Rob Horning has written a terrifically thought-provoking short essay on “the production of the self.” It is so interesting that I’m going to post the bulk of it, and offer parenthetical commentary:

One might object that no labor is in fact “useless” if someone is willing to pay for it. If that is so, then we will naturally begin to increasingly locate our self-worth in net worth, since social recognition is not conferred by the quality of our social contribution in these useless fields (though the examples given, heath care and education, are not particularly useless, just somewhat immaterial).

There is a conceptual leap here. A parallel development, as Tyler has discussed, is the rise of “threshold earners,” who don’t locate their self-worth in net worth. Rather, they evaluate themselves according to the evolving habits, standards, and expectations of narrower cultural groups. And on the health care and education front, I think that Horning may have missed Avent’s point, which we could relate to productivity levels. As Rick Hess has observed, student-teacher ratios have markedly declined since 1970, leaving us with 3.2 million public school teacher rather than 2.2 million. Educational outcomes haven’t improved despite this “improvement” in student-teacher ratios, which suggests that some of this additional labor has proven, in some sense, “useless.” Yet those 1 million workers are earning a wage, and they are part of a respected profession. They are undoubtedly engaging in work that is intellectually, emotionally, and physically taxing. It just happens that we could do something like the same work with fewer, more effectively deployed bodies.

In fairness to Horning, I don’t think he’s just working within what he takes to be the Avent-Cowen framework.

But if the “useless” work—and I am thinking more of designy-ness, creative-class hucksterism, culture industry, etc., than care work—must be subsidized via the government through a redistribution regime, theoretically something that might look like a negative income tax (Guy Sorman recently defended the idea in City Journal here), then what we make (money or stuff) can’t testify to our personal value either. We’re doing useless things and collecting the dole like the rest of our peers, so what makes us stand out?

This is a very interesting idea. I wonder if we need to even make the leap to a NIT, given the many ways redistribution shapes the lives of all Americans, e.g., various forms of middle-class redistribution through the tax code

Hence the field of consumption becomes the field of distinction and social recognition as well, and consuming becomes a sort of semiotic labor that absorbs more and more of our natural inclination to do something regarded as socially useful.

This does strike me as compelling, and it bears more than passing resemblance to the Stevenson-Wolfers analysis as modern marriage as a consumption partnership.

(And Shop Class as Soulcraft-style retro crafts like carpentry and gardening and Etsy-ism start to register as consumerist hobbies, not “real” production.) Social media supplies the factory and distribution center for this sort of work, as well as the scoreboard in the form of data about just how many people are paying attention to you. We produce content and links to try to “connect” to others, that is, have them regard us as socially necessary the way, say, in the 19th century the village blacksmith was vitally necessary when the horse you were traveling on pulled up lame. (Okay, that was a somewhat far-flung, Downton Abbey-inspired example.) The point is we want to feel useful, and there are fewer opportunities for that in the sphere of production. So consumption becomes production, and the main way that happens is to make what we consume more salient and more socially significant, to have it inflect an ever-shifting language of status signifiers.
This whole set-up, in turn, fuels the view that narcissism and hipsterism are increasing society-wide, since self-production in the mode of marketing copy (developing the personal brand) is more and more what people do, if not for a living, then simply to appear, to be socially relevant.

This last part sounds roughly right to me, and I’m struck by how much it resonates with Kay Hymowitz’s recent laments about youngish American men. My main disagreement with Horning is that I take a far more sanguine view of what he describes as “narcissism and hipsterism,” seeing it as something akin to the democratization of personality. There was a time when only the rich were secure enough, socially as well as economically, to be self-inventing eccentrics, and now something like that is available to a much larger slice of the population in the advanced market democracies. This might be irritating, but I think it has a significant upside.

The rise of “self-production in the mode of marketing copy” is occurring alongside disruptive innovation in the entertainment industry, which UCLA sociologist Gabriel Rossman convincingly described in November of last year. As Hollywood dies, peer production is filling the vacuum. And as we cultivate eccentricity, we’re creating new niches that a centralized entertainment industry could never hope to serve. Horning’s dark scenario of a more narcissistic culture could mean a more stimulating, vibrant popular culture over time.