Commitment to Continuous Learning Zygmunt Bauman
I'm presently enjoying re-reading Bauman's major works – I thought offering up my summaries might be useful to some students. I will eventually further summarise/ comment/ critique, but in the meantime.. the raw summary of chapter two of Liquid Modernity….
Bauman begins by pointing out that Huxley's and Orwell's dystopias were very much products of their time. Although they clearly had their differences, what they both shared in common was a fear of individual freedom being reduced to a sham ; both felt the world was heading in the direction of an ever increasing split between remote controllers and the controlled. Just like Plato's inability to imagine a utopia without slaves, Huxley and Orwell could not imagine a world without a supreme controller's office. Today's Liquid Modern society, the type of dystopia imagined by Orwell and Huxley makes no sense.
Capitalism Heavy and Light
In this section, Bauman introduces his by now classic concepts of heavy and light (or liquid) modernity.
He casts 'heavy capitalism' as being a like Nigel Swift's notion of the 'Joshua discourse' – centrally organized and rigidly bounded. In heavy Capitalism, order is all important, and to be seen as having legitimate existence, something must serve a purpose that fits the overall end. In such a 'modern' system – the system is like God, it is the reason for its existence, and its perpetuation is the goal. Under such a discourse, it was the capitalist managers of business who controlled things – who decided what was rational and what was not, thus determining the range of viable alternatives available to actors.
The world sustaining the Joshua discourse was the Fordist world, which in its heyday was simultaneously a model of industrialisation, of accumulation and of regulation. At a deeper level, the Fordist model was also an epistemological building site – It was about binary oppositions such as manager and managed, design and execution, freedom and obedience.
Heavy Capitalism was fixed to the ground , tied to one place (as in the Fordist factory), it seemed set to stay and it seemed as if there was no alternative to it. Despite the seemingly oppressive nature of this heavy period of history, this at least gave people a sense certainty, predictability and rootedness, and people generally had jobs for life, they knew where they stood, labour could 'dig in' and make deals.
All of this solidity is gone under Light Capitalism. NB Bauman here doesn't actually say much about this concept, possibly in an attempt to mirror the 'ambiguous nature' of this current mode?
He limits himself to saying that nowadays capital travels light, it can stop-over almost anywhere, and is no longer has to stay put. Labour, on the other hand, remains as immobilised as it was in the past – but the place it was once fixed to has lost its solidity. Bauman characterises the passengers of 'Light Capitalism' as being on an aircraft who have discovered that….
'to their horror the pilot's cabin is empty and that there is no way to extract from the mysterious black box.. any information about where the plane is flying, where it is going to land, who is to choose the airport, and whether there are any rules which would allow the passengers to contribute to the safety of their arrival.'
(p59) Have car, can travel
In Heavy Modernity, we new what the ends were, although there may have been some level of uncertainty over the means whereby we should achieve those ends. However Liquid Modernity introduces a new level of uncertainty as we no longer know what the ends are. Furthermore, in the absence of a supreme office, it is now up to the individual to decide what these ends should be.
Since there are now more life experiences than we can experience in a lifetime, even when we achieve something, there is still more to be achieved, and thus in the Liquid Modern society, are always becoming something but never finally arriving finally.
On this note, Bauman offers up a nice quote by Zbyszko Melosik and Tomasz Szudlarek:
'living amidst apparently infinite chances offers the sweet taste of 'freedom to become anybody'. This sweetness has a bitter after-taste, though, since while the 'becoming' bit suggests that nothing is over yet and everything lies ahead, the condition of 'being somebody' which that becoming is meant to secure, portends the umpire's final end of game whistle: 'you are no more free when the end has been reached; you are not yourself when you have become somebody'.
This state of unfinishedness, incompletenesss and underdetermination is full of anxiety and risk, but its opposite brings no unadulterated pleasure either, since it forecloses what freedom needs to stay open.
Bauman uses a Buffet Table analogy to describe this world of possibilities….
'the world full of possibilities is like a buffet table set with mouth-watering dishes, too numerous for the keenest of eaters to hope to taste them all. The diners are consumers and the most taxing and irritating of the challenges consumers confront is the need to establish priorities' – which dishes to forgo that have never yet been experienced… the means are obvious, but the question of 'have I used my means to the best advantage' remains.'
Bauman rounds off this section by pointing out that (or this might be inferring it!) Liquid Modern Capitalism requires consumers…. and there is no objective function of the consumer other than to carry on making choices. To make the choice between what to consume is the telos, the purpose the end goal. This means the consumer can never be wrong. If we accept this role of consumer, this means consigning ourselves to a life of perpetual choice and uncertainty.
(63) Stop Telling Me Show Me
Heavy Fordism had clear authority figures. However, in the new capitalism, these don't disappear, it's just there are more of them and none of them hold their power for long.
Bauman now makes the distinction between Heavy Modernity's authorities as 'leaders' and Liquid Modernity's authorities as 'counsellors –
| Leaders | Counselors |
| A by-product and necessary supplement to the world which aimed at the 'good society'. Are to be followed, demanding and expecting discipline. Act as two way translators between individual good and the 'good of us all' (between Mill's private worries and public issues). Politics with a capital P. Use the word 'we' – offers the possibility of collective solutions to social problems. | Exist in a Liquid Modern World in which there is not only no commitment to the hope of agreeing on the 'characteristics of the good society', but where people generally believe that there is no such thing as society. Are to be hired and fired. Need to earn the right to be heard by currying favor with would-be listeners. Are wary of stepping beyond the closed doors of the private, and so offer only therapeutic means to fight off private worries – life-politics politics with a small 'p'. After counseling, the private individual is as alone as when he started. |
The crucial thing about advice offered by counsellors is that the counselled is always referred to things he can do himself to put him in the right situation. The source of one's unhappiness is always diffuse, never rooted in society. Solutions offered to personal worries typically come in the form of individual examples…
What people today want is a living example of how they can solve their own problems, rather than a leader to tell them. Bauman provides the case of Jane Fonda as an example of one of these 'examples'. Fonda took responsibility for her own body, treated it like a project, and made her own way, through her own efforts. The message here is 'I am to blame and to shame if I err.'
Other examples of popular examples are celebrities and Bauman also casts the chat show in a similar light – On chat shows, it is people 'like me' who explain their stories. He explains the popularity of chat shows because they are closer to me, and there are more examples to be learnt from. Ultimately, however, chat shows legitimise filling public space with private concerns (that never become public issues).
The current definition of the public sphere seems to be the right of the public to play out their private dramas and the right of the rest of us to watch. As an example of this Bauman reminds us of how we are interested in the private lives of politicians, and much less interested in their political careers and policies.
(p72) Compulsion turned into addiction
Looking for counsel, guidance and examples becomes an addiction, because no matter how much of these we receive, none ever deliver on their promise of fulfilling us, they all have their use by date, and so we must move onto the next fix. This is similar to the short-lived satisfactions gained through the consumption of products, the satisfaction gained through each materialistic attachment eventually fades, and so we move on to the next one. As a result, we become 'content' that we can simply 'stay in the race', and abandon any attempt to reach the finish line.
The archetype of staying in the race is shopping – and today this doesn't just mean going to the mall – pretty much anything we do today takes the form of shopping if, by shopping, we mean scanning the assortment of possibilities, testing, touching, comparing and finally choosing.
To quote Bauman directly…
' the avid and never ending search for new and improved examples and recipes for life is also a variety of shopping, and a most important variety, in the twin lessons that our happiness depends on our competence but that we are personally incompetent, or not as competent as we could or should be if we only tried harder.
(On a personal note this sounds like the message we give out to our students on a daily basis at our sixth form college!)
There are so many areas of life in which we now need to be more competent and Bauman now lists the type of things we can shop around for such as job skills; numerous aspects of advice to do with relationships; how to save money; how to cook (cheer's Jamie); and how to use our time more efficiently (the discourse of time-management is probably the one I find the most irritating.)
Bauman now distinguishes between 'need', 'desire' and 'the wish' to describe how the nature of consumption has changed. He suggests that consumerism has for a long time been more than about just satisfying needs, but has been (for many decades) about satisfying consumers' self-generated desires. Bauman casts needs as having some kind of objective basis, while desire is subjective, and required considerable resources to be employed by producers to generate. Desire, however, although flightier and shorter-lived than needs had specific objects as its focus, and it was at least rooted in something, but today consumerism has moved beyond this – it is now focused on what Bauman calls 'the wish' – which is much more gaseous and spontaneous and rooted in fantasy rather than reality.
To 'elucidate' the difference between the desire and the wish –
Desire – is fluid and expandable, based on half-illicit liaisons with fickle and plastic dreams of the authenticity of an 'inner self' waiting to be expressed. The facilitation of desire is founded upon comparison, vanity, envy and the 'need' for self-approbation.
The Wish – completes the liberation of of the pleasure principle, purging and disposing of the last residues of the 'reality principle' impediments… Nothing underlies the immediacy of the wish. The purpose is casual, unexpected and spontaneous. It has a dream like quality of both expressing and fulfilling a wish, and like all wishes, is insincere and childish.
(p76) The Consumer's Body
The seminal difference between post-modern and modern society is that post-modern society engages its members primarily as consumers rather than producers.
Life organised around the producer's role tends to be normatively regulated… There are bottoms lines outlining what one needs to survive as a producer, and there are realistic upper limits to ambition which one 's peers will make sure are kept within. The major concern in a society of producers is then that of conformity, of settling securely between the upper and lower limits.
'Life organised around consumption, on the other hand, must do without norms: it is guided by seduction, ever rising desires and volatile wishes – no longer by normative regulation' – Luxuries make little sense in the society of consumers because the point is to turn today's luxuries into tomorrows necessities, and to take the waiting out wanting. There is no norm to transform luxuries into needs, and thus the major concern in a consumer society is that of adequacy, or being ever ready to rise to the opportunity as it comes, to be able to respond to new desires as they arise, and get more out of new consumer experiences.
Health was the standard of modern society, while fitness is the standard in the society of consumers.
Health implies coming up to a normative standard that is required to do the work required of you in a society. Being fit, on the other hand requires having a flexible, adaptable body, it means being ready for new, testing experiences. Whereas health is about sticking to the norms, fitness is about smashing through those norms to set (temporarily) new ones.
'Life organised around fitness. promises a lot of victorious skirmishes but never the final victory. There is no final goal in the pursuit of health. The pursuit of fitness is the state of perpetual self-scrutiny, self-reproach and also self-deprivation, and so continuous anxiety.
The consequences of a society organised around 'fitness'
Ever new states of the body become the target for medical intervention
second the idea of disease (dis ease) becomes blurred. It is no longer a one off by a perpetual fight.
Finally the meaning of a healthy life never stands still!
(p80) Shopping as a rite of exorcism
This never ending quest calls upon the consumer to be active in their pursuit of maintaining their health. Being healthy does not require abstinence, rather it requires ever more shopping around and staying on top of the latest 'health trends'.
Common interpretations of shopping around are that this activity is a manifestation of dormant materialistic and hedonistic instincts, but another part, and a necessary complement of all such explanations is that the shopping compulsion-turned-into-addiction is an uphill struggle against acute, nerve-breaking uncertainty and the annoying, stultifying feeling of insecurity.
People shop because they want security, they want certainty, but it is not in the final product they seek security, it is in the very act of shopping, of picking and choosing itself.
(p82) Free to shop – Or so it seems
People think they cannot own the world fully enough, but it appears to them that other people's lives are fuller than theirs. Distance blurs reality, and other people's lives seems like works of art, and so we try to make our lives appear as works of art too.
That work of art which we want to mould out of the friable stuff of life is called 'identity'. Whenever we speak of identity, there is at the back of our minds a faint image of harmony, logic, consistency, all those things which the flow of our experience seems – to our perpetual despair – so grossly and abominably to lack. The search for identity is the ongoing struggle to arrest or slow down the flow, to solidify the fluid, to give form to the formless. We struggle to deny or at least to cover up the awesome fluidity just below the thin wrapping of the form; we try to avert our eyes from sights which they cannot pierce or take in. Yet far from slowing the flow, let alone stopping it, identities are more like the spots of crust hardening time and again before they have time to cool and set. So there is need for another trial, and another – and they can be attempted only by clinging desperately to things solid and tangible and thus promising duration…. In the words of Deleuze and Guattari: 'Desire constantly couples continuous flow and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented.'
Today our identities are volatile, and because of this we increasingly see the ability to shop around in the supermarket of identities and hold it as long as I desire as desirable.
The experienced, lived identity can only be held together with the adhesive of fantasy… and fashion fits the bill here especially well… just the right stuff, at it provides ways of exploring limits without commitment to action. The ultimate freedom is the freedom to have an identity, to be different, with a nod and wink to the idea that we are all playing the game, but because this game requires us to buy into things, we need stuff to express our identities, we are not really free.
And in today's world the fashions we use to identify ourselves have built in obsolescence, and so we are required to keep on top of things- more effort. (Lasch) As a result we have moved from a Panotopicon to a Synopticon – where spectacles take the place of observers without losing any of the disciplinary power of their predecessor. NB the few used to watch the many, now the many watch the few. This appears in the guise of freewill but it is really not!
In society we and celebrities and experts, we all construct and present fake identities – but sometimes we see interviews (possible on chat shows) which aim to get to the 'real person' – this is equally as nonsense, this is a myth…..
In our society notions of authenticity and inauthenticity are moot, because what is more important is the ability to choose, to be on the move, and in such a society.
There are consequences of living in such a society – on the one had there is the uncertainty and anxiety, on the other your ability to shop around depends on your local in society, which is especially bad for the poor, because in a synoptic society of shopping/watching addicts, the poor cannot avert their eyes.
(89) Divided we shop
In a consumer society with an ever faster turnaround of products -each product's appeal is shorter-lived, this is more of a problem for the poor who cannot afford to keep up with consumer trends, less of a problem for the wealthy. Being wealthy also means you are more able to avoid the negative consequences of your consumption.
He now uses Gidden's concepts of plastic sexuality, confluent love and the pure relationship to illustrate this – these fluid forms of relationships, when they come to an end, are clearly going to have some who come out of them better than than others, especially where children are involved.
To sum up – the mobility and flexibility of identification which characterises the shopping around type of life are not so much vehicles of emancipation as the instruments of the redistribution of freedom. They are for that reason mixed blessings.
Comments to follow…
Source: https://revisesociology.com/2017/01/24/summary-of-liquid-modernity-chapter-two-individuality/