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excellence of makeovers and botox because its incumbents  naturally
Consumerism as the Liquid Modern Way of Life 125
believe that lines on the face are unpleasant on the eye  as well as being
a constant reminder of mortality  and it makes perfect sense to airbrush
them out of sight. This aesthetic impulse also makes perfect sense because
liquid modernity is a world where theatricality and the childlike delight
in pretending go hand in hand  as Lyotard might have put it, the idea of
performativity is coterminous with the new  generalized spirit of
knowledge in liquid modernity.
If consuming is the stuff of dreams in liquid modernity it co-exists
with a hopeless evasion of the public realm. Bauman brings to our
attention the point that at the present moment in time liquid moderns are
likely to be neither independent-minded individuals nor interdependent-
citizens but slavering dogs more accustomed to shopping and too busy-
minded towards consuming to be bothered by the messy particulars of
politics. To paraphrase Pyotr Chaadaev: the minds of liquid moderns
reach back no further than yesterday; they are, as it were, strangers to
themselves & That is a consequence of living in a consumer culture that
consists entirely of imports and imitation. They absorb all their ideas
ready-made, and therefore the indelible trace left in the mind by a
progressive movement of ideas, which gives it strength, does not shape
their intellects & They are like children who have not been taught to
think for themselves; when they become adults, they have nothing of
their own  all their knowledge is on the surface of their being, their soul
is not within them.38
The great French novelist André Gide may have found wisdom in
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry s39 demonstration of the  paradoxical truth
that  man s happiness lies not in freedom but in his acceptance of duty
(sic) .40 But as Bauman reminds us, when that duty is toward shopping 
as it is in the liquid modern sociality  much more than the happy shoppers
contentment to shop is at stake. It is the threat of losing the hard-won
citizenship rights, which until their emergence in modernity were
restricted to only the most privileged social groups, that are most at risk.
As Bauman puts it:
The truth is that the consumer s skills, indeed, rise at the same
time as the citizen s ineptitude and, ultimately, the citizen s
impotence. The  consumer s skill consists in seeking biographical
solutions to socially-produced afflictions; to use a metaphor  it
consists in fighting a nuclear threat by purchasing a family nuclear
shelter, or pollution of drinking-water supplies by finding a
reliable brand of bottled water. Consumer skills emphatically do
not include the art of translating private troubles into public issues,
and public interests into individual rights and duties  the art that
126 Zygmunt Bauman
constitutes the citizen and holds together the polity as the
congregation of citizens.41
When  things don t go as planned , citizens recast as consumers are
naturally inclined to blame the manufacturers rather than taking
responsibility of putting things right themselves. As Bauman points
out, it 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. 42 Liquid moderns are free,
but existentially they are stubbornly bound by their dedication to
consumer culture. For the majority, freedom consists of little more than
deciding whether to eat at McDonald s or Burger King, shop at
Sainsbury s or Asda, buy their furniture at Ikea or Habitat, or fill their
car up at Shell or BP. Consumer culture, with its bland, uniform ubiquity,
has a sameness and wherever you go there will be Britney Spears playing
in the background and the world s local bank, HSBC, will do nicely
thank you. But even this lack of surprise and suspense does not seem to
dull their propensity to shop.
If in Adorno s administered society43 consumer culture felt like a
violation of what life was meant to be, in Bauman s liquid modernity it
seems more and more like life itself, as life should be. Consumerism
seems to have everything going for it, because more than anything else it
makes consumers feel free. But if men and women recast as consumers
act as if they are overtaken by a sublime confidence, it is one that has a
surprising absence of responsibility. Consumers might operate with a
feeling that they are flying on automatic pilot and as obstacles present
themselves, so adjustments have to be made, but these are made with the
caveat that as consumers they do not really have to get involved. Like
Lyotard, Bauman insists that there is something performative and wished
about liquid modern living. It is a privatized kind of theatre, in which the
larger sociality provides the parts, but doesn t directly cast the play. But
rather than being a public world proper, this sociality of individuals is a
performance of individuals who perform their lives and continue to do
so even when their individual circumstances dictate otherwise. But the
real problem is that it is a consumer culture that robs individuals of the
responsibility of the stewardship, which if they were prepared to look for
it, would make them the architects of their own destinies.
Seduction and repression
Bauman argues that, contrary to the postulations of the critical theory of
Habermas,44 in the liquid modern sociality, the  weapon of legitimation
Consumerism as the Liquid Modern Way of Life 127
 the hegemony by which the state acquires its raison d être  has been
supplanted  with two mutually complementary weapons: this of seduction
and that of repression .45 For Bauman, as for Giddens,46  experts and
 expert systems play a crucial role in liquid modern sociality, but not in
Habermas s sense. They are no longer needed to serve the needs of
capitalism to  legitimate the dominant hegemony; rather, they become
crucial to the enforcement and preservation of the weapons of seduction
and repression.
For Bauman, as for Foucault, it is the poor who continue to experience
the hard edge of exclusionary and repressive surveillance. As Bauman
points out,  repression [still] stands for  Panoptical power, as described
by Foucault. It employs surveillance & and is indispensable to reach the
areas seduction cannot, and is not meant to, reach .47 A crucial role that
repression carries out in this respect is to elucidate the unappealing traits
of non-participation in the realm of the free market, by reforging  the
unattractiveness of non-consumer existence into the unattractiveness of
alternatives to market dependency .48
Ultimately, it is the prevailing presence of repression that manifests
itself in the form of the welfare services  the reforms that once aimed to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]