Consuming Life
Zygmunt Bauman
Language: English
Pages: 168
ISBN: 0745640028
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
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It needs tolerance, the awareness that one must not impose one’s outlook or ideals on one’s companion or stand in the way of the other’s happiness. Love, we may say, abstains from promising an easy passage to happiness and meaning. A ‘pure relationship’ inspired by consumerist practices promises that passage to be easy and trouble-free, while rendering happiness and meaning hostages to fate – more like a lottery win than an act of creation and dedicated effort. Introduction 23 As I write.
Of being a consumer as a product of nature, not a legal construct – as part of that ‘human nature’ and inborn human predilection that all positive laws are obliged to respect, attend to, obey, protect and service; indeed, as that primordial human right underlying all citizen rights, the kinds of secondary rights whose major task is to reconfi rm that basic, primary right as sacrosanct, and render it fully and truly unassailable. Having studied and reconstructed the sequence of developments.
Scientists were left with little choice except to describe, misleadingly, the advent of the ‘postmodern condition’ (a development coinciding with the entrenchment of the society of consumers) as a product of the ‘de-civilizing process’. What in fact happened, though, was the discovery, invention or emergence of an alternative method (less cumbersome, less costly and relatively less conflict-ridden, but above all giving more freedom, and so more power, to the powerholders) of manipulating the.
The antinomy of the allowed and the forbidden as the cognitive frame and essential criterion of the evaluation and choice of life strategy, it is only to be expected that depression arising from the terror of inadequacy will replace the neurosis caused by the horror of guilt (that is, of the charge of nonconformity that might follow a breach in the rules) as the most characteristic and widespread psychological affl iction of the denizens of the society of consumers. As the commonality of.
Flawed consumers 4–6, 64–7, 98, 132, 138–9 forgetting 96, 108 Foucault, Michel 74 Frank, Thomas 108 Freud, Sigmund 43, 69, 70–1, 88 Furedi, Frank 146–7 Gallie, W. B. 124 Gamble, Jim 3 Gans, Herbert J. 123 Gaulejac, Vincent de 84 Giddens, Anthony 21 Greer, Germaine 13 Habermas, Jürgen 7 happiness 42–6 159 Hegel, Friedrich 75 Hobbes, Thomas 50, 70, 88, 90 Hochschild, Arlie Russell 9, 50, 120–1, 140 Hostyn´ski, Lesław 102 Huntington, Samuel 148 identity 49–50, 199, 106, 110–12, 114–16 inadequacy.