Aufhebunga Bunga
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/341/ How to Grow a Backbone (II), ft. Russell Jacoby
🕑 Added 2023-05-16 16:32:06 +0000 UTCOn whether the individual is becoming weaker.
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We continue the interview by asking intellectual historian and critic Russell Jacoby what is behind the apparent flattening of the individual, and whether Western society is no longer creating subjects adequate to democracy. Is Jacoby being overly conservative in mounting a retreat to the 19th century individual?
We discuss consumerism and homogenisation, and the role that 'public opinion' plays – both more fragmented than ever, and yet ever-present.
In the After Party, the Bunga boys discuss three key issues:
- What places beyond academia are there where critical thinking takes place
- Whether there are green shoots of utopian thinking today, as seen in dystopian series
- How does individuality become undermined as we become more individualised
Selected books by Jacoby:
- Social Amnesia: A Critique of Contemporary Psychology (Beacon Press, 1975; Transaction, 1997)
- The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (Basic Books, 1987; new edition with new Introduction, Basic Books 2000)
- The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in the Age of Apathy (Basic Books, 1999)
- Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (Columbia University Press, 2005)
- On Diversity: The Eclipse of the Individual in a Global Era (Seven Stories Press, 2020)
Other recent articles and interviews:
- D’une pensée critique sous emprise – Un entretien avec Russell Jacoby, Comptoir
- A Climate of Fear, Russell Jacoby, Harper's
- The Takeover, Russell Jacoby, Tablet
Comments
Aufhebunga Bunga
There are formal aspects I didn't think were that great, but that's rather by-the-by; the point I was making is that it depicts a different post-apocalyptic scenario to the one we've become used to in the past decades. Namely, a hopeful, cooperative vision of humanity lifting itself back up. -Alex
Knoroz
On the issue of individuality. I think we don't have less (or more) individuality. There is a change in the perception that there is individuality but that is what we are being told by the media, public intellectuals and our leaders. My experience doesn’t support this. When I talk to people I am constantly amazed with the diversity of views despite all my circle having more or less the same cultural reference points. The world is so vast and there are so many niches that this individual diversity lives on. What, I think what changed is the ability to assess this. In the past it was easy because it was superficially visible - you just went to a foreign country and everything was visibly different. But this 19th century reading of individuality was just an extension of the colonial world clashing with its dependencies. This old instrument to identify individuals’ individuality are just not fit for purpose today. They are too blunt and crude. Contrary to what Phil concludes, individuality hasn't been hollowed out in the last 150 years, it just remains the same but harder to measure. If individuality is really a thing, then the solution is to develop tools that can capture it rather than assume it has gone because we can’t see it. Miguel
Andrea
Station eleven is the epitome of what your friends from performance anxiety talked about in one of your episodes. A boring reiteration of the compulsion to flashbacks and backstories, meshed with a morbid insistence on trite US literary tropes and on intersectional bs.
