Successful creators oscillate between being the firm and merely being its product

Evidence

The second point we want to draw from this quote, which is a point we’ll return to, is that Star conflates the activities of his businesses with himself. The production of makeup, the manufacturing of products—these are framed as things that Star, personally, does himself. This is a contradiction: Star wants to equate his business with himself but, simultaneously, maintains a distance between the two in which “he” is merely one product sold by his business as a whole. We are seemingly left with a synecdoche in which part and whole continuously oscillate. Is Star (the “brand,” the “image”) a part that appears, standing in for the whole of Star’s business? Or is Star (the person, the capitalist) the “whole” that unifies and effectively is all the different corporations and investments for which he takes credit? — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 301

Categorization

• DEFINE: The synecdoche oscillation (part/whole) is the mechanism resolving how corporate personhood and the influencer-as-firm combine in one person.
• XREF: Connects to the corporate-personhood legal fiction: the person is invoked to claim the company’s acts as their own while using the company to insulate the ‘person’ as an asset. Relevant to applying the framework to a real creator.
• DEEPTHINKING: The part-whole oscillation is a genuinely dense analytic hinge: it shows person and corporation mutually constitute rather than oppose each other through a continuous synecdoche that cannot be stabilized.