Consuming Life

Zygmunt Bauman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745655826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

With the advent of liquid modernity, the society of producers is transformed into a society of consumers. In this new consumer society, individuals become simultaneously the promoters of commodities and the commodities they promote. They are, at one and the same time, the merchandise and the marketer, the goods and the travelling salespeople. They all inhabit the same social space that is customarily described by the term the market.

The test they need to pass in order to acquire the social prizes they covet requires them to recast themselves as products capable of drawing attention to themselves. This subtle and pervasive transformation of consumers into commodities is the most important feature of the society of consumers. It is the hidden truth, the deepest and most closely guarded secret, of the consumer society in which we now live.

In this new book Zygmunt Bauman examines the impact of consumerist attitudes and patterns of conduct on various apparently unconnected aspects of social life politics and democracy, social divisions and stratification, communities and partnerships, identity building, the production and use of knowledge, and value preferences.

The invasion and colonization of the web of human relations by the worldviews and behavioural patterns inspired and shaped by commodity markets, and the sources of resentment, dissent and occasional resistance to the occupying forces, are the central themes of this brilliant new book by one of the worlds most original and insightful social thinkers.

1

Consumerism versus Consumption

Apparently, consumption is a banal, indeed trivial affair. We all do it daily, on occasions in a festive manner, when throwing a party, celebrating an important event or rewarding ourselves for a particularly impressive achievement – but most of the time matter-of-factly, one would say routinely, without much advance planning or a second thought.

Indeed, if reduced to its archetypical form of the metabolic cycle of ingesting, digesting and excreting, consumption is a permanent and irremovable condition and aspect of life, bound by neither time nor history; one of the inseparable elements of biological survival which we, humans, share with all other living organisms. Seen in that way, the phenomenon of consumption has roots as ancient as living organisms – and most certainly it is a permanent, integral part of every form of life known from historical narratives and ethnographic reports. Apparently, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose … Whatever form of consumption is noted as typical for a specific period in human history may be depicted with no great effort as a slightly modified version of past ways. In this field, continuity seems to be the rule; ruptures, discontinuities, radical changes, not to mention revolutionary, watershed transformations, can be (and often are) disavowed as purely quantitative rather than qualitative transformations. And yet if the activity of consuming as such might leave little room for inventiveness and manoeuvre, this does not apply to the role played and continuing to be played by consumption in past transformations and the current dynamics of the human mode of being-in-the-world; in particular, to its place among the factors determining the style and flavour of social life and its role as a pattern-setter (one of many or the paramount one) of interhuman relations.

Throughout human history, consumer activities or consumer-related activities (production, storage, distribution and disposal of the objects of consumption) have offered a constant supply of the ‘raw material’ from which the variety of forms of life and patterns of interhuman relations could be and indeed were moulded – with the help of cultural inventiveness driven by imagination. Most crucially, as an extendable space opened up between the act of production and the act of consumption, each of the two acts acquired growing autonomy from the other – so that they could be regulated, patterned and operated by mutually independent sets of institutions. Following the ‘Palaeolithic revolution’ which ended the hand-to-mouth gatherers’ mode of existence and ushered in the era of surplus and storage, history could be written in terms of the ingenious ways in which that space was colonized and administered.

It has been suggested (and this suggestion is followed and elaborated upon in the rest of this chapter) that a highly consequential breakpoint, which, it could be argued, deserved the name of a ‘consumerist revolution’, arrived millennia later, with the passage from consumption to ‘consumerism’, when consumption, as Colin Campbell suggests, became ‘especially important if not actually central’ to the lives of the majority of people, ‘the very purpose of existence’;¹ and when ‘our ability to “want”, to “desire” and “to long for”, and especially our ability to experience such emotions repeatedly, actually underpins the economy’ of human togetherness.

Excursus: On the method of ‘ideal types’ Before we proceed, a warning is called for, in order to pre-empt the inevitably unresolvable disputes regarding the uniqueness or generality, or for that matter particularity or commonality, of the analysed phenomena. It is beyond dispute that nothing or almost nothing in human history is totally novel in the sense of having no antecedents in the past; chains of causality may always be stretched infinitely into the past. But it is also beyond dispute that in various forms of life even the phenomena that can be shown to be universally present enter a somewhat different configuration – and it is the particularity of the configuration, much more than the specificity of its ingredients, that ‘makes the difference’. The model of ‘consumerism’, as well as those of the ‘society of consumers’ and ‘consumer culture’, proposed here are what Max Weber named ‘ideal types’: abstractions which try to grasp the uniqueness of a configuration composed of ingredients that are by no means unique, and which separate the patterns defining that figuration from the multitude of aspects that the configuration in question shares with others. Most if not all concepts routinely used in social sciences – like ‘capitalism’, ‘feudalism’, ‘free market’, ‘democracy’, or indeed ‘society’, ‘community’, ‘locality’, ‘organization’ or ‘family’ – have the status of ideal types. As suggested by Weber, ‘ideal types’ (if properly constructed) are useful, and also indispensable, cognitive tools even if (or perhaps because) they deliberately throw light on certain aspects of described social reality while leaving in the shade some other aspects considered to be of lesser or only random relevance to the essential, necessary traits of a particular form of life. ‘Ideal types’ are not descriptions of reality: they are the tools used to analyse it. They are good for thinking; or, arguably though paradoxically, despite their abstract nature they make empirical social reality, as available to experience, describable. These tools are irreplaceable in any effort to render thoughts intelligible and to enable a coherent narrative of the abominably messy evidence of human experience. But let us recall Max Weber’s own most elegant and convincing case justifying their construction and use – an argument that has lost nothing of its topicality and relevance to sociological practice:

(S)ociological analysis both abstracts from reality and at the same time helps us to understand it, in that it shows with what degree of approximation a concrete historical phenomenon may be in one aspect ‘feudal’, in another ‘bureaucratic’, and in still another ‘charismatic’. In order to give a precise meaning to these terms, it is necessary for the sociologist to formulate pure ideal types of the corresponding forms of action which in each case involve the highest possible degree of logical integration by virtue of their complete adequacy on the level of meaning. But precisely because this is true, it is probably seldom if ever that a real phenomenon can be found which corresponds exactly to any one of these ideally constructed ideal types.²

As long as we remember Weber’s words, we may safely (if cautiously) continue to use ‘pure constructs’ in our struggle to make intelligible and understand admittedly ‘impure’ reality, while simultaneously avoiding the traps awaiting the unwary prone to confuse ‘pure ideal types’ with ‘real phenomena’. We can proceed therefore to construct the models of consumerism, the society of consumers and consumerist culture – in the author’s view precisely the tools fit for the job of understanding a crucially important aspect of the society we currently inhabit, and therefore for also the job of constructing a coherent narrative of our shared experience of that habitation.

We may say that ‘consumerism’ is a type of social arrangement that results from recycling mundane, permanent and so to speak ‘regime-neutral’ human wants, desires and longings into the principal propelling and operating force of society, a force that coordinates systemic reproduction, social integration, social stratification and the formation of human individuals, as well as playing a major role in the processes of individual and group self-identification and in the selection and pursuit of individual life policies. ‘Consumerism’ arrives when consumption takes over that linchpin role which was played by work in the society of producers. As Mary Douglas insists, ‘unless we know why people need luxuries [that is, goods in excess of survival needs] and how they use them we are nowhere near taking the problems of inequality seriously.’³

Unlike consumption, primarily a trait and occupation of individual human beings, consumerism is an attribute of society. For a society to acquire that attribute the thoroughly individual capacity for wanting, desiring and longing needs to be, just as labour capacity was in the producers’ society, detached (‘alienated’) from individuals and recycled/reified into an extraneous force which sets the ‘society of consumers’ in motion and keeps it on course as a specific form of human togetherness, while by the same token setting specific parameters for effective individual life strategies and otherwise manipulating the probabilities of individual choices and conduct.

All this says little as yet about the content of the ‘consumerist revolution’. The question that needs a closer investigation is what do we ‘want’, ‘desire’ and ‘long for’, and how the substance of our wanting, desiring and longing is changing in the course of and as a consequence of the passage to consumerism.

It is commonly (though arguably incorrectly) thought that what men and women who have been cast in the consumerist form of life desire and long for is first and foremost the appropriation, possession and accumulation of objects, valued for the comfort and/or the esteem they are expected to bestow on their owners.

The appropriation and possession of goods ensuring (or at least promising to ensure) comfort and esteem might indeed have been the principal motive behind human wishes and longings in the society of producers, a kind of society committed to the cause of stable security and secure stability, relying for its own long-term reproduction on patterns of individual behaviour designed to follow those motives.

Indeed, the society of producers, the principal societal model of the ‘solid’ phase of modernity, was primarily security oriented. In its pursuit of security, it put a wager on the human desire for a reliable, trustworthy, orderly, regular, transparent, and by the same token durable, time-resistant and secure setting. Such a desire was indeed an exquisitely suitable raw material from which to construe the kinds of life strategies and behavioural patterns indispensable for servicing the ‘bulk is power’ and ‘big is beautiful’ era: an era of mass factories and mass armies, of binding rules and conformity to rule, and of bureaucratic and panoptical strategies of domination which, in their effort to elicit discipline and subordination, relied on the patterning and routinization of individual behaviour.

In that era, large volumes of spacious, heavy, stolid and immovable possessions augured a secure future, a future promising a constant supply of personal comfort, power and esteem. Bulky possessions implied or insinuated a well-anchored, durably protected and safe existence, immune to the future caprices of fate; they could be, and indeed were trusted to insure the lives of their owners against the otherwise uncontrollable vagaries of fortune. Long-term security being their major purpose and value, acquired goods were not meant to be immediately consumed; on the contrary, they were meant to be protected from impairment or dispersal and stay intact. Like the massive walls of a fortified town intended to defend the dwellers against the incalculable and unspeakable dangers suspected to be lying in ambush in the wilderness outside, they had to be guarded against wear and tear and any premature falling out of use.

In the solid modern era of the society of producers, gratification seemed indeed to reside primarily in the promise of long-term security, not in the immediate enjoyment of pleasures; that other gratification, were one to indulge in it, would leave a bitter aftertaste of improvidence, if not sin. Using up, in full or in part, the consumables’ potential of offering comfort and security had to be postponed, virtually indefinitely, in case they failed to deliver the principal function in their owner’s mind when they were laboriously put together, accumulated and stored as they were intended to remain – that is, the function of staying in service for as long as a need for them might arise (practically, ‘till death us do part’). Only truly durable, time-resistant and time-immune possessions could offer the security craved for. Only such possessions had the inner propensity, or at least a chance, to grow in volume instead of diminishing – and only they promised to base the expectation of a secure future on ever more durable and reliable foundations through presenting their owners as worthy of trust and credit.

At the time when it was vividly described by Thorstein Veblen at the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘ostentatious consumption’ bore a meaning sharply different from its present one: it consisted in the public display of wealth with an emphasis on its solidity and durability, not in a demonstration of the facility with which pleasures can be squeezed out of acquired riches right away and on the spot, promptly using them up and digesting and relishing them in full, or disposing of them and destroying them potlatch-style. The profits and benefits of display rose in proportion to the degree of solidity, permanence and indestructibility evident in the goods displayed. Noble metals and precious jewels, the favourite objects of display, were not going to oxidize and lose their shine, being resistant to the destructive powers of time; thanks to those qualities, they stood for permanence and continuous reliability. So did the massive steel safes where they were stored between periodic public displays, as well as the mines, oil rigs, factories and railways which allowed a constant supply of fanciful jewellery and insured it against the danger of being sold or pawned, or the ornate palaces inside which the owners of the jewels invited their significant others to admire them at close quarters – and with envy. They were as durable as the inherited or earned social standing they stood for was wished and hoped to be.

All that made obvious sense in the solid modern society of producers – a society, let me repeat, which put its wager on prudence and long-term circumspection, on durability and security, and above all on durable, long-term security. But the human desire for security and dreams of an ultimate ‘steady state’ are not suitable to be deployed in the service of a society of consumers. On the road to the society of consumers, the human desire for stability has to turn, and indeed does turn, from a principal systemic asset into the system’s major, perhaps potentially fatal liability, a cause of disruption or malfunction. It could hardly be otherwise, since consumerism, in sharp opposition to the preceding forms of life, associates happiness not so much with the gratification of needs (as its ‘official transcripts’ tend to imply), as with an ever rising volume and intensity of desires, which imply in turn prompt use and speedy replacement of the objects intended and hoped to gratify them; it combines, as Don Slater aptly put it, an insatiability of needs with the urge and imperative ‘always to look to commodities for their satisfaction’.⁴ New needs need new commodities; new commodities need new needs and desires; the advent of consumerism augurs the era of ‘inbuilt obsolescence’ of goods offered on the market and signals a spectacular rise in the waste-disposal industry …

An instability of desires and insatiability of needs, and the resulting proclivity for instant consumption and the instant disposal of its objects, chimes well with the new liquidity of the setting in which life pursuits have been inscribed and are bound to be conducted in the foreseeable future. A liquid modern setting is inhospitable to long-term planning, investment and storage; indeed, it strips the delay in gratification of its past sense of prudence, circumspection and, above all, reasonability. Most valuables rapidly lose their lustre and attraction, and if there is procrastination they may well become fit solely for the rubbish tip even before they have been enjoyed. And when degrees of mobility, and the capacity to grasp a fleeting chance on the run, become major factors in high standing and esteem, bulky possessions feel more like irritating ballast than a precious load.

Stephen Bertman has coined the terms ‘nowist culture’ and ‘hurried culture’ to denote the way we live in our kind of society.⁵ Apt terms indeed, and they come in particularly handy whenever we try to grasp the nature of the liquid modern phenomenon of consumerism. We can say that liquid modern consumerism is notable, more significantly than for anything else, for the (thus far unique) renegotiation of the meaning of time.

As lived by its members, time in the liquid modern society of consumers is neither cyclical nor linear, as it used...