Research by artists and thinkers presented in the new RESEARCH section, provides an analysis of contemporary art and the contemporary world. This first issue contains a description of the philosophy of the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, whose most recent book, Liquid Life (2005), appears to be conquering the art world.
According to the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (born Poznan, 1925), the constant balancing of freedom and security is one of the most important characteristics of life in the modern world. But does this modernity still exist? Many sociologists have tried to come up with an alternative name for our new reality: the second modernity, hypermodernity, late modernity, high modernity, or as Bauman calls it in his ‘Liquid trilogy of accessible descriptions of society’, ‘liquid modernity’.
Bauman has gained a large readership through his books Liquid Modernity (2000), Liquid Love (2003) and Liquid Life (2005). With Pierre Bourdieu’s death, Anthony Giddens being dismissed as Tony Blair’s theoretical lackey and while Jean Baudrillard desperately searches for a suitable way of perfecting his nihilist pensée radicale, Bauman has become the only remaining credible sociologist who manages to bridge the gap between the academic world and public debate. Leaving the purely academic world to the academics, his style and presentation (short, multifaceted books with a wealth of information that adorn many a coffee table with their splendid designs) lend themselves perfectly for a broader public. Few can better translate theoretical erudition into questions that concern us all, managing to place everyday matters, such as business parks, SUVs, internet dating, mobile phones and the relationship between children and work in a larger social context. Bauman identifies the existential discomfort of the 21st century without resorting to terrorism.
Outsider
It is not surprising that one of the sharpest thinkers on the subject of modernity is an outsider. Though almost destroyed by what he later described as ‘the two most successful expressions of modernity’, Soviet Communism, which was somewhat kinder to him, and the advance of fascism, Zygmunt Bauman remains a committed socialist, one who keeps a close eye on the rift between humanist potential and totalitarian interpretation. This explains how, as a former member of the Red Army, Bauman can quote Marx favourably in his latest book, Liquid Life (2005), without a hint of embarrassment. As a Jewish inhabitant of Poznan, he was chased out of Poland in 1968 during a renewed wave of anti-Semitism. Unable to settle in the ultranationalist state of Israel, he has lived in England since, as Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds. Does this status of outsider make of Bauman the ultimate sociologist? Perhaps it does. After all, sociologists are sceptical of collective processes and prefer not to belong to any one particular group.
Bauman will never be a system-builder. He rejects attempts to describe social reality as a single, predominant concept. In Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) he explores how dangerous such attempts can be, presenting modernity as a universal project of rationalisation and bureaucratisation which endeavours to remove all differences between people. According to Bauman, such egalitarianism, combined with technological culture, resulted in moral erosion and ultimately paved the way for the extermination camps.
In the late eighties, Bauman also argued a crucial change in the role of the intellectual. Modernity, he maintained, was above all a perception of the world, a cultural ideology that claimed universal answers on truth, justice and beauty. As a carrier of these values, the intellectual increasingly lost his power and in turn, the world refused to conform to his models. The modern state needed ever more experts to keep its social system running with techniques such as surveillance, medicalisation and ‘psychiatrisation’. This left only one role for the intellectual, that of interpreter.
Now that modernity is held suspect as being capable of mass extermination and the intellectual appears to be out of the game, as a vassal of the modern nation state, it was a logical step for Bauman to place the interpretive intellectual, and therefore himself, in the era of post-modernity.
Consumerism
This proved to be a successful approach and made Bauman the sociologist of the 1990s. A sociologist who describes his field as one having difficulties escaping its own modern roots. Bauman brilliantly takes up the interpretive role in such books as Intimations of Postmodernity (1992) and Life in Fragments (1995). His books are collections of essays, based on a sort of literary sociology, with different subjects which are often, though not necessarily, subtly interrelated.
One concept in particular plays a central role in his philosophy, that of consumerism. NonMarxist sociologists have always had a slight distaste for economic reductionism; nevertheless, consumerism can be of great interest precisely because it was consistently neglected by economic science. As Bauman indicates, consumerism plays an increasingly important role in life as both a social and philosophical factor. He clearly describes the significance of consumerism near the end of Intimations of Postmodernity: ‘Consumerism stands for the production, distribution, desire, acquisition and use of symbolical goods. Symbolic goods are a very important factor. Consumerism is not only about satisfying a material need, filling your belly; it is a matter of manipulating symbols for all sorts of different purposes. At the level of experiencing the world, this is about creating an identity, a self and a relationship with others. At the level of society it is about protecting the existence of successive institutions, groups and structures, and those sorts of things.’
Identity as a construction
No matter how his ideas continue to evolve, this will remain the core of his analysis. For Bauman, post-modernity is a new social condition which is clearly distinct from modernity. History no longer moves in one direction. The securities of modernity are replaced by characteristics symbolising insecurity, and we will have to learn to live with them: institutionalised pluralism, diversity, coincidence and ambivalence.
One consequence is that the environment becomes an unpredictably complex system, with little room for interdependence between individuals. It is possible that a heightened level of autonomy develops parallel to establishing the purpose and meaning of life, and results in an ‘existential modality’ that can be characterised by terms such as indeterminacy and indecision, spontaneity and deracination. These sorts of terms are characteristic of Bauman, who refuses to moralise. Words beginning with the prefix ‘un’ or ‘in’ are loaded with a negative significance and by avoiding them Bauman subtly expresses his concern about social trends. However, it still proves possible to relate these terms to a context of possibilities resulting in something that can be described as the task imposed by freedom. Freedom rushes through the individual. Identity becomes a construction, a life project without a goal, a constant movement of creation and demolition. The only continuity in this process is to be found in the bearer of identity: the body (beautifully described as a recorder of impressions and the producer of public ‘legible’ definitions of the self).
A careless reading could lead to the conclusion that we are confronted here with a neoliberal, good-news-show. And yet Bauman is not blind to the problems consumerism can cause. After all, the access to forms of self-realisation differs from individual to individual, and is mainly dependent on a certain level of financial clout.
In Liquid Life, Bauman formulates the problem of failing consumers more seriously. With great insight, he describes the potential victims of the ‘quota of deportations’ instituted by the by now notorious French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nicolas Sarkozy: ‘They really are completely useless, superfluous remnants of a consumer society, outside the official studies. They have nothing to offer an economy based on consumption, neither now nor in the future. They do not contribute anything to the wonders of the world of consumerism; they will not lift the country from the depression by taking out credit cards which they do not own, or withdrawing savings which they do not have – and therefore society would be better off without them.’
The waning of the consumer society
This quotation is representative of the pessimistic tone in Bauman’s recent work. Suddenly the term ‘post-modern’ disappears only to be replaced by the expression ‘liquid modernity’. Why this sudden manoeuvre? Discussions about postmodernism have always been permeated by the question: ‘And what happens next?’ According to Bauman, liquid modernity is a way of thinking beyond the demolition mentality of postmodernism.
What is a liquid life? It is the life in a society in which virtually everything is in motion and refuses to be consistent (in the sense of the structures that claimed to establish the old version of modernity). In Liquid Love Bauman describes how this movement not only changes our thinking about love and sexuality, but also our ideas about human relationships (the relationship with your neighbours, to strangers). As an extension of the free life dominated by consumer choices, people increasingly delay commitment in the area of loving relationships. Options must be kept open, there is a fear of permanent commitment (it may always be possible to find a better relationship, and furthermore, a relationship which doesn’t work could be an obstacle to further self-development). Bauman suggest that people prefer to talk about networks rather than partners. In a network of ‘virtual relationships’ it is easier to form temporary connections and take breaks. It is a clear way of relating to each other, in which breaking off relationships can take place without excessive drama or emotional investment.
Liquid life is life based on consumerism. Despite his refusal to pass judgement too harshly, man in Liquid Love moves suspiciously like a vampire who consumes love and leaves it behind. But problems do emerge. The recreation of the individual through consumerism, previously welcomed as a model for social reproduction and now identified as a modernist project at the individual level, is a privilege. It is apparent that it is impossible to achieve the standard of living promoted by the richest western countries on a global scale. There is a fundamental inequality which produces new classes, including an international elite of self reflecting consumers, so-called cultural hybrids.
Hybrid culture allows one the freedom to move on a global level; a distributed no man’s land where one is never really at home. Anyone inside this world, no matter how temporary their membership may be, lives in a wonderful world devoid of a credible hierarchy, where authorities cannot gain any power in the field of culture and ideas and where identity is permanently undetermined. Hybrid culture is extracultural, eclectic, unprejudiced and feels like real freedom. It is clear that this class has its counterpart in all those who are denied movement, who are imprisoned in the identity imposed upon them. (In this respect, fundamentalism is no more than a choice to safeguard this imposed identity in the face of a global ideology of the free market and individualism.) Bauman’s new favourite negative metaphor and realistic concern plays an important role here: waste. Waste is the product created in abundance by the liquid consumer society, and one which becomes increasingly difficult to dispose of. Waste is what you are reduced to once you become a failed consumer.
Art versus impermanence
A leading question of critical commentators is whether art can actually play a meaningful role in such a society. For Bauman, in the first instance, there is little room for it. In his essay on culture in Liquid Life he describes the relationship between the originally interrelated terms: culture and management. These two ‘narratives’ are at loggerheads because they in fact share the same goal: to change human behaviour.
It is not surprising that the manager despised by the artist, has developed new criteria based on consumption, as an agent of the market, rather than of the nation state (and the related concepts of speed and circulation that do not work effectively within the practice of culture). The consequences are predictable: cultural products must gain legitimacy in terms of their market value. Fame, brand names and events are better suited to attracting the short attention span of the consumer. Liquid modernity is a culture of discontinuity and forgetfulness. As soon as he formulates this idea, Bauman looks for representative artists. Jacques Villeglé’s lacerated posters, the layered collages of Manolo Valdes –whether they are completed or are already disintegrating is not clear– and Hermann Braun-Vega’s paintings of impossible encounters, all reproduce the liquid aspect of modernity: ‘Again and again they emphasise this – within the tendency to shorten works of art to a performance, a happening, the length of an exhibition from and to something; in the preference for fragility, delicacy and art objects which are made from impermanent materials which easily break down; in the earth works for which it is not clear whether they still have to be visited or whether they will continue to exist under the impact of weather conditions, and in general, by incorporating the threat of decay and disappearance in the material substance of the artistic creation.’
Bauman cautiously looks for hope in these ‘dark times’ in another favourite work of art by Gediminas Urbonas: four arctic containers, one of which does not contain an artwork but is empty and therefore open to the viewer’s own projection and meaning. Certainly in Bauman’s theories a central role is reserved for the eroded place of public dialogue, where diversity (the motor of cultural change) can still flourish. This will have to be a new sort of public area on a worldwide scale for the politics and the responsibilities on this same scale, seeing as such problems also occur at a global level. Bauman hopes for a solution which we cannot yet imagine. At the same time we must ask ourselves if our consciousness is not fatally flawed and thereby creating a situation in which we are able to gain an overall view of the world, but unable to take action until the problems penetrate our immediate lives and environments.
Polity Press, Cambridge 2005.
ISBN 0745635148
Notes
- Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity, Routledge 1992.
- Ibid., p. 223.
- Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Life, Polity Press, Cambridge 2005.
- Ibid.,p. 66.
Opening
