Marketing Selves

Abstract

This article examines civil society initiatives in Hungary which urge individuals to re-make themselves as entrepreneurs and unfettered free-agents. These projects cast the subjects of formerly state socialist regimes as prone to pessimism, dissimulation, and manipulation, and contrast them to a valorized ‘Western’ Self. Treating these implicit classificatory schema as a species of Occidentalism, I discuss how the Western Self has been understood as self-authoring, in contrast to its determined Others. Among these Others were the subjects of state socialism, figured as the products of a totalizing system. I discuss the origins of this figuration, and draw upon Bourdieu’s work to situate the ambivalent responses that greet civil society projects. I suggest that in the name of bridging differences between erstwhile Cold War adversaries, civil society projects rein-scribe the transition away from state socialism as rupture rather than as continuity; and are part of a larger project of re-imagining Selves and Others in the post-Cold War period.