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Journal of Consumer Culture
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DOI: 10.1177/1469540508090086
2008 8: 197Journal of Consumer Culture
Alison Hearn
`Meat, Mask, Burden` : Probing the contours of the branded `self`
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197
ARTICLE
‘Meat, Mask, Burden’
Probing the contours of the branded ‘self’
ALISON HEARN
University of Western Ontario, Canada
Abstract
This article will argue that the ‘reflexive project of the self’ (Giddens) has become an
explicit form of labour under post-Fordist capital in the form of ‘self-branding’. Here,
work on the self is purposeful and outer-directed; self-production is heavily narrated,
marked by the visual codes of the mainstream culture industry, and subject to the
extraction of value. The article will explore inflections of self-branding across several
different mediated forms. Contemporary marketing literature identifies the
construction of a branded persona as a central strategy in the negotiation of
increasingly complex corporate environments. Recently the practice and logic of
personal branding has moved out of the boardroom and into the television studio.
Television shows such as The Apprentice and American Idol invent a narrative of
self-branding and simultaneously produce branded personae.Websites such as
2night.com extract value from partying young people; photographers take pictures at
nightclubs and link them to advertisements online, blurring the distinction between
product and consumer, private self and instrumental associative object. The logic and
practice of self-branding is inflected differently again on social network sites such as
facebook.com or myspace.com, which are inventories of various types of ‘selves’.
These forms of self-branding, found across several different kinds of media, illustrate
the erosion of any meaningful distinction between notions of the self and capitalist
processes of production and consumption.
Key words
branding ● labour ● promotional culture ● reality television ● social networks ●
subjectivity
Journal of Consumer Culture
Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications
(London, Los Angeles, New Delhi and Singapore)
Vol 8(2): 197–217 1469-5405 [DOI: 10.1177/1469540508090086]
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we arrived spectacular, tendering
our own bodies into dreamery,
as meat, as mask, as burden . . .
(Dionne Brand, Inventory, 2006)
INTRODUCTION
This article will seek to explore the rise of ‘self-branding’ in western
consumer society. It will argue that the reflexive project of the ‘self’, identified
by Anthony Giddens as a hallmark of modernity, can now be understood
as constituting a distinct form of labour. Self-branding involves the
self-conscious construction of a meta-narrative and meta-image of self
through the use of cultural meanings and images drawn from the narrative
and visual codes of the mainstream culture industries. The function of the
branded self is purely rhetorical; its goal is to produce cultural value and,
potentially, material profit. Different inflections of self-branding can be
traced across several mediated cultural forms that directly address the constitution
and celebration of the ‘self’ as such. The practice of self-branding is
clearly expressed and delineated in current management literature as a
necessary strategy for success in an increasingly complex corporate world.
Many reality television shows invent narratives of self-branding and, simultaneously,
produce branded personae. Websites such as 2night.com and
universityparty.ca improvise on the theme of self-branding by taking
photographs of young people at clubs and linking them to advertisements
online, blurring the distinction between private self and instrumental
associative object, while social network websites such as MySpace and
Facebook offer inventories of various selves.
The understanding of the self at work in this article takes seriously
Michel Foucault’s insight that ‘nothing in man – not even his body – is
sufficiently stable to serve as a basis for self-recognition or for understanding
other men’ (Foucault, 1990: 153). Here, the self is understood as something
made or produced and conditioned by dominant notions of the
‘body’ and ‘being’. Psychoanalytic concerns about unconscious identity
formation are, for the most part, left to the side here, as are any claims about
essential human nature. Indeed, this article assumes a dearth of orienting
templates from which to produce a stable identity, arguing instead that
current inflections of self-branding are the product of an economy and
culture in the West intent on constant innovation and flexibility. Work on
the production of a branded ‘self’ involves creating a detachable, saleable
image or narrative, which effectively circulates cultural meanings. This
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branded self either consciously positions itself, or is positioned by its
context and use, as a site for the extraction of value. If we see the self as
both a product and a reflexively constituted brand subject to transaction
and exchange, we see a notion of self deeply marked by the discourses and
practices of post-Fordist modes of capitalist production.
The idea of the self as a commodity, or form of property subject to
market exchange,is not new; it was envisioned by John Locke in The Second
Treatise on Civil Government (1986). More recently, Anthony Giddens offers
a view of self-commodification as marked by ‘the possession of desired
goods and the pursuit of artificially framed styles of life’ (Giddens, 1991:
196) and writes of ‘self-actualisation . . . packaged and distributed according
to market criteria’ (1991: 198). But what does it mean to suggest that
the self has become a brand?
The term ‘brand’ is most commonly understood to stand for a distinct
form of marketing practice intended to link products and services with
resonant cultural meanings through the use of narratives and images. In
recent years,the practices of branding have moved from attempting to discipline
consumer taste directly to working more indirectly to install definite
and highly circumscribed ‘sets of relations between products and services’
(Lury, 2004: 1) and the consumers who use them. Branding does this by
constructing a particular ambience, comprised of sensibilities and values,
which may then condition consumer behaviour. A brand no longer refers
to a simple commodity but to an entire ‘virtual context’ for consumption;
it ‘stands for a specific way of using the object, a propertied form of life to
be realized in consumption’ (Arvidson, 2005: 244). In a world marked by
increasing flexibility and flux, branding works to fix, albeit temporarily and
tentatively,cultural meanings around consumption,producing aestheticizied
modes of justification for life under capital (Goldman and Papson, 2006).
The material form of the brand as an image, logo, or trademark is the
first line of any marketing strategy.The brand or logo,dispersed via a variety
of media forms,comes to stand as the face of a corporation,good,or service
and functions as a central point of mediation between the brander and
consumer.While the object of the logo or trademark was initially intended
to guarantee quality, it has now become the sign of a definite type of social
identity, which summons consumers into relationship with it. The material
brand is the ultimate image-commodity: a fetish object par excellence,
pursued and paid for by consumers who wish to become a part of its fabricated
world of purloined cultural meanings. Branders, as the apotheosis of
Barthes’s bourgeois myth-makers, ‘are addicted to borrowed equity; from
babies to breasts, from heart-wrenching melodies to lame jokes, from leafy
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roads to grandiloquent clichés about the “road of life”’ (Goldman and
Papson, 2006: 329); they steal images, stories and language to constitute
brand identities. This leads to another inflection of the term ‘brand’ as a
specific cultural resource through which individuals and communities
define themselves. Brands, both as trademarked image-objects and as sets of
relations and contexts for life, become the ground and comprise the tools
for the creation of self and community ( Holt, 2002; Arvidson, 2005).
A third inflection of the ‘brand’ defines it as a value-generating form
of property in its own right. A brand is recognized as such by trade mark
licensing law and,since the 1980s,by corporate accounting practices,which
consider the brand as a distinct, albeit intangible, commercial asset. Brands
generate value for their corporate fathers in and through the practices
described above, essentially monetizing the symbolic meaning-making
activities of consumers.Agencies,such as Interbrand,are dedicated to determining
brand value (Lury, 2004: 120) and measure brand equity by the
extent to which consumers recognize, use, and live through the brand: ‘the
autonomous immaterial productivity of consumers is simply commodified
as it unfolds “naturally”’ (Arvidson, 2005: 249).
The practices of branding comprise a rigorously instrumental set of
commercial activities linked to the hegemony of post-Fordist corporate
capital. In his book, Promotional Culture, Andrew Wernick argues that all
manner of communication under the contemporary cultural condition of
promotionalism have as their function ‘some kind of self-advantaging
exchange’ (1991: 181). So, while current branding techniques may no
longer attempt to directly persuade consumers, their function remains
fundamentally persuasive; they work to colonize the lived experience of
consumers in the interests of capital accumulation. Indeed, the finely calibrated
practices of corporate branding express the self-advantaging values
of capital most pointedly, inscribing these values directly into branded
experience. As ‘managerial power becomes an immanent component of
the very environment in which consumers act’ (Arvidson, 2005: 248), we
are all, in some sense, ‘branded’ by the instrumental logics of corporate
capitalist culture.
Andrew Wernick’s work on promotional culture provides a useful
starting point for the exploration of self-branding. Promotionalism,
Wernick argues, is a dominant contemporary cultural condition. A
promotional message is a ‘complex of significations which at once represents
(moves in place of ), advocates (moves on behalf of ) and anticipates
(moves ahead of ) the circulating entity . . . to which it refers’ (Wernick,
1991: 182). Promotion entails a re-arrangement of the relation between
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sign and referent, the sign comes to displace the material object to which
it refers, and, in this way, acquires a kind of agency. For Wernick promotion
‘is a mode of communication, a species of rhetoric. It is defined not by what
it says but by what it does’ (Wernick, 1991: 184). A culture marked by the
ubiquity of promotional discourse is a truly postmodern one, signalled by
a lack of trust in language. Here what matters most is not ‘meaning’ per se,
or ‘truth’ or ‘reason’, (for these terms have been stripped of their referents
and indentured into rhetorical service) but ‘winning’ – attention, emotional
allegiance, and market share. Goods, corporations, and people are all
implicated in promotionalism; not only are they commodified, but they
must also generate their own rhetorically persuasive meanings. They must
become ‘commodity signs’, which ‘function in circulation both as . . .
object(s)-to-be-sold and as the bearer(s) of a promotional message’
(Wernick, 1991: 16).
The branded self is a commodity sign; it is an entity that works and,
at the same time, points to itself working, striving to embody the values of
its working environment. Here we see the self as a commodity for sale in
the labour market, which must generate its own rhetorically persuasive
packaging, its own promotional skin, within the confines of the dominant
corporate imaginary. As such the branded self must be understood as a
distinct kind of labour; involving an outer-directed process of highly
stylized self-construction, directly tied to the promotional mechanisms of
the post-Fordist market.Within promotional culture, the branded self may
be seen as the ‘significative supplement’ (Wernick, 1991: 190) of the
commodity-self, transforming what it doubles and extends, producing a
version of self that blurs distinctions between outside and inside, surface
and depth. This ‘persona produced for public consumption’ reflects a ‘self,
which continually produces itself for competitive circulation’ (Wernick,
1991: 192) and positions itself as a site for the extraction of value. The
branded self sits at the nexus of discourses of neoliberalism, flexible
accumulation, radical individualism, and spectacular promotionalism.
FLEXIBLE ACCUMULATION, FLEXIBLE SELVES
Self-promotion is not new. One could argue that it has been around as long
as there have been personal advertisements in newspapers, since ads for
mail-order brides in the 1800s (Coupland, 1996). Self-improvement books,
such as Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1981), have
also been popular for many decades. The cultural forces and discourses that
have given rise to the overt practices of self-branding, as expressed in
personal branding management literature,are relatively recent,however,and
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have their root in the rise of the networked organization and the entrepreneurial
workplace.
The phenomenon of self-branding has developed against the backdrop
of just-in-time post-Fordist industrial production processes and the rise of
what David Harvey and others have termed‘flexible accumulation’: a mode
of production based on strategies of permanent innovation, mobility and
change,subcontracting,and just-in-time,decentralized production (Harvey,
1990). Flexible accumulation is heavily dependent on communication
networks and on lateral flows of information and production, as opposed
to hierarchical ones. Corporations increasingly act through ‘the agency of
small, independent production units, employing skilled work teams . . . and
relying on relatively spontaneous forms of cooperation with other such
teams to meet rapidly changing market demands at low cost and high speed’
(Holmes, 2006: 5).
As a result of instantaneous communicative capacities, new technologies
and mediatization, the creation and deployment of ephemeral images
comes to play a larger role in capital accumulation: ‘investment in imagebuilding
. . .becomes as important as investment in new plants and machinery’
(Harvey, 1990: 288). Flexible accumulation, then, relies heavily on the
production and consumption of knowledge and symbolic products,emphasizing
packaging, image, design, and marketing over concrete material
production (Harvey, 1990; Goldman and Papson, 2006). Here, branding, as
an ‘institutionalized method of practically materializing the political
economy of signs’ (Goldman and Papson, 2006: 328), becomes ‘a core
activity of capitalism’ (Holt, 2006: 300). Branding simultaneously produces
sets of images and immaterial symbolic values in and through which individuals
negotiate the world and works to contain and direct the expressive,
meaning-making capacities of social actors in definite self-advantaging
ways, shaping markets and controlling competition. Within current
branding practices,consumer behaviour and lived experience become‘both
the object and the medium of brand activity’ (Moor, 2003: 42).
Luc Boltanski’s and Eve Chiapello’s research into the management
literature of the 1960s and 1990s support the claims of David Harvey and
others about the emergence of a new regime of capitalist accumulation,
although from a very different Weberian perspective. Boltanski and
Chiapello argue that, in response to the economic and legitimation crises
of the 1960s and early 1970s, capitalism has reconstituted its ‘spirit’ in the
form of a networked organization, marked by flexibility, subcontracting,
casualization, segmentation, speed-up, work intensity, and increased job
competition or precariousness. This new organization is accompanied by
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new value systems, and new regimes of justification. In the contemporary
networked organization, activity becomes the standard of value for personal
success:
What is relevant is to be always pursuing some sort of activity,
never to be without a project, without ideas, to be always
looking forward to, and preparing for, something . . . (Boltanski
and Chiapello, 2002: 9–10)
Perpetual activity on the part of workers is highly dependent on their flexibility
and adaptability to change.The motivation for this activity must come
from within and reflect personal innovation and autonomy.
Boltanski and Chiapello argue that the networked organization and its
attendant values of flexibility, communicative competency, and creativity
are the result of capital’s fun-house mirror recuperation of forms of cultural
criticism from the 1960s, which attack capital’s various modes of social and
individual alienation.As Brian Holmes writes,‘the networked organization
gives back to the employee . . . the property of himself or herself that the
traditional firm had sought to purchase as the commodity of labor power’
(Holmes, 2006: 6). Crucially, however, any attempt to overcome individual
alienation in the workplace still happens in the workplace, on the ground
of capitalist relations of domination (Virno, 1996: 27). While an individual
is expected to invest his soul in his work and to become ‘the manager
of his own self-gratifying activity’ this may only happen so ‘long as the
activity turns into profit producing activity’ (Holmes, 2006: 6). In true
neoliberal fashion, the responsibility for self-fulfilment and meaningful
community is downloaded onto the individual worker, as the world of
alienated labour is ostensibly overcome.
As a result, we have seen the rise of what Paul du Gay and others have
called an ‘enterprise culture’ in the workplace, which regards ‘certain enterprising
qualities – such as self-reliance, personal responsibility, boldness and
a willingness to take risks . . . as human virtues and promote(s) (them) as
such’ (du Gay, 1996: 60). Workers are expected to be ‘entrepreneurs of the
self’ (du Gay, 1996: 70), engaged in the ‘continuous business of living to
make adequate provision for the preservation, reproduction, and reconstruction
of (their) own human capital’(Gordon,1991: 44).The workplace,
now presumably full of non-alienated and self-directed workers, still
requires containment and control by management, however. Distinct
management strategies, such as team or family concepts and total quality
management circles, are specifically ‘concerned with the production and
regulation of particular work-based subjectivities’ (du Gay, 1996: 59). They
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aim to keep workers invested in corporate functioning by addressing each
worker’s subjective sense of self and identity,soliciting them to express their
uniqueness and tying that to corporate objectives.
There can be no doubt that the‘selves’that emerge from these management
processes are deeply conditioned and constrained by the management
processes that produced them (du Gay, 2000). Participative management
programmes remain authoritarian; ‘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).As David Harvey writes, the
soul of the worker must be culturally legible, arguably in the form of an
resonant image or brand, in order to be effective: ‘the acquisition of an
image . . . becomes a singularly important element in the presentation of
self in labour markets’ (Harvey, 1990: 288).
The centrality of branding to capitalist accumulation occurs at the same
time as the drive toward activity in any guise ‘overcomes the oppositions
between work and no work, steady and unsteady, paid and unpaid, profitsharing
and volunteer work’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2002: 9). Autonomist
Marxist critics have referred to these conditions as the ‘social factory,’
in which the human creative capacity or ‘species being’ is subsumed to the
logic of capital and modes of capitalist accumulation extend well beyond
the confines of the factory into all activities of human life (Lazzarato,1996;
Hardt and Negri, 2000).
We might characterize all individuals at this historical moment, then,
not as workers on the one hand,or as autonomous individuals on the other,
but as ‘creative, nature-transforming agents on whose cooperative activity
capital depends for the creation of surplus value’ (Dyer-Witheford, 2001:
164). Branding practices extract value from us, conditioned as we are ‘by
the logics of the world market, and . . . socialized to be “subjectively reconciled”
to the situation, accepting it as if it were voluntarily chosen’ (DyerWitheford,
2001: 166). Nick Dyer-Witheford has named us ‘global value
subjects’.
The extent to which we, as individuals and groups, are able to exert
meaningful control over the methods and means for the extraction of
surplus value varies greatly across class and social position. In the case of
self-branders, however, we see a highly self-conscious process of selfexploitation,
performed in the interests of material gain or cultural status.
The overt practices and discourses of self-branding evident in contemporary
management literature, for example, are evidence of the ways in which
‘(c)apital’s direct involvement in the production of subjectivity . . . scrambles
the division between production, as the production of things, and
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reproduction, as the reproduction of the relations of production’ (Read,
2003: 159). Under the conditions of the social factory, ‘subjectivity and
social relations (become) both produced and productive’ (Read, 2003: 159).
ME INC.
Against this backdrop of neoliberalism, flexible accumulation, and the rise
of a culture of promotionalism with the postmodern brand as life-defining
resource, the personal branding movement in management literature arose
in the late 1990s. Claiming to provide a ‘communicative response to
economic uncertainty’ (Lair et al., 2005: 309), gurus of personal branding,
such as Stedman Graham, Tom Peters and Peter Montoya, offer ways to
compete and gain power in the volatile work world of flexible capital. In
this literature, success is dependent, not upon specific skills or motivation,
but on the glossy packaging of the self and the unrelenting pursuit of attention.Here
an improved self is not just a pleasant outcome of fulfilling work
within a corporate setting, but is explicitly defined as a promotional vehicle
designed to sell: one that anticipates the desires of a target market. The
most important work is work on the self. As Tom Peters writes:
You’re not a ‘staffer’ at General Mills, you’re not a ‘worker’ at
General Electric or a ‘human resource’ at General Dynamics . . .
You don’t ‘belong to’ any company for life, and your chief
affiliation isn’t to any particular ‘function’ . . . Starting today you
are a brand. (Peters, 1997: 83)
Unlike personal ads, which are highly circumscribed and formulaic types
of self-promotion, the practices of personal branding are ongoing and
involve a whole way of life.As Montoya writes: ‘a personal brand (is) built
on the person’s true character, values, strengths and flaws’ (Montoya, 2002:
16). Workers are encouraged to distill their top ten qualities into a few
outstanding attributes, or ‘braggables’, that might help them achieve ‘top of
mind’ status in their target audience. As Chuck Pettis writes: ‘You are a
“product” with features and benefits, certain skills and special talents . . . In
creating your Personal Brand, Me. Inc . . . you want to use those skills and
talents that are highly valued by your “customer”’ (Pettis, 2006).
Those in quest of a personal brand are encouraged to expose their
braggables in every venue available to them by launching a full-on‘personal
visibility campaign’: ‘When you’re promoting brand YOU, everything you
do – and everything you choose not to do – communicates the value and
character of your brand’(Peters,1997: 83).Carefully crafted appearance and
maximum image exposure, such as writing in newsletters or appearing on
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TV, are crucial. Personal branders must also remain in control of their
message at all times, even in private. Ultimately your personal brand is not
only a pretty veneer; it is intended to be a rhetorically persuasive version
of yourself. Like all branding practices, you are hoping to colonize a piece
of real estate in the mind of your consumer, as YOU Inc.: ‘Personal
Branding is about taking control of the processes that affect how others
perceive you,and managing those processes strategically to help you achieve
your goals’ (Montoya, 2002: 7).
Gurus of self-branding are careful to dress up the practice in the
rhetoric of self-care. As Stedman Graham writes, ‘building a life brand is
not about achieving status, wealth or fame. It’s about taking responsibility
for your own happiness and fulfillment. It’s about creating a life of value
by putting your gifts to their highest use’ (Graham, 2001: 22). The practices
of personal branding can help in every area of life. Chuck Pettis
describes his client,Will, who applied the steps of personal branding to his
marriage by attempting to embody the desirables listed by his target
audience, his wife. He sees his personal brand as a ‘value added’ to his
relationship: ‘Now I pick up my clothes’, Will states,‘my wife is the most
important person in the world to me. Because she is the number-one
customer in my organization, I have to make sure she’s 100 percent satisfied
and happy with the product’ (Pettis, 2003). Gurus of personal branding
simultaneously claim that a personal brand‘is not you; it’s the public projection
of your personality and abilities’ (Lair et al., 2005: 325) and that it is
a way to improve yourself and serve others, a means for achieving a
‘transcendent self’ (Graham, 2001: 24).
As personal branding literature celebrates the freedom and radical individual
empowerment involved in creating the personal brand, its numerous
edicts and rules seriously delimit the field of possibilities within which any
imagined ‘authentic self’ might be performed, reducing the self to a set of
purely instrumental behaviours and circumscribing its meanings within
market discourse. These practices are the epitome of a process Norman
Fairclough has called ‘synthetic personalization’ (Fairclough, 1993).What is
actually being sold in this literature, then, is expertise in crafting a potent
image of autonomous subjectivity. As critics Daniel Lair, Kate Sullivan, and
George Cheney write,‘a professional work world where personal branding
predominates would . . . be one with few enduring bonds and little trust
but a great deal of political maneuvering, competition, and cynicism’ (Lair
et al. 2005: 335–36).
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SELF-BRANDING AS SPECTACLE
It is no coincidence that this description sounds just like an episode of
Survivor (CBS, 2000) or The Apprentice (NBC, 2004).As I have argued elsewhere,
reality television programs invent narratives about how to become
a notable self or celebrity, at the same time as they offer a means to achieve
a branded persona (Hearn, 2006). Here the discourses of entrepreneurial
self-branding and promotionalism are explicitly tied to the image-economy
of the culture industries. Reality shows entice individuals with the
‘dreamery’ of the television industry and ask them to share their unique
virtuosity with the cameras for very little, if any, financial remuneration.
Autonomist Marxist critic Paolo Virno defines individual virtuosity as
a capacity for improvised performance, linguistic and communicative innovation,
which inevitably requires the presence of others. He sees virtuosity
as a core component of immaterial labour, defined by Maurizio Lazzarato
as ‘the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the
commodity’ (Lazzarato, 1996: 133). Similarly, Lazzarato argues that the
central component of immaterial labour is subjectivity, marked by
communicative capacity, perpetual flexibility, innovation and the continual
self-(re)creation of subjects at work and through consumption. As the
culture industries are, initially, where ‘the virtuoso begins to punch a time
card’ (Virno, 2004: 56), under post-Fordism, the practices of the culture
industries have become ‘generalized and elevated to the rank of canon’
(2004: 58). Insofar as ‘productive labour, in its totality, appropriates the
special characteristics of the performing artist’ (Virno, 2004: 54–5),
Lazzarato and Virno both argue that ‘subjectivity ceases to be only an
instrument of social control . . . and becomes directly productive’
(Lazzarato, 1996: 142). The culture industries, then, work to provide
templates for effective performance, communicative, and image skills, all
requisite for the production of the entrepreneurial branded self.
Reality television shows, such as American Idol (FOX, 2002) and
America’s Next Top Model (UPN, 2003), have the story of self-branding as
the central theme of their narratives and include explicit instruction on
how to manage the demands of fame and effectively perform one’s own
celebrity brand. The body makeover shows are the literal enactment of
Goffman’s ‘face work’, involving the material construction of the body
according to the dictates of celebrity culture, illustrated in shows such as I
Want a Famous Face (MTV, 2004) and The Swan (FOX, 2004). Transformation
shows, such as Extreme Makeover Home Edition (ABC, 2004) or What
Not to Wear (TLC, 2003), offer instruction on how to achieve the appropriate
wardrobe or home to gain attention and success on the more general
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market in social status.As one pleased contestant on What NotToWear states:
‘I should always live as though there were television cameras outside my
house!’ To which the hosts reply,‘Not a bad idea!’ Here the eye of the television
industry, not the corporate boardroom, is the ultimate authorizing
force, the power behind the brand.
In this culture of promotionalism, or ‘phantasmagoric capital’, as economist
Ernest Sternberg has called it, notoriety serves as a ‘proxy indicator’
of personal ability, and the ‘capacity for calculated posing,’ or the construction
of a clear brand identity, is often more important than possessing any
specific skill set (Sternberg, 2001). It can be argued that reality television
provides a quick way for individuals to brand their own personae and get
fame, which can be exchanged for cash down the line. American courts
have recognized fame as a commodity since 1953 when the right to publicity
law was first introduced. The law recognizes the fact that a celebrity
image can ‘enhance the commercial value of commodities or services with
which they are associated’ (Madow, 1993: 128), and therefore treats the
public persona or brand as a saleable commodity in its own right,ultimately
alienable and descendible from the body that produced it. Perhaps the bestknown
example of a celebrity brand functioning directly as a profitproducing,
symbolic cultural resource on the open market is David Bowie’s
1997 offer of ‘Bowie Bonds’. Here Bowie trades on his reputation directly,
asking investors to bank on his brand equity, based on the past and future
royalties of his music (Kadlec, 2004).
While the right to publicity only applies to those considered ‘celebrities,’in
it we can trace the roots of self-branding as a cultural practice.Here,
celebrity functions not only as cultural resource in and through which individuals
construct their identities, but becomes a generalizable model of
profitable self-production for all individuals. Participants on reality television,then,function
both as image-entrepreneurs,as they work to produce
branded versions of themselves, and as unpaid labourers for the networks
who reap financial rewards as a result of lowered production costs. The
immaterial labour involved in the construction of a personal image-brand
is simultaneously enacted in reality television’s narratives and on their shop
floors.
The notable thing about the kinds of personal brands generated on
reality television is that they are not tied to any particular kind of work or
specific skill set.Instead,they are images of various types of everyday selves,
generated inside the structural limits set by reality television’s producers.
Just as in the personal branding literature, the personae developed on reality
television are often strategic choices made by the contestants, intended to
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persuade the camera, the producers, and the audience of the personal
brand’s viability. We might also see these character types as rendered from
individuals’ virtuosity; they are the result of communicative improvisation,
which takes place inside a tightly controlled corporate context. In addition,
and again, just as the personal branding literature dictates, the image-brands
produced are consistent with the demands of the culture industries; they
are‘synthetic,believable,passive,vivid,simplified,and ambiguous’(Boorstin,
1961: 185).
In the end, reality television’s branded personae are not freely chosen,
but are determined by agents of the industry during editing. Reality television
producers also work to control the branded personae produced on
their shows through the use of binding contracts; participants are often
asked to sign away the rights to their images and voices. A section of an
American Idol contract reads: ‘other parties . . . may reveal and/or relate
information about me of a personal, private, intimate, surprising, defamatory,
disparaging, embarrassing or unfavorable nature, that may be factual
and/or fictional’ (Olsen, 2002). These highly structured reality programs,
which narrate procedures of self-branding, and the concrete personal
brands produced on and through them simultaneously function as training
for life under neoliberalism.
BRANDED BODY, PROMOTIONAL SKIN
Websites such as 2night.com and universityparty.ca actively capitalize on
the improvisational communicative competencies of partying young
people, mining the theme of personal branding narrativized so inventively
by reality programming. These sites hire photographers and send them out
to clubs in various cities around the world. The photographers act as
paparazzi and take pictures of the partiers. The photographs are posted
online the next day where anyone can download them for free.
Working within the genre of celebrity paparazzi candid shots, the tag
line of 2night.com is ‘Where the world sees you’.As the partiers go to the
site to see themselves packaged in a celebrity format, the site capitalizes on
their attention, selling it to advertisers. On the website, the lines between
the clubs, the advertisers, and the individuals are blurred, as they are all
linked together in one promotional package. Much like the current trend
in corporate advertising that encourages ‘regular’ (read unpaid) people to
create their own ads, sites such as 2night.com extract value from the unique
virtuosity of partying men and women by packaging, branding them, and
selling them back to themselves. These sites work to blur the distinction
between product and consumer, private self and instrumental associative
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object, and, in this sense, are prime indicators of the extension of
promotional and branding practices into all realms of experience.
Individuals captured on these sites are a part of a practice called
‘ambient marketing’, which involves recruiting spaces, bodies, and experience
into rhetorical service. As marketer Adam Lury contends,‘everything
is unpaid media if you want to use it in that kind of way’ (Moor, 2003:
45). Ambient marketing ‘seeks to achieve a much more proximal relationship
between consumer bodies and brands’ (Moor, 2003: 45), attempting to
foreground the brand as the source of enriching life experiences. In this
way, the young people on these websites contribute, through the simple act
of socializing, to the bottom line of the experience economy (Pine and
Gilmore, 1999).
These websites also point to the extension of image capital into all areas
of life and to a very real investment in its visual aesthetics. The fascination
with the paparrazi format and the specific way of being seen that this
format signifies reinforces the argument that fame and attention are now
significant cultural values, which bring their own strict visual templates
with them. These websites trade on the recognition that ‘perception is
increasingly bound to production’ (Beller, 2006: 3), and, in so doing, work
to constitute the branded self as a transactional object, creating a strange
new form of currency out of this dominant regime of exclusion, which I
have elsewhere called ‘the will to image’ (Hearn, 2004).
VIRTUALLY ME INC.
The branded self is inflected differently again in the practices of social
network sites such as Myspace.com and Facebook.com. With MySpace
accounting for 10 percent of all advertisements viewed online (Hempel,
2005) and Facebook receiving approximately 250 million hits a day
(Bugeja, 2006), it currently appears as though social network sites are the
centre of both community and commerce in the virtual world. Both sites
allow people to create their own unique virtual space. Users spend time
crafting their public profiles, posting pictures and information about themselves
and connecting with others doing the same.As Max Valiquette, head
of the marketing firm Youthography,notes,‘everybody’s got something,and
that something needs virtual representation’ (Halpern, 2006).
In a questionnaire format focusing primarily on popular culture likes
and dislikes, the profile pages of these sites encourage users to reveal
intimate details of their consumer tastes. They also encourage the posting
of as many personal images as possible. Christine Rosen has called these
profiling practices ‘egocasting’ (Bugeja, 2006). Participation on these sites
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also involves the formation of groups around shared interests and connections.
Collecting or acquiring as many friends as possible seems to be a
central goal. As one of my students told me: ‘Facebook is addictive. It’s a
giant popularity contest to see how many friends you can accumulate.
I have 261.’
Of course, the profiles that individuals create on Facebook or Myspace
are clearly constrained by the structural features of the sites, most notably
by the questionnaire formats, which focus on consumer tastes and activities.So,while
a user becomes a‘digitized character actor’,(Alexander,2007)
carefully producing personal profiles and snapshots of their busy social lives,
he or she also becomes a promotional object comprised of ‘an inextricable
mixture of what its author/object has to offer, the signs by which this
might be recognized, and the symbolic appeal this is given in order to
enhance the advantages which can be obtained from its trade’ (Wernick,
1991: 193). Users become FacebookTMers. Arguably, these sites produce
inventories of branded selves; their logic encourages users to see themselves
and others as commodity-signs to be collected and consumed in the social
marketplace. How else to understand the accumulation of hundreds of
virtual ‘friends’ (usually people one barely knows) and the view that this
constitutes ‘popularity’ than as the channeling of age-old human desires
into the hollow, promotional terms of post-Fordist capitalist acquisition?
Beyond these theoretical claims, there is another, more concrete, inflection
of self-branding at work here.Facebook and MySpace are coveted sites
for web advertising, not only because they attract a youth demographic but
because they are very ‘sticky’. Users tend to visit often (Malik, 2005). Given
that ‘millions of consumers, and especially young ones, now find online
pals’ content – be it photos, messages, or random musings – more
compelling that that of “professionals”’ (Fine, 2006), corporate interests see
a way to embed their brands in the minds of hard to reach teens by talking
to them in ‘their online vernacular’ (Hempel, 2005).
MySpace is practically synonymous with self-promotion; everyone
from Paris Hilton to your next door neighbour has a MySpace site and is
working to draw attention to their ‘special something.’ Such is the power
of these sites to attract attention and profit that ‘para’ sites, such as Fakemyspace.com,
have arisen, which allow a user to buy good-looking friends
who will post on your wall twice a month for a set fee. Big Hollywood has
found a way onto MySpace as well. Characters from Hollywood films are
regularly assigned MySpace sites and interact with other users as though
they were real people. The character Johnny Knoxville played in the film
The Ringer garnered 11,000 friends in the time the space was up, even
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though there was never any guarantee that Johnny Knoxville himself was
manning the site (Halpern, 2006). Kevin Smith promoted his film Clerks 2
by asking MySpace users to add him to their list of top eight friends. The
first 10,000 users to do so were guaranteed a free DVD of the film and
their name in the credits.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s creator, has allowed corporations to troll
the site for organically generated groups who might serve as unpaid
marketers for their particular brands. Apple Computers, Victoria’s Secret
and Electronic Arts all sponsor groups on Facebook, using the site to
promote products and cultivate potential viral marketers or ‘influencers’
(Hempel, 2005). Indeed, there are now sponsored Facebook groups for
everything from local radio stations to Burger King: ‘ (m)arketers pay for
the ability to advertise their groups in “news feeds” alongside user updates
on what’s going on with their friends’ (McArthur, 2007). Recognizing its
ability to generate vast amounts of social capital, Facebook has extended
its own brand by inviting users to submit new platforms and add-ons to
the site (Sun, 2007). Just as with 2night.com and universityparty.ca, participants
work to augment the market value of the brand through their social
interactions.
The melding of egocasting with viral promotional tactics and ambient
marketing produces another variation of the branded self. On sites such as
these the lines between private identity and public persona, corporate
sponsor and individual producer, user and consumer are hopelessly blurred.
In a universe where a fictional Hollywood character can be your ‘friend’
and the offer of a free burger is considered as significant as a relative’s
wedding, any meaningful distinction between notions of the self and
capitalist processes of production and consumption has finally collapsed.
Recently,the assiduously crafted gloss of privacy on these sites has been
shattered, as university administrators have logged in and busted students
for everything from drinking to cheating. Facebook, in particular, has
engendered its own moral panic, as pupils in Toronto were recently disciplined
for writing derogatory comments about teachers on their profile
pages (El Akkad and McArthur, 2007). In this era of hyper vigilance,
employers have begun using social networks sites as a quick and easy way
to judge job candidates and run background checks.While employers can’t
ask personal or political questions in formal interviews,‘if it’s on the web,
they’re entitled to make decisions based on it’ (Medintz, 2006). So, while
individuals on Myspace and Facebook are busy acquiring friends and
joining groups, exposing their every taste for marketers to exploit, potential
employers are busy watching and assessing them. In the end, and not
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surprisingly, it all comes back to the smooth functioning of capitalist
accumulation and to the effective reproduction of its labour power, no
matter how socially dispersed or immaterial it might be.
CONCLUSION
The phenomenon of self-branding can be understood as labour in its
simplest sense as ‘the process by which people transform nature into objects
of their imagination’ (Burawoy, 1979: 15). Indeed, the production of self
must always involve some form of labour in order to create a public persona
that might be of practical or relational use. Warren Sussman asserts that
procedures of self-production 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). We
might argue that modalities of selfhood have shifted from a preoccupation
with ‘character’ in the19th century to ‘personality’ in the 20th. Now, in this
era of flexible accumulation, we have seen the rise of what Brian Holmes
has called ‘the flexible personality’: perpetually active, willing to innovate
and to change personal affiliations on a dime.
As Paolo Virno has written, in the precarious dog-eat-dog world of
the flexible entrepreneurial workplace, we no longer trust in any overarching
system of values. 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. Along with this comes ‘disenchantment’,
as we realize that there are no longer any identity systems worth
believing in and ‘no secure processes of collective interpretation’ (Holmes,
2006: 10) in which to invest.
The branded self is one of the more cynical products of the era of the
flexible personality: a form of self-presentation singularly focused on
attracting attention and acquiring cultural and monetary value.The flexible,
visible, culturally meaningful branded self trades on the very stuff of lived
experience in the service of promotion and possible profit. Even when it
might be argued that Facebookers and partiers on 2night.com are not
consciously self-branding, they remain (as we all do) global value subjects.
They are product, producer, and consumer, but they do not control the
means of their own distribution. They remain captive to and conditioned
by the controlling interests of global flexible capital.
While there is considerable variability in terms of how directly the
forms of self-branding explored here are tied to the money economy, and
it is true that, potentially, explicit profit might be deferred indefinitely, the
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practices of self-branding are clear evidence of the increasing cultural value,
and potentially surplus value, that is now extracted from the production of
affect, desire, attention, and image. Self-branding is directly tied to the
emerging attention economy, where, as Jonathan Beller writes,‘not only do
the denizens of capital labor to maintain ourselves as image, we labor in
the image’ (Beller, 2006: 1). As such, the phenomenon of self-branding
provides us with an important opportunity to explore the relationships that
currently exist between the dominant mode of production and its modes
of subjection (Read, 2003).
This article has traced variations on the theme of the branded self
across several mediated forms. It has considered the self as a strategic lifebrand
intended to rhetorically persuade employers of its competitive
viability, as a carefully crafted image-invention designed to garner fame and
profit, as an instrumental associative object exploited to sell ads even as it
is in the thrall of its own image, and as a self branded through lists and
inventories, which is sold and surveyed even as it attempts to form
community and friendship. As an explicitly narrativized, image-based, and
cynical form of labour, the variations of the branded self described here
confirm that the construction of the self is‘not some side show to the main
event of global economic restructuring; rather it is an essential element in
the very process of restructuring itself’ (du Gay, 1996: 69).
It is no accident that the discourses of branding borrow heavily from
the language of radical individualism: the ‘face’ or ‘identity’ of a brand
works to establish a ‘relationship’ with the consumer. Corporations ask to
be treated as though they are‘citizens’under the law and in the public mind.
As we have seen, the degree to which a brand is able to embody human
attributes is dependent on the degree to which it is able to insinuate itself
into the lives of consumers in profound ways. Self-branding illustrates how
flexible corporate capital has subsumed all areas of human life, including
the very concept of a private self, so conveniently celebrated as sacrosanct
by the ideologies of neoliberalism. Simply put, as the corporate brand
becomes a commodity fetish, the self becomes reified – a brand in and for
itself, a promotional object – proof positive of the inherent centrality of
subjectivity to the current mode of production.
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Alison Hearn teaches media theory and cultural studies in the Faculty of Information and
Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. She is co-author of Outside the
Lines: Issues in Interdisciplinary Research (with Liora Salter; McGill–Queen’s University Press,
1997) and has published in such journals as Topia, The International Journal of Media and
Cultural Politics, and Bad Subjects. She is currently completing a book entitled Real
Incorporated: Reality Television, Promotional Culture and the Will to Image. Address: Faculty of
Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada N6A
5B7. [email: ahearn2@uwo.ca]
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