CONSUMER SOCIETY

Zygmunt Bauman's Concept of Consumer Society

Zygmunt Bauman's Concept of Consumer Society

Introduction

The modern consumer is characterized by very glorious propensity for convenience and laziness. He expects immediate results preferably without leaving home. He seeks to satisfy his needs, desires and whims. Today's consumer wants to reach a state of satisfaction and contentment with each other and provide the appropriate social status (Bauman 1997 68). Consumerism theorists believe that the myth of happiness is achieved through two objects and signs, through the material equivalents of prosperity and abundance. The natural human need opens up scope for producers of goods of all kinds, stimulates the formation and development of consumer society and its evolution towards a post-modern form of capitalism. In this essay, I critically examine Zygmunt Bauman's concept of consumer society.

Discussion

Zygmunt Bauman, also a principal theorist of postmodernity, is the most eminent recent theorist of consumer society. He maintains that consumption has superseded production as the dominant organizing principle of society (Bauman & Tester 2001 84). Whereas industrial society engaged with its members in their capacity as workers, the consumer society “engages its members - primarily - in their capacity as consumers. The way present day society shapes up its members is dictated first and foremost by the need to play the role of the consumer” (Hall 1996). The consumer attitude becomes pervasive; that is to say, people expect that their problems will find a solution, and their needs satisfaction, through their capacity to purchase goods and services. Consumption then becomes the principal means of achieving social integration as a majority of the population is seduced by the promises of consumer freedom (Kelly 2003 45).

Consumerism is the paradigm which sets contemporary society apart; market forces are echoed in culture and private life with the exchange of “symbolic goods.” Bauman traces the movement of the producer/soldier, a citizen of modernity, to a postmodern counterpart of sensation-gatherer. Rather than channeling productive energy into an endless stream of creation or destruction in keeping with the panoptical myths of industry and war, the contemporary person is pushed by consumerism into a constant search for peak experience. In Freedom, Bauman observes that the central role once played by profession has been replaced by consumer choice (Buder 2009 98). This leads not only to the rise of consumptive disorders but to a new understanding of the underclass, who are no longer the under-producers but the under-consumers, those who by choice or circumstance cannot afford to buy. In Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, Bauman explores this “flawed consumer,” arguing that the rise of the American prison state, the collapse of welfare, and the criminalization of poverty are largely the effects of a market society which must, like all societies, punish those who do not conform.

With Intimations of Postmodernity and Postmodernity and its Discontents, Baumann confronts the current era. Responding to Freud's portrait of modernity as a search for beauty, cleanliness and order, Bauman's postmodernism is characterized by the self-awareness of intellectuals: those who claim to have both ...