Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought

read in terms of a fundamental tension in the representation of the

individual, a dismantling of the classical figure and a simultaneous

effort to reconceive it. For structural analysts from various disci¬

plines, the development of autonomous individuality has passed

from its initial characterization as the telos of modernity to be¬

come the principal ideology of an illegitimate mass culture. For a

time, systemized knowledge of the objective determinants of con¬

sciousness appeared to offer a theoretical bulwark against the ethi¬

cal anarchy of radical subjectivism. As structures proliferated,

however, their manifestly relative character drew attention to their

production by individual analysts as well as to their role in a regime

'of knowledge and power. Thus, strategies emerged to relocate the

experience of individuality in the indeterminacies left around the

edges of competing structures. Of course, the sense of selfhood that

appeared in these gaps could not assume the coherence and consis¬

tency of the classical representation; the claim of an unproblematic

and substantial individuality is, in the modern period, inevitably

an index of ideology. Nevertheless, a major theme of many of the

conference papers is that the modern crisis of the individual in¬

volves not merely negation but also complex and often subtle efforts

to reconceptualize the role of individual experience, choice, and

initiative.

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