'Meat, Mask, Burden' Probing the contours of the branded 'self'

This article will argue that the 'reflexive project of the self' (Giddens) has become an explicit form of labour under post-Fordist capital in the form of 'self-branding'. Here, work on the self is purposeful and outer-directed; self-production is heavily narrated, marked by the visual codes of the mainstream culture industry, and subject to the extraction of value. The article will explore inflections of self-branding across several different mediated forms. Contemporary marketing literature identifies the construction of a branded persona as a central strategy in the negotiation of increasingly complex corporate environments. Recently the practice and logic of personal branding has moved out of the boardroom and into the television studio. Television shows such as The Apprentice and American Idol invent a narrative of self-branding and simultaneously produce branded personae. Websites such as 2night.com extract value from partying young people; photographers take pictures at nightclubs and link them to advertisements online, blurring the distinction between product and consumer, private self and instrumental associative object. The logic and practice of self-branding is inflected differently again on social network sites such as facebook.com or myspace.com, which are inventories of various types of 'selves'. These forms of self-branding, found across several different kinds of media, illustrate the erosion of any meaningful distinction between notions of the self and capitalist processes of production and consumption.