Abstract
Over the past twenty five years consumption has emerged as a key topic for sociological investigation. Debates around the sociological significance of consumption have sought to critique the complex and often paradoxical role of consumption as a simultaneous arbiter of freedom and control. Zygmunt Bauman's book, ‘Consuming Life’ contributes to such debates but in so doing points towards some key issues about where the sociology of consumption finds itself and where it might go from here. On the one hand Bauman's book may indeed provide a timely intervention in helping sociologists think about what the sociology of consumption has achieved up to now; on the other it may give us food for thought in considering whether the sociology of consumption is adequately comprehending the changing consumer landscape within which it operates.
Bauman describes a world in which the ‘society of choosers’ is bound to be limited. Bauman proposes three ‘ideal types’: of consumerism, the society of consumers, and consumerist culture as a means of understanding what Bauman considers to be the fundamental operating principle of contemporary society. For Bauman ‘liquid modern consumerism’ is notable for the way in which the meaning of time is renegotiated: this is a society on the move. Consumer society thrives insofar as its members exist in a perpetual state of non-satisfaction. The reality of the consumer's life can never match its aspirations and it this mismatch upon which the success of the consumer society is dependant. As Bauman suggests, “The society of consumers derives its animus and momentum from the disaffection it expertly produces itself” (48). The choices offered by the consumer society from this point of view are illusory: the only choice available is that of a consumerist lifestyle, being a consumer is tantamount to a vocation. This creates society without lasting bonds. We live in a society in which consumption and no longer production, defines the status of the citizen.
The bones of the above argument will not be revelatory to anybody with a cursory grasp of theoretical debates around consumption. Similarly Bauman's reflections on the ‘collateral casualties of consumerism’ and the status of ‘failed consumers’ “the yarn of which nightmares are woven – or, as the official version would rather have it, they are ugly yet greedy weeds, which add nothing to the harmonious beauty of the garden but make the plants famished by sucking out and devouring a lot of the feed.” (124) will be familiar to readers of Bauman's (2004) book, ‘Work, Consumerism and the New Poor’ (Open University Press). Indeed, the power of consumption to divide as well as provide is well documented: flawed consumers simply cannot afford to be seduced however much the consumer society tells them that they can. As Bauman puts it, “Heads you lose, tails they win.” (139). The poor are excluded if they eschew the consumerist model of life, whilst partaking in the wares of consumerism will by implication simply intensify the experience of poverty.
The focus on the exclusionary impact of consumption represents a key focus for recent developments in consumption studies. However, it also raises the concern that the sociology of consumption may itself be too easily concerned with the role of consumption as some form of identity inclusion as opposed to a potentially more fruitful debate around questions of social justice. The recent ESRC Cultures of Consumption initiative, for example, was concerned with how “consumption has returned to the centre of public affairs, government policy making, and intellectual life in recent years”, in other words on the interactive nature of consumption in the changing relationship between commerce and culture. This approach is in danger, no doubt unintentionally, of underestimating the ideological role of consumption. Its focus on the liberatory potential of consumption and its associated agendas promotes a vision of consumption as choice. Meanwhile, broader political discourses, themselves commodified, have tended to focus on how to best repair some of the injustices caused by social change rather than addressing the source of those injustices. Sociologists such as Bauman have long been concerned with charting the emergence of a world in which your status as a consumer is paramount. So far so good. However, the logical implication of this process is that the freedom to consume gets to a point where it is itself constraining in nature. This is something that Bauman acknowledges in ‘Consuming Life’ but, as tends to be the case with most contributions to this field, although Bauman presents a theoretically ambitious effort to account for the role of consumption in contemporary society in doing so he offers a critique of the consumer society that is inevitably limited by the very parameters within which it operates.
The sociology of consumption needs to bridge the gap between approaches that intentionally or unintentionally tend to reaffirm the primacy of the consumer and those sociologists who are reluctant to engage with notions of consumption for fear of compromising their own critical-political credentials. The cultural turn in the Humanities promoted a shift in emphasis towards meaning and culture rather than politics and economics. Bauman's work is certainly in the latter camp, but its success or otherwise is dependent upon how far it engages with the former. Bauman accepts that the pleasures of consumerism cannot make up for a state of affairs in which civilisation is defined by the ability to consume and which is therefore by implication irresponsible. The question remains though: is the recognition of such a responsibility enough or does it simply serve to underestimate the power of consumerism as an ideological force that operates far beyond the immediate experience of the consumer? The time has surely come for sociology to pursue the implications of a consumer society in a more critically charged and focused fashion than is realistically possible within the confines of a book of this kind. In other words, to debate the fact that life is ‘consumed’ is one thing, but to actually construct an agenda to deal with the complexities of this problem is something altogether different.