Coming of Age in Times of Uncertainty. Harry Blatterer

      “Life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages.”

      Mark Twain, Letter to Edward Dimmitt (1901)

      The self-aware and autonomous individual is central to the self-understanding of modern societies. In the European imagination its emergence is commonly traced to the Renaissance, when individual identity is said to replace collective identity as the center of subjectivity.¹ With the development of the “ideal of authenticity” around the eighteenth century the subject becomes the full-fledged individual in the modern sense (Taylor 1991: 28). In opposition to those who see the ability to separate right from wrong as a matter of rational calculation, the self is now linked to the belief that human beings have an inherent sense of morality. Charles Taylor (1991) suggests that this moral moment becomes displaced, and authenticity disengaged from its ethical horizons becomes an end in itself. These developments go hand in hand with an increasing freedom of self-determination in fact and as a promise. The promise of freedom remains only partially redeemed. Envisaged by Kant as “humankind's emergence from self-incurred immaturity,” on another level it also delivered its opposite: “Standards started to shift, and then there were many of them. The authority of each one came to be cast in doubt, ridiculed or otherwise sapped by another, finding its own indignance reciprocated. A yawning hollowness now spread where once was a centre that held the world, and all its segments, in place” (Bauman 1995: 146).

      This “disenchanted” world, as Weber (1992) called it, signaled the emergence of a new imperative: to wrest meaning from existence without the comfort and hope that the belief in a realm beyond the mundane can bring. At the same time the mental security based on “knowing one's station” was traded in for the uncertainties that comprise the other side of relatively greater autonomy. And this all the more so because the world in which we needed to make our own way increased dramatically in scope. As local ties were loosened and state centralization increased, protection and control functions were taken over by the nation-state as a new identity-conferring entity (Elias 1999). Today, in light of the globalization of social relations this abstract scheme of reference has gained in intangibility. Our ethical and moral sense draws on a frame of reference that is unfathomable in its totality, and it is within this context that biographies have become the individual's responsibility to an unprecedented extent. This theme is central to my analysis of contemporary adult lives and bears some further consideration.

       Contemporary Individualization

      Ulrich Beck's observations of present and emerging forms of sociation are far ranging: changes in the structure of the family and work; the continuing rapprochement of the sexes; the demise of anthropocentrism amid the recognition of ecological risks; and the emergence of issue-based politics and the decline of traditional forms of political affiliation and action. These are all transformations that according to Beck spell the departure of past attitudes, actions, and social life forms. He contends, however, that far from cutting the individual loose from social exigencies, these transformations have chiefly served to reembed subjects in more complex institutional arrangements that demand from them a heightened self-awareness of their biographical trajectories.

      The freedom gained by individuals released from traditional social bonds requires that they lead their own lives without the securities of old. While institutional arrangements necessary for society's continuity and reproduction continue to exist, they have to be chosen and prioritized by individuals themselves. This, then, is an “institutionalized individualism” in the manner described by Talcott Parsons with all its ambiguities intact (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 163). Jürgen Habermas (1992: 149) too explains this phenomenon succinctly: “On the one hand the person is supposed to achieve greater freedom of choice and autonomy in proportion to his individuation; on the other hand, this extension of the degree of freedom is described deterministically.” Bauman (2001a: 9) gets to the heart of the reigning cultural vision:

      The distinctive feature of the stories told in our times is that they articulate individual lives in a way that excludes or suppresses (prevents from articulation) the possibility of tracking down the links connecting individual fate to the ways and means by which society as a whole operates; more to the point, it precludes the questioning of such ways and means by relegating them to the unexamined background of individual life pursuits and casting them as ‘brute facts’ which the story-tellers can neither challenge nor negotiate, whether 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