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

changing economic circumstances—declining real wages and increased uncertainty about employment stability and opportunities—created a context in which constant self-improvement is suggested as the only reliable insurance against economic insecurity.

Thus within the discourse of recovery, the family, set aside and sequestered as though it operated independently of the larger frameworks of society, is located as the source of one’s oppression (in the past) and one’s problems (now personalized and depoliticized in the present).

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

Psychotherapeutic notions of health and well-being were conflated with spiritual values of saintliness or goodness, while the Protestant religious imperative to pursue a calling was wedded to notions of mental health and psychological well-being.

One might hope that inside every person imagining himself or herself the creator of his or her own life-artworks—inside every CEO of Me, Inc.—is a belabored self finally weary and fed up enough to throw off the fantasy of self-sufficiency and to demand instead, sufficiency for each and all.

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

Some social theorists have called this phenomenon “the jobless future” or the “end of work.”16 But in a strange twist for American workers, the result has been something akin to work without end.

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

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