Consuming Life by Bauman Zygmunt;

Author:Bauman, Zygmunt;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

3

Consumerist Culture

An influential, widely read and respected fashion handbook, edited by a highly prestigious journal for the autumn–winter 2005 season, offered ‘half a dozen key looks’ ‘for the coming months’ ‘that will put you ahead of the style pack’. This promise was aptly, skilfully calculated to catch the attention: and very skilfully indeed, since in a brief, crisp sentence it managed to address all or almost all anxious concerns and urges bred by the society of consumers and born of consuming life.

First, the concern ‘to be and to stay ahead’ (ahead of the ‘style pack’ – that is, of the reference group, of the ‘significant others’, the ‘others who count’ and whose approval or rejection draws the line between success and failure). In the words of Michel Maffesoli, ‘I am who I am because others recognize me as such’, while ‘the empirical social life is but an expression of sentiments of successive belongings’1 – the alternative being a succession of rejections or an ultimate exclusion, as a penalty for the failure to force, argue or wriggle one’s way into recognition.

It needs to be remembered, though, that in a society of consumers, where human bonds tend to lead through and be mediated by the markets for consumer goods, the sentiment of belonging is not obtained by following the procedure administered and supervised by those ‘style packs’ to which one aspires, but through the aspirant’s own metonymical identification with the ‘pack’; the process of self-identification is pursued, and its results are displayed, with the help of visible ‘marks of belonging’, obtainable as a rule in the shops. In the ‘postmodern tribes’ (as Maffesoli prefers to call the ‘style packs’ of consumer society), ‘emblematic figures’ and their visible marks (clues suggestive of dress and/or conduct codes) replace the ‘totems’ of the original tribes. Being ahead in sporting the emblems of the style pack’s emblematic figures is the sole trustworthy prescription for gaining the conviction that if it was aware of the aspirant’s existence the style pack of one’s choice would indeed accord the desired recognition and acceptance; while staying ahead is the only way to make such an acknowledgment of ‘belonging’ secure for the desired duration – that is, to solidify the single act of admission into a (fixed-time, albeit renewable) residence permit. All in all, ‘being ahead’ augurs a chance of security, certainty and the certainty of security – precisely the kinds of experience which the consuming life most conspicuously and painfully misses, in spite of being guided by the desire to acquire it.

The reference to ‘being ahead of the style pack’ conveys the promise of a high market value and a profusion of demand (both translated as a certainty of recognition, approval and inclusion). In the case of a bid reduced by and large to the display of emblems, a bid that starts from the purchase of emblems, goes through a public announcement of their possession and is seen as completed once possession becomes public knowledge, this translates in turn into the sentiment of ‘belonging’.

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