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.The upshot of Bauman’s analysis is that with this abnormally high propensity to consume and normally low ability to understand their own behaviour, liquid modern men and women are bound to carry on acting without the knowledge of the ambivalences of consumerism, and they will be destined to experience ambivalence, and as a result are likely to remain unhappy people who – despite their ostensible addiction to consuming – know deep down that they already have everything.And not only that, it would seem that rather than contemplate why they are unhappy, they would presently more willingly close their eyes to the ambivalences of consumerism and project the bases of them onto the lives of others (read: waste, expendable relationships, exploitation of third world workers making goods for first world consumers, etc.).Pace the Frankfurt School, consumerism is not so much an ideological conspiracy in which we collude, as a competition between sellers and buyers who try to get the best value for their money.Capitalism wants nothing from consumers but their capacity “to stay in the game and have enough tokens left on the table to go on playing” (Bauman 2004:52).The contingent worlds that constitute liquid modernity operate as a matter of action in spite of knowledge: individuals in their liquid modern roles as consumers are not so much brainwashed as lacking the appetite for the class struggle – beliefs and ideologies are relegated to the background.In other words, from the moment the market laid its friendly hand on our shoulder in this all-encompassing way, we were, to a previously unimaginable degree, touched and moved.It was as if the roads to shops opened before us, giving the reality to the dictum: ‘There is no alternative’.In this sense, Bauman’s sociology captures the irony that if for the majority of people solid modernity was a time when freedom was seen an astonishing but largely unachievable hope, in the time of liquid modernity they appear to be prepared to surrender their hard fought freedoms to the vast decentred power-knowledge of consumer capitalism, which they happily (and unhappily) allow to not so much regulate as deregulate their lives.To put it another way: rather than just being a‘January’ or ‘Summer’ treat, the ‘sales’ have become a ubiquitous feature of the liquid modern landscape and Bauman recasts men and women as ubiquitous saleBauman on Consumerism125shoppers too heavily weighed down by all the delightful purchases they have been making to devote any of their time to more serious issues.Consumer capitalism bombards them, every day, with images of things that they can and cannot afford to pay for, and encourages them to want all of them.Rational men and women know that their economic survival depends on buying only what they can afford, but the availability of credit encourages people to live above their means.Liquid modernity is in effect a sociality in which these class-bound virtues have been subsumed by credit, which, as Peter Conrad (2006) recently argued, lasts as “long as you pay your bills, proof of moral standing, and the merchants who extend it express their own faith in your probity”.As Bauman suggests, it is the configuration of economic arrangements associated with consumer capitalism which is of far greater importance for explaining patterns of social control today.To put it another way, social control – like much else in liberal democracies – has by and large been commodified and privatized.The comfortable majority no longer lives in the shadow of tyranny of the state; instead they create their own turmoil, their own paroxysm, driven by market forces that they have no authority over, but which at the same time have no final authority over them.The turmoil is barely noticeable – publicly at least – it is simply how people live.As Bauman puts it, it is as if “we have been trained to stop worrying about things which stay stubbornly beyond our power … and to concentrate our attention and energy instead on the tasks within our (individual) reach, competence and capacity for consumption” (Bauman 2004:74).In liquid modernity, consumption replaces work as the backbone of the reward system in a sociality which is underpatterned rather than patterned, disorganized rather than ordered.It is only the poor who are still controlled through the ‘work ethic’.To put it simply, liquid modernity redraws the boundaries between social class divisions as a relationship between those who happily consume and those who cannot, despite their want of trying.Instead of being repressively controlled, this fragmented sociality is driven by the ‘pleasure principle’.Bauman (2000) ventures the across-the-board generalization that if solid modernity was a class society based on Panopticon surveillance, the single dominant symbol at the core of liquid modernity is consumerism with its (dis)organization of social control based on ‘precarisation’as the ‘reality principle’ and the ‘pleasure principle’ strike a deal.All of this has served to liberate liquid modern men and women from the Panopticon belief that the institutions of governmentality that make up civil society should unfailingly try to set the parameters of right and wrong.Instead they are today presented with a celebration of everything that makes life magical as well as irresponsible, at least within the boundaries of consumer culture.The repressive apparatus of the Panopticon has largely been supplemented by the seductive allure of Synopticon watching, whose central organising principle follows the legendary Hollywood star Mae West’s maxim that ‘it’s better to be looked over than overlooked’.Unable to find our true selves and fearful of not having just the right ‘street cool’– most of us have difficulty keeping on the right side of the line dividing cool from naff – we also constantly crave the confirmation of others that is the Synoptic other side of liquid modern surveillance.Social control is barely noticeable, except126The Sociology of Zygmunt Baumanfor the flawed consumers, the izgoy 1 of liquid modernity – incapable of fulfilling their designated social positions as ‘consumers first, and all the rest after’ – whose subordinate position prevents them from participating freely in what has become for the masses a dream world of consumption.Bauman implies that what we are dealing with in liquid modernity is the kind of sociality, once again so aptly described by Albert Camus (1953) in the opening chapter of his book The Rebel, that is knowledgeable but is incapable of contemplating itself, and which asks no questions because it allows consumerism to provide all the answers – in other words, a sociality which has not learned rebellion.Accordingly, he suggests that we need to recognize that it is not ideology but the power of seduction that is central to the understanding the social control of the majority in liquid modernity [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]