that stretched from about 1500 to 1991 was that, at least for those in secure positions, there was a prevailing faith in progress—hence in the likelihood that, as miserable as things may be now, there would be a better day.

When some talk about the end of modernity they’d do well to speak precisely of the loss of the promise of modern progress. We simply do not know what any future will bring, but certainly not the future in which global encounters so invade the local and personal, even intimate corners of the soul and body, that we are vulnerable in ways that 20 years and more before the new century few would have imagined possible. Yes, of course, over the centuries women bound their feet, forced their tummies into corsets, buttressed their bosoms, and much else. But only in past years do women seek to have their bodies cut and remade, in search of an ideal new individualism. And let us not forget the men who drug themselves in the search for more prominent biceps. The promptings for such decisions, we contend, go back to childhood, to the deepest hopes and dreads experienced during the very earliest years of self-definition.

Children are increasingly identified with the cultural gains of techno-literacy. This is, at any rate, what adults in the polished expensive cities of the world—overcommitted, overstretched, and generally time-poor—tend to think about the young today. So, typically, today’s generation of technokids are viewed as the product of a subsiding of industrial social structures and the increased flexibility of new information and communication technologies. The more yesterday’s world of solid social structures dissolves, linked as this dissolution is to a communications revolution which bites deeply into the fabric of daily life, the more it falls to the next generation to embrace the new technologies, to figure out the latest techno-gadgets and their myriad uses.

In a 2005 survey collated by ChildWise, a market research agency specializing in young people, an eye-opening picture emerged of children’s access to the latest techno-gadgets. Mobile phones, MP3 players, DVDs, Net-surfing, texting: this list is what shapes the present condition of childhood, certainly in the UK according to ChildWise and perhaps increasingly in the postmodern West. According to this survey of school children in England, 13 per cent of 5- and 6-year-olds and 24 per cent of 7- and 8-year-olds now possess a mobile phone. These figures rise to 58 per cent among those aged 10, 89 per cent of those aged 12, 93 per cent among those aged 14, and 95 per cent for those 15 and over. This picture of rapidly escalating mobile phone use by the very young is, in effect, repeated with other forms of technology. To list just two of the more noteworthy from ChildWise, a third of children under the age of 11 have DVD players in their bedrooms, and one in ten has an MP3 digital player. Cultural reactions to these statistics are interesting, precisely because to date there seems to be a neat divide between the positive and negative. For the positive camp, this generation of technokids are to be welcomed in terms of useful future employment skills. Computerization and the knowledge society demands techno-literacy, and so the sooner children get to grips with the new technologies the better. For the negative camp, such an upbeat interpretation of these figures can only be maintained if divorced from social context. That is to say, the pessimists worry that techno-literacy achieved in childhood is purchased at the cost of a loss of interpersonal maturity due to premature withdrawal from family intimacies. Technokids are, in short, anti-social, or at least asocial; individuals ill-formed and social members ill-equipped.

Whether anxiety that technology is leading the young to become anti-social is misplaced is hard to say. Similarly it is impossible to say, with any degree of certainty, whether the techno-literacy of young people today really will render them tomorrow’s useful employees. But what does arise for consideration, surely, is the issue of how today’s imbrication of technology, information and communications alters or transforms not only how we experience our sense of identity and individualism but the very process—at once social and emotional—by which young people come to think of themselves as individuals. In this respect it is clear that the communications revolution and new technology wear away at embedded social structures as well as traditional ways of doing things. Technology penetrates to the core of human experience, turning people’s emotional exchanges into units of information, as the latest holiday snaps are compressed to jpeg files and emailed around the planet in seconds and the most private, intimate biographical details are routinely typed on-line in order to go Internet dating.

Sociologists the world over have been preoccupied with the conditions and consequences of advanced technology as regards our social and personal lives in recent decades. The advent of the term ‘information age’ has been one outcome in the contemporary sociological imagination, as specialists in the field have sought to map the impact of global communication flows on the textures of everyday social life. French social critic Jean Baudrillard argues that our globalized era of mass communications and brilliant technology has ushered in mediated simulations of reality as never before. Perhaps more than any other theorist of the information age, Baudrillard captures how flows of communication, information, images, ideas and ideologies pervade every aspect of daily life—from digital and satellite television to mobile phones and the Internet. Central to this analysis of the information society is a shift from modernist understandings of reality to a postmodern conceptualization of simulated reality, or of what Baudrillard calls ‘hyper-reality’. The age of the hyper-real, he contends, ‘begins with a liquidation of all references’. What he means to say is not simply that reality is mediated (which, to varying degrees, is true of all societies) but that our worlds today are saturated by media simulation. Military violence as outstripped by the globalization of terror and terrorism; sexuality as outflanked in the pornography of silicone and hard sex; fashion as raised to the second power with supermodels: media simulation for Baudrillard ‘implodes’ the world it seeks to represent. In consequence, life in a world of round-the-clock mass media is one in which people experience, struggle, and try to cope with signs of the real.

In a world in which fleeting signs of the real issuing from televisual media are the central building blocks of identities that are of themselves fractured and split, nothing holds for long. The world ‘as shown on TV’ is one of flickering, simulated events, disposable products, fantasmatic places, sanitized information and addictive signifiers. This is the world that the next generation accesses, and evidently with increasing ease, with the aid of the latest technologies. The extent to which individualism is grounded in new ways as a result of these technological developments is key to grasping the dilemmas of identity that the young now face the world over.

Childhood, identity and the sense of emotional freedom

Shrieks of delight can be heard from the upstairs landing. Running, giggling, laughter: the unrestrained happiness of childhood. It appears from all this noise that Caoimhe and Annie have become interested, indeed fascinated, with something. For the parents, suspicion abounds. What are they up to now? Whatever it is, we check. Our own ways of knowing pleasure link us, instinctively, to our children. And we know that such noisy pleasure probably spells trouble.

News of minor traumas travels fast on the domestic front, and this time is no exception; it filters through to us from upstairs that a lamp in Caoimhe’s bedroom has been knocked over. With parents arriving on the scene, both Caoimhe and Annie stare at the lamp on the floor. What happened? Who did this? As if grasping the complex links between transgression, punishment and guilt, both look sheepish. ‘Don’t know’, murmurs Caoimhe. Annie runs off. Caoimhe follows. Happily, the lamp isn’t broken. Happily, Caoimhe and Annie don’t care. Minor traumas are habitual work for parents.

Childhood is the art of making the world anew out of the world as we find it. We don’t choose our parents, but we do make something with and out of them—through unconscious desire, attachment, creativity and symbol formation. So what are we to make of Caoimhe’s little white lie, of her not quite true but not alarming false account of ordinary events? One thing we might make of it is that it is...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction to the Revised Edition
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Individualism for beginners: When Caoimhe met Annie somewhere in global space
• 2 Was the free individual just a dream?: Snapshots of individualism and the illusion of the good society
• 3 Living in a privatized world: Coping with globalization
• 4 On the individualist arts of sex: Intimacy, eroticism and the newly lost individual
• 5 The self and other ethical troubles: Ethics, social differences and the truths of multiculturalism
• 6 Surviving the new individualism: Living aggressively in deadly worlds
• Notes on selected individuals
• Bibliography and further reading