It is those who find it harder to promote their interests within the exchange system who must turn to collective political action, and to the collective identity it presupposes, in order to turn their resentments into action. I have often spoken in these columns about the ever-expanding capacity of consumer society to furnish elements of a discourse of identity to its members. However secondary and ephemeral these creations, they are real and freely chosen, in some cases with great care and self-consciousness. Let me suggest a paradigm of two literary models of individual identity, the Proustian and the lyrical . Proust's is a universe without human love which therefore lacks the possibility of fulfillment through human interaction.
Art is the only means of genuine communication with others.
The goal pursued by the protagonist from the beginning is to accede to the realm of esthetic creation, which requires of him renunciation of worldly desires. Once we have gone through this process, we can write our own novel of disillusion. His identity includes all the content of the worldly desires he has transcended. Esthetic salvation does not reject the worldly, but lifts it to a higher sphere. The attractiveness of Proust's novel as a model for individual identity is that it understands the totality of our life, however sordid or self-indulgent its details, as an askesis and therefore as something valuable in its very lostness.