Individualism. The self and distinction 4018-SEM33-CLASS

“Individualization” was one of the first and most important diagnoses offered by social sciences. It is treated as a framework for the processes typical of modernity and late modernity. From the start, “individualization” was seen as a new form of socialization, subsequently linked to people coming out of structures and entering culture, and as social disintegration.

The sources of individualization are sought as far back as mediaeval legal systems regulating ownership and inheritance. The starting point for the discussion on studies on individualization will be the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Aesthetics and psychoanalysis are two domains which are characteristic of individualization while also diagnosing it. Daniel P. Schreber’s “neurotheology” is viewed as a harbinger of phenomena and processes which determined the direction of the individualization process. The pairs of notions - old middle class and new middle class, and expressive self and enterprising self - name the sources of conflict regarding the direction of individualization that we see. It is widely accepted today that the critical moment for late modernity was the 1980s, when new political and economic dogmas developed.
The current diversity of research on the process of individualization highlights the uncertainty as to the important features of this process, and the cultural phenomena and practices which might be considered “characteristic” of it. During the seminar we will consider current trends in research for which individualization is the main theoretical context. In contemporary research on individualization, we can distinguish several important problematizations of this diagnosis:
- the circularity of explanations; culturalization, de-traditionalization, feminization, reflectivization, aestheticization are seen as the cause and effect of individualization
- a diversity of research areas perceived as being privileged for diagnosing individualization (new cultural practices, intimate relations, religiousness, lifestyles, life orientations, cultural citizenship, consumerism, aestheticization and cultural messages, individual strategies and micropolitics of interaction in the workplace)
- the hypotheses offered and the questions asked during studies often individualize respondents in advance (beforehand)
- the voracity of the process of individualization has its other side; individualization is hindered by various ignored countertendencies (community impulses, primordialism, remasculinization), which begs the question of whether “regressions” of this process are possible and how they would manifest themselves
- how can studies account for the fact that individualization is not a one-way process and its pace is not constant?
- important trends in the process of individualization include biographical narrative projects disseminated by institutions (education, therapy, welfare work) and cultural messages. This raises the question of how to distinguish new narratives - giving assurances as to the possibility of identity “mobility” - from what people really do
- research related to feminist studies and postcolonial theory indicate an urgent necessity to revise previous research so that wherever change, hierarchy reversal, de-traditionalization, reflectivization and counter-socialization are observed, the reproduction and reshuffling of cultural content is also taken into account.