Bernard Stiegler on Individuation vs Individualization

Contextual Quote

Stiegler: Individuation versus Individualization

“It is a paradox of our time that has often been noted: mass individualism does not allow for mass individuation. The strength of neoliberal technologies of governance lies precisely in having succeeded in depriving individuals of their individuation, in the very name of their individuality.

Individualism is a general regime of equivalence in which, since everyone is equivalent to everyone else, everything becomes equivalent; by contrast, individuation involves a philosophy in which nothing is equivalent to anything else.

Individualism follows a logic in which the individual claims his or her share within the distribution of rights-holders (a distribution among particularities, among minorities); by contrast, individuation corresponds to a philosophy that breaks with this logic of identification, and for which there is no sharing that is not participation, and no participation that does not lead the individual to go beyond what separates and distinguishes them.

As should now be clear: individuation is not individualization — and individualization, in the sense understood by consumerist individualism, is a process of de-individuation.”

(Source: via a French 'convivialist' mailing list, no source specified)