Many of us spend a lot of time thinking about the things we might consume, and how we might consume them, and we do this not only as individuals, but as friends, partners, and families, and so intensely do we think about our consumption practices that the things we buy and the experiences we engage which are linked to them become invested with emotional significance and central (crutches) to our very identities.
The consumption of goods and services is so thoroughly embedded into our ordinary, everyday lives that many aspects of its practice go largely unquestioned – not only the environmental and social consequences have got lost on the way, but also they very notion that consumption itself is a choice, and that, once our basic needs are met, consumption in its symbolic sense is not necessary and thus is itself a choice.
In sociological terms one might say that contemporary reflexivity is bounded by consumption – that is to say that most of the things most of us think about in life – be they pertaining to self-construction, relationship maintenance, or instrumental goal-attainment, involve us making choices about (the strictly unnecessary) things we might consume.
Even though I think that any attempt to achieve happiness through consumption will ultimately result in misery, I would hardly call anyone who tries to do so stupid – because all they are going is conforming to a number of recent social changes which have led to our society being based around historically high levels of consumption.
There are numerous explanations for the growth of a diverse consumer culture and thus the intense levels of unnecessary symbolic consumption engaged in by most people today – the overview taken below is primarily from Joel Stillerman (2015) who seems to identify five major changes which underpin recent changes in consumption since WW2.
The first explanation looks to the 1960s counter culture which despite having a reputation for being anti-consumerist, was really more about non-conformity, a rejection of standardised mass-consumption and promoting individual self expression. Ironically, the rejection of standardised consumption became a model for the niche-marketing of today, much of which is targeted towards people who wish to express themselves in any manor of ways – through clothing, music, foodism, craft beers, or experiences. Some members of the counter culture in fact found profit in establishing their own niche-consumer outlets, with even some Punks (surely the Zenith of anti-consumerism?!) going on to develop their own clothing brands.
A second discussion surrounding the normalisation of consumerism centres around changes in the class structure, following the work Bourdieu and Featherstone (2000). Basically these theorists see the intensification of consumption as being related to the emergence of the ‘new middle classes’ as a result of technological innovations and social changes leading to an increase in the number of people working in jobs such as the media and fashion.
Mike Featherstone focuses on what he calls the importance of ‘cultural intermediaries’ (who mainly work in the entertainment and personal care industries) who have adopted an ‘ethic of self-expression through consumption’ – in which they engage in self-care in order to improve their bodies and skills in order to gain social and economic capital.
The values of these early adopters has gradually filtered down to the rest of the population and this has resulted in the ‘aestheticisation of daily life’ – in which more and more people are now engaged in consumption in order to improve themselves and their social standing – as evidenced in various fitness classes, plastic surgery, and a whole load of ‘skills based’ pursuits such as cookery classes (yer signature bake if you like).
A third perspective focuses on individualisation – as advanced by the likes of Zygmunt Bauman and Ulrich Beck.
In their view, after World War II, universal access to higher education and social welfare benefits in Europe led to the erosion of traditional sources of identity provided by family, traditional authority, and work. Today, individuals are ‘free’ from the chains of external sources of identity, but this freedom comes at a price. Individuals are now compelled to give meaning to their lives without the certainty that they are making the right choice that in the past had come from tradition. Individuals are forced to be reflexive, to examine their own lives and to determine their own identities. In this context, consumption may be a useful vehicle for constructing a life narrative that gives focus and meaning to individuals.
As I’ve outlined in numerous blog posts before, Bauman especially sees this is a lot of work for individuals – a never ending task, and a task over which they have no choice but to engage in (actually I disagree here, individuals do have a choice, it’s just not that easy to see it, or carry it through!).
Fourthly, Post-modern analyses of consumption focus on the increasing importance of individuals to consumption. Building on the work of Lytoard etc. Firat and Venkatesh (1995) argue that changes to Western cultures have led to the erosion of modernist ideas of progress, overly simplified binary distinctions like production and consumption and the notion of the individual as a unified actor. They suggest that in contemporary societies production and consumption exist in a repeating cycle and retail cites and advertiser have increasingly focussed on producing symbols which individuals consume in order to construct identities.
These changes have led to increasing specialising of products and more visually compelling shopping environments, and F and V argue that these changes are liberating for individuals and they seek meaning and identity through consumption, which they can increasingly do outside of markets.
Fifthly – other researches have looked at the role of subcultures in contemporary society, where individuals consume in order to signify their identity as part of a group, and doing so can involve quite high levels of consumption, even if these groups appear quite deviant (McAlexander’s 1995 study of Harley Davidson riders looks interesting here, also Kozinet’s study of Star Trek fans).
Something which draws on numbers 3,4 and 5 above is the concept of consumer tribes (developed by Cova et al 2007) which are constantly in flux, made up by different individuals whose identities are multiple, diverse and playful – individuals in fact may be part of many tribes and enter and exit them as they choose.
Finally, Stillerman points out that underlying all of the above are two important background trends
Firstly, there are the technological changes which made all of the above possible – the transport links and the communications technologies.
Secondly there is the (often discussed) links to the global south as a source of cheap production.
Very finally I’m going to add in one more thing to the above – underlying the increase in and diversification of consumption is the fact that time has sped up – in the sense that fashions change faster than ever and products become obsolete faster than ever – hence putting increasing demands on people to spend more time and money year on year to keep up on the consumer treadmill….
So there you have it – there are numerous social trends which lie behind the increase in and diversification of consumption, so the next time you think you’re acting as an individual when you’re getting your latest tattoo, maybe think again matey!
Related Posts
Consuming Life (Bauman, 2007) – A Summary of Chapter One
If you like this sort of thing – then why not my book?
Early Retirement Strategies for the Average Income Earner, or A Critique of Curiously Ordinary Life of the Everyday Worker-Consumer
A Summary of Anthony Giddens’ Modernity and Self Identity, Chapter 4 – Fate, Risk and Security
Fate, Fatalism, Fateful Moments
To live in the universe of high modernity is to live in an environment of chance and risk. The future is seen as a place which can be shaped by human intervention, and thus, within limits, can be regulated by risk-assessment. However, notions of fate and destiny have not entirely disappeared.
As a sweeping generalisation, there is no non-modern culture which does not have at its centre notions of fate and destiny – an individual’s future is not seen as chaotic, but rather as part of some cosmic plan, specified by a person’s fate, or destiny.
Unlike in the past, the idea that we can control the future is central to modernity, and thus the notion of risk becomes central. Today, fate has been replaced with the idea of Fatalism – which is refusing modernity – a refusal to control the future, to let events come as they will (and, to an extent, this is seen as morally abhorrent). In other words (I think he’s saying) – attempting to colonise the future is now the norm, rejecting this is Fatalism – which is a perceived inability to colonise the future, and is still thus future-oriented, rather than seeing the future as determined by the past as would have been the case in pre-modern times. NB I also think this can’t be universally applied!
The future is new terrain, a place to be colonised by risk assessment, but the calculation of risk can never be fully complete.
The intrusion of abstract systems and the dynamic nature of knowledge means that risk seeps into the actions of almost everyone. We live in a society when most of us will face what Giddens calls ‘fateful moments’ – such as what A levels to do, whether to get married or divorced, or to start a business – these are moments which carry significant consequences, moments when then protective cocoon of business as usual is threatened, risky moments for the individual – at these times we will typically draw on experts to help us engage in risk assessment.
In contrast to fateful moments, stands ‘dead time’ – time which has no consequence.
The parameters of risk
Since risk, and attempts at risk assessment, are so fundamental to the colonising of the future, the study of risk can tell us much about the core elements of modernity.
Preoccupation with risk in modern social life has nothing to do with the actual prevalence of life-threatening dangers. We live in one of the most risk-free societies in history. The list below records some of the most important risk-reducing advances relevant to health which occurred during the years 1907-77:
Safe drinking water
Sanitary sewage disposal
Hygienic food preparation
Pasteurised milk
Refrigeration
Central heating
Scientific principles of nutrition widely applied
scientific principles of personal hygiene widely applied
Eradication of major parasitic diseases, including malaria
Rodent and insect control
Continually improving parental and postnatal care
And so the list goes on!
Against such risk-reducing changes, we have to place a number of negative influences – two world wars, more car crashes, more drugs which have been inadequately tested, increased consumption of alcohol and tobacco, environmental pollution, food additives, exposure to natural disasters, chemical fertilisers.
Nonetheless, in terms of basic life security, the risk-reducing elements seem to substantially outweigh the new array of risks. There are various ways this can be assessed – the strongest piece of evidence being that of increased life-expectancy.
Risk concerns future happenings – as related to present practices – and the colonising of the future therefore opens up new settings of risk, some of which are institutionally organised. Today, institutionalised systems of risk affect virtually everyone, regardless of whether they are ‘players’ within them.
Two very different areas of risk are the stock market and health profiling – both involve expert systems, and both involve ‘laymen’ having to make decisions about their futures based on their judgement of what competing experts advise them to do.
In addition to these ‘everyday risk arenas’ there are more high-profile risks associated with new technologies and globalisation – such as the threat of nuclear melt-down – and here we don’t know necessarily how bad the consequences of an accident could be.
Thus, living in the world today is not riskier than in the past, but thinking in terms of risk is more part of our day to day experience, and there is a certain uncertainty to this. Hence we have developed a kind of ‘risk consciousness’.
This is an inevitable part of modernity – the more we try to colonise the future, the more expert systems there are, and the more competing voices – and the greater one’s consciousness of risk – this risk climate is unsettling for everyone, no one escapes.
NB – Sixth form education today is increasingly about socialising kids into this risk consciousness and providing them with the tools to ‘colonise the future’.
The Active Courting of Risks
Not all risks are voluntarily undertaken – for example some of us have no chance but to drive to work, while even activities such as smoking and drinking can develop a compulsive character and so may not be entirely a matter of free-will.
People do not tend to evaluate the risks associated with individual events, but rather do risk assessment in terms of the package of events associated with their overall life-plan.
Although much risk assessment is not conscious, but rather takes place at the level of practical consciousness (certain avenues being blocked off by the ordinary assumptions of day to day life), being ‘at ease’ in late modernity is much more difficult because so many of our relationships have been reflexively achieved – that is, they are a matter of choice.
Risk, Trust and the Protective Cocoon
The uneventful character of much of our day to day life is only the result of long schooling and skilled watchfulness – this is why things such as using a knife and fork or walking have no ‘fateful consequences’ in our adult life.
These phenomena can be usefully analysed using Goffman’s concept of the Umwelt – a core of accomplished normalcy with which individuals surround themselves – in the case of humans the Umwelt extends beyond immediate physical surroundings. It extends over indefinite time and space, and corresponds to the system of relevancies to the individual’s life.
In terms of risk – the Umwelt orders events in relation to risks, and tells us which we should be alarmed about – there are generally two types of future event – those over which we have control, and those which we don’t (designed and adventitious happenings).
As mentioned earlier, the protective cocoon (developed through childhood) enables us to bracket out the bulk of what ‘goes on’ as non consequential, with little chance of anything bad happening – however, as the abstract systems (of time and money and experts) have penetrated more into our Umwelt, the capacity for developing trust becomes seriously reduced.
‘In modern social conditions, the more the individual seeks reflexively to forge a self-identity, the more he or she will be aware that current practices shape future outcomes. Assessment of risk becomes the core element of the personal colonising of future domains.
Of course we do not always calculate risk using purely quantitative methods – people are generally more afraid of flying than travelling by car even though the risks of dying in a car accident are far greater, because the idea of the magnitude of an air disaster is so much more horrifying, and distance in terms of time and space can affect risk assessment in relation to action too – as with young people smoking – the thought of a cancer related death is so far in the future you can ‘discount it’ in your youth.
Notions of fate do not disappear altogether – most of us trust governments and scientists to steer us through global problems, such that we can forget about them in regards to our day to day lives.
Fatalism is part of our lives – two coping mechanisms at the level of identity are ‘pragmatic acceptance’ – taking one day at a time and ‘Cynical Pessimism’ – world weary humour about how bad everything is. However, Fatalism is only likely to be reserved for select areas of our lives (a Blasse attitude?) given the social importance of being creative and innovative.
Our lives are frequently punctuated by fateful moments – some are not called for, in which case we have to draw on a range of strategies to cope, some are deliberately cultivated, and allow us to demonstrate some level of skill and resourcefulness in shaping our future.
As to the later of these, the risk takers, it is the capability more and more people now have to engage in risk in order to disturb the ‘fixity of things’ that is part of modernity’s unsettling character.
Risk taking is an experiment with trust – it goes back to the ‘power to be’ which we first encountered with early childhood – it has consequences for our self-identity, and the costs or benefits may not be felt for years afterwards.
Risk, Trust and Abstract Systems
‘The abstract systems of modernity create large areas of relative security for the continuance of day to day life. Thinking in terms of risk certainly has its unsettling aspects, but it is also a means of seeking to stabilise outcomes. The more or less constant and rapid momentum of change of modern institutions couples with structured reflexivity mean that on the level of everyday practice as well as philosophical interpretation, nothing can be taken for granted. What is acceptable/ recommended behaviour today might be different tomorrow in the light of new knowledge. Yet at the same time, many activities are successfully routinised across time-space (on a scale never achieved before).
Two examples of abstract systems Giddens now provides are those of money and the division of labour, using the food supply as an example of the later…. so long as an individual invests a level of trust in money and the division of labour, these allow for greater security and predictability than at any previous time in history. He also provides the examples of the provision of food, water, power and lighting and travel.
However, the penetration of abstract systems into day to day life also open up the individual to high consequence risks (because of the system of which we are a part). Giddens also points out the fact that the control of nature has been a key part of the above, to the extent that we can even talk of the ‘end of nature’, which is what adds to the potential for high-stakes negative outcomes. Just some of these which we face include>
The vagaries of the global economy
Prolonged droughts caused by centralised water systems
Power outages
Global warming
Security, Deskilling and Abstract Systems
Abstract systems deskill – not only in the workplace, but in all aspects of life they touch. This is an alienating and fragmenting phenomenon. It is alienating because expert systems undermine pre-existing forms of local control. It is not just lay people who lose power in this sense, but also experts, because experts are only experts in one narrow field, in all other fields, they are also lay-people.
Against Braverman, this is not a one-way process, but rather a dialectical one. Some people gain from the process of deskilling and reskilling, and in so doing reinforce new (dynamic) structures (NB this is part of structuration, I think!). In an important way, the invasion of expert systems into day to day life can be empowering, increasing the quanta of power. Loads of new spaces open up between the realms of lay and expert knowledge.
Empowerment and Dilemmas of Expertise
Here Giddens uses the analogy of seeking a solution to a back problem to show how there are numerous available diagnoses available as solutions – which means no one expert in the field can be said to have a universal solution to everyone’s back problems.
Summary: authority, expertise and risk
No one can disengage completely from the abstract systems of modernity. An individual experiences these most acutely in the form of expert systems when going through fateful moments when identity needs to be reconstructed – here, when an individual comes into contact with counselling or therapy we find expressed some of the central dilemmas to which modernity gives rise.
A summary of/ notes on Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age by Thomas Hylland Eriksen (2001)
The general focus of the book is on why social life has become so hurried and accelerated and what the (negative) consequences of these changes are for family life and leisure-time.
Preface
We face a double paradox – Despite the proliferation of time-saving technologies we seem to have less time to spare than ever, and the information revolution has not created a more informed population, but a more confused one.
The book stems from a sabbatical in which the author got very little work done, because his time seemed to filled with lots of minor tasks – he had no time to sit down to a long project. So it seems with life today – we seem unable to think a thought more than two inches long.
This book is not luddite, it is an attempt to create understanding of the unintended consequences of the information society.
The general focus of the book is on how life is hurried and accelerated – how working days are overloaded, leisure-time is chopped up and the consequences of these changes for family life.
Chapter One – Introduction – Mind The Gap
A central claim of this book is that the unhindered and massive flow of information in our time is about to fill all the gaps, leading as a consequence to a situation where everything threatens to become a hysterical series of saturated moments, without a ‘before’ and ‘after’, a ‘here’ and ‘there’ to separate them.
We seem to live about two seconds in the future. When one is on the receiving end of a mass of information, the scarcest resource is slow, continuous time.
In the information age it could be that more flexibility makes us less flexible and more choice makes us less free – Why do most of us have less spare time, and why does more information result in less comprehension?
Chapter Two – Information Culture, Information Cult
We need to understand the move from an industrial to an informational society – a term which can be traced back to The Frankfurt School, MacLuhan and of course Toffler.
The move to the informational society is only one of many trends leading to greater complexity, uncertainty and individualism.
The twenty first century began in 1991 with three major events – firstly the collapse of the USSR, secondly the emergence of geopolitical instability, for example the Balkan Wars and the USA’s New World Order – heralding more wars in far flung places.
The third major event was the emergence and rapid growth of the Internet, which changes knowledge through linking chunks of it together differently and leads to constant updating, which heralded the move to an informational society, which is a society in which IT is integral to all production, as it is in many other spheres of social life.
Information has now become the new scarce resource – Information processing is increasingly integral to many jobs.
In the information society, freedom from information is a scarce resource. The skill we really need to learn is to learn to filter out the 0.001% we actually need.
Many of us are coming to see living in a world of colourful fragments of knowledge – and engaging with this knowledge without being able to grasp everything in its entirety as not being a problem. People used to worry about knowing everything – now they don’t.
however, even though we do not regard this as a problem this represents a profound transformation of knowledge.
In information society, the gaps are being filled with fast time (NB Mgraine has something to say about this).
For those on the supply side of the economy, they are competing for attention – and they want our attention NOW because information can quickly become obsolete. For those of us who are consumers, freedom from information is our scarce resource. (Interesting).
People are uncertain of who they are, where they have to re-invent themselves on a day to day basis. People are free to choose but not free not to choose.
In Information society – The point of gravity in the global economy has moved from things to signs. The sign economy changes at astonishing speed, and requires other organisational forms and a greater flexibility than the economy of things, since signs float more freely than things…. The free availability of ideas simultaneously implies that many of them compete for the free spaces in our heads, leading to confusion and uncertain identities – identity has become disembedded from tradition, or major, continuous narrative. Hybridity and blurred boundaries are the norm.
Another feature of the 21st century is that freedom and vulnerability are synonyms – the bipolar world has been replaced with a unipolar world. That pole is called market liberalism and indivdualism, and its beats the drum with catchwords like flexibility, freedom and openness. Resistance is scattered and uncoordinated. New tensions result and new types of scarcity might emerge as a result:
Slow time
Security
Predictability
belonging, stable, personal identity
Coherence and understanding
Cumulative, linear, organic growth
Real experiences.
What matters is not whether any of this is new, what matters is the fact that our age is the information age.
What is the relationship between technology, time and culture? You have to understand this by looking at the recent past… which is where we go back to in chapter 3…
Chapter Three – The Time of the book, the clock and money.
Skimread
Acceleration is at the heart of the last 10000 years of cultural history – Writing lasted 4500 years, the printing press 500, while radio only had a few decades of dominance before the TV. Today, it is feasible that a product can be obsolete before it hits the shelves.
He now apologies for making some general comparisons of the traditional, the modern era and the information era…..
In this chapter Eriksen looks at five technological innovations which indicate those ‘peculiar institutions’ of modern society which are precursors of the information society: Writing, clocks, money, and notation,
Writing – Has been an essential tool in the transition from a concrete society based on intimate, personal relationships, memory, local religion and orally transmitted myths, to an abstract society based on formal legislation, archives, a book religion and written history.
The emergence of Clock Time – Time used to be event-determined – Something would happen when everything else was ready – You find this in some traditional societies today – where trains arrive when they arrive, not at a pre-given time. With the invention of the calendar and especially the clock, time becomes external and something which we are expected to sign a contract to stick to from cradle to grave – It becomes something objective which can be chopped up. It also now becomes something which can be used to coordinate us – the basis of modern business.
Bergson in ‘Time and Free Will’ has criticised how quantitative empty time now regulates us from outside rather than letting tasks at hand fill time from within.
Money does roughly the same thing to payment, value measurement and exchange as clocks and writing do to language and time. They make the transaction abstract and impose a standardised grid on the whole world. They place individual, mundane transactions under an invisible umbrella of abstraction. Money renders personal connections and trust redundant, as long as we agree on the value of the digit.
Musical Notation is his final example – manuscripts make music abstract, separate them from the individual. He argues that classical music would not have been possible without musical notation.
All of these changes together lead to a small-scale society based on local knowledge to a large scale society based on an abstract legislative system and abstract knowledge founded in logic and science.
The printing press and the industrial revolution were also necessary to pull all of the above together in modernity – a society where external abstract systems regulate huge people into being part of of one machine in which they are expendable. ‘Particular individuals are expendable because language, economy, memory, morality and knowledge are all externalised’.
Linear time is not part of the problem…
In addition to all of the above, possible because all of the above, a key feature of modernity was faith in progress – that things were getting better – however, now we are living in a postmodern age. People think things are about to go horribly wrong. This is not caused by linear time, but by a time perception which is not sufficiently linear. Time has been partitioned into so many pieces that the only time in existence is a single, manic, hysterical moment which is continuously changed, but which does not point to anything other than the next moment.
This could well be an unintended consequence of the efficient society concerned with speed.
Chapter Four – Speed (and the consequences of time speeding up!)
The chapter starts off by drawing on Paul Virilio, a theorist of speed (dromology)
Virilio studies the military – pointing out that invading a country used to take another country months to organise, then weeks and now possibly minutes – even more rapidly if we include the potential of cyber-war.
In response to Mcluhan’s global village, V prefers the term global megacity – characterised by anonymity and disintegration – Where everyone communicates to everyone and nobody really speaks with anyone. Time dominates place, everyone is close by in an instant.
The chapter now goes into an interesting description of how acceleration took place in the industrial revolution which was caused by the IR and new productivity demands in commodity production.
This acceleration was aided in the second half of the twenty first century by Information Technology – IT is simultaneously catalyst, source of coveted goods and economic powerhouse.
There are eight consequences of acceleration which are unique to post-modernity:
One – Speed is an addictive drug…
Because it is easier to communicate today, we communicate more – previously, the labour in writing a letter precluded the writing of unnecessary letters, emails are easier to write, and we we can be contacted anywhere, so we send more emails. Also, we are now more impatient in waiting for a response. In the age of email, we now expect, demand, a rapid response to our communications –
Because we demand a rapid response, this interrupts slow time.
It is not just email, everything moves faster now.
Two – Speed leads to simplification…
For example paintings to photos, and summaries of books in Readers Digest (actually the reference to Readers Digest dates this a bit!)
Three – Speed creates assembly line effects….
Quite a weak section – speed leads to a reduction in quality generally, but sometimes fast products are OK and especially better than nothing!
Four – Speed leads to a loss of precision…
Today decisions have to be made almost immediately. Those who pause for thought are overtaken by those prepared to act immediately. This can lead to bad decisions and uncertainty – unsurprising maybe when we no longer stop to reflect.
In politics, politicians react immediately and short termism is in fashion – those who play the long game get nowhere (the greens?). While in financial markets, ripples in one country rapidly domino to others.
Finally he turns to Journalism where accuracy and complexity have been replaced by speed and what’s interesting. What matters is beating the other guys to getting something published.
Erikson notes that this is correlated with declining trust in journalists – an interesting dialectic where increasing freedom = increasing distrust.
Five – Speed Demands Space…
Because they complete over our attention, every spare moment is precious in the information age – There are less empty spaces, less time for the free flow of thought, messages on mobile technologies fill every gap.
Six – Speed is Contagious…
Short wins out over long – and what’s lost along the way is context and understanding and credibility. We also speed up…. Plays are faster…
A political scientist recently studied the development of the annual financial debate in the Norwegian Parliament, comparing the speed of speech in selected years from 1945 to 1995 – Looking at Phonemes per minute…
584 in 1945
772 in 1980
863 in 1995
In other worlds the average politician spoke 50 percent faster in 1995 compared to 1945.
Increasing speed also makes us more impatient – If a plane journey takes an hour, a delay of 15 minutes is less bearable than if the same journey took two hours. Similarly we are now impatient when it takes a computer 30 seconds to log on.
Seven – Gains and losses tend to equal each other out…
For example — Although computer processor power doubles every 18 months, so does the complexity of the software.
Worse, more complex software means more chances of crashing.
Also it means more choice, and more time spent negotiating these choices, and hence less efficiency.
Eight – Technology leads to unpredictable changes
Who could have thought that time saving technologies and more information could have made time scarcer and us less enlightened?
Chapter Five – Exponential Growth
Basically involves the doubling of a number over a certain time period – Growth is slow at first, and then there is a sudden leap upwards, leading to a qualitative shift in a very short time – for example when a village becomes a town.
Exponential growth creates scarcity of space…
There is now a dearth of information – and when there is more information, we spend less time looking at any one piece of it…. And thus the producers of info change the info to fit in with this – Movies are more action packed and commercials shorter for example. Speed is also a narcotic, it is easier to speed up the info rather than to slow it down.
Side effects become dominant –
Quantitative growth leads to qualitative change – For example Bateson’s Polyploid Horse and the tendency to larger institutions towards Bureaucratisation. Basically larger organisations are less efficient, and more time is spent in wasteful activities.
There is more of everything – he now spends some time outlining the rapid growth of books and journal articles (most of which are never read?) and air traffic. Before stating that the growth rates in cyberspace surpass everything (p97)
Changes in cyerbspace represent compression in time – more and more information, consumption, movement and activity is being pushed into the available time, which is relatively constant. When the growth line hits vertical, time has ceased to exist – this happens when news is outdated the moment it is published.
When more and more is squeezed into each moment, the result is stacking…
Chapter Six – Stacking
We have moved from the relatively slow and linear to the fast and momentary – novels and old style dramas evolved based on passed events and assume you read progressively. The internet and new style dramas (Dynasty) stand still at enormous speed – the web is not hierachical and new dramas despite the cliffhangers do not generally progress – you can pick up the narrative thread after being away for several episodes.
The most important part of navigating the web is filters, but filters do not remove the fragmentation .
We are forced to customise the content in the internet – this gives us freedom of choice but we lose internal cohesion, meaningful context and slowness.
In the Informational Society pieces replace totalities…
Industrial society
Informational Society
CD/ Vinyl record
Book
Sinlge channel TV
Letter
Stationary Telephone
MP3
WWW
Mutli-channel TV
Email
Mobile Telephone
Lifelong Monogamy
Lifelong work
Depth
Linear Time-saving
Scarcity of Information
Serial Monogomy
Flexible Work
Breadth
Fragmented Contemporariness
Scarcity of Freedom of Information
The tidal waves of information fragments typical of our kind of society stimulate a style of thought that is less reminiscent of the strict, logical, linear thinking characteristic of industrial society than of the freely associating, poetical, metaphorical thinking that characterised many non modern societies. Instead of ordering knowledge in tidy rows, Information Society offers cascades of decontextualised sings more or less randomly connected to each other.
Contemporary Culture runs at full speed without moving an inch
The close cousins of acceleration and exponential growth lead to vertical stacking. Since there is no vacant time to spread information in, it gets compressed and stacked in time spans which become shorter and shorter.
He also uses music to point out that nothing new has been created since about 1990. The new now emerges from stacking – new combinations of old phenomenon. This has consequences for human creativity.
When this happens it becomes increasingly difficult to create narratives. The fragments threaten to become hegemonic. This has consequences for the way we related to knowledge, work and lifestyle. Cause and effect, internal organic growth, maturity and experience are all under threat in this situation.
The law of diminishing returns strikes with a vengeance
Media appeal is the most important thing politicians can have – their ideas are less important. Those who take time and prefer complexity have less influence.
Today, there are diminishing returns of media participation following information explosion… Basically the more channels, the less valuable a media appearance. Also, a stronger effect is needed to get the message across.
News has a decreasing marginal value – the first ten seconds is valuable, and after that…?
Information destroys continuity….
A section on today’s typical HE student who has to vertically stack activities – a lecture is something one goes to between many other activities – slow learning is marginalised – and universities adapt – they teach faster. This is like his own life, but his is because of information lint.
Very few academics today have five years to spend writing a book – especially since the marginal value of new information is next to zero, and so easier to produce something rapidly that grabs attention, even if it is cut and paste from a conference paper.
Because of all this stacking, the moment is ephemeral, superficial and intense. When the moment dominates, everything must be interchangeable with everything else in the immediate NOW – even if some things only make sense with duration.
Chapter Seven – The Lego Brick Syndrome
The relationship between time and space has undergone dramatic transformations in the IS –
Baudrillard talks of the implosion of the time/ space axis
Giddens says there has been a collapse of time and space
Castells talks about how the space of flows has been replaced by the space of places
Harvey of Time Space Compression.
It is no longer viable to pretend that a certain duration corresponds to a certain distance, and for this reason delays, gaps, slowness are threatened.
When time is chopped up into sufficiently small units, it ceases to exist as duration but continues to exist as moments about to be overtaken by the next moment.
The same pattern can be observed in many apparently unrelated fields…. We used to receive a set of lego bricks at birth with a number of sets of instructions to choose between – now there are no instructions – this must have been what Giddens meant when he spoke of the self as a project – it is not a given entity, it has to be created again and again.
He now looks at how fixation on the moment, stacking and the lego brick syndrome influence labour, family life, leisure, and consumption.
An accelerated professional life offers flexibility but leads to a whole host of other negative consequences….
In the Corrosion of Character, Richard Sennett describes how successful people in the emergent economies of the 1990s – flexible, adjustable, technologically capable people – experienced a vacuum in the very centre of their lives. They work in sectors such as finance, web design, e-commerce, advertising and journalism, in sectors which have been radically transformed in the information age.
New technology in many ways makes up the backbone of these industries, but at the same time it also forces the labour market to adapt to it. Old-timers with long and vast experience do not have much value in this new setting.
Sennett describes people who have been liberated from the monotonous drudgery of the labour market, but they live under constant pressure to reinvent themselves, update and change their perspective on the job they are doing. There is little of routine in their work, and they enjoy the opportunities on offer, but they experience serious problems in attempting to make their lives hang together as something other than a discontinuous series of events, career moves, and so on.
Some of them are virtually burnt out by the time they are 35. He now quotes some stats (30% of the workforce report mental health issues in the UK) and early burn-out is already in a good position to contend for the title of the civilizational disease of the new century.
Also, long-term planning seems to have disappeared as a concept in the world of work. Short-term stays in jobs are much more common than they used to be and contract work has increased enormously. (I guess this means more intense working?). This means job security is reduced.
This new world of work also favours a particular personality type – adaptable, opportunistic etc, which helps to explain why teaching is now seen as a low-grade profession.
Finally, these changes result in increased uncertainty, not least because the present is opaque but also because the demands of this moment are terrorised by the next.
The effects on family life and leisure-time
Given that fast time beats slow time, when the concept of working at home was introduced, the former was bound to win. Workers may not be expected to be on time any more, but they are expected to be online.
Work has invaded our home lives, and one of the most profound effects is that our family lives have become ‘Taylorised’ (following Bateson) – because increased flexibility in one area of life means less in other areas:
We now have to negotiate how to keep the kids busy so I can fit in with the flexible demands of work. We have lost the sense of slow time in which we just live for the sake of living, family life has become a tit for tat process of negotiating.
Family life is not particular labour-intensive, or capital-intensive, but it is time-intensive – and this is precisely what is absent in today’s society, hence these changes
Furthermore, family life in general is by nature slow and fits the current era badly – frequent changes of life partners are clear indications of the spread of the tyranny of the moment into the intimate sphere. The number of failed marriages and the number of Peter Pans and Bridget Jones are also testimony to this.
Serial Monogamy is a good example of standing still at great speed – the same debates in relationships had over and over again.
Marriages are also under direct pressure from the Tyranny of the Moment in which ever more exciting things are just around the corner, and there is no sense of continuity. Duration and continuity lose out, spontaneity and innovation win.
The Cult of Youth is Caused by the Tyranny of The Moment
When knowledge changes quickly, what role for the older generation? They lose at least some of their relevance and the youth are minded to fashion their own values from fragments – from a mixture of the older generation and X box!
Until quite recently 15 year olds were quite happy to start their adult life – to become properly independent persons – while at the other end of the scale, with age came established certainty and authority.
Today, however, youth, or that ambiguous phase between childhood and adulthood, has extended in both directions – through marketing to the very young and those in their 40s to remain younger. Lasch’s ‘The Culture of Narcissism’ is now truly relevant.
Two of the most serious symptoms of the tyranny of the moment are the cult of youth and the crisis of knowledge transmission – A society which does not value ageing has no interest in where it has come from – and thus no real handle on where it is going.
Our society values spontaneous energy over historical experience (in the new economy) and this is often blamed on advertising and pop culture, but it is all of the above that is really to blame.
Leisure-Time becomes a stressful rush to get more things done…
Staffan Linder talks of The contradictions of Capitalism – a healthy growth rate requires us to produce more efficiently and consume at a faster rate. Leisure time thus turns into a mad rush for intensified consumption. Leisure time becomes like work – we have to organise it, learn to multi-task and stack, to consume more efficiently and spend less time doing just one thing.
The fragmentation of work, consumption, family life and the public sphere brings us to a world where each must construct their own identity – but is such a task manageable or is life inevitably becoming collage-like and filled with singular events and impressions, arbitrariness and spontaneity with no over-arching direction, is the fast-mode becoming hegemonic rather than a mix between fast and slow modes?
Finally, the further social consequences of a life in fragments…
Bauman is far from alone in publishing books such as life in fragments – the dividing of time into ever decreasing units and the lost of internal coherence lead to….
Fundamentalism
Extreme Opportunism
Burn-Outs
Politics devoid of vision.
Does the Information Revolution actually increase efficiency?
Obviously with more complex technology we are required to go on courses to learn how to use their functionalities.
But also when we have mobile technologies, the quiet times disappear because we are expected to be always on! When emails reach a certain threshold, we loose convenience and they become oppressive. Similarly he argues that many transport connections designed to speed travel up are cancelled out by traffic jams and queuing….And now we have impatience, which is the transition between fast and slow time , and journeys are filled with things we should be doing.
Chapter Eight – The Pleasures of Slow Time…
Not everyone is affected by the pressures of fast time – but a growing number of people in the developed world are and because fast time affects the production of culture the majority is exposed to such pressures – when you switch on the TV for example.
A brief summary of the main points in Tyranny of the Moment
When there is a surplus, and no scarcity of information, the degree of comprehension falls in proportion with the growth of the amount of information. The more you know, the more you do not know.
The main scarce resource for suppliers of any commodity is the attention of others
The main scarce resource of the inhabitants of an IS are well-functioning filters
Acceleration removes distance, time and space.
When fast and slow time meet, fast time wins
Flexible work causes a loss of flexibility in the non-work areas of life.
When time is partitioned into sufficiently small units it ceases to exist as duration.
There are many academics who write about exponential growth, stacking and acceleration – Giddens and Beck are the figureheads but also Bordieu, and their theme seems to be that there is now a generalised inability to get a coherent overview of everything in this fast moving world.
There are few solutions offered to acceleration and information overload:
Castells just warns against ‘building castles’
Giddens talks of dialogic democracy but provides no substance about how this might be achieved
Bordieu – simply suggests we hit the off button
Baudrillard escapes into dark humour
Virillio says he has no solutions
So what to do? Some suggestions:
What can be done fast should be done fast
Remember that dawdling is a virtue as long as no one gets hurt
Recognise that slowness needs protection
Treat delays are a blessing in disguise
The logic of the wood cabin needs to be globalised
All decisions need to exclude as much as they include
It is necessary to switch consciously between fast and slow time
Recognise/ accept that most things one will never need know about
We also need to put the breaks on fast time by….
Establishing press rules for the slow production of more types of news.
Establishing the rule of less is more – quality over quantity.
He finishes with a number of fairly obvious public/ work level policies for introducing slowness, which I won’t go into.
A brief summary of Steph Lawler’s ‘Identity’ – Chapter One – Stories, Memories, Identities
Introduction: living lives and telling stories
‘We endlessly tell stories, both about ourselves and others, and it is through these stories that we make sense of ourselves.’
This chapter explores the perspective which sees people engaged in a creative process of producing identities through assembling various memories, experiences and episodes within narrative. From this perspective, identities are not seen as ‘fake’ in any way, but as creatively produced by selecting from an enormous range of raw materials.
Paul Ricouer identifies three things as crucial to narrative – characters, action and plot. The plot is what brings together everything into a meaningful whole, and both narrator and audience take part in emplotment – through a shared cultural understanding that these events have a place in this narrative.
A sense of time is crucial to understanding our identities – narratives link events in sequence through time – thus we come to understand ourselves as developing from a certain point and moving forwards to a future point, this is crucially a process which involves interpretation, and thus is creative.
However, the narrative cannot stand alone, in order for it to make sense it must stand in relation to broader cultural frames of reference.
Sociological thinking about narratives
Stanley and Morgan (1993) identify five trends which have led to an increasing focus on narrative within sociology –
1. A turn to textuality – where texts are increasingly seen as products rather than reflecting reality
2. A questioning of the distinction between structure and agency
3. An examination of referentiality and lives – attention to the relationship between representations of lives and the lives themselves
4. An increasing attention to time
5. A turn to intertextuality – we increasingly draw on other texts to tell our stories
What is a narrative?
A narrative is a synthesis of heterogeneous elements brought together through the interpretive process of emplotment.
According to Paul Ricouer, there are three main forms of synthesis at work in emplotment:
– between many events and one story
– between dissonance and concordance
– between open time and time as something which is over with.
Through the process of emplotment, we turn events into episodes, but this is an interpretive processes, because by looking back at the past self, we have no more direct access to that person than any one else.
Narrative and identity
Emplotment configures a self which appears as the inevitable outcome and actualisation of the episodes which constitute a life. The self is understood as unfolding through episodes which both express and constitute that self. Identity is constituted over time and through narrative, and the whole processes is profoundly social.
Identity is not something foundational, but it is something produced through all of the above processes.
In narrating stories, we interpret memories, but these memories are themselves interpretations.
Evidence for this lies in an experiment carried out by Frederic Bartlett in 1932: white north American college students were asked to read a Native American legend and then recall the events as accurately as possible. Bartlett found that students tended to forget those parts of the story which did not fit their cultural framework or expectations.
We engage in what Ian Hacking calls ‘memero-politics’ – we reinterpret past events in light of present knowledge. Thus (according to Ricouer) the process of constructing a narrative is teleological – the story we tell is that we are who we are because of past events, but in ‘reality’ the events we select to explain how we got here are selected because they seam meaningful now.
As Kiekergaard said ‘live is lived forwards, but understood backwards’ – but it might be better to understand life as being both lived and understood both forward and backward – in a spiral movement of constant interpretation and reinterpretation.
Self and other
A focus on narrative challenges the concept of the atomised individual and replaces it with a concept of a person enmeshed in and produced within webs of social relations – this is for two major reasons – first because life stories must always contain the stories of others and second because the social world can itself be seen as storied.
Two early ways this happens are through the teaching of literature and history in school – the former encourages us to identify with characters and reflect on our inner selves, and the later offers us a way to understand our own personal history in relation to the social world.
Identifying with the subjects of pain
Carol Steedman argues that identifying with the pain and suffering of others is a common way of developing self-understanding. This has been the case since the 18th century, identification with someone worse off than we are is common place.
This may go some way to helping us understand the current fascination with trauma narratives – such as those who suffered abusive childhoods.
Identifying with victims of suffering is one way in which those in power can obtain authority – however, this can only ever be imagined and it can backfire dramatically. There are limits on the stories we can borrow from.
Nb – I’m not convinced that this is that significant – the powerful only choose to identify with certain types of suffering others (not the poor, disabled or refugees for example) and I’m sure there’s more of an identification with those who are self-made despite social disadvantage?
Functionalists believe society shapes the individual and that social order and value consensus are good.
Functionalism is a structural consensus theory. Functionalists believe there is a social structure made up of institutions which shape individual behaviour. Institutions such as the family and education socialise individuals and create value consensus.
This post covers the following:
Definitions of the key Functionalist concept: structural and consensus
A summary of the key ideas of Emile Durkheim: social facts, social solidarity, and anomie
A summary of the key ideas of Taloctt Parsons: the organic analogy, the importance of socialisation, value consensus and functional prerequisites.
Evaluations of Functionalism including criticisms and ways in which it may be relevant in contemporary society.
This post has primarily been written as an introduction to Functionalism for AS and A level sociology students.
Functionalism is a ‘structural-consensus theory’
The ‘structural bit’ means that Functionalists argue there is a social structure that shapes individual behaviour through the process of socialisation.
The ‘consensus bit’ means that Functionalists believe that a successful society is based on ‘value consensus’ – people agree around a set of shared norms and values. This value consensus enables people to co-operate and to work together to achieve shared goals.
Functionalists also believe that a successful society has a stable social structure, in which different institutions perform unique functions that contribute to the maintenance of the whole – in the same way that the different organs of the body perform different functions to keep a human being healthy.
In a successful or ‘healthy’ society, for example, social life is organised so that the family socialises the young and meets emotional needs, school teaches us broader life skills, and the workplace is where we contribute to the economy.
Functionalists generally believe institutions perform positive functions (they do good things for the individual and society), and social institutions work together to provide social order and prevent too much crime and deviance.
This post provides an introduction to some of the key ideas of Emile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons, two key functionalist thinkers and some overall evaluations of the Functionalist Perspective.
Durkheim’s Functionalism
Historical Context
Emile Durkheim (1858 – 1917) was the first ever professor of Sociology.
Durkheim’s major works were published between 1893 and 1912 –and his writings are mainly concerned with how rapid and dramatic social changes such as industrialisation at that time would affect French society. . Below are just two of Durkheim’s key ideas
Society shapes the Individual
Durkheim argued that society has a reality of its own over and above the individuals who comprise it. Members of society are constrained by ‘social facts’, by ‘ways of acting, thinking and feeling which are external to the individual and endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they control him’.
Social facts include such things as beliefs, moral codes, and basic norms and values which are passed from one generation to the next and shared by individuals who make up a society. It is not the consciousness of the individual that directs human behaviour but common beliefs and sentiments which shape his or her consciousness. In short, according to Durkheim, society shapes the individual.
Social solidarity, socialisation and anomie
Durkheim believed that too much freedom was bad for the individual – when individuals have too freedom, or when there is no clear guidance about what is right and wrong, individuals suffer from a sense uncertainty and confusion about their place in world, not knowing what they should be doing, a condition Durkheim called ‘anomie’.
Durkheim argued that societies needed to create a sense of social solidarity – which is making individuals feel as if they part of something bigger and teaching them the standards of acceptable behaviour. At one level this is achieved through the family, but for Durkheim, feeling a sense of belonging to wider society was also important. Traditionally this was achieved through religion, but Durkheim was concerned that religion was fading in 20th century Europe, and that modern societies faced a ‘crisis of anomie’.
He theorised that new institutions such as schools, work places and voluntary organisations would eventually provide the ‘social glue’ which would make people feel like they belonged. Durkheim’s thinking is actually one of the fundamental things which convinced governments in Europe to create national education systems in order to socialise the young and create a sense of solidarity.
For Durkheim, and functionalists in general, socialisation (the teaching of shared norms and values) through institutions was one of the key ways in which social solidarity was to be achieved.
Talcott Parson’s Functionalism
Writing in the 1940s and 1950s Talcott Parsons built on Durkheim’s work
The Organic Analogy – we should see society as a system
Talcott Parsons saw society as working like a human body, arguing that institutions in society were like organs in the body – each performing specific functions which were necessary to the maintenance of the whole. Parsons argued that parts of society should be understood in terms of what they contribute to the maintenance of the whole.
Parsons identified various similarities between the human body and a society:
The body
Institutions
Each Organ has a unique function
Institutions have a unique function
All the bits essentially work together harmoniously
All institutions work together harmoniously
Organs are interdependent
Organs are interdependent
Has an identifiable boundary
Has an identifiable boundary
The sum is greater than its parts
The sum is greater than its parts.
Normal: healthy
Normal: low rates social problems.
Parsons believed that societies had certain ‘functional prerequisites‘ which need to be met in order for society to survive. Just like human beings need certain things to survive, so every society has to have certain things in order to function properly. For example, a society must produce and distribute resources such as food and shelter; there has to be some kind of organization that resolves conflicts, and others that socialize the young.
According to Parsons a social system has four needs which must be met for continued survival – These are adaptation, goal attainment, integration and latency. In advanced industrial society, these needs are met through specialized sub systems:
Every society needs to
Institutions in society which might perform these functions?
Produce goods and services
the work place
Achieve ‘value consensus’ – by teaching people the difference between right and wrong
schools
Resolve differences of opinion, deal with conflict, and punish ‘deviants’.
courts
Reproduce and socialize the next generation so society can carry on
the family
Value Consensus
Parsons believed that American society generally worked for most people, and thus preserving the social order (preventing conflict or revolution) was particularly important.
Parsons argued that social order was mainly achieved not through the rule of force, but through institutions promoting Value Consensus – which is agreement around shared values. Parsons argued that commitment to common values is the basis for order in society.
Two of the most important institutions which do this are the nuclear family and school
The Family is responsible for providing ‘primary socialisation’ – teaching the basic norms and values of our society. Parsons believed the nuclear family was the best type of family for providing a stable upbringing for children, and the best type of family to provide moral guidance (the difference between right and wrong.
Later on in life, education integrates individuals into wider society – providing individuals with a sense of belonging and identity to the wider society. Parsons argued, for example, that education does this through teaching us a shared history and language.
Two of the most important shared values in industrial societies include a belief in the work ethic and a belief in meritocracy (the idea that people are rewarded on the basis of their ability and effort), both of which are taught through education. Parsons argued these were both vital to modern society because a work ethic ensures people value working rather than lazing about and meritocracy means that those people who end up in lower paid jobs accept inequality in society because they believe they at least had a fair chance to do better in life.
This relates back to the previous point – individuals need to be integrated in shared values in order to be directed to meet the system’s needs. For Parsons the system has two mechanisms for ensuring that individuals conform to shared norms and meet the system’s needs: socialization and social control.
Evaluating Functionalism
When evaluating Functionalism we need to keep in mind that it is a historical perspective: Durkheim’s work is over a century old and Parsons was writing in the 1940s and 1950s, so it is quite likely that some of the key ideas aren’t that useful in helping us to understand modern society.
Criticisms of Functionalism
The easiest way to criticise Functionalism is to use some of the other sociological perspectives, and some of the points below do that.
It is difficult to argue today that there is value consensus in society – societies around the world seem much more divided. Brexit in Britain, for example, divided the nation in half, and America is split into anti- Trump and pro-Trump supporters, and divided by strong attitudes on abortion.
Marxists believe Functionalism is biased and ideological – Functionalists such as Parsons said that Value Consensus was necessary because they wanted to preserve the social order, whereas in reality society is based on inequality and exploitation and it is in the interests of the exploited to join together in revolution.
Interactionists and argue that individuals are less constrained by the social structure than functionalists suggest – individuals have more freedom to shape their own lives and are less predictable than Functionalists suggest.
Postmodernists argue that there is no such thing as a social structure or social norms, rather ‘society’ (if there is such a thing) is fluid and diverse.
Ways in which Functionalism may still be useful for understanding contemporary society
While some of the key ideas of Functionalism may not seem to ‘fit in’ with society today, some concepts do seem to be relevant…
Durkheim’s idea of ‘anomie’ for example may be more relevant than ever before – it seems fair to say that society is more disordered and chaotic than ever – and the amount of people suffering with mental health disorders is higher than ever – and maybe the level of uncertainty has got something to do with this…?
While it is fair to say that on an individual level people are unpredictable, when we look at things from a macro perspective, societies appear more predictable (if not entirely predictable) – there are clear statistical patterns which emerge by social class, gender and and ethnicity, a main theme of A-level sociology – for example, in general, children from poorer households as a whole do worse in education that children from richer households.
Functionalism: Discussion Questions
Think about the following questions – try to think of further contemporary evidence for and against each question which both supports and criticises these key ideas of functionalism
To what extent does socialisation shape an individual’s identity?
Is anomie (too much freedom) a problem in today’s society?
Do institutions really perform positive functions? (do we all benefit the same amount or do some benefit more than others?)
Do we have value consensus in today’s society?
Functionalism: Find out More
The Functionalist perspective is a recurring theme in the first and second years of A level sociology, and if you will find many of the above ideas expressed in more detail, and applied more specifically in the following posts:
A summary of Michel Foucault’s work on identity, deviance and normality, governmentality, subjectification and technologies of the self, taken from Steph Lawler’s ‘Identity’ (2014) – also includes Nikolas Rose’s development of Foucault’s work.
If there’s one central idea in this chapter (IMO) it’s this – ‘In today’s society, we have little choice but to be tied into a project of the self in which the self becomes something to be worked on – and it is in this way that power works through us.’
Becoming ourselves: governing and/ through identities
In the contemporary West it is hard to avoid the idea that the self is a project to be worked on. We see this everywhere, but especially in self-help books, therapy, the various experts promising to guide us through different stages of our lives and, of course, in the media: in chat-shows and ‘make-over’ programmes for example.
All of this is presented as freeing, as if working on the self involves freeing us of the oppressive influences of others.
What Nikolas Rose calls the ‘norm of autonomy’ has become an orthodoxy in many discussions about identity – but we should consider the argument that when we are incited to be ‘free’, we are then the most enmeshed in in the workings of power – the relationship of the self to itself within a contemporary project of self-actualisation, self-awareness and self-improvement has become a norm which ties us to relentless self-scrutiny, in which we watch ourselves for signs of deviancy and wrong doing.
We can only perceive such a project of the self as being about autonomy if we perceive power as a repressive and denying force.
An alternative perspective, associated with Michel Foucault, envisages power as a force which works positively through our desires and our selves, which sees categories of subject as produced through forms of knowledge.
(A legitimate question to ask would be why are we so obsessed with the idea of individual autonomy when we live such complex, interdependent lives.)
Power/ knowledge
Michel Foucault – ‘Power Produces Truths’
The Enlightenment view = ‘knowledge is power’ – if we obtain knowledge this will free us from the workings of power. This assumes a true self which lies outside or beyond power and self-knowledge, realised through reason.
Foucault – opposes the view that knowledge is power – one of the ways in which power works is through producing ‘truths’ about the world. These truths come to seem obvious, necessary and self-evident, they form part of the coherence of the social world and place the self within it.
Foucault argues that there has been a gradual shift in the uses and forms of power in the last 150 years in the West –
From juridical, or law-like power – which uses the language of rights and obligations.
To forms of normalising, or regulatory power – which uses the language of health, normality and self-fulfilment.
Juridical power says ‘obey me or you will be punished’, regulatory power says ‘obey me so that you can be happy’. This is a form of power which doesn’t rely on coercion, but one in which we scrutinise and regulate ourselves, the self comes to act on itself.
For Foucault, power is at its most powerful when it is its least repressive – power works not just though denying but through offering ways of being and pleasure.
As Tom Inglis puts it – ‘power announces truth’ – its truths are forged on the basis of knowledge, but this refers not to knowledge about a set of facts but rather to what might be termed ways of knowing, or in Foucauldian terms discourse.
Discourses define what can be said and thought, and how these things can be said and thought. – they are verbal or non-verbal ways of organising the world, creating ways of conceptualising that are seen as axiomatically obvious – they are epistemological enforcers (Said, 1991). (I guess they’re sort of like paradigms!)
An example of a discourse today is to understand present emotional problems as stemming from a troubled childhood, rather than because you’ve been cursed by a witch-doctor – the later would just not be taken seriously, it is outside of the discourse of understanding negative emotions.
Discourse differs to the concept of ideology because ideology presupposes a real which is beyond ideology which the ideology obscures – to speak of discourses is to speak of the knowledges which produce the truth. Foucault, in fact talks of the politics of truth.
What this line of questioning opens up is the possibility that who we and who other people are is an effect of what we know ourselves and others to be, that it is discourses which have produced categories of person and that this is how we understand ourselves.
Making people up
A good example of how categories of people are produced can be found in the way many Westerners think about sexuality – many people don’t just think of sex as something they do, they think of sex as something they are.
Foucault argues that this way of brining together sexuality and identity is relatively recent. In the 19th century, same-sex relations occurred, but there was no special consideration given to ‘being homosexual’.
It was throughout the 20th century, along with the new pseudo-science of Sexology in which people categorised the minutiae of sexual activity, that the category of the homosexual became created as a subject, and thus the identity of the homosexual was produced (or you might say, invented/ constructed). Alongside this, the category of heterosexual also needed to be produced, because homosexuality has no meaning without it.
These new categories of knowledge in fact produced what they aimed to describe – categories of person.
Foucault wants to challenge the ‘sexual liberation’ discourse – especially the idea that new apparent sexual freedoms bring with them an absence of power and control. With increased interest in sexuality in the 20th century came new forms of scrutiny as more experts emerged – and while the invention of sexual subjects has clearly been liberating for some, it has also become a means whereby we increasingly scrutinise ourselves for signs of abnormality and unhealthiness.
This legacy goes beyond sexual identity to extend into every area of our lives and our identities.
Technologies of the self
One way in which power works is through categorising people in terms through which they come to understand themselves – in this sense subjectivities are created in regimes of knowledge and power.
In explaining the relationship of the self to itself, Foucault uses the term subjectification. There are two meanings of the word subject – subject to someone else through control and dependence and tied to one’s own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to, according to Foucault.
Through subjectification, people become tied to specific identities, they become subjects, but they also become subject-ed to the rules and norms engendered by a set of knowledges about these identities.
We have little choice but to be tied into a project of the self in which the self becomes something to be worked on – and it is in this way that power works through us.
We are subjected subjects across many forms of identity – parent, worker, citizen, for example, all of which demand a level of scrutiny to maintain. The way government works today is through establishing normal-abnormal categories along these various dimensions of identity and then people employ technologies of the self in order to stay within the boundaries of normality (usually) – (the struggle is to keep up, or stay ahead, if you like!)
Psy knowledge, expertise and authority
Psy knowledges includes such disciplines as medicine, psychiatry, psychology and pedagogy, which produce ‘truths’ about the self and its relation to others. These have gained ascendancy in the West, especially since these knowledges have escaped the boundaries of academia and inform a whole of host of professional practices (social work and teaching for example) and our daily lives through such things as chat-shows and gossip magazines.
Nikolas Rose argues that it is hard to conceive of person-hood today without reference to ‘psy.’
Psy governs through using regulatory or normalising power – not working in spite of our desires, but through them – and generating specific kinds of desire in the first place.
This process started about 150 years ago through the development of ‘technologies of responsibilisation’ – when the home became perceived as the counterweight to the state, new experts in the fields of medicine and education emerged to regulate private life – and these experts govern through making assertions about the way we should act as subjects, which go largely unquestioned.
Over the years subjects have come to understand themselves as people who should be morally responsible for their own actions by monitoring the minutiae of daily-life – two examples of how this is achieved in the context of education are the teaching of English literature in schools and more recently circle time – both of which encourage the development of a self-reflecting, moral, responsibilised subject.
The norm of autonomy and the scrutiny of the soul
Rose argues that we now live in a psychotherapeutic society in which the self is understood as an inner state, to be sought out, understood, and actualised. This doesn’t so much manifest itself as narcissism, but is rather something we are stuck with – most of us can’t imagine attempting to understand ourselves without the discourses of psy.
Therapy has now become the norm for many areas of social life – that is reflecting on inner states is seen to be a cure for all sorts of social ills. Rose’s task is show how this therapeutic culture which stresses autonomy actually ties us more closely to the workings of power.
Foucault suggested that abnormal and normal manifestations of sex became axes around which people’s behaviour could be judged – Rose has broadened this out – now it is not normality which is the goal, but rather autonomy, and he applies this to much more than the sexual dimension of identities.
We live in an era where dependency now means pathology – but the path to autonomy means adhering to the strictures of psy expertise and watching and monitoring ourselves more closely.
Rose argues that there are four principle sets of concern around the goal of autonomy:
A subjectification of work – work is understood as significant in terms of identity
A pyschologisation of the mundane – life events such as marriages and births are seen as having a potentially transformative role in life.
A therapeutics of fininitude – chapters in our life ending are now seen as times of potential danger but also possibility for personal growth.
A neurotisation of social intercourse – social ills have come to be understood in terms of problems stemming from the ways we interact with others.
Across these four dimensions, we see the production of a particular kind of self – ideally autonomous, self-actualising, exercising choice, and a project to be worked on.
For Rose, in a therapeutised culture, social ills become personal problems to be worked on. We are not necessarily free, because we are now obliged to live our lives as projects.
The state of the therapeutic
States still exercise regulatory, normalising power through the deployment of expertise. This is most notable in expert knowledge surrounding the child.
The state takes a special interest in producing the right kind of citizen – citizens who believe themselves to be free and who believe there are equal opportunities. This is primarily done through exploiting the desire of parents to be ‘good parents’, especially mothers. For example:
– parents are enjoined to turn learning into play
– they should evoke reason and rightness
– states employ numerous professionals which subject parenting to scrutiny
Parents are encouraged to engender a sense of autonomy in their children, but this autonomy is a myth – the belief that children can do anything will not reduce structural barriers to their achieving certain goals in life.
The state also retains its ability to use coercive measures, though these are rarely deployed, such as:
– parenting orders
– parenting contracts
– ASBOs
– Those who are subjected to these things fall into the category of ‘failed parent’ (or ‘failed human’) and if people are subject to these things, the failures are understood as their own or their parents’ fault, not because of social ills. The discourses of psy rest on these categories of exclusion.
Resisting these discourses is not straightforward – Foucault offers no straightforward method, other than to constantly question the desirability and legitimacy of such categories.
Evaluations of this perspective
The strength of this perspective lies in highlighting the myth of individual autonomy and the fact that your ‘identity’ isn’t really your own – you are a product of social categories, which in turn are products of power relations.
One problem is that this perspective cannot explain why people make such intense investments in their selves.
Lawler finishes the chapter by recommending Barry Smart’s ‘Michel Foucault’ (1985) and Michele Barret’s ‘The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault’ (1991) as good introductions to Foucault’s work.
The British media love The Olympics, especially when ‘Team GB’ are so successful, but there’s a lot more to individual or even team success than just the individual athletes…Team GB’s success actually illustrates the relevance of Anthony Giddens’ concept of structuration, as well as the damaging effects of class-divide in the UK (despite ‘our’ success)
The Olympics and Structuration Theory
(NB this is applying what Giddens’ actually meant by structuration, not how the concept has been over-simplified to the point of misrepresentation in every A level text book).
Structuration refers to the fact that structures enable individual action and are necessary to empower people, or necessary for people to realise their talents, or for people to ‘shine’ as individuals – there are several ways you can put it, and the concept stands against the postmodern ideas that there is no social structure any more and individuals are totally free agents).
While it obviously takes a lot of individual effort to be an Olympic athletes, there seemed to also be quite a lot of recognition of the fact that there is a lot of ‘structures’ in place behind these individual success – for example:
Lottery funding
The team of experts behind the athletes – coaches, physios, nutritionists
The years of planning, training and discipline building up to the Olympics
The idea that Olympic success is merely a story of individual success is clearly nonsense, and we could take the above further – in order for there to be an Olympics at all we need to have at least the following in place:
Nation States (or similar groupings which mean something to people)
Billion dollar infrastructure such as stadiums
A global communications network.
Having said all this, it’s unlikely that the ‘minions’ behind the successful athletes will see any real recognition – the chances are that it’s the individual athletes who’s stories will be told and the individual athletes who will receive honours. Thus is the dominance of the discourse of individualism.
The Olympics as an illustration of the class divide in the UK
‘There are more British Olympians who have a horsey relative named Portia than there are Olympians from working class backgrounds.’
Just a hypothesis for you -a reasonable one based on the actual social class stats on GB Olympians – According to the Independent you are more than four times more likely to be a top GB Olympian if you were privately educated – they made up 28% of the UK’s Olympic squad, while only making up 7% of the UK population as a whole – NB that 28% is up from 21% since the London Games.
This has a lot to do with private schools providing access not only to expensive elite sports such as rowing and dressage, but also providing higher quality coaching and facilities for the more accessible sports.
If you look at the medal tables, people from comprehensive schools do just as well (near enough, proportionally) compared to people from private schools, suggesting that when they get the opportunity, there is equality.
It seems rational to suggest that if we could harness the full-talent pool of the United Kingdom by getting more of the 93% (non-independent) kids into the Olympics squad, then we’d win even more medals, rather than our nation being held-back by the elites?
NB – If you think this is bleak, then this pattern of independent school privilege is mirrored in both university entrance and access to the top professions such as medicine, journalism and law. Recent research from 2016 –
Three-quarters (74%) of the UK’s top judges went to a fee-paying school
Slightly more than half of leading print journalists and solicitors (51% each) attended fee-paying schools.
Of course you’re not told this in the mainstream media – the class inequality that probably limits our medal prospects and the same class inequality that probably makes our top professions less-dynamic (and certainly less-diverse) – which is probably a reflection of the fact that it is precisely those people (independently educated) who fail to report on such things – they tend to see their careers, and the Olympians’ success as mostly down to individual efforts and generally fail to tell us about the significance of structure and structuration.
P.S. I’m calling this post ‘Sociology in the News (2) – given that the Olympics dominated the news for half of August.
In Runaway world Giddens examines how the rise of a ‘risk consciousness’ and detraditionalisation’ have affected social life. He argues that these two consequences of globalisation have undermined the ability of institutions such as the Nation State, the family and religion, to provide us with a sense of security and stability.
These institutions are no longer able to offer us a clearly defined norms and values that tell us how we should act in society. This situation has far reaching consequences for how individuals experience daily life and for how they go about constructing their identities.
This post summarises Runaway world. In the process it defines many of Giddens most influential concepts, such as cosmpolitanism and detraditionalisation.
Globalisation, manufactured risks and risk consciousness
The title of Giddens’ accessible modern classic ‘Runaway World’ immediately suggests to the reader that he perceives globalisation as an unpredictable, destabilsing process. In Giddens’ own words:
“We are the first generation to live in global society, whose contours we can as yet only dimly see. It is shaking up our existing ways of life, no matter where we happen to be. This is…. emerging in an anarchic, haphazard, fashion… it is not settled or secure, but fraught with anxieties, as well as scarred by deep divisions. Many of us feel in the grip of forces over which we have no control” (Giddens 2002).
One aspect of globalisation is the emergence of ‘manufactured risks’ which are man made, having arisen as a result of new technologies developed through advances in scientific knowledge. Many of these new technologies, such as nuclear and biotechnologies bring about risks which are truly global in scope. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, for example, resulted in nuclear fall out spreading thousands of miles to several countries, while the burning of fossil fuels in the United States may lead to flooding in Bangladesh.
According to Giddens, we have little experience of how to deal with these new threats as they have only been in existence for the last half a century. He argues that there is a “new riskiness to risk” in that these new technologies could have catastrophic consequences for humanity, yet we do not yet know all of the consequences associated with them. We cannot be certain, for example, of the possible effects that modifying the genetic structure of our basic food stuffs will have, and we do not know exactly how much of global warming is due to human influence.
Many of the above problems require international action, as well as co-coordinated local action; and in this context, Nation States appear ill equipped to deal with such global problems. In addition, in the context of imperfect knowledge, competing expert voices emerge, such as with the debate over whether Britain should build more nuclear power stations, or whether or not we should support Genetically Modified crops. As a result, the experts employed by politicians become just one voice amidst a field of experts citing different evidence that point to different courses of action.
For Giddens, it apppears that globalisation is undermining the authority of the Nation State. At least to an extent, it doesn’t make it irrelevant in his opinion, but it struggles more to address global social problems.
Globalisation, Risk and Identity
So what are the consequences of this situation for self identity?
On the one hand, we have identity politics and on the other, we have apolitical apathy. Those who are concerned about the global problems mentioned above and who perceive the government as being ill equipped to deal with these new global risks, have gravitated towards New Social Movements such as the green movement. At the more radical end of these movements, one’s whole lifestyle, one’s whole being and identity is oriented towards addressing global problems, at the local and international level, through protesting globally and acting locally.
However, such radical action is only undertaken by the relative few, and many remain apathetic towards global risks. Political apathy can also be easily justified in the context of imperfect knowledge, in which no one can ever be certain of the full extent of these global risks.
Detraditionalisation
A second major theme of Giddens’ work is that of detraditionalisation. Giddens argues that
“For someone following a traditional practice, questions don’t have to be asked about alternatives. Tradition provides a framework for action that can go largely unquestioned… tradition gives stability, and the ability to construct a self identity against a stable background.”
Globalisation brings this to an end as local cultures and traditions are exposed to new cultures and ideas, which often means that traditional ways of acting come to be questioned. As a result of globalisation, societies and cultures go through a process of detraditionalisation, where day to day life becomes less and less informed by ‘tradition for the sake of tradition’.
A good example of an institution undergoing this process is marriage. Although the tradition of marriage remains, a couple is much less likely to get married simply for the sake of marriage, either because it is ‘what people do, or what their parents did’. A typical couple today will discuss whether they should get married or not; they will think about whether it is right for them, and if they do decide to get married, they will then discuss where they should get married, and a whole range of other aspects associated with the marriage ceremony itself.
This theme of detraditionalisation is to be found in many other areas of life. If we think back to the example of identity politics as expressed through New Social Movements, this tells us that traditional ways of political engagement are changing.
Giddens also argues that globalisation has even lead to religions becoming detraditionalised, and there is plenty of evidence that he is right, as practices such as church attendance in Christianity and veiling in Islam appear to be more a matter of personal choice than of unquestioning adherence to tradition.
Cosmopolitanism and Democratisation
The positive side of detraditionalisation is the spread of what Giddens refers to as cosmopolitanism in which the individual is much less constrained by arbitrary tradition than in ‘traditional’ or pre-global societies. In a cosmopolitan society, the individual has much more freedom to reflect on already existing cultural practices such as those associated with marriage, religion and politics, and to choose which aspects of these cultural practices suit him or her.
As a result of this, culture becomes something that is more fluid, more open to debate and more open to adaptations by individuals than ever before in human history. Culture, according to Giddens, becomes more democratic as more people have more of a say in how culture will inform their lives.
Detraditionalisation and self identity
Detraditionalisation also has consequences for self-identity. According to Giddens
“Where tradition lapses, and life-style choice prevails, self-identity has to be created and recreated on a more active basis than before.”
Giddens further argues that individuals must engage in an ongoing process of reflecting upon their lives and adapting them in the light of new knowledge that arises in a rapidly changing, globalising world. This whole process of ongoing reflecting on one’s life and changing accordingly is known as reflexivity.
Reflexivity is necessary because many of our institutions no longer provide us with a clear set of pre-given norms and values. Modern relationships, including marriages, no longer come with a set of clear norms and values, duties and responsibilities, instead, these need to be negotiated. Similarly, for those that are religious, the ‘meaning of ‘being Christian’ or ‘being ‘Muslim’ is much more open to debate than ever before, and for those who want to get political, this is no longer limited to union membership, or party membership and voting in general and local elections, one has to choose between a whole range of political activism.
The individual is faced today with a situation in which modern institutions no longer simply tell the individual how to act, or how to ‘be’, they no longer act as stabilising forces that anchor individuals to society in clearly defined ways. Instead, we have to choose which aspects of tradition suit us, and be able to justify to others why we have made these choices.
Even once we have decided on what the rules of a relationship are, on what our religion means to us, or what kind of political action we should engage in, the rapid pace of social change, brought on by globalization means that we may well have to redefine our relationships and our religious and political identities over an over again.
To give examples, a foreign firm relocating outside the United Kingdom may mean a career change, which could mean a renegotiation of the terms of a relationship; The recent decision of the government to build more nuclear power stations will lead many green activists to shift their political attentions to this issue, and the ongoing ‘threat of Islamic extremism’, exaggerated or not, has lead to a debate over the meaning of what it means to be British and Muslim.
Reflexivity, expert systems and therapy
Giddens argues that this constant need to adapt our identities in line with global changes has lead to the emergence of ‘expert systems’. These are found everywhere in British society, from the careers advisor, helping us to choose which degree is best suited to us, to the therapist and counselor, providing us assistance in the necessary task of continually reconstructing our identities.
The negative consequences of Globalisation and detraditionalisation
While Giddens is cautiously optimistic about the changes brought about by globalisation, in that he believes that global risks are something we can work together to deal with, and detraditionalisation opens up the possibility of a radical democratisation of daily life, he does also point to two major problems.
The first of these is the increase in addiction in modern society. Today, people can develop recognised addictions to sex, food, gambling and even shopping. Giddens perceives this increase in addictions as being linked to detraditionalisation. In pre-global societies, stable traditions provided individuals with a link to the past, now this is gone, addiction is seen as an attempt by individuals to construct a coherent ‘narrative of the self’ through repetitive actions that provide comfort, thus linking actions today with actions to the past.
The second negative consequence of detraditionalisation is the rise of Fundamentalism, which Giddens sees as traditional practices that are defended by a blinkered commitment to ideologies and beliefs, and a resistance to engaging in dialogue about those views.
Evaluating Giddens
Many contemporary critics, argue that Giddens’ view of contemporary societies is too optimistic.
Zygmunt Bauman essentially agrees with the fact that uncertainty in society requires most individuals to constantly engage in ‘identity construction’, but he also points out that the wealthy and powerful are the ones both creating and benefiting from an unstable, rapidly changing world, and that these people are much more able to defend themselves against the negative consequences of living in a runaway world.
Frank Furedi, who draws on Bauman, argues that the expert systems that have emerged to assist us in the construction of our identities are not neutral institutions. He argues, amongst other things, that far from allowing individuals to be more autonomous actors, they actually encourage individuals to be dependent on expert advice.
I will summarise the work of these two contemporary critics of Giddens in a future article. Suffice to say for now that all three agree that Globalisation has far reaching consequences for the British society, culture and the ways in which we construct our identities.
Runaway World: Relevance to A-Level Sociology
There has been a considerable amount of research and theorising into globalisation and its consequences over the past decade, yet little of this has filtered down to students of A level Sociology.
This article aims to address this by summarising Anthony Giddens’ views on globalisation and its consequences for culture and identity in the West, focusing on the two core themes of risk and detraditionalisation.
Zygmunt Bauman is one of the world’s leading sociologists. He is particularly interested in how the west’s increasing obsession with ‘individualism’ actually prevents the individual from being free in any meaningful sense of the word.
In ‘Liquid Times (2007), Bauman argues that there are a number of negative consequences of globalisation such as the generation of surplus people who have no where to go in a world that is full; of increasingly visible inequalities as the rich and the poor come to live closer together; and of a world in which it is increasingly difficult for communities and nations to provide collective security.
According to Bauman, the ultimate cause of negative globalisation is due to the fact that the owners of Capital are invisible and shifting, having the power to invest locally without making commitments, and even to ignore international law if they deem it in their interests. The global elite are globally mobile, they are not stuck in one place, and they are free to move on if there are better investment opportunities elsewhere. The elite are seen as creating an unstable world as they move from place to place, seeking to maximise their profits. Meanwhile, the experience of ‘negative globabalisation’ for the rest of us who are ‘doomed to be local’ is one of increasing anxiety, fear, and suspicion, which derive from living in an unstable and unpredictable world over which we have no control, and we are compelled to develop strategies to counter the unstable, unjust, unequal and ‘risky’ and ‘dangerous’ world that the forever shifting elite leave in their wake.
The strategies adopted depend on the specific experience of negative globalisation, but they nearly always involve putting up barriers to protect us from ‘dangerous others’, or they involve escaping from a world that is perceived as no longer worth living in.
Those that ‘run away’ include everyone from refugees fleeing a war torn country to the millions of people in the West who continually reinvent themselves selves through seeking out new life experiences rather than rooting their identities in involvement in local and national institutions.
‘Barrier strategies’ include the emergence of fortress Europe to keep refugees out; the development of gated communities and the move towards zero tolerance policing policies in many cities.
For Bauman, these strategies are always ineffective, because they do no address the root cause of our anxiety, which is the fact that our national and local institutions can no longer provide us with security in the wake of instabilities brought on by advanced global capitalism. Instead, these strategies end up increasing the amount of anxiety and fear and segregation and eventually serve to justify our paranoia.
The remainder of this article looks at three elements of ‘negative globalisation’: The generation of surplus people; Increasingly visible inequalities; and the undermining of national and local institutions.
Surplus people
Bauman argues that ‘When the elite purse their goals, the poor pay the price’, seeing the instabilities and inequalities caused by global capitalism as creating the conditions that can lead to ethnic nationalisms, religious fanaticisms, increased civil wars, violence, organised crime and terrorism, all of which do not respect national boundaries. As a result, there is a new ‘global frontier land’ occupied by refugees, guerrilla armies, bandit gangs and drug traffickers.
Focussing on refuges, Bauman points out that they are outside law altogether because they have no state of their own, but neither are they part of the state to which they have fled. He points out that many Palestinians, for example, have lived in ‘temporary’ refugee camps for more than a decade, but these camps have no formal existence and don’t even appear on any maps of the regions in which they are situated. To make matters worse, refugees often have no idea of when their refugee status will end, and hence Bauman argues that they exist in a ‘permanent temporary state’ which he calls the ‘nowhere land of non humanity’.
Refugees in camps can be forgotten, whereas if they were amongst us, we would have to take notice of them. In these camps, they come to be seen as one homogenous mass, the nuances between the thousands of individuals living therein becoming irrelevant to the outsider. Refugees, in fact, go through a process much like Goffman’s mortification of the self, as many of them are stripped of all the usual things they need to construct an identity such as a homeland, possessions and a daily routine. Unlike the mentally ill who Goffman studied, however, refugees have no formal rights, because their self- mortification takes place in a land that doesn’t formerly exist. Bauman’s point is that one of the worst consequences of globalisation is the absolute denial of human self expression as experienced by refugees.
While Bauman’s work provides us with an insight into why refugees may want to escape their permanent temporary camps, there is little chance of this happening. For a start, Europe is increasingly developing a ‘fortress mentality’ in which we try our best to keep refugees out the European Union through offering aid to countries that boarder international crisis zones in order to help them, rather than us having to deal with the ‘refugee problem’ ourselves.
Those refugees that do make it to the United Kingdom and other European countries have an ever slimmer chance of being awarded Asylum, and are increasingly likely to be locked up in detention centres. In the United Kingdom, Asylum seekers are not allowed to work or to claim benefits, which in turn makes it incredibly difficult for such individuals to ever integrate into what is to them a new and strange country. Thus even for those who escape, their reward is further experience of marginalisation.
Bauman also deals with why the general populace of the West are so scared of Refugees. Firstly, and very importantly, he reminds us that the real underlying cause of our fears, anxieties and suspicions is that we have lost control over the collective, social dimensions of our life. Our communities, our work places, even our governments, are in constant flux, and this condition creates uncertainty about who we are and where we are going, which is experienced at the level of the individual as fear and anxiety.
This experience of fear and anxiety means that we are unnaturally afraid of a whole range of things, but a further reason that we might be especially scared of Asylum seekers in particular is that they have the stench of war on them, and they unconsciously remind us of global instabilities that most of us would rather forget about. Asylum seekers remind us, ultimately, that the world is an unjust place full of tens of millions of people who, through no fault of their own, bear the consequences of negative globalisation. Asylum seekers remind us of the frailties of a global system that we don’t control and don’t understand.
Rather than looking at the complex underlying causes of our irrational sense of fear, the Media and Politicians see people such as Asylum seekers as an easy target: They are confined to camps, and hence stuck in one place, and they will obviously look different and hence are more visible. Keeping Asylum seekers out, or sending them back in droves, becomes a political tool, with politicians winning points for adopting ever greater levels of intolerance towards the desperate.
The consequence of this for refugees is bleak. A major theme of Bauman’s work is that once fear of a group in society has been generated it is self perpetuating, whether or not that fear is justified. The very fact that we are afraid of Asylum seekers means we are less likely to approach them, it means that were are less likely to give them a chance, which in turn leads to a situation of mutual suspicion in which both parties seek to keep as much distance between themselves as possible.
The experience of Global Inequality
The radical inequality between citizens in the United Kingdom and refugees living in the no where land of non humanity is stark, but, for most of us, easily ignored. Much more visible are the inequalities that exist within International cities such as London, New York, and, even more obviously Mexico City and Rio Di Janeiro.
Bauman points out that cities used to be built to keep people out, but today they have become unsafe places, where strangers are an ever looming presence. The underlying reason why the modern city is a place that breeds fear and suspicion is because they are sites of some of the most profound and visible inequalities on earth, where the poor and rich live side by side. As a result, those who can afford it take advantage of a number of security mechanisms, such as living in gated communities, installing surveillance cameras, or hiring private security. The architecture of the modern city has become one of segregating the haves from the have nots.
For the poor, this ‘fortification mentality’ is experienced as ‘keeping us excluded from what we can never have’ and they effectively become ghettoised in areas which will always seam undesirable compared to the places they are prevented from being. Thus the poor are permanent exiles from much of their city. Lacking economic capital, sub cultural capital becomes the only thing the excluded can draw on in order to carve out some status for themselves. This, argues Bauman, is the reason why there are so many distinct and segregated ethnic identities. These are the strategies adopted by the poor to carve out some freedom for themselves, the strategies of those who are doomed to be local.
This strategy, however, breeds a culture of difference, and separatism. It breeds a city in which we are surrounded by strange others whose territory will always seam unfamiliar, which in turn breeds yet more suspicion, fear and insecurity. Islands of difference rather than an integrated city are the result, a city populated by unfamiliar people who we do not know.
Bauman points out that, once visited on the world, fear takes little to keep it going. Social life changes when people live behind walls, wear handguns, carry mace and hire security guards. The very presence of these things makes us think the world is more dangerous, leading to increased fear and anxiety. It doesn’t actually matter if the ‘others’ are actually, or ever were, dangerous, the fact that we put up defences against them is proof enough of the fact that they must be a threat.
Insecurity, anxiety, and the inadequacy of identity…
While Globalisation creates instabilities which creates surplus people and stark inequalities, Bauman also argues that Globalisation erodes the ability of the state and local communities to provide genuine stability and security for individuals. Social institutions such as the family, education and work dissipate faster than the span of one’s life, and it becomes difficult for individuals to construct a coherent life-project.
This situation results in what Bauman calls ‘existential tremors,’ where individuals do not have a stable sense of who they are, or what they belong to, resulting, as we have already come across, in increased feelings of anxiety, fear and uncertainty. As evidence of this, Bauman points out that most of us do not generally perceive the future as a bright place of hope and of ‘better things to come’, instead we see the future as a series of challenges to be overcome, of risks to be managed, and of threats to our security. In short, the future is a bleak, dark, and uncertain place.
In the absence of collective security, individuals and families are left to try and develop strategies to find security and stability themselves, and our goals become limited to the managing risks, and our horizons limited to the every narrowing sphere over which we still have some measure of control! Thus we invest in pensions, become very protective of our children, and become increasingly suspicious of strangers. We are obliged to spend our time doing things to minimise the perceived threats to our safety: checking for cancers, investing in home security, and monitoring our children. Our life-project becomes not one of developing ourselves, not one of striving for a deeper understanding of what it means to be human, but, instead, our life goals become limited to avoiding bad things happening to ourselves.
Bauman also has a pessimistic take on the common practice of the continual reinvention of the self. Bauman argues that the process of constructing an identity is sold to us as something that is fun, as something that should be pleasurable, and as something that is indicative of individual freedom. One only needs look at the various networking and profiling sites to see that the expression of self identity is something associated with pleasure and leisure. It has become a normal part of daily life to spend a considerable amount of time, effort, and money on constructing, maintaining and continually transforming one’s self.
Bauman, however, reminds us that although we may think we are free, we are actually obliged to engage in this process of continual reinvention because our social lives are in continual flux. Furthermore, many identities are not rooted in the local, the social or the political, they are much more floating and transient, based on fashion, music, and interests, and Bauman interprets many of these strategies as an attempt by individuals to try and escape from a world over which they have no control.
Following Joseph Brodsky, Bauman is rather scathing of the range of shallow strategies many of us adopt to escape from the world, and ultimately argues that they are all pointless….
“you may take up changing jobs, residence, company, country, climate, you may take up promiscuity, alcohol, travel, cooking lessons, drugs, psychoanalysis…. 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, yet with the same stale feeling toward the light of day pouring through your window.” (105)
Bauman seams to be arguing that individuals will never find peace of mind, never find ‘who they really are’ unless they have stability and security, and in order to have that, people need to root themselves in local and national institutions, otherwise, our attempts to find ourselves through the reinvention of the self will always be less than satisfactory.
Conclusion and Evaluation
Bauman’s work is important as it reminds us that there is inequality in the way we experience risk and instability. On the one hand, the global elites who cause our global society to be unstable benefit from this instability and are able to avoid the worst effects of it, through, for example, moving away from war zones, or retreating into gated communities. Meanwhile, the poorest are the ones who suffer, having lost, in the extreme example of refugees, the very right to be regarded as human beings.
As a final perverse twist, the elites that created this situation in the first place end up either retreating to expensive enclaves that are well secured, or they profit from our fears politically and financially.
One cannot help but feel incredibly pessimistic after reading Bauman’s work. It is as if hegemonic control has penetrated so far into the hearts and minds of the populace that the huge effort required for people to reassert localised, communitarian politics against global capitalist hegemonic power is simply too much to ever hope for.
But for those that are inclined to join Social Movements, at least Bauman’s work identifies an elite to position oneself against, and reminds us this elite continually flout the principles of genuine freedom, equality, in the pursuit of their self interest. Bauman’s work also offers a useful counterpoint against what some would regard as the pointless relativism of post-modernism and the mediocre third way quiescence of Anthony Giddens.
A brief summary of Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity, chapter one. A level sociology labels Bauman as a postmodern Marxist.
Chapter One – Emancipation
The chapter begins with Marcuse’s complaint (writing in the 1970s) that most people don’t see the need to be liberated from society, and of those that do, relatively few are prepared to take action towards liberation, and most of those have little idea of how a more liberated future might be different to our current situation.
Next Bauman outlines his conception of liberation, noting that ‘to feel free means to experience no hindrance, obstacle, resistance or any other impediment to the moves intended or desired’. He then argues, following Schopenhauer, that feeling free from constraint means finding a balance between one’s wishes (or imagination) and the stubborn indifference of the world to one’s intentions. This balance might be achieved in two ways – through either expanding one’s capacity to act or through limiting one’s desires (imagination).
Distinguishing between these two strategies of emancipation makes possible the distinction between subjective freedom (to do with how one perceives the ‘limits’ to one’s freedom), and objective freedom (pertaining to one’s capacity to actually act). This highlights the fact that people may not be objectively free but feel free because they either fail to realise they are not free, or, more worryingly for Bauman, because they dislike the idea of freedom given the hardships that come along with that freedom, which brings him onto the ‘mixed blessings of freedom’.
(P18) The mixed blessings of freedom
This section begins with an episode from the Odyssey in which Odysseus manages to trap a sailor who had been turned into a hog by Circe. Odysseus (through the use of a magical herb) manages to release the sailor from his bewitchment. However, the released sailor, Elpenoros, is far from grateful and complains:
‘So you are back you busybody? Again you want to nag and pester us, to expose our bodies to dangers and force our hearts to take ever new decisions? I was so happy, I could wallow in the mud and bask in the sunshine, I could gobble and grunt and squeak, and be free from doubts… Why did you come? To fling me back into the hateful life I led before?’
Bauman now poses two questions (NB this isn’t that clear from the writing!) – firstly, why has freedom been slow to arrive? Secondly, when freedom does arrive, why is it so often seen as a curse?
Bauman explores one type of answer to the first question, which is that men are not ready for freedom. These types of answer tend to be accompanied by either pity for the men duped out of their freedom or anger at the masses unwilling to take up their liberty. Such answers are also accompanied by attempts to explain why men do not perceive the need to be free, with the blame being laid variously at a modern culture which replaces ‘having’ with ‘being’; the embourgeoisement of the underdog, or a culture industry which makes us thirst for entertainment rather than spiritual fulfillment.
A possible answer to the second question (the answer that Elpenoros would have given) is that men are not prepared to face liberty because of the hardships it brings. This type of answer criticises libertarian notions of Freedom such as those outlined by the likes of Charles Murray in which happiness is related to individual resourcefulness. Murray argues that what fills an event with satisfaction is that ‘I’ did it, but this is flawed, Bauman points out, because being thrown back on one’s own resources also portends a paralysing fear of risk and failure without the right to appeal and seek redress.
On a personal note, I would generally agree with this critique of libertarian notions of freedom. The thought of working on projects such as moving house, or clearing my allotment,or, on a larger scale, building an eco-village are much less daunting, and actually only made possible with the co-operation of others.
Bauman now draws on the legacy of Hobbes and Durkheim to argue that we are right to be sceptical about the benefits of libertarian notions of freedom. He seems to sympathetic with the Durkheimian idea that a degree of social coercion is actually an emancipatory force. To quote Durkheim:
‘The individual submits to society and this submission is the condition of his liberation. For man freedom consists of deliverance from blind, unthinking physical forces; he achieves this by opposing against them the great and intelligent force of society, under whose protection he shelters. By putting himself under the wing of society, he makes himself also, to a certain extent, dependent upon it, But this is a liberating dependence, there is no contradiction in this.’
In other words, there is no way to achieve freedom other than to submit to the norms of society – the individual needs society to be free. Total freedom from society means a perpetual agony of indecision and uncertainty about the will of those around you, whereas patterns and routines condensed by social pressures give us road markings, inform us how to act, and give us a sense of certainty in this life.
Bauman now outlines arguments which support the view that an element of routine is necessary, citing Fromm’s notion that we need certainty, Richard Sennet’s notion of character, and Giddens’ concept of habit.
Having established that the individual needs social norms, some sense of routine to ground himself, Bauman rounds of this section by introducing one of the central problems of living in a postmodern society – that such norms and routines are much less stable than they once were. Citing Deleuze and Guatari’s and Alain Touraine’s ideas he points out that the time has come when we no longer have a social definition of the self, and individuals are expected to define themselves in terms of their own psychological specifity and not society or universal principles.
The individual has already been granted all of the freedoms he could have ever dreamed of, and that our social institutions are more than willing to cede the worries of self-definition to individuals, while universal principles which might guide our lives are hard to find.
Bauman rounds off this section by suggesting that Marcuse’s pining for communitarianism is outdated because there is no social aspect in which we can re-route the individual, all that is left is the psychologist’s couch and motel beds. The individual has become disembedded and there is nowhere to re-embed.
(p22) The fortuities and changing fortunes of critique
Bauman’s main point here is that our society is still hospitable to critique, but the focus of critique has shifted from criticising society and positing viable ways of changing that society to criticising ourselves and our life-politics. Today, we are reflexive beings who constantly question what we are doing and express dissatisfaction with various aspects of our lives.
The problem is that at the same time as us becoming more self-critical, we have lost control over the agenda which shapes our life-politics. Our reflexivity is shallow, it does not extend in any meaningful sense to our having control over the system in which we are embedded.
Bauman now provides a ‘caravan park’ analogy to describe the way we tend to interact with society today. According to Bauman, we are mostly content to limit our concerns to what goes on in our own individual caravans, and we only want to engage with other caravan dwellers occasionally and in a non-committal manner, reserving the right to up and leave when we choose. We only ever complain about the caravan park when certain services break down, such as the electricity or water supply, otherwise we are happy to let it run itself, without feeling any need to to commit to it, or question the way it is run.
This is very different to the type of social engagement that was the norm when Adorno developed his critical theory. At that time, Bauman suggests, many more people treated society as if it were their house, and acted within it as if they were permanent residents who could, if necessary, alter the structure of that house.
Moving onto one of the central themes in Bauman’s work, he now argues that this changing mood of critical engagement with society (or lack of it) is because of the shift from heavy to light modernity which has resulted in a profound transformation of public space and, more generally, in the fashion in which the modern society works and perpetuates itself.
Bauman notes that heavy modernity was endemically pregnant with the possibility of totalitarianism – the threat of an enforced homogeneity, the enemy of contingency, variety and ambiguity. The principal icons of the era were the fordist factory, with its simple routines, and bureaucracy, in which identities and social bonds meant nothing. The methods of control in this period were the panopticon, Big Brother and the Gulag. It was in this period of history that the dystopias of Orwell and Huxley made sense to people (which they no longer do) and that the defense of individual autonomy and creativity against such things as mass culture offered by critical theory appealed to a wide body of citizens.
However, in liquid modernity, we are no longer constrained by industry, bureaucracy and the panopticon, and Orwell’s dystopia no longer seems possible. Liquid Modern society, however, is no less modern than it was 100 years ago, because it is still obsessed with modernising, with creative destruction… with phasing out, cutting out, merging, downsizing, dismantling, becoming more productive or competitive, and, just as with heavy modernity, fulfillment is always somewhere in the future.
But two things make the Liquid Modern Era different to the Heavy Modern Era: –
Firstly, the end of the idea of perfectibility: we no longer believe that there will be an end to the process of modernisation – it has become a perpetual process.
Secondly, we are now expected to find individual solutions to our problems. Gone is the idea that reason applied to social organisation can improve our lives, gone is the ideal of the just society. No longer are we to solve our problems collectively through Politics (with a capital P), but it is put upon the individual to look to themselves to solve their life-problems, or to improve themselves.
(p30) The Individual in Combat with The Citizen
Bauman starts off with something of a homage to Norbert Elias (and fair play, History of Manners was a terrific read!) for shifting the dualist sociological discourse of self-society to one which focuses on a ‘society of individuals.’
Casting members as individuals is the trade mark of modern society and this casting is an activity re-enacted daily. Modern society exists in its incessant activity of ‘individualising’. To put it in a nutshell, individualisation consists of transforming human identity from a given into a task and charging actors with the responsibility for performing that task and for the consequences (also the side effects) of their actions.
Bauman now points to another difference between heavy and liquid modernity. In the period of ‘heavy modernity’, having been disembedded from previous social-locations, people sought to re-embed themselves in society, through, for example, identifying as a member of a stable social class. By contrast, in today’s modernising society, we have no stable beds for re-embedding, we just have musical chairs, and so people are constantly on the move. In the liquid modern world, there is no end of the road, nowhere for us to ‘re-embed’.
Having established what individualisation is, Bauman now goes on to make three further points –
In the age of liquid modernity the option to escape individualisation and to refuse to participate is not on the agenda -Individualisation is not a choice – to refuse to participate in the game is not an option.
In the Liquid Modern society, how one lives becomes a biographical solution to systemic contradictions – risks and contradictions go on being socially produced; it is just the duty and the necessity to cope with them which are being individualised.
A gap is growing between individuality as fate and the ability for genuine self-assertion. The self-assertive capacity of men and women falls short of what genuine self-constitution would require..
Bauman now distinguishes between the citizen and the person – the former seeks their well-being in the city (read ‘society’), while the later is unconcerned with collective well-being. and basically makes the argument that part of individualisation is the ending of citizenship.
Another unfortunate aspect of the Liquid Modern era is that, rather than being used to discuss public issues, public space is brimming with private problems – where people’s individual problems and their individualised biographical solutions are discussed, without any consideration of the social conditions which gave rise to those problems.
Bauman rounds off this section by pointing out that in today’s society, the chances of being re-embedded are thin, and this means that new communities are wandering and fragile, and he alludes to the fact that newly-emerging networks with low commitment are not sufficient to empower individuals.
He ends with a rather bleak quote from Beck ‘On the Mortality of Industrial Society’… ‘
‘What emerges from the fading social norms is naked, frightened aggressive ego, in search of love and help. In the search for itself and an affectionate sociality, it easily gets lost in the jungle of the self.. Someone who is poking around in the fog of his or her own self is no longer capable of noticing that this isoloation, this solitary confinement of the ego’ is a mass sentence’.
(p38) The Plight of Critical Theory in the Society of Individuals
The modernising impulse means the compulsive critique of reality, and the privatisation of that impulse means compulsive self-critique, and perpetual self-disaffection. It means that we look harder and harder at how we can improve ourselves.
I’m in two minds about what to make of Bauman’s idea of perpetual disaffection – On the one hand I’m impressed by the sympathy for the basic plight of the individual – it is, after all, an experience of the perpetual suffering that accompanies the human condition; on the other hand I’m concerned that what Bauman’s going to try and argue later on is that this disaffection will disappear once individuals gain some greater degree of control over the process of their self determination. In Buddhism, the fact the individual seeks to self-determine in the first place is the source of the disaffection, so this won’t be remedied through merely reinventing one’s relations with one’s social context (although this is part of the process in Buddhism – through right livelihood) – this disaffection is probably better seen as individuals en mass realising their true nature – and this needs a deeper solution, which will combine the various factors found in the Noble Eightfold Path.
The problem with this is that there are no ‘biographical solutions’ to systemic contradictions – except for imaginary ones, and as a result, there is a need for us to collectively hang our fears on something – and so we scapegoat ‘strangers’, and go along with moral panics, it is these kind of fears which fill the public space voided of properly public concerns.
The job of critical theory is now to repopulate the public sphere – to bring back politics with a capital P – to bring back the two groups of actors who have retreated from it – The person and the elite.
People do not engage because they see the public sphere as merely a space in which to private troubles without making any ‘public connections’. The elite meanwhile now exist in ‘outer space’ and remain for the most part invisible, their favourite strategic principles being escape, avoidance and disengagement.
The job of critical theory is to figure out how to empower individuals so they have some level of control over the resources which they require for genuine self-determination.
(p41) Critical Theory Revisited
Bauman starts with a section devoted to Adorno’s view that the act of thinking is itself freedom, but that any attempt to give thoughts a market value threatens the genuine value of thought.
He then talks about the tension between ‘the cleanliness of pure philosophy’ – drawing on the notion of the withdrawn intellectual contemplating life and refining systems of thought and the problem of then applying the ‘truths’ found to the ‘dirty business’ of getting involved with the world of politics as one attempts to enact one’s ideas. He essentially argues that thought in isolation from society is useless – In order for it to have any value at all, thought has to be applied to society.
Bauman concludes this section by pointing out that the unfortunate corollary of this is that whatever truths come to power will inevitably be tainted by those in power.
(p48) A critique of life-politics
In this summative section Bauman points out again that it is up the individual as an isolated actor to themselves find individualised solutions to social problems… He points to a range social situations, from us being called upon to adapt to neoliberal flexibalisation at work, to our efforts in seeking romance, and he rounds of my reminding us that any search for liberation today requires more not less public sphere, so any critical theory today must start from a critique of life-politics – a critique of the paucity of individualised solutions to systemic contradictions.
Many of us spend a lot of time thinking about the things we might consume, and how we might consume them, and we do this not only as individuals, but as friends, partners, and families, and so intensely do we think about our consumption practices that the things we buy and the experiences we engage which are linked to them become invested with emotional significance and central (crutches) to our very identities.
A summary of Michel Foucault’s work on identity, deviance and normality, governmentality, subjectification and technologies of the self, taken from Steph Lawler’s ‘Identity’ (2014) – also includes Nikolas Rose’s development of Foucault’s work. 
A brief summary of Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity, chapter one. A level sociology labels Bauman as a postmodern Marxist.
