On Sat, 10 Sep 2005, Lionel Mandrake wrote:
> Our culture isn't hyperindividualist. It's atomized.
> There's a difference. Modern capitalism is largely
> fueled by individuals' sense of inadequacy in relation
> to others and faith in work and consumption as means
> to resolving this inadequacy. People with a strong,
> independent sense of self and a coherent, relatively
> inflexible set of ethics, predicated for the most part
> on empathy, are less easily manipulated into jumping
> through capitalism's hoops.
>
No, capitalism needs and helps generate people with an "independent sense of self"! How could businesses survive if no one took initiative, engaged in creative thinking, had personal motivation to develop skills and knowledge, and so on? I know we'd like to draw a clear distinction between the "atomized" individual of capitalism and a person with a truly "independent sense of self", but it's just not there: capitalism needs individuals in the sense you celebrate.
This is a common theme--capitalism is an imposition upon the solitary individual, and solitary individuals with "inflexible" morals obstruct the capitalist social order. I like Foucault on this: social relations produce the types of people who are needed by a given social order. This includes the modern concept of the individual that is often valorized in our society. Thus our Emersonian odes to self-reliance and personal ethics are themselves social products. I love the paradox here: people celebrate individuality because they live in a society that requires it, and then they treat their own beliefs and values as the result of individual reflection!
The individual--even an independent person with empathy!-- is a product of a constellation of social relations.
Miles