Table of Contents for Twilight of the Self
Introduction
Traces the history of capitalism to the point of neoliberalism and the ways this has effected a change in the structure of the individual. Also traces the ways that the individual is articulated in relation to the social structures that articulate it.
1.The Rise of Cybernetic Society: The Patterned World and the Fate of the Individual
Provides a history of the machine metaphor in modern society and its displacement by cybernetics. Also traces the history of the ideal of the authentic individual and the ways that this has been displaced by cybernetic society.
2.Social Domination, Social Systems, and the Constitution of the Self
Outlines a theory of domination as embedded in social systems and the ways that these systems depend on the subjective compliance of individuals to their logics. Domination becomes entrenched when social systems shape and control the agency of individuals by having them internalize the norms and values that underwrite the system's logic.
3.The Reification Problem and the Normative Entanglement Hypothesis
This chapter constructs a theory of reification and social domination along the lines of social ontology. The thesis is that reification is a feature of domination in the sense that the norms of power become entangled with the basic norms and constitutive rules that shape our consciousness and patterns of praxis.
4.Alienation: From Autonomy to Moral Atrophy
Argues that alienation is a problem of consciousness wherein the self is no longer able to distinguish what is authentically "his" or "hers" and what has been internalized from the external social world. In this sense, alienation is the condition where one is unable to make "authentic" judgments on the world because the self is too firmly ensconced within the value systems that shape it.
5.Reconsidering False Consciousness: An Etiology of Defective Social Cognition
This chapter rehabilitates the concept of false consciousness by arguing that it is a defect in our capacity to cognize the world rationally. False consciousness is not an organic defect in cognition but rather a problem of consciousness being injured by the logics and processes of defective social institutions—that is, social institutions that do not seek to shape the whole self but only use each member of the community for instrumental ends.
6.Cultivating Consent: Reification and the Web of Norms
This chapter argues that reification is best understood as the ways that norms orient and organize our experience and our cognition of the world. Reification is a matter of how our normative structures of consciousness are grounded and how that grounding orients our experience of the world, as well as how we recreate it.
7.The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego
This chapter applies a psychoanalytic perspective to the ways that the self has withered in modern society. The idea is that the withered self is a weakening of the ego such that it can no longer function as a critical, autonomous being. The relational structures of modern society are such that the individual becomes stripped of the requisite ego-strength as anxiety is produced by the atomization and hierarchization of modern life. As such, what in previous phases of liberal society would have been seen as a civic self has withered, searching for psychological scaffolding and surplus recognition in order to hold it together and gain some kind of feeble coherence.
8.Autonomy as Critical Agency: Reconstructing the Democratic Self
This final chapter outlines a theory to help reconstruct autonomy as a concept. I argue that critical agency is a fundamental aspect of autonomy and that it must be reconceived as the achieved status of a kind of selfhood that is capable of grasping our ontology as relational-practical beings. As such, the autonomous self can reappropriate the world as a collectively generated reality and judge it on the basis of its achievement of freedom-enhancing forms of life. Shattering reification and heteronomous modes of life and thought therefore is at the core of reclaiming a theory of autonomy and reconstructing democratic selfhood.