CHOICE
BIG IDEAS
General editor: Lisa Appignanesi
As the twenty-first century moves through its tumultuous first decade, we need to think about our world afresh. It’s time to revisit not only politics, but our passions and preoccupations, and our ways of seeing the world. The Big Ideas series challenges people who think about these subjects to think in public, where soundbites and polemics too often provide sound and fury but little light. These books stir debate and will continue to be important reading for years to come.
Other titles in the series include:
Julian Baggini |
Complaint |
Jenny Diski |
The Sixties |
Paul Ginsborg |
Democracy |
Ian Hacking |
Identity |
Eva Hoffman |
Time |
Steven Lukes |
Moral Relativism |
Susie Orbach |
Bodies |
Slavoj Žižek |
Violence |
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
PROFILE BOOKS LTD
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London EC1R OJH
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Copyright © Renata Salecl, 2010
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Printed and bound in Italy by LEGOPRINT S.p.a. – Lavis
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All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 84668 192 9
eISBN 978 1 84765 226 3
Introduction
1 Why choice makes us anxious
2 Choosing through others’ eyes
3 Love choices
4 Children: to have or have not?
5 Forced choice
Conclusion
Shame and the lack of social change
Notes
Further reading
Acknowledgements
Index
Browsing through the self-help section of a New York bookshop, I came across a book entitled All About Me. The book was mostly blank. On each page there was only a question or two about the reader’s likes and dislikes, memories and plans for the future – nothing more.
These empty spaces perfectly illustrate the dominant ideology of the developed world: the individual is the ultimate master of his or her life, free to determine every detail. In today’s consumer society we are not only required to choose between products: we are asked to see our whole lives as one big composite of decisions and choices.
During a single train journey, for example, I was reminded many times that I am free to make whatever I want out of my life. An advertisement for a university encouraged me to ‘Become what you want to be’. A beer company urged, ‘Be yourself’. A travel company exhorted, ‘Life – book now’. The cover of Cosmopolitan read, ‘Become yourself – only a better version’. When I used a Chase Manhattan cash machine, the screen told me: ‘Your choice. Your Chase’. Even in post-Communist countries, advertising tells us that we should endlessly be deciding what kind of life to live. In Slovenia a lingerie company put up huge advertising hoardings asking, ‘What woman do you want to be today?’ A Bulgarian mobile phone company uses the logo ‘It’s your voice’, and its Croatian counterpart repeats the mantra: ‘Be yourself!’
Becoming oneself seems to be no easy task. A quick look at the bestseller lists suggests that people are spending a lot of time and money learning how to become themselves. Change Your Thought: Change Yourself, You: The Owner’s Manual, Now Discover Your Strengths and Reposition Yourself – each offers a new strategy for redefining one’s entire life. Internet astrology sites advertise free insight into the ‘real you’, television ads encourage a total body makeover and in every area of private and public life there are coaches available to help one achieve the ideal lifestyle.
All this advice, however, does not necessarily bring contentment; instead, it can actually increase one’s anxiety and insecurity.
One magazine editor, Jennifer Niesslein, decided to try to resolve all the problems in her life, using only the advice offered in a variety of self-help books that promised to help her find happiness and fulfilment. In her book Practically Perfect in Every Way Niesslein describes how, after two years of following advice on how to lose weight, declutter her house, be a better parent and a better partner and find more serenity in her overall existence, she started suffering from serious panic attacks.1 She found herself less contented, not more. Not only were all these attempts at self-improvement taking up all her time, but she wasn’t enjoying what she had achieved: a spotless kitchen, three home-cooked meals a day and the new communication skills that she had mastered. Even the weight that she had lost through strenuous exercise came back within a few months. When it was all over, Niesslein explained why she thought people follow these books rather than attempting to change on their own terms: ‘I think we feel responsible for so much in our lives. There’s jobs, kids, the responsibility for your marriage. If you can turn to someone else and they’ll tell you what to do, it’s comforting.’2
How is it that in the developed world this increase in choice, through which we can supposedly customise our lives and make them perfect leads not to more satisfaction but rather to greater anxiety, and greater feelings of inadequacy and guilt? And why is it that in order to alleviate this anxiety people are willing to follow random bits of advice from marketing people or horoscopes, take beauty tips from the cosmetics industry, be guided by economic forecasts from financial advisers and accept relationship advice from the writers of self-help books? Given that more and more people defer to these so-called experts, it would seem that we are increasingly eager actually to have the burden of choice taken away from us.
People are often trapped into a vicious circle when they try to improve their lives with the help of experts. For example, some psychoanalysts have observed a particular kind of obsessive behaviour among the followers of the ‘FLYlady.com’ self-help website. (FLY stands for ‘Finally Loving Yourself’), whose readers are encouraged to keep a journal of their daily tasks and to follow detailed advice on how to de-clutter their space, their bodies, their emotions and their relationships. The site’s users would complain to psychoanalysts that they were constantly failing to accomplish the tasks they had been set or that the list of tasks they wanted to complete grew ever longer. Some would even behave as though their whole life was a list of achievements that had to be fulfilled: work on a particular assignment, lose a certain amount of weight, get married by a certain age, have a child, build the perfect home. Yet complaining about their inadequacy, however self-induced, seemed to bring a particular pleasure of its own.
These forms of self-torture go hand in hand with attempts to pursue ever new forms of enjoyment. Post-industrial capitalist ideology tends to treat the individual as someone for whom enjoyment is without limit. She is portrayed as someone who can endlessly push back the boundaries of pleasure, constantly satisfying her ever-expanding desires. Paradoxically, however, many people do not find satisfaction in a society seemingly without boundaries, and often swerve instead onto a path of self-destruction. Unfettered consumption tends to lead people to consume themselves; with self-harm, anorexia, bulimia and addictions being only the most obvious forms.
When the current economic crisis began in 2008, it seemed at first as though choice had been replaced by restraint, happiness by gloom and individual freedom by the desire for an authority figure to take charge and put things right. Standard-bearers such as the Financial Times ran articles on the gloomy economic situation with headlines such as ‘A Borrowed Tomorrow’; ‘Payback Time’ and ‘Wall Street Drowns Its Sorrows’. An analysis of society at large began with a call for a reality check, a ‘clean break’. A ‘sense of irrationality’ was said to be hovering over everything. Even in articles on the arts a new fatalistic discourse seemed to be emerging. The question ‘How To Survive The End Of “Civilization”’ was answered by recourse to the ‘Master Of Balance And Harmony’, the ‘Voice Of The Future’ or ‘Songs Of Simplicity’.3 But as soon as there appeared a glimmer of hope that the crisis might not mean total economic meltdown, the idea of choice re-emerged as the powerful ideological tool of consumer society. This time it was wrapped in discussions as to whether prosperity truly increases happiness and whether conspicuous consumption was the best way for people to spend their free time. But these very ideas about simplifying life became enmeshed in another version of choice. The consumer had to choose not to choose and often had to pay for advice on how to do this. Simply throwing things away or donating them to someone else was not an option: advice was needed on how to do it.
This shift in the perception of prosperity, however, did not happen overnight. It is not that people suddenly woke up one day and saw their lives differently. The seeds of the impending economic crisis had been sown some time earlier. Similarly, depression about the ideology of choice had already permeated times of greater exuberance, as is clear from the anxiety and insecurity evident during the last decade of post-industrial capitalism. It is almost as though the crisis represented the fulfilment of a desire, only partially given voice for some limit to the plethora of choice available during wealthier years, as well as the concomitant release from the pressure created by it. The crisis even brought a strange, relieved form of enjoyment in some quarters, where a desire for some cap on extravagance – or rather, on the multitudinous possibilities that affluence allowed – had long been felt, though only partially realised. The New York Times caught this new puritanical mood by outlining a downsized way to celebrate the holidays in an article entitled ‘We’re Going to Party Like It’s 1929’. The piece suggested how people could hold a decent dinner party on a more modest budget in the midst of the crisis. One socialite featured in the article observed: ‘The thing about the recession is, it takes the pressure off … It allows you to strip away all the stuff that’s not important and focus on what is: friends, family, togetherness.’4 Yet the party hosts felt the need to hire an adviser to tell them how to entertain in times of crisis. There was a distinct ambivalence in their wish to give up on the thrills of consumption. They may have wanted to limit their choices, but not too much, and they wanted someone else to do it for them.
The question to be examined here is not simply why people shop, or how they think about their lives, but why they embrace the idea of choice, and what is gained and lost when they do. People may worry about the terrorist threat, or new viruses and environmental disasters, but their greatest worries are usually about their own private well-being: their jobs, relationships, finances, their place in the community, the meaning of their lives, or the legacy they will pass on.5 All of these involve choices. And since we strive for perfection not only in the here and now but also in the future, choices become even harder to make. Choice brings a sense of overwhelming responsibility into play, and this is bound up with a fear of failure, a feeling of guilt and an anxiety that regret will follow if we have made the wrong choice. All this contributes to the tyrannical aspect of choice.
The sociologist Richard Sennett points out:
One of the oldest usages of the word ‘tyranny’ in political thought is a synonym for sovereignty. When all matters are referred to a common, sovereign principle or reason, that principle or person tyrannizes the life of a society … An institution can rule as a single fount of authority; a belief can serve as a single standard for measuring reality.6
In the last few decades the idea of choice, as presented in rational choice theory, has become one such tyrannical idea in the developed world.
Rational choice theory presupposes that people think before they act and that they will always seek to maximise the benefits and minimise the costs of any situation. Depending on the prevailing circumstances and given sufficient information, people will thus always choose the option that is in their own best interest. Critics of rational choice theory, however, have pointed out that human beings don’t always act in their own interest even when they know what that is. Hence the many instances where people act in a charitable or altruistic manner rather than on the basis of naked self-interest. Psychoanalysis has also shown that people often behave in ways that do not maximise their pleasure and minimise their pain and that they even sometimes derive a strange pleasure from acting against their own well-being. Even if people think that they have the necessary information to make the best choice available, their decision will be heavily influenced by external factors, such as other people, or by internal factors, such as their own unconscious desires and wishes.
In today’s society, which glorifies choice and the idea that choice is always in people’s interests, the problem is not just the scale of choice available but the manner in which choice is represented. Life choices are described in the same terms as consumer choices: we set out to find the ‘right’ life as we would to find the right kind of wallpaper or hair conditioner. Today’s advice culture presents the search for a spouse as not all that different from the search for a car: first we need to weigh up all the advantages and disadvantages, then we need to secure a prenuptial agreement, mend things if they go wrong and eventually trade in the old model for a new one, before finally getting tired of all the hassle of commitment and deciding to go for a temporary lease agreement.
The issue of choice has been a concern primarily of the middle classes in the developed world. Yet even in poor countries many have been deeply troubled by the contradictions inherent in the ideology of choice. Supposedly now free to make whatever they want out of their lives, in reality they suffer from numerous constraints. People are treated as though they are in a position to make a work of art out of their own lives, shaping every element at will. They are encouraged to act as though they live in an ideal world and as though the choices they make are reversible, while the reality is that their economic circumstances prevent them from having much freedom of choice at all and that one wrong decision can have disastrous consequences. Even in wealthy countries poor people lack the ability to take advantage of the choices on offer to them. In the USA, for example, there are a huge range of treatments and technology to choose from if you have health insurance and can afford them. But without universal healthcare poor people cannot choose even the most basic treatment. And even for those for whom money is not an issue, choice can be a burden and source of confusion: on the one hand, the latest scientific research tells them that their genes have already determined what illnesses they will have and how long they will live; on the other, they are made to feel responsible for their own well-being through their lifestyle choices.
The aim of this book is to explore how the idea of choosing who we want to be and the imperative to ‘become yourself’ have begun to work against us, making us more anxious and more acquisitive rather than giving us more freedom. According to the French philosopher Louis Althusser, ‘post-industrial capitalism’s espousal of the ideology of choice is not a coincidence but rather enables it to perpetuate its dominance’. The problem, Althusser suggests, is that we don’t notice the forms in which our lives are constructed. Society functions as something obvious, something given, almost natural. In order to understand the hidden imperatives, the codes of being, the secret requirements that philosophers call ‘ideologies’, we need to remove the veil of obviousness and given-ness. Only then do we notice the bizarre but highly ordered logic that we obey, unthinkingly, in our everyday lives. We may well feel ourselves opposed to ‘society’ or the ‘status quo’: however, paradoxically, for a particular ideology to survive, it is not essential that people actively support or believe in it. The crucial thing is that people do not express their disbelief. For them to abide by the majority opinion, all that matters is that they believe it to be true that most of the people around them believe. Ideologies thus thrive on ‘belief in the belief of others’. This was perhaps most obvious in former Communist regimes, where most people did not fully believe in the dominant ideology. Citizens reason along the lines of: ‘I do not believe in the Party, but there are many, more numerous and powerful than me and those like me (and not only Party apparatchiks) who do, so I will keep in line.’ (It now seems that in fact not even many Party apparatchiks were genuine believers in Communism. They were often deeply suspicious of people who went back to the works of the founders of socialism, Marx and Engels.) In the end what held society together was a belief in those fictional others who supposedly did believe and who thus enforced belief.
This logic of belief holds for the idea of choice. We may not think that our choices are limitless or that we are fully capable of determining the direction of our lives and making ourselves whatever we want to be, but we believe that someone else believes in these ideas and so we do not express our disbelief. For the ideology of choice to hold such power in post-industrial society, all that is needed is for people to keep their disbelief to themselves.
In the process of feeling guilty about who we are and working constantly to ‘improve’ ourselves we lose the perspective necessary to instigate any social change. By working so hard at self-improvement we lose the energy and ability to participate in any form of social change and constantly feel anxious that we are somehow failing.
If we want to relieve this anxiety, we must understand how it has taken hold in the first place and how it works. And if we hope to change the way society functions, we must acknowledge that there are alternatives to the tyranny of choice, which plays such a central role in the ideology of late capitalism. Instead of glorifying rational choice, we need to look at how choices are often made at an unconscious level and how they are influenced by society at large.
In times of economic crisis other questions arise. How do we go from boundless free choice to severely limited choice? How can we go from believing that everything is possible to believing that nothing is possible any longer? How can we forget the promise and face the reality? These questions entwine us in the difficult logic of loss. In the developed world the last decades have created the illusion of an eternal present: the past does not matter, and the future is ours to create. In the midst of this, the reality of loss is occluded. Decisions become ever harder to make when one is perceived as being the master of one’s fate, of one’s own well-being and the well-being of those close to us: our children, for example. The feeling of regret for decisions that one took, the fear of making another mistake, can become overwhelming. In order to avoid feelings of loss and regret, and a pervasive anxiety, one tries to minimise risk or at least make it predictable. The society that prizes choice relies on the idea that we have to prevent all risk, or at least predict it.
Crisis can be defined as precisely the moment when we lose control – the moment when the world we know is destroyed and we are confronted with the unknown. Whatever its consequences for society, for the individual, such a crisis may be a moment to reassess what really matters. When an economic crisis compels people to save, they are also being forced to consider their desires. To save is to sacrifice desire – or, at least, to defer it. Until recently, the society of choice encouraged immediate gratification and taught us not to defer anything.
But even in the midst of this process, people have formed ever new limits in order to keep their desire alive: they have invented new prohibitions of their own to curb their society’s push to enjoyment. This is why I disagree with theories that we live in a society without limits. There is a difference between a society where limits do not exist and an ideology that depicts that society as being without limits. While our current ideology, as represented in the media, has played on the limitlessness of enjoyment, the individual still struggles with his or her own prohibitions.
Dostoevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov (in The Brothers Karamazov) reasons that, if God does not exist, then everything is permissible. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan reversed this into ‘If God does not exist, nothing is permitted any longer’, meaning that the loss of belief in an authority that prohibits our actions opens the door not to freedom but rather to the creation of new limits. With the ideology of choice we are confronted by similar reversals. The limitless choices that we are supposed to have in regard to our lives have turned into new prohibitions. Nowadays, however, it is not that these limits are imposed on us by an external authority, such as parents, or teachers, but rather that we create our own prohibitions. And the vast advice/self-help industry also enables us to choose yet further authorities to whom we can delegate the right to limit our choices.
This book will show how misleading the ideology of choice can be when it burdens the individual with the idea that he or she is the total master of their well-being and the direction of their life and how little this ideology contributes to possible change in the organisation of society as a whole. There are moments when rational choice is possible for the individual, and there are moments when the choices we make are irrational and sometimes damaging. Choice is a powerful mechanism in people’s hands. It is the basis, after all, of any political engagement and of the political process as a whole. However, when choice is glorified as the ultimate tool by which people can shape their private lives, very little is left over for social critique. While we obsess about our individual choices, we may often fail to observe that they are hardly individual at all but are in fact highly influenced by the society in which we live.
Some time ago I stopped at an upmarket grocer’s in Manhattan to pick up some cheese for a dinner party. There they were: countless shelves of dairy classics, specimens of perfectly judged maturation – the soft, the blue, the hard Dutch, the crumbly English, the superior French – all with an equal claim on my attention and my purse. I was spoilt for choice.
The mechanisms of a dutiful student kicked in: I began reading the labels. If my first mistake was to enter the shop without a definite idea of the cheese I wanted, this was my second, for now the dizzying magnitude of the selection was complicated by the rhetoric on the wrappers. What made a given cheese so distinct from the hundreds of others surrounding it? Each one sang its own virtues with precision and feeling. I began to grow woozy, and not just from the smell of Camembert. Most peculiar of all was that instead of resenting the unnecessary bother that came with picking up a decent cheese – by this time I would have been grateful for ‘spreadable’ or ‘tastes good on toast’, as opposed to the ‘mellifluous’ and ‘smoky’ varieties enticing me – I was soon very angry at myself for my indecisiveness. What were the names of all those great cheeses I had tasted before? What good had all that time in France done me?
My third mistake that day was to consult the man in charge of the cheese department. Hovering in a spotless liveried apron, his hands held primly behind his back, he appeared very knowledgeable, gladly taking on the role of authority, but still something made me suspect that perhaps his real aim was merely to offload some expensive cheeses that he would be unable to sell otherwise. Thus confusion descended into suspicion and resentment. In the end, ignoring his advice and blocking out the siren calls of the chorusing Brie and Cheddar, I decided to pick out five quite random cheeses, on the basis that they either looked great or had interesting-sounding names.
A rather bourgeois little vignette, perhaps, but one that illustrates some of the reasons why overwhelming choice can increase our anxiety and feelings of inadequacy. When Italo Calvino writes about a similar experience – that of his protagonist, Mr Palomar, visiting a Parisian Fromagerie – he conveys the overwhelming choice facing him as an existential dilemma:
Palomar’s spirit vacillates between contrasting urges: the one that aims at complete, exhaustive knowledge and could be satisfied only by tasting all the varieties; and the one that tends toward an absolute choice, the identification of the cheese that is his alone, a cheese that certainly exists even if he cannot recognize it (cannot recognize himself in it).
Overwhelmed by the museum-like experience and encyclopaedic knowledge that he discerns behind the vast array of cheese, Mr Palomar first tries to write down the names of the unknown cheeses, ones he hopes to remember for the future; but in the end, when he finally makes his choice, he chooses something rather ordinary:
The elaborate and greedy order that he intended to make momentarily slips his mind; he stammers; he falls back on the most obvious, the most banal, the most advertised, as if the automatons of mass civilization were waiting only for this moment of uncertainty on his part in order to seize him again and have him at their mercy.1
For Calvino’s character, imagining the story that each cheese has, the fact that ‘each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky’, is overwhelming. His final banal choice is thus a gesture reminiscent of closing the encyclopaedia because it simply has too much information. The most advertised cheese brings solace because it takes away the uncertainty of discovering something new.
When I faced my own little ordeal at the cheese counter, I did not experience anxiety in regard to the ‘different green’ and ‘different sky’ behind each cheese, I was rather questioning my own desire in the eyes of the desire of others. First, I was bothered by the question of how others would judge the choice I made. I tried guessing what kinds of cheese my friends might like, and what unusual types of cheese I could surprise them with; and I was uneasy about the arrogant way the man behind the counter looked at me, obviously enjoying my lack of knowledge in his domain of expertise. Second, I was anxious about my perception of myself – I was angry with myself for not being a more knowledgeable consumer. When it was all over, I was able to understand the anxiety that my friend, a well-known law professor, admits to feeling when he’s asked to choose a wine in a restaurant. He is afraid that others will laugh at his choice. Because of this anxiety, he usually orders very expensive wine and, at the end of the dinner, insists on paying for it.
When people are asked what is traumatic about choice, they often list the following:
• they want to make an ideal choice (which is why they constantly switch their telephone provider, for example)