Abstract
Modernity promised individual freedom through the exercise of reason backed up by social justice and scientific knowledge. But modernization processes conjure a desire for new experiences and the satisfaction of spiralling wants. Thus, Bauman explains how ‘solid’ modernity, based around the fusion of societal interests, has given way to today’s ‘liquid’ form. Here, everything is in flux, and individualization—the demand for self-realization—has become our paramount goal. Society is merely a vehicle for our individual performances and a space of social fracturing rather than a source of cohesion and normative obligations. Sociologists and others have conceptualized individualization processes in different ways: as the reflexive self, determined to construct a personal DIY biography; the neoliberal individual living for market gain; the post-modern fragmented self, endlessly pursuing transitory sign values; the ‘free’ individual imprisoned within his own private caravan world, incapable of shared action; or the lone person who no longer has access to an identity grounded in workplace loyalty or valued long-term skills. The chapter then discusses three wider consequences of individualization processes. Consumerism increasingly compensates us for the loss of employment security and provides an exciting realm of fantasy and escapism which now defines individual identity. But it also locks us into a materialistic, narcissistic world of private obsessions and leaves us prey to capitalist seduction. Second, politics and politicians are trivialized because we expect them to pander to our personal whims in the same way as corporate brands and advertising. Last, individualization ultimately leaves us disempowered because it divides and distracts us from the need to engage in collective action while shared-lifestyle fads are too temporary and fragmented to bear the weight of effective societal unity. But without this we are unable to seriously confront the wider socio-economic crises that threaten our lives and futures.
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Notes
- 1.
E.P. Thomson’s classic and renowned book The Making of the English Working Class (1963) captures these processes brilliantly.
- 2.
Postmodern theory covers far more ground than can be discussed here: for example, the claim that social life is aesthetized in the kaleidoscope of shifting surfaces, the collapse of any distinction between ‘high’ bourgeois and popular ‘low’ culture and the rise of pluralistic cultural experiences which bring the previously excluded and marginalized—women, racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTs and so on—into the centre.
- 3.
Some recent observers are convinced that the digital revolution, along with the rise of the social media and networked sociality, are changing individualization processes to the extent that new forms of social solidarity are emerging (e.g. Mason 2013 and 2015a and Rifkin 2014). In Chaps. 8 and 9 we examine this argument in detail.
- 4.
Streek (2012: 37) shows how Germany had only two national television channels in the 1970s but now that are over 100 across many cities.
- 5.
Perhaps, though, politicians are only too aware of this reality—and this explains the soundbites they frequently employ in attempting to shape public opinion. I am indebted to Ray Kiely for this observation.
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Kennedy, P. (2017). Individualization and the Cultures of Capitalism. In: Vampire Capitalism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55266-2_6
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