Jacob Bar Nathan is a left-wing writer and academic who teaches in the Department of English Literature & Cultural Studies at the University of Enfield. He has written extensively on the relationship between media and conceptions of the self, with particular focus on Kafka and Dickens.
“I am not a finished product,” declares Melody from the Apprentice. Note the absence of the definite article. Melody has unwittingly slipped, because she tacitly sees us all as products, and herself as well. In this sense, Melody, raised from the age of 2 by malfunctioning robots, is ahead of the global trend.
In the present moment of late capitalism, we are increasingly coming to see ourselves as products, complete with launch strategies, unique selling points, and branding. It has been noted that philosophers tend to base their models of the mind on whatever the most advanced technology is available at the time: for Boethius it was the aqueduct; for Hobbes the automated chess-playing clockwork Turk; for Schopenhauer the steam engine; for Wittgenstein the calculator; for Fodor the computer. It is by the same logic that man comes to base his image of himself on whatever happens to be most present in their lives: for the Egyptians the Nile; for the Mongols the horse; for the Chinese Emperor his own palace; for the Victorians the clunking factory with its demon mills (this is why they outlawed all forms of sexual congress). So it only makes sense that nowadays our model of the Self should be based around the Product, which is everywhere we look.
The ‘Product’, in its modern form, was born with the advent of Bernays in the 1920s, and we have been basing our lives in part around Product-forms of life for the best part of a century (see, for example, movements based around self-fulfilment, or the idea of personal uniqueness). But it is only recently that we have been given the means to become Product entirely: and that is, of course, the social network.
What do we do on the social network? Ask the man or woman on the street and he/she will most likely gormlessly reply: “duh, socially network.” A thin sliver of drool works their way down his or her unshaven chin, and you shudder. But in fact the answer is: we foster a profile. The presence of other members of the social network is merely as viewers: we are the passive receptors of their curiosity in our lives, which we do as much as possible to present to them as being interesting, exciting, frustrating, or whatever. Facebook is, of course, purely bodily: the profile we foster is a perfectly carnal presence of photographs and educational/employment history. Facebook, then, turns our base selves into products. We ‘tell our story’, branding our physical presence-in-the-world. Twitter is even more insidious than this, because it represents the branding of our thoughts. Before @JacobBarNathan posts (please follow me, incidentally! Will follow back) he must think: “is this *really* a ‘JacobBarNathan’ post?”, just as Coca Cola must think, before they launch their latest ad campaign: “does this *really* represent our Coca Cola values?” Soon, this comes to reflect back on our actual thoughts themselves: we identify ourselves with our own twitter feed, and delete thoughts that would not honour a re-tweeting.
The important point to grasp, I think, is that, along with the zeitgeist, which otherwise obliges us to image ourselves as Product-like, it is only through the social network that the realisation of this imaging is possible. In our everyday, ‘real-worldly’ (though I reject the idea that the internet is not part of the ‘real’ world… this argument need not concern us here, however) lives, we are unable to pursue the full Productification of ourselves as we can online. So, we will inevitably spend as much time as possible online. Our ‘real’ (stand-in for ‘not-internet’) lives only become something for our Facebook/Twitter profiles to map, perhaps even inaccurately.
For western civilization as a whole, the upshot of this is of course total collapse. The reason being is to do with labour. The productification of the self is completely at odds with the idea of the self as labourer. Our only (as yet) ‘full’ examples the Productifed Man have been popstars or celebrities: Elvis, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Jade from Big Brother, Cheryl Cole, Slavoj Zizek, Lady Gaga. These are people who have successfully branded everything about them. But what does the product, in actuality, ‘do’? It fulfills expectations, it stands still. The product is incapable of toil. The product is already finished. Labour has yet to happen, it is something that is yet to do. The productified man can only procrastinate. The productified man only requires a job in order to brand it, as a part of themselves, like certain permutations of Barbie have jobs. This is obviously heralded by teenagers unable to envisage a life doing anything other than either playing football, being a celebrity, blankly staring into space all day, or dying violently and getting on the news. But it is also heralded by the attitudes even of certain people with real jobs, to their jobs. ‘I am a LAWYER,’ shouts one profile. ‘I am a SOCIAL ENTREPRENUER’. ‘I am a LEFT-WING ACADEMIC AND WRITER’. But these are not jobs, in the sense of being something one labours at: these are just things that one is nominally occupied at during the temporal space when they are not on the network.
- Jacob Bar Nathan, July 2011
