Need help telling your life story? A critical study of capitalist ideology and narrative in self-help literature

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University of Amsterdam

Need help telling your life story?

A Critical Study of Capitalist Ideology and Narrative in Self-help Literature

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Introduction

You are the author of your own life; make your life story an inspiration!

This is one of those self-empowering quotes that one finds written on drift-wood boards on sale in hip lifestyle stores. The concept of ‘story’ is being used as a metaphor for life, implying that you can shape your own life if you take on the role of the author. Perhaps there is a truth in this message: your life is a story. Many theorists propose that we can only express our personality and describe our life events in the form of a story. We construct ourselves autobiographically, as it were. In particular, psychologists and narrative theorists concerned with identity suggest that we use narrative structures as designs to form our lives:

Life stories express our sense of self: who we are and how we got that way. (Linde 3) Narrative imitates life, life imitates narrative. ‘Life’ in this sense is the same kind of construction of the human imagination as ‘a narrative’ is. (Brunner 692)

Storyworlds can be viewed as mental models enabling interpreters to frame inferences about the situations, characters, and occurrences either explicitly mentioned in or implied by a narrative text or discourse: reciprocally, narratives provide blueprints for the creation and modification of such mentally configured storyworlds. (Herman 314) Narratives provide the blueprints through which we shape our lives, our identities. Life narratives are those stories that make you… you.

In this thesis on the other hand, I would like to context the notion that we are really authors in charge of shaping our own life stories. The way we shape our stories is influenced by culture. Our surroundings provide those narrative-blueprints; they reflect stories of ‘possible lives’ that are part of one’s culture (Bruner 694). In this thesis I will argue that these blueprints, these ‘possible lives’, are driven by certain power-mechanisms and ideologies derived from capitalism. The narrative structures which shape our identity emerge within the circulation of wealth, value and culture. Additionally, I will argue that within our present-day culture, these blueprints are not as clear as they might once have been, which makes it more difficult to shape a life story and therefore an identity. This is to say that our individualized identity-talk is not of much use for making sense of personal life today. Our world is accelerated, and meaning seems to be ever-shifting, disturbing images of the self. Yet it is precisely in this speeding, changing era that the stories about ‘finding the self’ have become amazingly popular.

In contemporary culture, this kind of individualized identity-talk is central to our experience and there is an emphasis on stories of ‘how I discovered the person I really am’

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(Sennett, 175). Such stories disguise a fixation on the ego as part of a developmental ‘journey’ - middlebrow self-help literature like Eat, Pray, Love argues that we can indeed find our ‘true’ selves in this world where everything is possible and in this case in threefold. Individuals are susceptible to these authoritative voices which tell them how to shape their life stories, now more than ever. Given that many feel they are in need of guidance and that the burden of autonomy fell directly on their shoulders. The self-help market exploits these needs by teaching individual, paradoxically, how to become the authors of their lives and how to create their own personal stories. This brings me to the question I will examine in this thesis, namely how does self-help literature shape contemporary subjectivity and life narratives?

To answer my question I elaborate on Murat Aydemir’s notion of Character aesthetics, to explain how identity is formulated through aesthetic mediation structured by narrative1_.

The first chapter examines the cultural constructedness of identity and how abstract narrative structures are motivated by particular power-mechanisms and ideologies. A combination of Judith Butler’s notion of a performed identity and Foucault’s notion of biopower shows how subjects can only make themselves and others intelligible through ideology and narrative. For contemporary relevance I will employ Zygmunt Bauman’s metaphorical concept of liquidity, exposing how present-day capitalism can be seen as a driving force in the construction of contemporary subjectivity. Immaterial flows motivated by economic processes give rise to a fluid subjectivity which is ever-changeable and elastic. Without a sense of definition, the subject becomes susceptible to self-empowering narratives which delude the subject with images of completeness by holding out an identity to cling to. This is why self-help is such an interesting object for research. By prescribing possible lifestyles, self-help normalizes a type of subjectivity synchronous with the abstract structures of capitalism.

The second and third chapters investigate subjectivity as it is performed in self-help books. Each of these chapters carries out an analysis of a self-help book in combination with a novel to examine how self-help rhetoric promotes certain narrative structures through which subjectivity is shaped. The second chapter compares the self-help book Becoming A life Change Artist (2010) by Fred Mandell and Kathleen Jordan to the self-help novel The change Artist (2009) by Carla Rieger, and the third chapter compares the self-help book Refuse to Choose (2006) by Barbarah Sher to the novel Indecision (2005) by Benjamin Kunkel. The fictional narratives serve as examples of how self-help rhetoric can shape subjectivity through specific narrative structures. This is why narrative theory is used as a method of analysis.

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Finally, in the conclusion I will investigate whether self-help gives rise to the kinds of well-defined identities that subjects of this ever-shifting era are longing for.

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Chapter I - Narrative and Ideology

The language we use, the rituals we perform and our habits and customs influence the way we shape our lives. As I noted in the introduction drawing on Brunner, the way we construct our life narratives is contingent on our cultural surroundings. In his text “Life as Narrative” (2004) Brunner states that a culture can be characterized by the narrative models made available for describing the course of a life. A culture contains “combinable formal constituents from which its members can construct their own life narratives: canonical stances and circumstances, as it were” (Bruner, 694). He takes this theory a step further by positing the notion that these culturally shaped processes that guide the self-telling of our life narratives have the power to “structure perceptual experience, to organize memory, to segment and purpose-build the very ‘events’ of a life” (694). As he goes on to explain, “in the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives” (694). But how do these culturally shaped processes form our life narratives and, by extension, our identities?

In this chapter I will assemble a conceptual framework for analyzing subject aesthetics. Building on Aydemir’s concept of character aesthetics, this chapter examines the way in which individuals tell their life stories and which powers guide the self-telling of these stories. How does a certain subjectivity become normalized through the working of certain power mechanisms? And what kind of power motivates our contemporary subject aesthetics.

Power and Identity

In her text “Giving an Account of Oneself” (2001) Judith Butler writes about the conditions for recognition. We can only make ourselves known, or know the other via the structures of a narrative. Butler argues that the other is recognized through a set of norms which she calls a normative horizon. This includes an established regime of truth that governs recognizability through which we and others are made intelligible (Butler 22). She continues by arguing that if you are to recognize someone, you submit to these established norms, the norms of recognition. You are both subjected to its norms and the agency of its use (22).

The Althusserian concept of ‘hailing’ can be deployed to clarify this theory, the classic example being a policeman who shouts “Hey you there!” to a person who responds and then recognizes himself as the subject of the hail (Butler 1997: 95). So when one gives and receives recognition through the established norms, one recognizes oneself as a subject of

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particular norms, at the same time reconfirming them. “The recognition you offer is potentially given to yourself. So you are receiving as well as giving in the same moment, in the act of giving” (Butler 2001: 22). It is a process of circulation, as one recognizes someone and therewith recognizes the norm, with which one recognizes someone and so on. Importantly however, feelings of alienation are also invoked along with this process of recognition. One is recognized through a set of norms that are not one’s own and entirely internal to one’s personality. Butler, moreover, also suggests that all our life narratives begin in media res, that is, as she explains,

when many things have already taken place to make me and my story possible. And it means that my story always arrives late. I am always recuperating, reconstructing, even as I produce myself differently in the very act of telling. (27)

If we have to base our identity in codes that are already given, our personality does not seem to be our own. This is where a paradox occurs: one recognizes one’s own singularity through norms that are impersonal and indifferent. One is presenting one’s ‘self’ with elements that have nothing to do with one’s self, elements that are pre-given and may be applied to anybody within the same normative horizon.

Butler also writes that the ‘I’ is ecstatic, it repeatedly finds itself outside itself. “I am always other to myself and there is no final moment in which my return to myself takes place” (23). In this sense, you are compelled and comported outside yourself: “I find that the only way to know myself is precisely through a mediation that takes place outside of me, (…) in a convention or norm that I did not make, of which I am not the author or agent of its making”(23). So subjectivity can only be made intelligible through the normative structures of a narrative. These narratives, however, are not created by the subject and therefore an identity can never be internal.

The quote at the introduction to the thesis – ‘you are the author of your own life’ – implies that subjects have the agency to shape their life stories and therewith their identities. However, Butler proposes that subjects are not the authors of their own making. But if individuals are not the author of their own life stories, then who is? In answer one might suggest that the normative horizon is driven by certain power-mechanisms that frame our encounters and determine what we will and will not construe as recognizability.

According to Foucault, these processes of power are motivated by the state and its institutions. In The History of Sexuality (1976), Foucault explains his concept of ‘biopower’, which describes the phenomenon of state power implicitly creeping in, to saturate the public and private sphere with various forms discipline. As Foucault argues, modernity gave rise to a

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new power which is not exercised by deciding over life and death, but which rather disciplines the social body by ensuring, maintaining and developing its life (Foucault 136). State power is able to subjugate bodies precisely by insinuating itself in life through and through. Rather than juridical power which is deductive and carried out in retrospect, disciplining power presents itself not as a coercion, but as a positive influence on life “that endeavours to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” (137).

Subjects are disciplined into a normative rhythm, and day after day they have to adjust to that norm. In this processes, coercion is indeed the object of discipline but it is present on an implicit level. Rather, this disciplining power works precisely by giving individuals the illusion of autonomy, the illusion that they are the ones to have decided on their routine, while in fact they are unconsciously motivated by disciplining norms. Hence, by believing that they shape their own plotline, subjects are implicitly forced into pre-given categories. Moreover, like Butler, Foucault argues that the individual can only have access to his or her own intelligibility by fitting into the classification norm (44). Additionally, Foucault argues that these classifications are rigid and one cannot escape ideological frames without being disregarded as a subject. In other words, there is no escape from ‘the order of things’. By combining Foucault with Butler then, I want to conclude that disciplining powers are the driving forces that guide the aesthetic structures on which we base our character. It is only through these aesthetic structures that we can make ourselves and others intelligible, so that they may be viewed as narrative plotlines from which we create our life stories.

Where Foucault states, however, that there is no escape from these rigid plotlines and that we must keep repeating our routine in order to be recognized as worthy subjects, Butler argues that there is hope in reiteration. It is exactly in this normative routine that there is room for change. Subjects have to performatively re-enact the same acts everyday to keep the norm alive. But precisely because of this repetition, subjects are afforded a modicum of latitude from which to change or challenge established norms (Butler 1997: 104). According to Bulter, nobody can meet ideology, nobody can ever correspond to the pre-given structures, therefore the norm is going to shift little by little. Every time you try to give an account of yourself, you will find an I outside yourself and you can never return to the I you were before. Following Butler then, our rigid slots or compartments may not be so rigid after all, and it is the potential for movement within repetition that may afford the agency to change our normative plotlines. But does this mean that there is a way to be the author of your life after all?

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Capitalism: The Driving Force

Butler and Foucault might not agree about whether identity is flexible within repetition, or rigid within slots; they both argue, however, that normative subjectivity is formed by the disciplining powers of the state. I will not counter this but I would like to argue that there are more powers in play that influence subjectivity. In his text about biopower, Foucault briefly makes a connection between power and the development of capitalism: subjectivity is formed in such as way as to be fit for economical processes (Foucault 141). He does not, however, explore this connection further, hence my goal here will be to include the notion that capitalism is a motivator for subject aesthetics, as a means of amplifying Foucault and Butler’s notion of power in relation to subject formation. For contemporary relevance I will introduce additional theorists who study the current advanced form of financialized neoliberal capitalism enhanced by increased globalization and increasingly sophisticated technology, and herewith, elaborate a clearer connection between capitalism and the formation of grand cultural narratives.

In “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”, the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai argues that there is a network of forces in play that shape the structures by which we build our life narratives; the forces create an image that mirrors an “imagined world” (Appadurai 1990: 5). Due to new technology and the dematerialization involved in information economics, our present world facilitates interactions of a new intensity. Global flows of ideas, people and money, move around to create ideologies and narratives (1-6). Wherever these flows intersect they reach a culmination point where an imagined world is created: a constructed landscape of collective aspirations wherein new “ideas of peoplehood and selfhood” emerge (5-10). These ideological worlds are not solely driven by political forces but also by patterns and codes embedded in the power mechanisms and circulation of capital. To make a connection with Foucault and Butler, these ideological worlds, these points of intersection which shape ideas of selfhood, can be seen as the building blocks for the construction of life narratives. They create a normative horizon, though a very fluid and changeable one.

Whereas in this text Appadurai states that subjectivity and social imagination are constructed by a network of political, capital and ideological powers, sociologists Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma focus on economical processes when studying subject formation. Their theories show that our narrative structures are created by transactions of money and processes of the economy. Global capitalism may be regarded as the driving force for motivating flows of ideas and meaning. For example, in their article “Cultures of Circulation:

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The Imaginations of Modernity”(2002) Lee and LiPuma write about the connection between culture and accelerated economical processes. In essence, they argue that the economic dynamics of circulation create meaning, hence circulation not only transmits meaning, it is also a constitutive act in itself (192).

Amplifying this theory, the anthropologist David Harvey, who wrote about the postmodern condition, also explicated a connection between culture and capital. He states that “money and commodities are primary bearers of cultural codes” (Harvey 1990: 299). Money and commodities are therefore bound up with the circulation of capital and “it follows that cultural forms are firmly rooted in the daily circulation process of capital” (299). But how do these cultural codes enter this dynamic of circulation?

Lee and LiPuma expand Butler’s concept of performativity to help develop a cultural account of economic processes. They seek to overcome the dichotomy of economy and culture that is characteristic of modern thought by suggesting that the two worlds are in fact one because they influence each other. It is within circulation, and based on the very ‘performative’ act of exchange and circulation, that economy and culture create and animate meaning.

Lee and LiPuma extend this speech-act based notion to other discursive mediated practices including ritual and economic practices (Lee and LiPuma 193). As performatives create the very speech act they refer to, “produced by their self-reflexive objectification, performative acts can thus be seen to be a presupposition of the very cultures of circulation of which they are constitutive part” (193). In other words, within circulation of the performative output of culture and economic practices, a social imagination is constructed. This very movement itself creates meaning: “circulation of capital and culture do not only move people, ideas and commodities, but it is the “abstract nature of the forms that underwrite and drive the process of circulation itself” (192). It is in the act of a self-reflexive structure of circulation, flowing around the reciprocal social action of buying and selling where meaning is created; it is this mobility of the circulation itself that becomes part of the modern-day discourse from which we create our identities.

What does this imply for the way we understand our subjectivity? Lee and Lipuma state that by creating a market, a particular subjectivity is presupposed and pre-shaped as a potential buyer:

[i]nstitutional forms such as markets and administrative bureaucracies instigate and feed off a dialectic between a continuing project of objectification and the production

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of forms of subjectivity necessary to produce culturally/historically specific types of collective identity. (194)

On the basis of this pre-created collective identity, institutional forms such as markets can feed and flourish. The circulation and exchange of capital shapes “new forms of subjectivity and identity that are grounded in the everyday, in the habitus (194). So together with flows of capital, ideas about subjectivity and identity circulate to provide a framework for subjects to hold on to and through which to shape their identity. As a function of the movement of the abstract structure of the circulation itself, subjectivities are created to keep the economical flow moving. In this sense, capitalist processes promote certain ideologies of mobility from which we create our life narratives.

Immaterial Flows

Now let us zoom in to explore how exactly these abstract structures of circulation are constituted. To examine this I will now scrutinize which economical processes influence our culture and therewith our account of ourselves, and what shape they take. Subsequently I will explain what this means for the way we shape our life narratives

In this section I will argue that the circulating and ‘flowing’ nature of economical processes was set in motion by a development toward dematerialization. The dematerialization of various material aspects of our life worlds, has speed up the circulation of goods and allowed these goods, people and so on, to move more feely. As a result, the entire conception of work shifted from the Post-Fordist period in the late 20th_{century onwards.}

Workflows left the insides of dusky ponderous factories and became intermingled in the vivid cultural field of daily life. Sociologist Maurizio Lazaratto studies this late capitalist phenomenon and states that ‘immaterial labour’ can be defined as “the labour which produces the informational and cultural content of commodities” (Lazaratto)2_{. This includes the notion}

that labour no longer has production as a solid core to which to refer. Rather, the focus has shifted onto the communication processes surrounding production.

This is where labour has increasingly come to involve skills that can be defined as ‘intellectual’, because highly developed communication procedures require a certain type of knowledge and attitude on the part of the worker-subject. “In today's large restructured company, a worker's job increasingly involves, at various levels, an ability to choose among

2 Lazzarato, Maurizio. "Immaterial Labor." Generation-Online. Lazzarato. Web. 15 June 2015. English translation without year or page numbers.

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different alternatives and thus a degree of responsibility regarding decision making” (Lazaratto). Consequently, an investment of subjectivity itself is required. Indeed, the worker’s personality becomes increasingly important in the ‘workspace’ in order to manage the flows of work and communication – modern management techniques increasingly endeavour to incorporate the worker’s ‘soul’ as part of the job.

A subjectivity that is especially convenient for this kind of immaterial work, is a flexible one and Lazaratto writes that the entire productive process exists in the form of networks and flows. I want to extend this thought and argue that subjectivity has to move along this current because wherever required by the capitalist, production comes into operation and small specific ad hoc projects pop from the ground like weeds. The worker-subject has to invest his personality only for the duration of one particular project, and once the job has been done, the subject “dissolves back into the networks and flows that make possible the reproduction and enrichment of its productive capacities”(Lazaratto). Unfortunately, this mode of flexibility makes the subject sensitive to exploitation and many jobs have now become extremely precarious. This current managerial and economic style has also resulted in the increasing “playbourization”3_{of work making it difficult to distinguish}

leisure time from work time. “In a sense, life becomes inseparable from work”(Lazaratto) so that labour loses its material core and becomes increasingly fluid, and likewise, subjects become increasingly fluid in order to deal with the flows of dematerialized capital.

Logic of the Derivative

An underlying development which helped advance these dematerialized flows of capital was the unpegging of paper money from gold: the demise of the gold standard. In 1971 the American dollar was rendered relative to other currencies as opposed to being supposedly stabilized because its value was based in gold. Hence whereas the dollar had previously been a gold-backed medium of trade it now began to float in relation to other currencies (Harvey 289). From that point forward, the value of money could only be measured in exchange and is therefore dependent on other countries with different currencies. Therefore the monetary system shifted to a global system of floating exchange rates and the unpegging of money from its former ostensibly “solid” core of gold gave rise to multiple competing capitalisms “represented by the floating national currencies against one another” (Lee and LiPuma 209), whereby constant changes in value make the currencies volatile. Faith is, in fact, the most

3 A concept denoting the progressive deconstructed of boundaries between work and play, explained in “Playbour, Farming and Labour”(2011) by Joyce Goggin.

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important factor in maintaining the value of a given currency, and this makes the system extremely precarious.

It is because currencies float that derivative trading came to rule different kinds of risky money transaction. Within the traffic and trade of commodities with foreign countries, the risk of these constant shifts of value has to be hedged. This is to say that, were a furniture business in the US to buy 200 tables from China and close the deal in advance to give the table producer time to finish his batch, the dollar could have become a lot cheaper in comparison to the Chinese Yuan in the meantime, therefore making the tables more expensive. Risky business like this is handled with derivatives: a risk assessment takes place in advance to take into account all the variables that could possibly effect the value of the product, and on the basis of this assessment, a price is negotiated. Such risky deals in finance are based on ‘derivatives’ because the outcome, or say, profit is dependent on changeable variables (Martin 85-87).

Not only currency has to be taken into account as a variable, however. There are endless variables and combinations of risk that investors and traders must bear in mind For instance weather and climate are central issues in the purchase of crops, or just as ethical approval impacts on the decision to buy a particular kind of medicine. Probability can be stretched out endlessly in combination with all possible risk variables and the financial derivative combines endless variables to move money, and to make money from money. This is to say that the sum of variables and probabilities transcends the value of all the parts that make up the derivative taken together. Immaterial flows of capital are thus constantly increased while at the same time creating ever-expanding pools of finance without a core or intrinsic value to refer to, hence value is now solely based on a combination of speculations (Lee and Lipuma 209). In this way, opacity and uncertainty are increased while volatility is enhanced by amplified risk.

Based on Lee and LiPuma’s theory that the ontology of economical processes performatively creates a corresponding image of the world, one might argue that the flowing, expanding properties of the derivative influenced our subjectivity. The shape that this financial tool takes, influences our culture and gave rise to a certain ‘social logic’. According to sociologist Randy Martin, derivatives are not essentially economic because they “feature in all manner of social relations, sites and forms” (Martin 85), and this logic is present in many fields, hence economy and culture circulate together and the flow of economical processes influences our normative horizon. The combination of variables and ever-expanding flows of finance without an intrinsic core to rely on, gave rise to a mode of intertranslatability (Lee and

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Lipuma 209).

In a parallel way, the expanding number of platforms on which narrative is now adapted (i.e. film, TV, comic books, painting, computer games and so on) suggests that narratives are endlessly combined intertextually, and stretched out from medium to medium, reused, reshaped, and restructured to the ongoing flows of capitalism in order to keep up with the rising current. A narrative ‘work’ is the sum of its versions and creativity extends beyond a single originator, transcending its single source of medium (Bryant 47). To put it simply, narratives are exploited in order to create increased profits. Books are turned into movies, and movies into computer games, while life-narratives seem to expand as contemporary subjects are enjoined to go with the flow. We are increasingly obliged to become a combination of everything while being nothing in particular at the same time – a combination of travel, an interesting job and exotic hobbies, to name a few, will supposedly result in profound character profiles. The more versatile, the better – one might argue that this versatility hints at a revival of the enlightened and enriched personality of the ‘Renaissance Man’, yet this type of subjectivity remains shallow as immaterial flows of labour demand elastic subjects who are capable of endless expansion and adaption without finding anything “real” or “eternal”. As the economic processes that lead to the dematerialization the of labour and money transactions, any possible point of orientation disappears. Without a core to provide some gravity, subjects begin to float without direction while constructing a contingent life-narrative out of all transient elements they encounter along the way.

Freedom and Individuality

How does one construct one’s identity, and what shape does it take in the contemporary world? Building on theory from Bruner, Butler and Foucault I argue that we shape our identities based on narrative structures, and these structures are driven by the political power of the state and its institutions. In combination with contemporary theorists who study the relation between capital and social imagination, I showed that capitalism may be considered the driving force for motivating our subjectivity and the way we shape life narratives. The dematerialized properties of current neoliberal capitalism gave rise to an ideology of flexibility and volatility, creating floating subjectivities.

What does this mean for our contemporary subject aesthetics on a more concrete level? What can we say about the ontology of the codes, patterns and structures through which we shape our life narratives? And what kind of docile bodies do these economical forces create? As I just argued, drawn from Lee and LiPuma, dematerialisation of formers

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ostensibly material processes gave rise to an ideological mode of mobility. In other words, immaterial economical processes dematerialized our mindsets. Life stories are constructed out of endlessly combinable constituents wherein plotline flows into plotline. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman uses the metaphor of liquidity to describe our modern-day world. He calls our era Liquid Modernity, and argues that these former ‘solid’ economical processes were melted in order to speed things up (Bauman 2000: 5). He describes the impact ‘liquidity’ has on our lives and identities on a more concrete level. By ‘releasing the brakes’ and taking away the solid material core, nothing is standing in the way of the individual to move freely to choose and act as he or she pleases (5) – that is to say, this is the ideology covering up for the speeding freedom of capital.

How did this ideology of mobility influence daily life? In this first place, liquidity gave rise to a crisis of choice. Everything in a consumer society is considered a matter of choice except the compulsion to choose itself. “The life of a chooser will always be a mixed blessing, […] even if (or rather because) the range of choices is wide and the volume of possible new experience seems infinite”(87). The life where the individual is afforded ostensible free choice is full of risk and uncertainty because subjects are held responsible for their every move. While disguising it as autonomy, economical logics like the derivative push the individual to make more and more choices, and it is his or her own responsibility if he or she chooses wrongly. The former solid structures by which we could shape our life narratives are nowadays increasingly in short supply, providing an abundance of different identities to choose from (7). However, following Butler and Foucault, subjects need society to provide them with normative blueprints because contemporaries are not solely guided by their imaginations and cannot create stories from scratch. There are just too many different plotlines clashing with one another, sometimes even contradicting one another, all combined in the autobiography of one individual. Constructing a clear, round life narrative becomes impossible, and subjects are condemned to fail in achieving self-identity. As a consequence of these numerous streams of possibility, Bauman poses that we are now in a mode of individuality (62). There are no common grounds, no set rituals or formulas to compare oneself to another, so everybody seems to be on his own. To my mind, however, this multitude is exactly the thing we have in common, it is the collective identity that the consumer world sets out for us, though we are too blinded by all our different options to see this conformity. Does this mode of individuality imply that we are not stuck in rigid slots anymore and that we can be the author of our own narratives? On the contrary, the notions of multitude and flexibility have become the new rigid slots from which one cannot escape.

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Butler might argue that within repetition one can change the status quo, but this is precisely the ideology of today: an ever changeable, fluid status quo. This ideology of speed and ostensible freedom deludes subjects they can move in whichever direction they please ad long as they don’t stand still. Everything is possible except to reduce possibility. Thus one may argue that Butler reconfirms this ideology with her notion of changeability. The desire to escape the solid boundaries is exactly what brought us to this new problematic of ever expanding, changing subjectivity in the first place. This ideology might be deeper engrained within our belief system than we want to admit.

The Attraction of Self-help

The analysis in chapters two and three examines how the ideology of mobility and flexibility motivates a particular subjectivity. I want to explore which rhetoric and narrative structures are deployed, on a more tangible level, to construct the type of subjectivity of contemporary life. To study this, I will use self-help as object of analysis because it is precisely the kind of literature that carries out normative ideas about subjectivity. Self-help addresses someone, as it were, it ‘hails’ the person who responds accordingly. In this way, the ‘life-guiding’ self-help books provide blueprints for narrative plotlines. I would like to argue, following Bauman, that contemporaries are sensitive to these kind of guiding voices because they are missing clear direction their lives. All the dazzling chaotic flows with which people are confronted make them hunger for unity and completeness. Infinite expansion of their subjectivity creates the wish to be a defined, whole person. Or in Bauman’s words,

In a world in which deliberately unstable things are the raw building material of identities that are by necessity unstable, one needs to be constantly on the alter; but above all one needs to guard one’s own flexibility and speed of readjustment to follow swiftly the changing patterns of the world ‘out there’. (85)

Subjects are in need of authoritative narrative examples for making sense of their personal experience in the hope of finding a revelation in the shape of some kind of ‘inner truth’ in them. This is where ‘synoptical’ powers enter the scene (Bauman and Haugaard 112). These are powers of seduction, luring subjects with promises of purpose and meaning; promises of guidance through the jungle of possibility. New power is exercised not by limiting options, as before in the more ‘solid’ times, but by multiplying them, making all actions more opaque and less calculable so that the confused subject is more sensitive to persuasion. The narratives presented in self-help books and novels present themselves as the key to unity and

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completeness; they will serve as a guiding light to lead lost subjects through this problematic liquid era. In fact, I want to argue that self-help repeatedly turns itself into the sublime object, the object of desire (Žižek 2006: 15), because self-help comes to symbolize the exact thing that subjects believe to be lacking. It represents the completeness and unity that subjects may be longing for by holding out exemplary narratives of defined personalities while at the same time, however, the subject is kept in constant suspension. In my analysis I will question whether the subject is actually able to reach a clear self-identification with the help of the authoritative voice of self-help, or whether self-help reconfirms the discourse that engenders the subject’s confusion in the first place.

Philosopher Hegel asked the rhetorical question: “What can I become, given the contemporary order of being?”(cited in Butler 2001: 24). With this question he impliesd that humans are limited because they are dependent on their surroundings when constructing their lives. In this research I examine this question for the contemporary order of being, or what Bauman called Liquid Modernity. What can we become? Or in other words, what do our present-day subject aesthetics look like?

Narrative theorist Bruner illustrated how the order of being translates itself in the narrative construction of characters. He describes how fictional character aesthetics have changed throughout the course of history. Over time, literary forms have developed, “they have moved steadily toward an empowerment and subjective enrichment of the Agent protagonist” (Bruner 698). The narrative subject started out as a flat figure, neither formed by nor owned by experience. In time, the subject was increasingly represented as a round character, as an ‘individual’, in charge of his or her decisions and responsible for the life-path he or she follows (698). So over time, character went from flat to round, from no agency to complete agency to decide and act. By extending fictional character aesthetics to our actual subjecthood, we can examine the stage of character development we are in at present. Is our subjectivity ‘round’, or did our aesthetics develop further, into a different abstract shape? In my analysis I will examine a shift in constructions of subjectivity and an expansion of notions of subjectivity. The following chapters explore the concept of ‘the change artist’, a concept which helps people transform so that they will be able to ‘go with the flow’. In particular I will provide a reading of the self-help book Becoming A Life Change Artist (2010) by Fred Mandell and Kathleen Jordan, in tandem with the self-help novel The Change Artist (2009) by Carla Rieger, in order to study the narrative construction of such a subjectivity. Secondly, I will explore how self-help reacts to the endless expansion of possibility and the problematic of free choice. Here I will analyse the self-help book Refuse to Choose

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(2006) by Barbarah Sher. Additionally, I analyse Benjamin Kunkel’s novel Indecision (2005), which portrays the contemporary problematic of choosing. This will enable a comparison of the aesthetic structures of the indecisive subject and the rhetoric used in the self-help book. What narrative structures in the present ideology become visible in self-help? And how do these structures shape our present-day subject aesthetics? Does self-help try to solve the ideological problematic as promised by helping subjects reach identification, or does self-help language reconfirm the liquid, flexible problematic of our status-quo?

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Chapter II - The Change Artist

The measure of intelligence is the ability to change. - Albert Einstein

Individuals living in a world of constant flux need to be flexible in order to survive. They require skills to adapt to the fickle flows of immaterial labour and keep up with the mind-numbing speed of information. Einstein has a point here: only those with the wits to transform will be able to move along the current. It appears that one must sink or swim. This is why the self-help culture called to life the concept of ‘the change artist’, based on which people are taught how to adapt to the ever shifting world and ‘go with the flow’. The self-help book Becoming A Life Change Artist by Mandell and Jordan teaches people how to tackle life transitions, whether they have to change careers or find a new purpose or calling in life. The authors compare life change to the fluidity of the creative process. The most important skills applied by creative thinkers throughout history, such as seeing the world from a new perspective and embracing uncertainty to take risks, are extended to life in general. The authors propose that creativity can help overcome the bumps and obstacles of major life transitions.

As a narrative representation of life-change, I include the self-help novel The Change Artist by Rieger. This novel conveys the life-changing development of the protagonist Fran Freeman, who, after her father dies, discovers that he had changed his identity twice in his life. The shy and insecure Fran embarks on a life-altering journey to find out the truth about her origins. The creative and fresh minds of the people she meets along the way help her to discover her ‘true self’ so that she is able to transform into a confident independent woman. Her newfound friend Marguerite only speaks in clichéd empowering quotes and acts as take on a catalyser-function to make this transformation possible. Marguerite embodies the role of life-coach, as it were.

In this chapter I will argue that the story of The Change Artist is precisely the type of story that attracts the confused individual of the liquid modern. This self-help novel is an example-narrative about a subjective transformation toward increased personal-empowerment by discovering a ‘real’, ‘authentic’ identity. In my analysis of the two books, I will explore how the self-help rhetoric and narrative endeavours to help subjects of the liquid modern in dealing with the shifting fickle character of our present times. How is subjectivity created based on the concept of change? And does this conception help subjects reach a defined sense of self?

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Life is an ongoing creative process, that is to say, according to the life-philosophy of Becoming A Life Change Artist and The Change Artist. In both self-help books, the significant properties of creativity are abstracted from the arts and integrated into a process of life change. In Becoming A Life Change Artist, Mandell and Jordan compare the creative process of great masters of art to the life transitions of ordinary people; they apply conceptions of, and association with art to daily life. For example, the “empty canvas” is used as a metaphor for life: “We may not be painting, sculpting, or writing, but each morning we wake to the canvas of a fresh day, with its own unique challenge” (Mandell and Jordan xxvi). The book sends the message that every day one can re-establish oneself as a new person, the white canvas makes anything possible. And if anything is possible, naturally one has a responsibility to create a masterpiece: “It’s up to us to practice creative skills that will allow us to express ourselves as fully as possible” (xxv).

In The Change Artist, Rieger shows the empowering effect the notion of art can have when applied to life narratives. When Fran discovers her roots and is reunited with her long lost family, her wise old artistic Roma grandmother shares her philosophy of life:

I can’t control what life brings me, but I can choose how I frame it, how I color it. Many options available, yes? Like colors on an artist’s palette. I can choose grey and black and have more misery, or I can choose purple and green and have more aliveness … more happiness. Whatever I want. (378)

This passage portrays the notion that life is your creation. You, as implied reader, have the agency and therefore the responsibility to take charge. And by creating your life-artwork, you can choose whichever direction you want to take. ‘Colour it perfect’.

The metaphor of art and creativity for living not only normalizes autonomy, but also authenticity, because everyone creates their own living artwork in a unique way. Mandell and Jordan propose that “[a]rt is not about copying or rendering. It is about exploring, discovering, and expressing ourselves”(Mandell and Jordan 45). Combining the notion of creativity with life, enhances the ideology of individuality: creativity is a highly individual process through which everybody goes in his or her own rhythm and time. If life is an artwork, you can create it to express your true authentic self. This engenders a modern-day paradox: expressing your authenticity is an impossible job because you can only express your ‘self’ with the aesthetics structures that are pre-given, through the contemporary ‘order of being’. However, art is held to break through rigid conventions, stimulating our creative ability; “our ability to experiment with the new and unknown, and believe that we can discover important things about ourselves if only we are willing to take that step into the unknown”(44).

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A notion of a creative life coerces subjects to constantly renew, change perspective and push for the unknown. This is precisely in tune with the ideology of ever changing mobility of the liquid modern. Creativity knows no boundaries, no rigidity, no halt. Change and flexibility have become the new rigid convention, the new order of being. In keeping this ideology, Mandell and Jordan write: “[a]rt, like life, is always changing. Life is not unchanging sameness. Rather, it is movement, flux, and complexity”(250). Change is never finite, it is a never ending flux. This extension of creative properties to everyday life helps to lubricate the capital flows. The creative subject is a flexible subject, always able to colour his life differently in order to transform and, therewith, deal with any problems that might slow down the speed of immaterial capital. The creative subject is precisely the subject required for immaterial labour, having has the capacity to move through the immaterial network of creative flows.

From Creativity to Creative Destruction

We have just seen how a combination of creativity and change promotes the liquid ideology and helps individuals take on different perspectives to break from their rigid patterns. Subjects are now disciplined not to repeat their routine every day, they are rather disciplined to constantly step out of it. In other words, they are forced out of their comfort zone.

In self-help, people are regularly instructed to leave their comfort zones. As I will argue, this pattern-breaking-task is engendered by the rhetoric of failure: a rhetoric which encourages subjects to make mistakes in order to learn from their faulty process. In this context, failure is positively revalued as feedback. There is no failure, only feedback, and as self-help language proposes, the only way to succeed in life is by constantly pushing boundaries, making mistakes and learning from them. Progress happens as a function of trial and error.

But where did this rhetoric of failure enter the discourse? And why is it so popular within contemporary self-help? I would like to argue that the self-help discourse called this notion of ‘failure as feedback’ into existence to cushion the blow of liquid modernity. In the liquid world where possibilities seem endless, choosing becomes a great burden. We cannot see a clear difference between right and wrong anymore because it is impossible to weigh all the options. Furthermore, with the notion of freedom of choice, responsibility falls directly on our shoulders. This is to say that we make our own success, hence we are also the only ones to blame for our mistakes. In a constant fear of failure we create a fantasy to numb the pain. This is what philosopher Slavoj Žižek calls the fantasy screen (Žižek 2008: 7). He poses that an

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ideology is created as a defence against a traumatic real. The fantasy screen restores order to a situation that otherwise seems chaotic or impossible. In a world where error seems inevitable, we need an ideology to rationalize failure. Hence failure becomes feedback.

In Becoming A Life Change Artist, Mandell and Jordan use the artist Berthe Morisot as an example figure to show that mistakes can be productive. In her painting Girl With A Greyhound (1893) she intentionally left her mistakes and corrections visible. This gave her the opportunity to experiment. Morisot believed that this would lead to greater spontaneity and greater artistic innovation. The book sends a positive message about failure by implying that the approval of failure opens up new possibilities and creates a safe environment in which one can experiment and explore.

We might argue that in this fashion, a positive attitude toward failure helps subjects of the liquid modern deal with their fear of failure by broadening the fantasy screen. However, at times the fantasy screen seems to be overcompensating when failure is not only tolerated: it is encouraged, and even forced upon subjects. Subjects are increasingly compelled to act outside of their ability, to make mistakes and push their limits. Thus through a rhetoric of failure, the self-help discourse pushes subjects out of their comfort zone. This is where Mandell and Jordan ask the rhetorical, almost imperative, question: “[d]o I embark on a journey of self-discovery or hold on to what is comfortable?”(Mandell and Jordan 27). With this question, the authors refer to the classic dilemma of having to decide between financial security or pursuing a dream-career with no secure pay. The book advises individuals to step into the unknown and change careers while calling it a ‘journey of self-discovery’. As a trigger for subjects to step out of their comfort zone, they are rewarded with the identity of ‘the explorer’. They must “experiment with things [they] are not familiar with” and “step into the forest”(52). An individual is considered brave and exciting if he pushes his limits.

The novel The Change Artist may be seen as a prime example of subjectivity being pushed out of the comfort-zone. Time and again, the insecure Fran is forced into adventure to explore, make mistakes and, consequently, transform into the best and most empowered version of herself possible. In this regard, one notable passage about a rollercoaster ride may be interpreted as the myse an abyme of the novel. The character embodying the personage of the life-coach, Marguerite, forces Fran onto a rollercoaster. At first, Fran is not able to enjoy the ride while she grips the handlebar. In reaction, Marguerite takes on the voice of self-help: “[h]olding on doesn’t make you more in control, it makes you more controllable” (Rieger, 79). Eventually Fran is able to let go and enjoy the ride. Rieger could not have picked a more cliché metaphor as her character Fran is forced into the uncomfortable, and has to learn how

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to let go in order to survive the rollercoaster of life. The usage of this metaphor compels subjects to let go of all the baggage that is weighing them down in order to fuel the rollercoaster of life, to enable the journey of self-discovery.

Letting go in order to ‘go with the flow’ means letting go of your context. Contemporary self-help compels subjects to let go of all their preconceptions in order to notice every new possibility and the newest most creative ways of life. The self-help book Becoming A Life Change Artist mentions the yoga concept of the “beginners mind”: “this means we see things with unencumbered eyes […], as though anything is possible and we are not bound by convention”(125). In my view, this conception engenders hyper flexibility. Nothing is secure or given anymore. Subjects become transparent, torn loose from anything meaningful, anything that might give them shape or definition as they lose track of context. In this way, subjects become malleable and ready to move along with the capitalist current of flowing change.

If subjects are compelled to break with the familiar, break with their routines and throw away all their conventions, they will be in a mode of constant renewal. They will destroy the old to create the new. This mode of constant renewal is in sync with the capitalist logic of creative destruction. Economist Joseph Schumpeter first observed this economic structure within the free market’s messy way of delivering progress. The economic structure is revolutionized from within, “incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism” (Schumpeter 83). This notion of creative destruction has become the centrepiece for modern thinking on how economies evolve. Within circulation of culture and economy, this logic has managed to infiltrate at the level of subjectivity. The ‘throwaway-society’ is performed on an individual level while we are now “able to throw away values, lifestyles, stable relationships, [and in general], received ways of doing and being” (Harvey 286). I want to argue that the logic of creative destruction and the rhetoric of failure motivate each other as both notions compel subjects to get out of their comfort zone, destroy the familiar, disrupt rigid old patterns, make mistakes and try over. In this way, the mode of renewal never ends. But whether renewal is in fact the same as progress we could question.

In line with the logic of creative destruction, the self-help book Becoming A Life Change Artist promotes a mode of tension. Mandell and Jordan propose that people are in a creative dilemma when they feel tension arising in their lives. They can choose whether to respond to that tension and change their lives, or ignore the tension and keep to their old pattern.

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Creative dilemmas unsettle us. That is their purpose. By their nature, creative dilemmas are anti-status quo. They are disruptive. They disturb us by stirring our emotions or influencing our behaviours or triggering our physiology. (37)

In my view, this creative dilemma Mandell and Jordan write about in their self-help book signifies the point of friction where the old must be destroyed in order to create the new. Naturally, the self-help language grants positive value to this type of tension. Tension is required in order to put creative destruction in motion.

Creative dilemmas are sources of innovative breakthroughs in art as well as in life. Without them the history of art would be a series of boring reproductions rather than the lively bursts of expressive originality. (31)

Thus the book portrays an appeal for tension. Mandell and Jordan accord positive value to the creative dilemma, which provokes tension that, in turn, is needed for innovation. By promoting tension, the self-help also promotes risk and uncertainty:

the truth is that risk is an essential element of facing our creative dilemmas because there is no guarantee that we will eliminate the tensions we feel in our lives when we enter the dimensions of change. Yet without risk there can be no breakthrough in art or in life.(33)

But if tension is needed for innovation, and creative destruction is an ongoing process, then the subject is in constant suspense, pushed out of his comfort zone, and unable to find his way back.

Because of this positive valuation of tension, I like to pose that the ‘struggle narrative’ is a popular example-narrative in the self-help genre. The struggle narrative embodies a structure wherein negative events are the catalysers leading to a positive resolution. Or put simply: ‘what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.’ In their self-help book, Mandell and Jordan use the hard knock life of the artist Matisse as an example. Critics “panned” his work but he had the courage to continue to follow his own path and earned a reputation of being one of the greatest colourists in the history of painting (18). When he grew older Matisse had a heart attack which severely limited his ability to move and paint. He started using scissors and coloured paper, and in that period he produced some of his most brilliant work (18). The narrative implies that only through his setbacks did Matisse turn out to be such a successful artist. His story is deployed as an example-story to send a message of empowerment to the struggling subject. The book is saturated with these kind of example-narratives and conjoins these stories with the instruction to turn negativity into positive energy.

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messages hidden in between the elements depicted on the canvas. The negative space in between the depicted figures holds meaning. Mandell and Jordan propose that people tend to ignore tension and negativity, and that, if in facing tensions, people could make shifts in understanding themselves (120). People should ask why they are afraid or what is nags at edges of their awareness. The struggle is necessary for a new and improved self, and through the language of self-help, becomes almost a precondition for success.

In her novel The Change Artist, Rieger shows that a life struggle is the one thing required for autonomy in order to make transformation possible. Her wise old grandmother shows Fran that she has indeed had struggles in her life as though it is a gift.

‘You had a tough life, too, in many ways. You have moxie in you. I see it in your eyes.’ Fran marveled at the possibility of having moxie. Memories of heartbreaking, soul crushing moments cascaded through her minds-eye – times when those shattering incidents activated a survival response so primal it astounded her. (Rieger, 407)

Tension and messiness in one’s life are held out to be positive things. They give one ‘moxie’, a backbone as they empower one to become an autonomous person. Via her struggles throughout the book, Fran transforms from an empty figure ‘lived by life’, into a confident actor who internalizes her struggles and turns them into something positive. Fran’s struggle-narrative exposes that tension, messiness and destruction are needed to bring about something new and good, to make positive change.

Ultimately one may conclude that the narrative of creative destruction, wherein all good things are catalysed by negative events, enhances a mode of randomness. A messy structure. The rhetoric of failure pushes subjects into the unknown, and because they break with the familiar they cannot know when the tension ends or when they will reach a point of equilibrium again before the next period of tension comes along. The structure is nonlinear and chaotic.

Before this conception of progress through failure entered the discourse, society believed in the ideology which Lacan calls evolutionism: the belief in a final goal of progress that has guided its rising trend from the very beginning (Pohl and Pais 80 ). Within this view, subjects are moving steadily toward some final point of completion. The harder they work the higher they move on the trend. To my mind, the rhetoric of failure counters the ideology of evolutionism. There is no defined rising trend visible in the life narratives of the liquid modern subject. The trend of creative destruction rises, then falls, then rises again, and so on. It moves unsteady and precariously. Additionally, there is no final goal of progress, or point of resolution, because once you have reached a state of equilibrium it is bound to be torn

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apart, and again, a new transformation is required. Once you have a job with secure pay you have to quit and embark upon an adventure to find your true self, because that boring comfortable person is not who you are. Becoming A Life Change Artist propels this messy structure. Mandell and Jordan pose that the creative process of transformation is complex, and this can only mean that “every journey is unique”(16). They enhance a discourse wherein there is lack of any clear structure. “So instead of fighting the currents in our river, instead of longing for the stability of the shore, we can flow with the river, finding our own unique way to make the journey”(6). In this sense, complexity and opacity are deliberately created. The authors propose to apply the artistic effect of the Mona Lisa’s sfumato to life. The “absence of sharpness or clarity”(158) in the hazy brushstrokes made the Mona Lisa smile so mysterious. This “gives us a painting of ultimate ambiguity”(158). They are suggesting that life is just as opaque and uncertain. Stability is not allowed because that would end the stream of renewal and would therefore would fix the endless transformation of subjectivity, engendered within circulation of the capitalist mode of creative destruction.

Inner Truth: From Being to Becoming

It is in times of great complexity and opacity that culture seems to be flooded with identity talk about ‘discovering the person I really am, who has been inside all along’. As a counter to their discourse of change, both self-help books expose the notion of a ‘true self’. This indicates a paradox: when subjects are coerced into a mode of constant change, how could they possess a singular true identity? Constant transformation implies complete relativism; no truth to refer to, let alone a defined inner self. Yet in Becoming A Life Change Artist, Mandell and Jordan pose that it is through change that individuals become who they were ‘meant to be’, “[w]ho they were meant to be was inside all the time” (63). Every example-story of a ‘change artist’ throughout the book thematizes the inner self wherein a construction of the ego is highlighted. One change artist writes, for example, “[a]s I let myself become more of myself, I discovered I liked me” (48). A dichotomy can be exposed here. There is a split between a constructed self and a true inner self which Mandell and Jordan respectively refer to as the “above the surface public facts” opposed to “a life of fear and uncertainty and self doubt and passion and authenticity and aspiration” (184). A life above and below surface. In The Rhetoric of Sincerity (2009), Ernst Van Alphen and Mieke Bal pose that such a dichotomy is false. A true inner self is postulated and becomes visible on the surface through performativity. The inner self is thought to arrive from within the subject and held to be non-discursive and free from ideology.

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This notion assumes that we, as individuals, have an “inner self” responsible for our conduct, performances, and speeches- in effect, all the ways in which we manifest ourselves for others. (Alphen and Bal 3)

Authenticity is a construction: there is a particular rhetorical and performative “apparatus of sincerity” which is driven by

conventions of performance and reception that have become so habitual and naturalized within our cultural spheres that much of what is transacted between us has been effectively rendered invisible. (22)

Spontaneous expressions that are held to arrive from within are in fact the expression of a set of social conventions that are continuously enacted. One might argue that in this sense, performativity is mistaken for autonomy.

I would like to argue that a postulation of a true inner self is contingent on the liquid ideology of mobility and flexibility perhaps exactly because the performance of an inner self is increasingly becoming problematic. As described in chapter one drawn on Bauman, in times of great opacity there is an excess of narrative examples to which we shape our lives. Subjectivity flows all over the place and the need for a core in the form of an inner truth grows. Accordingly, the sociologist Harvey poses that “deeper questions of meaning and interpretation” arise in these chaotic times (Harvey 292). “The greater the ephemerality, the more pressing the need to discover or manufacture some kind of eternal truth that might lie therein” (292). Subjects are in search of a core to hold on to. This is why a true inner self is postulated. The “search for personal or collective identity, the search for secure moorings in a shifting world” can be seen as a reaction to the liquid discourse (302). On the downside, the notion of a true inner self ends up abstracted from the fight against ephemerality and becomes exploited for the ‘greater good’ of the economy (302). The ‘true identity’, the discovery of the ‘real me’, is produced and marketed as a poor substitute for cohesiveness. Subjects are longing for completion and wholeness. Through deliberately creating opacity and uncertainty, lost subjects are attracted by a defined image they can conform to, so when they do not know how to enact their inner truth, self-help enters the stage to show them.

In Becoming A Life Change Artist, the way to perform the true inner self is by what Mandell and Jordan call ‘integration’. All the new things individuals discover about themselves on their journey of life-change will at first cause identity to look like a messy incohesive blur. This is why the authors propose that individuals combine their separate transformed selves. Through integration of all these new discoveries, the subject becomes more whole and in touch with his inner self. “The integration dimension always moves us

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closer to personal wholeness, bringing us more in alignment with our values” (61). Through performatively integrating all different life-aspects, an inner self is constructed: “[i]t’s a matter of creating our new lives out of the rough marble of our existing lives” (226). This is an example of how the economic logic of the derivative is performatively enacted in order to shape a corresponding subjectivity. Performatively enacting the self happens through integration; a true self can only be performed by bringing together a plurality of identities. Thus the book exposes a paradoxical notion of subjectivity wherein transformation is required for a defined inner truth, in order to become more complete as a person. I like to argue that in his or her transformation into a whole, the subject moves from a synchronic sense of self towards a diachronic sense of self. As just argued, our modern structure of progress is nonlinear and messy. Accordingly, subjects experience time predominantly in an illogical fashion: the succession of events happens synchronically; they do not logically follow each other and there is no cause and effect. In line with this illogical structuring of events, a subject’s sense of self is coincidental. In this case, subjectivity is based on the assumption “I-am who I-am” (Bamberg, 6), which could be this ‘I’ at one moment and another ‘I’ at the next. There is no logical causal development of personality. Contrary to this, the narrative examples of the self-help books analyzed in this study provide some kind of logic to the story. The example narratives show subjects who move from a synchronic- to a diachronic self. These subjects are saying: “[a]ll of my background led me here”(Mandell and Jordan 69). Their random past events are coupled and held to provide the basis for their identity in the present. A sense of self that moves from being to becoming.For this transition to happen, autonomy is postulated and the subject needs to take charge of randomness, as it were, in order to provide a logic structure. Self-help language would call this a transition to “self-awareness” (16). So cause and effect are imaginatively coupled by the performative act of autonomy. Reason is imagined in order to deal with randomness, and eventually, all random events are moulded into a ‘true self’. Finding one’s true identity means that one is able to connect the dots. Subjects are compelled to connect all the diverse aspects that made them the person they are.

The Change Artist exposes this notion of subjectivity. The subtitle of the novel captures this notion into one sentence: “[a] story about discovering the past to recreate the now” (Rieger front cover). The protagonist, Fran, transforms from a dependent, circumstantial figure to an independent autonomous subject who connects her past events to give meaning to her present situation. Her character development starts out with a synchronic sense of self. Fran does not ‘own’ her life and her identity. She has a talent for imitating others and uses it

Need help telling your life story? A critical study of capitalist ideology and narrative in self-help literature