Twilight of the Self: The Decline of the Individual in Late Capitalism

TWILIGHT OF THE SELF

The Decline of the Individual in Late Capitalism

Michael J. Thompson

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2022 by Michael John Thompson. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Thompson, Michael J., 1973– author.

Title: Twilight of the self : the decline of the individual in late capitalism / Michael J. Thompson.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021051935 (print) | LCCN 2021051936 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503632448 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503632455 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503632462 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Self—Social aspects. | Neoliberalism. | Social history—1970- | Democracy—Philosophy. | Political science—Philosophy.

Classification: LCC BF697.5.S65 T46 2022 (print) | LCC BF697.5.S65 (ebook) | DDC 155.2—dc23/eng/20211109

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021051935

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021051936

Cover design: Rob Ehle

for elena, with love

Ben è colui d’ogni valore scarco

Qual tuo spirto gentil non innamora.

Die einzig wahrhafte Kraft gegen das Prinzip von Auschwitz wäre Autonomie . . . die Kraft zur Reflexion, zur Selbstbestimmung, zum nicht-Mitmachen.

—T. W. Adorno

Contents

Preface

Introduction

PART I: OUR STEELY ENCASEMENT

1. The Rise of Cybernetic Society: The Patterned World and the Fate of the Individual

2. Social Domination, Social Systems, and the Constitution of the Self

3. The Reification Problem and the Normative Entanglement Hypothesis

PART II: AN ANATOMY OF HETERONOMY

4. Alienation: From Autonomy to Moral Atrophy

5. Reconsidering False Consciousness: An Etiology of Defective Social Cognition

6. Cultivating Consent: Reification and the Web of Norms

7. The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego

PART III: TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

8. Autonomy as Critical Agency: Reconstructing the Democratic Self

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

More than ever, the ideal of autonomy is in peril. Now, as in perhaps no other time in recent cultural memory, the extent of group uniformity engulfs the self and, with it, the cognitive, critical, and libidinal capacities that shape the individual. We live more and more in an age of heteronomy, that state of the self’s other-directedness that Enlightenment thinkers took as their central philosophical nemesis. Today, new intellectual fads, rooted in technologically mediated forms of group-think, continue to assail the very resources of thought and reason that were at the heart of the Enlightenment project. Once again, we can perceive the potent force of antirationality, what Kant termed misology, making its way in the world. It is not only the banner of conservative and reactionary forces but, now increasingly, those that masquerade as progressive, as radical. More than even in the days of postmodern and poststructural theory, we are turning away from reason as the core dimension of what it means to be and to think freely. Reason as a harmonizer of the self—conceived as a thinking, feeling being rather than as an instrument of power and domination has always been at the heart of the humanistic strand of the Enlightenment, and decades of myopic academic assault have left us with scant resources to combat the antihumanism of our age.

In a previous book, I elaborated a system that established a critical theory of political and ethical judgment. What was missing from that account was a study of the kind of self that would be capable of achieving critical consciousness and an account of the pathologies of the self that prevent such critical consciousness from being articulated. In this book, I want to defend the idea of the individual and argue that the idea of autonomy is, in fact, a central category for reviving critical consciousness and a more robust democratic civic life. I believe that the forces arrayed against the individual are more powerful and more pernicious than at any other time during the course of the modern world. But it is not the individual as envisioned in the past that I want to rehabilitate; rather, I want to propose an individuality that lies in potentia, a kind of individuality that can come to grasp its essential relatedness to others and to the world. I do not defend the atomized, classical liberal self that is a fiction of independence and still serves as the ideological cornerstone of our collective consciousness, nor do I rehearse the claims of intersubjectivists and pragmatists who dissolve the self into a web of relations with their naive belief in deliberation and common sense. These positions can no longer be defended because of the deep powers of reification and alienation that shape modern consciousness and the inner structure of the self. Rather, autonomy denotes a self that is conscious of its potential solidarity with others, that questions the social world’s legitimacy with respect to its capacity to cultivate a community of concrete freedom. It further denotes a self that refuses participation in a world that does not promote the common interest and that understands its interdependence on others as a substrate for freedom—a freedom to posit and to act upon purposes and ends that are its own.

Indeed, as I conceive it, at the core of any genuine theory of autonomy is a self that seeks its communality with others just as it seeks to defend its own individuality—an individuality that is able to question the ends toward which the community has organized itself and to posit new ends and purposes that give concreteness to freedom as an actually lived life. The dialectical sublation of the two is the moment when real freedom can be glimpsed. In this sense, autonomy as a manifestation of critical consciousness and agency entails stripping away the calcified sedimentation of reified thought, feeling, and sensation in order to see the world anew; to achieve autonomy, as I conceive it at least, means experiencing a shift in the very horizon of our ontology as social beings capable of an individuality that is harmony with common needs and goods. But today, individuality has suffered from many years of a resurgent, neoliberal transformation of our institutions and our social relations. As our relations to others have become increasingly shallow, instrumental, and brittle, the modern self has been rendered weak, incoherent, and powerless. It searches in vain for an identity, for stimuli, or some other resource to grant its existence some sort of meaning.

Modernity is the cultural and social framework that permitted the expansion of the self and its deepened capacities for subjectivity, self-directing reason, and aesthetic experience. It has opened a new font for generating a social world that would enable new forms of growth and human potential. The forces against this seek to foreclose this expansion of the self; they seek control and subordination. The inner world of the individual is therefore deeply political in the sense that it is the crucible for what is private and what is social: to be all one or the other is a distortion, a constriction of our capacities for development and freedom. As such, I see the decline of the self in late capitalism (if there is such a thing) as the withering of the inner world, of subjectivity as such that serves as the font of the new, not only for the self but at the same time for the collective. But, as Adorno once pointed out: Privacy has given way entirely to the privation it always secretly was, and with the stubborn adherence to particular interests is now mingled fury at being no longer able to perceive that things might be different and better.¹

In truth, a loss of our capacity to envision the new, to think outside the confines of the alienated world that ensconces us, is the true cultural deficit of our age. If we are unable to resuscitate some semblance of critical self-consciousness to nurture our civic agency, then I fear that the forces of capitalistic technology, a resurgent, one-dimensional bourgeois ideology, the increasing submission to the logics of efficiency over that human need, and the continued expansion of an ever more rapacious and extractive capitalist society will snuff out the requisite psychic energies needed for self- and social-transformation. This process of dismantling the autonomous self, one that could serve to invigorate our collective ethical life, has been long in the making. As Weber noted not long after the First World War: Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness.² It is my hope that this prediction, which weighs on the shoulders of each of us, can be shown to be a false prophecy. This book is by no means up to that task, but it is my hope that it can inspire debate and provoke thought toward that end.

I must acknowledge and thank others for discussing the ideas I present in this book with me. Jim Block has been a formidable interlocutor and friend, constantly chiding me to keep in view the potential for human self-transformation. My continuous discussions over the years with Lauren Langman have also kept me focused on the relation between the psychic and the social. In addition, I have benefited greatly from conversations that have, in one way or another, found their way into the ideas of this book: with Stephen Eric Bronner, Michael E. Brown, Tom Bunyard, Andrew Chitty, Joel Crombez, Harry Dahms, Jeffrey Halley, Neal Harris, Reha Kadakal, Nicola Marcucci, Darrow Schechter, Dirk Michel-Schertges, Steve Panageotou, and Heinz Sünker. I must also recognize the rich intellectual and humanistic environment of the William Alanson White Institute for Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology, where I am currently in psychoanalytic training and where I have learned much about the nature of consciousness, the unconscious, and the dynamics of the self. I have profited greatly from this collective wisdom, and I must absolve everyone mentioned from the errors that indubitably follow.

Introduction

Our age is defined by a fundamental contradiction and tension. On one hand, the basis of our modern democratic order and institutions, as well as the basis of the beliefs about who we are as persons, is rooted in a particular idea of the individual—that is, the belief that my choices, my beliefs, my ideas are my own and that the life I live is my own. On the other hand, we are witnessing a remarkable expansion of large-scale social systems that have synthesized technology, economic goals of efficiency, and surplus extraction, as well as political-administrative forms of authority. This post-neoliberal phase of society that has taken root in Western democracies operates by absorbing the individual into its own matrix, not by coercively annihilating the individual but by recircuiting its needs, desires, interests, the perimeter of its knowledge, and the depths of its imagination toward its own imperatives, logic, and goals. I believe we are perched dangerously on the historical cusp of losing one of the great cultural innovations of Enlightenment humanism: the self-reflective, ethically engaged, autonomous self.

This book proceeds from the premise that individuality, indeed subjectivity itself, is on the verge of being absorbed into the systemic apparatus of a social order rooted in large-scale regimes of normative power and dominance. On the brink of extinction is the existence of a pattern of selfhood that is capable of genuinely democratic attitudes and agency, a self that can serve as the font for democratic ideals and aesthetic sensibilities that can disrupt the cohesive institutional and ideological frameworks that shape our world—a world penetrated by reification, alienation, and powerlessness. Stated in its most succinct terms, I submit that we are witnessing the disappearance of the critical, rational, autonomous self that was once the ideal of the humanistic Enlightenment that first countered the more cumbersome systems of power of the Middle Ages. What is disappearing from our culture is a self, understood as the individual’s moral and psychological infrastructure, capable of envisioning the new, of expanding the horizons of the possible beyond what the patterned world of commodified society that seeks to enclose and envelop it permits. What is being gradually erased—indeed, what has been in the process of being erased for decades—is the idea, as well as the existence, of an individual capable of critique. Along with this is the erasure of a kind of autonomous individuality capable of positing its own ends and purposes in the world. To judge and to generate meaning for action, for obligation, for our individual and civic lives—this is the vision of modernity worth defending even more as we are witnessing the twilight of this kind of selfhood. The dynamics and trends of modern culture are fostering a new kind of self, one that is incapable of the kind of critical autonomy needed for democratic civic agency. It is a self absorbed into the edifice of an administered mass society that disables the capacity to think or imagine any alternative to it.

Some may say that such a self has never existed, that the idea of a self that was actually autonomous and critical, rooted in reason and reflection, has always been the myth of modernity. But such a position seems to me overly cynical and, to be sure, historically false. Throughout the unfolding of the modern world, the individual’s self-consciousness as a rational social agent has been at the center of the projects of modern democratic life, philosophical insights into human value and integrity, no less than the aesthetic insights of modern literature, painting, and music. Even though we may find it abstract to grasp the idea of a singular type of self that any period produces, I believe we can discern, through its various vicissitudes, a basic structure of the individual personality that can be traced over time and that changes in response to its social environment and context. The Greek world could not have produced Don Quixote any more than the world of steam engines and assembly lines could have produced Jesus of Nazareth. The structure of the self is coordinate with the kinds of social, economic, and cultural patterns that come to grip society and the values it espouses, as well as the shapes of social relations it engenders. The self is at once shaped by and a shaper of its world; it is formed by the dynamic relations that ensconce it; its specific character is rooted in the various forms of life that it occupies. I contend that recent shifts in modern society have effected a new and radical change in the self: a change that is witnessing its dissolution and degradation.

One place this shift can be sensed is in the realm of democratic politics. Contemporary democratic institutions are rooted in eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideas about rational individuality, where each of us is capable of rational endorsement, responsiveness to reasons, and persuasion. All of this seems to me to be in stark and chilling contrast to the world as it actually is: a world governed by a system that, even as it gains in scope and intensity, is also overseeing the death of the very spirit and cultural vitality that gave the modern world its self-confidence and its distinctive moral and political cast. A world where the dignity of the individual would be reflected in a robust form of social freedom, where our shared political institutions would be matched by our aesthetic and psychological explorations and enrichment of the self, a world that would hold out the possibility for a democratic order that maximizes a common good that has the good of the individual at its core—these were some of the aspirations that animated the project of modernity. Autonomy was seen as the paradigmatic self-structure for modernity. It was the specific, historically achieved structure of self-organization that enabled social norms, practices, and institutions to be metabolized by the enzyme of reason.¹ Only those forms of life that had passed through the judgment of the autonomous self were to be seen as valid, rational, and free. Freedom was possible in the world once the individual moved from being a passive, role-occupying part of the whole to an active, self-conscious constitutive force in the world—an individual that not only followed the scripts available to it in the given world but also generated new ends and purposes, new forms of meaning and collective forms of life.

But these ideals and theories could not have anticipated the rapid and deep changes that affected modern societies from the dawn of the industrial era to today. The emergence of mass society had the effect of crushing the moral-political ideal of a self-governing community of autonomous individuals. Cultural modernism registered the shock of these social changes as the individual searched inward, deeper into the self and its own psychology, for the energy to compensate what was being lost in the vast machinery of modernity. But as the twentieth century came to a close, it became clear that even this activity of the individual was being eclipsed. The vision of a world where our social arrangements nourish and promote the development of the individual has been engulfed by the reified logics of acquisitive individualism. Public life has gradually petered out, replaced by a world where our identities and our former domain of privacy have been subsumed by a new digital face of capital. Indeed, what was once the realm of bourgeois privacy has now succumbed to the engineered patterns of life orchestrated by market forces and the incorporation of our inner experiences into the commodity form. In such a world, it becomes increasingly difficult, perhaps even impossible, to imagine, to think the alternative.

Previous manifestations of large-scale social systems did not suffer this same fate. The Roman world’s apocalyptic Christians or the Protestant radicals that undermined church authority a thousand years later were able to transform the cohesive system of the classical Roman world or the Catholic Church, respectively. They were able to imagine the new and to undermine the great institutional and cultural forces of their time. But these large-scale social systems have been dwarfed by our own technological, administrative, commodified world. Indeed, our culture is now marked by the desiccation of the self, as well as of society as a whole; a gradual bleeding out of the energies and motivational values that could give rise to a more democratically organized, more humane, and more individually satisfying world now plagues modern life. Ours is a culture of uniformity rather than conformity; it is a world where each has constructed the illusion of his or her own individuality and unique, authentic intrapsychic world. But, as critics as early as Rousseau were able to see, the nature of modern domination was premised on the capacity for the powerful to create within its subjects the requisite norms, values, and cultural patterns that would cement and naturalize unequal power relations.² The security of domination relations was at issue in the modern world; neither the sword nor the guillotine would be the instrument of power but the very infrastructure of a self turned against itself. Culture and the psyche were the final domains to be conquered by the powerful in order to secure political and economic dominance. It is precisely this, I contend, that has happened in modern society, and we are currently living through its implications.

One aspect of this phenomenon is the increased unification of social, cultural, and political institutions and spheres, of the invasion and recoding of our culture by the logics of efficiency, instrumentality, and surplus extraction that have defined the trajectory of capitalism as a social system from its inception. These variables are defined more and more by the dictates of capital at the expense of other social values and purposes: of the need for profit, the production of economic value, and the defense of oligarchic wealth. At the same time, the transformation of our institutions entails their gradual isomorphism according to the banal logic of the commodity form. Capital’s incessant capacity and drive to absorb everything external to it into the realm of the market, to commodify everything possible, has finally penetrated to the level of the personality, to the psychic world within. This has had—and, I believe, will continue to have—a profound effect on the moral and political landscape of modern culture.

Add to this the increase of the alienating effects of technologically mediated relations and the shallow world of a commodified culture and we can see that the sociocultural resources that once propelled the progressive forces of modernity have in fact petered out. So too in the world of individuals, wrote Kierkegaard, all too presciently, in the first half of the nineteenth century, remove the essential passion, the one purpose, then everything becomes an insignificant featureless outwardness; the flowing current of ideality stops and the life that people share becomes a stagnant lake.³ Only several years prior, Marx had perceived the same dynamic as the resulting pathology of capitalism’s transformation of social relations and the regression of the individual stemming from alienation: It replaces labor by machinery, but it casts some of the workers back into a barbarous kind of work and turns the others into machines. It produces intelligence, but also, for the workers, stupidity, cretinism.⁴ These two insights blend into a single idea diagnosing a pathology that still holds true today: the stagnation and alienation of the self in a world that appears to us as dynamic and fluid, but is actually highly patterned and concealed, is increasingly coming to have a rigid command over its fate.

Much of my research over the past decade has focused on the problem known as reification, the thesis that the inner world of consciousness takes on the form of the rationalized, technical external world and reproduces those logics within the subjective field of the individual. This relation between the dynamics of the outer, social world and the inner, subjective world constitutes a crucial field for understanding how the status of the modern individual has been formed. Although generally thought of as a term of Marxian theory, as I studied this phenomenon more closely, I realized that the various studies on which I had embarked were converging on the following hypothesis: that the constitution of our individuality, our subjectivity, indeed the very pattern of the modern self, has been colonized by a regime of social norms rooted in heightened and intensified technical and commodified logics required for the coordination and maintenance of a social system based on the extraction of value and surplus and other needs of hierarchical social relations. Furthermore, these norms were becoming entwined with the very structure of our consciousness in a way that had hitherto been unappreciated. The very idea of the self—its functions, capacities, and status as a moral and political agent—has been transformed by the emergence of what I will call the cybernetic society.

Cybernetic society is a phase of capitalism saturated by the logic of instrumental extraction and commodification—that is, where every sphere of society, polity, culture, and psyche are extruded through a uniform deep logic of efficiency and profit maximization, as well as the attendant logics of control and organizational management that secure it, leading to a corrosion of psyche and culture. This is a society where these technical logics of organizational management and control have been able to socialize the self, making it the simultaneous object and subject of control and surplus extraction. This theory follows on the salient insight of Georg Lukács, who saw the outlines for it in the early 1920s: the atomization of the individual is, then, only the reflex in consciousness of the fact that the ‘natural laws’ of capitalist production have been extended to cover every manifestation of life in society; that—for the first time in history—the whole of society is subjected to, or tends to be subjected, to a unified economic process, and that the fate of every member of society is determined by unified laws.⁵

This has been the primary systemic drive and aim of capitalism since the first industrial plants emerged in the eighteenth century. But this older paradigm of the relation between the human and technology, between the self and the megamachine, always existed within a dualist structure where the machine’s logic was external and apparent to the self. Chilling images of the computer HAL in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey pursuing its human crew comes to mind. But today, the emergence of a new form of technology has shifted this paradigm. Now, technology has become personalized; it has been miniaturized and embedded within the reflexes of our own sense of self. As a result, the domains of privacy and the unconscious, previously potential reservoirs for explosive counterorganizational energies, have been packaged by the injection of the commodity form as experience, as fantasy, as the fundamental basis of our beliefs and thought. As never before, capitalism has been able to bring the commodity form not merely before our eyes but into the internal phenomenological and psychological framework of the self. The result is a profound intensification of the forces of reification on the self, a kind of hyperreification that demands a new look into the dynamics and mechanisms responsible for its production.

When I thought, at a more philosophical and technical level, about how this was all happening, I began to discover that intentional structures of consciousness are increasingly mapped out by the normative webs and prepatterned practices of a cohesive institutional world that appears, on its surface, to be diverse, energetic, and complex but that, in truth, is underwritten by a deeper logic of coordination and socialization toward economistic ends of efficiency and oligarchically organized extractive wealth. What some have referred to, after Lukács, as reification is actually a much deeper phenomenon infecting the deepest structures and dynamics of consciousness that shape our world-constituting and self-reflective faculties. More precisely, I came to see that the technological and cultural permeation of late capitalist society shapes norms and practices to such an extent that it has repatterned the collective-intentional rule-sets at the root of our self- and world-generating powers. The result is that the modern world is circumscribed by these deep patterns of being and that they structure an ever-widening scope of our experience—from education, culture, politics, and the intimate life of the family to the internal world of the self. If we agree that the most important achievement of modern culture has been the articulation of the individual as a distinct mode of experience, a source of rational reflection, as well as a source of affective energy and ethical care, then we cannot help but witness, today, its decline, even its eclipse.

I believe that we are witnessing a rupture in the political, cultural, and psychological strivings that characterized much of the modern period. Where the modern individual emerged out of a secularized reconception of the person that possessed an inner, self-directive capacity, the contemporary self is plagued by a lack of agency ensconced in a narcissistic sphere of self-absorption, shallow social relations, and one-dimensional subjectivity. Whereas the modern self initially emerged as a civic being, a being of conscience, the contemporary self no longer possesses the moral or psychic fortitude to stand against its socially constructed fate. It no longer can say, Here I stand; I can do no other. Rather, it needs the security of the group even as it passively accepts the machinations of the social order around it. The modern self is essentially isolated and without power. It feels the effects of a system of social relations degraded by the market, by commodification, by instrumentality, and by the dehumanizing consequences of the social pathologies of a system rooted in capital that has its own agglomeration rather than human benefit as its central aim.⁶

These shifts have occurred as a result of another set of changes that have gradually occurred as the result of macrostructural changes in the economic, technical, and administrative nature of modern capitalism.⁷ What we broadly understand as modernity emerged out of the fracturing of the cohesive powers of feudal patterns of power that dominated the Middle Ages. The church controlled cultural, educational, and spiritual dimensions of self and society, whereas concentrations of economic and political power were collected in the hands of aristocratic and landowning classes that sustained a stable system of extractive power over their communities. As market relations broke up these closed economic systems and Protestant movements gained cultural and political success, the stability of this cohesive power system was eroded. But even before this, papal reforms in the church from about 1000 to 1300 CE provided a new context for understanding justice. These reforms cast the individual as an entity with distinct moral status, translating this into a new legal and social status of the person: the individual was now no longer, as in the classical world, primarily a member of a group but an individual with rights and obligations, a crucial change that set the stage for the modern individual. Indeed, as Larry Siedentop notes, Under way was nothing less than a reconstruction of the self. . . . Translating a moral status into a social role created a new image of society as an association of individuals rather than of families, tribes or castes.⁸

The result of these shifts was a new way of thinking about the self and society. The rise of the individual did not entail society’s disintegration but rather a gradual displacement of communal forms of life and identification with more solidaristic forms of political cultural association and a new desire for self-governance in political, as well as individual, moral terms.⁹ Now, instead of a natural dimension of a group whole, society could be seen as a self-conscious association rooted not in tradition and custom but in principles of reciprocity, equality, and rights. Modern ideas of self-rule and civic life began to emerge in full cultural and political form in the northern Italian city-states during the Renaissance, as a more comprehensive sense of moral and intellectual importance was affixed to the individual gathered cultural force.¹⁰ The self that began to emerge between the seventeenth century and the early twentieth was therefore oriented toward moral responsibility and the importance of public life, but it was also increasingly unable to generate new forms of life and systems of meaning as technological and economic modernization outpaced it. The vitality that animated Western societies during this period was fueled by a search for a more humane social context for the development of the individual. In art and literature, politics and philosophy, this reflection on the nature of the individual and society served as a fulcrum against the awesome powers not only of throne and altar but of the newly emerged satanic mills and the unjust social order that spawned them.

As late as the mid-twentieth century, this picture of the self was still active and real. The economic organization of society was still under a redistributive regime that protected the basic security of individual social membership and nourished an aspirational culture for social transformation. Liberation of the self was now primarily cultural, referring to the expansion of the horizons of experience. As the psychoanalyst Hans Loewald wrote from the vantage point of the 1970s: In modern art, literature, and philosophy; in the mood, aspirations, conduct of life of the younger generation, we see a fresh flowering of that more ancient, more deeply rooted mode of human experience which perhaps is leading toward a less rigid, less frozen, and more humane rationality.¹¹ The affluent society of the 1950s and 1960s unleashed a new set of aspirations and deeper human needs than the material world of suburban security and industrial consumption could offer. Technology was seen as crushing the individual, the economic drives for consumption and growth an empty, impoverished form of life. Culture, not yet colonized by the forces of commodification, was reacting to the stringent order of the bureaucratized, commodified society.

I submit that this situation has radically altered and that the self, as a source of critical autonomy and of creative, transformational desire, is rapidly disappearing, and a new, more submissive and less autonomous kind of selfhood is emerging in its place. Since the 1980s, we have been witnessing the growth of a cohesive system of social power rooted in economic imperatives that is absorbing the individual into its matrix of subordination and control. The rapidly increasing gradient of technological change has been fused to economic imperatives that have shaped a world narrowly organized around surplus extraction and mass consumption. Economic growth has become the central and, in many respects, single value orienting the dominant institutions of modern Western cultures. All other values are either to be subordinated to this more dominant value pattern or extinguished. As a result, the contemporary self lives, desires, and thinks within the prepatterned confines of this cohesive social reality.

As I see it, the self needs to be understood as more than the cognitive and epistemic structures of consciousness alone; it refers also to the affective, libidinal, cathectic, intrapsychic dimensions of subjectivity that shape the ways we validate the kinds of norms, desires, and values that grant some degree of legitimacy to the world we inhabit. The energy of our affects has much to do with the ways our ideas are shaped and organized. In this sense, perhaps the most insidious change in the structure of the self has been the transformation of desire away from objects that enhance our experience and freedom and toward the objects of the system itself. Indeed, it is perhaps more correct to say that genuine desire itself has been subverted; capitalism in its current phase of the commodification of everything, preempts desire. Each time I feel a need, a restlessness with my aloneness, I reach for a device to connect me with the prepackaged experience of the commodified world. With this erosion of desire, so, too, goes the very energy for political transformation and the capacity to think capitalism’s alternative. The commodity’s mechanical accumulation, writes Guy Debord, "unleashes a limitless artificiality in [the] face of which all living desire is disarmed. The cumulative power of this autonomous realm of artifice necessarily everywhere entails a falsification of life."¹² What Debord perceived in the late 1960s has itself become the dominant mode of cultural production and, as I will explore in the pages that follow, the construction of the modern self, as well.

Ours is a society that has commandeered the great developments of science and technology for economistic ends, robbing art and culture of their once-prized critical autonomy from the material ends of profit and exchange. It is a society that, above all, has undercut and stifled the powers and robustness of the individual, pressing each of us into intricately engineered patterns of being and acting. Now, the once-repressed energies of the individual unconscious have been sopped up by the commodification of desire, of the simulacra of sex, of play, of the reified oral fixations of consumption without end. As Mark Fisher once insightfully pointed out: "What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture."¹³

It is in the midst of this reality, of the prepatterning of the self, that what I am calling the cybernetic society achieves its culmination. Only when the norms and values, practices and institutions of capitalist economic logics have penetrated the cultural sphere of society and the psychological structures of the individual can we speak of a truly inverted world, an elaborate cybernetic steering of the self by systems of control that manifest not as raw power but as a transformation of the relational matrices of sociality that articulate new inner impulses within the self. As a result, I maintain that we are witnessing an eclipse of the individual: the deformation of the cognitive and psychic capacities for autonomy as a critical, developmental, and creative form of agency, an agency capable of both negating the social relations and values that sustain domination and deploying the creative energies rich enough to build alternatives to them. It seems to me that there is a historicity to this phenomenon: where the nineteenth century saw the subsumption of precapitalist forms of labor and economic life, the twentieth the subsumption of political and administrative means of coordination and social control, the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries are witnessing the absorption of culture and the subsumption of the self into the imperatives of capital and the processes of accumulation. Now, all of these sectors cohere where new kinds of power and domination are fused to new forms of social, political, technological, cultural, and self-organization—the world of the cybernetic society.

The origins of this crisis of the individual are not hard to see. The neoliberal counterrevolution that began in the late 1970s, against the redistributive, social-democratic welfare state forged in the postwar era, sought primarily to unleash capital and financial speculation in order to evade redistribution but also to breathe new life into rates of profit that had fallen since the 1960s. Besides the legal-political architecture of the welfare state, it also had another barrier to overcome for the rate of profit to expand. This was the problem of the saturation of markets that plagued the 1970s. Central to this problem was that demand began to wane as the industrial production and consumption boom of the 1950s and 1960s began to weaken. There were only so many washing machines, cars, and televisions that could be purchased per household to sustain corporate profits. New markets had to be found, and new regimes of labor had to be instituted for profit rates to be resuscitated. Two trends were born from this economistic need. First was the undercutting of labor power and wages that resulted from attacks on organized labor and the spatioglobal elasticity of capital that conspired to make production both more flexible and cheaper. At the same time, new management techniques were instituted to socialize workers into a culture of the firm, displacing former coworking solidarities as labor unions shattered. Class consciousness was thereby absorbed into a more alienated, meaningless sense of identity as an employee or associate of the firm.¹⁴

Second was the need to jump-start consumption by commodifying essentially everything—not merely physical objects but also experience and personal identity. Consumption gradually became a means to find and to highlight one’s self-expression and identity. The alienation felt by an