Reality—the real world of financial constraints, failed plans, and typically insufficient childhoods—is jettisoned for a world of fantasy where any career or outcome is possible.

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.

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.

In the context of late-twentieth-century America, mind-power offered magical explanations for the source of wealth when hard work was clearly no longer a reliable means of securing prosperity.

When Foucault imagined life as a work of art he imagined an art object. Arendt, in contrast, imagined life as a narrative, authored by the social collectivity rather than by the lone individual.

One might reasonably expect that new modes of being, new individual identities, and new conceptions of selfhood would abound. And such does seem to be the case.

The possibility of redress through political channels has been effectively eliminated: the victimized child grows up, throws off the shackles of family and liberates himself completely except from his membership in a depoliticized recovery group.

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.

The actually existing culture of self-improvement, while its prevalence fairly shouts the need for progressive social movements, does not yet offer much possibility for progressive social change. What would be required to tap into the unrest in self-improvement culture would be a politics committed to economic justice (redistribution) as well as to