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| 23 1 Brand Me “Activist” Alison Hearn In 2006, Time magazine named “YOU” person of the year. Arguing that the Internet and social network sites had facilitated the emergence of “community and collaboration on a scale never seen before,” the magazine went on to celebrate Web 2.0’s revolutionary political possibilities, suggesting that the new Web demonstrated “the many wresting power from the few,” which might then lead to “a new kind of international understanding.”1 But, what kind of power does creating a Facebook profile, posting personal videos on YouTube, designing a cool avatar on Second Life, or “tweeting” your thoughts hourly constitute? What form of revolution is fomented when individuals follow their favorite celebrities’ “green dos and don’ts” or vote on which green project Disney should support with 1 million of its billions of dollars? Who is this “ME” imagined by Time’s interpellation “YOU” anyway? This chapter will examine the versions of selfhood assumed and partially produced by contemporary forms of “commodity activism,” with reference to three popular “green” websites emanating from, and totally dependent on, the economy of Hollywood celebrity: ecorazzi.com, ecostiletto.com, and Disney’s friendsforchange.com. I argue that Time magazine’s imperative “YOU” and its concomitant response “ME” mark the conflation of selfhood with neoliberal modes of governmentality, the economic logics of post-Fordism , hyperconsumerism, and promotionalism, and marries this conflation to social activism. As the boundaries between work and life erode, broadbased structural, systemic, and collective problems are routinely reduced to issues of “personal responsibility” and “the reflexive project of the self,”2 or the constitution of “ME,” becomes a distinct form of labor in the guise of self-branding. This chapter interrogates the naturalized elision seen in many contemporary forms of commodity activism between radical individual empowerment, necessary for the market, and collective and communal affiliation, necessary for long-lasting political change. While acknowledging that new media technologies and social networks can enable increased social and ethical accountability on the part of corporations and government, this 24 | Brand, Culture, Action accountability is never simply given. This chapter insists that, in order for significant social change to take place, dominant templates for meaningful selfhood must also be remade; ultimately, a conceptualization of selfhood tightly bound to the logic of neoliberalism and the post-Fordist market is one of the core components, and central limitations, of “commodity activism.” The Empty Self in Consumer Society American psychotherapist Philip Cushman argues that the “self” is a cultural construct, which expresses “the shared understanding within a community about what it is to be human.”3 Cultural historian Warren Sussman asserts that procedures of self-production and self-presentation have always reflected the dominant economic and cultural interests of the time. Invariably , “changes in culture do mean changes in modal types of character.”4 In other words, our forms of self-production and self-understanding are deeply conditioned by our economic and social context; dominant modalities of “self” are both summoned into being and illustrated in our cultural discourses and institutions. The ways we come to internalize or embody these versions of “selfhood” are always contested and in flux, constituting examples of biopower in action. As Michel Foucault has famously written, “Nothing in man—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to serve as a basis for selfrecognition or for understanding other men.”5 During the 20th century, Anthony Giddens argues, we have been “disembedded ” from more traditional forms of sociality and community, such as the church or family. As we develop ever more abstract systems, institutions , and technological forms, which pull us out of our cultural, spatial, and temporal situatedness, established modes of identity and selfhood are dislodged and thrown into crisis.6 Cushman describes the terrain of modernity as marked by social absences and a lack of coherence and tradition. We experience this “interiorly as a lack of personal conviction and worth,” and we embody it “as a chronic and undifferentiated emotional hunger” that “yearns to acquire and consume as an unconscious way of compensating for what has been lost.”7 Cushman describes the modality of selfhood in the growing post–World War II consumer landscape, then, as an “empty self”; this self must perpetually consume in order to be filled, organized, and effectively identified, but it can never truly be satiated. As Zygmunt Baumann writes, midcentury consumer society “proclaims the impossibility of gratification and measures its progress by ever-rising demand”;8 desire is its principle engine. [3.138.113.188...

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