ABSTRACT
I follow Paterson in viewing advertising as “the poetry of capitalism” (Paterson, 2006), so, although a slogan such as this one might seem completely innocent, it actually brings forth a certain aesthetics and underlying logic concerning how one should live and think about life as a person in the 21st century. This is related, I shall argue, to the dominant views of psychiatric subjectivity today, found also in the logic of current diagnostics, which are by and large quantitative, but which thereby fail to understand the qualitative aspects of human self-identity, as articulated, for example, by Charles Taylor in the last couple of decades. I shall argue that the rush toward a quantifi ed subjectivity – with psychiatric diagnoses playing a key role in the process – can be seen as an attempt to create a kind of solidity in an era that Zygmunt Bauman has otherwise addressed as liquid modernity.
