Sublime

In the place of a social safety net, Americans have been offered row upon row of self-help books to boost their spirits and keep them afloat in uncharted economic and social waters.

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

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 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.

The consolidation of vast wealth in the hands of a few industrialists, and a burgeoning population of new millionaires, required moral justification.

What finer characteristics could a system like capitalism seek in a worker?

“Klosterman is like pop culture’s version of Michael Moore, a zealot who simultaneously amuses and provokes…. Savvy and insightful.” —USA Today

Social structures and individual identities are mutually constitutive: interconnected to such an extent that changes in the former necessarily produce changes in the later, and, some would argue, vice versa.

In these labors that are purported to be labors of self-creation, the exercises provided are actually most effective not for the creation of newly invented selves but rather for the maintenance of existing notions of the self and its relation to the social and political worlds.