The work of avoiding politics is hard work.105 In the context of self-help television, this labor of displacement is accomplished by adopting the notion of revolution to the most depoliticized possibilities: revolution is alive and well just as long as it’s a revolution from within that stays within: as long as it’s a revolution of the spirit, or a

Traditionally, the mythology of the self-made man had relied on the exploitation of women’s labor in their roles of wives, mothers, and sisters, as well as on a pejorative understanding of “the feminine.” Often the measure of a man’s success was calculated on the basis of his ability to out-earn his wife’s capacity for spending, a criterion for suc

if one understands the self as both embedded in and at least in part constitutive of others and of a social sphere—as a contributor to the making of both self and others, as well as an outcome of the efforts and actions of others—then the pursuit of individual self-invention continues to hold radical political possibilities, particularly when one’s

But, as in any version of the self that assumes a highly autonomous individual agent, the belief in such an authoritative, authentic, self-authoring self requires the repression of any consideration of the contributions of others to one’s self and one’s world.

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.

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

what the French fin de siècle social theorist Gabriel Tarde called “the grooves of borrowed thought”71—patterns of thought that are unlikely to create any serious disruption of the status quo.

With the emergence of an emphasis on self-fulfillment, one finds there is no end-point for self-making: individuals can continuously pursue shifting and subjective criteria for success.