of the neoliberal self begins when the agent is brought face to face with the realization that she is not just an employee or student, but also simultaneously a product to be sold, a walking advertisement, a manager of her résumé, a biographer of her rationales, and an entrepreneur of her possibilities. She has to somehow manage to be simultaneously subject, object, and spectator. She is perforce not learning about who she really is, but rather, provisionally buying the person she must soon become. She is all at once the business, the raw material, the product, the clientele, and the customer of her own life. She is a jumble of assets to be invested, nurtured, managed, and developed; but equally an offsetting inventory of liabilities to be pruned, outsourced, shorted, hedged against, and minimized. She is both headline star and enraptured audience of her own performance. These are not effortless personas to be adopted, but roles to be fortified and regimented on a continuous basis. As Foucault insisted, the neoliberal self dissolves the distinction between producer and consumer. Furthermore, there is no preset hierarchy of resident personas, but only a shifting cast of characters, depending upon the exigencies of the moment. The summum bonum of modern agency is to present oneself as eminently flexible in any and all respects.35
This kind of everyday wisdom is so pervasive that one tends to notice it only in cases of extreme parody, such as that reported by Siva Vaidhyanathan:
In his manual for a better (or, at least, for his own) life, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, self-help guru and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Timothy Ferriss outlines his secrets to a productive and wealthy life. One of the book’s central tenets is to “outsource everything.” Ferriss suggests we hire a series of concierges to triage our correspondences, arrange travel and restaurant reservations, contact old friends, and handle routine support tasks in our lives. Ferriss contracts with concierge companies in India to handle much of his data flow. He suggests we hire local people to take our clothes to the cleaners, scrub our floors, and cook for us.
Ferriss has become a guru to the geek set, as I witnessed at the book-signing event for his hefty fitness manual, The 4-Hour Body, at the 2011 South by Southwest Interactive meeting in Austin, Texas. A line of more than one hundred remarkably unkempt, unfit young men waited to shake Ferriss’s hand and thank him for releasing them from the bonds of the full-time working grind. They can’t all be working four-hour weeks, I thought. My understanding of work life in the tech sector leads me to believe that retrieving the forty-hour week would be a major personal, if not indeed a political, victory. Ferriss greeted fanboys for more than an hour that day, leaving him a mere three more hours of actual work before the fun began. As if to emphasize his mastery over his life and the better times he had waiting for him upon his release from the event, Ferriss held hands with a striking young woman who looked as if she could not wait to be relieved of this duty to dazzle young men with whom she would rather not make eye contact. It was not clear if that young woman was part of Ferriss’s outsourced personal labor force. But she certainly did not seem thrilled to be part of his commercial branding effort.
Ferriss’s life is his brand, his data, his evidence, his project. In his books he shares—no, sells—every feature of his daily life, including details of ejaculations and defecations. Every aspect of Ferriss’s life is on the market, just as he engages with market transactions to advance many of his professional and personal aims.36
This was a quantum leap beyond the social psychology of an Erving Goffmann, merely the age-old challenge of the staged presentation of the self in everyday life. Living in the material world these days means that one must maintain a rather strained, distanced relationship to the self, since one must be prepared to shed the current pilot at a moment’s notice. Due to the shifting cast of characters with their complements of accessories, technologies, and emotional attachments, it is never altogether clear whom precisely is managing the menagerie. Outsourced components of the self still need to report to something more than a post office box on some distant offshore platform.37 Integration and coordination may sometimes need to take a backseat to innovation and appropriation. Self-care must be balanced against the dictum that bygones are bygones, or in more economic terms, sunk costs should never be entered into calculation of expected future revenues. The weight of history is more often than not considered a burden of little consequence for the entrepreneurial agent, something that can be repudiated and reversed. The stipulation of flexibility militates against treating any aspect of the self as indispensible; taken to extremes, this can resemble out-of-body experience or asomatoagnosia.
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