Advanced capitalism generates an illusory conviction of individual self-centering among its elite classes

Evidence

Graduates and undergraduates alike seem caught in a doctrine of individual uniqueness. In a dehistoricized academy, they find no difficulty in claiming their opinions’ center as their own self-possession. This is matched by the ease with which collectivities in the person are assigned centralized unitary descriptions: the fifties, the sixties, the seventies; Romanticism, Structuralism, Phenomenology. In the meantime, even in the most superficial and minimal analysis, one of the most striking characteristics of any version of advanced capitalism is the fragmentation and decentralization of the individual’s putative political and economic control over her own life. One of the peculiar and paradoxical byproducts of this system is to generate a conviction of individual centrality among most members of the intellectual, bourgeois, as well as managerial classes-”the internal regulation of the capitalist system which must limit concentration and decision-making power in order to protect itself against its own ‘crisis’” (pp. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 808

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s central research on strategic essentialism — this paradox (fragmented subjects insisting on unitary self-possession) is precisely the ground on which Spivak later argues for strategic essentialism. — connects to: Advanced capitalism generates a false conviction of individual centrality that blocks collective action — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 808; Domination in advanced capitalism is masked as neutral administration and objectivity — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 186; Late capitalist life forces individuals to identify with the power that oppresses them — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 116 (+5 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that decentralized economic control produces intensified belief in individual centrality is a dense systemic observation worth sitting with.

Broader Connections

• Advanced capitalism generates a false conviction of individual centrality that blocks collective action #corroborates (0.92) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 808
• Late capitalist life forces individuals to identify with the power that oppresses them #expands (0.78) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 116
• Internet self-representation conceals a capitalist infrastructure producing the self as commodity #exemplifies (0.78)
• Individualism intensifies the moral idealization of wealth as society fragments #expands (0.75)
• Domination in advanced capitalism is masked as neutral administration and objectivity #expands (0.72) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 186
• Modern capitalist societies experience themselves as pluralistic rather than unified #expands (0.70)