The Unbearable Lightness of Property - alastairhudson.com

must be built upon coercion and renunciation of instinct” 23 , Bauman posited the views
in Modernity and Holocaust that it was the bureaucratisation of society which enabled
the Nazi administration to conduct such a genocide without public interference and
that it was the technological modernity championed by the Ford production line which
enabled that administration to conduct the business of executing such an extraordinary
number of people in such a short space of time. 24
Bauman’s viewpoint shifted in his postmodern phase into a world whose values he
saw as having collapsed. In its place came a consumer culture in which people were
valued for what they bought. Identity was not something forged in the light of
experience, nor of phenomenological perception nor in the crucible of the Freudian
triumverate of ego, id and superego; rather identity was something that was bought
and which could be discarded, replaced or updated through the cleansing medium of
shopping. 25 His influences became Foucault, Lyotard, Adorno and Levinas. From
Levinas he derived an ethical understanding of “the Other”, in which each individual
must be understood as being an ethical self and not merely a social product, and in
which a sensitivity to the needs of each individual is considered to be the obligation of
every other individual. 26 From Lyotard an understanding that postmodernity
necessitates the deconstruction of value and the possibility of creating new values in
their place. 27 From Adorno, frankly, a pessimism that this consumer-orientated world
could generate the socialist oasis he had striven for in his modern and pre-modern
periods. 28 From Foucault, a renunciation of Habermas’s dogmatic assertion that the
ideal speech situation would be place of consensual and not contested values, working
beyond Foucault a perception that the Panoptic control of the state has been replaced
by the Synoptic control of mass culture as the many sit indoors watching, envying and
emulating the few on television. 29 In short, this postmodern turn places an accent on
deconstructing strictures on thought or lifechoices. Ironically, standing in the way of
such a liberating project is the all-consuming postmodern world itself.
In this postmodern worldview, property will frequently be part of the individual’s
atomistic project, part of a series of acquired identities and short-term life projects
which can be discarded without sentiment in the whirling oceans of the zeitgeist. This
property is of the ephemeral kind which we would be least likely to litigate for: last
year’s combat trousers, heroin-chic v-necked jumpers, or chocolate coloured jeans
from the year when brown was the new black. This is the most common inter-action
of property and the personal life project: the collection of belongings acquired to
constitute an identity. In place of solid social bonds we have now the constant chatter
of magazine features telling us who’s in and who’s out with all the enthusiastic throwaway
analysis of the day’s stock market reports: from these polls of whose stock is up
and whose down, we are invited to select our selves. From Bauman we can take a
vision of the loneliness of the individual confronted by such choices and not reassured
by familiar social expectations, values or organic communities. It is from these
23 Bauman, Community, Polity, 2000, 25.
24 Bauman, Modernity and holocaust, Polity, 1991.
25 Bauman, Liquid modernity, Polity, 2001.
26 Levinas, Otherwise that being: or beyond essence, Duquesne University Press, 1998.
27 Lyotard, The postmodern condition, Manchester, 1984.
28 Adorno, Negative dialectics, Routledge.
29 Mathieson, “The viewer society: Michel Foucault’s ‘Panopticon’ revisited”, Theoretical
Criminology, 1 / 2, 1997, 215.
9