Zygmunt Bauman Identity Quotes

sociologist Zygmunt Bauman writes, in modern life, “there is always a suspicion . . . that one is living a lie or a mistake; that something crucially important has been overlooked, missed, neglected, left untried, and unexplored; that a vital obligation to one’s own authentic self has not been met or that some chances of unknown happiness completely different from any happiness experienced before have not been taken up in time and are bound to be lost forever if they continue to be neglected.”8 He speaks directly to our nostalgia for unlived lives, unexplored identities, and roads not taken.

Even if the self he or she is struggling to display and get recognized is deemed by the actor to precede, pre-empt and predetermine the choice of individual identity (ethnic, race, religious and gender ascriptions claim to belong to that category of self), it is the urge of selection and the effort to make the choice publicly recognizable that constitutes the self-definition of the liquid modern individual. That effort would have hardly been undertaken if the identity in question was indeed endowed with the determining power it claims and/or is believed to possess.

Every type of social setting produces its own visions of the dangers that threaten its identity, visions made to the measure of the kind of social order it struggles to achieve or to retain. If the self-definition, simultaneously descriptive and postulative, can be thought of as a photographic replica of the setting, visions of threats tend to be the negatives of those photographs. Or, to put this in psychoanalytical terms, threats are projections of society's own inner ambivalence, about its own ways and means, about the fashion in which that society lives and intends to live.

People want certainty and experts provide some appearance of that certainty. The problem for the old communist states was that they were unable to move into the postmodernist world in the same way capitalist states had. They were still building tractors and talking in the tonnage of iron being produced, even while capitalist society had moved on to the information age, an age defined more by consumption than by production. And so, young intellectuals in East Germany are discussed, since they felt they wanted to leave, not because they were unhappy with their state supplied doctor – but because in post-modern times, one is defined by the choices one makes – and where there are no choices, there is no identity either. This runs the whole way down. He constructs a dualism between seduction and surveillance (Foucault’s panopticon). He says that the main force of social regulation now is seduction. At least this is true for those who matter in society. They are seduced by products – their need to buy is generated by their need to assert and create their own identity – and so, we are all constantly seduced by the images of what we could become if only we added this one more item to our store. For those who are at the bottom of society, all that is available to them is the minimum necessary to keep their body and soul together. And so, these people must be watched to ensure they do not try anything that might otherwise damage social harmony. Bauman doesn’t say this here, but since these people are essentially failed consumers, all they really want is access to the same kinds of products the comparatively wealthy enjoy, products that would enable them to also construct their own identities. When there were riots in England in 2011, for example, as others have said – including Bauman, I believe – the precariat did not seek to tear down the system, they broke into department stores and stole shoes and wide-screen televisions. The revolution was not a call for Liberty, Equality, Fraternity – but Gucci, Chanel, Calvin Klein.

A geração mais tecnologicamente equipada da história humana é aquela mais assombrada por sentimentos de insegurança e desamparo.

Forms of modern life may differ in quite a few respects – but what unites them all is precisely their fragility, temporariness, vulnerability and inclination to constant change. To ‘be modern’ means to modernize – compulsively, obsessively; not so much just ‘to be’, let alone to keep its identity intact, but forever ‘becoming’, avoiding completion, staying underdefined.

Zygmunt Bauman says that liquid modernity compels us to refuse stability because it’s a fool’s game. “The hub of postmodern life strategy is not identity building but avoidance of fixation,” he writes.5 In Bauman’s pitiless analysis, to succeed today, you need to be free of all commitments, unbound by the past or the future, living in an everlasting present. The world changes so quickly that the person who is loyal to anything, even to her own identity, takes an enormous risk. Instead of believing that structure is good and that duties to home and family lead us to live rightly, people today have been tricked by liquid modernity into believing that maximizing individual happiness should be the goal of life. The gyrovague, the villain of Saint Benedict’s Rule, is the hero of postmodernity.

Self-fashioning is the work we are all given, and we dutifully comply with the prescription continually to reinvent ourselves and manage our intricate identities. As Zygmunt Bauman has intimated, we may not grasp that to decline this endless work is not an option.