Author: Dr. Patricia Neville Affiliation: Dept of Humanities and Social Studies, Institute of Technology, Tralee, Kerry, Ireland Email address: patricia_nevilleno1@hotmail.com Title of abstract: Book-marking the self: the rituals of buying and reading self-help books Abstract: Many commentators have argued that contemporary society has become increasing reflexive and with this a return in interest with the self- as both an ontological property that can be ‘rediscovered’ by the atomised social actor, and as an existential project or lifestyle complete with a set of ‘life skills’ (e.g. Foucault, 1988, Moscovici, 1990, Giddens, 1991, Bauman, 1992). This objectification of the ‘self’ in late modernity has taken many forms but this paper would like to address the increasing psychological nature of the self as a prescriptive discourse through the global cultural industry of self-help books. Self-help and self-awareness books have had a consistently high rating in the American bestseller lists over the past thirty years (Smith, 2002) with domestic sales reaching $9.6 billion in 2006 (Seate, 2007). This strong consumptive relationship with self-help books is not an exclusively American phenomenon but can also be found to be on the increase in Britain, Japan, China, and India to name a few. Despite the huge popularity of self-help books, the practice of buying and reading self-help books and the many anecdotal claims made by their readers that these books have ‘changed’ their lives the phenomenon of self-help has received very little scholarly attention. In this paper I would like to redress this academic blind spot and investigate the impact that self-help books and their message of self-knowledge and self-awareness have on their atomised reader. A discursive analysis of self-help books will be undertaken with the purpose of exposing the ideological claims of self-help books. This alternative interpretative framework will be tested against the views and responses of regular self-help readers. By combining these two methods it is hoped to expose the nature of self-help books and locate the place that the search for self-knowledge and self-care have acquired in contemporary society. Introduction It has become increasing self-evident that the concept of the self and the search for well-being has grown in symbolic, social and political capital in recent years. Ipseity, or “the quality of having or possessing a ‘self’’(Sawday, 1997:30) has always been an important reference point for western society 1 . Throughout modernity, various ‘verbal rituals’ (Foucault, 1971:19) have been available through which we can experience and partake in a discourse that reassures our existence and visibility as a knowing subject. In Christianity the notion of the self was something that was to be discouraged, denied and repressed in favour of the ‘greater good’ (Foucault, 1986). In 1 As a meta-narrative of modernity, the notion of the self helps to legitimise the ‘myth of original unity’ (Haraway, 1991:151) by promoting the assumed universality and homogeneous nature of social experience (Haraway, 1991:151). From this, the rational knowing subject helped to produce and legitimate an essentialist category of ‘us’ (Haraway, 1991:155) upon which a political system based on a notion of the ‘common good’ would emerge. In this respect, our individual sense of self is established as a function of variance, where our sense of self is assured through the rational assumption that we are not like another living person and that our sense of self exists as an intimately private property, independent of external or collective forces.