Identity In Daniel Bell's The Disjunction Of Realms

In our Modern culture, individuals are preoccupied with identity. Modern identity is about the individual as described in the modern world. How modern people think of themselves and their experience. It is the conjunction of modernity and identity influences by history, society, and culture. Modernity is defined as the time after the 17th century in the Western World, which consists of North America and Europe. In the 17th century there is a surplus in capital because of technology and inventions. Previously, there had been land based economy with a feudal system. In the pre-modern world, an individual’s identity was defined by the community in which they were born. People’s identities were given, institutional, collective and shared; there

Previously, there was unity between the three realms of society: culture, polity, and economy. Pre-Modern society had culture that facilitated social structure; there was unity between how people worked and what they believed in. With the turn of the 17th-century, most societies maintained Protestant values of the individual, frugality, and hard work in social structure and culture. However, in the mid-20th century, there was a change from an industrial economy to a service economy which is reliant on consumerism. Bell writes that “what we have today is a radical disjunction of culture and social structure” (Bell 53). The culture of modernity is self-pursuing and antinomian and it values self-impression, the private self, and leisure. “There is not a common being but a self,” and the self is concerned with solely with the search for individual authenticity. All of which are celebrated in popular culture – social media, art, photography and theater. Meanwhile, social structure or the workplace is technical, structured and rational. Bell writes that “the business corporation wants an individual to work hard, pursue a career, accept delayed gratification” yet the culture’s consumerism “promotes pleasure, instant joy, relaxing and letting go” (71/72). Because of this disunity, individuals must move in-between the two realms, changing their identities depending on where they