Zygmunt Bauman argues in Liquid Love that in the consumer age, human relationships are caught between our irreconcilable needs for security and freedom. Stuart Jeffries fears he may be right
Saturday April 19, 2003 The Guardian
In 1957, Richard Hoggart wrote in The Uses of Literacy about the "uprooted and anxious". These were the gifted scholarship boys of postwar Britain who were born working class, bettered themselves through education but in so doing left their communities for good and as a result became sad and solitary figures.
For the uprooted and anxious man there was no direction home. He was too tense and self-conscious to swan into middle-class soirées with aplomb, and as for trying to stay chummy with people from his own class, he could put that idea right out of his head. "They can immediately detect from the uncertainty of his attitudes," wrote Hoggart, "that he belongs neither to them nor to one of the groups with which they are used to performing a hierarchical play of relations." He was doomed to be the odd man out.
If there was anything that might make the uprooted and anxious feel less odd, it was that the solidarity of the working class that reviled them was falling apart. Its members, seduced by what Hoggart called the "candy-floss world" of sensationalist entertainment - of Hollywood flicks, cheap mags and that burgeoning monster, telly - were being yanked out of their cultural security and hurled they knew not where. Nothing was what it used to be; even deference to toffs had to be set aside. Hoggart, witnessing the death of the face-to-face, communal pub singalongs and the rest of the working-class culture he had grown up with in Leeds, lamented the loss and worried about where it would all end.
We're all uprooted and anxious now. Such, at least, is the contention of Zygmunt Bauman in this riveting and important book. Admittedly there's little in the way of specific class analysis here, for it is Bauman's view that all our traditional bonds are loosening their choke-holds. Those purportedly fixed and durable ties of family, class, religion, marriage and perhaps even love (we'll come back to that tricky notion) aren't as reliable or as desirable as they were. It's fitting that Bauman is emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Leeds because, nearly half a century after Hoggart's book, West Yorkshire has spawned another sociological account of anxiety and vertigo in a rootless society.
But the tone of Liquid Love isn't elegiacal, or not often. Rather, Bauman's book is a hymn to what he calls our liquid modern society. The hero of the book has no kinship ties and constantly has to use his skill, wits and dedication to create provisional bonds that are loose enough to stop suffocation, but tight enough to give a needed sense of security now that the traditional sources of solace are less reliable than ever. Bauman likes his hero's ingenuity, his upbeat determination never to be the odd man out like Hoggart's clever but doomed scholarship boys.
The metaphor of liquid courses through the book. Relationships are like Ribena for the new uprooted and anxious - taken undiluted, they are nauseating. Our deepest wish is to prevent our relationships from curdling and clotting (that, we fear, is what marriages used to be about). That's not to say that we're all hipster SDCs (semi-detached couples), the self-styled romantic revolutionaries who want separate pads from their partners and a Rolodex filled with ready lovers. We don't all want to pour water on troubled rela tionships, and the SDCs, so emblematic of the liquid modern age, provoke as much hostility as identification.
Instead, we're torn, as Freud recognised, between freedom and security, and Bauman's book is about how we try to create a livable balance between the two. Those who tilt the balance too far to freedom, are often to be found by Bauman rushing for home, desperate to be loved, eager to re-establish communities. But that's not to say that the liquid moderns want their old suffocating security back. They want the impossible: to have their cake and eat it, to be free and secure.
Sisyphus had it easy. The work of the liquid modern is likewise never done, but it takes much more imagination. Bauman finds his hero working everywhere - jabbering into mobile phones, addictively texting, leaping from one chat room to another, internet dating (whose key appeal, Bauman notes, is that you can always delete a date without pain or peril). The liquid modern is forever at work, forever replacing quality of relationship with quantity.
What's the significance of all this anxious work? For Bauman, the medium isn't the message - the new gadgets we use hardly determine who we are. Nor are the messages that people send each other significant in themselves; rather, the message is the circulation of messages. The sense of belonging or security that the liquid modern creates consists in being cocooned in a web of messages. That way, we hope, the vexing problem of freedom and security will disappear.
We text, argues Bauman, therefore we are. "We belong," he writes, "to the even flow of words and unfinished sentences (abbreviated, to be sure, truncated to speed up the circulation). We belong to talking, not what talking is about . . . Stop talking - and you are out. Silence equals exclusion." Derrida was on to something when he wrote " Il n'y a pas dehors du texte," though not for the reason he supposed. It is that the fear of silence and the exclusion it implies makes us anxious that our ingeniously assembled security will fall apart.
What about love? It's always been a problem, but now more than ever. Its pathos, Bauman finds, is the insurmountable duality of beings. Proust knew that when Marcel trapped his beloved Albertine in his hotel room, thinking that in so doing he would finally possess her, his love for her died. Bauman writes: "Attempts to tame the wayward and domesticate the riotous, to make the unknowable predictable and enchain the free-roaming - all such things sound the death knell to love. Eros won't outlast duality. As far as love is concerned, possession, power, fusion and disenchantment are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."
And, in the liquid modern times, that is what makes love so vexing. We want love to yield to us like everything else does. We are inveterate shoppers and we insist on our consumer rights: love and sex must give us what we have come to expect from our other purchases - novelty, variety, disposability. In these times, even children become objects of emotional consumption, argues Bauman: the big question for liquid moderns considering having a family is this: can the investment in children be justifiable or is the risk-exposure too great? It's very difficult for liquid moderns to find that there are things - the most fundamental ones - like families, love and sex, that don't obey economic rules.
Take sex. We talk about sex endlessly and read manuals to give us the necessary information to maximise the return on our investment. Bauman cheerfully quotes a sex therapist: "Today everyone is in the know, and no one has the faintest clue." We want sex to be more like shopping, for it to be transparent and easily gratifying. But, Bauman argues, it isn't. We are trying to make it into a technique to be mastered. "Concentration on performance leaves no time or room for ecstasy," he counsels.
Bauman resembles his liquid moderns, ever ingenious and leaping incessantly in unexpected directions. There he is, watching EastEnders three times a week and spotting the parallels between Little Mo and Antigone. Here he is flicking through the Sunday supplements and submitting them to hermeneutical sociological analysis. And there he is again, wandering shopping malls and wondering what they did to our souls. As a Polish-Jewish immigrant to Britain, Bauman's culture is broader than most of our native sociologists', and his writing more elegant than any of his contemporaries can manage. It's a spectacular performance that he didn't learn from a manual.
When Bauman turns from love, his hymn to the liquid moderns curdles and a loathing for our society becomes evident. In our liquid modern cities he finds a struggle between mixophobia and mixophilia, expressed through gated communities and hostility to immigrants, and their opposites. Here the struggle between freedom and security becomes more sinister. Bauman hopes for more ennobling struggles, more worthy work for us anxious and uprooted to do. How do we get to what Kant called the universal unity of mankind, where community means something and globalisation isn't just the extension of consumerism's banal remit? How does the liquid modern learn to do what is most alien to someone steeped in economic activity and so used to disposing of those they don't like: namely, to love his neighbour as himself? His prognosis is bleak. Bauman quotes an Irish joke. A driver asks a passer-by how to get to Dublin. "If I wished to go to Dublin," comes the reply, "I wouldn't start from here."
Stuart Jeffries's Mrs Slocombe's Pussy: Growing Up in Front of the Telly is published by Flamingo.