Particularity and Individuality

I have just started auditing a course on Male and Female in Modernity, with Dr Alastair Roberts, and we have taken as our launching point Ivan Illich’s book Gender. Illich provides a stimulating vantage on the conditions that inform our debates about the sexes, drawing out attention to the way the modern market dominates our experience of gender in a manner alien to past ways of life. While his thesis does directly call into question the accepted narrative of a homogenous sexism that extends through all human history (until of course it began to be overcome in the last two centuries), I found myself questioning another narrative altogether: the story of the emergence of modern individualism from conformist premodern societies.

Ivan Illich’s distinction between modern ‘economic sex’ and the ‘vernacular gender’ of premodern societies can be understood as a distinction between the universalising tendencies of the modern labour market — in which all goods (including one’s own labour) are perfectly fungible and subject to universal principles of exchange according to the rules of the market — and the particularity of premodern gendered societies. Illich wants us to understand ‘vernacular’ through its etymological roots in the ‘home-grown’. Consider a homemade meal: it has this quality by virtue of being cooked by your own mother, in your own kitchen (perhaps you helped or watched it come together, while chatting from the kitchen stool—smells permeated the house for an hour before the table was laid), perhaps even with vegetables grown in your own garden and bearing the ineffable qualities of your own soil. Every other house in the neighbourhood might also be enjoying such a meal at the very same time, but you couldn’t swap out your own for one of theirs and have the same experience. While ‘homemade’ is available to everyone, it is everywhere particularised and therefore unable to be recognised or captured by exchange value.

According to Illich, vernacular gender is of just this form—deep cultural distinctions between male and female ways of life which complement and support each other as right and left hands, but which are also distinct to each culture and cannot be universalised in terms of ‘roles’ and ‘functions’. A ‘role’ or ‘function’ is by definition abstracted from the person who does it, and could in theory be performed by another. Such an abstraction is inconceivable within the frame of vernacular gender.

Through Illich, and other authors, Dr Roberts drew our attention to the way that post-industrial Western societies rest upon an anthropology of a universal ‘human’ subject which is interchangeable with any other, regardless of sex (or this, at least, is the ideal). This helps us to understand why questions about equality between the sexes are so often foregrounded, because the notion of an underlying universal human subject invites comparison between (equation of) the terms.

The point here is not merely that modernity produces the appearance of a universal human subject, but that it in some sense actually renders that subjecthood universalisable. By participating in the modern labour market, I sell my labour as a function I perform which could in principle be performed by anyone else. In this respect and in every other respect in which I am subjected to the statistical and bureaucratic analysis of the nation state and its institutions, I am universalised and de-particularised. The question this then raises is, what has happened to the particularity which is otherwise constitutive of me? Has modernity truly reconfigured human nature, stripping back and suppressing all its particulars? Or does particularity simply reemerge elsewhere, transposed into another register than that of vernacular culture?

That our society is obsessively individualistic is a commonplace. It is generally thought that this individualism is a self-conscious break from the heavily conformist forms of societies past by opening our society up to expressions of individual difference. True, vernacular culture is ‘conformist’ in some sense, if by that we do not just mean active suppression of deviance from cultural norms, but that deviance is to a certain extent unthinkable to those who inhabit the vernacular culture. But what if individualism is not in fact best conceived as in a reactionary pairing with vernacular culture, but rather as in a necessary dualism with the universalising forces of post-industrial economies and nation states?

De-particularisation threatens to erase personhood. If I am in all respects functionally interchangeable with anyone else, what is left that is peculiarly me? In such a social context, of course we yearn for individuation, for a unique identity which is recognisable not only to ourselves but also to others. The indissoluble experience of my subjectivity (I can never really forget that I am this person and not another, despite the strongest of de-particularising forces) must somehow be externalised and asserted in resistance to de-particularisation. Each one’s particularity must now be publicly performed.

The victory of individualism over a hyper-conformist premodern past is a favoured myth. The English curricula of Australian schools are filled with novels on this theme: the sometimes tragic, always heroic efforts of a social outsider to stand against the entrenched and unconsidered norms (‘prejudices’) of her community. While the choice of theme might be explained by its appeal to adolescents’ preoccupation with figuring out who they are becoming (the kids aren’t reading much these days, so we’d better coax them into it with something they’ll relate to), I think it also speaks to this being a founding myth of liberal society. A good citizen of the liberal market-state is thankful for being freed from vernacular society, into performative individualism.

If I am right, then the irony here is that only against the backdrop of the universalising economic market is performing one’s individuality an existential necessity for basically everyone. In vernacular societies there would have been outsiders for whom the status quo was not beyond question, and who perhaps would indeed have experienced it as oppressive. But it seems unlikely to me that this would have been the experience of most members of these societies, as it now seems to be the universally shared fear in ours. This is because the very particularity that defines vernacular custom has individuation built in: each person would have had a very fixed place in a web of social relations but — and this is what we often overlook — each had a place which was distinctly hers and in which it was impossible for her to be replaced by anyone else. While it is true that little of her place may have been chosen, there was no risk of disappearing into the sea of fungible market products, and thus surely far less of a felt need to strike out and assert her individual identity.

What vernacular society supports, then, is a form of individuation markedly different to our modern individualism — so different that we mistake it for its opposite. But it seems to me that the true foil of individualism is not premodern custom, but the effacement of personhood which only in the modern world of the universalising market now haunts each and every one of us.