The irony, however, is grossly overstated. Individuality is an aspect of being. Autonomy, while relative, is nevertheless real. All those who are jeering at the idea of individual agency nevertheless take this very same idea for granted in the way that they live their lives. Noone here would simply try to abdicate their own responsibility for making decisions about their own lives. Noone will refuse to say things like "I think ..." or "I decided to ..." or "I felt ..."; nor will they imagine when they say these things that they are simlutaneously speaking for everyone else.
The possible proofs of the relative autonomy of the individual, are many, and I stress that all of us take them for granted: 1. The burden of choice, as described in the existentialist literature for example. None of us feels that others should, or even can, make our difficult choices for us. 2. The phenomenon of originality. We are all aware that we have certain thoughts that the next person does not have; we produce texts and utterances that are in some sense individual (or that we hope are such); and we admire certain thinkers and artists precisely because they have produced things that are distinctive. 3. We differ with other people and we argue and occasionally fight with them, regardless of whether they belong to the same class, culture, creed,'race', nationality or family. This would be utterly inexplicable from the point of view of social thought simply instantiating itself at the individual level. 4. Everybody here relies on the list names that are provided to identify an individual for the purposes of debate, polemic, etc. In fact one venerable member of this list who regularly claims to be among its most anti-individualist gets most irate when it is not clear in a message which lines are attributable to which voice.
For the more academically inclined here is the way that I put it in a paper once (and yes, this was written intentionally against postmodernism in social theory):
"When I use the terms subject and subjectivity, I do not use them in an especially technical sense. But I do wish to draw attention to an intimate relationship that exists between the notions of subjectivity and agency, and to a certain surplus of meaning in these notions that remains unaccounted for by reference to determining forces or structures outside of the individual. In other words, the meaning of subject must be reconcilable with that of self-active agent. It does not seem to be plausible to regard every thought, every agonizing choice, every new idea that occurs to each individual as simply being a product of a known or identifiable social structure or of a socialization process, as one finds in certain anti-humanist doctrines, both marxist and non-marxist. In a substantial recent article, Emirbayer and Mische have pointed out that the iterative dimension of agency is necessarily only one amongst other dimensions, such as those of projectivity and practical evaluation, which lead to both reproduction and transformation of structured environments. The same concern is found abundantly in the philosophy of Roy Bhaskar. By contrast, a notion of subjectivity that posits a relationship of identity between subject and structured environment, i.e. subjectivity as introjection, is one that would abolish subjectivity on the very ground of subjectivity. I do not have space to engage with such views here, with the notoriously difficult philosophical problems that they entail, save to say that they sometimes tend to imply a reduction of subjectivity to a copy or analogue of the dominant ideology within the individual, a view that would render any notion of agency meaningless or any notion of class struggle inexplicable, let alone that of freedom. Rather, the subject here is one that reflects and acts by summoning up whatever internal resources are available * this necessarily includes those deriving from relations with others (‘intersubjectivity’) * to sustain or transform conditions of life. In this proclivity to act subjectivity is seen as productive and not merely iterative or reactive."
I am aware of course that there is an argument to be made against the opposite extreme, the atomism of a Russell for example, but I don't see anyone here making that case, so I'm not arguing against it here.
Tahir
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