The inner life depends on collective institutions that give it language

Evidence

For the inner life was not in the heads of people who invented its language on their own; rather, it was in the world and in us at the same time. It required individuals who formulated shared concepts that everyone could understand and make their own and that would express what they felt inside. Without institutions dedicated to the inner life there would not, socially speaking, be an inner life. The inner life was the product of an act of collective creation, which provided a social context within which it might reside. — Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self, 530

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Reverses the intuition that interiority is private and pre-social; argues subjectivity is institutionally manufactured.
• QUESTION: Follow-up: what are the modern equivalents of the magazine ‘institutions of interiority,’ and what happens when they fragment into algorithmic feeds?
• XREF: connects to: Neurosis gave ordinary people a language for their suffering. — Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing…, 262; The modern self experiences suffering without naming a specific cause. — Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing…, 174; Society presupposes a harmony between its structure and individual inner callings — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 191 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Language is socially constructed and speaks through individuals #expands (0.85)
• Language’s defining power enforces social structures by silencing alternatives #expands (0.78) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 609
• Society presupposes a harmony between its structure and individual inner callings #expands (0.75) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 191
• Social relations crystallize into fixed external forms that cannot keep pace with inner life #qualifies (0.75) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 778
• Totalitarian control targets the inner life, not just behavior #exemplifies (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1181
• The individual’s inner mental relations mirror social relations among persons #corroborates (0.72) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 354
• Social structure and individual agency are mutually constitutive, not opposed #expands (0.70)
• Institutionalization enables collective work while codification imposes a false orthodoxy #qualifies (0.70)
• Human life must be understood under both individual and social attributes at once #expands (0.70) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 213