The argument that neo-liberalism aims at the destruction of collective entities, such as political structures and culture, is persuasive. But it needs to be taken further. Can neo-liberalism leave the individual intact? asks Dany-Robert Dufour
In the present era of liberal democracy everything rests, in the final analysis, on the individual as ”subject” on his economic, legal, political and symbolic autonomy. Yet despite the most obsessive expressions of self-affirmation, the attempt to be oneself is fraught with difficulty. A host of symptoms testify to the ”impairment of the individual” in contemporary societies. Psychic disorders, cultural malaise, the increase in violence and widescale exploitation are all vectors of new forms of alienation and inequality.
These phenomena are directly related to the change in the state of the individual as ”subject” that is now taking place in our market democracies. The modalities of ”being a subject” both being oneself and being together are appreciably different from what they were for earlier generations.
The emergence of this new ”subject” reflects a rupture in the modern condition to which philosophers have drawn attention in various ways. Jean-Franois Lyotard was one of the first to describe the advent of the postmodern era, characterised by the disappearance of the great legitimising discourses, particularly religion and politics. With the disappearance of avant-gardes, too, we are witnessing no less than the disintegration of the forces that shaped modernity in its classical form. The mutation taking place is significantly related to what we know as neo-liberalism. In short, postmodernity is to culture what neo-liberalism is to the economy.
This mutation is giving rise to a new malaise within our civilisation. It reflects a strengthening of factors long at work in our societies that are increasing the autonomy of the individual. This process is generating entirely new forms of suffering. For, although autonomy is seen as progress towards emancipation, there is nothing to show that every individual is capable of attaining it. This is especially true of the younger generations exposed to the full force of the new requirement to ”be oneself”. The ”loss of reference points” on the part of the young is therefore not surprising. They are experiencing a new subjective condition to which nobody certainly not those responsible for their education holds the key. And it is pointless to believe that a few old-fashioned lessons in morality could stop the damage.
Moralising no longer works because morals have to be passed on in the name of something. But that is precisely the problem: we no longer know in what or whose name to address the young. The situation of the postmodern ”subject” is characterised by the lack of any credible collective enunciator. He is summoned to invent himself without possessing the means to do so, in the absence of any historical or generational antecedent that can still legitimately address him.
So what exactly is an autonomous subject? The term has a meaning, derived from the Latin subjectus, which denotes the state of being subjected. But subjected to what? The question has always interested philosophers. The individual owes his existence not to himself but to something else, to which successive ontologies have given different names: nature, ideas, God or simply ”being”. An incarnation of that ”being” has been present, in one form or other, throughout history. It is that historical-political construct that ontology of which it is itself a new stage that postmodernity is now overturning.
To denote the incarnation of ”being” in history, we shall borrow from the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan the term ”Other”, to distinguish it from its purely speculative aspect and include its symbolic and clinical dimensions. So, if human beings are now to free themselves from dependence on any Other, what figures of this Other have they constructed throughout history?
If the subject is subjectus that is, subjected then history appears as a series of subjections to great figures placed at the centre of symbolic configurations: the physis in the Greek world; god in the monotheistic religions; the king in the monarchical system; the people in the Republic; the race in Nazism; the nation in the era of sovereign states; the proletariat in communism and so on. What we have is a series of discourses, each bolstered by intellectual constructs, practical realisations and demanding settings.
Not all these constructs are equivalent. Depending on the figure of the Other that is chosen, ”being together” changes, along with all the constraints and social relations. What remains constant is the relationship of subjection and, of course, the efforts to escape it. Everywhere, texts, grammars and whole fields of knowledge were developed in order to achieve the subjection of the individual (in other words, to produce the subject as such) and to regulate his sometimes widely differing ways of working, speaking, believing, thinking, dwelling, eating, singing, dying, etcetera. What we call education is simply the institutional structure established in order to produce subjects, according to the type of subjection required.
Thus at the centre of the subject’s discourse stands a figure one or more discursive beings that he believes to be real. In the face of chaos, these gods, devils, demons or other beings provide the subject with permanence, origin, finality and order. The Other makes symbolic functioning possible by giving the subject a point of reference that can serve as a foundation for his discourse.
Without the Other, the individual ”being oneself” is at a loss. Put simply, he has no one to turn to. ”Being together” is also endangered, because only common reference to the same Other enables different individuals to belong to one community. For the subject, it is the Other that makes time and space possible. First, as a founding earlier reality in relation to which a temporal sequence of events can exist. Second, as an exterior spatial reference a ”there” in relation to which a ”here” can be established. In short, in order for me to be here, the Other must be there.
Psychoanalysis, particularly the Lacanian variety, has had a great deal to say on the key question of access to symbolisation. On the other hand, it has remained fairly indifferent to the variance of the Other throughout history. In the postmodern era, it is immediately apparent that my distance from that which establishes me as a subject is constantly diminishing. From physis to people, we can trace key stages in the entry of the Other into the human universe: the short but insuperable distance of the numerous Greek or Roman gods and the gods of the polytheistic system, always ready to intervene directly in the human world; the infinite distance of the transcendental god of monotheism; the middle distance of the king between heaven and earth in the monarchical system of divine right; and, finally, the earthly distance between the individual and the collectivity in the republic.
On this argument, modernity appears as a collective space in which the subject is defined by multiple instances of the Other. It exists when the world ceases to be closed and becomes open or ”infinite” even with regard to its symbolic references. It is a space in which the individual is subjected to gods, the king, the republic, the people, the proletariat, and so on. In modernity, all these definitions of the Other coexist. Its great propensity to mutate from one to the other is what gives modernity its restless, crisis-ridden and critical aspect.
In modernity the ultimate reference is constantly changing, throwing the whole symbolic universe into flux. The Other is present, but there are many Others, or at least many figures of the Other. For that reason, the condition of the subject is defined by two factors: neurosis (as we call it since Sigmund Freud’s time) in the case of the unconscious, and criticism in the case of the secondary processes. Neurosis, because it is simply the way in which each subject pays his symbolic debt to the Other (the father, in Freud’s system). And criticism, because the subject in modernity must necessarily possess several competing or conflicting references points.
Clearly, the latter factor is decisive for education. As an institution addressing and producing modern subjects, it can exist only as a space defined by critical thought. Taken all in all, the modern subject can be defined as neurotic and critical.
It is this double definition that has now collapsed. Why? Because no figure of the Other is valid in the postmodern period. While all the old figures, and those of modernity, are still there, none of them seems any longer to possess the necessary prestige to impose itself. They all display the same symptoms of decadence. And the steady decline of the father-figure in Western modernity has hardly passed unnoticed.
Whereas earlier periods established spaces marked by the distance between the subject and the founding Other, the postmodern period is defined by the abolition of that distance. Postmodernity is the age in which the subject begins to be defined in terms of his own autonomy, especially his legal autonomy, that is, by reference to himself. Legal autonomy and economic freedom are exactly congruent with the self-referential definition of the subject.
For that reason, analysis of the decline of the Other in the postmodern period must include the neo-liberal times in which we live, characterised by the grant of maximum economic ”freedom” to the individual. What we call ”the market” is of no use as a new Other, because it does not begin to address the question of origin or self-foundation. Therein lies the fundamental limitation on the market economy’s claim to take charge of all personal and social relations.
It is at the moment when each subject is required to be himself that he encounters the greatest difficulty, even impossibility, in being himself. Hence the increasing resort in postmodern societies to techniques of action upon the self that are applied, like identity prostheses, to the spot where the subject has been disabled. Examples are the television ”reality shows” and the psychotropic drugs that stimulate mood and increase individual capacities.
With the advent of postmodernity, distance from the Other has become distance from oneself. The postmodern subject is no longer simply divided he is schizoid. Each subject has to wrestle with his own self-foundation. He may succeed but not without constant setbacks. This internal distancing appears to be inherent in the postmodern subject and considerably modifies Freud’s diagnosis. Freud was concerned with modern subjects inclined to neurosis, whereas the postmodern subject tends towards a borderline state between neurosis and psychosis. He is caught between latent melancholia, the impossibility of speaking in the first person, delusions of omnipotence and headlong escape into a false self through the adoption of one or more of the range of personalities offered by the market.
Large sections of the population are now permanently suffering from what is called depression. This sickness of the soul, once known as melancholy, has been transformed into an inability to act for which people increasingly resort to medication, especially anti-depressants. In the United States massive administration of Ritalin to young people with symptoms of hyperactivity testifies to the increasingly widespread medical treatment of disruptive behaviour. In postmodernity, the subject is no longer defined by neurotic guilt, but by something akin to a feeling of omnipotence when things go right and total impotence when they do not.
Shame (towards oneself) then has replaced guilt (towards others). Lacking points of reference that can serve as a basis for symbolic exteriority and anteriority, the subject is unable to deploy himself adequately in space and time. He is trapped in a present moment in which everything is taking place. Relations with others become problematic because his personal survival is always at stake. If everything is decided in the present moment, then projection, anticipation, self-appraisal and introspection become problematic. The individual’s whole critical universe is affected.
What is to be done if there is no Other? Construct the self unaided, using the many resources available in our societies? All well and good, but it is by no means certain that autonomy is a demand that all subjects can meet. Often, those who succeed are people who have previously been alienated and have had to struggle to free themselves. In that sense, the apparent state of freedom promoted by neo-liberalism is a delusion. There is no such thing as freedom per se. There are only acts of liberation. People who have never experienced alienation are not necessarily free as Pierre Bourdieu’s use of the phrase ”cult of the lone but free individual” might lead us to believe. The new individuals are abandoned, rather than free. That is why they are such easy prey to whatever appears to satisfy their immediate needs and sitting targets for such a powerful mechanism as the market.
Looking at postmodern society, we can identify a number of responses that are in fact attempts to compensate for the absence of the Other. One is the growth of neighbourhood gangs. Young people who cannot cope alone with autonomy and the need for self-definition can try to cope together with others. The gang possesses a collective identity a name that each member wears outside, and a signature, tag or logo that marks and delimits its territory. And since all its members constitute a single person, if one falls, another may be hurt.
Another response is the growing influence of sects. Here, the subject elects a surrogate to compensate for the absence of the Other. He devotes all his energy to his substitute, in exchange for an absolute guarantee against any risk of absence.
A third response, drug addiction, is also a form of substitution. The subject relocates the Other in the realm of need, rather than desire. Having done so, he knows at least what he is lacking and where it is a chemical product as addictive as possible that he will always be able to procure provided he becomes its slave.
A fourth response goes even further, since it is actually an attempt to become the Other. The subject endows himself with signs of omnipotence and supposedly magical powers, and assumes the right of life and death over his fellow human beings. In the resulting absence of restraint, the crudest acts of violence become possible.
Not all the identifiable responses involve delinquency. A widespread trend in all levels of society is the use of techno-sciences to achieve emancipation from the constraints of material existence, to reinforce the subject’s feelings of omnipotence and free him from his restrictive assignation to a given space and time. We see this response in the attempt to overcome the natural sequence of generations (with grandmothers giving birth and dead fathers, conveniently preserved in little bottles, begetting children).
We also see it in the attempt to escape from gender assignation, that is, to be able to be man or woman (an age-old temptation of every human being, legitimate in itself when it was played out in the register of symbol and imagination, but now being activated in the real world).
It is also manifested in the attempt to transcend genetic differentiation and the boundaries between species, as in the genetic modification of pigs for purposes of xenotransplantation. And, on all sides, the techno-sciences are creating a ”virtual reality” that reinforces the desire of the postmodern subject to emancipate himself from organic constraints.
In addition, the information culture is producing a new illiteracy that hampers transmission between the generations. It can be seen in the marked decline of reading among the young and in a failing education system that turns out increasing numbers of almost illiterate graduates.
Neo-liberalism is forcing us to take stock of the whole situation. We need more than a critique of an iniquitous economic system, more than an understanding of the mechanisms that are destroying our collective structures and our ”being together”.
We also need to renew our thinking on the individual. The subjective condition created by modernity is now under threat. Can we allow the critical space developed with such great effort in the course of centuries to evaporate in a couple of generations?