One of the strangest features of contemporary society is that we have probably never talked so much about individuality while simultaneously making individuality increasingly standardized. We are constantly encouraged to express ourselves, construct identities, find our aesthetic, display our opinions, and distinguish ourselves from everyone else. At first sight, this appears perfectly compatible with individualism. I think the opposite process is often taking place. What we increasingly encounter is not individuality itself but a simulation of individuality.
This distinction is important because there is a difference between what I would call real individuality and hyperreal individuality. Baudrillard himself did not formulate this distinction in these terms. I am applying his theory of simulation to individuality from an individualist perspective. In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard describes a world in which signs and models no longer simply represent an independently existing reality but increasingly substitute themselves for it. His reversal of the map and the territory captures the problem particularly well. The representation that was supposed to describe reality begins to precede and organize our experience of reality.
Real individuality begins with the actual individual. It emerges from a particular person living a particular life, developing his own preferences, relationships, experiences, contradictions, interests, beliefs, and purposes. This does not mean that the individual somehow exists outside society or produces every part of himself from nothing. Human beings inherit languages, cultures, ideas, traditions, and relationships. Real individuality simply means that these things are incorporated into the life of an acting person rather than functioning as a script that completely determines him.
Hyperreal individuality reverses this relationship. The individual still appears to possess an identity, perhaps an extremely distinctive one, but signs and models increasingly provide the framework through which he understands and presents himself. The representation no longer merely follows the person. It begins to precede him.
This is why hyperreal individuality is not simply the disappearance of individuality in the traditional collectivist sense. It is more subtle because it presents itself as the triumph of individuality. Everyone is encouraged to be different, but the available forms of difference are increasingly recognizable and reproducible. There are aesthetics for being different, products for being different, political identities for being different, musical subcultures for being different, and online communities built around recognizable forms of personality. The individual can assemble a remarkably distinctive identity while most of the signs composing it already existed before he adopted them.
Baudrillard’s analysis of consumer society makes this especially interesting. Commodities are not consumed only for their practical usefulness or exchange value. They can also function as signs communicating prestige, status, style, belonging, taste, or identity. Baudrillard developed the concept of sign-value precisely to describe this symbolic dimension of consumption. Consumption can therefore become something more than obtaining things we want. It can become a language through which we communicate what kind of person we are.
The automobile can signify independence, clothing can signify rebellion, a particular brand can signify taste, and an entire collection of commodities can become incorporated into the story someone tells about himself. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Buying a particular shirt obviously does not somehow destroy individuality. The interesting transformation occurs when consumption moves from expressing preferences toward constructing the identity that is supposed to possess those preferences. Instead of saying that I like something and therefore incorporate it into my style, the relationship can gradually reverse until an established identity begins telling me what someone like me is supposed to like.
Consumer society can therefore produce enormous visible differentiation without necessarily producing the same degree of genuine individuality underneath it. Two people can desperately attempt to distinguish themselves from everyone else while selecting their differences from the same catalogue of recognizable signs. Hyperreal individuality does not require uniformity because standardized difference works perfectly well.
Politics can function in much the same way. Political identities are useful because they allow us to summarize complicated sets of ideas, but they can also become packages containing expectations about positions that are only loosely connected. Someone begins with several political conclusions and adopts a label because it describes them. Eventually, however, the label can start functioning in the other direction and provide expectations about which conclusions should follow.
I obviously do not think political labels are inherently opposed to individuality. I use philosophical labels myself. Someone can call himself a socialist, conservative, anarchist, liberal, libertarian, or practically anything else because the term approximately describes what he thinks. The problem begins when maintaining the coherence of that identity becomes more important than independently evaluating something that might contradict it. The label that originally summarized the person begins producing expectations for the person.
Social media intensifies this process because practically everyone can now construct a public representation of himself. A profile is necessarily selective. We choose photographs, opinions, interests, jokes, accomplishments, and fragments of everyday life while leaving most of our existence invisible. Research on social-media self-presentation has documented the tension between idealized and authentic self-presentation, including users consciously attempting to construct and communicate what they perceive to be an authentic self online.
The interesting question is therefore not whether the online representation is simply true or false. Someone can post completely truthful information about himself and still participate in this process. The more important issue is whether the profile remains an incomplete expression of the person or whether the person increasingly organizes himself around maintaining the coherence of the profile. Someone known online for a particular political philosophy, aesthetic, lifestyle, profession, or personality may discover that changing creates friction because an audience has learned to recognize a particular version of him.
This produces a peculiar kind of conformity. Traditional conformity demands visible sameness, while hyperreal conformity can accommodate enormous visible difference as long as those differences remain intelligible through recognizable signs. A society could therefore contain millions of people continuously displaying their uniqueness while many of those forms of uniqueness are constructed through the same symbolic systems. The surface can appear enormously diverse while the mechanisms producing identity remain surprisingly standardized.
The State produces another version of this problem through administrative abstraction. A modern State governing millions of people cannot encounter everyone as a complete and particular individual. James C. Scott developed this problem extensively in Seeing Like a State, showing how centralized authorities simplify complicated local realities into categories, measurements, records, and classifications that make populations and resources easier to perceive and administer.
The individual consequently becomes a taxpayer, citizen, voter, worker, employer, tenant, homeowner, immigrant, beneficiary, income bracket, age bracket, or demographic unit. These categories can communicate useful information, but they necessarily contain less information than the individuals they classify. Political discourse can push the abstraction further when we begin speaking about what young people want, what workers believe, what homeowners need, or what the middle class demands. What begins as useful shorthand can become misleading when millions of different individuals are replaced by an imaginary representative character.
This is where Austrian methodological individualism provides an important counterpoint. Mises is explicit in Human Action that social analysis begins with individuals acting. Collective entities such as States, nations, parties, and churches are real social phenomena, but their operation is ultimately manifested through individual action. Methodological individualism does not require pretending that society does not exist. It means that collective phenomena have to be understood through the individuals whose actions constitute them.
Mises also does not imagine an individual who somehow appeared outside society without culture, language, history, or relationships. He recognizes that the acting human being emerges as a social being and that reason, language, and cooperation develop within social relations. This matters because the distinction between real and hyperreal individuality is not a distinction between a socially influenced person and a completely independent person. Such a completely independent person does not exist. The distinction concerns whether identities, communities, aesthetics, and categories remain ways through which individuals understand and express themselves or become models to which individuals increasingly conform.
I can call myself an individualist anarchist without believing that every opinion I hold must be mechanically derived from whatever an individualist anarchist is supposed to believe. I can inherit a culture without treating that culture as a script, admire an author without turning his philosophy into a personality I have to perform, and participate in a community without reducing myself to a representative sample of that community. Influence does not destroy individuality because individuality has always developed through interaction with other people.
Real individuality is therefore messy because individuals are messy. A person can combine influences that do not fit comfortably together, change his mind without reconstructing his entire identity, share an opinion with people he otherwise strongly disagrees with, or develop tastes that contradict the aesthetic associated with him. Hyperreal individuality is cleaner because it is recognizable, communicable, reproducible, and increasingly marketable. It converts individuality into a system of signs through which other people can quickly determine what kind of person they are encountering.
This is why hyperreality can become an attack on individuality even while constantly speaking the language of individuality. It does not need to eliminate the individual or force everyone into visible uniformity. It can produce an image of individuality so convincing that the actual individual increasingly conforms himself to it. The individualist response is therefore not to become someone without labels, influences, communities, aesthetics, or culture. It is to restore their proper relationship to the individual. My labels should describe me rather than command me, my political philosophy should emerge from what I think rather than determine what I am permitted to think, and my public image should remain an incomplete representation of me rather than becoming something I must continuously perform.
Real individuality begins with the person and produces the image, while hyperreal individuality begins with the image and increasingly produces the person. Baudrillard gives us the theory of simulation necessary to understand that reversal, Scott shows how institutions simplify complex individuals into legible representations, and Mises reminds us why social analysis ultimately has to return to acting persons. The problem with hyperreal individuality is not that individuality simply disappears. Something that looks very much like individuality remains everywhere. The deeper problem is that the signs of individuality can survive even when the individual has ceased to be their origin.
Sources
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. University of Michigan Press, 1994. Used for Baudrillard’s theory of simulation, simulacra, hyperreality, and the reversal between the model and the reality it supposedly represents.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. Sage, 1998. Used for Baudrillard’s analysis of consumer society, differentiation, consumption, and the symbolic organization of commodities.
Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Telos Press, 1981. Used for the concept of sign-value and the treatment of commodities as elements within systems of social differentiation and meaning.
Mises, Ludwig von. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Chapter II, section 4, “The Principle of Methodological Individualism.” Used for methodological individualism, the analysis of collective entities through individual action, and Mises’s rejection of the idea that methodological individualism requires an asocial conception of man.
Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998. Used for the discussion of State legibility, administrative simplification, standardized categories, and centralized representations of complex social realities.
Bailey, Erica R., Sandra C. Matz, Wu Youyou, and Sheena S. Iyengar. “Authentic Self-Expression on Social Media Is Associated with Greater Subjective Well-Being.” Nature Communications 11 (2020): 4889. Used for research concerning authentic versus idealized self-presentation on social media.
Smith, Leanne R., et al. “Self-Presentation and Gender on Social Media: An Exploration of the Expression of ‘Authentic Selves.’” Qualitative Market Research 25, no. 1 (2022): 80–99. Used for the discussion of online self-presentation and the construction and communication of an authentic self.
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