Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life

All the work of care—both the private and public labors of care—are rendered meaningless and debased when one is seeking some grander work of self-making, some vision of life as a permanent reified work of art.

Demands for recognition without a parallel demand for economic justice is at the heart of why the self is belabored.

By locating and articulating these spaces of disjunction—of the differences between one’s own experience and the predictable, stereotypical categories of borrowed thought, by operating against the cultural grain—the cultural citizen engages in a kind of autoinvention that challenges existing norms and modalities, generating new and emancipatory pos

The demand that one “be all one can be” is double-edged. On the one hand, if one imagines oneself living in a democracy where every person’s self-development will benefit them individually as well as society as a whole, then “being all one can be” is a social responsibility and privilege for each and all. On the other hand, if one imagines oneself

Along with new spaces of dialogue, what will also be needed are new ways of envisioning the world: ways of making over culture rather than remaining subject to makeover culture.

Maintaining the fiction of the autonomous self, a laborious fiction that is ultimately unsustainable, has become hard work.

For the most part, self-improvement culture continues to operate on a belief that wealth is a sign of industry, intelligence, competence, or attunement with the universe. Poverty, bred of economic injustice, remains a marker of laziness, stupidity, immorality, or some sort of cosmic dissonance.

The ideal of political change through imaginative transformation—the vision of the artist as an agent of social change—must be joined to a culture of collective dialogue to forge effective political transformation.

Covey’s conflict-averse cosmology requires a focus on the internalized versions of the external world. Social relations are reduced to roles, and conflicts are internal—between the roles one fulfills rather than with actually existing others in the world.

Although these emerging tropes—the metaphor of life as work of art, and the model of artists as ideal workers—suggest a Romantic, antimodernist refusal of the domination of market forces, paradoxically they contribute to the expansion of a culture of work without end.