Roland Barthes's Enigmatic Individualism

It is often said that man is a social animal; that he's naturally gregarious. 

And, I suppose, that's true and that this herd instinct is not entirely a bad thing. I certainly wouldn't wish to dissolve all sense of solidarity and belonging with others in favour of a liberal idealism which posits the individual as a self-contained unit. I'd sooner be a sheep existing as part of a flock, than Rob Brydon's Small Man in a Box.       

Having said that, I'm wary of the fact that a vulgar and often aggressive will to conformity reigns in every herd. Thus the idea of individualism continues to attract and demands to be taken up in a new (non-bourgeois, non-romantic) manner. 

Some authors, like Nietzsche, think of this in terms of starry singularity and a speculative transhumanism. Others, such as Barthes, are perhaps not quite so optimistic and conceive of an alternative individualism as something equally radical, but more enigmatic. 

That is to say, a clandestine and ambiguous model related to the margins rather than the heavens; one that's non-militant in its discourse and its methods and doesn't directly contest or confront power, so much as subvert or seduce it via the creation of queer new styles of writing, desiring, dressing, etc. 

This is why fashion - perhaps even more than philosophy - provides a "privileged vantage point for observing how society functions" and why the question of individualism invariably leads us back to dandyism, that peculiarly modern and scandalous form of stoicism and self-creation.

Start with externals, as Lawrence says, and the rest will slowly follow ...


See: Roland Barthes, 'The Crisis of Desire', from an interview conducted by Philip Brooks (20 April, 1980), in The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale, (University of California Press, 1991), pp. 361-65. The line quoted from is on p. 362.