In the pre-digital era, the act of “sculpting a life” was a philosophical pursuit reserved for the educated. Today, it is offered online as a universal daily practice. With every filtered photo, curated “link in bio”, and calculated caption, social media users engage in a modern form of what Michel Foucault called the “Aesthetics of Existence”. We are no longer merely living our lives; we are composing them as exemplary multimedia artifacts. However, as I will argue, this process can be better defined as personal branding. Rather than being the product of the philosophical “care of the self”, the personal brand can be considered the contemporary counterpart of to the Foucauldian notion of “entrepreneur of himself”, describing the subjectivity produced by neoliberal governmentality. In what follows, I discuss the problem of self-creation to shed some light on the economic conditions of subjectivization in our digital era.
Aesthetics of Existence: The Care of the Self
Foucault’s “Aesthetics of Existence” isn’t about vanity but autonomy and freedom. It is the idea that we can use specific techniques to transform ourselves into something intentional. As a homosexual man, he was looking for shaping his persona independently of social norms and stereotypes.
“What strikes me is the fact that, in our society, art has become something that is related only to objects and not to individuals or to life. That art is something which is specialized or done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life?”1
In his later works, Foucault shifted from the “discipline” of the state to the “care of the self.” He was fascinated by the Greco-Roman idea that one’s life should not be a byproduct of external rules but a masterpiece created through deliberate practices. He called these “technologies of the self” and compared them to the artist’s endeavor to manipulate matter to achieve an original expressive form. The care of the self was meant to construct one’s own subjectivity autonomously through a careful understanding of the external and internal forces that determine how one behaves and thinks. In line with the Socratic wisdom, these practices include the knowledge of oneself, and, for this reason, they are linked to personal identity. However, this is not a matter of discovering one’s identity as it was something given but hidden and repressed by imposed social norms. Neither is it a matter of assuming a model that became a sort of static ethical code. As Foucault explained:
“If people think that they have to ‘uncover’ their ‘own identity,’ and that their own identity has to become the law, the principle, the code of their existence; if the perennial question they ask is ‘Does this thing conform to my identity?’ then, I think, they will turn back to a kind of ethics very close to the old heterosexual virility. Not only do we have to defend ourselves, not only affirm ourselves, as an identity but as a creative force”2
So, according to Foucault, the care of the self allows for an ongoing experimentation with self-construction rather than a simple affirmation of a supposedly pre-existing identity. Hence, to produce one’s own life as an artwork means to transform through an ongoing process that is not exhausted by a specific achievement.
From the Nietzschean perspective that informs Foucault’s reflections, the knowledge of the self consists in a diagnosis of the impulsive forces, internal and external, that try to impose on each other to determine who one is. It is a matter of allowing a creative play among different tendencies by preventing the static domination of one over the others. The care of the self does not consist in forcing oneself into a mold; rather, it aims at letting a form to emerge according to the various dispositions of the material, exactly like a sculptor who brings matter to a surprising expression.
Foucault defines the care of the self as the practice of freedom, and he thinks of freedom as the capacity to transform oneself. From this standpoint, freedom is not a condition but the never-ending effort of making one’s own life a work of art. However, we don’t have to think of it as a hedonistic and solitary undertaking. In fact, it is in the public and political sphere that freedom manifests itself by inviting wider social changes.
In this regard, we have to consider that the interest in the care of the self was inspired by the movement of May 1968 that the philosopher interpreted as a form of resistance against governmental techniques of subjectivization. In the important paper “The subject and power” (1982), Foucault describes how a new form of power operates by shaping individual identities rather than by constraining the masses. First, this power is supported by science that turns humans into objects of knowledge, i.e. into systems whose behavior can be conditioned through information feedback. Second, it introduces dividing practices that establish binary criteria for telling groups apart, for instance, the mad and the sane, the sick and the healthy, the criminal and the “good boy”, etc. As he noticed, during the 60s’ and the 70s’ people were insurrecting against these governmental techniques for the right to self-determination. In particular, he describes them as
1. They are “transversal” struggles; that is, they are not limited to one country.
2. The aim of these struggles is the effects of power as such and how modes of living are shaped.
3. In such struggles, people criticize instances of power which are the closest to them, those which exercise their action on individuals.
4. They are struggles which question the status of the individual: on the one hand, they assert the right to be different. On the other hand, they attack everything which separates the individual and constrain him to his own identity.
5. They are in opposition to the effects of power which are linked with knowledge. But they are also an opposition against the mystifying representations imposed on people.
6. Finally, all these present struggles revolve around the question: Who are we? They are a refusal of normative abstractions and of the violence with which they are imposed on anybody while ignoring singularities.3
We can now understand why Foucault is critical about minorities that end up defining their identity as anethical code: they recreate fixed and normalized categories and impose them on themselves and upon the others while sanctioning any deviation, with the effect of preventing transformations. For this reason, Foucault insists that, to actually become a practice of freedom, autonomous self-creation should avoid any crystallization of identity into recognized models. Accordingly, freedom does not simply consist in the liberation from given molds but also in avoiding the creation of new ones. In other words, progressive forces must avoid turning themselves into reactionary ones.
For Foucault, the play of opposite forces is what constitutes the vital dynamism of societies. From this point of view, power relations are the very fabric of reality. Power expresses itself as an effort to orient the other’s conduct, so as any kind of relation is a power relation. Power relations are not intrinsically bad; what is bad is when they turn into a state of domination. This happens when one of the forces at play succeeds in completely determining the expression of the others while preventing any further transformation of the relation. In such situations of domination, freedom is abolished as the system tends to maintain its form. This is also true for the relation with the self: it’s a matter of composing and recomposing the different tendencies that constitute an individual in such a way as to allow for unpredictable changes in the equilibrium. In the case of the individual, a state of domination arises when one becomes a slave to a specific passion or when one assumes an identity that prevents further experimentations.
Towards Neoliberal Governmentality: The Entrepreneur of Himself
It is important to situate Foucault’s reflections at a precise historical moment. In particular, the social movements he observed were accompanying the transition from disciplinary societies, linked to industrial capitalism, to a new form of organization characterized by biopower, a form of power that Foucault compares to the pastoral, when the object of attention is the individual whose conduct is oriented without constrains. The struggles of the minorities that Foucault observed were symptoms of the crisis of disciplinary societies and of the transition toward a new order called neoliberalism. As we are going to see, neoliberalism took advantage of the will to emancipation and autonomous self-creation that animated minorities’ battles.
Foucault started confronting the neoliberal techniques of government in his lectures at Collège de France in 1978–1979. He first observed that these techniques are grounded on the criticism of the excessive power of the State: it was the matter of rationalizing government by scaling down. Rather than achieving the complete control of social and economic dynamics, the aim is to ensure the condition for the auto-regulation of both by relying on agent’s rationality. Individuals are now conceived as subjects of interests making the best choices for themselves in order to maximize utility. In some way, neoliberalism acknowledges the productivity of the free game of power relations, and, rather than trying to dominate, it limits itself to organizing the space where individuals can challenge their reciprocal conducts. This space is the market. Here, prices are the signals that allow agents to make decisions that, at the same time, satisfy their specific preferences and contribute to general wealth. Nevertheless, neoliberals were aware that the invisible hand cannot properly work without the government taking care of the conditions for this fair competitiveness. The idea was that it is less costly to put the individuals in the conditions of disciplining themselves rather than to maintain the gigantic public apparatuses to constrain their behavior. Among the measures for ensuring the correct functioning of the market, neoliberals provided individuals with an adequate mentality.
For Foucault, neoliberalism is based on a new scientific comprehension of humans. It was no longer the biological systems that must have been taken care of, but rational agents that were perfectly capable of taking care of themselves and that must have been incentivized to be responsible for their own satisfaction. Accordingly, neoliberalism is based on the extension of economic rationality to all aspects of life. Any kind of behavior must be understood as the effect of an economic calculation aiming at the maximization of utility. As Foucault observes, this form of knowledge makes individuals very predictable, although they are relatively free to make their own decisions.4
“Homo economicus, that is to say, the person who accepts reality or who responds systematically to modifications in the variables of the environment, appears precisely as someone manageable, someone who responds systematically to systematic modifications artificially introduced into the environment. Homo economicus is someone who is eminently governable.”5
Known and modeled as rational agents that look to obtain greater satisfaction in any domain of activity (like family, health, leisure, culture, etc.), individuals appear to be easier to handle than those who, feeling oppressed by the power of the State, develop hostile feelings and try to revolt.
The theory of human capital, which is central in Foucault’s study on neoliberalism, is the consequence of this extension of the economic understanding of behavior to all the aspects of life. Gary Becker introduced this theory while understanding labor from the perspective of the workers conceiving them as a rational economic agent. The basic idea is that wages are the returns of the individuals’ investment in their personal competences in such a way that they are, for themselves, as forms of capital to be put at profit. As Foucault explains, “wage is nothing other than the remuneration, the income allocated to a certain capital, a capital that we will call human capital inasmuch as the ability-machine of which it is the income cannot be separated from the human individual who is its bearer.”6
In this model, the individual is revealed to be an entrepreneur of himself “being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings.”7 As entrepreneurs of themselves, individuals work to increase their own agency in such a way to enhance the chances of success in a competitive market. They are motivated to challenge themselves by introducing new and more rewarding strategies, hence by continuously adapting their behavior to the changing demands of the market. So it is the productive efficacy of the economic system that increases thanks to the efforts of the individuals to improve their returns. The role of government is now to support the individual’s hope to autonomously improve their conditions by sustaining the belief in the narrative of the self-made man. To this analysis, I would add that, by increasing his personal satisfaction, human capital also aims at making himself employable, i.e. more useful to the development of the economic systems, thanks to the improvement of his skills. In fact, any activity, from education to leisure or sport, is considered an investment that allows the individual to increase the returns.
The subjectivity of the entrepreneur of himself was the product of the new account of the individual as a rational economic agent, and it was infused through specific methods. For instance, the diffusion of the psychologies of self-improvement and personal development might be seen as a way of producing the new mentality, hence of creating functional autonomous subjects. Neoliberal governments developed new techniques for creating responsible entrepreneurs of themselves, agents capable of taking care of themselves rather than relying on costly social programs. And this, of course, had the scope of allowing for reducing public expenses and favoring the development of enterprises. For instance, programs for unemployed people are transformed into services to help people to help themselves by acquiring new competencies and increasing their value on the labor market. Another example is the replacement of public health programs with private insurance service. In short, neoliberal governmental techniques pushed people to discipline themselves according to economic rationality, with the effect of improving general productivity. In this regard, we have to point out that economic growth is the main criterion to legitimize the work of governments.
While thinking they are finally in charge of their own development, individuals are actually shaped through the different costly services that are offered in this new world. Now it is the space for autonomy that is carefully organized to improve productivity without any apparent constraint on behaviors. If agents can be let free to make decisions for themselves, it is because their choices are made predictable by the fact they will act according to the economic rationality of human capital. Within the neoliberal framework, the minoritarian demand for self-determination finds an illusory satisfaction in the generalized competition for social recognition that is functional to market development. Adapted services and merchandise are now released to meet the special requests for non-conventional lifestyles and, as a consequence, the will to autonomous realization is turned into the entrepreneurial effort to make oneself employable, i.e. to affirm according to exterior signs of success.
I think that Foucault dedicated the last part of his life to the antique notion of the care of the self to provide people with an alternative to the neoliberal doctrine of entrepreneurial self-improvement. While acknowledging the rise of the industry for self-help and its capacity for detourning minorities’ struggle, as a member of a minority himself, he was concerned with the possibility of exerting freedom in a system that promoted its most convincing simulacrum.
Brand Subjectivity
Today, in the age of social media and of a general crisis of neoliberalism, the situation has rapidly altered with major consequences for the techniques of subjectivation.
The erosion of neoliberalism is made evident by the multiple complaints addressed from different sides and angles. From the left, it is accused of the drastic reduction of public programs supporting the unsuccessful “entrepreneurs of themselves,” whose failures are explained as systemic rather than due to laziness. From the right, neoliberalism is considered responsible for the erosion of the traditional cultural values of societies. The fact is that, after a period of rapid growth, the repeated economic crises showed the difficulties for governments to ensure the condition of fair competition. Austerity measures and inflation contributed to the impoverishment of larger portions of the population at the benefit of financial elites. Despite the divergences in attributing the role of the victim (minorities versus white Western citizens) and of the exploiters (businessmen or radical trendy intellectuals), an increasing number of entrepreneurs of themselves have been left neither with personal economic resources nor with the hope to improve their situation. Degrees and skills are no longer enough to be employable in a shrinking labor market. On the one hand, individuals are obliged to ask for loans; on the other hand, they try to invest all their personal and intimate resources on social media by making their life a product for consumption.
As I will explain, the conjunction of the financialization of the economy (a development that neoliberal theoreticians did not anticipate) and the rise of algorithmic technologies, has given birth to a new kind of subjectivity: the personal brand.
In the same way as the human capital was the effect of the crisis of the governmental apparatuses linked to industrial capitalism, so the personal brand is the consequence of the transition from the neoliberal market to the information economy.
In the same way as the subjectivity of the entrepreneur of himself diverted people’s desire for self-determination, so the personal brand turns the unsatisfied will for recognition into an engine for enhancing the system’s productivity.
Social media provides individuals with the possibility of experimenting with new ways of relating to each other that better conform to their affective needs that couldn’t find satisfaction under neoliberalism. Simultaneously, these technologies are adapted to organize the space of free association, sharing, and expression according to the needs of financial capitalism.
To support this intuition, I’ll first introduce the notion of brand, then I’ll show the connection with platform and financial economy.
A brand is not exactly an enterprise. The goal of the latter is selling objects or services, and its success is linked to the capacity of finding new clients. Instead, a brand is an image, a character, or a personality that looks for people eager to identify with it. To produce this identification, a brand is constructed as an embellishing mirror where individuals in need of social recognition can contemplate an empowering image of themselves. A brand is interested in constructing itself as a person who embodies particular values, styles, and perspectives on the world. The merchandise associated with a brand is considered a form of expression of a peculiar and recognizable personality; the proof is that often the construction of the brand-image precedes the choice of the commercialized goods. A brand does not chase clients by advertising the quality of the products or services it provides but asks people to buy a model for expressing their identity. Accordingly, the proposed merchandise is just the suggested means to manifest one’s authentic being in a more appreciable way.
The followers of a brand recognize themselves in idealized communities that valorize their singularity while producing a sense of belonging that makes up for their exclusion from the elites.
Coming together under a brand image, individuals feel more confident, and they have the impression that together they acquire the power to challenge official representations. Brands construct themselves by making the effort of bringing isolated individuals into a collective identity that reflects their specificities in a powerfully empowering image.
The influence of a brand corresponds to this power of enhancing identification while contributing to the valorization and recognition of a community. Communication is essential in the strategy of a brand, and marketing is the science that measures and guarantees success.
Today’s social media platforms and apps provide individuals with the possibility of constructing themselves as brands, i.e. the possibility of becoming the representative image of a community. For instance, social media content producers and influencers define themselves as different “personal brands”, meaning that they propose themselves as inspirational models. While sharing their opinion and lifestyle, they propose to their followers transformative practices to magnify different aspects of their personality. Moreover, like commercial brands, personal brands get ideas from spontaneous tendencies to construct themselves according to a latent demand for valorisation.
However, it’s important to clarify that as far as brands are concerned, “valorization” has a precise financial meaning.
Brands are different from enterprises also because of their economic model: while an enterprise aims at the revenues generated by the sale of products, a brand aims to increase the value of the shares in the interest of the investors.
A brand needs to prove its creditworthiness; it needs to attract investments rather than to increase the returns. It proposes itself as a project that must convince potential investors. Their most persuasive argument is the creation of positive expectations about the future value of the shares. Now, what is called brand value or equity depends less on sales than on reputation, i.e. on collective appreciation and social influence.8 The financial value of shares depends, in fact, on the opinion or the feeling of the market, exactly like in Keynes’ beauty contest, where the winning girl is the one that the electors think will be preferred by the majority of the others. As we know, a rumor can determine a rapid decrease in the value of an asset, while demonstrations of trust may entail a sudden spike. Investors’ decisions are based on the speculation that the shares will rise in value, and these anticipations are based on the perception of the general appreciation of a brand, on its capacity for producing identification. In short, an investor must make sure that others will be confident in investing, and the degree of confidence is relative to the reputation of a brand.
In the era of data analysis, brand equity can be exactly calculated according to the indicators of popularity, affection, and engagement. The quantification of a brand’s influence provides information that not only supports investors’ decisions, but also guides the reshaping of the image. We can say that, while refreshing their expressions according to the affective demand of communities, brands also modify their message to increase creditworthiness.
These processes all apply also to the personal brands who are the individuals: an influencer constructs himself as an image capable of producing collective identification and capable of valorizing a community. The worth of personal brands is constantly quantified by analyzing the reactions on social media. Liking content, sharing it, or commenting on it are actions that produce data used to calculate reputation and influence. The first function of the metrics is to establish the degree of the algorithms’ investment: the most engaging users are rewarded with a boost in visibility. The expected return of this investment is the reputation of the platform, which is linked to the appreciability of the proposed contents.
And, of course, this translates into an increase in the tech company’s equity.
The second function of the metrics is to introduce to individuals the hyped brands and the communities in such a way as to guide their investment in attention. In this case, the expected return is personal popularity through the possibility of reshaping oneself according to the most influential images of the moment. Hence, the measurement of a personal brand value allows it to obtain more support from the users who aim at increasing their own creditworthiness in return.
The system of evaluation constrains and organizes brands’ space of expression: they must conform to the criteria of creditworthiness in a system where anyone is, at the same time, an investor and a project looking for support. The spreading of financial economy, in fact, came with the extension of the speculative mentality to any aspect of life — exactly like neoliberals spread the entrepreneurial one to all the domains of existence. Anyone is called to put all his available personal resources (time, attention, affection, money, etc.) into supporting the projects that, like financial products, are expected to inspire confidence. At the same time, anyone is called to make of himself a financial product whose goal is promisingness. Creditworthiness is the correlate of a brand (personal or commercial) capacity to successfully compete against others brands for creating new, enlarging and economically productive communities. We can say that this competition takes place in a market where identities are the products to be produced, sold, and bought. Like any other commercial product, identities must evolve and renovate to avoid saturation: there is no branding without careful strategies of rebranding. We could say that the “care of the self” has become a common practice, although in our context what is available is only the illusion of freedom and self-determination. Platforms are the organized spaces where behaviors are modulated to serve the interests of the information economy for the benefit of the big investors in technology brands. In short, creditworthiness is the universal criterion that informs the autonomous and collective identity construction.
Now, to be productive, this economy must be competitive. In a situation where resources are limited and equally distributed, the existence of a brand — commercial, personal, or communitarian — depends on the capacity to attract investments while diverting them from the competitors. As a consequence, brands (at any level) are driven into an aggressive competition for influence and reputation. Tactics of persuasion and manipulation are common; moreover, strategies for discrediting the adversaries are not excluded. In this situation, advertising or announcing one’s ethical values often aims at enhancing the identification of the numerous who feel isolated, marginalized, and oppressed.
To construct oneself as an engaged and socially responsible brand is today a usual choice to foster reputation. This “politically engaged” posture typically implies the denunciation of the “enemies”, i.e. the brands that threaten the valorization of the community one stands up for. Here, political engagement assumes the form of a normative behavior that is imposed on a community by sanctioning any deviation. In addition, since resources are scarce, brands are put in the situation of competing for credit not only through strategies of self-valorization but also by slandering the adversaries.
In this context, anybody is for anybody else a severe moral judge whose pronouncements have a direct impact on reciprocal reputation and influence. Anybody constantly evaluates the personal advantages of being identified with a specific community while rigorously monitoring other available options. Moreover, social media users constantly try to increase the value of the community with which they identify by criticizing the attitude, values, and beliefs of the competitors to make stakeholders turn away. The climate of insecurity enhances polarization and aggressiveness that justify even more severe measures against the perceived threats. This warlike situation makes it indispensable for anybody to be part of a powerful community to efficaciously fight those who undermine his reputation. However, the show of this deadly conflict that unfolds in real time on social media benefits in primis the industry of information and platforms whose shares do not cease to increase in value.
To conclude, I would say that the difference between a personal artwork and a personal brand is that the latter is a mere representation of political participation; a brand sells an aestheticized image of engagement whose aim is, for the buyer, to increase his equity. Moreover, such images are normative, and members of a community are immediately excluded if they deviate from the accepted form of expression: anyone lives under the menace of being identified with the wrong camp for the slightest slip of the tongue. In contrast, a personal artwork is the expression of a creative force that challenges any crystallized identity and resists the binary distinctions between the criminals versus good boys. While brands create communities defined through the opposition to the enemies, living artworks conceive themselves as part of a heterogeneous multiplicity to be further differentiated. Here political engagement is not a matter of expanding one’s own influence at the expense of the adversaries, but of stimulating the imitation of freedom as an opportunity to be transformed by encountering the other.
We need more than ever techniques for escaping the subjectivity of the brand as well as a politics capable of articulating alterity without its suppression or normalization.
- Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress”. Essential Works of Foucault Vol. 1: Ethics Subjectivity and Truth. New York: The New Press 1997, p. 261. ↩
- Michel Foucault, “Sex, power, and the politics of identity”, Essential Works of Foucault Vol. 1: Ethics Subjectivity and Truth. New York: The New Press 1997, p. 166. ↩
- Michel Foucault, “The subject and Power”. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Summer, 1982), p. 781. ↩
- For an explanation of the predictability of rational economic agents see Anna Longo, Le jeu de l’induction, automatisation de la connaissance et réflexion philosophique (Mimesis 2022). ↩
- Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, Lectures at Collège de France 1978–1979, Palgrave Macmillan 2008, p. 270. ↩
- Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, Lectures at Collège de France 1978–1979, Palgrave Macmillan 2008, p. 226. ↩
- Ibid., p. 226. ↩
- Adam Arvidsson, “Brands: A critical perspective”. Journal of Consumer Culture, 5(2), 2005, pp. 235–258. ↩