Abstract
Self-construction is a process by which a person exercises self-governing agency and fashions his or her own identity, creatively weaving together the various values, beliefs, loves, and aesthetic tendencies that ultimately make a self. Though consumer culture seems to provide the raw materials necessary for self-construction using the meaning-making and signaling capabilities of products and brands, consumption-based projects of self-creation will likely falter because of structural features of desire-formation in that setting. For projects of self-creation to be meaningful, the choices about what kind of identity to form must (1) flow from reflective processes and (2) be based on grounds that the agent him or herself can endorse—two conditions necessary for self-governing agency. Yet desires in consumer culture are often hardened into what Kant calls “passions,” a kind of desire that precludes and overcomes reflective processes thus undermining the self-governing agency that is required for self-construction.
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