♦
AN INFLUENTIAL AND widely read fashion handbook for the autumn-winter 2005 season offers “half a dozen key looks” “for the coming months” “that will put you ahead of the style pack.” This promise is aptly, skillfully calculated to catch our attention: in a brief, crisp sentence it manages to address all the anxieties and urges bred by the society of consumers and born of the consuming life.
First, to be and to stay ahead (of the “style pack,” that is, of those “significant others,” the others who count, and whose approval or rejection draws the line between success and failure).1 Being ahead is the sole trustworthy recipe for the style pack’s acceptance, while staying ahead is the only way to make sure the supply of respect is comfortably ample and continuous. The offer promises, therefore, a guarantee of safety resting on self-confidence, of certainty or near certainty of “being in the right”—the kind of sensation that the consuming life most conspicuously, and painfully, misses, despite being guided by the desire to acquire it. The reference to being and staying ahead of the style pack promises belonging—being approved and included. “Ahead” implies safety from falling by the wayside: avoiding exclusion, abandonment, loneliness.
Second, the promise comes with a use-by date: you have been warned that it holds solely “for the coming months.” The latent message is, “Hurry up—there is no time to waste.” There is also an assumption of yet greater import: whatever your gain from promptly following the call, it won’t last forever. Whatever insurance for safe sailing you acquire will need to be renewed once the “coming months” pass. So watch this space. As Milan Kundera observed in the novel appropriately called Slowness, there is a bond between speed and forgetting: “The degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.” Why so? Because if “taking over the stage requires keeping other people off it,” taking over the stage that is public attention—the attention of the public earmarked to be recycled into consumers—requires keeping other objects of attention off it. “Stages,” Kundera reminds us, “are floodlit only for the first few minutes.”
Third, since there is not one look on offer but “half a dozen,” you are free (that is, free to choose between these six). You can pick and choose your look. Choosing a look is not at issue (choosing as such, and bearing responsibility for your choice, you can’t avoid), nor are the options you must choose from (there are no other options; all possibilities have already been discovered and preselected). But never mind the pressure of time, the necessity to curry the favor of the style pack, and the limited number of choices you can make (only half a dozen). What matters is that it is you who are now in charge. And be in charge you must: Choice is yours, but making choices is obligatory, and the limits on what you are allowed to choose are nonnegotiable.
All three messages together announce the state of emergency. Emergency itself is no news, to be sure (only the assurances that the vigilance, the constant readiness to go where one must go, the money spent, and the labors done are sure to be right and proper are added to reassure the anxious). Alert signals (orange? red?) are switched on and announce that new beginnings full of promise lie ahead, along with new risks full of threats. The point is, now as before, never to miss the moment for action, lest one find oneself behind instead of ahead of the style pack. And that taking action while relying on implements and routines that worked in the past won’t do. The consuming life is a life of rapid learning—and swift forgetting.
Forgetting is as important as learning, if not more. There is a “must not” for every “must,” and which of the two reveals the true objective of the breathtaking pace of renewal/removal, and which one is but an auxiliary measure to ensure that the objective is attained, is a moot question at best. The kind of information and instruction likely to crop up most profusely in this fashion handbook and in the scores of similar ones is that “the destination this autumn is 1960s Carnaby Street,” or that “the current trend for gothic is perfect for this month.” This autumn is, of course, not last summer, and this month is not like past months, and so what was perfect last month is no longer perfect for this one, just as last summer’s destination is no longer this autumn’s destination. “Ballet pumps?” “Time to put them away.” “Spaghetti straps?” “They have no place this season.” “Biros?” “The world is a better place without them.” The call to “open up your makeup bag and take a look inside” is likely to be followed with an exhortation such as, “The coming season is all about rich colors,” followed closely by the warning that “beige and its safe-but-dull relatives have had their day . . . Chuck it out, right now.” Obviously, “dull beige” can’t be pasted on the face simultaneously with “deep rich colors,” and one of the palettes must give way.
But what is all this about? Must you “chuck out” the beige in order to make your face ready to receive deep rich colors, or are the deep rich colors bursting from the supermarket shelves and cosmetics counters in order to make sure that the bagful of unused beige supplies is indeed chucked out right away? The millions chucking the beige out and refilling their bag with deep rich colors would most probably say that the beige consigned to the rubbish heap is a sad side-effect, or “collateral casualty,” of makeup progress. Yet some of the thousands who restock the supermarket shelves might possibly admit in a moment of truth that overflowing the shelves with rich deep colors was prompted by the need to shorten the beige’s useful life and so to keep the economy going. Both explanations will be right. Is not GNP, the official index of the nation’s wellbeing, measured by the amount of money changing hands? Is not economic growth propelled by the energy and activity of consumers? Is not a “traditional consumer,” a shopper who shops only to meet his or her “needs” and stops once those needs have been met, the greatest danger to the consumer markets? Is not the bolstering of demand, rather than the satisfying of needs, the prime purpose and the flywheel of consumerist prosperity? In a society of consumers and in the era of life politics’ replacing Politics with a capital P, the true economic cycle, the one that truly keeps the economy going, is the cycle of “buy it, use it, chuck it out.”
The fact that two such ostensibly contradictory answers may both be right at the same time is precisely the greatest feat of the society of consumers and the key to its astounding capacity to reproduce and expand itself.
The consuming life is not about acquiring and possessing. It is not even about getting rid of what had been acquired the day before yesterday and was proudly paraded a day later. It is, first and foremost, about being on the move. If Max Weber was right and the ethical principle of the producing life was (and is, whenever a life wishes to become a producing life) the delay of gratification, the ethical principle of the consuming life (if its ethics could be at all frankly articulated) would be about the fallaciousness of resting satisfied. The major threat to a society that announces “customer satisfaction” to be its motive and purpose is a satisfied consumer. To be sure, the “satisfied consumer” would be a catastrophe to herself or himself as grave and horrifying as it would be to the consumerist economy. Having nothing more to desire? Nothing to chase after? Left to what one has (and so what one is)? Nothing vies any longer for a place on the stage of attention, and so there is nothing to push the memory off the stage and clear the site for “new beginnings.” Such a condition—hopefully short-lived—would be called boredom. The nightmares that haunt Homo consumens are memories outstaying their welcome and cluttering the stage.
Rather than the creation of new needs (some call them “artificial needs”—though wrongly, since a degree of artificiality is not a unique feature of “new” needs; while using natural predispositions as their raw material, all needs in any society are given form by the “artifice” of sociocultural patterns and pressures), it is the playing down, derogation, ridicule, and uglification of yesterday’s needs (beige makeup, the sign of last season’s boldness, is not just out of fashion now, but dull and indeed shameful, since cowardly: “This is not makeup—it’s a security blanket”) and, even more, the discrediting of the idea that the consuming life ought to be guided by the satisfaction of needs, that constitutes the major preoccupation and, as Talcott Parsons would have said, the “functional prerequisite” of the society of consumers. In that society, those who go solely by what they believe they need, and are activated only by the urge to satisfy those needs, are flawed consumers and so also social outcasts.
The secret of every durable—that is, successfully self-reproducing—social system is the recasting of “functional prerequisites” into behavioral motives for actors. To put it a different way: the secret of all successful “socialization” is making the individuals wish to do what the system needs them to do for it to reproduce itself. This may be done explicitly—by mustering popular support for, and in direct reference to, the declared interests of a “whole,” like a state or a nation, through a process variously dubbed “spiritual mobilization,” “civic education,” and “ideological indoctrination”—as it was commonly done in the solid phase of modernity, in the society of producers. Or this may be done obliquely, through an overt or covert imposition or drilling-in of appropriate behavioral patterns. And also through problem-solving patterns, which once observed (as observed they must be, because of the receding and vanishing of alternative choices and of the skills needed to practice them), sustain the system—as it is done in the liquid phase, in the society of consumers.
The explicit way of tying together systemic prerequisites and individual motives typical of the society of producers required the devaluation of the “now”—in particular, immediate satisfaction, and more generally, enjoyment (or rather, the devaluation of what the French entail in the virtually untranslatable concept of jouissance). By the same token, that way also necessarily had to enthrone the precept of delayed gratification—that is, the sacrifice of specific present rewards in the name of imprecise future benefits, as well as the sacrifice of individual rewards for the benefit of the “whole” (be it society, state, nation, class, gender, or just a deliberately underspecified “we”)—that would secure in due course a better life for all. In a society of producers, the long term is given priority over the short term, and the needs of the whole over the needs of its parts—and thus the joys and satisfactions derived from “eternal” and “supraindividual” values are cast as superior to fleeting individual raptures, and the happiness of a greater number is put above the plight of a smaller one. These are seen as, in fact, the only genuine and worthy satisfactions amid the multitude of seductive but false, deceptive, contrived, and degrading “pleasures of the moment.”
Wise after the fact, we (men and women whose lives are conducted in the liquid-modern setting) are inclined to dismiss that way of dovetailing systemic reproduction with individual motivation as wasteful, exorbitantly costly, and, above all, abominably oppressive because it goes against the grain of the “natural” human proclivity and propensity. Sigmund Freud was one of the first thinkers to note this; though gathering his data, as he had to, from a life lived on the rising slope of the society of mass industry and mass conscription, even that exquisitely imaginative thinker was unable to conceive of an alternative to the coercive suppression of instincts.2 To what he observed, Freud ascribed the generic status of necessary and unavoidable features of all and any civilization—of civilization “as such.”
Freud concluded that the demand of instinct-renunciation would not be willingly embraced. A great majority of humans, he insisted, obey many of the cultural prohibitions (or precepts) “only under the pressure of external coercion”—and “it is alarming to think of the enormous amount of coercion that will inevitably be required” to promote, instill, and make safe the necessary civilizing choices such as, for instance, work ethics (that is, a wholesale condemnation of leisure coupled with the commandment to work for the work’s sake, whatever the material rewards), or the ethics of peaceful cohabitation prescribed by the commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” (“What is the point of a precept enunciated with so much solemnity,” Freud asks rhetorically, “if its fulfilment cannot be recommended as reasonable?”) The rest of Freud’s case is too well known to be restated here in any detail: civilization must be sustained by repression, and repeated rebellions, as well as continuous efforts to hold them down, or preempt them, are inescapable. Dissent and mutiny cannot be avoided, since all civilization means constraint and all constraint is repulsive. “The replacement of the power of the individual by the power of community constitutes the decisive step of civilization. The essence of it lies in the fact that the members of the community restrict themselves in their possibilities of satisfaction, whereas the individual knew no such restriction.”
Let’s leave aside the caveat that “the individual” who is not already a “member of the community” may be an even more mythical figure than Hobbes’s presocial savage of the bellum omnium contra omnes, or be just a rhetorical device “for the sake of argument” (like the famous “original patricide” that would crop up in Freud’s later work). For whichever reason the particular wording of the message was chosen, the substance of the message is that putting the interests of a supraindividual group above the individual inclinations and impulses, as well as placing the long-term effects above the immediate satisfactions in the case of work ethics, is unlikely to be willingly acknowledged, embraced, and obeyed by the hoi polloi; and that the civilization (or, for that matter, peaceful and cooperative human cohabitation with all its benefits) that deploys such precepts to legitimate its demands must rest on coercion, or at least on a realistic threat that coercion would be applied if the restrictions imposed on instinctual urges were not punctiliously observed. If civilized human togetherness is to persist, the “reality principle” must be, by hook or by crook, assured an upper hand over the “pleasure principle.”
Freud reprojects that conclusion on all types of human togetherness (retrospectively renamed “civilizations”)—presenting it as a universal law of life in society. But whatever answer is given to the question of whether or not the repression of instincts was indeed coterminous with the history of humanity, one can credibly suggest that it could have been discovered, named, put on record, and theorized upon only at the dawn of the modern era; more to the point, only following the disintegration of the ancien régime that immediately preceded it, that sustained a by-and-large monotonous (indeed, sufficiently unproblematic to remain unnoticed and perhaps unnoticeable) reproduction of the customary rights and duties. It was the failure of such reproduction that laid bare the human-made artifice hiding behind the idea of the “natural” or “Divine” order, and so forced the reclassification of that order from the category of the “given” to the category of “tasks,” thus re-representing the logic of Divine creation as an achievement of human power.3
“Power of community” did not have to replace “the power of the individual” to make human cohabitation feasible and viable; power of community was in place long before its necessity, let alone its urgency, was discovered. Indeed, the idea that such replacement was a task yet to be performed by one or the other power holder, collective or individual, would hardly occur to either the individual or the community so long as that was the case. Community, as it were, held power over the individual (a total, “everything included” kind of power) so long as it remained unproblematic, and not a task (as all tasks) in which it could succeed or fail. To put it in a nutshell, community held individuals in its grip so long as it remained unaware of “being a community.”
Turning the subordination of individual powers to those of a community into a need waiting to be met reversed the logic of modern development. At the same time, however, by “naturalizing” what was in fact a historical process, it generated in one fell swoop its own legitimation and an etiological myth of the ancient, presocial collection of free-floating, solitary individuals who, once upon a time, came to be transmogrified, through civilizing effort, into a community bidding for the authority to trim and repress such individual predispositions as had been revealed and declared to be contrary to the requirements of secure cohabitation.
Community might be as old as humanity, but the idea of “community” as a condition sine qua non for humanity could be born only through the experience of its crisis. That idea was patched together out of the fears emanating from the disintegration of the self-reproducing social settings retrospectively called the ancien régime and recorded in the social-scientific vocabulary under the rubric of “traditional society.” The modern “civilizing process” (the only process calling itself by that name) was triggered by the state of uncertainty for which the falling apart and impotence of “community” was one of the suggested explanations.
“Nation,” that eminently modern innovation, was visualized in the likeness of community: it was to be “like the community,” or a new community—but a community-by-design, a community expanded and stretched to unprecedented volume, made to the measure of the newly extended network of human interdependencies and exchanges. What was later to be named the “civilizing process” (at the time when the developments to which that name referred were grinding to a halt or apparently shifting into reverse!) was a steady attempt to re-pattern and re-regularize, by new means pursued by new strategies, the human conduct no longer subjected to the homogenizing pressures of self-reproducing premodern institutions. Ostensibly, that process was focused on individuals: the new capacity for self-control in the newly autonomous individual was to take over the job done before by the no-longer-available social controls. But what was genuinely at stake was the deployment of the self-controlling capacity of individuals in the service of reenacting or reconstituting the “community” at a new, much higher level.
Just as the ghost of the lost Roman Empire hovered over the formation of feudal Europe, the specter of lost community soared over the constitution of modern nations. Nation building was accomplished with patriotism, an induced (taught/learned) readiness to sacrifice individual interests to the interests shared with other individuals ready to do the same, as its principal raw material. As Ernest Renan famously summed up the strategy: a nation is (or rather can live only by) the daily plebiscite of its members.
When setting about restoring the historicity absent from Freud’s extemporal model of civilization, Norbert Elias explained the birth of the modern self (that awareness of one’s own “inner truth,” coupled with the acceptance of one’s own responsibility to assert it) by the internalization of external constraints and their pressures. The nation-building process was inscribed in the space extending between supraindividual panoptic powers and the individual’s capacity to accommodate him- or herself to the necessities that those powers set in place. The newly acquired individual freedom of choice (including the choice of self-identity) resulting from the unprecedented underdetermination of social placement caused by the demise or advanced emaciation of traditional bonds was to be deployed, paradoxically, in the service of the suppression of choices deemed detrimental to the “new totality”: the community-like nation-state.
Whatever its pragmatic merits, the panopticon-style, “discipline, punish, and rule” way of achieving the needed/intended manipulation and routinization of behavioral probabilities was, however, cumbersome, costly, and conflict-ridden. It was also inconvenient, and surely not the best choice for the power holders, as it imposed severe and nonnegotiable constraints on the rulers’ freedom of maneuver; as it transpired later, alternative and less-awkward strategies could be devised through which systemic stability, better known under the name “social order,” could be achieved and made secure. It was because they had identified “civilization” as having a centralized system of coercion and indoctrination (later reduced, under Michel Foucault’s influence, to its coercive wing) that social scientists were left with little choice except to, misleadingly, describe the advent of the “postmodern condition” (which coincided with the entrenchment of the society of consumers) as a product of the “de-civilizing process.” What in fact happened was the discovery, invention, or emergence of an alternative method of civilizing (a less cumbersome, less costly, and relatively less conflict-ridden method, but above all, one that gives more freedom, and so more power, to the power holders)—an alternative way of manipulating the behavioral probabilities necessary to sustain the system of domination represented as social order. Another variety of the civilizing process, an alternative and apparently more convenient way in which the task of that process can be pursued, was found and set in place.
This new variety of the civilizing process, practiced by the liquid-modern society of consumers, arouses little if any dissent, resistance, or rebellion as it represents the obligation to choose as freedom of choice; by the same token, it overrides the opposition between “pleasure” and “reality” principles. Submission to the stern demands of reality may be experienced as an exercise of freedom, and indeed as an act of self-assertion. Punishing force, if applied, is seldom naked; it comes disguised as the result of a false step or lost (overlooked) opportunity, and far from bringing into the light the limits of individual freedom, it hides them yet more securely by obliquely entrenching individual choice in its role as the main, perhaps even the only, “difference that makes a difference” between victory and defeat in the individual pursuit of happiness.
The “totality” to which the individual should stay loyal and obedient no longer enters individual life in the shape of obligatory sacrifice (of the universal-conscription kind—of a duty to surrender individual interests, including one’s own survival, to the survival and welfare of a “whole,” of the country and the national cause), but in the form of highly entertaining, invariably pleasurable and relished festivals of communal togetherness and belonging, held on the occasion of a soccer World Cup or a cricket test. Surrendering to the “totality” is no longer a reluctantly embraced, discomforting, cumbersome, and often onerous duty but an avidly sought and eminently enjoyable entertainment.
Carnivals, as Mikhail Bakhtin memorably suggested, tend to be interruptions in the daily routine, the brief exhilarating intervals between successive installments of dull quotidianity, a pause in which the mundane hierarchy of values is temporarily reversed, most harrowing aspects of reality are for a brief time suspended, and the kinds of conduct considered shameful and prohibited in “normal” life are ostentatiously and with delight practiced and brandished in the open. If, during the old-style carnivals, it was the individual liberties denied in daily life that were put unashamedly on public display and ecstatically enjoyed, now it is a time to shelve the burdens and quash the anguishes of individuality through dissolving oneself in a “greater whole” and joyously abandoning oneself to its rule, while submerging in the tide of an undifferentiated sameness. The function (and seductive power) of the liquid-modern carnival lies in the momentary resuscitation of sunk-in-a-coma togetherness. Such carnivals are akin to “rain dances” and séances during which people join hands and summon the ghost of deceased community. Not an insignificant part of their charm is the awareness that the ghost will pay but a fleeting visit and will promptly go away, out of sight, once the séance is over.
All this does not mean that the “normal,” weekday conduct of the individuals has become random, unpatterned, and uncoordinated. It means only that the nonrandomness, regularity, and coordination of individually undertaken actions can be, and as a rule are, attained by means other than the solid-modern contraptions of enforcement, policing, and chain of command, of a totality bidding for being “greater than the sum of its parts” and bent on training or drilling its “human units” into discipline.
The consumerist economy lives by the turnover of commodities and is booming when more money changes hands. Money changes hands whenever consumer products are hauled to the dump. Accordingly, in a society of consumers the pursuit of happiness tends to be refocused from making things or acquiring them to disposing of them—just as it should if one wants the gross national product to keep growing. For the consumerist economy, the first and now abandoned focus of consumption (appeal to the needs) portends ill: the suspension of shopping. The second (appeal to forever-elusive happiness) bodes well: it augurs another round of shopping.
Big companies specializing in selling “durable goods” have accepted that much. These days they seldom charge their customers for delivery—much more frequently they demand payment for the disposal of the customers’ old “durable goods,” converted by the new and improved durable goods from a source of joy and pride into an eyesore, a blot on the home-scape, and altogether a stigma of shame. It is getting rid of such burdens that promises to make one happy, and happiness needs to be paid for. Just think of disposing of the waste in transit from the UK, where the volume, as Lucy Siegle reports, will soon pass 1.5 million metric tons.4
Big companies specializing in selling “personal services” focused on the client’s body have followed suit. What they advertise most avidly and sell for the largest financial gains are the services of excision, removal, and disposal: of body fat, face wrinkles, acne, body odors, post-this or post-that depressions, the oodles of yet unnamed mysterious fluids or undigested leftovers of past feasts that settle illegitimately inside the body and won’t leave unless forced, and whatever else can be detached or squeezed and disposed of. As to the big firms specializing in bringing people together, such as the America Online (AOL) Internet dating service, they tend to stress the facility with which clients who use their services can get rid of unwanted company, or prevent that company from becoming difficult to dispose of. When offering their go-between assistance, they stress that the “online dating experience” is “safe”—while warning that “if you feel uncomfortable about a member, stop contacting them. You can block them so you will not get unwanted messages.” AOL supplies a long list of “arrangements for a safe offline date.” Such appeals and promises are clearly in tune with the spirit of the time: as Helen Haste, professor of psychology at the University of Bath, found out, a third of questioned boys and nearly a fourth of girls saw nothing wrong in ending a relationship with a mobile-telephone text message.5 These numbers, as one would guess, are bound to have grown further since: the number of mobile-telephone messages that make cumbersome face-to-face negotiations redundant shot up in the UK from zero to 2.25 million per month in a matter of five years. Increasingly, it appears, text messages are being recognized as the most convenient way of preventing the chore and agony of breaking up from turning acrimonious and too time- and labor-intensive.
It seems to be but a small step for a man, though a gigantic one for mankind, that leads from the here and now to which the hurried, emergency culture of consumerist society has already brought us, to the exporting of human waste (or, so to speak, “wasted humans”): transporting the undesirable—that is, the humans charged with the guilt or crime of undesirability—to faraway places, where they can be safely tortured until they confess that they have been indeed guilty as charged.6
In a book with a says-it-all title, Thomas Hylland Eriksen identifies the “tyranny of the moment” as the most conspicuous feature of contemporary society and arguably its most seminal novelty: “The consequences of extreme hurriedness are overwhelming: both the past and the future as mental categories are threatened by the tyranny of the moment . . . Even the ‘here and now’ is threatened since the next moment comes so quickly that it becomes difficult to live in the present.”7
This is a paradox indeed, and an inexhaustible source of tension: the more voluminous and capacious becomes the moment, the smaller (briefer) it is; as its potential contents swell, its dimensions shrink. “There are strong indications that we are about to create a kind of society where it becomes nearly impossible to think a thought that is more than a couple of inches long.”8 But contrary to the popular hopes beefed up by the consumer-market promises, changing one’s identity, were it at all plausible, would require much more than that.
While undergoing the “punctuation” treatment, the moment is thereby cut off on both sides. Its interfaces with both the past and the future turn into gaps—hopefully unbridgeable. Ironically, in the age of instant and effortless connection and the promise of being constantly “in touch,” communication between the experience of the moment and whatever may precede or follow it needs to be permanently, and hopefully irreparably, broken. The gap behind should see to it that the past is never allowed to catch up with the running self. The gap ahead is a condition of living the moment to the fullest, of abandoning oneself totally and unreservedly to its (admittedly fleeting) charm and seductive powers—something that wouldn’t be feasible were the currently lived-through moment contaminated with worry about mortgaging the future. Ideally, each moment would be shaped after the pattern of credit card use, a radically depersonalized act: in the absence of face-to-face intercourse it is easier to forget, or rather never to think in the first place, of the unpleasantness of repayment. No wonder the banks, eager to get cash moving and so earning yet more money than it would while lying idle, prefer to have their clients fingering credit cards instead of visiting branch managers.
Following Bertman’s terminology, Elżbieta Tarkowska, a most prominent chronosociologist in her own right, develops the concept of “synchronic humans” who “live solely in the present,” who “pay no attention to past experience or future consequences of their actions”—a strategy that “translates into absence of bonds with the others.” The “presentist culture” “puts a premium on speed and effectiveness, while favoring neither patience nor perseverance.”9
We may add that it is such frailty and the apparently easy disposability of individual identities and interhuman bonds that are represented in contemporary culture as the substance of individual freedom. One choice that such freedom would neither recognize, grant, nor allow is the resolve (or indeed the ability) to persevere in holding to the identity, once constructed—that is, in the kind of activity that presumes, and necessarily entails, the preservation and security of the social network on which that identity rests, while actively reproducing it.
To serve all these new needs, urges, compulsions, and addictions, as well as to service new mechanisms motivating, guiding, and monitoring human conduct, the consumerist economy must rely on excess and waste.
The speed with which the cavalcade of novelties dashes along in order to overshoot any target made to the measure of the already recorded demand must be so mind-boggling as to cast the prospect of taming and assimilating innovations well beyond the ordinary human’s capacity. In the consumerist economy, products as a rule appear first and only then seek their applications; many of them travel to the dumping site without finding any. But even the lucky few products that manage to find or conjure up a need, a desire, or a wish for which they might demonstrate themselves to be (or eventually to become) relevant soon tend to succumb to the pressure of “new and improved” products (that is, products that promise to do all they can do, only quicker and better—with an extra bonus of doing a few things that no consumer has as yet thought of needing and intended to buy) well before their working capacity reaches the point of its preordained exhaustion. As Eriksen points out, most of the life aspects and the life-servicing gadgets grow at an exponential rate—whereas in each case of exponential growth, a point must be reached when the offer exceeds the capacity of the genuine or contrived demand; more often than not that point arrives before another, more dramatic point, the point of the natural limit to supply, has been reached.
Such pathological (and eminently wasteful) tendencies of any and all exponentially growing output of goods and services could conceivably be spotted in time and be recognized for what they are, and could perhaps even manage to inspire remedial or preventive measures—if not for one more, and in many ways special, exponential process, which results in the excess of information. As Ignazio Ramonet points out, during the past thirty years, more information has been produced in the world than during the previous 5,000 years, while “a single copy of the Sunday edition of the New York Times contains more information than a cultivated person in the eighteenth century would consume during a lifetime.”10 Just how difficult, nay impossible, to absorb and assimilate—and how endemically wasteful—such a volume of information is, one can glean, for instance, from Eriksen’s observation that “more than a half of all published journal articles in the social sciences are never quoted,” and that many articles are never read by anyone except the “anonymous peer reviewers” and copy editors.11 It is anybody’s guess how small a fraction of their content manages to find its way into the social-sciences discourse.
“There is far too much information around,” Eriksen concludes. “A crucial skill in information society consists in protecting oneself against the 99.99 per cent of the information offered that one does not want.”12 We may say that the line separating a meaningful message, the ostensible object of communication, from background noise, its acknowledged adversary and obstacle, has all but disappeared. In the cut-throat competition for that scarcest of scarce resources, the attention of would-be consumers, the suppliers of would-be consumer goods desperately search for the scraps of consumers’ time still lying fallow, for the tiniest gaps between moments of consumption that could still be stuffed with more information—in the (vain) hope that some section of the Internauts at the receiving end of the communication channel will, in the course of their desperate search for the bits of information they need, come by chance across the bits that they don’t need but the suppliers wish them to absorb, and that they will be sufficiently impressed to pause or slow down enough to absorb those bits instead of the bits they had originally sought.
Picking up fragments of the noise and molding them, kneading and converting them into meaningful messages, is by and large a random process. “Hypes,” those products of the PR industry meant to separate “desirable objects of attention” from the nonproductive (read: unprofitable) noise (like the full-page advertisements announcing a premiere of a new film, the launching of a new book, the broadcasting of a TV show heavily subscribed by the advertisers, or an opening of a new exhibition), serve to divert for a moment and channel in a direction chosen by promoters the continuous and desperate, yet rambling and scattered, search for “filters,” and focus attention, for a few minutes or a few days, on a selected object of consuming desire.
Moments are few, however, in comparison with the number of contenders, who in all probability also multiply at an exponential rate. Hence the phenomenon of “vertical stacking”—a notion coined by Bill Martin to account for the amazing piling up of musical styles—as gaps and fallow plots have been or are about to be all filled to overflowing by the ever-rising tide of supplies, while promoters struggle feverishly to stretch them beyond capacity.13 The images of “linear time” and “progress” were among the most prominent victims of the information flood. In the case of popular music, all imaginable retro styles, together with all conceivable forms of recycling and plagiarism that count on the short span of public memory to masquerade as the latest novelties, find themselves crowded into one limited span of music fans’ attention. The case of popular music is just one manifestation of a virtually universal tendency that affects in equal measure all areas of life serviced by the consumer industry. To quote Eriksen once more: “Instead of ordering knowledge in tidy rows, information society offers cascades of decontextualized signs more or less randomly connected to each other . . . Put differently: when growing amounts of information are distributed at growing speed, it becomes increasingly difficult to create narratives, orders, developmental sequences. The fragments threaten to become hegemonic. This has consequences for the ways we relate to knowledge, work and lifestyle in a wide sense.”14
The tendency to take a “blasé attitude” toward “knowledge, work, and lifestyle” (indeed, toward life as such and everything it contains) had been noted by Georg Simmel, with astonishing foresight, at the start of the last century, as surfacing first among the residents of the “metropolis”—the big and crowded modern city: “The essence of the blasé attitude consists in the blunting of discrimination. This does not mean that the objects are not perceived, as is the case with the half-wit, but rather that the meaning and differing values of things, and thereby the things themselves, are experienced as insubstantial. They appear to the blasé person in an evenly flat and grey tone; no one object deserves preference over any other . . . All things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money.”15
Something like a fully fledged version of the tendency Simmel spotted and described, so to speak, avant la lettre—an ever more salient phenomenon strikingly similar to that discovered and dissected by Simmel and that he called “blasé attitude”—is currently discussed under a different name, that of melancholy. Writers who use this term tend to bypass Simmel’s augury and foreboding and go even further back, to the point where the ancients, like Aristotle, left it and the Renaissance thinkers, like Ficino and Milton, rediscovered and reexamined it. In Rolland Munro’s rendering, the concept of melancholy in its current use “represents not so much a state of indecision, a wavering between the choice of going one way or another, so much as it represents a backing off from the very divisions”; it stands for a “disentanglement” from “being attached to anything specific.” To be melancholic is “to sense the infinity of connection, but be hooked up to nothing.” In short, melancholy refers to “a form without content, a refusal from knowing just this or just that.”16 I would suggest that the idea of “melancholy” stands in the last account for the generic affliction of the consumer, Homo eligens (man choosing), by behest of the consumer society, resulting from the fatal coincidence of the compulsion/addiction of choosing with the inability to choose. To repeat after Simmel, it stands for the inbuilt transitoriness and contrived insubstantiality of things that surf with the same specific gravity over the tide of stimulations; insubstantiality that rebounds in consumer behavior as indiscriminate, omnivorous gluttony—that most radical, ultimate form of hedging bets and a last-resort life strategy, considering the “pointillization” of time and the unavailability of the criteria that would allow consumers to separate the relevant from the irrelevant and the message from the noise.
That humans at all times prefer happiness to unhappiness is a banal observation, or, more correctly, a pleonasm, since the concept of “happiness” in its most common uses refers to the states or events that humans desire, while “unhappiness” stands for the states or events humans desire to avoid; both “happiness” and “unhappiness” refer to a distance between reality as it is and reality as it is wished to be. For that reason, all attempts to compare degrees of happiness experienced by people living in spatially or temporally separate forms of life are idle efforts.
Indeed, if people A spent their lives in a different sociocultural setting from that in which people B lived, it is vain to pronounce which one of them was “happier” than the other; as the sentiment of happiness or its absence depends on hopes and expectations, as well as on the learned habits admittedly different in different settings, what is meat for people A may well be poison for people B; if transported to conditions known to make people A happy, people B may feel excruciatingly miserable, and vice versa. And as we know from Freud: the end to toothache makes one happy, but nonpainful teeth hardly do. The best we can expect from comparisons that ignore the factor of unshared experience is information about the time-or place-bound proclivity to complain or tolerance of suffering.
For those reasons, the question of whether the liquid-modern consumerist revolution has made people happier or less happy than, say, people who spent their lives in the solid-modern society of producers or even in the premodern era is as moot as a question can be; in all probability it will remain moot forever. Whatever assessment is made, it makes sense and sounds convincing solely in the context of preferences specific to the assessors, since the registers of blessings and banes must be composed according to the notions of bliss and misery dominant at the time when the inventory is conducted.
Relations between two compared populations are doubly and hopelessly asymmetrical. The assessors never lived nor would live (as distinct from paying a brief visit, while retaining the special status of visitors/tourists for the duration of the trip) under conditions normal to the assessed, while the assessed would never have a chance to respond to the assessors’ assessment; and even if they had such a (posthumous) chance, they would not be able to present an opinion of the relative virtues of a totally unfamiliar setting of which they did not have firsthand experience. And so, since the judgments pronounced on the (frequent) relative advantages or (infrequent) disadvantages of the society of consumers’ happiness-generating capacity are devoid of cognitive value (except for the insight they offer into the outspoken or implicit values of their authors), one is well advised to focus on the data that may shed light on that society’s ability to live up to its own promise; in other words, to evaluate its performance by the values it itself promotes while promising to facilitate the effort of their acquisition.
The value most characteristic of the society of consumers, indeed the metavalue, the supreme value in relation to which all other values are called to justify their worth, is happy life. Our society of consumers is perhaps the only society in human history that promises happiness in earthly life, and happiness here and now, in every successive “now”—an undelayed and continuous happiness—and the only society that refrains from justifying any variety of unhappiness, refuses to tolerate it, and presents it as an abomination that calls for punishment of the culprits and compensation for the victims. The question, “Are you happy?” addressed to members of the liquid-modern society of consumers has therefore a status hardly similar to the same question addressed to members of societies that did not make such promises and commitments. More than any other society, the society of consumers stands and falls by the happiness of its members. The answers they give to the question, “Are you happy?” may be viewed as the ultimate test of the consumer society’s success and failure.
By now, the answers are fully predictable—and the verdict they insinuate is not at all flattering. And this is true on two counts.
The first: as the evidence collected by Richard Layard in his book on happiness suggests, it is up to only a certain threshold (coinciding with the point of providing for the “essential” or “natural” needs, “survival needs”—the very motives for consumption that the society of consumers denigrated as the source of demand and on which it declared war, aiming to substitute desires and impulsive wishes for needs) that the sentiment of being happy grows with the increments of income (and so also with the intensifications of consumerist bustle). Above that fairly modest threshold, the correlation between wealth (and so presumably the level of consumption) and happiness vanishes. More income does not add happiness. What such findings suggest is that, contrary to its official and most often restated plaidoyer, “consumption for consumption’s sake,” consumption as an autotelic activity and a source of happiness in its own right (“the hedonic treadmill,” in Layard’s terminology), fails to increase the sum total of satisfaction among its practitioners. The happiness-enhancing capacity of consumption is fairly limited; it can’t easily be stretched beyond the level of the satisfaction of “basic needs,” as famously defined by Abraham Maslow.
The second: there is no evidence whatsoever that with the overall growth of the volume of consumption, the number of people reporting that they “feel happy” grows. Andrew Oswald of the Financial Times suggests that the opposite tendency is more likely to be recorded.17 His conclusion is that the highly developed, well-off countries with consumption-driven economies have not become happier as they’ve grown richer and as consumerist preoccupations and activities have grown more voluminous. It may be also noted, at the same time, that negative phenomena, causes of discomfort and unhappiness such as stress or depression, long and unsocial working hours, deteriorating relationships, lack of confidence, and nerve-racking uncertainty about “being in the right” and secure, tend to increase in both their frequency and their overall volume.
The case for rising consumption, in its plea to be recognized as the royal road to the greatest happiness of the greatest numbers, has not been proved, let alone closed: it stays wide open. Indeed, as deliberations of the facts of the matter proceed, the evidence in favor of the plaintiff grows thinner and more dubious. In the course of the trial, more serious doubts have been raised: is it not, rather, the case that, in opposition to the plaintiff’s argument, a consumption-oriented economy actively promotes disaffection, saps confidence, and deepens the sentiment of insecurity—the major factors behind the insecurity and ambient fear saturating liquid-modern life and the principal causes of the liquid-modern variety of unhappiness?
While consumer society rests its case on the promise to gratify human desires like no other society in the past could do or dream of doing, the promise of satisfaction remains seductive only so long as the desire stays ungratified. More important, it tempts only so long as the client is not “completely satisfied”—so long as the desires that motivate the consumers to further consumerist experiments are not believed to have been truly and fully gratified. Just as the easily satisfied “traditional worker” (a worker who wished to work no more than absolutely necessary to allow his habitual way of life to continue) was the nightmare of the budding society of producers, so the traditional consumer, guided by yesterday’s familiar needs and immune to seduction, would (were she or he allowed to survive) sound the death knell of a mature society of consumers, consumer industry, and consumer markets. Setting targets low, ensuring easy access to the goods that meet the targets, and a belief in objective limits to “genuine” and “realistic” desires are the major adversaries of consumer-oriented economy earmarked for extinction. It is the nonsatisfaction of desires, and a firm and perpetual belief that each act of their satisfaction leaves much to be desired and can be bettered, that are the genuine flywheels of the consumer-targeted economy.
Consumer society thrives so long as it manages to render dissatisfaction (and so, in its own terms, unhappiness) permanent. One way of achieving this effect is to denigrate and devalue consumer products shortly after they have been hyped into the universe of consumers’ desires. But another way, yet more effective, tends by and large to be kept out of the limelight: the satisfying of every need/desire/want in such a fashion that cannot help giving birth to new needs/desires/wants. What starts as a need must end up as a compulsion or an addiction. And it does, as the urge to seek in shops, and in shops only, solutions to problems and relief from pain and anxiety turns into a behavior that is not just allowed but eagerly encouraged as a habit.
The realm of hypocrisy stretching between popular beliefs and the realities of consumers’ lives is therefore a necessary condition of the properly functioning society of consumers. If the search for fulfillment is to go on and if the new promises are to be alluring and catching, promises already made must be routinely broken and the hopes of fulfillment regularly frustrated. Each single promise must be deceitful or at least exaggerated, lest the search lose its intensity or even grind to a halt. Without the repetitive frustration of desires, consumer demand could quickly run dry and the consumer-targeted economy would run out of steam. It is the excess of the sum total of promises that neutralizes the frustration caused by the excessiveness of each one of them, and stops the accumulation of frustrating experiences short of sapping consumers’ confidence in the ultimate effectiveness of the search.
In addition to being an economics of excess and waste, consumerism is for this reason also an economics of deception. Just like the excess and waste, deception does not signal its malfunctioning. On the contrary—it is a symptom of its good health and a signal that it is on the right track; a distinctive mark of the sole regime under which the society of consumers may be assured of its survival.
The discarding of successive consumer offers expected (promised) to satisfy desires is paralleled by the rising mountains of dashed expectations. Among the expectations the mortality rate is high, and in a properly functioning consumer society it must be steadily rising. The life expectancy for hopes is minuscule, and only an extravagantly high fertility rate may save them from thinning out to the point of extinction. For expectations to be kept alive and for new hopes to promptly fill the voids left by the hopes already discredited and discarded, the road from the shop to the garbage bin needs to be short and the passage swift.
There is even more, though, that sets the society of consumers apart from all other known arrangements, including the most ingenious among them, for skillful and effective “pattern maintenance” and “tension management” (to recall Talcott Parsons’s prerequisites of the “self-equilibrating system”). The society of consumers has developed to an unprecedented degree the capacity to absorb any and all dissent it inevitably, and in common with other types of society, breeds—and then to recycle it as a major resource for its own wellbeing and expansion. The society of consumers derives its animus and momentum from the disaffection it itself expertly produces. It provides the prime example of a process that Thomas Mathiesen has recently described as the “silent silencing” of potential system-born dissent and protest through the stratagem of “absorption”: “The attitudes and actions which in origin are transcendent [that is, threatening the system with explosion or implosion—Z. B.] are integrated in the prevailing order in such a way that dominant interests continue to be served. This way, they are made unthreatening to the prevailing order.”18
It was Stephen Bertman who coined the terms “nowist culture” and “hurried culture” to denote the way we live in our kind of society.19 Apt terms they are indeed—and such as come in particularly handy whenever we try to grasp the nature of the liquid-modern human condition. I would suggest that, more than for anything else, this condition stands out for its (thus far unique) renegotiation of the meaning of time.
Time in the liquid-modern society-of-consumers era is neither cyclical nor linear, as it used to be in other known societies of modern or premodern history. I would suggest that it is pointillist instead—broken up into a multitude of separate morsels, each morsel reduced to a point ever more closely approximating its geometrical idealization of nondimensionality. As we surely remember from school lessons in geometry, points have no length, width, or depth: they exist, one is tempted to say, before space and time; both space and time are yet to begin. But like that unique point that, as state-of-the-art cosmogony postulates, preceded the big bang that started the universe, each point is presumed to contain an infinite potential to expand and an infinity of possibilities waiting to explode if properly ignited. And remember, there was nothing in the “before” that preceded the eruption of the universe that could offer the slightest inkling that the moment of the big bang was approaching. The cosmogonists tell us a lot about what happened in the first fractions of a second after the big bang; but they keep odiously silent about the seconds, minutes, hours, days, years, or millennia before.
Each time-point (but there is no way to know in advance which) might—just might—be pregnant with the chance of another big bang, though this time on a much more modest, “individual universe” scale, and successive points continue to be believed to be so pregnant, regardless of what might have happened with the previous ones and despite the accumulating experience showing that most chances tend to be wrongly predicted, overlooked, or missed, that most points prove to be barren and most stirrings stillborn. A map of pointillist life, if one were charted, would look like a graveyard of imaginary or unfulfilled possibilities. Or, depending on the point of view, like a cemetery of wasted chances: in a pointillist universe, hope’s rates of infant mortality and miscarriage are very high.
Precisely for that reason, a “nowist” life tends to be a “hurried” life. The chance that each point might contain will follow it to its grave; for that particular, unique chance, there will be no “second chance.” Each point might be lived through as a new beginning, but more often than not the finish will arrive right after the start, with pretty little happening in between. Only an unstoppably expanding multitude of new beginnings may—just may—compensate for the profusion of false starts. Only the vast expanses of new beginnings believed to be waiting ahead, only a hoped-for multitude of points whose big-bang potential has not yet been tried, and so remains thus far undiscredited, may salvage the hope from the debris of premature endings and stillborn beginnings.
As I said earlier, in the “nowist” life of the avid consumer of new Erlebnisse (lived-through experiences), the reason to hurry is not to acquire and collect as much as possible, but to discard and replace as much as one can. There is a latent message behind every commercial promising a new unexplored opportunity for bliss: no point crying over spilt milk. Either the big bang happens right now, at this very moment and on the first try, or loitering at that particular point makes sense no longer; it is time to move on to another point.
In the society of producers that is now receding into the past (at least in our part of the globe), the advice in such a case would have been “try harder”; but not in the society of consumers. Here, the failed tools are to be abandoned rather than sharpened and tried again with greater skill, more dedication, and better effect. And the appliances that stopped short of delivering the promised “full satisfaction,” as well as the human relationships that delivered a “bang” not exactly as “big” as expected, should be chucked as well. The hurry ought to be at its most intense when one is running from one point (failed, failing, or about to start failing) to another (yet untried). One should be wary of the bitter lesson of Christopher Marlowe’s Faust: of being cast into hell when wishing the moment—just because it was a pleasing one—would last forever.
Given the infinity of promised and assumed opportunities, what makes a most attractive novelty of time into pulverised “points,” a novelty one could be sure would be avidly embraced and explored with zeal, is the double expectation or hope of preempting the future and of disempowering the past. Such a double accomplishment is, after all, the ideal of liberty.
Indeed, the promise of emancipating actors from the choice-limiting remnants and echoes of the past, particularly resented for their nasty habit of growing in volume and weight as the “past” expands and devours ever greater chunks of life, together with the promise of denying the future its similarly discomforting propensity to devalue successes currently enjoyed and dash the presently entertained hopes, augur between them a complete, unrestrained, well-nigh absolute freedom. Liquid-modern society offers such liberty to a degree unheard of, and downright inconceivable, in any other society on record.
Let us consider first the uncanny feat of disabling the past. It boils down to just one change in the human condition, but a truly miraculous one: the facility of being “born again.” From now on, it’s not just cats that can live nine lives. Into one abominably short lifespan on earth, bewailed not that long ago for its loathsome brevity and not radically lengthened since, humans—like the proverbial cats—are now offered the ability to squeeze many lives, an endless series of “new beginnings.” Being born again means that the previous birth(s), together with their consequences, have been annulled; it feels like the arrival of the always dreamt of, though never before experienced, divine-style omnipotence.20 The power of causal determination can be disarmed, and the power of the past to cut down the options of the present can be radically limited, perhaps even abolished altogether. What one was yesterday would no longer bar the possibility of becoming someone totally different today.
Since each point in time is, let’s recall, full of potential, and each potential is different and unique, the number of ways in which one can be different is genuinely uncountable: indeed, it dwarfs even the astonishing multitude of permutations and the mind-boggling variety of forms and likenesses that the haphazard meetings of genes have managed thus far and are likely in the future to produce in the human species. It comes close to the awe-inspiring capacity of eternity, in which, given its infinite duration, everything may/must sooner or later happen, and everything can/will sooner or later be done. Now that wondrous potency of eternity seems to have been packed into the not-at-all-eternal span of a single human life.
Consequently, the feat of defusing and neutralizing the power of the past to reduce subsequent choices, and thus to severely limit the chances for “new births,” robs eternity of its most seductive attraction. In the pointillist time of the liquid-modern society, eternity no longer is a value and an object of desire—or rather, what was its value and what made it an object of desire has been excised and grafted onto the moment. Accordingly, the late-modern “tyranny of the moment,” with its precept of carpe diem, gradually yet steadily and perhaps unstoppably replaces the premodern tyranny of eternity, with its motto of memento mori.
That transformation stands behind the new centrality accorded in the present society to the preoccupation with “identity.” Though remaining an important issue and an absorbing task since the early-modern passage from the “ascription” to the “achievement” society, identity has now shared the fate of other life pursuits and undergone the “pointillization” process. Once a whole-life project, a project coterminous with the duration of life, it has now turned into an attribute of the moment. It is no longer designed once and built to last forever but is intermittently, and ever anew, assembled and disassembled—each of those two apparently contradictory operations carrying equal importance and being equally absorbing. Instead of demanding advance payment and a lifelong subscription with no cancellation clause, identity (or, more correctly, identification) is now an activity akin to watching pay-per-view movies on your television set (or using a pay-as-you-go phone card). While still a constant preoccupation, identification is now split into a multitude of exceedingly short (and, with the progress in marketing techniques, ever shorter) efforts fully within the capacity of even a most fleeting attention span; a series of sudden and frenetic spurts of no predesigned, predetermined, or even predictable succession—but instead with effects following the beginnings comfortably closely and quickly, and so freeing the joys of wanting from the dark prison of waiting.
The skills required to meet the challenge of the liquid-modern manipulation of identity are akin to those of the famous Claude Lévi-Strauss’s bricoleur, a juggler, or—even more to the point—to the artfulness and dexterity of a prestidigitator. The practice of such skills has been brought within reach of the ordinary, run-of-the-mill consumer by the expedient of simulacrum—a phenomenon, in Jean Baudrillard’s memorable description, similar to psychosomatic ailments, known to cancel the distinction between “things as they are” and “things as they pretend to be,” or reality and illusion, the true state of affairs and its simulation. What once was viewed and suffered as an interminable drudgery calling for the mobilization and onerous straining of any and all of one’s “inner” resources can now be accomplished with the help of ready-to-use contraptions and gadgets, purchasable for a modicum of money and time. To be sure, the attractiveness of identities patched together from bought trappings rises in proportion to the amount of money spent; most recently it has also risen with the length of waiting, as the most prestigious and exclusive designer shops introduce waiting lists—clearly for no other purpose except to enhance the distinction with which the waited-for tokens of identity endow their buyer. As Georg Simmel pointed out a long time ago, values are measured by the volume and painfulness of the sacrifice of other values required to obtain them (and delay is arguably the most excruciating of sacrifices that members of the society of consumers may be required to accept).
Annulling the past, “being born again,” acquiring a different self, reincarnating as “someone completely different”—these temptations are difficult to resist. Why work on self-improvement, with all the strenuous effort and painful self-sacrifice such toil notoriously requires? Why send good money after bad? Is it not cheaper, and quicker, and more thorough, and more convenient, and easier to cut the losses and start again, to shed the old skin—spots, warts, and all—and buy a new one? There is nothing new in seeking escape when things get really hot; people have tried that in all times. What is new is the prospect of a leopard’s actually changing its spots, the dream of escaping from one’s own self, complemented by the conviction that making such a dream a reality is within reach; this is not just one of many options but the easiest option, the one most likely to work in case of trouble—a shortcut less cumbersome, less time- and energy-consuming, and so, all in all, a cheaper option.
Joseph Brodsky, the Russian-American philosopher-poet, vividly described the kind of life guided by trust invested in this kind of escape. For acknowledged losers, like the “flawed consumers” (the poor, eliminated from the consumerist game), the liquid-modern variety of social outcasts, the sole form of escape from oneself (from being tired of oneself, or as Brodsky prefers, from being bored) is alcohol or drug addiction: “In general, a man shooting heroin into his vein does so largely for the same reason you buy a video,” Brodsky told the students of Dartmouth College in July 1989; this is as far as flawed consumers, the social rejects barred from entry to the more refined and ostensibly more effective (but also more expensive) escape routes, can go. As to the potential haves, which the Dartmouth College students aspired to become, they need not stop at buying a new video. They may try to live out their dream. “You’ll be bored with your work, your spouses, your lovers, the view from your window, the furniture or wallpaper in your room, your thoughts, yourselves,” Brodsky warned. “Accordingly, you’ll try to devise ways of escape. Apart from the self-gratifying gadgets mentioned before, you may take up changing jobs, residence, company, country, climate, you may take up promiscuity, alcohol, travel, cooking lessons, drugs, psychoanalysis.”21
The haves may indeed pick and choose their ways of escape from uncountable numbers of options on offer. And they are likely to be tempted to try as many as they can afford, one by one or all together, since what is much less likely is that any of the chosen ways will indeed deliver that freedom from “boredom with oneself” that all of them promise to bring: “In fact, you may lump all these together, and for a while that may work. Until the day, of course, when you wake up in your bedroom amid a new family and a different wallpaper, in a different state and climate, with a heap of bills from your travel agent and your shrink, yet with the same stale feeling toward the light of day pouring through your window.”22
Andrzej Stasiuk, an outstanding Polish novelist and insightful analyst of the contemporary human condition, suggests that “the possibility of becoming someone else” is the present-day substitute for the now largely discarded and uncared-for salvation or redemption. “It is highly probable that the quantity of digital, celluloid, and analogue beings met in the course of a bodily life comes close to the volume that eternal life and resurrection in flesh could offer,” Stasiuk suggests. “Applying various techniques, we may change our bodies and reshape them according to different patterns . . . When browsing through glossy magazines, one gets the impression that they tell mostly one story—about the ways in which one can remake one’s personality, starting from diets, surroundings, homes, and up to rebuilding of psychical structure, often code-named as a proposition to ‘be yourself.’”23
Sławomir Mrożek, a Polish writer of worldwide fame and a man with firsthand experience of many lands and cultures, compares the world we inhabit to a “market-stall filled with fancy dresses and surrounded by crowds seeking their ‘selves’ . . . One can change dresses without end, so that a wondrous liberty the seekers enjoy can go on forever . . . Let’s go on searching for our real selves, it’s smashing fun—on condition that the real self will never be found. Because if it were, the fun would end.”24
If happiness is permanently within reach, and if reaching it takes but the few minutes needed to browse through the yellow pages and to pull the credit card out of the wallet, then obviously a self that stops short of reaching happiness can’t be “real”—not really the one that spurred the self-seeker to embark on the voyage of self-discovery. Such a fraudulent self needs to be discarded on the grounds of its “inauthenticity,” while the search for the real one should go on. And there is little reason to stop searching if one can be sure that the next moment another moment will duly arrive, carrying new promises and bursting with new potential.
Blaise Pascal suggested that “the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”25 Pascal wrote these words almost four centuries ago, but even if he were to have written them a mere fifty years ago, little would he have known that, first, a time would arrive when men and women would be unhappy for much the same reason, and second, that however keenly they tried to remain in their own respective rooms at this time, they would hardly manage to stay quiet, since their rooms, set on castors rather than solid and durable foundations, would be exquisitely mobile; and they, the men and women of our times, would have no inkling, let alone any reliable knowledge, of when their rooms would be moved, where to, and with what speed. Don’t blame Pascal, though. He was born, and he died, long before the advent of our liquid-modern world.
It is inside this liquid-modern world that we’ve been called to consider the fate, the value, and the prospects of memory. And no wonder that nowadays we believe these questions to be worthy of our particularly acute attention. As Martin Heidegger pointed out, we human beings start pondering the essence of something only when that “something” goes bust on us: when we can’t find it in the place in which it “always was,” or if it begins to behave in a way that for all we know and are used to expecting can be described only as odd, surprising, baffling, and puzzling. As Hegel remarked a century earlier, the owl of Minerva, that goddess of wisdom, spread its wings only at dusk—at the end of the day.
Memory has recently fallen into just that category of “somethings” of which you become suddenly aware—things that have gone bust, or things that the eye of wisdom has not spotted since they started dissolving in the darkness of night and so stopped hiding in the dazzling light of the day. If these days we return, compulsively and obsessively, to the issue of memory, it is because we have been transported from a civilization of duration, and for that reason of learning and memorizing, into the civilization of transience, and thus of forgetting. Of that seminal departure, memory is the prime victim, disguised as its collateral casualty.
It took more than two millennia after the ancient Greek sages invented the notion of paidea for the idea of “lifelong education” to be transformed from an oxymoron (a contradiction in terms) into a pleonasm (akin to a “buttery butter” or “metallic iron”). But that remarkable transformation has occurred quite recently—in the past few decades—under the impact of the radically accelerated pace of change taking place in the social setting in which both principal actors in education, the teachers and the learners alike, have found themselves obliged to act.
The moment they start moving, the direction of ballistic missiles and the distance they will travel have been already decided by the shape and the position of the barrel from which they are fired and the amount of gunpowder in the shell; one can calculate with little or no error the spot on which the missile will land, and one can choose that spot by shifting the barrel or changing the amount of gunpowder used. These qualities of ballistic missiles make them ideal weapons to use in positional warfare—when the targets stay dug into their trenches or bunkers and the missiles are the sole bodies on the move.
The same qualities, however, make the guns useless or almost useless once the targets, invisible to the gunner, start to move—particularly if they move faster than the missiles can fly, and even more so if they move erratically, in an unpredictable fashion that plays havoc with all preliminary calculations required for setting the missile’s trajectory. A smart, “intelligent missile” is needed then—a missile that can change its direction in full flight, depending on changing circumstances, one that can spot immediately the target’s movements, learn from them whatever can be learned about the target’s current direction and speed—and extrapolate from the gathered information the spot in which their trajectories may cross. Such smart missiles cannot suspend, let alone finish the gathering and processing of, information as it travels—as its target may never stop moving and changing its direction and speed, and the place of encounter needs to be constantly updated and corrected.
We may say that smart missiles follow the strategy of “instrumental rationality,” although in its, so to speak, liquidized, fluid version; that is, in the version that drops the assumption that the end is given, steady and immovable for the duration, and that only the means are variable and can and must be calculated and manipulated. Even smarter missiles won’t be confined to a preselected target at all but will choose the targets as they go. They will be guided solely by two considerations: what are the greatest effects they can achieve, given their technical capacity, and which potential targets are they best equipped to hit? This provides, we may say, the case for instrumental rationality in reverse: targets are selected as the missile travels, and it is the available means that decide which “end” will be selected. In such cases the “smartness” of the flying missile and its effectiveness would benefit from its equipment’s being of a rather “underspecified,” “uncommitted” nature, unfocused on any specific category of ends, not overly specialized or adjusted to hitting one particular kind of target.
Smart missiles, unlike their ballistic elder cousins, learn as they go. So what they need to be initially supplied with is the ability to learn, and learn fast. This is obvious. What is less visible, however, though no less crucial than the skill of quick learning, is the ability to instantly forget what has been learned before. Smart missiles wouldn’t be smart if they were not able to “change their mind” or revoke their previous “decisions” with no second thoughts and regret. They should not overly cherish the information they acquired a moment earlier and on no account should they develop a habit of behaving in a way that that information suggested. All information they acquire ages rapidly and, instead of providing reliable guidance, may lead astray, if it is not promptly dismissed—erased from memory. What the “brains” of smart missiles must never forget is that the knowledge they acquire is eminently disposable, good only until further notice and of only temporary usefulness, and that the warrant of success is not to overlook the moment when that acquired knowledge is of no more use and needs to be thrown away, forgotten, and replaced.
Philosophers of education of the solid-modern era saw teachers as launchers of ballistic missiles and instructed them how to ensure that their products would stay strictly on the predesigned course determined by their initial momentum. And given the “praxeomorphic” nature of human cognition, it’s no wonder they did, as ballistic missiles were, at the early stages of the modern era, the topmost achievement of human technical invention.26 They served flawlessly whoever might have wished to conquer and master the world as it then was; as Hilaire Belloc confidently declared, referring to African natives, “Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim Gun, and they have not” (the Maxim gun, let’s recall, was a machine to launch great numbers of ballistic bullets in a short time, and was effective only if there were very many such bullets at hand). As a matter of fact, though, that vision of the teacher’s task and the pupil’s destiny was much older than the idea of the “ballistic missile” and the modern era that invented it—as an ancient Chinese proverb, preceding the advent of modernity by two millennia but still quoted by the Commission of the European Communities in support of its program for “lifelong learning” at the threshold of the twenty-first century, testifies: “When planning for a year, plant corn. When planning for a decade, plant trees. When planning for life, train and educate people.” It is only with our entry into liquid-modern times that the ancient wisdom has lost its pragmatic value and people concerned with learning and the promotion of learning known under the name of “education” have had to shift their attention from the ballistic to the smart missiles.
Harvard Business School professor John Kotter advised his readers to avoid being entangled in long-term employment of the “tenure track” sort; indeed, developing institutional loyalty and becoming too deeply engrossed and emotionally engaged in any given job, taking an oath for a long-term, not to mention a lifelong, commitment to anything or anybody in particular, is ill advised, he wrote, when “business concepts, product designs, competitor intelligence, capital equipment and all kinds of knowledge have shorter credible life spans.”27
If the premodern life was a daily rehearsal for the infinite duration of everything except mortal life, the liquid-modern life is a daily rehearsal of universal transience. What the denizens of the liquid-modern world quickly find out is that nothing in that world is bound to last, let alone last forever. Objects recommended today as useful and indispensable tend to “become history” well before settling long enough to turn into a need and a habit. Nothing is believed to stay here forever, nothing seems to be irreplaceable. Everything is born with a brand of imminent death and emerges from the production line with a use-by date printed or presumed. Construction of new buildings does not start unless permission has been issued to demolish them when the time to pull them down comes (as it surely will), and contracts are not signed unless their duration is fixed or their termination on demand is made easy. Few if any commitments last long enough to reach the point of no return, and decisions or rulings, all of which are ad hoc and deemed to bind “for the time being,” may stay in force for long only by accident. All things, born or made, human or not, are until-further-notice and dispensable.
A specter hovers over the denizens of the liquid-modern world and all their labors and creations: the specter of superfluity. Liquid modernity is a civilization of excess, redundancy, waste, and waste disposal. In Ricardo Petrella’s succinct and pithy formulation, the current global trends direct “economies towards the production of the ephemeral and volatile—through the massive reduction of the life-span of products and services—and of the precarious (temporary, flexible and part-time jobs).”28 And as the late Italian sociologist Alberto Melucci used to say, “We are plagued by the fragility of the presentness which calls for a firm foundation where none exists.”29 And so, he added, “when contemplating change, we are always torn between desire and fear, between anticipation and uncertainty.” Uncertainty means risk: undetachable companion of all action and a sinister specter haunting the compulsive decision makers and choosers-by-necessity that we are since, as Melucci put it, “choice became a destiny.”
As a matter of fact, to say “became” is not entirely correct, as humans have been choosers as long as they have been humans. But it can be said that at no other time was the necessity to make choices so deeply felt, and that choosing has become poignantly self-conscious since being conducted under conditions of painful yet incurable uncertainty, of a constant threat of “being left behind” and of being excluded from the game and barred from return for failing to rise up to the new demands. What separates the present agony of choice from discomforts that tormented Homo eligens, the “man choosing,” at all times, is the discovery or suspicion that there are no preordained rules and universally approved objectives that may be followed and that thereby insure the choosers against adverse consequences of their choices. Reference points and guidelines that seem trustworthy today are likely to be discredited tomorrow as misleading or corrupt. Allegedly rock-solid companies are unmasked as figments of their accountants’ imagination. Whatever is “good for you” today may be reclassified tomorrow as your poison. Apparently firm commitments and solemnly signed agreements may be overturned overnight. And promises, or at least most of them, seem to be made solely to be betrayed and broken. There seems to be no stable, secure island among the tides. To quote Melucci once more, “We no longer possess a home; we are repeatedly called upon to build and then rebuild one, like the three little pigs of the fairy tale, or we have to carry it along with us on our backs like snails.”30
In such a world, one is compelled therefore to take life bit by bit, as it comes, expecting each bit to be different from the preceding ones and to call for different knowledge and skills. A friend of mine living in one of the European Union countries, a highly intelligent, superbly educated, uniquely creative person with full command of several languages, a person who would pass most capacity tests and job interviews with flying colors, complained in a private letter of the “labour market being frail like gossamer and brittle like china.” For two years she worked as a freelance translator and legal adviser, exposed to a full measure of the usual ups and down of market fortunes. A single mother, she yearned, however, for a more regular income and so opted for steady employment with a salary and a paycheck every month. For one and a half years she worked for a company, briefing its budding entrepreneurs on the intricacies of EU law, but as new adventurous businesses were slow to materialize, the company went promptly bankrupt. For another year and a half she worked for the Ministry of Agriculture, running a section dedicated to developing contacts with the newly independent Baltic countries. Come the next election, the new government coalition chose to “subsidiarize” that problem to private initiative and so disband the department. The next job lasted only half a year, and then the State Board of Ethnic Equality followed the pattern of governmental hand-washing and was declared redundant.
Never before has Robert Louis Stevenson’s memorable declaration—“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive”—sounded truer than it does now in our liquidized and fluid modern world. When destinations change places, and those that don’t lose their charm faster than legs can walk, cars can drive, or planes can fly—keeping on the move matters more than the destination. Not making a habit of anything practiced at the moment, not being tied up by the legacy of one’s own past, wearing one’s current identity as one wears shirts that may be promptly replaced when they fall out of fashion, scorning past lessons and disdaining past skills with no inhibition or regret—all are becoming the hallmarks of today’s liquid-modern life-politics and the attributes of liquid-modern rationality. Liquid-modern culture no longer feels like a culture of learning and accumulating, as did the cultures recorded in the historians’ and ethnographers’ reports. It looks and feels instead like a culture of disengagement, discontinuity, and forgetting.
In what George Steiner called “casino culture,” every cultural product is calculated for maximal impact (that is, for breaking up, forcing out, and disposing of the cultural products of yesterday) and instant obsolescence (wary of outstaying its welcome because of the steadily shortening distance between the fragrance of novelty and the odor of the rubbish bin, it promptly vacates the stage to clear the way for the cultural products of tomorrow). The artists, who once identified the value of their work with their own eternal duration and so struggled for a perfection that would render all further change all but impossible, now put together installations meant to be pulled apart when the exhibition closes, and happenings that will end the moment the actors decide to turn the other way; wrap up bridges until traffic is restarted, or unfinished buildings until the construction work is resumed; and erect or carve “space sculptures” that invite nature to take its toll and to supply further proof (if further proof is needed) of the ludicrous vanity and brevity of all human deeds and the shallowness of their traces. Except dedicated TV-quiz competitors, no one is expected, let alone encouraged, to remember yesterday’s talk of the town, though no one is expected, let alone allowed, to opt out of the talk-of-the-town of today. The consumer market is adapted to the liquid-modern casino culture, which in turn is adapted to that market’s pressures and seductions. The two chime well with each other and feed on each other. So where does this leave the learners and their teachers?
To be of any use in our liquid-modern setting, education and learning must be continuous and indeed lifelong. No other kind of education or learning is conceivable; the “formation” of selves or personalities is unthinkable in any other fashion but that of an ongoing, perpetually unfinished, open-ended re-formation.
Given the overwhelming trends that shape power relations and the strategy of domination in our liquid-modern time, the prospects are poor, at best, that the twisted and erratic itinerary of market developments will be straightened out and that “human resources” calculations will become more realistic—and most probably they are nil. In the liquid-modern setting, “manufactured uncertainty” is the paramount instrument of domination, whereas the policy of “precarization,” to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term, fast becomes the hard core of the domination strategy.31 The market and “planning for life” are at loggerheads. Once state politics surrenders to the guidance of the “economy,” understood as the free play of market forces, the balance of power between the two is switched decisively to the advantage of the first.
This does not augur well for the “empowering of citizens,” named by the Commission of the European Communities as the primary objective of lifelong learning. By widespread consent, “empowerment” (a term used in the current debates interchangeably with that of “enablement”) is achieved when people acquire the ability to control, or at least to significantly influence, the personal, political, economic, and social forces by which their life’s trajectory would be otherwise buffeted; in other words, to be “empowered” means to be able to make choices and act effectively on the choices made, and that in turn signifies the capacity to influence the range of available choices and the social settings in which choices are made and pursued. To put it bluntly, genuine empowerment requires not only the acquisition of skills that would allow one to play well the game designed by others, but also the acquisition of such powers as would allow one to influence the game’s objectives, stakes, and rules—in short, not just personal but also social skills.
Empowerment requires the building and rebuilding of interhuman bonds, the will and the ability to engage with others in the continuous effort to make human cohabitation into a hospitable and friendly setting for the mutually enriching cooperation of men and women struggling for self-esteem, for the development of their potential and the proper use of their abilities. All in all, one of the decisive stakes of lifelong education aimed at empowerment is the rebuilding of the now increasingly deserted public space, where men and women may engage in a continuous translation between individual and common, private and communal, interests, rights, and duties.
“In light of fragmentation and segmentation processes and increasing individual and social diversity,” writes Dominique Simon Rychen, “strengthening social cohesion and developing a sense of social awareness and responsibility have become important societal and political goals.”32 In the workplace, in the immediate neighborhood, and in the street, we mix daily with others who, as Rychen points out, “do not necessarily speak the same language (literally or metaphorically) or share the same memory or history.” Under such circumstances, the skills we need more than any others, in order to offer the public sphere a reasonable chance of resuscitation, are the skills of interaction with others—of conducting a dialogue, of negotiating, of gaining mutual understanding, and of managing or resolving the conflicts inevitable in every instance of shared life.
Let me restate what I stated at the beginning: in the liquid-modern setting, education and learning, to be of any use, must be continuous and indeed lifelong. I hope we can see now that one reason, though perhaps the decisive one, for which learning must be continuous and lifelong is the nature of the task we confront on the shared road to “empowerment”—a task that is exactly what education should be: continuously confronted, never completed, lifelong.
But the consumer is an enemy of the citizen. All over the “developed” and affluent part of the planet, signs abound of fading interest in the acquisition and exercise of social skills, of people turning their backs on politics, of growing political apathy and loss of interest in the running of the political process. Democratic politics cannot survive for long the citizens’ passivity out of political ignorance and indifference. Citizens’ freedoms are not properties acquired once and for all; such properties are not secure once locked in private safes. They are planted and rooted in the sociopolitical soil, which needs to be fertilized and watered daily and which will dry up and crumble if it is not attended to day in and day out by the informed actions of a knowledgeable and committed public. Not only do technical skills need to be continually refreshed, not only does job-focused education need to be lifelong. The same is required, and with a yet greater urgency, for the education in citizenship.
Most people would agree today without much prompting that they need to refresh their professional knowledge and digest new technical information if they wish to avoid “being left behind” or being thrown overboard by fast-accelerating “technological progress.” And yet, as Henry Giroux meticulously documented in a long series of eye-opening studies, a similar feeling of urgency is conspicuously missing when it comes to catching up with the impetuous stream of political developments and the fast-changing rules of the political game. Survey results testify to the rapid widening of the gap that separates public opinion from the central facts of political life. For instance, soon after the invasion of Iraq, the New York Times released a survey indicating that 42 percent of the American public believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. CBS News also released a poll indicating that 55 percent of the public believed that Saddam Hussein directly supported the terrorist organization Al-Qaeda. A Knight Ridder/Princeton Research poll found that 44 percent of respondents said they thought “most” or “some” of the September 11, 2001, hijackers were Iraqi citizens. A majority of Americans also already believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that such weapons had been found, that he was about to build a nuclear bomb, and that he would eventually unleash it on an unsuspecting American public. None of these claims had any basis in fact, as no evidence existed to even remotely confirm these assertions. A poll conducted by the Washington Post near the second anniversary of the September 11 tragedy indicated that 70 percent of Americans continued to believe that Iraq had played a direct role in the planning of the attacks.
In such a landscape of ignorance, it is easy to feel lost and hapless—and easier yet to be lost and hapless without feeling it. As Pierre Bourdieu memorably remarked, he who has no grip on the present wouldn’t dream of controlling the future—and most Americans must have but a misty view of what the present holds. This suspicion is amply confirmed by more incisive and insightful observers. “Many Americans,” wrote Brian Knowlton in the International Herald Tribune, “said the hot-cold-hot nature of recent alerts had left them unsure just how urgently, and fearfully, they should react.”33
Ignorance leads to the paralysis of will. One does not know what is in store, one has no way to count the risks. For the authorities, impatient with the constraints imposed on power holders by a buoyant and resilient democracy, the ignorance-incurred impotence of the electorate and the widespread disbelief in the efficacy of dissent and unwillingness to get politically involved are much-needed and welcome sources of political capital: domination through deliberately cultivated ignorance and uncertainty is more reliable and comes cheaper than rule grounded in a thorough debate of the facts and a protracted effort to agree on the truth of the matter and on the least risky ways to proceed. Political ignorance is self-perpetuating, and the rope plaited of ignorance and inaction comes in handy whenever democracy’s voice is to be stifled or its hands tied.
We need lifelong education to give us choice. But we need it even more to salvage the conditions that make choice available and within our power.