'I' is for 'Empty'... posted by Richard Seymour

The always excellent Charlotte Street has a fine post about 'individuality' in capitalist society today:

The increase in ideologies of ‘individuality’ and ‘individual expression’ is inversely proportional to the actual possibilities for such individuality within contemporary society. One might even say that the existence of the former is a symptom of the disappearance of the latter, that the emergence of the signifier (‘individuality’) is like an epitaph for its signified.

Not untypically, one’s ‘individuality’ mimics that of the commodity. The commodity must differentiate itself from other commodities by whatever means. Each must have its quirky tic, style, unique symbolic attachment etc in order to make it different. Its individuality is therefore the secondary effect of competition and bears no qualitative or expressive relation to the object itself. It ‘expresses’ nothing but the empty fact of differentiation.

Similarly the ‘individual’ today must quickly assume some trick or style with which to signify his individuality in the contemporary bazaar of individualities. Again, this is no more than a surface effect which exists only through differentiation and beneath which true individuality is smothered.

At this point, however, I start to wonder what 'true individuality' is. Slavoj Zizek, making fun of bourgeois notions of human rights, noted how human worth was located in some secret essence, some objet petit a like the plastic toy in the Kinder Surprise egg (which, although worthless, is the real point of it, the thing that kids always hurry to get, ignoring the chocolate). Is that where individuality resides? In the excremental excess?

I'm just asking, and certainly not in an aggressive way because, as you'll have guessed, I'm becoming a big fan of Charlotte Street. In fact, if Kaplan wants, I can be his academic groupie.