When Life is not Enough: Making More of the Self

Abstract

Fat Face, the international outdoor clothes retailer, liberally smatter motivational adages over their merchandise: ‘just living is not enough’ is stamped on packets of buttons in their summer 2010 range (FatFace.com). Fat Face invites us to add value to our ordinary lives – suitably clothed of course. What interests me at the start of a chapter charged with the task of introducing the self in relation to lifestyle media is the use of ‘just’ in the context of living. Colloquially ‘just’ can mean ‘barely’, ‘simply’ and ‘no more than’. To be ‘barely living’ suggests passivity, a rudderless life that rolls up and over us, a life scarcely noticeable. Taking another meaning of ‘just’, simply living seems to target a familiar excuse – if we felt that there was ‘enough’ to do simply coping with tempo of, say, employment and the irregular rhythms of domestic life and excuse ourselves from Fat Face’s invitation, we are advised that we risk being ‘no more than’ those modulations. If any uncertainty remains, we are cautioned that a life without added value ‘is not enough’. This packet of buttons then suggests that just living is a mark of failure and missed opportunities. What is striking is that ordinary life can be imagined – can be intelligible – as such. How the ordinary is imagined in this way is explored in this chapter.

To start with a clean slate. English Proverb.

The unmarked character of the one very often becomes the condition of articulation of the other.

Judith Butler (Bell, 1999, p. 168)