Identity and Social Change

Joseph E. Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781412857109
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351513906
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Identity and Social Change examines the thorny problem of modern identity. Trenchant critiques have come from identity politics, focusing on the construction of difference and the solidarity of minorities, and from academic deconstructions of modern subjectivity. This volume places identity in a broader sociological context of destabilizing and reintegrating forces.

The contributors first explore identity in light of economic changes, consumerism, and globalization, then focus on the question of identity dissolution. Zygmunt Bauman examines the effects of consumerism and considers the constraints these place on the disadvantaged. Drawing together discourses of the body and globalization, David Harvey considers the growth of the wage labor system worldwide and its consequences for worker consciousness. Mike Featherstone outlines a rethinking of citizenship and identity formation in light of the realities of globalization and new information technologies.

Part two opens with Robert Dunn's examination of cultural commodification and the attenuation of social relations. He argues that the media and marketplace are part of a general destabilization of identity formation. Kenneth Gergen maintains that proliferating communications technologies undermine the traditional conceptions of self and community and suggest the need for a new base for building the moral society. In the final chapter, Harvie Ferguson argues that despite the contemporary infatuation with irony, the decline of the notion of the self as an inner depth effectively severs the long connection between irony and identity.

Part 1

The Changing Landscape

1

Tourists and Vagabonds:
Or, Living in Postmodern Times

Zygmunt Bauman

Nowadays, we are all on the move. We change places—moving homes or traveling to and from places that are not our homes. We are all on the move even when we stay physically put. While glued to a chair, we zip between cable or satellite channels with a speed much beyond the capacity of supersonic jets and cosmic rockets, staying nowhere long. We flit through the Web, netting and mixing on one computer screen messages born in opposite corners of the globe. In the world we inhabit, distance does not matter much; it exists as if solely to be canceled—it offers a constant invitation to traverse. It has stopped being an obstacle; one needs but a split second to conquer it. There are no “natural borders” anymore. Wherever we happen to be at the moment, we cannot help knowing that we could be elsewhere, so there is less and less reason to be anywhere in particular. Spiritually at least, we are all travelers.

But we are also on the move in another, deeper sense, whether or not we take to the roads or leap through the channels and whether or not we like doing it. One cannot stay put in this postmodern world of ours—a world with reference points set on wheels, known for their vexing habit of vanishing from view before the instruction they offer has been pondered and acted upon. Professor Ricardo Petrella of the Catholic University of Louvain sums it up very well: “Globalization drags economies toward the production of the ephemeric, the volatile (through a massive and universal reduction of the life-span of products and services) and the precarious (temporary, flexible, and part-time jobs)” (Petrella 1997: 17). In order to elbow their way through the dense, deregulated thicket of global competitiveness and into the limelight of public attention, goods and services must seduce their prospective consumers and out-seduce their competitors. But then they must make room, and quickly, for other objects of desire, lest the global chase of profit and ever-greater profit (re-baptized as “economic growth”) should ground to a halt. Today’s industry is geared increasingly to the production of attractions and temptations. And attractions tempt and seduce only as long as they beckon from that faraway place that we call the future.

Being a Consumer in a Consumer Society

Our postmodern society is a consumer society. When we call it a consumer society, we have in mind something more than the trivial and sedate circumstance that all members of that society are consumers—all human beings, and not just human beings, have been consumers since time immemorial. What we do have in mind is that ours is a “consumer society” in the similarly profound and fundamental sense in which the society of our predecessors, modern society in its industrial phase, used to be a “producer society.” That older type of modern society once engaged its members primarily as producers and soldiers; society shaped its members by dictating the need to play those two roles, and the norm that society held up to its members was the ability and the willingness to play them. In its present late-modern (Giddens), second-modern (Beck), or postmodern stage, modern society has little need for mass industrial labor and conscript armies, but it needs—and engages—its members in their capacity as consumers.

The role that our present-day society holds up to its members is the role of the consumer, and the members of our society are likewise judged by their ability and willingness to play that role. The difference between our present-day society and its immediate predecessor is not as radical as abandoning one role and picking up another instead. In neither of its two stages could modern society do without its members producing things to be consumed, and members of both do, of course, consume. The consumer of a consumer society, however, is a sharply different creature from the consumer of any other society thus far. The difference is one of emphasis and priorities—a shift of emphasis that makes an enormous difference to virtually every aspect of society, culture, and individual life. The differences are so deep and multiform that they fully justify speaking of our society as a society of a separate and distinct kind—a consumer society.

Ideally, all acquired habits should “lie on the shoulders” of that new type of consumer just like the ethically inspired vocational and acquisitive passions used to lie, as Max Weber repeated after Richard Baxter, “on the shoulders of the ‘saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment’” (Weber 1976: 181). And the habits are indeed continually, daily, and at first opportunity thrown aside, and never given the chance to firm up into the iron bars of a cage (except one meta-habit: the “habit of changing habits”). Ideally, nothing should be embraced by a consumer firmly, nothing should command a commitment forever, and no needs should be seen as fully satisfied, no desires considered ultimate. There ought to be a proviso “until further notice” attached to any oath of loyalty and any commitment. It is the volatility, the in-built temporality of all engagements that counts, and counts more than the commitment itself, which is not allowed to outlast the time necessary for consuming the object of desire (or the desirability of that object) anyway.

That all consumption takes time is in fact the bane of the consumer society and a major worry for the merchandisers of consumer goods. The consumer’s satisfaction ought to be instant and this in a double sense. Consumed goods should bring satisfaction immediately, requiring no learning of skills and no lengthy groundwork, but the satisfaction should end the moment the time needed for consumption is up, and that time ought to be reduced to a bare minimum. The needed reduction is best achieved if consumers cannot hold their attention nor focus their desire on any object for long; if they are impatient, impetuous, and restive; and above all if they are easily excitable and predisposed to quickly lose interest. Indeed, when the waiting is taken out of wanting and the wanting out of waiting, the consumptive capacity of consumers may be stretched far beyond the limits set by any natural or acquired needs or designed by the physical endurability of the objects of desire. The traditional relationship between needs and their satisfaction is then reversed: the promise and hope of satisfaction precedes the need promised to be satisfied and will be always greater than the extant need—yet not too great to preclude the desire for the goods that carry that promise.

As a matter of fact, the promise is all the more attractive the less the need in question is familiar; there is a lot of fun in living through an experience one did not know existed. The excitement of a new and unprecedented sensation—not the greed of acquiring and possessing, nor wealth in its material, tangible sense—is the name of the consumer game. Consumers are first and foremost gatherers of sensations; they are collectors of things only in a secondary and derivative sense. As Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen put it, “Desire does not desire satisfaction. To the contrary, desire desires desire” (1994: 11). Such is the case with the ideal consumer. The prospect of the desire fading off, dissipating, and having nothing in sight to resurrect it, or the prospect of a world with nothing left in it to be desired, must be the most sinister of the ideal consumer’s horrors (and, of course, of the consumer-goods merchandiser’s horrors).

To increase their capacity for consumption, consumers must never be left to rest. They need to be constantly exposed to new temptations to keep them in the state of perpetual suspicion and steady disaffection. The bait commanding them to shift attention needs to confirm the suspicion while offering a way out of disaffection: “You reckoned you’d seen it all? You ain’t seen nothing yet!” It is often said that the consumer market seduces its customers. But in order to do so, it needs customers who want to be seduced (just as to command his laborers, the factory boss needed a crew with the habits of discipline and command-following firmly entrenched). In a properly working consumer society, consumers seek actively to be seduced. They live from attraction to attraction, from temptation to temptation—each attraction and each temptation being somewhat different and perhaps stronger than its predecessor. In many ways they are just like their fathers, the producers, who lived from one turn of the conveyer belt to an identical next.

This cycle of desire is a compulsion, a must, for the fully fledged, mature consumer; yet that must, that internalized pressure, that impossibility of living one’s life in any other way, is seen as the free exercise of one’s will. The market might have already selected them as consumers and so taken away their freedom to ignore its blandishments, but in every successive visit to the marketplace, consumers have every reason to feel that they are the ones in command. They are the judges, the critics, and the choosers. They can, after all, refuse their allegiance to any one of the infinite choices on display—except the choice of choosing among them.

It is the combination of the consumer, constantly greedy for new attractions and fast bored with attractions already had, and of the world in all its dimensions—economic, political, personal—transformed after the pattern of the consumer market and, like that market, ready to oblige and change its attractions with ever-accelerating speed, that wipes out all fixed signposts from an individual map of the world or from the plans for a life itinerary. Indeed, traveling hopefully is in this situation much better than to arrive. Arrival has that musty smell of the end of the road, that bitter taste of monotony and stagnation that signals the end to everything for which the ideal consumer lives and considers the sense of living. To enjoy the best this world has to offer, you may do all sorts of things except one: to declare, after Goethe’s Faust: “O moment, you are beautiful, last forever!”

Divided We Move

And so we are all traveling, whether we like it or not. We have not been asked about our feelings anyway. Thrown into a vast and open sea with no tracks and milestones fast sinking, we may rejoice in the breathtaking vistas of new discoveries or tremble out of fear of drowning. How does one voyage on these stormy seas—seas that certainly call for strong ships and skillful navigation? This becomes the question. Even more so when one understands that the greater the expanse of free sailing, the more the sailor’s fate tends to be polarized and the deeper the chasm between poles.

But there is a catch. Everybody may be cast into the mode of consumer; everybody may wish to be a consumer and indulge in the opportunities which that mode of life holds. But not everybody can be a consumer. Desire is not enough; to squeeze the pleasure out of desire, one must have a reasonable hope of obtaining the desired object, and while that hope is reasonable for some, it is futile for others. All of us are doomed to the life of choices, but not all of us have the means to be choosers.

You can tell one kind of society from another by the dimensions along which it stratifies its members, and, like all other societies, the postmodern consumer society is a stratified one. Those “high up” and “low down” are plotted in a society of consumers along the lines of mobility—the freedom to choose where to be. Those “high up” travel through life to their hearts’ content and pick and choose their destinations by the joys they offer. Those “low down” are thrown out from the site they would rather stay in, and if they do not move, it is the site that is pulled from under their feet. When they travel, their destination, more often than not, is of somebody else’s choosing and seldom enjoyable; and when they arrive, they occupy a highly unprepossessing site that they would gladly leave behind if they had anywhere else to go. But they don’t. They have nowhere else to go; there is nowhere else where they are likely to be welcomed.

As it happens, the degree of global polarization has broken all registered and remembered records in the last three decades. According to the United Nations’ Program for Development (1994 edition), the top fifth of the world population in 1960 was thirty times richer than the bottom fifth; in 1991 it was already sixty-one times richer. Nothing in the foreseeable future indicates a slowing down of the widening of this gap, much less a reversal. In 1991, the top fifth of the world population enjoyed 84.7 percent of the world’s gross product, 84.2 percent of its global trade, and 85 percent of its internal investment, against, respectively, the bottom fifth’s 1.4 percent, 0.9 percent, and 0.9 percent share. The top fifth consumed 70 percent of the world’s energy, 75 percent of its metals, and 85 percent of its timber. On the other hand, the debt of the economically weak countries of the “Third World,” which was more or less stable at around $200 billion in 1970, has since grown tenfold and is today fast approaching the mind-boggling figure of $2 trillion.

Commenting on the findings of the 1996 U.N. Human Development Report that the total wealth of the top 358 “global billionaires” equaled the combined incomes of the 2.3 billion poorest people (45 percent of the world’s population), Victor Keegan of the Guardian (1996) called the present reshuffling of the world’s resources “a new form of highway robbery.” Indeed, only 22 percent of the global wealth belongs to the so-called “developing countries,” which account for about 80 percent of the world population. This is by no means the end of the story, as the share of current income received by the poor is smaller still: in 1991, 85 percent of the world’s population received only 15 percent of the world’s income. No wonder that in the last thirty years the abysmally meager 2.3 percent of global wealth owned by 20 percent of the poorest countries fell further still, to 1.4 percent. The global network of communication, acclaimed as the gateway to a new and unheard of freedom, is clearly very selectively used; a narrow cleft in a thick wall, rather than a gate. “All computers do for the Third World these days is to chronicle their decline more efficiently,” says Keegan. And he concludes: “If (as one American critic observed) the 358 [billionaires] decided to keep $5 million or so each, to tide themselves over, and give the rest away, they could virtually double the annual incomes of nearly half the people on Earth. And pigs would fly” (1996: T2). In the words of John Kavanagh of the Institute of Policy Research in Washington,

Globalization has given more opportunities for the extremely wealthy to make money more quickly. These individuals have utilized the latest technology to move large sums of money around the globe extremely quickly and speculate ever more efficiently. Unfortunately, the technology makes no impact on the lives of the world poor. In fact, globalization is a paradox: while it is very beneficial to a very few, it leaves out or marginalizes two-thirds of the world’s population. (Quoted in Balls and Jenkins 1996)

Global polarization is replicated on only a slightly reduced scale in the inner-societal polarization in most affluent countries. Throughout the affluent part of the globe, we hear of the unprecedented phenomenon of the permanent, perhaps even hereditary, “underclass,” and of the equally unprecedented phenomenon of “structural unemployment.” The long-forgotten category of “working poor” (people who are employed and earn money yet whose wages fail to lift them above the threshold of poverty) has made an unexpected comeback. Whether measured globally or nationally, the gap between the affluent and the poor grows steadily.

Two Spaces, Two Times

Although this trend may be measured economically, the phenomenon itself is more than just an issue of economic divisions. The two worlds at the top and bottom of the emergent hierarchy differ sharply and have become increasingly incommunicado to each other. If for the first world—the world of the rich and the affluent—space has lost its constraining quality and is easily traversed in both its “real” and “virtual” renditions, for the other world—that of the useless and unwanted poor, the “structurally redundant”—real space is fast closing up. And the deprivation is made yet more painful by the obtrusive media display of space conquest and the “virtual accessibility” of distances that stay stubbornly unreachable in the nonvirtual reality. The shrinking of space abolishes the flow of time. The inhabitants of the first world live in a perpetual present, going through a succession of episodes hygienically insulated from both their past and their future. These people are constantly busy and perpetually “short of time,” since each moment of time is nonextensive. People marooned in the opposite world are crushed under the burden of abundant, redundant, and useless time that they have nothing with which to fill. They do not “control” time, but neither are they controlled by it, unlike their clocking-in, clocking-out ancestors who were subject to the faceless rhythm of factory time. They can only kill time, as they are slowly killed by it.

Residents of the first world live in time; space does not matter for them, since every distance can be spanned instantaneously. It is this experience which Jean Baudrillard (1983) encapsulated in his image of “hyperreality,” where the virtual and the real are no longer separable, since both share and miss in the same measure that “objectivity,” “externality,” and “punishing power” which Emile Durkheim listed as the symptoms of reality. Residents of the second world live in space—heavy, resilient, untouchable—which ties down time a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Changing Landscape
• 1 Tourists and Vagabonds
• 2 The Work of Postmodernity
• 3 Public Life, Information Technology, and the Global City
• 4 False Faces
• Part 2: Identity and Dissolution
• 5 Identity, Commodification, and Consumer Culture
• 6 Technology, Self, and the Moral Project
• 7 Not Dead Yet
• 8 Deception and Despair
• Contributors
• Index