2 :: THE REINVENTION OF PERSONS
Self-help, too, for all its crass commercialism, is intricately interwoven with reinvention
in a more strategic sense. Like the reinvented “new you” which the genre promises,
self-help offers various tools of reinvention as a means of preparing for the attainment
of a desired lifestyle. This is what the British sociologist Anthony Giddens calls “strategic
life-planning” or “life-plan calendars” (1991:85). Strategic life-planning centres on an
adherence to certain timing devices for the realization of lifestyle change desired by the
individual, and Giddens argues that self-help literature makes clear the importance of
preparing for the future in a world which is increasingly post-traditional in orientation.
Such timing devices, or tools of reinvention, offered by self-help literature range from,
say, programmes of self-writing (the keeping of a journal, or autobiography) to five easy
steps for taking charge of one’s life. Understanding that the individual is responsible for
the building and re-building of life-plan calendars, and that persons must continuously
engage in the making of their identities, is a pervasive feature of the selfhelp genre.
Self-help, on this view, is essentially an endeavour of reinvention.
It is, though, and perhaps above all, speed that counts most in the negotiation of
self-help today. We live, as Milan Kundera brilliantly put it, in a culture of “pure
speed” (1995:1) – where lines of flight from person to person, organization to
organization, at once proliferate and intensify. This is well illustrated, for example, by
considering self-help books currently on the market. Title after title underscores how
the time/space architecture of our lives is driven by the pressures of pure speed. The
4 Hour Body, 34 Instant Stress Busters, Instant Self-Confidence, Fast Road to Happiness:
these are just some of the books currently available to women and men seeking to
refashion, restructure and rebuild their personal lives. But, as I say, professional life
is also ripe for a menu of continual instant change. 1 Hour Negotiator, 30 Minute
Career Fast Track Kit, Fast Thinking, Fast Track to the Top and The Attention Deficit
Workplace: professionals the world over are busy remaking and reorganizing their
careers on the pure speed model promoting the faster, quicker, lighter.
In this emergent cultural fantasy tailored for the twenty-first century, professionalism
turns into performance, presentation and public relations. The mantra runs as
follows: just as there are no constraints on the individual self, so there are no natural
limits to promoting speed in one’s personal and professional life.
CELEBRITY CULTURE: REINVENTION AS PUBLIC OBSESSION
Celebrity is at once astonishingly mesmerizing and mindnumbingly dull, crazily
libertarian and depressingly conformist. Our culture of celebrity feigns the new, the
contemporary, the up-to-date, as it recycles the past. Celebrities are constantly on
the brink of obsolescence, of appearing out of date. Today Lady Gaga, yesterday