Zygmunt Bauman and the Consumption of Ethics by the Ethics of Consumerism

Abstract

This article focuses on the ethical quandary of Zygmunt Bauman’s interpretation of modernity as a double logic that heralds both emancipation and domination. After outlining his liberation sociology and the liquid moral ontologies he discerns, it argues Bauman’s solution to the consumption of ethics by consumerism demands too much, too late. Firstly, Bauman misappropriates Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction. The actual outcome is the dissipation of the Levinasian centrifugal self, whom Bauman wants to uphold as a cure for the Nietzschean centripetal self. Secondly, as Daniel Miller shows, totalizing critiques of consumerism – such as Bauman’s – blind us to forms of moral self-constitution within consumption. And, thirdly, Bauman’s concept of the autonomous agent overlooks the power relations that are inherent to the constitution of subjectivity. Notwithstanding, Bauman highlights the need to articulate an ethics of freedom, and the article concludes with Foucault’s aesthetics of existence to meet this challenge.

Keywords

consumerism consumption ethics freedom liquid modernity self-formation

Introduction

Michel Foucault (1984: 389–390) provided a succinct definition of problematization. He said it refers to how clusters of issues are translated into a set of problems, which are narrowed down in line with a finite number of solutions. If Foucault's point is that we analyse a problematization by applying a symmetry principle to its component parts, we can earmark modernity as the problematization that has preoccupied Zygmunt Bauman. He excavates its main historical forms and, through an analysis of the concepts that represent them, Bauman reveals a set of problems that anchor his critical inquiries. These include socialism’s political credentials, the institutional politics of the intellectual, the dark-side of bureaucratic organization and the production by power of ‘human waste’.¹ Recently, through a flurry of works written against the backdrop of globalization, Bauman (2003, 2005a, 2006, 2007a, 2008a, 2008b) has taken an ethical turn via the critique at the heart of his intellectual vocation.

The moral tenor is evident in Bauman’s claim that the distinguishing feature of the present is the extension of domination in parallel to the expansion of (consumer) freedom. Fuelled by globalization’s ‘liquefaction of contemporary society’ (Gane, 2001: 267), domination is exacerbated by the elevation of the ‘laws of the market to the rank of life precepts’ (Bauman, 2007a: 62). On the back of the laundering of ethics by neo-liberal politics, Bauman criticizes the structural effects of globalization upon individual autonomy. In a society of consumers where the market is the ‘true carrier of sovereign power’ with the right to exempt (Bauman, 2007a: 65; italics in the original), undemocratic ethical practices loom large. Yet even if ethics appears to be doomed, Bauman (2002: 17; italics in the original) argues that one of globalization’s by-products is ‘the desideratum of moral responsibility’, which makes it simultaneously ‘an ethical challenge’. The aim here is to unpack this conundrum by examining his account of the liberating, yet concomitantly amoral, constitution of ethical subjectivity today. In particular, does Bauman offer us a way out of the impasse of the consumption of ethics by the ethics of consumerism?

Section one (‘Liberation Sociology and Modernity’) outlines the quandary of the Baumanian ethical subject. In her pursuit of autonomy, the decentring forces of heteronomy constantly confront her. Any ethical quest therefore tends to be undermined by consumerism’s incessant incitement of desire. Section two (‘Modernity's Moral Ontologies’) details Bauman’s existential interpretation of this moral tension. Within the society of consumers, self-constitution is diverted through the insatiable desires of subjects of the ‘consumerist syndrome’, whose existence of ‘excess and waste’ allows little time to care for others (Bauman, 2007a: 86; italics in the original). Moral identity ceases to resemble a stable state, which is indicative of solid modernity’s society of producers. It becomes a contingent hope, which Bauman (2007a) suggests is a consequence of the shift to liquid modernity’s society of consumers and its ‘volatile consumerist identities’ (Jay, 2010: 97). Section three (‘Becoming through Consumption’) fleshes out this claim. It shows how the pursuit of happiness through consumerism leads down a moral cul-de-sac that estranges us from both our social context and others. The result, which is outlined in section four (‘The Consumption of Ethics’), is the culmination of the processes of individualization in the centripetal self. For the latter, ethics is a project of ego care from the outside-in, which Bauman juxtaposes with the centrifugal self’s ethics of being for others from the inside-out.

Finally, section five (‘The Dilemmas of the Ethics of Consumerism’) highlights three dilemmas in Bauman’s argument. Firstly, he misappropriates the concept of creative destruction from Joseph Schumpeter. As a consequence, Bauman is blind to the actual outcome, which is the dissipation of the Levinasian centrifugal self, whom he wants to uphold as a cure for the Nietzschean centripetal self. Secondly, Bauman’s macro-social analysis bypasses empirical approaches. As Daniel Miller shows, these reveal both the moral positioning of subjects within consumer society and the centrality of the act of consumption to self-constitution. And, thirdly, in his prognosis of how to become a moral subject that is responsible for the other, Bauman’s concept of the centrifugal self overlooks the power relations that are inherent to the constitution of subjectivity. As such, his concept of freedom lacks the ethical import he asks of it.

Notwithstanding, Bauman expands our understanding of how the immoral paths down which liquid modern consumer societies venture are contingent upon neo-liberal political choices. Yet because his centrifugal self falls short as a viable alternative, Foucault’s account of subjectivity within a field of agonistic relations is suggested. It offers a way out of the impasse that Bauman’s ethical subject finds herself in, yet he is unable to get us out of.

Liberation Sociology and Modernity

The consumption of ethics by consumerism stems from Bauman’s problematization of the structural forces underpinning globalization and the ethical positions they channel us into. His approach, which we might call ‘liberation sociology’, rests on four mutually reinforcing axes: (1) insofar as individual life-stories are implicated in the structural forces of society, (2) a vision of the personal as political drives the search for novel alternatives, which demands that we pierce through doxa, or ‘assumptions one thinks with, but not of or about’ (Bauman, 2008b: 259, f2); (3) however, given the impotency of private actions on (doxa saturated) socio-economic structures, a collective politics must be fostered, which (4) requires ethical commitment from the critic as a crutch for the sans voix.

Bauman’s liberation sociology is a hermeneutics of our existential condition. It reveals the politics that imposes contingent limits upon who we are, which encourages a Heideggerian forgetting of being. Liberation involves retrieving lost possibilities, as the ‘moral self comes into its own … through its defiance of being’ (Bauman, 1993: 72). Borrowing from The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard 1853–1854, Keith Tester (2004: 9) reminds us that, if ‘[i]t is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards[, we must not] … forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards’. For Bauman, liberation comes from knowing how to live forwards, which the intellectual avant-garde is instrumental in charting. Morality cancels out the necessity of the way the world is and provides the opportunity to be human by staying ahead of it.²

Bauman plies his trade by deconstructing those socio-political concepts that act as the ‘navigational instruments of the changing movement of history’ (Koselleck, 2002: 129). Through them he reveals the ambivalence of representation, which subjects things to a ‘differentiating power [that] hides as a rule behind one of the members of the opposition … [which] is but the other… (… suppressed…) side of the first and its creation’ (Bauman, 1991: 14; italics in the original). Bauman’s critique of modernity’s solidifying mechanisms enables him to treat its aporiæ as windows into its soul, rather than as states of exception to be explained away. These include his controversial reading of the Holocaust and his analytical forays into the bounded spaces of the outsiders at the bottom of the hierarchy of global mobility, the glebae adscripti (Bauman, 1998: 105). One of their contemporary manifestations, for example, is as ‘a race of debtors’ (Bauman and Rovirosa-Madrazo, 2010: 20), which has been created by a form of power whose ‘[s]peed of movement … [is both its] most popular technique’ (Bauman, 2001: 12) and the key facilitator of the decoupling of a nomadic, extra-territorial elite from the constraints of time and space.

Bauman’s theorization of liquid modernity’s global ‘consumerist opulence’ (Bauman, 2008a: 113) places him in a tradition of thinking about the present as a condition in which a double logic is at work. It demands that modernity be put on ‘endless trial’ (Kolakowski, 1990), for as Nietzsche (1974: 181) first intuited, with ‘night continually closing in on us …[,we]… need to light lanterns in the morning’ in order to reveal the shadows that constantly descend upon our attempts at self-constitution. Similarly, since Legislators and Interpreters, Bauman (1987) has come to see postmodernity as an intellectual position. As ‘modernity minus its illusion’ (Bauman and Yakimova, 2002), it helps us come to terms with modernity’s ‘own impossibility’ (Bauman, 1991: 272). For Bauman (1992: 187), the task is to render modernity responsible for itself by making it ‘conscious of its true nature’, which is no longer that of a condition (or solid) but of a process (or liquid).

Modernity’s double logic is manifest in the dynamic relation between the possibility of moral agency and overbearing social structures that stifle it. Because the latter are ‘not reducible to the sum total of the separate units [they] contain’ (Bauman, 2008a: 88, 123), they produce what Bauman terms social facts with ‘indomitable coercive power’. In other words, if the self-creation inherent to moral agency also implies an existential yearning for self-affirmation, which is realized in communal, authoritative sources of belonging, then the negotiation between freedom and security is the enigmatic quandary of modernity that is ‘ardently coveted but excruciatingly difficult to reconcile’ (Bauman, 2008a: 82). And, if in solid modernity security in the shape of hegemony or discipline had the upper hand, in today’s liquid modern world it is a naïve neo-liberal freedom dressed up as licence that holds sway. A politically detonated explosion of energy from the bottom-up has replaced problems of domination from the top-down. In the guise of individualized freedom, it not only melts all that was previously solid, but has no truck with solidifying sources of belonging for today’s solitary seekers of happiness.

Finally, Bauman broaches modernity’s double logic from a dual perspective. At the macro level, he reminds us of the moral invisibility produced by bureaucratic organizations, which tend to alienate those who issue commands from those affected by them. Here, Bauman (1989: 111) has in mind both the Nazi regime, which proved ‘incapable of guaranteeing the moral use of the awesome powers [modernity] brought into being’, as well as states that pander to global financial markets and international trade (Bauman 1998; Bauman and Rovirosa-Madrazo, 2010: 15–44). At the micro level, he reveals how a neo-liberal governmentality makes us into ‘artists by decree … [that are] coerced to seek happiness’ (Bauman, 2008a: 50). Finding ourselves subject to ethical diktats that cajole us to live out our fate in the face of dominant structural forces, we are also dissuaded from believing political engagement can make any difference to them (Bauman, 2001: 7; 1999: 3–5).

Modernity’s Moral Ontologies

The unbearable weight of moral agency in modernity, which creates ‘the perfect conditions for individuals to act unethically’, is not a new theme for Bauman (2007b). In previous analyses, he first introduced us to the pilgrim (Bauman, 1995: chs 3–5). Her identity is indicative of what Foucault termed a quasi-juridical style of self-formation, in which the subject’s conduct is referred back to a moral code. In such a mode of subjectivation, which is ‘the procedure by which one obtains the constitution of a subject’ (Foucault, 1988: 253), the individual takes a back seat to the moral code. She is subject to, rather than properly speaking an agent of, an ascribed identity. Designed for solid modernity, it entails a life of pilgrimage to a stable state of being moral. In tracking the transition to liquid modernity, Bauman (1998: ch. 4) then discerned a subject of contingent, skin-deep modes of self-formation. Here, conduct is no longer a question of obedience to a moral code but of a strategic relation to self in the ethical name of a eudæmonics of existence.

Once our horizons of belonging are rendered liquid, the life strategies of individuals oscillate between those of the flâneur, for whom meaning resides in appearance; the tactics of the player, for whom the purpose of life is the game itself and the chance of being ahead in it; and the plans of the tourist, whose strategy of movement and privileged rites of passage produce new experiences in an exclusive world of time divorced from space. Yet there is also the plight of the vagabond, or the tourist’s confined alter ego. Because her low potential for consumption makes her an easy target ‘for stigmatising’ (Bauman, 1998: 96), the vagabond is forever being moved on for want of an adequate space in which to settle. However, the lot of the wandering tourist that is homeless by choice, albeit at home anywhere in the world, is tied to that of the migrant vagabond, who really has no place to call home. Tourists fear vagabonds, as they represent what the tourist should never become. They are thus assigned to the underclass as a problem to be dealt with by any means, as a ‘world without vagabonds is the utopia of the society of tourists’ (Bauman, 1998: 97).

The moral upshot is that we have traded in a preordained identity, which in an ascription society required socialization and cultivation, for an identity that has to be constructed and discovered. For ‘addicts of identity alteration’ (Bauman, 2007a: 114), this injunction is a huge burden of responsibility, if not a poisoned chalice. In today’s achievement society, it is an obligation that is exclusively borne by the individual and an edifice that is denied permanence (Bauman, 2008a: 12–13).

Bauman implies that the transition from a code-oriented to an ethics-oriented morality is inevitable for subjects hailed into being by the clarion call of autonomy.³ Moreover, when the latter encounters the seductive egoism of consumerist culture and the licence it fosters, it tends to produce unethical moral agents. They are both divorced from their social contexts (being-with) and bifurcated from others, who become mere asides to our individual fulfilment (being-aside). The outcome for the ‘new narcissists’, who suffer from commitment phobia (Bauman, 2008a: 42), is an inability to rise to the challenge of responsibility for the other (being-for). This explains why Bauman (1995: ch. 2; 1999) advocates the decolonization of private concerns from the public sphere and the rejuvenation of the agora.

As Tom Campbell and Chris Till (2010) show, the ethical commitment of Bauman qua liberation sociologist precedes his political action. His account of being-for-the-other is a blueprint for being-in-the-world. But why prioritize ethics over ontology? One reason is methodological. Because true facts are neutral, we cannot derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’. Yet Bauman also argues that constantly questioning the world reduces the risk of moral indifference. By prioritizing ethics we reject the world as it has been made, for efforts at ‘world-making’ are fraught with domination.⁴ Lastly, Bauman worries about the impotence of ethical principles. They emphasize following universal rules to the detriment of particular consequences, which is why he turns to Levinas. Ethics must be contingent, or subjective, if we are to unequivocally care for the other before us, and contextual, or case-by-case, if it is to deal with exceptions to the rule. Such an unconditional being-for-the-other springs from a ‘pre-societal, not pre-social’ Rousseauian moral impulse, whose (social) condition of possibility is coexistence, or being-with-others (Hell, 2010: 144–5). It is more effective than deontological ethics and better suited to scepticism about the universality of truth, which is typical of a society of consumers.

Bauman, however, is not naïve about whether such a moral imperative is feasible. Instead, his purpose is to reveal the social conditions that preclude it and the ways in which processes of individualization encourage us to side-step it. Bauman therefore offers little immediate solace, as one might expect from a writer who first revealed the contingency of the legislative mode of critique to solid modernity.⁵ Preferring to offer ‘one narrative among many … [that is] a part of the ongoing exchange of ideas’ (Campain, 2008: 193), Bauman makes a categorical demand ‘upon the reader as … ethical actor’, because it is ultimately actors ‘who are responsible for the human condition’ (Beilharz, 2001: 3). For his part, Bauman directs his critique at ‘revitalizing sociological theory through … challenging … doxic assumptions’ (Jacobsen and Poder, 2008: 2). His recent work continues this trajectory. It explores how, as subjects interpolated into giving form to our existence, our ‘life politics strategies’ (Bauman, 2008a: 3) flounder due to the constantly changing conception of happiness. More of a hope than a state, happiness has become a liquid that slips through our hands as soon as it is grasped, instead of a solid that we can keep hold of and cherish.

Becoming through Consumption

Bauman’s point of departure is that, in wealthy countries at least, greater material welfare fails to correlate with rising levels of happiness. Yet the paradox of the GDP-based measure of happiness is a prelude to Bauman’s analysis of consumer society. In its basic metabolic form of ingestion, digestion and excretion, consumption is a permanent part of the human (or any animate) condition. Its core activities of production, storage, distribution and disposal provide the raw material of social life. A determining factor in the transition from solid to liquid modernity is the revolution brought about by the separation of the act of production from the act of consumption. It gives birth to the market economy, where agents are preoccupied with making, appropriating, possessing and accumulating goods to gratify needs. Still, if in the society of producers consumption is a species attribute of individuals, the transition to a society of consumers occurs when it ceases to be a means of survival.⁶ Once an increasing volume and intensity of desires reify consumption into an extraneous force that constitutes human interaction, it becomes an end in itself. Ontologically, it is manifest as a ‘consumer attitude’.⁷ As an attribute of society, Bauman calls it ‘consumerism’, which 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 (Bauman, 2007: 28).⁸

If consumerism defines our current conditions of possibility, Bauman says it goes hand in hand with the extension of market mechanisms beyond mere relations of production to all aspects of life, or commodification (Bauman, 2008a: 41). Historically, the solid modern state underwrote the corporate risk associated with the vagaries of commodity markets. It also disciplined, trained and assured the welfare of the humans that participated qua commodity in them. Indeed, until the emergence of a neo-liberal logic of ‘DIP (deregulation, individualization, privatization)’ (Bauman and Rovirosa-Madrazo, 2010: 52), the state supported capital and labour in equal measure. With globalization, however, the scales are tipped in favour of corporations. Employees are left to fend for themselves, with the processes of recommoditizing labour into flexible and permanently available workers transferred to the private sector. Instead of the separation of the individual – with, pace neo-liberalism, the capacity to exercise choice⁹ – from the commodity chosen, the distinguishing feature of the society of consumers is ‘the transformation of consumers into commodities’ (Bauman, 2007a: 12; italics in the original).

With every aspect of culture ‘subordinated to the logic of the market’ (Bauman, 1987: 166), thinking about community and a better society become ‘a waste of time, since they are irrelevant to individual happiness’ (Bauman, 2008a: 88). In a consumerist culture where people are recognized in their capacity as commodities, we substitute after-purchase bliss with the act of shopping itself. As is our lot in a liquid modern society that is technologically mediated, the means overrun the ends. The pursuit of commodified happiness has no summum bonum. Consequently, ‘labels, logos and brands are the [new] … language of recognition’ (Bauman, 2008a: 12). As happiness is reduced from a state of being – of something achieved, had and enjoyed – to merely a hope, individuals are apt to assemble, and to just as quickly disassemble, their identity. Existential security is reduced to the mere possibility of being happy (Bauman, 2008a: 28). Secondly, those who are ceaselessly trying to bricoler an identity are turned in upon themselves. Consumerism does not produce the desired security and satiety. Anxiety escalates about what tomorrow’s trend is going to be, while paranoia takes hold over whether one is actually consuming the latest thing, for how long does the latest last in fashion conscious consumption?

Not surprisingly, in a society of oniomaniacs one-upmanship is the only way to overcome identity diffidence. Compulsive consumers have no need for others, nor any time for them. Notions of self-sacrifice and attachment to others fall by the wayside for individuals whose carefree notion of moral commitment blinds them to injustice (Bauman, 2008a: 42–4). In any case, the competitors undertaking the journey only ever have a brief insight into the troubles of the less fortunate, who are either relegated to the role of spectator, socio-economically bivouacked along the road, or kept out of the game altogether through relegation to the underclass. Ethics, in short, is the main casualty of seekers of happiness in a consumer society.

The Consumption of Ethics

Even if happiness is a universal yearning driven by the existential desire to mitigate the ‘eroding powers’ of time (Bauman, 2008a: 31), it comes packaged with an inkling of its own impossibility. But like Odysseus’ soldiers seduced by the songs of the Sirens, it does not dampen our insatiable desire for happiness, especially in liquid modernity. Powered by a Nietzscheanesque will to happiness that is boosted by the uprooting of individuals, the switch from any end state of being (objectively) happy to the (subjective) pursuit of it signals the point at which a society crosses the ‘threshold of modernity’ (Bauman, 2008a: 29).¹⁰

So what is problematic about the pursuit of happiness for subjects that cross it? Bauman’s reply is to identify the ethical practices through which we articulate ourselves as artists of life. These assume a particularly modern assumption, namely, that one can make a difference in the world. Although the precise difference is impossible to discern – indeed, by 1669 Pascal had already meditated on our insignificance in relation to the infinite – it functions as an existential heuristic device that pushes subjects into action as if it mattered. We have become artists that create ourselves, and the fact that we approach ‘life as a work of art’ is linked to the human condition of will and freedom of choice (Bauman, 2008a: 53).

In reference to the quandary of reconciling liberty and security, Bauman says that when the bearers of will, agents, confront sources of belonging that produce recognition, the latter are exogenous structures that are anything but a matter of choice. Yet this antagonism between will and freedom, or moral agents who seek affirmation in the background practices through which they are constituted, cannot be transcended. We are not autarkic islands of spontaneous freedom, but dialogical beings. This is why Bauman (2008a: 71) suggests there is ‘little point in the art of life unless there is some hope … that the objets d’art it produces will be admired’.¹¹

In this regard, Bauman demarcates solid modernity from its liquid offspring by the arts of life that are specific to each. The former entails a Sartrean mode of ethical self-formation, in which successive situations are ‘stages of a predesigned itinerary … [on the] pilgrimage to a destination designed once and for all’ (Bauman, 2008a: 73).¹² In contrast, Bauman (2008a: 74) speaks of ‘creative destruction’, which is attractive to ‘many people’ in liquid societies. Its pulling power is the flexibility it offers. Indeed, this art of life imitates contemporary art itself. Self-constitution becomes a happening, where the only certainty is the uncertainty of what will happen during affirmations of who we are. Similarly, ethical self-fashioning mimics the installation. With only the short-run in mind, we patch ourselves together from brittle and perishable elements.

If subjects fashion themselves into an artistic creation that is admired and destroyed in a single gaze, there is an archetype that predominates and an alternative that Bauman invites us to take up. Because liquid modernity is characterized by ambivalence, it constitutes what Bauman (2008a: 107) describes as the ‘home ground of the moral person’. It throws us into a position of responsibility for the other that implies an ethical duty to care for her. However, the archetypical response to this calling is the Nietzschean position, where responsibility is uncompromisingly to and for ourselves. It is only our interests and desires that matter. With this attitude, there can be no gesture of self-sacrifice towards the other, who ends up as the victim at the other end of the adiaphorized social relations of commodification. Bauman (2008a: 122; italics in the original) portrays this Nietzschean subject as a centripetal self, for whom ethics is tantamount to a ‘programme of ego care, ego enhancement and altogether self-referential concerns’.

Bauman’s alternative is a Levinasian archetype. He calls it the centrifugal self, for whom ethics is the ‘prospect of care and concern for the Other – and the happiness of being for’ (Bauman, 2008a: 122). The advantage of the centrifugal self is that it encapsulates its Nietzschean rival’s desire for self-fulfilment. Concern for the well-being of others has a centripetal effect, as care for the other can only enhance my happiness. Yet Bauman also speaks of the centrifugal self as an imperative due to the collateral damage that the centripetal self leaves in her wake.

Firstly, existential Angst sets in. Individuals become obsessed with staying ahead of reference groups to improve their market value, or with constant renewal to bolster their sense of security. The individualized self may live or die by her style and economic viability, but while the content of choice is free, making a choice – the context – is obligatory. Secondly, the structural conditions that impose this existential predicament offer little solace for renegades. The time of being is out of joint. Any hope of psychological coherence is overwhelmed by a pointillist life that is punctuated with a profusion of ruptures. The past and future conflate, with the present experienced as an incoherent succession of discontinuous episodes. Although each collection of instants may promise the possibility of an existential anchoring, they are never more than broken promises. Finally, even if there is no moral or legal responsibility for the suffering of the underclass in the society of consumers, Bauman (2007: 128) warns there are no victors of consumerism either, as ‘the most salient among the victims is the humanity of those who escape the [underclass’s] perdition’.

Why, therefore, is the centrifugal self on the wane? Of course, the adiaphorization of intersubjective relations does not help matters. In the Machiavellian market, choices are rendered amoral. For agents in for the free moral ride, the norm for some is to pop Viagra in the evening, while for others it is to take the morning-after pill come daybreak (Bauman, 2008a: 109–10). Because of his adherence to a lay ‘conversational image of interpretation’ (Beilharz, 2001: 1–2), Bauman also castigates philosophers. Their folly is to dissuade us from a centripetal life of self-interest by outlining the rewards to be had from the duty to care for others. Similarly, the ‘self-proclaimed masters of fool proof … research methods’, the sociologists, are not beyond disparagement either (Bauman, 2008a: 97). They fail to explain why, at crucial moral junctures, centrifugal selves choose to do good. In the end, Bauman argues, we simply care for others because of free will. It is a spontaneous expression, devoid of any ulterior motive, which makes true moral acts intrinsically free choices.

In short, we can succumb to the force of social structures imbued with consumerism and carve out an existence that is thoroughly unconcerned with the other. Alternatively, we can act as an ethical self, who has an unconditional impulse towards the other and a will to take ethical responsibility for her because she is weaker. As Bauman (2008a: 124, 103; italics in the original) argues, ‘assuming responsibility for that responsibility … is a matter of choice’, and while many choices originate with ‘fate and its guerrilla troops, accidents’, what ultimately determines which choices are made is an inner moral voice that tells me the choice could not be otherwise. With ‘moral responsibility … [ultimately] a mystery contrary to reason’ (Bauman, 1993: 13), being ethical is not a question of being stronger than, or more enlightened about the limits of, the centripetal mode of ethical life, but of moral fibre and strength of character.

The Dilemmas of the Ethics of Consumerism

There are three dilemmas in Bauman’s account of the consumption of ethics by the ethics of consumerism. Given his claim that the liquid modern centripetal self ends up in a moral cul-de-sac, the obvious question is should we heed his advice and become a centrifugal self? However, despite the attractiveness of the latter’s moral responsibility for the other, the prior question is whether we can in fact turn back and take up this position? And if the answer is negative, what is the value of Bauman’s critique?¹³

Firstly, although Bauman (1991: 51) believes that liquid modern pluralization returns ‘moral responsibility … to … the acting individual’, it may still be some way off. In the crossing of the threshold of modernity, artists of life turned in on themselves may equally have crossed the moral Rubicon. While Bauman refers to the centripetal self’s penchant for ‘creative destruction’, the idea as developed by its originator, Schumpeter, is a critique of revolutionary alternatives to capitalism.¹⁴ As Schumpeter realized, it prospers by destroying its offspring through a process of cyclical creation, whence critical philosophy’s fascination with capitalism as ‘an immanent system that’s constantly overcoming its own limitations’ (Deleuze, 1995: 171). Analogously, if an ethical character of depth is the prerequisite for a centrifugal self, how can Bauman expect centripetal selves characterized by their shallowness to perform a moral volte-face? It would deny the existential effectiveness of the structures of consumerist culture upon shaping ethical subjectivity to begin with, while those Bauman needs to transform themselves – the global elites in their delimited communities – show few signs of scaling down the conspicuousness of their consumerist mode of being.

Bauman’s plea for individuals to redirect the moral gauge from the outside-in to the inside-out can therefore only fall on deaf ears. The centrifugal self – if not ethics tout court – is destroyed through the creation of the centripetal self by political choices made in the name of consumerism. Indeed, this is precisely Schumpeter’s point. Creative destruction is a revolution ‘from within, incessantly destroying the old [economic structure], incessantly creating a new one’ (Schumpeter, 1943: 83; italics in the original). It produces ‘discrepancies as an essential element in the structures which develop’ (Schumpeter, 1939: 102). Irrespective of the moral urgency, there can be no return. Bauman’s moral ‘discrepancy’, the centripetal self, is the creation of neo-liberal politics, which in turn destroys the centrifugal self and her ethics.

Secondly, despite capitalism’s de rigueur denigration from the academy, it offers endless possibilities to mortals now fully aware of their finitude, yet screened from it by our increasingly virtual experiences of death. Individualized liberty in the free market thrives on this logic, too. By proffering an irresistible licence without suffering or responsibility (Warde, 2001: 561–2), it produces a solipsistic self that gets as much out of life as possible. As a result, the creative forces that propel the centripetal self into consumerism leave the centrifugal self by the wayside. Notwithstanding, should we simply dismiss this ontology as crooked timber? The work of Daniel Miller is instructive here and reveals the totalizing bent of Bauman’s interpretation.

Bauman and Miller both want to get beyond consumption as merely a ‘mode for the free expression of the creative subject’ (Miller, 2001: 4). Similarly, Miller’s (2012: 29, 183) debt to Pierre Bourdieu means consumer ‘taste is really a map of structural differences between classes’, whence a ‘moral imperative to end poverty and deprivation’. However, the similarity ends here, as Bauman retreats back upstream of consumption, while Miller soldiers on downstream. In contrast to Bauman’s concern about the structurally dominated and symbolically manipulated consumer, Miller (1987: 144–65) rejects the subject as the dupe of consumerism and focuses on the consumer qua expressive, dominant communicator.¹⁵

The social sciences, Miller (1995) argues, need to ‘acknowledge consumption’ because it links production and consumption through the reflexive subject. Consumption structures and is structured by material culture, through which we ‘delineate our values, cosmology, emotional repertoires, and sense of sameness and difference’ (Miller, 2012: 184). Capitalism is then the ‘context for this engagement … [as well as] consequence and cause’, while ‘[s]ocial relations are the primary cause of consumption’ (Miller, 2012: 184).¹⁶ Further, because of its pivotal role in moral self-constitution, consumption is often at odds with the subject’s ethical responsibilities. Miller (2012: 88) argues that, insofar as thrift is the hallmark of a moral consumer – it displays a will to cherish resources through purchasing wisely for the household – there is often a ‘contradiction between morality and ethics’. We often ‘fail to be ethical’ in respect of the environment or social justice, for instance, as they require the consumer to prioritize ‘abstract goals’ over the ‘natural’ moral concerns of the household (Miller, 2012: 89).

The question for Bauman is whether his truck with consumer society concerns the poverty of the life strategies that cajole us to be present to ourselves and others as commodities, or the way consumerism inserts the commodity between subjects, hereby negating a Levinasian ethics that might precede our taking up with material objects? Either way, Miller’s insights arguably undermine Bauman. If individuals ‘play creatively … [in] processes of socialization’ (Miller in Borgerson, 2009: 163), with commodities ‘a non-verbal communication medium … to make sense of things’ (Douglas, 2001: 264), then consumption is a form of symbolic labour in which consumers mould themselves via objects into subjects. For this reason, Miller (1987: 192–3) rejects deterministic views of consumerism, which Bauman is arguably guilty of, as they assume ‘an essentialist natural self masked by the artificial nature of culture as commodity’.

Ironically, therefore, Bauman and Miller share the same objective of humanizing the world. Yet for the former it is by juxtaposing ethics with consumer society, whereas for Miller (2001: 291) it is through ethical consumption as a political activity that enables ‘a supersession of any autonomous interest called capital’. At the very least, an analysis of the morality of consumption in terms of ‘social justice, the environment, values and social connection’ is needed to escape the ‘theoretical cul-de-sac’ of analytically totalizing critiques of consumerism (Schor et al., 2010: 275–8). Apart from being politically self-defeating, critiques of Bauman’s ilk cut off consumption as:

a realm of intensely practical morality: … people’s everyday statements of need are a space of moral reasoning (‘I need this to live a proper life’), of political critique (needs stake a normative claim to social resources, and critique any system which denies them), and of ethical engagement (how can we properly negotiate conflicting needs and resource claims within relationships or communities) (Schor et al., 2010: 282–3; italics in the original).¹⁷

The third observation about Bauman’s critical project concerns his agent of ethics, the centrifugal self. Her independence from power enables her to choose with the other in mind (being-for). It also allows an understanding of the social conditions (being-with) that uphold authentic moral choices, which push her beyond self-centred concerns of individual fulfilment (being-aside). Of course, it is only because Bauman stands by the autonomous subject, with its necessary separation of ‘people from things, and of seeing people as the natural preserve for individuation … and things as the natural preserve for commoditization’, that any concern ‘about the commoditization of [the] human’ arises in the first place (Kopytoff, 2001: 26–7). But it also begs the question of how Bauman is able to explain the domination of the subject without himself being a victim of it, other than from a position of epistemological privilege. Matters are exacerbated by Bauman’s disdain for sociology as little more than ideology. In this case, how solid is the ground upon which he stands when criticizing it (Milbank, 2010: 109)? Bauman finds himself here in an ‘aporetic trap’: ‘[d]oes he scorn the masses and their proneness to religiosity, thereby inviting the charge of elitism (besides the charge that he continues to endorse the pseudo-religiosity of intellectuals), or does he rather scorn intellectual elites, thereby compromising the advocacy of progress’ (Milbank, 2010: 111)?¹⁸

Further, is the solipsistic centripetal self a dupe of the ideological power of consumerism, which Bauman’s (2007a: 47–9) description of the ‘economics of deception’ seems to support? Or are the centripetal self’s market choices the form that freedom now takes, if only because all historical alternatives have been destroyed, albeit creatively? If the latter, then Bauman’s meditations on freedom are timely, but what would a centrifugal self’s genuine freedom of choice look like? Is Bauman (2008a: 77) calling for a pristine form of autonomy, where choices are made without the distorting decrees of consumerism that direct us through the labyrinth of the mall into a Nietzschean narcissism? In this case, a sharper distinction is needed between the moral choices that free will confronted with the other imposes upon us, which Bauman designates as freedom of choice, and the expression of everyday consumer preferences without a necessary concern for the other, but which have ethical connotations, as Miller and others demonstrate.¹⁹

Finally, perhaps Foucault gestures at a way out of the impasse in which Bauman finds himself, especially Foucault’s take on the reciprocal relation between freedom and power and the ethical bridge between them. Starting from an epistemological perspective, and moving through to a political and ultimately an ethico-moral one, Foucault writes a critical history of the thought that circumscribes who we are.²⁰ The hyphen in the third perspective derives from the substitution of a history of moral codes with a critical history of ethical practices, which allows us to delineate the ethical moments of moral agency. Of particular interest here is the way in which the subject, via ascetic practices and techniques of the self, ought to train herself to be ethical in relation to an agonistic field of power (Foucault, 1992: 21–6). The subject is treated as a field of forces – desires, appetites, licence, lust and violence – which are permanently prone to excess, typically through incitement by technologies of power, such as consumerism. Yet ceding would be indicative of failure, or unethical conduct, and via practices and techniques the subject strives after moderation in the use of her ethics inducing dispositions. Ethico-political subjectivity, or what Foucault (1992: 92–3) calls an ‘aesthetics of existence’, is hereby constituted. In short, a Foucauldian ethics is the midwife of an agonistic freedom which, because of its mediation through power, is inherently political.²¹

Unlike Bauman’s assumption of an autonomous subject with an undistorted (consumerist) relation to the other, the Foucauldian subject is ontologically implicated in the world. Ethics cannot precede politics. Based on an agonistic relation to technologies of power in which the stakes are not power or freedom, but the articulation of freedom through an individualizing power ‘which makes individuals subjects’ (Foucault, 1982: 212), the task is to conceive of an ethico-political – rather than ethical or political – subject that pursues a ‘purposeful art of a freedom perceived as a power game’ (Foucault, 1992: 252–3). Understanding consumerism as a technology of power, we can imagine an agonistic ethico-political subject that resists consumption by consumerism, because at ‘the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom’ (Foucault, 1984: 222).

Conclusion

None of the dilemmas above play down the importance of Bauman’s observations. Rather, they question the impact of his critique, for as Gane (2001: 274) says in respect of Bauman’s attempt to translate private troubles into public concerns, how is any of this ‘to be achieved in practice’? Furthermore, it may well be the case, Jacques Derrida (2005: 80; italics in the original) notes, that ‘we belong … to the time of … a harrowing tremor in the … experience of belonging’, yet we ‘are more unwilling than ever to accept … advice [on how to conduct ourselves morally]’ (Best, 1998: 315).

Despite his ability to be ‘provocative’ (Gane, 2001: 272), as well as the acuity of his writing that teases out the discursive intricacies that constitute who we are, Bauman has an air of nostalgia about him. Perhaps inevitable after ‘a life-time of sociological observation’ (Jay, 2010: 98–100), Peter Beilharz (2001: 1–2) suggests it is due to Bauman’s thinking being notoriously ‘slippery’ and unsystematic in its pursuit of the ‘fragment’, with his reflections experimental ‘works-in-progress’ (Vecchi, 2004: 1). Nevertheless, Bauman departs from his otherwise admirable analytic posture from within the fray. Instead, he comes across as someone who is above and, indeed, estranged from it. To be sure, he encapsulates the centrifugal self he recommends, but the impression is of a thinker who is looking inwards rather than outwards and clutching at a form of ethical existence which, like the epoch of modernity it was relevant to, is no longer solid and, in fact, almost fully melted away. In the end, his counsel comes across in a tone more akin to a moralizer than a moral adviser.

The challenge is to avoid both a conservative solution of retrieval and a celebration of new modes of ethical self-formation in the immature present that is not yet painted grey. Bauman obviously rejects the latter, even if he veers too close to the former with the attendant dilemmas mentioned. Yet it would also be unreasonable to expect ready-made solutions from Bauman, in as much as his thought is ‘a poetic imagination’ (Jacobsen and Marshman, 2008: 19) that creates metaphors for a ‘world that is constantly changing’ (Blackshaw, 2010: 72–3). On this understanding, Bauman gives an insight into the ethical consequences for subjects that fashion themselves through consumerism. It is in keeping with his portrayal of the radical liquidity of today’s moral currency in the hope that we face ‘our choices more consciously and [see] their moral contents more clearly’ (Bauman, 1995: 7). Bauman’s ‘politics of ethics’ (Hell, 2010: 127; italics in the original) and desire for ‘humanization through metaphor’ (Jacobsen and Marshman, 2008: 21; italics in the original) lead us to a moral crossroads. Although difficult to ‘recognize the crossroads as a crossroads … [and] to accept that … pursuing the future – any future – may require sharp turns’ (Bauman, 2005b: 120), one turn we might entertain in virtue of Bauman is that of Foucault’s ethico-political subject.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Pierre-Antoine Chardel for his socio-philosophical input, as well as the anonymous reviewers at TCS for both their patience and constructive comments and recommendations, which I trust have made the article much better than it otherwise would be.

Notes

Bregham Dalgliesh is Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, Japan, and Research Associate of LASCO (LAboratoire Sens et COmpréhension du monde contemporain), Université Paris Descartes/Institut Mines-Télécom, France. His work focuses on the concept of critique, as well as on technoscience and power, with the former used to analyse the constitutive effects of the latter upon the socio-political, cultural and ethico-moral relations that define the human condition.

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