singly, severally or collectively.
Individuals more or less voluntarily carry the burden of responsibility should their attempts at biographical self-determination meet with misfortune. The diminishing reliance on collectively negotiated conditions of life means that unanticipated consequences are attributed to individuals, and are usually perceived by them as personal failures whether or not these are in fact due to systemic factors. It is amid the hegemony of sequestered lives that individualization, far from being descriptive only of emancipatory potentials, also describes an attributive process that renders people increasingly self-accountable: “Social problems can be directly turned into psychological dispositions: into guilt feelings, anxieties, conflicts and neuroses. Paradoxically enough, a new immediacy develops in the relationship between the individual and society: an immediacy of disorder such that social crises appear as individual [crises] and are no longer—or only very indirectly—perceived in their social dimension (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 24).”
This process becomes pathological, in the literal sense, when the consequences of decisions are “socially individualized,” that is, when their individual shouldering is systemically endorsed. For Honneth (2002b: 146), for example, individualization in its current form signals that “the claims for individual self-realization…have become institutionalized patterns of expectations and social reproduction to such an extent that their inner purpose has been lost and has, rather, become the foundation for the legitimation of the system.” He further argues that in the course of recent history there has been a transformation of “ideals into constraints, of claims into demands” that also gives rise to new forms of social suffering (Honneth 2002b: 155). Not only can the imperative to choose the right course of action and to be self-responsible for one's destiny lead to feelings of alienation and atomization, but contemporary preoccupations with self-realization, the imperative to “be yourself” in addition to structural pressures toward self-responsibility, may well be a key factor in the increasing incidence of depression.2 In a like manner, Kevin McDonald ( 1999: 208) suggests that the emergent model of subjectivity, which elevates self-monitoring and strategic action to normative status, gives rise to “new pathologies of the self” afflicting “those who fail to become ‘entrepreneurs of the self.’”
Individualization in its current form harbors new dependencies and thus calls for alignments of individual destinies with various institutional demands. Moreover, the individualization of institutional connections, and thus the real and perceived primacy of agency, renders these structural demands obscure; they are consigned to Bauman's “unexamined background” of individual pursuits. But the very fact of individuals' readiness to internalize responsibility and blame, and to take on board not just the positive but, more significantly, the negative consequences of their choices and decisions, presupposes an estimation of self as unique and authentic. The resulting disembeddedness, rather than creating realms of freedom for self-cultivation, creates an increased vulnerability to those forces that play a vital part in shaping the directions of individuals' lives.
Michel Foucault squarely names the ideology under which individualization accelerates: neoliberalism. For Foucault, government includes both the sense of “governing others” as well as “governing the self,” and with his concept of “governmentality” he seeks to establish the interpenetration of systemic power relations and subjective self-regulation. In his rendering of Foucault's lecture on neoliberal governmentality, Lemke (2001: 201) unwittingly gives political-ideological context to Beck's nonpartisan circumscriptions:
The strategy of rendering individual subjects ‘responsible’…entails shifting the responsibility of social risks such as illness, unemployment, poverty, etc., and for life in society into the domain for which the individual is responsible and transforming it into a problem of ‘self-care.’ The key feature of the neo-liberal rationality is the congruence it endeavours to achieve between a responsible and moral individual and an economic-rational actor. It aspires to construct prudent subjects whose moral quality is based on the fact that they rationally assess the costs and benefits of a certain act as opposed to other alternative acts. As the choice of options for action is, or so the neo-liberal notion of rationality would have it, the expression of free will on the basis of a self-determined decision, the consequences of the action are borne by the subject alone, who is also solely responsible for them. This strategy can be deployed in all sorts of areas and leads to areas of social responsibility becoming a matter of personal provisions.
Individualization is thus not simply a historical process devoid of power play. Rather, freedom and control are two sides of the same coin. Control, though, is more effective if beliefs give credence to freedom while discrediting notions of control and limitation. The proliferation of options in all spheres of life is a case in point.
Options and Futures
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