Flexible Self Under Hyper-Networked Conditions
Discussion
Allison Hearn:
"Cultural historian Warren Sussman asserts that procedures of self-production and self-presentation have always reflected the dominant economic and cultural interests of the time. Invariably ‘changes in culture do mean changes in modal types of character’ (Sussman, 1984: 285). In other words, our forms of self-production are deeply conditioned by our economic and social context; dominant modalities of ‘self’ are both summoned into being and illustrated in our cultural discourses and institutions. The ways we come to internalize or embody these versions of ‘selfhood’ are always contested and in flux, constituting examples of biopower in action (Foucault, 1990: 153).
Critics such as Philip Cushman and Anthony Giddens contend that the burgeoning consumer landscape post World War II brought us an ‘empty self’: a self who must perpetually consume in order to be effectively organized and identified, but who can never effectively be satiated. For Giddens, as for Cushman, perpetual attention to the construction of ‘self’ through the production of a coherent narrative of self is the only remaining continuity, or through-line, in our lives (Giddens, 1991; Cushman, 1990). Zygmunt Baumann (2001: 22) concurs: ‘(i)t is me, my living body or that living body which is me, which seems to be the sole constant ingredient of the admittedly unstable, always until further notice composition of the world around me’.
Eva Illouz, in her book Cold Intimacies, describes the ways in which Freudianism, as it was disseminated in both scientific discourses and popular culture in the early part of the twentieth century, resulted in new kinds of ‘identity symbols’ and new emotional styles of selfhood predicated on the outward struggle for personal authenticity and truth (2007). These styles of selfhood, in turn, jibed nicely with the intensification of consumer culture throughout the twentieth century. To follow these lines of inquiry we might ask: How are our personal narratives predicated on more general culturally constructed ideas about our interiority, and the values we attach to the expression of some version of interiority, being generated, conditioned and deployed within post-Fordist capitalism and neo-liberal modes of governmentality?
As David Harvey has famously argued, processes of ‘flexible accumulation’ mark the current post-Fordist mode of production. These processes include strategies of permanent innovation, mobility and change, subcontracting, and just-in-time, decentralized production (Harvey, 1990). They are also heavily dependent on communication networks and emphasize the production of knowledge and symbolic products, including packaging, branding and marketing, over concrete material production (see Goldman and Papson, 2006; Harvey, 1990). Under these conditions, the construction, deployment, and embodiment of perpetually changing images come to play a larger and larger role in capital accumulation (Harvey, 1990: 288). Neoliberalism, as the political ideology and mode of governmentality that accompanies these economic developments, posits that the role of the state is to advance and protect ‘strong property rights, free markets and free trade’ (Harvey, 2005: 2). Here, individual responsibility is stressed, while communitarian or state-run social or cultural initiatives are discouraged. And, most significantly, market exchange is seen as ‘an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human action, and substituting for all previously held ethical beliefs’ (Harvey, 2005: 3).
Work under the hyper-networked conditions of flexible accumulation and the market-driven ethos of neoliberalism has grown increasingly precarious and unstable. French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello describe them as marked by flexibility, casualization, segmentation, intensity, and increased competition (Boltanksi and Chiappello, 2005). Autonomous Marxist critics, such as Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Paolo Virno argue that the increased production of immaterial commodities, such as design, knowledge and communication, necessitates new forms of labour, which involve creativity, innovation, and the manipulation of personal emotion and affect. This ‘immaterial labour’, defined by Maurizio Lazzarato as ‘the labour that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity’ (Lazzarato, 1996: 133), demands that the worker put his or her own life experience, communicative competency, and sense of self into the job. In other words, with immaterial labour, ‘the very stuff of human subjectivity’ is put to work for capital (Neilsen and Rossiter, 2005: unpaginated). But this subjectivity is not freely expressed or unfettered; it is most often subject to rigorous participative management programs, which remain authoritarian. As Lazzarato writes ‘one has to express oneself, one has to speak, communicate, cooperate…(t)he tone is that of the people who are in executive command’ (Lazzarato, 1996: 135).
The paradigmatic worker under post-Fordist capitalism may likewise be considered a virtuoso. Paolo Virno defines virtuosity as ‘an activity which finds its own fulfillment (that is, its own purpose) within itself’ (Virno, 2004: 52), and requires the presence of others. Insofar as we are language speakers, we are all virtuosos, and our ability to create, communicate and manipulate affect is increasingly central to job performance: think of the call centre worker, the waitress, airline attendant or the Reality TV participant. Virno’s figure of the virtuoso signals the move of labour toward the never-ending immaterial production of affect, feeling, or emotional ‘experience’, and the transformation of the space of work into something resembling a highly socialized (yet privatized) public sphere.
A version of selfhood that arises from these conditions has been termed the ‘flexible personality’ (Holmes, 2002): perpetually active, willing to innovate and change personal affiliations on a dime. In order to hedge against our ‘stable instability’ (Virno, 1996: 17), we look to exploit every opportunity and grow increasingly cynical as we recognize that work is a game and that its rules do not require respect, but only adaptation. And, under the conditions of a perpetually transforming, unstable and increasingly image-based mode of production, we come to recognize that the ability to attract attention – to garner a reputation – might provide us with a modicum of personal and financial security.
If these conditions of work suggest a perpetually malleable, cynical and changeable style of selfhood, then the cultural industries are the places where the appropriate, profit-producing templates of the self are developed and propagated. Elsewhere I have argued that reality television programs are the paradigmatic example of how individuals’ affect, creativity, communicative capacity and the ability to forge social relationships become directly productive for capital (Hearn, 2006), at the same time as they provide the parameters within which a self can become culturally legible and potentially profitable for the culture at large. But, reality television is not the only place where this cynical outer-directed approach to self-production can be found; indeed as Emma Dowling, Elizabeth Wissinger, and Lynne Pettinger among others, have noted, most kinds of service work these days require it (Dowling, 2007; Wisinger 2007; Pettinger, 2004). In the post-Fordist era, then, we see a shift from a working self, to the self as work in the form of a self-brand with reputation as its currency."
Promotional culture and self-branding
Allison Hearn:
"As mentioned above, marketing and branding have become central activities of contemporary capitalism. No longer concerned with simply fixing a logo to a product, branding practices increasingly attempt to establish virtual contexts for consumption; experiences, spaces, relationships are all branded. In addition, branding activities are entirely dependent on the processes of meaning making and sociality of consumers as they not only buy but also live through the brand. So, branding practices produce sets of images and immaterial symbolic values in and through which individuals negotiate the world at the same time as they work to contain and direct the expressive, meaning-making capacities of social actors in definite self-advantaging ways, shaping markets and controlling competition. Here, consumers’ behavior, relationships, bodies, and selves become ‘both the object and the medium of brand activity’ (Moor, 2003: 42). Contemporary branding efforts exemplify Michel Foucault’s famous claim that:
[T]he body is…directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. This investment of the body is bound up...with its economic use. (Foucault, 1977: 25 emphasis added)
Andrew Wernick outlines a specific example of the body forced to be economically useful and to emit signs of its own utility in his book Promotional Culture. He argues that the intensification and generalization of the processes of promotion and marketing produces a ‘promotional culture’, and era of ‘spin’, where what matters most is not ‘meaning’ per se, or ‘truth’ or ‘reason’, but ‘winning’ attention, emotional allegiance, or market share. Goods, services, corporations, and, most centrally, people are all implicated in a promotional culture. Wernick describes it this way: ‘a subject that promotes itself, constructs itself for others in line with the competitive imaging needs of the market. Just like any other artificially imaged commodity, then, the resultant construct is a persona produced for public consumption’ (Wernick, 1991:192).
This process of self-production might also be described as ‘self-branding’. Elsewhere I have defined the ‘branded self’ as an entity that works and, at the same time, points to itself working, striving to embody the values of its working environment (Hearn, 2008). The self as commodity for sale on the labour market must also generate its own rhetorically persuasive packaging, its own promotional skin, within the confines of the dominant corporate imaginary. Self-branding may be considered a form of affective, immaterial labour that is purposefully undertaken by individuals in order to garner attention, reputation and potentially, profit.
The view that self-promotion is a form of profit-producing work is now very common. Indeed, we most likely engage in a form of it ourselves as we craft our profiles on social network sites, such as Facebook, or attempt to compose compelling 140 character messages on Twitter. Self-branding is a function of an image economy, where attention is monetized and notoriety, or fame, is capital. And these days, as Barbra Ehrenreich reminds us in her recent book Bright-Sided, a smiley face and a positive attitude are the hallmarks of a successfully ‘branded person’; to borrow from Mauricio Lazzarato, smiley positivity is ‘the tone of the people who are in executive command’ (Lazzarato, 1996: 134). It is against this backdrop, then, that we might begin to explore the rise of the online reputation economy."