Zygmunt Bauman's Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?

Prolific Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has written several books over the past decade about consumerism -- which he for some reason prefers to call "the world of consumers" -- hence the verbose title of his most recent book, Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? -- in what he has dubbed the "liquid modern era." (He also dislikes the term postmodern, and this is his way of avoiding semantic arguments about what it precisely means.) There's not much suspense about the question the title poses: The answer, as you'd probably guess, is basically no.

It's a not a question you'd ask if you were actually optimistic about it. Bauman, while not as thoroughgoingly pessimistic as such past consumer-society critics as Jean Baudrillard, is still left dispiritedly positing utopian scenarios after laying out his grim analyses of our social situation -- he calls it a "battlefield" in the introduction -- which, in his view, technology is rapidly worsening. The characterological changes brought on by consumerism are accelerating, he argues, turning the democratic ideals of liberty, equality and brotherhood into the diminished qualities of security, parity and networking.

In Bauman's account -- and it is a familiar, comfortable story to anyone schooled in leftist, Adornoesque social theory -- the liquid modern world's problems start when aspects that traditionally limited our possibilities in the world (religion, geography, class, occupation, family, ethnicity) gradually became less restrictive, thanks mostly to capitalism's modus operandi of creative destruction. Things once regarded as more or less permanent or unmarketable were subsumed by the market, reified, branded, and made subject to neoclassical economic truths about privatization, rational choices, and marginal utility. No longer assigned a specific role in the community from birth, we are alienated, atomized, cut free as an individual, forced to make our place. This has tangible benefits, obviously, in expanding our freedom to act. But it also brought with it the scourges of insecurity and boundless responsibility. (This is Frankfurt school orthodoxy -- not unlike Erich Fromm's and Herbert Marcuse's ideas about freedom, in Escape From Freedom and One-Dimensional Man respectively.) "As Alain Ehrenberg convincingly argues," writes Bauman, who frequently selects choice quotes from other thinkers (one of the nice things about Bauman's book is that it serves as a kind of index to recent theoretical trends), "most common human sufferings tend to grow from the surfeit of possibilities, rather than from the profusion of prohibitions as they used to in the past" -- an insight he may have attributed to any number of behavioral economists as well. Overt coercion in the pre-consumerist world was replaced by the regime of flattering persuasion, which is just as coercive, only we feel like we are in control, volunteering to participate in it (we shop because we want to), making the meaningful choices (between the things supplied by the market to satisfy the needs it has trained us to adopt). "As Pierre Bourdieu had already signaled two decades ago, coercion is being replaced by stimulation, forceful imposition of behavioral patterns by seduction, policing of conduct by PR and advertising, and the normative regulation, as such, by the arousal of new needs and desires."

At this point, I'm nodding in agreement, but none of this is new -- this is more or less the case that all left-leaning thinkers have made about consumerism. It seduces us to control us, replaces the ideal freedom of citizens in the public sphere determining a future for society collectively with that of a a bunch of individuals free only to choose among doodads after having their brains filled with bafflegab.

But Bauman turns an interesting corner. He cites philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's notion of society as not a limit on our selfishness, as Freud, for instance, claimed in Civilization and Its Discontents, but as a limit on our boundless ethical responsibility to our fellow humans. "Using the vocabulary of Levinas, we may say that the principal function of society, 'with its institutions, universal forms, and laws,' is to make the essentially unconditional and unlimited responsibility for the Other both conditional (in selected, duly enumerated, and clearly defined circumstances) and limited (to a select group of 'others,' considerably smaller than the totality of humanity and, most important, narrower and thus more easily manageable)." Society may be not the force that stops the Hobbesan war of all against all, but "an outcome of tempering their endemic and boundless altruism with the 'order of egotism.' " (It's like bizarro Ayn Rand.) That altruism -- that feeling of ethical responsibility to others -- is an impossible, crippling burden. Only by curtailing it can we accomplish anything. But in doing that, we also curtail the spontaneous impulse Levinas believes that we have to trust and help others. And possibly we curtail the source of life's meaning.

The way consumer society allows us to escape from that responsibility -- its innovative method, perhaps -- is to train us to fix it on ourselves. "Responsibility now means, first and last, responsibility to oneself ('You owe this to yourself,' as the outspoken traders in relief from responsibility indefatigably repeat), while 'responsible choices' are, first and last, such moves as serve well the interests and satisfy the desires of the actor and stave off the need to compromise." The celebration in consumer society of individualism and our "right" to convenience mean that we have a duty to free ourselves from having to consider other people's needs -- and the market works to supply us the tools to avoid impinging human contact. It sells us ways to avoid having to deal with other people and the hassle they represent. "The privatized utopias of the cowboys and cowgirls of the consumerist era show vastly expanded 'free space' (free for myself, of course)," Bauman explains, "a kind of empty space of which the liquid-modern consumer, bent on solo performances and solo performances only, never has enough. The space consumers need and are advised on all sides to fight for can be conquered only by evicting other humans -- and particularly the kind of humans who care for others or may need care themselves." (This ties in another subject Bauman has written about frequently: the systematic exclusion from society of the victims of the Holocaust.)

Along with that championing of individuality and training of responsibility on ourselves instead of others comes a newfangled responsibility for shaping and projecting our own identity, which used to be dictated entirely by our circumstances but is now subject (seemingly) to our control. As a consequence, we are now all required to continually fashion our identity and project it in social symbols, which are supplied by the language of consumer goods and brands. In order to keep the consumer economy dynamic, the meaning of these symbols are constantly in the process of redefinition, and we adapt our identities to follow suit, let our identities function as brands for ourselves. What Bauman doesn't mention, but is sort of implied, is that in making identity formation a never-ending process, consumer society sells that process as pleasurable. Actually, it probably is in fact pleasurable -- it makes real life into a kind of daydream in which we can impersonate anyone and fantasize freely and openly, playing pretend games in public. And when you embrace novelty as an end in itself, it becomes a need easily (albeit temporarily) gratified. If you're a dog who likes chasing your tail, you'll never want for entertainment. The point is that pleasure comes not in some final achievement of the right identity, but in the multiplicity of identities always available to us, and the freedom we feel in swapping them out. If we were easily satisfied, it would take a lot to motivate us as workers (we could just sit in the park and watch butterflies rather than work overtime to buy a flat-screen). Not accidentally, our consumerist refusal to be easily pleased, to demand more, is routinely portrayed as a positive trait, a testament to our superior discrimination.

Bauman argues that we all are forced to become pseudo-artists, with our identity as our chief work, a kind of temporary installation in our own bodies. At the same time, any continuity between identities is discarded, leaving us living through a series of discrete moments in which it is possible for us to be anything. Bauman argues,

What follows is that the sole skill I really need to acquire and exercise if flexibility -- the skill of promptly getting rid of useless skills, the ability to quickly forget and to dispose of the past assets that have turned into liabilities, the skill of changing tacks and tracks at short notice and without regret, and of avoiding oaths of life-long loyalty to anything and anybody.

As individuals, we need to embrace capitalism's creative destruction at the personal level, seizing upon a moment's given opportunities with no recourse to past or future inclinations or sentimentalities. The most important aspect of that flexibility is the ability to forget -- to believe that we have always been at war with Eurasia. Skirts have always been knee-length. Crocs have always been stylish.

The institutionalized contempt for continuity encourages us to replace friendships with the network: "relations set by and sustained by network-type connectedness come close to the ideal of a 'pure relationship,' one based on easily dissolvable one-factor ties, with no determined duration, no strings attached, and unburdened by long-term commitments." What this gives individuals is "the comforting (even if ultimately counterfactual) feeling of total and unthreatened control over his or her obligations and loyalties." Of course, if you control obligations, they aren't exactly obligatory -- they are voluntary. That is what conceals from us the larger dimensions of our cultural obligations.

Bauman implicitly likens this situation to the notion of "groups of belonging" and the conditions of exclusion that set up the parameters of the Holocaust. The illusion of control may mask our obligations to play the game. The coercion to be a consumer is experienced generally as freedom (our ideology's accomplishment), but if you resist it, you run the risk of social exclusion -- not on a stateless-person-headed-to-concentration-camp level, but moving in that direction. "All of this may be intuited," Bauman writes, "from the dark premonitions that haunt them at night after a busy shopping day -- or from the warning that goes off when their bank account falls into the red and their unused credit reaches zero." To be without credit takes on multiple meanings -- you become worthless as a human being.

This is a roundabout way of point out that in a society where purchasing power is how we experience freedom, being poor means being very unfree. In other words, poverty really sucks, moreso than it did when society was less open. (Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation explores this simple truth at length.) The poor, and those who are sympathetic to them, or nostalgic for old roles, or repulsed by the identity shuffling were expeced to relish, perhaps "do not view this life as a kind of life that they themselves, given genuine liberty of choice, would wish to practice." But these people obviously need reeducation. "Those who go solely by what they believe they need, and are activated only by the urge to satisfy those needs, are flawed consumers and so also social outcasts." If you aren't worried about keeping in tune with the zeitgeist, you are seen to be expressing some kind of contempt for the socially-agreed-upon way of being happy.

It is often said of such people that they are indifferent if not downright hostile to freedom, or that they have not yet grown up and matured enough to enjoy it. Which implies that their nonparticipation in the style of life dominant ... tends to be explained by either ideologically aroused resentment of freedom or the inability to practice it.

If they only loved freedom a little more, they wouldn't be concerned with how the system is basically rigged to assure that they will never be regarded with dignity in the public sphere, that they will always seem helplessly out of touch. Their fashion backwardness seems to justify their social exclusion, as we are invited to see how they manifest their identity as an expression of their own poor opinion of themselves. "If 'to be free' means to be able to act on one's wishes and pursue the chosen objectives," Bauman notes, "the liquid-modern, consumerist version of the art of life may promise to all, but it delivers it sparingly and selectively."

So what do you do if you don't want to include yourself in the consumerist economy, you want to preserve an ethical code, but you don't want to risk living as a semi-persecuted outcast. Do you "go live in a jelly jar"? Bauman's text doesn't offer much in the way of answers. He urges that we become better educated in the sorts of things I was taught in civics class -- fundamentals about the how politics works and so on -- and that we become citizens instead of consumers. But it seems that in order for that to happen, citizenship will have to assume some of the technique of consumerism -- it will have to be able to generate the personal, individualistic pleasures we have come to expect from consumerism and which we now regard as the guiding purpose of our lives. We need to make the pursuit of happiness an explicitly political matter once again.

Anonymous authority (26 June 2008)

I've been on a kick where I'm reading works by outdated Frankfurt School thinkers -- first, Eros and Civilization by Herbert Marcuse, then Escape From Freedom by Erich Fromm. (Maybe I'll move on The Authoritarian Personality next.) Marcuse argues that economic productivity has moved us beyond scarcity as a motive, and therefore civilization should be capable of transcending Freud's reality principle, which asserts (as Marcuse interprets it) that we need to repress libidinal urges and channel them into alienated labor, into work conceived as a necessary evil. This transcendence, Marcuse argues, would be a matter of ceasing to repressive erotic impulses, a position that is easy to lampoon as a call to free love and orgies and pansexual abandon. (Because he is working in the hypersexualized Freudian context, he practically invites this interpretation.) But if one puts aside the polymorphous perversity, one can see a more useful ideal that Marcuse is sketching out, basically a utopian version of the grail of meaningful work for all: "The free development of transformed libido within transformed institutions, while eroticizing previously tabooed zones, time, and relations, would minimize the manifestations of mere sexuality by integrating them into a far larger order, including the order of work." If I'm understanding this correctly (the 1960s context of this book tempts me to use the word grok), he's saying that non-repressed society -- a culture that moved beyond capitalism's repressive reason and no longer mandated the "performance principle" -- would not be fixated on genital sex, but would instead suffuse social relations with the positive vibes of love. "The organism in its entirety becomes the substratum of sexuality, while at the same time the instinct's objective is no longer absorbed by a specialized function -- namely, that of bringing 'one's own genitals into contact with those of someone of the opposite sex.' " That fixation, he suggests, is the product of the repressive culture; in the utopian culture the joy limited to sexual intimacy would be accessible in basically any social activity (and bourgeois fictions like the nuclear family and "falling in love" would fall away). Then we would finally be free, without institutions working to make us repress our libidinous instincts and sacrifice the primal pleasures of sensuousness and free play.

Now, it would be easier to buy into this if it conjured up in me the vision of idealized Fourierist phlanastèries instead of the Manson family. But I get stuck on the dirty-hippie attempt to realize these ideals, shed their hang-ups and unleash free love, an effort doomed by the way it was embedded in a hostile culture and easily coopted and enticed by that culture. The lesson to seems to have been that one can't will oneself into the post-repressed state, the institutions that shape us -- the society in which who we are has meaning -- need to be changed before we can change. Efforts to set up alternative, independent societies are useful to the degree that their ideas are absorbed and shift the nature of the hegemonic culture, but in and of themselves, they are doomed to eventual failure.

Why? As Marcuse points out,

Civilization has to defend itself against the specter of a world which could be free. If society cannot use its growing productivity for reducing repression (because such usage would upset the status quo), productivity must be turned against the individuals; it becomes itself an instrument of universal control. Totalitarianism spreads over late industrial civilization wherever the interests of domination prevail upon productivity, arresting and diverting its potentialities.

The methods for doing this? Marcuse lays them out in a passage that seems to draw heavily from Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment: The "coordination of the private and public existence of spontaneous and required reactions. The promotion of thoughtless leisure activities, the triumph of anti-intellectual ideologies, exemplify the trend.... The individuals who relax in this uniformly controlled reality recall not the dream but the day, not the fairy tale but its denunciation. In their erotic relations, they 'keep their appointments' -- with charm, with romance, with their favorite commercials." Technology is not helping. In a passage that would please Nicholas Carr, he writes, "With the control of information, with the absorption of individual into mass communication, knowledge is administered and confined. The individual does not really know what is going on; the overpowering machine of education and entertainment unites him with all the others in a state of anesthesia from which all detrimental ideas tend to be excluded." Think of the internet in this light, and there might be reason to fear Google, which is nothing if not an administrator of knowledge, perhaps the most efficient the world has ever seen.

Marcuse says that the non-repressive utopia will be based on "purposiveness without purpose" and "lawfulness without law" -- an ethos of aestheticism. Fromm, too, dreams of human liberation into "an active and spontaneous realization of the individual self." But in Escape From Freedom he argues that we often see individuality as a burden, as a state of insecurity and purposelessness that is not pleasurable but intolerable.

Capitalism not only freed man from traditional bonds, but it also contributed tremendously to the increasing of positive freedom, to the growth of an active, critical, responsible self. However, while this was one effect capitalism had on the process of growing freedom, at the same time it made the individual more alone and isolated and imbued him with a feeling of insignificance and powerlessness.

Capitalism destroys the traditional ways our identity would be anchored, in the class or religion to which we were born, in the duties assigned to us, in our our overall lack of social or geographical mobility. The powerlessness and unrootedness is exacerbated by the rationalization of life in a capitalist society, with all relations between people reified, instrumentalized and marked with alienation and mutual manipulation. People have no value in and of themselves, but only in what they can contribute and sell. So in isolation, they learn that they are worthless, with no innate qualities.

Fromm figured this left them vulnerable to totalitarian movements like Nazism, that promised to supply individuals a purpose in supplication to an authority figure who alleviates one's feelings of inferiority and insignificance but taking away the burden of individuality. It's obvious he has Hitler and Mussolini in mind, but Fromm also points to anonymous authority, which reigns while leaving its subjects seemingly free.

It is disguised as common sense, science, psychic health, normality, public opinion. It does not demand anything except the self-evident. It seems to use no pressure but only mild persuasion.... In anonymous authority, both command and commander have become invisible. It is like being fired at by an invisible enemy. There is nobody and nothing to fight back against.

This analysis presages Althusser's definition of ideology, in which such dispersed, institutional authority is actually constituitive of the individual rather than a response to developing individualism. In Decoding Advertisements Judith Williamson looks at how that authority manifests specifically in advertisements, which present themselves as common sense and help us call into a being a sharpened sense of identity that we then become reliant on -- as though it were the source of our integrity. Ads seem always to be reminding us of what we already know; that is the velvet way they exercise their insidious authority.

Fromm characterizes the seductiveness of ads, as anonymous authority, in a similar way.

It does not appeal to reason but to emotion.... by attracting the customer and at the same time weakening his critical abilities by the sex appeal of a pretty girl; by terrorizing him with the threat of b.o. or halitosis, or yet again by stimulating daydreams about a sudden change in one's whole course of life brought about by buying a certain shirt or soap. All these methods are essentially irrational; they have nothing to do with the qualities of the merchandise, and they smother and kill the critical capacities of the customer like an opiate or outright hypnosis. They give him a certain satisfaction by their daydreaming qualities just as movies do, but at the same time they increase his feeling of smallness and powerlessness.

That passage touches on a few of my favorite themes -- (a) ads and entertainment are indistinguishable, (b) ads turn our insecurity into a feeling of certainty and a possibility for productive action -- a purchase, (c) ads work by stimulating fantasies not about the product but about ourselves; they encourage us to consume our sense of ourselves vicariously; to enjoy ourselves through the product the way we would enjoy the details of the lives of any other celebrity -- it puts us on their level, particularly when ads feature celebrity endorsements, and most significant, I think, (d) the point of ads collectively is to reduce our objections to non-logic and experience it as liberation.

Of course, Marcuse sees the undermining of reason -- of constricting, repressing rationality -- as liberation. But ad discourse evokes a fantasia that merely teases us with the kind of non-repression Marcuse sees as being just around the corner in his dialectic of civilization. We "keep our appointments" with commercials, just like Marcuse noted, but what we experience there is enough of the utopian promise to defuse the possibility of our ever fighting to bring that utopia into being. Ads de-repress us as they exert their authority; they solve our problems with individuality while seeming to reinforce our freedom (our freedom from hang-ups). It seems that capitalism's systems for entertaining/controlling us can absorb even the rationality-smashing protocol and make it too serve the status quo.

Adorno for pop critics (20 September 2006)

Yesterday I noticed that elsewhere at PopMatters was a review of Adorno's Philosophy of Music, which, as the author of the review, Patrick Schabe notes, has nothing to do with "new music" as anyone outside of academic music programs would understand it. Those interested in mounting an Adornoesque critique of contemporary pop music would be better served by reading "Perennial Fashion -- Jazz," from Prisms. The essay, which isn't about jazz so much as it is about whatever musical product is being manufactured and marketed for the masses, features this immortal observation:

The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.

I think of this whenever the need to concentrate on what I'm listening to makes me feel peevish and disgruntled. Isn't music supposed to make me relax? Then I know for sure I'm in the illustrious fraternity. When I start to write a record review and I try to conjure criteria by which to judge it, I feel a bit haunted by Adorno's words; I know nothing I will say will dispel the notion that I'm pounding out my own castrated, syncopated rhythm on my keyboard. In "On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening" (anthologized by Routledge in The Culture Industry), Adorno suggests that with the advent of commercialized music, "the concept of taste is outmoded" because "the subject who could verify such taste has become as questionable as has the right to a freedom of choice which empirically, in any case, no one any longer exercises." Taste may survive as a necessary fiction, more necessary for those who attempt to codify subjective judgments and share them as music writers, people who won't surrender to the idea that cultural product is just product whose significance lies merely in how sellable it is. Adorno notes "the golden age of taste has dawned at the very moment in which taste no longer exists."

Adorno's often criticized for his rampant elitism, which consists mainly of insisting that collectively our ability to even hear music has regressed to the point where authentic music has become incomprehensible to our infantile ears. As Martin Jay explains it in The Dialectical Imagination, Adorno believed that one of the effects of commercialized popular music was to regress a listener to an infantile state where "like children who demand only food they have enjoyed in the past, the listener ... could only respond to a repetition of what he heard before." Such a listener's attitude toward culture is like "that of the meaningless leisure of the unemployed." Commercialized music, by destroying the link between performance and listening (you can hear it in an inferior reproduction with no apprehension of what's been lost, whenever its convenient for you the listener with no attention to the work involved in creating it) also destroys the Benjaminian aura of a musical work, which destroys its critical function, its ability to comment negatively on the culture and suggest something larger.

Adorno had none of the faith that later pop culture theorists have had in the ability of consumers to subvert culture industry brainwashing and find liberating, creative use for Justin Timberlake or episodes of Grey's Anatomy. That we mistake playing with the culture industry's toys for a kind of real freedom shows only how impotent and short-sighted we've become. As far as Adorno is concerned, popular music is never about active engagement but always about relaxation, of lulling to sleep the individual's critical awareness, of wallowing in passivity. (Is dancing a passive response to rhythmic music? Yes, in Adorno's mind. It's mimicking the martial movement of troops massed and marching past the dictator's parade stand.)

Critics try to invent standards that will insulate themselves from the consequences of music commercialization, from the reality of exchange value, which levels off all other forms of value and slowly but surely introjects itself into the populace so that top-sales lists are popularly held to be synonymous with best lists. "If one seeks to find out who 'likes' a commercial piece, one cannot avoid the suspicion that liking and disliking are inappropriate to the situation, even if the person questioned clothes his reactions in those words." I can pretend to subjective opinions based on criteria of my own devising, but my own ability to hear has already been too compromised to make these criteria anything but postures of resistance to the market, or collaboration with it -- I can either condemn sell-outs (or laud bands for "authenticity") or hype bands and build their PR image; that is what is left to the music reviewer.

Adorno has this cutting comment for my delusion: As a pop-music critic, I am like "The couple out driving who spends their time identifying every passing car and being happy if they recognize the trademarks speeding by, the girl whose satisfaction consists solely in the fact that she and her boyfriend 'look good,' the jazz enthusiast who legitimizes himself by having knowledge about what is in any case inescapable." As for the masses? "Where they react at all, it no longer makes any difference whether it is to Beethoven's Seventh Symphony or a bikini."

The general idea is that the standardization that comes with preparing a piece of music for the market makes whatever difference may exist between products superficial. Such works cease to be "autonomous" and thereby forfeit aesthetics. "An approach in terms of value judgments has become a fiction for the person who finds himself hemmed in by standardized musical goods. He can neither escape impotence nor decide between the offerings where everything is so completely identical that preference in fact depends merely on biographical details or on the situation in which things are heard." In other words, we choose favorite bands the way we choose favorite sports teams, when really they all play the same game by the same rules and are ultimately exchangeable for one another. We celebrate bands or singers for the cult of personality built up around them, or because we heard the music in conjunction with certain epochs in our own lives.

This relates to what neuroscientist Daniel Levitin found -- in This Is Your Brain on Music (reviewed here) he argues that the cerebellum, the lizard part of the brain that synchronizes movement, is as involved in music listening as the frontal lobe, the cognitive part. Adorno would probably argue that now the cerebellum works at the expense of the frontal lobes, so that we have a mechanical, rhythmic response to music that is pleasurable without ever having out intellect engaged. Levitin also suggests that at times of emotional tumult -- teenage years, etc. -- our brains are more likely to tag certain pieces of music with emotion and have them serve as emotional cues for the rest of our lives. Then as our brain wiring hardens, this tagging ability diminishes, and it becomes harder to become emotionally attached to new music. We recur to the stuff that is "nostalgic" -- the only music we're wired to instinctively appreciate. If Adorno's right, and we've let our intellectual means for appreciating music atrophy, and we've instead become reliant on these emotional/instinctive methods for assimilating music, at a certain point we become frozen; without the intellectual basis upon which to enjoy music we haven't heard before, we're incapable of taking pleasure in anything new. This lost ability is serious stuff to Adorno, because real music, like all real art, when heard with the intellect, offers listeners a means by which to criticize a given reality, to synthesize alternatives. Without it, we're trapped in the status quo, and worse, self-deluded into enjoying it as plentitude.