Event Information
Date: May 23
Time: 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM PST
Location: Zoom
About:
The Center for Discursive Inquiry at Calarts is delighted to announce that Anna Longo will be presenting work “Post-Neoliberalism & the Rise of Brand Subjectivity” from her most recent project in our upcoming seminar!
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 to this Foucauldian notion; now being the “entrepreneur of himself”. This describes the subjectivity that is 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.
