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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Sunday, June 01, 2003
The Guardian has an interesting interview with Zygmunt Bauman. The interest lies in his thesis that modern alienation and anomie are attributable to the degree to which identity has become a reflexive matter than one of convention (this being the inverse of Anthony Giddens and his thesis on the subject)."What preoccupies him is how social conventions obstruct the possibility of human liberation and it makes him a stern critic of the status quo, particularly in his growing focus on how an individualistic society finds common cause, and how the public realm can be renewed and sustained... Bauman points out that Freud's thesis that human beings had traded freedom for security has been inverted; now we have traded security for freedom and with that freedom has come unprecedented responsibilities for the conduct of our own emotional lives and for our political participation."
As such, the fluidity of modern identity makes any form of stable social relations impossible at best (rather like Slavoj Zizek's observation that liberal capitalism tends to produce cultures that are both more individualistic and unstable due to higher rates of criminality), something that reminds me of Freud's observation that "most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility and most people are frightened of responsibility" (quoted here as trading security for freedom). That said, the problem with this is that Bauman's view that we have traded security for freedom seems somewhat odd to anyone not coming from a Marxist background. It would seem more accurate to say that the state is becoming a surrogate for an ever increasing number of social relations, in which case I can't help but wonder if something in Bauman's arguments doesn't start to unwind somewhat.Labels: Alienation, Individuality
posted by Richard 9:33 pm
