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

One way to foster this mutual recognition would be to focus not on one’s differences but rather on the common vulnerabilities that we experience as embodied, corporeal creatures.

The feeling of abundance is substituted for the reality of economic insecurity—a substitution that is hardly new in American popular culture.

In the place of the traditional notion of the self-made man—a construct that is gendered in its basic formation, patriarchal in its assumptions of how individuals come into being, and self-congratulatory in its tone—the belabored self presents itself as overworked both as the subject and as the object of its own efforts at self-improvement.

Hochschild notes that “the authors of advice books act as emotional investment counselors. They do readings of broad social conditions and recommend to readers of various types, how, how much and in whom to ‘invest’ emotional attention.”45

The impossibility of finding one’s “authentic” self is mitigated by the possibility of accessing, at least, one’s most persuasive self. One does not need to be an authority if one can appear authoritative.

While you might have thought you looked just fine, or that your home was pretty comfortable, the people closest to you have been making some rather different, even scathing, assessments. No one is ever completely safe from the critical gaze of a culture steeped in the makeover ethos.

literature typically maintain the status quo. On the other hand, the ideas that self-improvement literature is premised on—self-determination and self-fulfillment—continue to hold political possibilities that might be tapped for a progressive, even a radical, agenda.

The cultural critic Andrew Ross points out that this new model of artists/ workers—unlike Marx’s “industrial reserve army” of the unemployed, always available to keep the cost of labor low—creates a reserve volunteer army of people who will work for fun.56 Here, Ross asserts, we have not just a low-wage reserve industrial labor force, but a no-wage

the decline of corporate structures that emphasized group affiliation has fostered a resurgence in the Protestant ethic, but in its contemporary version this ethic returns as both entrepreneurial and artistic, rational and expressive.