Individual

cultures. The subversion-containment debate of the ’80s, especially as it was articulated in works like Stephen Greenblatt’s “Invisible Bullets,” is best understood as an excited overstatement of this insight (see Stevens 2002). So many critical modes that now dominate English literary studies, modes as diverse as Postcolonialism, Postmodernism, Gender Studies, or even the New British History (see Armitage 2000), are deeply indebted to, if not wholly explained by, the historicist perceptions of the ’80s—that history is a matter ofthe genealogy ofcultures and those cultures produce or come to consciousness ofthemselves in language. Though many ofthese historicizing modes of criticism are capable of falling back into a kind of archival antiquarianism, at their best their practitioners insist on the crucial relevance of culture to history. This is a cause for some pride. For while the vulgar historicism of so many elites both inside and outside the academy has made them incapable of resisting various crude, neo-liberal and/or neo-conservative agendas, the nuanced, “culture-full”history of so many academic disciplines, not least literary criticism, has enabled their members to stand firm and keep faith with the deeply humane ethos of Williams’ s Keywords. History is a keyword because at this point in time it reveals how two rival social processes or responses to the past occur simul­ taneously within the same language—the one closing our minds, effortlessly assimilating the past into the present; the other opening them, tirelessly defamiliarizing the present by showing how the past is another culture and how other cultures themselves reveal the possibility of other pasts. Paul Stevens University of Toronto Individual Some coordinates: Anthony Wilson, 43 of Branson, Mo., has changed his name legally to They. The inventor says he became the mythical per­ son cited as “they say”for the fun of it, and also: “It’ s important to be an individual. But this is a reminder that the sum of all is greater than the individual.” The Globe and Mail, Social Studies, 1 October 2004 Retro Keywords | 33 “Do not shoot,” it shouted. “I am a B-b-british object.” David Malouf, RememberingBabylon All these ill-assorted people walking toward the giant clock on Churchgate: they are me; they are my body and my flesh. The crowd is the self, 14 million avatars of it, 14 million celebra­ tions. Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found That last passage is quoted by Amitava Kumar in his review of Suketu Mehta’ s ethnographic memoir. He sets Kumar’ s celebration of “they are me” against Naipaul’ s unsettled realization, described in An Area of Darkness, that “there was nothing in my appearance or dress to distinguish me from the crowd eternally hurrying into Churchgate Station,” stressing Naipaul’ s need to separate they and me, to claim his individuality. Those two reactions enact exactly the paradox that Williams identifies at the start of his entry for “individual,”where he locates the word’ s original meaning as indivisible. However, in the early modern period, the word took on the opposite mean­ ing with the emphasis on distinctness, on divided from, although it often retained something ofthat original sense ofconnection. What Williams was interested in was “the extraordinary social and political history”(161) charted by the movement from “one in substance or essence” to “a separate entity,” from “that which cannot be separated”to “a single human being, as opposed to society” (oed). The word individuality marks this distinction but since it carries both the sense of“a unique person and his (indivisible) membership ofa group”(W 137), it keeps the paradox alive and productive. “They are me,” even as I am me, too. In relating this problem to “the break-up ofthe medieval social, economic and religious order”(163), as well as to the development of scientific thought (and we might add, although Williams doesn’t, postcolonial discourse), Wil­ liams here and in many of his other entries (man, subjective/subject/object, humanity/humanism, liberal/ism, social/ist, society, personality, private) joined and in large measure opened up an ongoing discussion, often pro­ ductive and as often baffling and baffled, on the individual subject in ethical, literary, cultural, and political theory...