Making Selves Without Straw

The late Jock Young observes in his Vertigo of Late Modernity that our period is characterized by “a combination of factors, some long existing yet unique in their combination, others pre-existent yet transformed in the present period. The impact revolves around three axes, the disembeddedness of everyday life, the awareness of a pluralism of values, and an individualism which presents the achievement of self-realisation as an ideal” (2).

The combination is poisonous. Disembedded from institutions and corporate habits that sustained people in earlier times, we don’t really have the resources to create our own reality. But self-realization is presented as the ideal, but we need the resources of work, family, and community to construct the self. Which is precisely what we lack, being disembedded.

Young puts it this way: “the bases of identity are less substantial: work, family, community, once steadfast building blocks, have become shaky and uncertain. At no stage in history has there been such a premium on identity, on constructing a narrative of development and discovery, yet where the materials to construct it are so transient and insubstantial.”

He goes on to point out that “it is not merely the instability of work, family and community which make the writing of such a narrative difficult, it is the nature of the building blocks themselves.” The various sources of identity work fail: “Work in particular is a locus of disappointment – it is the site of meritocratic ideals, of notions of reward and social mobility commensurate with effort, which very frequently it fails to deliver. It is the supposed font of self-realisation yet all too usually a mill of tedium. It is the workhorse of a consumerism which evokes self-realisation and happiness, but which all too frequently conveys a feeling of hollowness, and neverending extravagance, where commodities incessantly beguile and disappoint. Even the real thing seems a fake.”

And the various bases of identity are often at cross-purposes with one another. Work is supposed to sustain family, but it erodes family: “Work does not merely sustain family life, it manifestly intrudes upon it. It is the long commute which cuts into both ends of the day, and where the family becomes the place of tiredness and worn nerves” (3). Working two jobs makes it hard for the working poor to devote any time to neighbors, or to children.

Young doesn’t think our lives are joyless wrecks: “None of this should deny for an instant the perennial human joys of companionship of work, marriage and partnership, raising children and the comforts of neighbourliness.” His point is “that it is precisely these parts of human fulfilment that suffer most … the shoe pinches where it is needed most” (4).

We are told to build monumental selves. We are to make bricks without straw.