(Ruhr-University Bochum)
Oppositional Lifestyle, Self-Help and Complicity: The Ambiguous Dis/Orientations of Minimalism
Taking its cue from Mark Sander’s observation that opposing something entails being complicit with the language and parameters of what you oppose (1), this project explores the ways in which lifestyles that oppose hegemonic structures of American neoliberal capitalist society are rooted in and folded back into the socio-cultural hegemony that they seek to resist, at the same time that they may still envision ways of being and living that open up ‘other’ relations to oneself and others. Specifically, I focus minimalism as a prominent lifestyle trend in twenty-first century American popular culture, to investigate how ‘oppositional’ lifestyles, social activism, and neoliberal ideologies converge, clash and fold into one another in a twenty-first century American cultural context, in which critical debates about social discrimination, wokeness, environmentalism, and anti-capitalism, have become increasingly visible and part of mainstream media culture.
As a form of ‘oppositional being/living’ minimalism has been promoted via discourses of self-help, including self-help books and their related social media. Historically, self-help cannot only be linked to specifically American notions of self-hood (e.g. ideas of the ‘self-made man’), but notions of self-help have also been central to American activist movements such as the feminist movement of the 1960s/70s and the black emancipation movement of the same time (cf. e.g. McGee 2). The contemporary self-help industry has, however, primarily been linked to a neoliberal rationality, where ‘happiness’ – promoted as key goal (cf. e.g. Ahmed 3) – equals ‘self-improvement’ and hegemonic social relations are solidified rather than contested (cf. e.g. Riley et. al. 4). Self-help literature functions as a technology of governmentality (Foucault 5, cf. Rimke 6) that instructs people in how to live – most often in ways that are in accordance with hegemonic, culturally and historically specific, ideals of subjectivity. Significantly, the past years have witnessed the increase and increasing visibility of social movements and forms of ‘oppositional’ living in American popular culture that challenge dominant social structures promoted through neoliberal self-help narratives also in and through self-help media like books and blogs. One form of ‘oppositional’ or ‘alternative’ living that has emerged in this context and that has been increasingly incorporated into mainstream media culture is minimalism.
Minimalism as a western lifestyle is based on the idea of ‘reduction.’ In order to live a simple life that rejects the capitalist impulses of consumer culture, minimalists eliminate ‘excess’ and focus on ‘essentials’. As a movement or lifestyle trend minimalism has been associated with decluttering, tiny houses, self-sustainable and environmentally friendly living, as well as a ‘simplistic’ aesthetics and design. While seeking to address the problems of consumer culture and offering alternative ways of living, minimalism has been critiqued as an individual(ist) lifestyle choice that does not function as social movement nor escape its entanglement in capitalism and global inequalities (cf. Rodriguez 7). This project will elucidate how as social activism, ‘oppositional lifestyle,’ or alternative way of being, minimalism has transformed and simultaneously been engulfed in American mainstream culture and its hegemonic structures, not least due to its popularization via popular media like self-help books and blogs. By analyzing different forms of minimalist advice, I seek to explore how minimalism is complicit with the ideological, generic and affective structures of the genres and media platforms through which it is promoted, at the same time that this complicity does not preclude minimalist advice from the possibility to chart ‘different’ ways of living. Such potentiality, as I will show, results from both minimalism’s ambiguous dis/orientations and the heterogeneity or diversification of contemporary minimalist advice.
(1) Sanders, Mark. 2002. Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid. Durham.
(2) McGee, Micki. 2005. Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life. Oxford.
(3) Ahmed, Sarah. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC.
(4) Riley, Sarah, et.al. 2019. “The Gendered Nature of Self-Help”. In Feminism and Psychology 29.1, pp. 3–18.
(5) Foucault, Michel. 2003. “Technologies of the Self”. In The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. by Paul Rabinow and Nikolas S. Rose, New York, pp. 145-169.
(6) Rimke, Heidi Marie. 2000. “Governing Citizens Through Self-Help Literature”. In Cultural Studies 14.1., pp. 61-78.
(7) Rodriguez, Jason. 2018. “The US Minimalist Movement: Radical Political Practice?“ In Review of Radical Political Economics 50.2, pp. 286–296.