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Zygmunt Bauman. Individual and society in theliquid modernityEmma Palese

Abstract

Starting from the postmodern, the philosophical and sociological speculation by Zygmunt Bauman,opens - through the analysis of the phenomenon of globalization – to the meta-level of life, and thencircumscribes the most recent thinking on political life, until reaching the liquid modernity: overcomingpostmodernity itself. As a result individual, society, ethics, power, religion become those words impregnated with aliquidity capable of condensing in itself the most significant aspects of the present reality: a dimension in which thelasting gives way to the transient, the need to the desire, and the necessity to the utility.

Zygmunt Bauman is one of the greatest interpreters ofour present time, a time which turns into a shapelessmass tending to a constant and relentless change. This isnot the modern era, nor the postmodern one, if any-thing, this period can be well identified as liquid mod-ernity: a concept, able to focus on the transformationsthat affect human life concerning the general policydeterminations of life. Moreover, Bauman’s liquid mod-ernity is a term that can overcome the concept of post-modernism, because basically leaning towards thecontemporary world: the reality in which life considershighly what is transitory rather than permanent, the im-mediate rather than long term; and regards utility asprior to any other value. Consequently it is fundamentalto understand in advance and profoundly the concept ofliquidity around which Bauman interweaves his mostrecent philosophical and sociological reflection. Solidityand liquidity are the distinctive features of two eras:modernity and postmodernity, which becomes liquidmodernity as it relates to contemporary existence. It isan existence where the need gives way to the desire thatdismays men in the constant changes and transforma-tions that affect their lives, and that turn identity fromfact into a task: each of us runs into the self-building,which replaces the project itself. Indeed, in our contem-porary age the relationship between the individual andsociety is changing because the concepts of identity, in-dividual and individuality are becoming meaningless.

Correspondence: palese@unisalento.it

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The world demands to the individual a constant andincreasingly controversial search for identity and track-ing of parameters for standardizing in order to obtainthe “role” of individuals, because, today, the identity is atask. Being individuals in the liquid society does not sim-ply mean being good consumers, but also being com-petitive goods in the global market. Such condition doesnot only require the purchase of “fashion items”, but,also, the purchase of a “fashionable body” assisting tothe complete passage from self-manipulation of our ownphysicality, to the real direct and independent choice ofthe body we want for our children. Structured on thispattern, Bauman’s futuristic view asserts that “being suit-able for the global” will not be satisfied for long withplastic surgery and remodeling on the basis of topoiwhich are continuously generated by the policies of theglobal market. It is important not only to buy whatmakes us “suitable” for the contemporary, but above allto change ourselves, the closest part to our possibility ofmanipulation and intervention: the body. It becomes afree space on which to shape the visible Self, since if weare not able to dress up our own physical, it means thatwe are lacking in something. The autonomous manage-ment of our corporeality, personal responsibility, whichbears the “responsibility of being individuals”, derivesfrom the concept of having and not of being. To havemeans to possess because some form of control is cap-able of generating security in a world lacking in its solidpoints of reference. For this reason the conditions ofhaving also falls on the body of contemporary man, whofinds in it a form of certainty: to manipulate and control

en Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commonsg/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproductionroperly cited.

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his physical means acting on what you are sure topossess. Incorporation and possession are part of having,that - in our times -is accomplished through consumer-ism as «The act of consumption is a form of having, per-haps the most important for today’s opulent industrialsociety. Consumption has ambivalent features: it relievesthe anxiety, because what one has, could not be takenback, but it also requires that consumers increasinglyconsume, since the previous consumption soon loses itsrewarding peculiarity».a And this vicious spiral, whichruns between the possession and consumption, is themost evident effect of what Bauman calls liquid modern-ity, which -unlike postmodernism - has a continuous re-lationship with the modernization process, which has itsorigins in modern times -but it prolongs and intensifiesuntil it reaches the liquidity of our time, characterizedby rampant consumerism.And in the convergence between identity and con-

sumption lies one of the main features of our age, be-cause «contemporary society relates to its membersprimarily as consumers, and only secondarily, and inpart, involves them also as producers. To meet the stan-dards of normality and to be recognized as a mature andrespectable members of society, we must respondquickly and efficiently to the temptations of the con-sumer goods market. It should be offered regularly acontribution to the demand fit to absorb the supply and,in the stages of reflection or stagnation of the economy,we must participate to the recovery led by consumers.The poor and the idlers, those who have neither a de-cent income, or credit cards, nor the prospect of betterdays, are not up to these requirements. Consequentlythe rule broken by the poor today, the violation of therule distinguishes them and tags them as abnormal, isthe standard of competence or fitness as consumers, notthat of employment. The poor of today (ie those thatconstitute a problem for others) are first and foremostconsumers rather than unemployed people. They are de-fined primarily by the fact of being bad consumers: in-deed, the most basic of social obligations, which they donot comply, is the duty to be active and effective purchasersof goods and services offered by the market ».b This meansthat if in a modern times consumption assumes the func-tion of a secondary activity compared to production, in thecontemporary world the ability of a person to consume de-termines his own social integration in a society no longerlimited to the local context or the sheer size of the daily ex-istence, but, in a macro society demanding accurate andspecific entry requirements. And the access falls directly onthe responsibility of the individual, who, in order to buildhis own individuality, prefers to invest its available eco-nomic resources for the purchase of those means suitableto classify, to modernize and introduce in the list of whomatters. Moreover, in a period of severe economic crisis

like the one we are currently experiencing, other statisticsshow that the primary consumption, referring to the basicnecessities, is put aside to buy advanced technology prod-ucts, clothing and cosmetics. These products aim at updat-ing the body in accordance with the minimal standardsrequired to be “in”, ie, to acquire a social status that doesnot differentiate, if anything, incorporates all those whoappear to be able to modernize themselves, regardless ofsocial productive capacity and the role everyone can play.Today consumption seems to be a homologating activity,and according to Bauman it is a way to measure how mucha person - in liquid society - is able to be individual. Onthat concept, Bauman builds his thought about the individ-ual and society, which runs on two main lines. The first isembodied in the idea that in the liquid world the conquestof identity goes hand in hand with the adherence to rulesof a consumers society directed by the policies of the globalmarket: being individuals is equivalent to being consumers.The second line, however, going further that consideration,expands to incorporate the individual in the products. Therelationship between the individual and the self, as well asbetween the individual and the others, acquires through Z.Bauman’s thought - a new meaning, which is based on areal anthropological metamorphosis. Being consumers andbeing consumed become, in fact, most general determina-tions of an individual who is affected the most problematiceffects of the process of de-socialization, started byglobalization, now arrived at one of its most acute and ex-treme phases. Social aggregation and organization are de-prived of their traditional tasks: they stop being identitydimensions of the subject capable of providing a set of stan-dards and benchmarks. The individual becomes an isolatedmonad always looking for new forms of socialization, whichinstead of providing safety and welfare, increase the gap be-tween man and the Self and between man and the other. Itis a social system that - despite being in possession of in-creasingly innovative means to communicate and interactwith their fellows - generates discomfort and loneliness,mainly because the son of a networked individualism that«it is a social model, not a collection of isolated individ-uals», just because «the most important role of internet inthe structuring of social relations is the contribution to thenew model of sociability based on individualism. More andmore people are organized in social networks, which com-municate via computer. Thus, it is not the internet to createa model of networked individualism, but the developmentof the Internet to provide adequate material support for thespread of individualism in the web as the dominant form ofonline socializing».c And this new form arises as a matrixof the identity update required by the global world in orderto “be included”, as the need for inclusion is nothing morethan legacy of the abandonment of the authentic sense ofbelonging. The belonging, in fact, is characterized as a nat-ural human feeling, that, being suppressed nowadays - is

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manifest in surrogate forms of virtual social aggregationthat are the attempt to satisfy the natural human sociability.The consumer society, in fact, does not aggregate, at anyrate, disaggregate turning groups into isolated monads, withweak and fragmented bonds, where the individual is crystal-lized between the search for Self and the disarray in thenot - Self. The idea of society survives in terms of com-mon trends to follow, where the groups are directed al-most anonymously in the pursuit of that “happiness”,whose traces are designed by external actors. Accordingto Bauman it is a review and revision of the “mechan-ical solidarity” in Durkheim,d whose characteristics dis-tinguish it from the “organic” one. The singularity anduniqueness of the individual is replaced by the flow of theneeds of a group, which - in our contemporary world -seems to assume the appearance of a swarm. Just in thedistinction between swarm and group Bauman identifiesthe radical changes that affect the individual and societyin the liquid-consumerist reality, where «the swarm tendsto replace the group and its leaders, its hierarchy and its“pecking order”. A swarm can do without all the cere-monial and tricks without which it would neither formnor survive. They come together, scatter and gather again,from an occasion to another, every time inevitably for adifferent reason, and are attracted by changeable aims.The seductive power of mobile objectives is a rule suffi-cient to coordinate movements, and this is enough to ren-der superfluous any other command or imposition fromabove. In reality, the swarms do not even have a high andlow: only the momentary direction of flight to place theunits of the swarm (working self-propelled) in position ofleader or followers, usually only for the duration of a givenflight , or even a part of it». Then, even the traditionalhierarchies that generate order, dissolve and becomestrong inviolable nucleus in which the individual can findhimself, directing and limiting his own desires. This meansthat every opportunity to address the human being col-lapses. Consequently the individual is considered as a mo-mentary unity of the passing swarm and driven by thefleeting current. That is a dimension impregnated with anillusory security of a free and optimal choice since it is thechoice of a large number of people. The choice is whataggregates in a liquid world, as these spaces are to berethought and redesigned according to certain canons ableto shape the communities in which the individual -consumer can find and fulfill their sense of belonging. Themalls seem to be hives of swarms of Bauman, as offeringthe ideally imagined community: a place where the pur-pose of purchasing aggregates. Thus, «the shopping /con-sumption places offer what no “real reality” outside cangive: an almost perfect balance between liberty and secur-ity. Within their temples buyers / consumers may also findwhat they were searching outside, uselessly as inexhaust-ibly: the comfortable feeling of belonging, the reassuring

impression of being part of a community».e Taking part isone of the ways in which consumption becomes a primaryactivity of contemporary man, and – especially - theprinciple of inclusion and exclusion of the subject. More-over, in this sense, Bauman tracks in the anthropophagicstrategy theorized by Levi-Strauss,f the practice of elimin-ation of differences between individuals, which isreproduced in the supermarket: the privileged places ofconsumption in which is performed the aggregating powerof purchase. Anthropophagic places contrast, in fact, tothe “emic” ones, consisting in «vomiting and spitting theothers out, considering them as being incurably strangersand aliens, in prohibiting physical contact, dialogue, socialrelationships and any kind of commercium, commensalityor connubium. The extreme variants of this emic strategyare, today as always, imprisonment, deportation and phys-ical suppression. Two updated forms, refined (modern-ized) are the spatial separation, urban ghettos, theselective access to spaces. The second strategy consists ofa so-called “disalienation” of stranger substances: “inswallowing”, “eating” the bodies and the extraneousspirits to make them, through metabolism, identicaland no longer distinguishable from the body that swal-lows them».g Therefore, the consumption becomes asurrogate way for social gathering, which, however, re-places the sense of belonging with the need for inclu-sion. This process inevitably excludes those who arenot in possession of the means fit to perform this activ-ity, which, indeed, remains essentially solitary. Here inthis game of appearances and reproductions the groupgives way to the swarm, which, in the collective whirl,loses that authentic sense of belonging that makes eachman a member of society, in which – mentioning Durk-heim - it performs the natural duality of the subject:animal with socialized personality, union of instinct andreason, of self and world.

EndnotesaE. Fromm, To have or to be?, Harper e Row, New

York, 1976, p. 40bZ. Bauman, Consuming life, Polity Press, Cambridge,

2007, p. 157cM. Castells, Internet galaxy, Oxford University press,

2001, p. 129; Idem, The Rise of the Network Society,Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1996 ; E. Susca, Nuovimedia, comunicazione, società, Aras, Fano, 2007

dDurkheim thinks that social facts exist before thesame individual because «the collective life, such asmental life is made of representations, so it is likely thatindividual representations and social representations arein any way comparable. We will try to show that in factone and the other have the same relationship with therespective substrate. But this approach, far from justify-ing the view that sociology reduces to a simple corollary

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of individual psychology, will, on the contrary, stressed therelative independence of these two worlds of these twosciences. […] The representation is not a simple aspect ofthe state in which the item is nervous when cu occurs be-cause when this was still not over and that the reports ofthe performances are of a different nature than that ofunderlying neural elements. […] The company's set of in-dividuals associated with the substrate. The system which,together they form and vary depending on their number,their arrangement on the surface of a territory, the natureand number of lines of communication, forms the basis cuwhich elevates the social life». É. Durkheim, Individualand Collective Representation (1898), in Sociology andPhilosophy, Free Press, New York, 1974

eZ. Bauman, Liquid modernity, Polity Press, Cambridge,2000, pp. 109-110

fBauman considers Claude Levi Strauss the greatestanthropologist of our time, for wich «the fundamentalprinciple is that the concept of social structure does notrefer to empirical reality, but the models built upon it. Itis therefore clear difference between the two conceptsare so close that they were often confused, namely thoseof social structure and social relations. Social relation-ships are the raw material used for the construction ofmodels that make manifest the social structure. In nocase, therefore, it can be identified as the set of social re-lationships observable in a given society. The investiga-tions of the structure do not claim a sphere of its own,between the facts of companies; rather constitute amethod capable of being applied to various problemsethnological, and resemble forms of structural analysisin use in different fields. The important thing is to knowthat what constitutes those models that are the peculiarobject of structural analysis. The problem is not ethno-logical, but epistemological, since the definitions that fol-low are independent of the raw material of our research.We think, that, to merit the name of the structure,models should only meet four conditions. First, a struc-ture has the character of a system. It consists of ele-ments such that any modification of one of theminvolves a modification of all the others. Secondly, eachmodel belongs to a group of transformations each ofwhich corresponds to a model of the same family, sothat the set of such transformations constitute a groupof models. Thirdly, the properties indicated above allowto predict how the model will react, in case of modifica-tion of one of its elements. Finally, the model must beconstructed such that its functioning can explain all theobserved facts ». C. Lévi - Strauss, Anthropologiestructurale, Librairie Plon, Paris, 1964, pp. 311-12

gZ. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, op. cit., p. 112

Received: 25 September 2012 Accepted: 13 February 2013Published: 29 April 2013

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doi:10.1186/2193-1801-2-191Cite this article as: Palese: Zygmunt Bauman. Individual and society inthe liquid modernity. SpringerPlus 2013 2:191.

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