Help Yourself

Cultural Studies or the "new humanism" sells itself as a
revolutionary method of investigation or an innovative way of being
-- creative, flexible -- all of this appears rather benign, until
business culture begins to sell "revolutionary and innovative" to
consumers as ITS identity.

If the 18th and 19th centuries were times of enormous struggle in
Europe to forge a new subject, original, private, bourgeois,
discerning, generous,sentimental, creative and distinctive, the 21st
century seems to be marked by the appearance of a new entity --the
Brand, or the Corporate Name and Logo that wants to assume those
"heroic" qualities of the bourgeois individual. In the 90s New
Economy, business culture was supposed to be a Messianic force that
would liberate us from oppression at work.

Remember how the New Economy workplace was supposed to be filled with
employees playing hacky sack and doing yoga? Remember how it was a
place where the boss and the mail clerk dressed alike, reflecting the
lack of both hierarchy and bureaucracy? Remember how New Economy
businesses were supposed to be as flexible as ballerinas and and
creative as Vincent Van Gogh? And successful entrepreneurs were
represented as the apotheosis of the self-actualized human being.

In the therapeutic language of self-improvement manuals, each
creative, flexible person exists in a purely monadic space. What is
absent from this world is a notion of contradiction or conflict. This
is why self help culture and business culture are deeply
anti-democratic.