The New Individualism

Corporate networking, compulsive consumerism, plastic surgery, therapeutic tribulations, instant identity makeovers and reality TV: welcome to life in our increasingly individualized world. In this dazzling book, Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert explore the culture of the ‘new individualism’ generated by global capitalism, and develop a major new perspective on people’s emotional experiences of globalization. The New Individualism offers fascinating, but disturbing, accounts of people struggling to cope with a new individualism reshaping the world today. There is Larry, a high-tech executive ‘emotionally wrecked by success’; there is Ruth, a married woman in her late ﬁfties, typing real-time erotica in cyberspace; there is Norman, a recovering drug addict infected with HIV, reinventing himself by accepting the deadly worlds for what they are; and Caoimhe and Annie, two little girls only beginning to explore the disorientating effects of the new individualism. This book powerfully cuts against the grain of current orthodoxies that view globalization as corrosive of private life. Elliott and Lemert argue that today’s worlds are not only risky but deadly. Yet there is hope, the authors contend, beyond the complexities. Anthony Elliott is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Flinders University, Australia and Visiting Research Professor at the Open University, UK. His recent books, all published by Routledge, include Contemporary Social Theory: An Introduction (2009), The Routledge Companion to Social Theory (2010) and Globalization (2010). Charles Lemert is John C. Andrus Professor of Sociology at Wesleyan University, USA. His recent books include Thinking the Unthinkable (2007), Social Theory (4th edition, 2009) and Globaliza- tion (2010). ‘An inspiring book.’ Professor Ulrich Beck, British Journal of Sociology

‘According to Charles Lemert and Anthony Elliott . . . globalization is transforming “the emotional textures of individualism”. In so diag- nosing the emotional discontents and demanding possibilities of the postmodern world, this wide-ranging book draws on social theorists from Jean Baudrillard to Ulrich Beck and psychoanalysts from Jacques Lacan to Julia Kristeva.’ American Journal of Sociology

‘This thought-provoking book is essential reading for social scientists.’ Journal of Sociology

‘This is a weak book’ Professor George Ritzer, Canadian Journal of Sociology

‘In ﬂagging up the reality of “many incommensurable worlds” The New Individualism [goes] beyond the grand theorizations of Giddens, Beck and others . . . [An] invaluable excursion into the categorization of multiple realities.’ Theory, Culture and Society

‘Doing “macro” sociological theory through biography is one of the achievements of Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert’s The New Individualism. An intriguing analytic strategy pursued by Elliott and Lemert is the elision of the boundary between sociological and everyday biography.’ Thesis Eleven

‘The New Individualism is undoubtedly a major statement in contemporary theory, and one that takes the innovative approach of studying global transformations and the fate of the modern ideal of individualism using the analytic of emotion.’ International Journal of Baudrillard Studies

‘This book is a stimulating and interesting read. The authors’ dis- tinction between three “new individualisms” provides clarity, and helps the reader to understand better the links between individualism and the current context of globalization. Their focus on the mechanics and impacts of globalizing social forces on the emotional lives of individuals is also distinctive and important. They provide powerful and convincing accounts of people’s struggles with these key issues, and engage energetically with sticky normative questions about how individuals might cope. For all of these reasons, The New Individualism comes recommended.’ Journal of Social Policy ‘The authors have drawn together and synthesized a huge body of social science literature that has accumulated on the subject of individualism over the last two centuries and they offer an extremely scholarly analysis of recent trends. The book is an enjoyable and informative read. It is highly recommended.’ Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare ‘An engagingly written volume.’ The Sociological Review ‘In The New Individualism Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert have infused high theory with a sense of what it means for everyday life. Blending a discussion of theory with case histories they take us into the heart of the contemporary dilemmas of globalization, and the growing inequalities – and awareness of these inequalities – that create a growing sense of unease within even the most prosperous of societies. This is an important contribution to the sociology of a world marked both by increasing fear and unprecedented consumption.’ Dennis Altman, Professor of Politics, LaTrobe University. Author of Global Sex and Gore Vidal’s America ‘Bringing sociology down to earth the authors force us to confront the disturbing consequences of the new individualism. A powerful account of the implosion of private life.’ Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology, University of Kent at Canterbury. Author of Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability In An Anxious Age ‘The New Individualism provides us with an original analysis of what is happening to our day-to-day life, and therefore our psyches, under globalization [ . . . ] Clearly written and well argued, this book will provide an important tool for anyone struggling to come to terms with our complex world.’ Drucilla Cornell, Professor of Political Science, Women and Gender Studies and Comparative Literature, Rutgers University. The New Individualism The Emotional Costs of Globalization

Revised edition

Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Revised edition ﬁrst published 2009 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2006, 2009 Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0-203-86570-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0–415–56069–1 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–415–56070–5 (pbk) ISBN10: 0–203–86570–7 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–56069–6 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–56070–2 (pbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–86570–5 (ebk) To Noah and Oscar, brothers to Annie and Caoimhe, who by the grace of life’s chances are themselves of different times and places – and to Matthew who left these dangerous worlds

Contents

Introduction to the Revised Edition xi Acknowledgements xxix

Introduction 1 1 Individualism for beginners When Caoimhe met Annie somewhere in global space 17 2 Was the free individual just a dream? Snapshots of individualism and the illusion of the good society 43 3 Living in a privatized world Coping with globalization 79 4 On the individualist arts of sex Intimacy, eroticism and the newly lost individual 107 5 The self and other ethical troubles Ethics, social differences and the truths of multiculturalism 133 6 Surviving the new individualism Living aggressively in deadly worlds 159

Notes on selected individuals 197 Bibliography and further reading 201 Index 215

Introduction to the Revised Edition

Some years have now passed since this book was first published. Yet it is a symptom of our times that what seems a good while in the past turns out to be, in this case, but a moment. We began conversations that led to the book early in the 2000s. The book appeared in 2006 and now, as we consider it afresh, the century is already a decade old. The times through which individuals, separately or well gathered, move are fast, to be sure, but they are more than that. Time flies in strange uneven circles. The new individualism, as we originally defined it, comprises four core dimensions: a relentless emphasis on self-reinvention; an endless hunger for instant change; a preoccupation with short-termism and episodicity; and a fascination with speed and dynamism. Our argument, broadly speaking, is that the new individualism can be deciphered from the culture in which people live their lives today – especially (but not only) those living in the polished, expensive cities of the West. Corporate networking, short-term project work, organizational downsizing, self-help manuals, compulsive consumerism, cybersex, instant identity makeovers and therapy culture: these are just some of the core features of global individualist culture, and throughout the book we developed the argument that immersion in such a world carries profound emotional consequences for people’s private and public lives. The academic and public impact of the book was, to us, surprising. Though we are both ambitious for our writing projects, neither of us supposed The New Individualism xii INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED EDITION might achieve the kind of robust consideration that has come its way. Scholarly colleagues from many corners of the academic world – from sociology to management studies, from political science to cultural studies – have read it. Many liked it a lot, some did not. More to the point of our surprise, the book struck some kind of a nerve in the world beyond the academy. From commercial breakfast television in Britain to the editorial pages of The Irish Times, from radio talk-back in Australia to late night current affairs on BBC World Service, our thesis that a new individualism is sweeping the globe was debated, dissected and decon- structed. In the tabloid pages of the UK’s Daily Mail and the pages of The Sydney Morning Herald, the book attracted some sharp critiques – some positive, others very critical. We arose at inconvenient night hours to suit the convenience of radio shows across the globe; in one rather stunningly improbable instance, a television crew flew a good distance to film a segment on the subject. To be sure, a good bit of the intrigue was unsurprisingly superficial, as in the instance of the interviewers who knew nothing of the contents of the book except that it had something to do with the tragic story of a girl whose search for the perfect breast destroyed her beautiful body. Today, we count these occurrences as but exceptions to the course of on-going life and work, amid which The New Individualism still holds its value as it does to those who continue to read it. This of course is reason for a new edition and the justification for the trouble our publisher takes to cause it to happen. We can hardly jump the hoops of academic and media attention without being alternately pleased and chastened, and these are the rods that measure the merit of the work. The New Individualism rests on the claim we make that individualism, the moral and social ideal, has undergone, in our times, still another of its many transformations. ‘Individualism’, the concept, was coined in the 1830s by Alexis de Tocqueville to describe the bourgeois gentlemen he observed in America who, having acquired means and manners, lived as if to cut themselves off as individuals from the masses. Thereafter, the individualism Tocqueville INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED EDITION xiii associated with the brash inventions of the still adolescent American culture of the nineteenth century more or less came to be one with the older ideals of the European bourgeoisie. In the 1920s and 1930s, however, all this began to change as European critical theorists challenged the liberal ideal of the cut-off individual freed from the fetters of common life. The global wars and holocausts of the twentieth century required the concept to adjust to the evidence that individuals, and hence individualism, were subject to terrible manipulations at the hands of tyrants able to control the cultural mechanisms of modern life. Hitler then became, we argue, the metonym for manipulated individualism. Then in the 1950s and 1960s, following the wars of the first half of the twentieth century, another revision of the ideal of individualism became necessary. In the affluent superabundance of post-war America, then in the time of reconstructed Europe, individualism appeared neither heroically arrogant (as Tocqueville had it) nor tragically threatened (as the German critical theorists thought), but now tragically pathetic. The first of many thinkers in this line of thought was David Riesman, whose 1950 book The Lonely Crowd, still widely read, put forth the idea of a mature modern individualism in which the productive force of the entrepreneur had fallen into a sad sort of conformism. The theory, as it turned out, was ironic. As the individual lapsed into conformism, she felt herself isolated, lonely; hence: isolated individualism. Then, just as the earlier revisions were responses to perturbations of the tragic 1920s and the pathetic 1950s, in the 1990s, still another new individualism was called forth by the then (and still) strange effects of globalization. Globalized individualism is a way of characterizing the evidence, canonized in a good deal of writing, that globalization, whatever its benefits, entails risks and risks require new individuals able to reflect coher- ently on their changing circumstances – thus to assess the real risks of a global life, and hence to revise their interior and exterior agendas to the risks and costs of the new global order. To be sure, now in and around 2010 all four of these charac- terizations of individualism as ways of life – the bourgeois, xiv INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED EDITION the manipulated, the isolated, and the globalized – still enjoy a currency in the history of the times as in the language of social commentators. But now, and this is the argument we make, a new individualism somehow confuses and reduces the better elements of the others into a form that is palpably tragic but, were it not for the tragedy, almost comic. This new individualism could be seen as a degraded extreme of the reflexive ideal that stands behind theories of the globalized individual. At the same time, it suffers the fate of the con- forming individual who, having lost her interior sense of productive originality, engages life in ways that cause her to remake her personal and bodily aspects to a vague norm of perfection but with the consequence of cutting herself off from others, often by having herself cut up by cosmetic surgeries meant to remake body and soul. One might even propose that this element of isolated individualism is, in its way, an interiorization of the earlier manipulated individualism that was thought to have done its dirty work by the intrusion of external cultural and social forces upon the individual. Social theories and commentaries are never merely ideas. Though we put the argument in reference to writers and their writings, the general idea of individualism as a way of human life was always, since the time when Tocqueville invented it, a way of talking about events evident to whoever would look in the worlds at large. In respect to what we have called the new individualism, the evidence is plain that there is, the world over, a false expectation that individuals can adjust to a fast and flashy new global order by somehow remaking themselves – by living differently, by cosmetically altering their bodies, by reinventing their lives. We identify a good bit of the aggregated data to this effect and present the outlines of the historical record as it may account for these changes. Yet, in the book itself, we intentionally rely (to the consternation of some of our critics) on personal narratives of many and various kinds to tell the story of the new individualism. If some of the more prurient media were mostly fascinated by the girl who wanted bigger breasts, a good many others, including our academic readers, dwelt more on the general INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED EDITION xv theory of individualism and the ways a new individualism alters how one rethinks received notions of identity formation, itself in relation to global forces, and the very idea of identity itself. This, at least, was and remains our intention in writing and now preparing a new edition of The New Individualism. Some have been generous in their responses to the book. Not all were satisfied by our ideas or the tales by which we presented them. They, the critics, are by necessity the ones who challenge us by the acuity (or in a few cases the clumsiness) of their criticisms. It is to them that we reply. We try not to be defensive. Yet, one of the concluding arguments of the book is that the best antidote to terrors of a new degrading individualism is a fresh sort of aggression – that is, aggression that moves not toward violence but toward the ideal of the mind and its selves as capable of travelling through the rough places to find not a paradise but still another unsettled territory in which one might live for a time. In preparing the book for this new edition, we address in particular two strands of criticism levelled against the thesis of a new individualism. The first concerns the question of whether socio-economic transformations in the first decade of the 2000s, particularly the global economic crisis of 2009, render our new individualism thesis outdated or redundant. This criticism has been developed in various ways by, among others, Dennis Smith and Matthew Adams.1 Though they wrote before the crash of financial markets in 2009, we will consider these observations in light of these recent turns in the global political economy. The second issue concerns whether the new individualism is a narrow-gauged phenomenon that targets the relatively well-off, who are clearly a shrinking number against the greater number of the global excluded. Here the suggestion is that by concentrating on the thinnest of global social strata we do symbolic violence to those marginalized and excluded by advanced global capitalism. xvi INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED EDITION

Cracks in the new individualism?: finance, politics and social order after 2010 The Great Crash of 2009 is ready to topple the ethos of the new individualism, or so some have supposed. After all, the ideological contours of the new individualism – instant change, short-termism, continual self-reinvention and episodicity – would appear profoundly challenged by the global crisis unfolding in financial, capital and political fields. Toxic assets; crippled bank balance sheets; the implosion of share markets; the collapse of some of the biggest names on Wall Street, such as Lehman Brothers; the big freeze on credit; the disintegration of various national financial budgets, such as the Icelandic economy; and the worldwide shrinking of consumer confidence and employment: these are just some of the elements of the global economic crisis. Add all this to the still reverberating political shocks of 9/11, and it is evident just how quickly the world has changed along with the texture of our lives. To the same degree that 9/11 provoked a crisis of confidence among the supreme powers of the world order and of their understanding of the world they thought they were ruling, so the Global Crash of 2009 provoked a crisis of confidence in the tenets of the neo-liberal orthodoxies that, since the 1980s, had been the ideological foundations of advanced capitalism. Whether or not an Obama regime after 2009 can reset the global alarm clock that stuck in neoliberalism’s powerful but quaint renewal of nineteenth- century market doctrines remains to be seen. However that turns out, it can hardly be disputed that the Crash of 2009 required, even demanded, a profound and near universal questing of neo-liberal dogma. The very idea that the free market principles allowed capitalism’s financial markets to blow in the wind of flatulent greed is sorely challenged by the failures of financial markets to cover the odour of decay. It is however another question whether the delegitimizing of pure market freedoms necessarily entails a collapse of individualisms of all kinds or, even, of the ideal of individualism as somehow at the core of a viable identity. INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED EDITION xvii

The two questions may be considered in their conjunc- tion but historically they must be examined according to their differences. There can be no argument with the claim that historically liberal (hence, neo-liberal) principles of the free market owe to the same nineteenth-century versions of the Enlightenment culture of reason as the liberating resources of the modern individual. The New Individualism, we should say, is not proposed as a celebration either of individualism as such or the new individualisms of the current situation. In fact, the point of it is to diagnose the tragic consequences of over-wrought attempts to shape personal identity to the mysterious and distant forces of global economies. Time and again we remark, as in the title of one chapter, that the issue before individuals who would survive these deadly worlds is to learn how aggressively to survive the lure of new individualisms. Whether we make the point well enough must, as always, be left to the tastes of readers. What we insist upon is that whatever the fate of identity as a key concept in the vocabulary of moral individualism, the project at hand is to describe the effects of global structures on emotional lives of individuals who must come to terms with changes hard to deny but harder still to take into the terms of individual social lives. Modern society, observed the late Cornelius Castoriadis, has ‘stopped questioning itself’. And indeed the political, cultural and economic responses to the Great Crash would suggest just such a lack of reflective self-interrogation as to the conditions of social life. Rather, and as the world navigates the financial misadventures of credit markets, debt markets, equity markets, derivative markets and property markets, what we see are the traces of the older liberal dogmas. Whatever exceptions there are, a very good many politicians, policy-makers and economists cling to the tacit individualist assumptions that for so long guided the crypto-theologies of modern progress. In the United States, the Crash of 2009 was certainly an element in the election of Barack Obama as the American President and, worldwide, as the object of a vague wish that the mess that has been made of global things can be cleaned up. Even this idealization of a solitary political figure is itself a ghost of xviii INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED EDITION the West’s long held belief that, as Weber put it, when the structures turn against the spirit of humanity perhaps a charismatic prophet will come along to put things right – that an exceptional individual will restore the terms and conditions of a proper individualism. One cannot blame those who think this way. We are all in a sense left without a way of thinking differently. As a result, until the better alternative is figured out, we who would think about these worlds can only think as we can and, for the time being, these thoughts continue to return to the value of the individual or, as we mean to say in The New Individualism, the ways individualisms are degraded by the structure of social and global things. The problem is how to think without thinking uncritically. Thinkers and actors engaged with the current realities are inclined, of course, to rethink market freedoms, to be suspicious of neoliberalism, and to loathe the greed of advanced capitalism. Yet, the ethos of the new individualism lurks in the shadows of lives wrecked by failed mortgages, lost jobs, diminished bank accounts, and everything else that the once well enough off suffer as, for years, have the major number of the world’s miserable and excluded. Still, it is far from clear that there is a sure path beyond the slogan: Individualist solutions to global problems! Thus, and perhaps paradoxically, a continuous and unstoppable new individualism lies at the core of societal attempts to restore confidence in the world’s key financial and economic institutions. Certainly, national programs to stimulate economies, regulate banks, re-train workers, and the like share a common conviction that the working individual is the one who will make the products that will grow the economies. Yet, when one puts the circumstances in these terms the question turns again back on the conditions of its origins. If from the start the individual was always thought of as the solution to the global, then how does one approach a truly original solution to economic problems that are now, since 9/11 and certainly since the Crash of 2009, global to a degree that goes far beyond metaphors like big, enormous, ubiquitous, overwhelming, whichever. Global economic forces, whether booming or busting, are not just global in the INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED EDITION xix sense of everywhere at once, they are global in that they redefine the global map – deterritorializing once well bordered regions like the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan or among the nation-states of the European Union. The global economy was founded in the long six- teenth century in a division of geographic labour among the colonizing powers of Europe. In 1648 the Peace of Westphalia came to stand as the symbol of the emergence of the modern nation-state in an agreement among other states to respect the rights pertaining to national territories. The system was always, as Immanuel Wallerstein has put it, an interstate system and this system was always an economic system of global proportions. Whether or not the nation- state is in decline is widely debated and not yet known, but it is certainly breeched. Whatever else globalization means, it means that there are forces that cover the earth without respect for short-run political territories and national cultures abiding therein.2 Deterritorialization is a terrible word, not much better than globalization, but it is the word to use when talking about these forces. And the forces of which we must speak in a limited and feeble vocabulary are forces by any name – in particular forces with which individuals of whichever socioeconomic station must contend. Whether one knows what to call them, or even has an inkling that they are what they are, global forces determine the fate of individuals in ways that not even states could. States, as Giorgio Agamben, elaborating on Carl Schmitt, has forced us to consider, are political theologians founded on the right of creating states of exceptions. Citizenship, he argues, is an unsettling prospect when it comes to rights of inclusion in the benefits of a society. We all live at risk of being thrown into naked life – down and out unto the garbage heap of exclusion that creates the misery so many endure. It is all too easy to speak of toxic debt or, before that, of toxic waste or, as Zygmunt Bauman has taught, of waste itself as the primal excrement of global capitalism. It is another thing to extend this proposition to the extent that Agamben and others do – to the point of defining exclusion in the real, if not yet everywhere, condition of bare life, of xx INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED EDITION the human as the animal life that can be at any moment killed with impunity or left otherwise to die. When the nation-state of the Enlightened West was thought to have been the prevalent social unit of world order, it was all too easy to profess and trust the rights of the individual as a true and ordinary member of a good society for which the democratic state was thought to be the guarantor of freedoms, hence rights, hence individual lives, hence normal identities. Before 2009 there were, the world over, assemblage cities like Shenzhen to which official statistics imputed a normal population of 12 million and growing, of which 9 million were thought to be quasi-legal immigrants working on the margins of barely liveable wages. Since 2009 some official sources state that the Crash has forced 14 million Chinese workers, many of whom had come to Shenzhen, to return to their impoverished rural villages where, no longer able to provide remittances to their families, they are considered outcasts. Of course, when it comes to official statistics no one knows for sure what the numbers are and, when it comes to the deterritorialized assemblages of people seeking work and wage wherever in the world they can find it, the numbers do not count as much as palpable evidence everyone experiences of the true vulnerability of their lives. To be sure there are individuals in a globalized world; and if individuals then there will be individualisms – that is to say practical moral ideals as to the value of individual lives that must face always difficult, perhaps overwhelming, forces. Where, then, are we to look for relief from agonies or, better yet, for new ways of thinking and acting in the current situation? There are, we contend, three emergent social forms in and through which the new individualism continues to expand its cultural logics at the level of identities, organizations, institutions and social interactions. These are (1) engagement through detachment; (2) responsi- bility-floating; and (3) speed of movement or mobilities. First, our argument is that life in the fast lane of the new individualism – of continual change, ongoing reinvention, short-termism and episodicity – requires a sense of detached engagement. Such engagement through disengagement INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED EDITION xxi ranges from ‘dropping in’ to organizational discussions through email whilst working abroad to the monitoring of professional contacts in thick networks. It is also evident that the prospects for the detached engagement of individualized actors increases the higher one is within an organization or firm. At the top, crisis is normalized and change ever-present, and so shifting from one network to another with speed and agility becomes central to professional and personal success. Knowing how to move in the networked world, perhaps even more so than the acquisition of specific technical skills, is fundamental to what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello call ‘the new spirit of capitalism’. As Boltanski and Chiapello summarize this ethos, the global business elite are ‘putting an accent on polyvalence, on flexibility of employment, on the ability to learn and to adapt to new functions rather than on the possession of skills and acquired qualification, on the capacity to gain trust, to communicate, to “relate”’.3 We should perhaps note that the inverted commas here around ‘relate’ do not, in our view, indicate a lack of expenditure of emotional energy invested in work and professional networking. On the con- trary, and as many of the stories we recount in this book underline, many new individualists feel themselves to be taxed to their limit in terms of their daily communications and relationships with colleagues. But the point is that less and less often in today’s fast-paced mobile world does the growing speed of networked communications lead many new individualists to ‘open themselves up’ to others or, for that matter, to themselves. From one angle, this is hardly surprising. Living in networked time means being continually on the move, both physically and emotionally. Second, abetted by various economic forces including financial deregulation, new individualists turn towards floating both their organizational responsibilities and their control over subordinates within firms. By floating, we mean to stress the collapse of managerially structured executive routines, as well as of the mentality of long-term ‘careers’. To say that mobile-driven organizations promote this floating orientation is to say that, like all obsolescent paradigms, the ‘scientific’ approach to management which dominated xxii INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED EDITION the advanced societies during the late twentieth century – involving the continuous presence of executives and ongoing surveillance of employees – has become a for- midable barrier to progress in the early twenty-first century. By contrast, and strikingly, the new approach to management involves a kind of non-management. The French economist Daniel Cohen says of today’s global business elite: ‘there are no more white collars who give orders to blue collars – there are only collars of mixed colours who confront the task they have to resolve’.4 And the task to be resolved, we might add, is more often than not an episodic project, each part of which creates further opportunities for networking as well as the likely improvement in opportunities for employment elsewhere or further promotion. This is why floating is both network-driven and self- interested. In a world of short-term, fast-changing projects, it is not so much narcissism which comes to the fore (as was supposed by critics like Richard Sennett and Christopher Lasch in the 1980s) but the always-switched-on, 24/7 commitment to living one’s professional identity – even if this means disengagement from family and friends, and even disengagement from the self within. Third, new individualists define their identities increasingly through the intensity and extensity of their mobilities – especially its speed.5 New individualists are, from this angle, technicians of speed – always on the move, ready to travel at a moment’s notice, adept at navigating the corporate sensa- tion of speed and global shift of movement. Multi-tasking across space and time is part of this, but another part is thinking and acting in instant-response mode, as the next corporate directive arrives by email, text, or fax. ‘Speed of movement’, writes Zygmunt Bauman, ‘has become today a major, perhaps the paramount factor in social stratification and the hierarchy of domination’.6 The new individualist’s speed of movement is necessary to ‘keep up’ with the networking, deal-making and swirl of market forces today. As Bauman explains it: Capital travels light with no more than cabin luggage – a briefcase, laptop computer and cellular telephone. INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED EDITION xxiii

That new quality of volatility has made the engagement redundant and unwise at the same time: if entered it would cramp movement and thus become a constraint on competitiveness and limit the chances of increased productivity.... [B]eing free of awkward bonds, cumbersome commitments and dependencies holding back movement was always an effective and favourite weapon of domination; but the supplies of that weapon and the capacities to use them are nowadays doled out less evenly than ever before in modern history.7 Individualist escape performances are central to the dramas of new individualism. A graphic illustration of these three new individualist currents – detached engagement, ﬂoating and speed – can be found in the ways in which corporations and organizations are seeking to reposition themselves – their products, people and brands – in the light of the 2009 Crash. Consider, for example, Ram Charan’s recent bestseller, Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty.8 Charan, a leading management guru, argues that decision-makers must grasp the need to trim, cut and downsize their organizations in order to survive the new global competition. This is not simply the ‘downsize mantra’ of the neo-liberal era; rather, in Charan’s eyes, it requires CEOs and executive managers to trim operations – focusing in particular on a smaller number of product lines – in order to protect the cash efﬁciency of their companies. ‘Shrinking will present opportunities’, writes Charan, ‘to simplify your processes and reduce the layers of management . . . In the end you will have fewer customers, fewer products, fewer facilities, fewer people, fewer suppliers – and a stronger company’. Charan’s strategy of ‘shrinkage’ dovetails perfectly with the ethos of new individualism, and arguably represents a lifting of hyper-individualizing ideologies to the second power. The irony, of course, is that this new individualist creed is also a public fetish, one in which the impulse to be leaner, trimmer, faster and speedier lies incongruously cheek-by-jowl with a robotic blank on possible collective futures for society and politics, let alone socially responsible economic growth and development. xxiv INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED EDITION

How the forces of market speed impact on individual lives can be understood, as some have interpreted our book as doing, to refer exclusively to the bearers of computers and briefcases. But it can also apply, differences being noted, to the refugees and the squatters who inhabit the assemblages of dispersed and deterritorialized regions formed in the wake of global capitalism’s ruthless mobility. And this is the point of our reply to the second of the major criticisms of The New Individualism.

The globalization of new individualism: culture, history and structural change In a review of The New Individualism, Sean Scalmer sharply criticized the book for its Western bias and neglect of other cultures and forms of life – especially the lives of the more marginalized, dispossessed and excluded.9 Moreover, Scalmer claimed that we ‘admit’ to not having sought out the ‘voices of the poor’. It is true that we admit that the impression is made that the new individualism is a fad of the higher social class, but then too our book concludes with a discussion of aggression as a mode of resistance to the changed world conditions, for which we offer the detailed case-study of Norman Bishop, a man who has faced countless trials in life, including poverty. Perhaps because the ﬁgure of Norman Bishop occurs late in the book, it was easy to overlook. Those who would take up a criticism like Scalmer’s may wish to consult our careful plotting of Bishop’s life in the context of more detailed analyses of the new socio-economic inequalities spawned by globalization. Relatedly, Scalmer points out that our book skates on thin empirical ice and that our argument for structural changes in the world order is, he supposes, a bit ‘unconvincing’. Whilst we do not wish to argue the point here of what constitutes thick empirical evidence, we would suggest that the proposition put in The New Individualism concerning the ‘deadly costs of global violence’ is indeed something that ‘everyone knows’. Yet we admit that it may be less well known in some places than others. Certainly in Africa, the Middle East, central Asia, East Asia, the United INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED EDITION xxv

States, the Caribbean, and even Europe, global violence is both a fact that everyone must live with and a symptom of deep structural collapse of long-standing liberal values. The general question of what constitutes empirical evidence is, as we say, a good topic for another time – except in one way. We might agree that an appeal to ‘whatever one knows’ may not and probably should not win the case. Still, for this point we thank our critics, for the occasion to refer, if not fully discuss, the question of fact as it concerns the relations in this world between the poor and excluded and the currently well-enough off. Though there are many ways to make the case to sceptics, the one that occupied us in the book is the relational unity of the global whole. In an odd sense those who would accuse us of symbolic violence to the excluded inadvertently make the point for us. When it comes to the question of the individual and her identity, symbolic violence is never a casual and alienable fact of life. What is it that the excluded, men and women like Norman Bishop, seek? They seek, as others do, what they have been taught by the mediated cultures of the modern era. They seek the comforts of a decent life which, in the only terms we have, are the comforts of well-enough secured individual life. It is true that we do not emphasize this point as separately and together we do in new work. Yet, that point being granted, the wider point of the debate with respect to individualisms is a debate over the structure of the worlds in which individuals must live. Tocqueville invented the term in respect to desires of the relatively secure gentleman. The German critical theorist stated a case for manipulated individualism (our term not theirs) in respect to the global terrors of Nazi regime. The commentators on the isolated individualism of the post-war era con- ceived of the individual as overwhelmed by the pressure to consume and conform that came with a time of relaxation and afﬂuence. The theorists of reﬂexivity and global risk had in mind the actual and true social conditions of new world order in the 1990s and since. Likewise we, respecting these traditions, build on them to offer a theory of an aspect of the situation that has come to full force early in the 2000s. xxvi INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED EDITION

The American edition of The New Individualism, which is now superseded by this new edition, bore the title Deadly Worlds, a reiteration of the theme that occupies the book. Leaving aside for now whether we might have done this better, the fact that transcends others is that the worlds we must live in are indeed worse than ever before – thus truly deadly and deadly of course for the excluded but in their ways just as deadly for the temporarily included. Before the Americans invaded, Baghdad was – for some, at least – a brilliant and postmodern city of many well educated and secured people. Soon after, those able fled their country as the city was reduced, in large part, to a rubble that has taken years to begin to repair. It is certainly true that the misery of those who lost their lives and livelihoods in Baghdad or Kabul were not in the same marginal circumstance as those who fled from Shenzhen or the floating populations in the bay outside Lagos or Sao Paulo. But it is not true that the suffering on either side of the global divide comes from different and distinct forces. Nor is it true, if true is the word, that individuals living on either side of security forces that divide the world are not infused with a sense that what they have lost or might lose is the right of free access to a good life, lived as individuals. If the sphere of human lives were so simple that we could only choose between being an individual or being a member, then hardly anyone would likely choose the latter, though to be sure many millions over the centuries have made the choice. But in the modern world, whenever and wherever it comes into local villages, the individual is the normal mode of being a member amid the social structure. Will, one day, our children’s children invent a new way to think and live beyond the constraints of individual identities? Should they? That too remains to be seen and, given the choice, one would rather not live to have to work that one through. What then remains in the current situation? We are left in a lurch we cannot escape. Individualisms are the moral code of modern life. At heart, when we speak of having an identity we are speaking of our tentative sense of when we, as the individuals we must live with, locate ourselves with respect to exterior others. As a result, it is not all that INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED EDITION xxvii remarkable that the modern history of individualism, new or traditional, is the history of attempts to find a solid footing against the social forces that would tempt us away or steal from us the right to be someone in and of ourselves. The new individualisms are a mixed bag of comic tragedies. The point is not to pretend they are what they are not, but to find the way around them which, given the nature of social life, is always through them. Working one’s way through indefinite and murky realities is far from easy, but it is the way life works, for better or worse.

Notes

1 For a critique of the new individualist thesis from the standpoint of historical sociology, see Dennis Smith, The Sociological Review, 2007: 417–19; from the standpoint of complexity and differentiation theory, see Matthew Adams, Theory, Culture and Society, 2007, Vol. 24: 147–153. 2 See Charles Lemert, Anthony Elliott, Daniel Chaffee and Eric Hsu (eds), Globalization, London and New York: Routledge, 2010. 3 Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, London: Verso, 2007. 4 Daniel Cohen, Richesse du monde: parvretes des nations, Paris: Flammarion, 1998. 5 See Anthony Elliott and John Urry, Mobile Lives, London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Also see John Urry, Mobilities, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. 6 Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualized Society, Cambridge: Polity, 2002, p. 27. 7 Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualized Society, pp. 26–7. 8 Ram Charan, Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009. 9 Sean Scalmer, Australian Book Review, February 2007.

Acknowledgements

We owe thanks to various institutions that provided support for the writing of this book. The British Academy, through the awards of various grants, made possible much of the travel that was necessary to complete the project, and we are grateful to the trustees of the Academy for their support. In the United Kingdom, a good deal of the research under- pinning the project was carried out at the Centre for Critical Theory at the University of the West of England, Bristol, and at the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and in the United States at the Department of Sociology at Wesleyan Uni- versity. Versions of some of these chapters were presented in recent years as lectures or seminars at the Tate Modern, the London School of Economics, the Boston School of Psycho- analysis, as well as at the universities of Oxford, Aberdeen, Nottingham, Nottingham Trent, La Trobe and Monash. We are, for rather obvious reasons, very grateful to those who make up ‘the new individualism’ for giving of their time during interviews and informal discussions. We also wish to thank those that assisted us in the interpretation of the various psychoanalytic case-studies and other secondary materials which we have drawn upon in the telling of these narratives. Many individuals provided helpful comments, suggestions or responses to our work, and we would especially like to thank Anthony Moran, Nick Stevenson, Larry Ray, Alison Assiter, Judith Brett, John B. Thompson, Paul Hoggett, David Held, Sean Watson and Jem Thomas. xxx ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Gerhard Boomgaarden at Routledge has been marvel- lously helpful, providing just the right editorial suggestions at key junctures, and always at hand with suggestions for how to escape the pressures of looming deadlines at the necessary moments. Also at Routledge, thanks to Constance Sutherland and Mark McKenzie. In the US, our thanks to Alan McClare. Thanks also to Norman Bishop, the very model of an individualist who will not cut himself off from the mass of men and women; and to the late Phyllis Meadow who, even in death, reminds those who knew her that an individual can move mountains; also the many who come and go through the doors of Positive Solutions and other such places, leaving little behind save for the collective ghosts of their readiness to face the risks of the deadly worlds. Finally, special thanks to Nicola Geraghty as well as to Caoimhe and Oscar Elliott. And, from Charles, the same warm thanks to Geri as to Annie and Noah. Anthony Elliott, Canterbury Charles Lemert, New Haven Introduction

Kelly just knew that bigger breasts were the way to go. Not that she needed them: she was, after all, naturally curv- aceous. Pretty too. Very feminine and fashionably polished – expensively dressed, blonde shoulder-length hair, manicured nails. No, necessity had nothing to do with it. Kelly’s decision to undergo the plastic surgeon’s knife – with a breast enlargement from 30B to 30DD – was a matter of choice. It was a matter of desire: of her wish for an improved body, and above all a new sense of self. Although on the face of it Kelly’s decision to undergo a breast enlargement procedure was entered into freely, a sense of personal autonomy was the last thing plastic surgery provided. For Kelly’s operation, undergone when she was only eighteen, ended unsatisfactorily. Not happy with the size and shape of her reconstructed breasts, Kelly underwent further plastic surgery – in fact, several more times – in her search for physical perfection. These operations also failed to provide the desired outcomes, and indeed a third operation ended disastrously – the implants were deemed to sit too high and unnaturally. Paradoxically, the matter of beauty (or, at least, traditional notions of the beautiful) had to begun to disappear as the issue. For Kelly had become absorbed by the possibilities of plastic surgery, of how far the process of self and bodily reconstruction might be taken. Seeking to have her latest bungled surgery reversed, Kelly underwent a fourth procedure. Finally, at the age of 22 and after having spent in excess of £30,000, she 2 INTRODUCTION found a meaningful solution to her specific dilemmas of identity: plastic surgery provided Kelly with 30G breasts. Kelly’s search for bigger breasts as a means of redefining her sense of individualism can be seen as part and parcel of our plastic culture of celebrity, of image, of instant identity makeovers. Yet hers is not the world of LA glitz, film prem- iers or globe-trotting. She works an unglamorous nine-to-five job in promotions, and her ‘story’ appeared in a 2004 feature article in the UK’s Daily Mail. Journalist Morag McKinnon tells Kelly’s story – and of countless others just like her – as typical of a new breed of attractive, educated women ‘who are having plastic surgery at the drop of a hat – “boob jobs”, “bum jobs”, botox injections, collagen fillers, liposuction’. McKinnon notes that more than a quarter of all women seeking plastic surgery in the UK are under 25. Just as socio- logically revealing, she gleans from her interviews with these young women who comprise ‘the plastic generation’ an unfaltering belief that ‘the body can be shaped and remoulded over and over again, regardless of the price (both financial, mental and physical)’. McKinnon rightly ties these women’s belief in the trans- formative powers of plastic surgery to our culture of consumption. ‘The incredible buzz of a successful operation’, comments one of McKinnon’s interviewees ‘is like the buzz I get when I go shopping. You get a dose of that high every morning.’ Bodily ‘improvements’ are thus closely interwoven with our culture of shopping – endlessly available, fast consumed and with immediate results. And yet however insightful McKinnon’s comments on the intricate connections between plastic surgery and consumerism are, it remains the case that a journalistic explanation like this may shift the focus away from the social context in which individuals struggle to define their individualism. That is, such popular accounts of current cultural trends often fail to critically probe the social conditions that shape, and are shaped by, the passionate attachments and emotional strategies of individuals. Whether or not contemporary Western women increasingly treat cosmetic surgery as casually as buying the latest fashions, it is evident that social pressures to redesign and instantly transform one’s identity are becoming a common INTRODUCTION 3 affliction. What all of us are increasingly called upon to do, in the frame of globalizing social processes, is reshape, reconstruct, reinvent and transfigure ourselves. Ours is the age of the new individualism.

Global spaces, individualist lives Consider the following paradox. In the kind of society we live in – that of the polished, expensive, globally networked cities of the West – the lures and seductions of individualism reign supreme. Everywhere in contemporary society, people desperately search for self-fulfilment and try to minimize as much as possible interpersonal obstacles to the attainment of their egocentric designs – as the culture of individualism has come to represent not only personal freedom but the essential shape of the social fabric itself. As British prime minister Margaret Thatcher famously summed up this individualist ethos: ‘There is no society, only individuals and families.’ In the so-called do-it-yourself society, we are now all entrepreneurs of our own lives. What is unmistakable about the rise of individualist culture, in which constant risk- taking and an obsessive preoccupation with flexibility rules, is that individuals must continually strive to be more effi- cient, faster, leaner, inventive and self-actualizing than they were previously – not sporadically, but day-in day-out. Mean- while, throughout both the academy and in public political discourse, proclamations about the ‘end of individuality’ and ‘death of the subject’ are increasingly heard. How are we to account for this massive contradiction between our individualist culture on the one hand, and our reckoning (or, some would say denial) of today’s global realities on the other? Why should it be that at precisely the historical moment individualism is raised to the second power in institutional conditions of globalization and political conditions of neo-liberalism, the very notion of individualism is claimed obsolete by much of the academy and also in public political debate? The term ‘individualism’ was coined by Alexis de Toc- queville in the early nineteenth century to describe an emer- ging sense of social isolation in American society. A denial 4 INTRODUCTION of social connection, the individualist creed was premised on the assumption that people should leave it to others to deal with their own problems and to get on with the living of life on their own terms. Today, evidence suggests that this individualist impulse thrives, albeit as an individualism suitably modified and adjusted to fit the technological inno- vations and multinational financial transactions spawned by globalization. In a report which powerfully underlines the interweaving of individualism with our cultures of immedi- acy, the United Nations Development Programme points to the enormous demand around the world for individual services and consumer products. ‘Demand’ in this instance means desire for instant gratification, a desire that as it happens not only bolsters the sense of social isolation Tocqueville first noted when studying individualism but also carries potentially disastrous global consequences. As regards inequitable consumption, for example, the UN notes that while basic education for all who live in developing countries would cost somewhere in the region of $6 billion a year to provide, the US alone already spends a staggering $8 billion annually on cosmetics. This inequality is not just a product of a cultural obsession with youth, beauty and attractiveness; it derives from a more thoroughgoing individualist emphasis on the satisfaction of individual desires and the cultivation of individual needs. UN figures provide ample illustration of this, but in the interests of brevity let us selectively summarize. While the UN calculates that it would cost $13 billion to provide basic healthcare and nutrition throughout the developing world, the following expenditures can be noted: • $11 billion is spent annually on ice cream in Europe. • $17 billion is spent annually on pet food in Europe and the US. • $50 billion on cigarettes in Europe. • $105 billion on alcoholic drinks in Europe. • $400 billion on narcotic drugs around the world. Such statistics suggest that the ethic of individual self- aggrandizement reigns supreme in modern society, and that desires for unrestrained individualism, instant gratification INTRODUCTION 5 and insulated hedonism are written into the fabric of Western culture. The popular view, generated from journalists and cultural critics, is that our increasingly individuated society expresses egoism. We are accustomed to thinking of life’s possibilities and responsibilities in individualistic terms – less as interwoven with cultural relations and social problems, and more as shaped by individual decisions, capacities and incapacities, personal achievements and failures. ‘Nar- cissism’ is one way to name this de-socializing of people’s biographies today – it is, as we subsequently argue, too sweeping to capture the daily struggles of individuals in the contemporary West, yet bears in several ways on the global transformations of our times. When social theorists reflect on the broad contours of change influencing the private and public make-up of individualism today, they generally do so in ways that are profoundly influenced by contemporary debates on globalization. They take their cue in particular from the work of sociological authors who, struggling to grasp profound changes in social, cultural, political and economic life, attribute major transformations to people’s sense of identity, their experience of place, space and time within the broader world, as well as their sense of nationhood and social belonging. Sociology has developed many conceptual angles naming different aspects of globalization. These include the ‘compression of time-space’ through the advent of instantaneous mass com- munication, the intensified intermeshing of local and distant events and experiences, and the acceleration of the speed of capital and cultural flows across the globe. A list of sociological definitions of globalism would be merely scho- lastic, yet the transformed dimensions of individualism arising from such worldwide change might be made to come to life by reconsidering this debate from the perspective of how individuals respond – creatively, defensively and patho- logically – to globalizing social processes. This is our central concern throughout this book. People’s perceptions of a global reality have become increasingly important to the most emotionally felt, highly resonant, personal experience in which the textures of individualism are today fabricated. A central argument of this 6 INTRODUCTION book is that we can understand the social impact of the development of globalization upon individualism only if we put aside traditional sociological assumptions concerning the geopolitical basis of a sense of societal belonging. For people of our times, as Ulf Hannerz perceptively notes, the notion of a ‘national society’ is less and less vital as a source of identity and imagined community: There are now various kinds of people for whom the nation works less well as a source of cultural resonance.... it seems, rather, that in the present phase of globalization, one characteristic is the proliferation of kinds of ties that can be transnational; ties to kin, friends, colleagues, business associates, and others. In all that variety, such ties may entail a kind and a degree of tuning out, a weakened personal involvement with the nation and national culture, a shift from the disposition to take it for granted; possibly a critical distance to it. In such ways, the nation may have become more hollow than it was. Above all, a profound change in the experience of time, work and meaning – from a clear and fixed long-termism to a more hurried short-termism – has accompanied the rapid dynamism of technological innovation. Sociologists like Richard Sennett have pointed to the disorientating effects of globalization on personal life – particularly of how today’s brave new world of impermanent, contract work sets the emotional, inner life adrift. He points out that the shift to temporary, part-time, flexible employment is eroding people’s capacity to create coherent narratives about their experiences of work, and to create predictive narratives about the personal and social value of their lives. For one thing, the working life is shortening. In the US, the number of men aged between 55 and 64 at work dropped from 80 per cent in 1970 to 65 per cent in 1990; these figures are much the same throughout Europe. Policy analysts predict that the working life will soon be shortened to about 30 years (from 24 to 54). Sennett has studied, too, the damaging personal and family consequences of frequent job moves; the average American graduating from college today can expect to change jobs some eleven times, as well as change their INTRODUCTION 7 skill base at least three times. The erasure of the traditional division between work time and time for family has meant not only a rise in the neglect of children but also increased levels of adult depression. Transposed to the personal realm, Sennett argues that the new flexibility demanded by unstable institutions means there is little stable ground for the individual to lodge an anchor. Keep moving and don’t commit yourself is the moral to be drawn from today’s hi-tech global economy. There are some reasons to suppose that this conflict between globalization and identity has led to the kind of ‘hollowing out’ of people’s emotional intimacies as supposed by those who speak of a ‘culture of narcissism’. But in actuality it is quite unusual to find people’s biographies as emotionally stripped down as this – living without any other emotional ties, pursuing only short-term interests, com- pletely alone and lonely. In the stories documented in The New Individualism, even the most narcissistic individuals that we detail are in search of something of emotional value, something of meaning, in their relations with others – however much they find their personal difficulties intensified in a world that more and more escapes their grasp. Individualism is and remains a master idea of modernity for a whole host of reasons, not least because ideologies pertaining to the free and autonomous individual have been essential to the patterning of relations between self and society throughout the capitalist West. Individualism prom- ises at its core an intimate relationship with the self which explores some of the most profound issues we encounter in personal and social life. The issues of how to lead a meaningful and autonomous life, how self-development – particularly through developing abilities and skills – generates fulfilment, what intimacy and eroticism means to the individual, and how we can open ourselves to others and explore the richness of relationships are all dimensions of our culture of individualism. Individualism has changed in three crucial ways, however, in the brave new world of globalization, new information technologies and multinational capitalism. First, the undermining of traditions – and in particular traditional 8 INTRODUCTION ways of living – has, as one might expect, enormously expanded the range of personal choice and opportunity for many people. As modern societies are more and more ‘detra- ditionalized’ (to use a term coined by Anthony Giddens), pre- existing ways of doing things become less secure, less taken for granted. It could be said that this is just a matter of the old rules and boundaries governing personal and social life dissolving, but we think not. For the import of traditions today has a reflexive aspect. Take marriage, for example. Not so long ago, marriage was widely seen as a sacred union ‘till death do us part’. By contrast marriage today, against a backdrop of both the sexual revolution and divorce rates soaring throughout the West, has been transformed for many into a kind of temporary arrangement – as something that can be discarded. Leaving to one side the issue of whether this has been progressive or regressive, we think that what’s important here is the new sense of uncertainty that such change has bred. For the likelihood of divorce must now be ‘factored in’ by everyone contemplating getting married, a reckoning rendering marriage different from what it was in the past. At the same time, however, such changes also open our individualist culture to wider challenges, extending the terrain of emotional life beyond the inviolable character of tradition. What most complicates the thread of individualism in this connection is the experimental feel that much of what we do in our private and social lives takes on. The second crucial way in which the ideology of individualism changes in our own time is as a consequence of privatization. The neo-liberal crusade to free individual ini- tiative from the control of the state has in recent years seen ravages of cutbacks in welfare provisions or services, as well as the spread of a more market-led, business orientation to the institutions of government, on both sides of the Atlantic. Privatism as a result becomes of central importance to large areas of contemporary urban life, especially so in an age of increased mobility and digital technologies. The shrinking of communal ties and relations as a consequence of privatism is one reason why Don Watson, in Death Sentence, suggests that economic rationalism has debased our public language. Welfare agencies try to provide better ‘outcomes’ INTRODUCTION 9 for ‘customers’; hospital managers develop ‘best-practice scenarios’; vice-chancellors review variable university fees in order to deliver improved ‘educational product’. Watson’s point is that a debased managerial language infects social life around the globe. But the problem is more pervasive than that of any mere infection. For individualism today is intrinsically connected, we argue, with the growth of privatized worlds. Such privatized worlds propel individuals into shutting others and the wider world out of their emotional lives. Under the impact of privatism, the self is denied any wider relational connection at a deeply unconscious level, and on the level of day-to-day behaviour such ‘new individualisms’ set the stage for a unique cultural constellation of anguish, anxiety, fear, dis- appointment and dread. Yet to connect individualism to the new social conditions of enforced privatization is not to say that we are witnessing the end of collective ideals or, in a wider sense, the public sphere. Rather, the privatizing of identities – what we term ‘the new individualism’ – becomes fundamental to the way individuals, groups and institutions organize social things. This is the case whether people yearn for either a public, cosmopolitan or a more traditional lifestyle. The relation between individualism and privatization has become our central theme, and hopefully gives the book a radical political edge for thinking about the shape of both identity and the social fabric today. The relation of individual and society has, of course, been central to the sociological tradition – of which we are, in broad terms, professional practitioners. C. Wright Mills, in his classic The Sociological Imagination, argued that social problems cannot have personal solutions. Notwithstanding the efforts of sociologists around the world who have taken heart from Mills’s maxim in trying to foster publicly engaged social debate, the privatization of social issues has indeed become a matter of over- riding political importance today. As market forces penetrate ever more deeply into the tissue of social life, what we see taking place today is a shift from a politized culture to a privatized culture. People, increasingly, seek personal solutions to social problems in the hope of shutting out the risks, 10 INTRODUCTION terrors and persecutions that dominate our lives in the global age. The third important change in the way individualism has changed is at once ironic and less definite than the for- mer two. Individualism, as it came to be understood since Tocqueville’s observations in the 1830s, was, for the most part, a value of the middle and upper classes in the European diaspora. But this does not mean that people on the social and economic margins of public life are ignorant of the life- styles of the dominant classes. Still, the classically free individual as the man who removes himself from the masses is necessarily a way of life possible only to people of means, to those able to attain and maintain a bourgeois life. The poor may aspire to the freedom, but neither the tenant farmer nor the factory worker is in a position to achieve it. Freedom, like individualism, is largely a conceit of the privileged who naively measure the differences they enjoy from the ways of the poor according to their impression that the poor simply do not know how to behave. The classical liberal principle of possessive individualism as the freedom embodied in the natural right to private property is the pure expression of the quandary of modern democratic states. They profess freedoms that can, in fact, only be attained by the landed and moneyed classes. Scratch a liberal and you’ll find a Tory at worst and a democrat at best. One of the striking facts of the current situation is the paradox that as the rich grow more distant from the poor in economic terms, the poor encroach more on the privileged cultures of the better off. Globalization is, at least, about economics and culture. At the same time, those who think it is nothing but good tend to collapse the two, as those who think it is nothing but bad distinguish them too harshly; the reality is that the economic and cultural are each powerful forces that sometimes move in concert, sometimes in tension, but most often in complex and surprising ways. Economic- ally the global nature of international capital has led to a net loss for the world’s poorest even as it may have pulled some into the comfortable social and economic classes. While culture in the form of mediated experiences and consumption desires has brought the rich and poor closer in the para- INTRODUCTION 11 doxical sense that the poor cannot achieve the standards of the well off but they can and do have a better understanding of how the other half lives. There is ample evidence that poverty has devastating consequences for children and their families. Depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, obesity, lung and heart dis- eases, and starvation are rampant among the very poor and especially when they are simultaneously exposed to violence, as they are. None of these disorders of the world’s social inequalities have declined, but it may be that to them is now added the affliction suffered more apparently by the middle and upper classes – that of isolation arising from being cut off from the social benefits the poor can now see plainly in the cities and towns where they beg or from which they flee. Over time, the poorer and more marginal social groups have tended to be the bearers of the traditions – religiously and ethnically most especially. The growth of religious activism in the most impoverished regions of Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Asia is but one of the obvious instances of a cultural reaction to the inequalities of the modern world. One result has clearly been the emotional cost of the epidemic of social isolation that is always more severely visited on the poor. It makes little sense, however, to refer to the isolation of the poor as privatization if the private is taken as the interior spaces to which the individual retreats. But it does make sense if the for- merly very different isolation of the poor from the means of success and self-esteem are crushed in the vacuum created by the flight of the new rich from the pains of human despair. Throughout the book we will use the pronoun ‘we’ and its variants as if we were speaking of all human beings on the globe. In one sense there is no universal ‘we’, but in another there is – the we, that is, of the varieties of men and women and children who in the social inequalities are none the less subjected to the combined forces of globalization. Our stories are frequently, though not entirely, the stories of men and women of relative privilege. But we want to say that they are because, as is necessarily the case in the mediated world, the emotional costs of individuals of means are more visible. One is unlikely to hear about Kelly and others of 12 INTRODUCTION whom we tell if they are not encountered in the normal course of public life. The poor are seldom on the public squares save to beg or catch a nap on the park benches, seldom portrayed on television as individuals. That their stories are less well known does not mean either that they are any less isolated or that their appeals to what traditions they may have are any less desperate than the fancier versions of the same phenomena among the world’s credit-card holders. If globalization has emotional costs, as surely it does, it is going to have them on the poor and wealthy alike – or, if not exactly alike, comparably. Our book is not primarily about the poor, who have always paid the greater emotional costs of life in this world. But neither is it meant to exclude them. This, simply, is an aspect of the problem about which less is known because the evidence is less available than one day it will be.

Defining the new individualism Accounts of individualism often characterize our current cultural preoccupation with the self in terms of narcissism, emotionalism, the manipulation of individual needs or desires and a quest for self-realization and self-fulfilment. Such accounts highlight the constraining or more negative features of our individualized culture and often present the world in which we live today as one shot through with traumatic consequences for people’s emotional lives and relationships. As we argue in more detail in Chapter 2, while these accounts contain useful insights, they fail to grasp the most central features of a new individualism sweeping the globe today. In The New Individualism we argue that the rise of a highly individualized common language for experi- encing and defining public issues is a double-edged phenomenon, one that promotes the realization of self-fulfilment as well as the cultivation of self-limitation. The culture of advanced individualism has ushered into existence a world of individual risk-taking, experimentation and self-expression – which in turn is underpinned by new forms of apprehen- sion, anguish and anxiety stemming from the perils of globalization. INTRODUCTION 13

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the new individualism is the playing out of these positive and negative features – the cultural trends towards freedom and alienation – against a backcloth of the demise of social context. Today, people in the polished cities of the West make sense of experience on the edge of a disappearance of context. As science and new technologies offer alternative paradigms and possibilities for social life, we have replaced the old contexts of tradition and custom with a focus on our individual selves. This shift of focus from the old rules and boundaries to the internal world of the individual is now central to the contemporary mood. The main legacy of this cultural trend is that individuals are increasingly expected to produce context for themselves. The designing of life, of a self-project, is deeply rooted as both social norm and cultural obligation. Everyone knows that the world is dramatically remaking itself in this period of intensive globalization. Hardly anyone doubts something like this is happening, but still asks: what changes does this carry for my personal life? How is the experience of individualism different now from days gone past? As it happens, though our experiences as individuals are very different, we tend to believe – as if instinctively – that the inner dimensions of our personal and social lives are something special, rare, precious and thus worthy of nurturance and protection. But how to get at these ‘inner dimensions’ of the individual experience of global transformations? The interest and fascination that people have with identity in general, and individualism in particular, has encouraged us to write about the individuated experience of globalization from the individual’s perspective. There is, of course, no shortage of works purporting to account for the accelerating pace of globalization and how this impacts upon daily life. One published book has chapters on Global Finance and its Personal Impacts, Globalization and Mass Migration, Corporate Power and Personal Development, as well as the Democratization of Globalization and its Cultural Consequences. Another covers topics that include Contemporary States of Mind, Postmodern Pathologies, Borderline Personalities and Identity Crises. Our book is 14 INTRODUCTION unlike these and contains little in the way of direct answers to the cultural problems they pose. This book adopts a focused psycho-social approach to understanding the complex ways that modernity and globalization impact upon individual lives and experiences. Through this concentration on individuals and their imagined worlds we seek to come to a better understanding of how global transformations shape, and are shaped by, human emotions. Throughout The New Individualism we draw on interviews, informal discussions and related material of our own as well as of other researchers; some of this material dates from the late 1980s, but the bulk of it is more recent. Our aim in concentrating on the global circumstances of individualism is to unearth the jumble of emotional and social forces at work in real lives, and to that end our approach or method is plural, open-ended, reflexive. As well as making use of in-depth interviews, we have also engaged with daily experiences of people’s individualism through informal discussions and ongoing encounters with our subjects. Other sources range from newspaper reports and interviews with ordinary people to more specialized material, including psychoanalytic case-histories. While our discussions of the various lives documented in The New Individualism are often drawn from real case or interview material, most necessarily appear as pseudonymous voices in order to protect confidentiality. This in turn, following the path-breaking lead of Susie Orbach’s fictionalized case- method in her provocative The Impossibility of Sex, led us to dramatize and invent certain aspects of characters in the pages of this book. Again the impulse was to ensure anonym- ity, while our hope is that we have accurately captured the sense of the most deeply felt, highly resonant, emotional experience that people conveyed to us in both formal interviews and informal discussions. And finally, we make use of autobiographical reflections and of detailed biography – notably of our daughters in the opening chapter. In developing stories of what the practice of social things in global conditions is like from the individual’s point of view, we try to convey something of the performative dimensions of individualism, of what is involved in doing identity: the INTRODUCTION 15 emotional difficulties posed, the interpersonal and cultural issues encountered, and above all the feel of the new individualism. Modernity’s new individualism is not only in its accelerating globalism, massive Internet traffic and G3 technologies, proliferating fast-food outlets, increasing ease of international travel and tourism, or infernal transnational pollution problems and urban traffic jams. It is in the expansive emotional literacy and cultural cosmopolitanism of its people who, in their diversity, have developed ways of living that are more open, experimental and privatized than was the case in the past. Finally, it is important to add the following qualification to the claims we develop in this book. Most of the biographical vignettes and materials presented are drawn from the Anglo-American world – specifically, from the lives of people struggling to define their individualism in contemporary Britain and the United States. The political geography which informs our thesis of an emergent new individualism should not, however, be taken to imply that such individualizing processes are dominant features of societies only in the Anglo-American world. From Singapore to Tokyo, from Seoul to Sydney, the individualist creed of the new individualism features significantly in the private and public lives of its citizens. The new individualism, we argue, is an emergent phenomenon that increasingly affects personal and social aspects of everyday life. It does not define in advance the ways people live their lives in the world’s rich states, and certainly has less impact in the developing societies. But its reach, at once emotional and cultural, is increasingly global in scope – thanks to the twin forces of globalization and the communications revolution.

References

Contents

Index 215 Bibliography and further reading

Introduction The quotation from Ulf Hannerz is taken from his stimulating Transnational Connections: Cultures, Peoples, Places (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 88–9.

1 Individualism for beginners: When Caoimhe met Annie somewhere in global space The survey conducted by ChildWise was reported in the UK by Denis Campbell, ‘Mobiles, MP3s, DVDs: raising a generation of techno-kids’, The Observer, 13 February 2005, p. 14. Some useful guides to Baudrillard’s work include Mark Poster’s edited collection, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (Cambridge: Stanford University Press, 1988) and Douglas Kellner’s Baudrillard: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). See also Charles Lemert, Postmodernism Is Not What You Think (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). For Erik Erikson, we consulted his classic Identity: Youth and Crisis (London: Faber and Faber, 1974); the quotes are from pp. 17–19. For William James we used his Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover Publications, 1955). For Goffman, see his The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959) and Stigma (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963). See also Charles Lemert and Ann Brannaman, The Goffman Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). The ﬁnal section, ‘The Individualist Imagination’ raises issues concerning socio-structural transformations sweeping the globe that we discuss in detail throughout the book, and to which we return from the angle of political history in the ﬁnal chapter. The article detailing the new American social contract is Jackie 202 BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING

Calmes, ‘In Bush’s “ownership society”, citizens would take more risk’, Wall Street Journal, 28 February 2005, p. 1. Our discussion of privatization here is substantially indebted to the works of Zyg- munt Bauman, speciﬁcally Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), Postmodernity and its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997) and The Individualized Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). On the ways in which mass privatization and deregulation breed social exclusion, see Naomi Klein, Fences and Windows (London: Flamingo, 2002).

2 Was the free individual just a dream? Snapshots of individualism and the illusion of the good society Recent social theory has identified pressures for individualism, identity politics and individualization, as well as a more thoroughgoing privatized culture where we are increasingly ‘subject to ourselves’, as key processes of global social change. For a summary of these trends in recent social science research, see Anthony Elliott’s Subject to Ourselves: Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Post- modernity, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Paradigm Press, 2004). Today, a breakdown of traditional stable identities based on social class hierarchies is said to give rise to multiple, fragmented and more liquidized identity practices, which in turn unleash new possibilities and risks for personal and social life. The best starting point for grasping changes to the fabric of individualism within the broader context of the polished, expensive cities of the West is Zygmunt Bauman’s various contributions to this debate, most notably Postmodernity and its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), The Individualized Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), and Liquid Love (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003). See also Anthony J. Cas- cardi’s The Subject of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1996), Anthony Giddens’s Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), Anthony Elliott’s Concepts of the Self (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), and Charles Lemert’s Post- modernism Is Not What You Think (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). Many works looking at changes in the area of identity, identity politics and the study of individualism more generally have drawn attention to the personal and cultural significance of global organizations, networks and flows in the reshaping of everyday life. A seminal contribution is Manuel Castells’s The Information Age (Oxford: Blackwell), in a three-volume series: The Rise of the Network Society (1996), The Power of Identity (1998), and End of BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING 203

Millennium (2000). The crisis of individualism today has its roots in a range of transboundary or global phenomena, which includes among others the spread of new information technologies, the development of the multinational culture industry and multinational telecommunication corporations, the organization of intensive transnational networks of production and distribution, the integration of finance systems in the world economy, and the formation of transnational political alliances and lobbies. This takes us directly to the contested terrain of globalization – a debate which is looked at in some detail in the next chapter. The theoretical backdrop to this chapter can be summarized as follows. Many recent social and political concerns about the reshaping of identity arising as a consequence of globalization hinge on an apparent increasing individualism on contemporary culture. One highly influential theoretical perspective has explored broad cultural shifts and identity tensions in relation to definitions of ‘national character’, especially American political culture. In a different theoretical fashion, and at a more transnational or global level, problems in identity construction and cohesion have also been tied to wide-reaching transformations associated with capitalism, modernity and processes of postmodernization. We discuss these different theoretical perspectives in this chapter under three broad headings: ‘Manipulated individualism’, ‘Isolated privatism’ and ‘Reflexive individualization’. All of these theoretical orientations, we argue throughout this chapter, have tended to ignore or isolate elements of emotional or psychic investment in the production and reproduction of the practices of individualism in contemporary society. That this is an important omission is apparent from recent research concerning debates over the homogenization of national identities and local cultures in conditions of globalization. As several influential studies in this field have stressed, the homogenization thesis rests upon a passive view of individuals and their capacity to make and remake their identities in alternative and unexpected ways. See, among others, D. Miller’s Modern- ity: An Ethnographic Approach (Oxford: Berg, 1994) and J. B. Thompson’s The Media and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). In stressing that cultural globalization is always individually consumed, locally read and regionally transformed, these studies have advanced new understandings of the self/society nexus in contemporary advanced society. Our thesis of an emergent ‘new individualism’ arises against the backdrop of these theories, tensions and omissions in the debate over individualism and seeks to develop further conceptualizations of the extent to which global forces at once increase and decrease the ‘affective density of social 204 BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING relations’, paying particular attention to the emotional invest- ments of individuals in global processes, flows and organizations.

Manipulated individualism For Simmel, we consulted his essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ in Mike Featherstone and David Frisby’s edited collection Simmel on Culture (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997). Also useful are David Frisby’s studies Fragments of Modernity (London: Polity Press, 1985) and Georg Simmel (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). For the Frankfurt School, some helpful overviews are Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (London: Heinemann, 1973), David Held’s Introduction to Critical Theory (Cambridge: Pol- ity Press, 1990), Douglas Kellner’s Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) and Rolf Wiggershaus’s The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Signiﬁcance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994). On the culture industry, see Adorno’s The Culture Industry, ed. Jay Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991). Some good overviews of Habermas’s social theory include Thomas McCarthy’s The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978) and William Outhwaite’s edited collection The Habermas Reader (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994). We have drawn here mostly from the early work of Habermas, notably The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). For Haber- mas’s account of the colonization of the lifeworld, see The Theory of Communicative Action (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986).

Isolated privatism We consulted the following texts: Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992); Christopher Lasch’s The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985); Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sul- livan, Ann Swidler and Steven Tipton’s Habits of the Heart: Indi- vidualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996); Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), and Arlie Hochschild’s The Commercialization of Intimate Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003). BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING 205

Reflexive individualization Ulrich Beck’s ideas on reflexivity and individualization are set out in his The Risk Society (London/Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1992), The Reinvention of Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997) and What is Globalization? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). The link between reflexive individualization and globalization is developed in Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim’s Individualization (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2002). One among many critical responses to Beck’s sociological writings is Anthony Elliott’s Critical Visions: New Directions in Social Theory (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), chapter 2.

Globalization and the interiors of the new individualism The quote from Marshall Berman is from All That is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Verso, 1982); the quote from Perry Anderson is from The Origins of Postmodernity (New York: Verso, 1998). Our outline of an imaginary domain that shapes, and is shaped by, the new individualism is substantially informed by Anthony Elliott’s Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition: Self and Society from Freud to Kristeva (Oxford: Free Association Books, 1999) and Social Theory Since Freud: Traversing Social Imaginaries (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). Other writings in this tradition which inform our conceptualization of both an imaginary domain and interior of the new individualism include Jacques Lacan’s Ecrits (London and New York: Routledge, 1977); Jean Laplanche’s Essays on Otherness (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), Julia Kristeva’s The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), Cornelius Castoriadis’s The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), Thomas Ogden’s The Primitive Edge of Experience (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1989), and Phyllis Meadow’s The New Psychoanalysis (Lanham, MD/Oxford: Rowman & Littleﬁeld, 2003).

3 Living in a privatized world: Coping with globalization Self-Therapy: A Guide to Becoming Your Own Therapist, by Janette Rainwater, was published in London by Crucible, 1989. The quotation is from p. 9. For an interesting use of Rainwater’s ideas in the context of a social-theoretical critique of therapy, see Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), chapter 3. The literature on globalization is huge. Much of the debate over globalization has emanated from the academy, yet it is equally 206 BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING true that the topic has been central to current political debate as well as economic and social policy dialogues. Useful guides to the various controversies about globalization are Malcolm Waters’ Globalization (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), Martin Albrow’s The Global Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), Robert Holton’s Globalization and the Nation State (London: Macmillan, 1998), Zygmunt Bauman’s Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), Ulrich Beck’s What is Globaliza- tion? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), Jean Aart Scholte’s Global- ization: A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), and Leslie Sklair’s Globalization: Capitalism and its Alternatives, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Concerning the Globalization I debate, the case of the sceptics was most forcefully advanced by Paul Hirst and Graeme Thompson, Globalization in Question, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). On the antiglobalization discourse, see David Held and Anthony McGrew, Globalization/Anti-Globalization (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). Roland Robertson’s Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1992) was one of the ﬁrst systematic works to contextualize globalization in relation to a growing consciousness of the world as a single place, a ‘global consciousness’. His approach directs us to issues of types of social agency, relationships, networks and communities within the broader global frame of multidimensionality. In addition to Robertson’s important research, we also have found the following books on the personal, political, and cultural aspects of globalization useful: Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), Ulf Hannerz’s The Transnational Connection (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), John Urry’s Global Complexity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003) and John Keane’s Global Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Important liberal presences of globalization include Joseph Stiglitz’s Globalization and its Discontents (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), Jagdish Bhagwati’s In Defence of Globalization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), and Martin Wolf’s Why Globalization Works (New Haven, Conn./London: Yale University Press, 2004). David Held’s research, which powerfully contextualizes globalization in the frame of social and political theory, is set out most recently in Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004). But we have also drawn from the work of Held and his associates for contextualizing the ‘diffuse globalism’ of Larry’s world and the BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING 207

‘thick globalism’ of Joe and Xavier’s worlds. See David Held et al., Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Cam- bridge: Polity Press, 1999). Held and his associates examine global flows, networks and relations in terms of their different possible consequences for extensity, intensity, velocity and impact pro- pensity. From this analytical baseline, four potential shapes of globalization are identified: ‘thick globalization’, ‘diffused globalization’, ‘expansive globalization’ and ‘thin globalization’. In reviewing and interpreting the interviews of Larry and of Joe and Xavier, we have drawn from this model for identifying the ‘deep drivers’ of globalism with particular reference to how its contemporary shape might affect practices of identity and the emotions. This is an extension of the model elaborated by Held and his associates, beyond the institutional political field of their research to the individualized emotional field of our research, and one which we believe is highly fruitful for connecting contemporary forms of globalism to what people say in interviews about emotional transformations occurring in their lives. The quotations from Beck and Beck-Gernsheim are from Indi- vidualization (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2002), pp. 38, 49. The quotation from Bauman is from Wasted Lives (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), p. 128.

4 On the individualist arts of sex: Intimacy, eroticism and the newly lost individual On the many forms and changing dimensions of globalization and sexuality, see Dennis Altman, Global Sex (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), surely the most insightful critical discussion recently published. Freud’s analysis of the polymorphous plasticity of sex is in ‘Three Essays on Sexuality’, in John and Alex Strachey (eds), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1973). For a discussion of how Freud’s theory of sexuality connects to wider social and political forces of change, see Anthony Elliott, Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). For Giddens, we draw upon his books The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990) and Modernity and Self- Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). See also U. Beck, A. Giddens and S. Lash, Reflexive Modernisation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994). For Giddens’s theorization of sexuality as reflexive, see his The Transformation of Intimacy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992). There is now an extensive literature on the sociological powers and 208 BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING limits of Giddens’s theory of reflexivity: among others, see Charles Lemert, Sociology After the Crisis, 2nd edn (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press, 2004) and Anthony Elliott, Critical Visions: New Directions in Social Theory, (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), chapter 2. Janice Radway’s provocative analysis of why women read, and what they are also doing psychologically when reading, is outlined in her Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). John B. Thompson’s critique of new media and information technologies as related to the ‘relevance structure’ of personal and social experience is developed in his The Media and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). Richard Lanham’s excellent work on the creativity of computational text is The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995) is one of the best psycho-social studies of the relationship between computers and emotional life available. Regarding the politics of therapy, we consulted Phillip Rieff’s classic The Triumph of the Therapeutic (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1987) as well as Stephen Frosh’s For and Against Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). Our discussion here foregrounds Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980) and Eva Moskowitz’s In Therapy We Trust: America’s Obsession with Self-Fulfillment (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Another recent study of the topic, Frank Furedi’s Therapy Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), casts the contemporary domin- ance of the therapeutic imperative as an outcome of a new emotionalism, in which the boundaries of private and public life are significantly redrawn. Furedi’s argument is that therapy culture seeks to repress and exclude the challenges and conflicts that individuals and groups necessarily deal with in daily life, shifting the management of people’s emotions to the terrain of political blue- prints and professional experts. Therapy culture for Furedi inaugurates a new order of emotional vulnerability, in which people are incited to feel powerless and helpless, a social order in which the politics of daily life becomes centred on issues of personal resilience and on an individualized capacity to cope with risks, hazards and dangers. In our view, it might be more fruitful to contrast not therapy and therapeutics as Furedi does, but emancipatory and commercial uses of these terms. Criticisms of therapy are now as multiple as the therapies on offer to individuals, and so it would seem evident BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING 209 that any cultural agreement or consensus on the powers and limits of therapy is unlikely to emerge. Of course the critique of therapeutics initiated by writers like Moskowitz and Furedi is important, especially where the private and therapeutic are recast as part of the processes of social regulation or personal demoralization. But the new individualism suggests that the reverse lining of this argument needs to be reckoned into account too. It’s not just the insidious forces of social power or ideological domination at stake here, but rather that oppressive rewritings of therapeutic practices render imaginative space too restrictive and insufficiently our own. Another way of putting this would be to say that we should consider using Freud’s fundamental psychoanalytic insight – namely, that we are not transparent to ourselves – to question the knowing- ness of the therapeutic imperative and especially the transmission of what passes for therapeutic insight across organizations and institutions. Therapy culture, in its more functionalist or instrumental modes, is the product of a relentless postmodern drive for self- fulfilment and self-expression. The therapeutic imagination is, in this sense, essentially devoted to simple, fast and final solutions, compressing complex individual and collective problems down to the point of psychologism – to a belief that focusing attention on private life is all that is needed for coming to terms with the riddles of being-in-the-world. The utopianism in all this is almost appeal- ing. Not only will therapeutic confession lead to better, and indeed happier, lives, but the outcomes from psychological diagnosis will produce a complete eradication of disorders, addictions and syn- dromes; instead of human ambivalence and productive psychic conflict (as conceptualized and recommended by Freud), an end to the dynamic unconscious, to repressed desire, to depression and the death drive. Such demand for psychological certitude, at once craved and reproduced by the more instrumentalist forms of today’s therapy culture, is fortunately not everywhere supreme. Modernist demands for a designed, managed and conformist therapeutic authority are increasingly brought low by our fast globalizing world, in which a proliferation of knowledge systems and knowledge capital means that dependence on professional authority can no longer take the form of either passive acceptance or blind trust. What this suggests, in a nutshell, is that claims to specialized knowledge advanced by therapists enter into direct competition and conflict with other professional experts in the fields of health, medicine, psychology, and on and on, such that the client or consumer has no choice but to engage with an endless menu of possible choices regarding matters 210 BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING of emotional health and psychological well-being. From this angle, therapy culture becomes squeezed between modernist dreams of psychological certitude and uncertainty-free solutions on the one hand, and late modern or postmodern aspirations for polytherapeu- tic or multicultural engagements with the emotional dilemmas of the age on the other. This revaluation of personal choice and individual decision-making in our increasingly consumer-orientated society is manifested in a fast-proliferating distrust of ‘experts’ (witness the explosion of litigation against therapists in the US especially), and particularly in an increasing rejection of the ten- dency of the ‘psy’-professions to recast emotional dilemmas as forms of illness. Debates about forms of therapy and their efficacy are not simply the preserve of experts and intellectuals, however, but also draw in those that have most to gain or lose from such psychological exploration – namely, the clients or subjects of therapy. Nearly everyone entering therapy today is aware, at however much a min- imum level, that there is no authoritative version of psychotherapy. To enter the therapeutic domain today is to enter a field comprising an almost inexhaustible variety of approaches, orientations, practices, theories and philosophies. By means of choosing a therapist, a person implicitly makes a choice regarding which of the competing schools and approaches best suits them and their strivings for human autonomy. Yet, in exercising choice in this way, people are engaging in much more than mere consumer selection. For just as therapists are viewed less and less as ‘professional authorities’ and more as ‘co-workers’ in revising narratives of the self, so clients themselves are demonstrating an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the competing claims, counter-claims and aims of therapeutic traditions and trends, initiating not only self-reflexive investigations of how the therapeutic process relates to the broader contours of their emotional lives but also engaging in discussion and debate with their therapist over the value of therapeutics more generally. The prime value of therapy from this angle is that it provides people with – to use British sociologist Anthony Giddens’s phrase – ‘a methodology of life-planning’. Of course, in actuality, things may not appear so plural or reflexive for subjects of therapy as they go about the daily business of reflecting on the apparent jumble of their emotional lives. And while it is also true that psychotherapy as a profession has been notably inward-looking and reclusive, it remains so that the diversity of therapeutic imaginaries is increasingly evident – for anyone who cares to look – at the level of theory and clinical practice. Classical psychoanalysis, it is true, retains a considerable degree of BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING 211 intellectual superiority here – especially for academics, but also for those with the time and money to pursue ‘a methodology of life- planning’ in such exquisite detail. Yet it is in the marketplace that one can find the strongest indication of the ever-growing diversity of therapeutics – from counselling and survivor groups to psycho- therapeutic mysticism and postmodern psychodynamic approaches. Perhaps the best indication of such pluralism is to be found by looking at one particular version of therapy; namely, psychoanalysis. It may be that, as the so-called ‘culture wars’ have it, the fascination with Freud is over – but then again, look at the sheer diversity of psychoanalytic theories and treatments on offer today. Classical Psychoanalysts, Post-Freudians, Kleinians, the Inter- personal School, Lacanians, Neo-Lacanians, Jungians, Winnicot- tians, Relational Analysts: such is the diversity of therapists that confronts anyone contemplating psychoanalysis today. What might such analytic differentiation within psychoanalysis mean in broader terms? We might, for one thing, expect to find diverse cultural emphases and psychological expectations operating within such approaches and theories. For example, Kleinian therapies might be subtitled ‘Portrait of the child overwhelmed by her mother’, or ‘How to keep Mummy and beat back Daddy’; classical Freudian therapies might be cast as psycho-cultural imaginaries locked on exclusions, denials, displacements and repressions; Lacanian therapies can be understood as fascinated by the early self’s relation to loss, lack and language. In picturing competing versions of psychoanalysis in this way, a different understanding of therapeutics opens out, one in which a concern with open-mindedness, differ- ence and diversity comes into view. If therapy is complex, contradictory and diverse at the level of clinical practice, then why might this not also be true within the broader field of culture? That is, why shouldn’t therapy culture participate in a similar mixture of opportunity and risk characteristic of modernity itself ? The short answer is that it does. Only a more refined psycho-social analysis, we argue, based on careful appraisal of the cultural consequences of the new individualism, can succeed in addressing the powers and limits of therapeutics. What is required now is the kind of social critique capable of addressing the various ways in which therapeutics infiltrates and frames diverse aspects of personal and organizational life – from the use of self-help manuals to the directives handed down from management therapists acting as consultants to various global conglomerates – and of how such social practices often bring with them gains in personal and social autonomy. Equally, what is also needed is a guiding framework that can trace and map the complex 212 BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING ways in which therapeutics often becomes degraded; that is, comes to be deployed oppressively and exploitatively. In a world of advanced globalization, in which media sound bites fuel political reaction and counter-reaction, this is clearly a pressing public issue. The rise of confessional culture and mediated scandal – from the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal to the sexual rumours surrounding football icon David Beckham and the state of his marriage – high- lights only too well the growing place of therapy-centred politics in our time. Sociologies of all kinds must try to grasp both these enabling and constraining features of therapeutics – in the worlds of individual selves certainly, but also culturally and across the globe.

5 The self and other ethical troubles: Ethics, social differences and the truths of multiculturalism The issues addressed in this chapter are discussed at great length and detail in Charles Lemert, Dark Thoughts: Race and the Eclipse of Society (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). The general argument on multicultural ethics is in Charles Lemert, ‘Can the Worlds Be Changed? On Ethics and the Multicultural Dream’, Thesis Eleven, 78 (August 2004), pp. 46–60. The references to Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of liquidity are from his Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). Ulrich Beck’s second modernity is from The Reinvention of Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), among other places. Anthony Giddens’s radical mod- ernization appears in several of his many writings, notably The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). Scott Lash’s version of reﬂexivity modernity is in Reﬂexive Moderniza- tion (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994) – a collection of essays on the subject by Giddens and Beck as well as Lash. The Immanuel Wallerstein reference is to his The Modern World-System, 3 vols (New York: Academic Press, 1974, 1980, 1989).

6 Surviving the new individualism: Living aggressively in deadly worlds In the reprise of the social history of the three types of new individualism the references to authors of various theories can be found in the original presentation of the ideas in Chapter 2. Those few that are mentioned here but not there are assumed to be so well known as to be recognizable. Still if they are not, try Charles Lemert’s Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classical Readings BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING 213

3rd edn (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2004), where the reader can find short selections as well as biographical information on the authors. Lemert’s long introduction to the historical periods covered in Social Theory provides more information on the history of the times from the 1920s on. Otherwise sources for the social history of the various periods are too numerous to mention, but some of the more notable are: Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage Books, 1994); Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to the Present (New York: HarperCollins, 2003); Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, 1973); Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1995); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bounder: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties (Boston, Mass.: Beacon, 1992); Walter Russell Mead, Moral Splendor: The American Empire in Transition (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987); Phyllis Meadow, The New Psychoanalysis (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); David Halber- stam, The Fifties (New York: Ballantine, 1994); John D’Emilio, Sex- ual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon: What Happened and Why (New York: Vintage, 1976); Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998); C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959); Immanuel Wallerstein, After Liberalism (New York: New Press, 1995) and The Decline of American Power (New York: New Press, 2003).