Eugene McCarraher, “Me, Myself, and Inc.” Paying for personality: spiritual treks with tour guides, bottoming out with the best psychiatric support, live-blogging your mental-breakdowns (and I am of course an example of this). Prior to this excellent distillation of the problem of contemporary selfhood in a market-culture, McCarraher writes:
“The crisis of American moral economy becomes the problem of “culture and commitment,” in Warren Susman’s formulation, the desire to foster “participation and belonging” by discovering “a special collective relationship in which all Americans might share.” That collective relationship has been understood as “consumer culture” –a “Republic of Goods,” in Roland Marchand’s words– which accompanied [the] shift “from character to personality.” … Dispossessed from proprietary labor, unbound from Protestant hegemony, and increasingly reliant on expertise, the consumer self sheds the virtues associated with “character” –hard work, sobriety, self-denial– and follows a “new gospel of therapeutic release” which “subordinate[s] the old goal of transcendence to new ideals of self-fulfillment and immediate gratification.” But this surrogate gospel of “personality” imprisons the self in a carceral culture advertising, marketing, professional advice, and public relations.”
Unfortunately, paid-for qualities immediately lose value if others buy them (and if they’re for sale, they will be bought); thus begins the dull race held for every meme: I was first, I knew it before the world, I like it more than anyone else. In primacy or extremity, my self is substantiated; the qualities I bought, like goods, are valuable for scarcity.
