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

In describing the nature of work on the self, the literatures of self-improvement offer two distinct options: the path of endless effort and the path of absolute effortlessness.

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 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.

Work on the self—the quest for a path, the invention of a life, or the search for authenticity—is offered as an antidote to the anxiety-provoking uncertainties of a new economic and social order. It is this newly emerging self—the self perennially at work on itself and the self labored over by the self—that I call the belabored self.

The promise of the literature of self-improvement—that one can imagine one’s self anew and then invent the life one imagines, that one can act on “the before” to create “the after”—demands the sacrifice of the present moment.

The notion of pursuing an individual calling and the belief in a highly individualistic, self-determining model of human action have been central to the myth of the self-made man. This model of human action, which emphasizes the individual’s independence or “agency” over the impact of the social milieu, was a profoundly masculine model.

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.

While industrial capitalism had melted away much of the structures of social life (traditional loyalties, customary rights, and obligations), advanced capitalism has, in Bauman’s view, melted any relationship between individual actions and those of political collectivities.92 The language of New Age literature renders this liquefaction as not only

Whether this mastery is seen as creating one’s life as a work of art or of realizing all of one’s business opportunities or of winning at the game of life, this idea of self-mastery has its origins in a context of the alienation from and domination of others.