Abstract
This chapter states that unlimited individualism is not a new characteristic of the global age since it originates both in the Promethean and acquisitive model of early modernity (Hobbes), and in the narcissistic individualism of second modernity (or postmodernity); globalization, however, produces a radicalization of the negative aspects of both. Unlimited individualism is what unites the three figures put forward to sum up the whole configuration of the global Self: the spectator, consumer and creator (homo creator) individuals. The global Self is configured, at the same time, as an apathetical and voracious, insecure and omnipotent, parasitic and acquisitive Self, characterized by a substantial atomism which we can recognize in the spectator’s indifference, the consumer’s parasitism and homo creator’s solipsistic omnipotence (fuelled by technology). It is an individual who, together with the projectuality and Hobbesian foresight of the modern homo oeconomicus, has lost the sense and purpose of his action, hence he ends up harming his own interests and endangering the survival of humankind and the world.
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Notes
- 1.
See Zygmunt Bauman, In Search of Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999).
- 2.
See Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
- 3.
The expression ‘postmodern syndrome’ is from Alessandro Ferrara, Modernity and Authenticity. A Study of the Social and Ethical Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), originally published as Modernità e autenticità. Saggio sul pensiero sociale ed etico di J.J. Rousseau (Rome: Armando, 1989).
- 4.
From Sennett to Lasch, Bell to Riesman, Bellah to Lipovetsky.
- 5.
Gilles Lipovetsky, L’ère du vide. Essais sur l’individualisme contemporain (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). But the author returns to this concept several times.
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
Ibid., 20. In truth, Lipovetsky speaks of ‘total’ individualism (individualisme ‘total’), but I prefer the term ‘unlimited’ which permits me to underline, as we will see, a more incisive aspect for the transformations of the global age.
- 8.
For a more in-depth analysis of the topics set out in this paragraph, see my Individual Without Passions. Modern Individualism and the Loss of Social Bond (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012). Originally published as L’individuo senza passioni. Individualismo moderno e perdita del legame sociale (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2001).
- 9.
Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT, 1983).Originally published as Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966).
- 10.
On the figure of Prometheus, see Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ed. C. B. Macpherson (1968; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980), XII:169.
- 11.
Ibid., XI:161: ‘So that in the first place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death.’ On Hobbes’s ‘unlimited individualism’, see Lucien Jaume, Hobbes et l’Etat représentatif moderne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986).
- 12.
See Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), vol. 1 in The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press/New York: Oxford University Press, 1976–1983), 64ff.
- 13.
Ibid., 50.
- 14.
Ibid., 83.
- 15.
On modern individualism and self-love, see my “La passione del moderno: l’amore di sé,” in Storia delle passioni, ed. Silvia Vegetti Finzi (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1995).
- 16.
See Part III.
- 17.
This is the case above all for the Hobbesian model, which in any case represents the hegemonic model of modernity. On the disciplinary model of modernity, see Marco Revelli, Oltre il novecento (Turin: Einaudi, 2001); Lipovetsky, L’ère du vide.
- 18.
See Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization. A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (London: Routledge, 1998), 159ff.
- 19.
Ibid., 169.
- 20.
Like the ‘Romantic expressivism’ of Wordsworth and Novalis – see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), Part IV, § 21; Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 92ff. – or the democratic individualism of Emerson and Whitman – see Nadia Urbinati, Individualismo democratico. Emerson, Dewey e la cultura politica americana (Rome: Donzelli, 1997), in particular II, I; and Robert Bellah, ed., Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 33ff.; like Kierkegaard’s self-choice or Nietzsche’s search for self-integrity (on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and ‘self-affirmation’, see Taylor, Sources of the Self, 447ff.; Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 119; Ferrara, Modernity and Authenticity, 149).
- 21.
See Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1992). Originally published in Canada under the title The Malaise of Modernity, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Massey Lectures Series (Concord: Anansi, 1991).
- 22.
See also Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
- 23.
See Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity,chap. 6.
- 24.
Ibid.
- 25.
See Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), chap. III, § 3; on the personalization of professional relations and the emphasis on subjective action rather than the objective value of action, see also Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976), 11–12.
- 26.
Riesman and Lasch place particular stress on this aspect, but still effective on the topic of the weakening of paternal authority is Alexander Mitscherlich, Society Without the Father: A Contribution to Social Psychology (London: Tavistock Publications, 1969), originally published as Auf dem Weg zur vaterlosen Gesellschaft. Ideen zur Sozialpsychologie (Munich: Piper, 1963).
- 27.
On this see Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism and Klaus Strzyz, Sozialisation und Narcissismus (Wiesbaden: Akademische Verlaggesellschaft, 1978). A general reference for the narcissism theory is Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self (London: Hogarth, 1971).
- 28.
Still fundamental on this topic is the text by David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1961).
- 29.
See Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1976).
- 30.
Riesman, The Lonely Crowd.
- 31.
See Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism.
- 32.
See Lipovetsky, L’ère du vide.
- 33.
See Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966).
- 34.
This also explains, as underlined by Giovanni Jervis in La conquista dell’identità (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1997), 30, the shift of attention in psychoanalytical theory from the problem of ‘conflict’ to the problem of ‘fragility’.
- 35.
See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. Introduction Alan Ryan, 2 vols (London: David Campbell Publishers Ltd, 1994). Originally published as La démocratie en Amérique (Paris: C. Gosselin), 1835–40.
- 36.
See Pulcini, The Individual Without Passions, chap. 4.
- 37.
See ibid.
- 38.
See Lipovetsky, L’ère du vide, chap. III.
- 39.
For a psychological approach to this type of pathology, of interest is the book by Miguel Benasayag and Gérard Schmit, Les passions tristes (Paris: La Découverte, 2003).
- 40.
The definitions belong respectively to Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, Lipovetsky, L’ère du vide and Sennett, The Fall of Public Man.
- 41.
Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic.
- 42.
The incisive definition of narcissism as an ‘identity logic’ (logica dell’identità) is by Umberto Curi, Endiadi. Figure della duplicità (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1995).
- 43.
Lipovetsky, L’ère du vide.
- 44.
The term is by Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, chap. X.
- 45.
Lasch alludes to the loss of critical capacity in The Culture of Narcissism, chap. X.
- 46.
See Lipovetsky, L’ère du vide, chap. 4, § ‘Crise de la démocratie’, 181ff.
- 47.
On the postmodern individual, with particular reference to Lipovetsky, see Furio Semerari, Individualismo e comunità. Moderno, postmoderno e oltre (Bari: Adriatica, 2005).
- 48.
While taking up the ‘aesthetic space’ concept proposed by Bauman, Magatti (L’Io globale, 165ff.) speaks of the enormous growth in the symbolic resources available to the subject and at the same time of the weakening of subjectivity, that is, a Self who is overblown and lost at the same time.
- 49.
On communication systems as factors that cause the expansion of the individual’s self-assertion, see John B. Thompson, Media and Modernity. A Social Theory of the Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).
- 50.
See Alain Caillé and Ahmet Insel, “Quelle autre mondialisation?,” Revue du MAUSS.
- 51.
See Magatti, L’Io globale, chap. 3, on the intertwining of the loss of modernity’s parameters and the excess of possibilities.
- 52.
See Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization. The Human Consequences (Cambridge/Oxford: Polity Press/Blackwell Publishers, 1998); Bauman, “A Catalogue of Postmodern Fears,” in Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Bauman, In Search of Politics.
- 53.
On the crisis of sovereignty, see Ohmae, The End of the Nation State; Badie, La fin des territoires; Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, ed. Max Pensky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), originally published as Die Postnationale Konstellation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998).
- 54.
See Bauman, In Search of Politics, 19ff.
- 55.
See Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992). Originally published as Risikogesellschaft. Auf dem Weg in eine Andere Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986).
- 56.
See Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character. The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York/London: W.W. Norton, 1998); André Gorz, Métamorphoses du travail (Paris: Galilée, 1988); Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work. The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995).
- 57.
See Bauman, In Search of Politics, 16ff. On the new forms of insecurity see also Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), chap. IV.
- 58.
Bauman, In Search of Politics, 157ff.
- 59.
On this aspect, which has already been recalled, see also Ulrich Beck, What Is Globalization? (Malden: Polity Press, 2000), 11, originally published as Was ist Globalisierung? (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997): ‘Globality means that from now on nothing which happens on our planet is only a limited local event; all inventions, victories and catastrophes affect the whole world, and we must reorient and reorganize our lives and actions, our organizations and institutions, along a ‘local-global’ axis.’
- 60.
See Part II.
- 61.
See Beck, Risk Society; Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).
- 62.
Beck, Risk Society, 19ff.
- 63.
On the concept of ‘immunity’, to which I shall have to return, see Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), originally published as Communitas. Origine e destino della comunità (Turin: Einaudi, 1998) and Esposito, Immunitas. Protezione e negazione della vita (Turin: Einaudi, 2002).
- 64.
See Beck, Risk Society.
- 65.
See Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). Originally published as: Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer. Paradigma einer Daseinsmetapher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979).
- 66.
See Part II.
- 67.
See Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism.
- 68.
On this passage see Riesman, The Lonely Crowd; Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism; Lipovetsky, L’ère du vide; and Featherstone, Global Culture.
- 69.
‘[…] our whole economy has become a waste economy, in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared’ (Arendt, The Human Condition, 134).
- 70.
See Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, II, 196–98. All quotations from Anders’s text are my own translations.
- 71.
Ibid., 312.
- 72.
See ibid., 69.
- 73.
See Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, 59ff.; see also Roberta Sassatelli, Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics (Los Angeles/London: Sage, 2007), originally published as Cultura, consumo e società (Bolgona: Il Mulino, 2004); Luisa Leonini, “Consumo,” in Parole chiave. Per un nuovo lessico delle scienze sociali, ed. Alberto Melucci (Rome: Carocci, 2000).
- 74.
See Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).
- 75.
See Gilles Lipovetsky, Le bonheur paradoxal. Essai sur la société d’hyperconsommation (Paris: Gallimard, 2006); Bauman, Consuming Life; Vanni Codeluppi, Il potere del consumo (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003), chap. I.
- 76.
See René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965). Originally published as Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Paris: Grasset, 1961).
- 77.
Bauman, Globalization.
- 78.
See Christoph Türcke, Erregte Gesellschaft. Philosophie der Sensation (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2002).
- 79.
See George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 1993).
- 80.
Bauman, In Search of Politics, 77.
- 81.
Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility; see also Jonas, Technik, Medizin und Ethik. Zur Praxis des Prinzips Verantwortung (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1985).
- 82.
Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, II, 21.
- 83.
See Arendt, The Human Condition, for example 139: ‘The animal laborans […] still remains the servant of nature and the earth; only homo faber conducts himself as lord and master of the whole earth. Since his productivity was seen in the image of a Creator-God, […] human productivity was by definition bound to result in a Promethean revolt because it could erect a man-made world only after destroying part of God-created nature.’
- 84.
Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, I, 49.
- 85.
See also Arnold Gehlen, Man: His Nature and Place in the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), originally published as Der Mensch. Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1966); Gehlen, Anthropologische Forschung. Zur Selbstbegegnung und Selbstentdeckung (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1961).
- 86.
Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, I, 24.
- 87.
In Anders’s division of modernity, the First Industrial Revolution is when machines were introduced to the production process, the Second pertains to the production of needs through the compulsion to consume, and the Third to the production of those means that can radically alter, or destroy, the living world. (Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, II, 15ff.).
- 88.
See Umberto Galimberti, Psiche e techne. L’uomo nell’età della tecnica (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1999).
- 89.
Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, I, 2.
- 90.
Promethean shame is in fact essentially shame of what is human and organic life, since in comparison with the manufactured world, this life appears full of incorrigible imperfections and becomes subject to embarrassment, and at times even disdain. First of all man feels ashamed of his origin, uneasy about his own birth; ‘he is ashamed of having become rather than having been made, of his existence, unlike perfect products calculated down to the smallest details, being the result of the blind and uncalculated and most outdated process of procreation and birth.’ (Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, I, 24). As a consequence, he feels the limits imposed by his bodily nature, he feels the body to be a ‘dead weight’, ‘unfree, refractory and obstinate’ (ibid., 33), hindering the Promethean hubris and impeding the unbounded projectuality made possible by technology.
- 91.
‘Indeed we can speak of a “second nature”, an expression that until now had only been used metaphorically. Today, instead, it can be used in a non-metaphorical sense, given that there are processes and pieces of nature which had never existed before we created them.’ (Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, II, 21).
- 92.
Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, I, 37ff.
- 93.
Ibid., 38.
- 94.
Ibid., 38ff.
- 95.
Ibid., 45.
- 96.
For a further investigation of this topic, see my “L’homo creator e la perdita del mondo,” in Umano post-umano. Potere, sapere, etica nell’età globale, ed Mariapaola Fimiani, Vanna Gessa Kurotschka and Elena Pulcini (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2004). On the concept of ‘post-human’, I shall make a single reference to the precious book by Roberto Marchesini, Post-human. Verso nuovi modelli di esistenza (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002).
- 97.
André Gorz, L’immatériel. Connaissance, valeur et capital (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 137, own translation.
- 98.
Ibid., 118, own translation.
- 99.
Ibid., 117, own translation.
- 100.
‘The techno-scientific imagination has structured itself for some six hundred years around the concept of disappearance – of the inexorable enactment of a stripping down of the World, of the substance of the living world’, Paul Virilio and Chris Turner, Ground Zero (London: Verso, 2002), originally published as Ce qui arrive (Paris Galilée, 2002), 12–13.
- 101.
Ibid., 37.
- 102.
For a more problematic, and in some aspects more critical view of the post-human, see Marchesini, Post-human; Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women. The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), about which see my “L’homo creator e la perdita del mondo”.
- 103.
According to Husserl’s distinction.
- 104.
See Martin Albrow, The Global Age. State and Society Beyond Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996).
- 105.
See Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.
- 106.
Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb (London/New York: Verso, 2000), 131. Originally published as La bombe informatique (Paris: Galilée, 1998).
- 107.
Ibid., 14.
- 108.
According to Virilio, it is the ‘information bomb’ that permits the invention of false horizons.
- 109.
In this connection Virilio speaks of ‘internal colonization’ in The Information Bomb, 138.
- 110.
Ibid., 55; see also Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), originally published as L’art du moteur (Paris: Galilée, 1993); Virilio, Unknown Quantity.
- 111.
See Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 9.
- 112.
On this crucial topic, which I can but hint at here, see Bauman, Postmodern Ethics,chap. 7; but above all the important and now classic works by Jacques Ellul, amongst which The Technological Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), originally published as La Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1954).
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Pulcini, E. (2013). Unlimited Individualism. In: Care of the World. Studies in Global Justice, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4482-0_2
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