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.

Rather than living one’s life in as unmediated a fashion as possible, the self-help reader engaged in Robbins’s exercise imagines herself directing herself in a film, a ghostly puppeteer of a marionette that is her imagined self. One conceives of one’s interiority by imagining how it might appear. This double gaze is not altogether new for women, w

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.

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

The tension between the near impossibility of working in a particular calling or vocation across the course of a lifetime and the ideology that finding one’s particular calling is central to achieving salvation (or even this-worldly happiness) is mitigated in two ways: first, an increased emphasis on working on the self, and second, the ideal that

Self-invention, once the imagined path to boundless opportunity, has become a burden under which a multitude of Americans hoping to fast track their careers, or simply secure their basic necessities, have labored.

This aesthetic self operates according to the principles of the marketplace and emerges fully formed in the figure that Tom Peters calls the “CEO of Me, Inc.”—the fully commodified self that incorporates both capital and labor in its model for individual development but identifies itself solely with capital.

Indeed, if one imagines these two threads in capitalist culture—instrumental/rational and expressive/affective—as the strands in a rope twisted tighter and tighter, then the rope began to double up and curl back onto itself as rational calculations were proposed for the intimate sphere and, as I will show, expressive and affective approaches were p

Yet appearing authentic while conforming to external values produces for the self-creating self an endlessly contradictory task of reconciling incommensurable values. How does this self, caught between a newly expanded sense of interiority and faced with an increased demand that it shape itself for the marketplace, render itself “authentic”?