Marketing as Governmentality
”[…] to understand the relationship between marketing and consumption is to acknowledge an ethics of the self that links the ongoing production of lifestyle, identity, and self to consumption and the market (Finn,2009). From this perspective, marketing represents a perpetual questioning machine asking the modern consumer to make a project of oneself based on ongoing self-examination and querying; to look at oneself as a set of constantly multiplying problems (too fat, too wrinkly, too boring, etc) and as yet unrealised potentialities; to translate them into personal needs and desires; and to look to the market for solutions. Marketing, as a product and producer of our contemporary obsession with a mode of existence centered on the “endless, self-creative project of making yourself and your life a work of art” (Nelson, 2008, 12), positions itself as an enabler- a kind of support system and resource center- for the work of continuos self-realization and self-production (cf. Binkley, 2007). In cultivating oneself as a form of “human capital” requiring constant investment in, and updating of, one’s individuality and capabilities, the responsibility for being interesting, happy, creative, healthy and beautiful rests with the individual; marketing seeks to ensure that practices of self-problematization never cease (Jambet, 1992) and that the resulting work of self-care is channelled through the freedom of market choice” (Zwick & Cayla, 2011, 7-8)
