Seduced and Repressed in contemporary consumer society

Seduced and Repressed in contemporary consumer society

Introduction

One feature of accounts of social change in the last decade has been the centrality of processes of consumption. One of the most radical and ambitious interpretations is offered by Zygmunt Bauman, who has developed a distinctive, insightful and challenging understanding of changes In the role of consumption in advanced societies. He puts it at the very centre of tile operation of the social world today, the cement that links the social system, its institutions and the everyday experiences of individuals in the life world. His general thesis is that a new epoch of western society, characterized by the cultural attributes of post-modernity, is now established. This chapter reflects on those aspects of Bauman's analysis directly relevant to understanding the consumer in contemporary society, Bauman Implies that there is a new consumer, and that though .he consumer docs not have complete authority, at least s/he has, through the use of markets, usurped authority from the state and from traditional arbiters of cultural correctness.

The development of Bauman's position illustrates some of, the dilemmas Involved In understanding contemporary consumption. His is an ambivalent, bitter-sweet interpretation of consumer behavior. He exhibits' his customary concern with moral aspects of the contemporary human predicament, characterized by tile counter pressures of individual freedom and social membership. Hostile to state control and disaffected With class as a progressive political bond, Bauman struggles to envisage an institutional nexus that might generate both tolerance and moral obligation. His project is admirable, his diagnosis largely pessimistic. However, I believe the analysis IS mistaken in certain respects and his pessimism thereby somewhat misplaced. It has three major defects, which successive sections of this chapter discuss. First, tile distinction between the seduced and the repressed is hard to sustain, being dependent on a stark, overdrawn antinomy between the state and the market. Second, the restless pursuit of self-identity through consumption is a one-Sided appreciation of the rationale of consumer behavior. Third, having constructed the individual consumer in such a fashion, inhibits tile development of a plausible account of the role of consumption in securing group 'membership and a sense of belonging.

The Seduced and the Repressed

Bauman developed the distinction between the seduced and the repressed towards the end of Legislators and Interpreters, his study of the changing role of intellectuals in western culture, There It contributed to the argument that previously intellectuals, bolstered by convictions of scientific certainty, had pronounced confidently, after the fashion of law-.makers, on the way the world ought to be; however, the radical doubt of the postmodern period (compare Lyotard, 1984) renders them mere interpreters , intermediaries in cultural communication between social groups With diverse meaning systems. The growth of culture industries and the proliferation of the consumer culture eliminated the role of the intellectual as legislator. For where markets operate 'There is no site from which authoritative pronouncements could be made, and no power resources concentrated and exclusive enough to serve as the levers of a ...