Everyone is different; it is the extent to which one perceives, acknowledges and acts on such difference that matters. Community negates difference, subsumes it. It puts things in their proper place, orders them, naturalises. By the same token, individuality, in its strictest sense, reveres difference. To be an individual is to recognise that no social structure is self-evident, that one’s community is arbitrary, that society’s constraints are internal, not external.
Individuality is celebrated in western culture, and aspired to. Yet expressions of one’s uniqueness are highly regulated, by moral norms, public discourse, state institutions. One is permitted to be an individual only on the condition that the manifestations of this being accord with broader social phenomena (such as fashions) and exist independently of behaviours associated with deviance and mental illness. Individuality must be confined to specific domains of activity, such that its expressions do not contaminate society as a whole. By orchestrating this quarantine, which communalises difference, society protects itself from threats to its ontological givenness.
Popular expressions of difference, as in art, music and fashion, serve less to challenge social values than to reinforce them. They are communal in nature, dependent on the recognition and endorsement of such differences by others, both within and beyond one’s community. Difference is domesticated. In other words, western individuality is affected, ostensible. Its surface forms betray an underlying conformity, an acceptance – and perhaps even a celebration – of existing social structures. Thus, in the West, to be different is to opt into society. True difference, in contrast, is anti-social.