Dr. Mario's 2nd 🧠

📖 Liquid Life

19 min read

Este libro fue el que elegimos el mes pasado en Fe de Erratas, y, aunque apuntaba mal, nos ha dado un buen inicio y una sesión de debate bastante intense. En torno a un 7/10 de nota media le pusimos…

Bauman pinta nuestra sociedad como la sociedad líquida, una sociedad que nos hace sufrir, fijándose en distintos aspectos de la misma, dando pequeñas pinceladas de cómo hacerla más hospitalaria para nosotros.

El tl;dr ¿Qué es la vida líquida?

‘Liquid modern’ is a society in which the conditions under which its members act change faster than it takes the ways of acting to consolidate into habits and routines. Liquidity of life and that of society feed and reinvigorate each other. Liquid life, just like liquid modern society, cannot keep its shape or stay on course for long.

Bauman dice que esta sociedad ahora mismo no es hospitalaria con la humanidad. “Ahora mismo” porque los temas son claramente relevantes hoy, a pesar de que el libro se escribiera en 2005. No es hospitalaria porque nos sumerge en profundas inseguridades por la incertidumbre ante los cambios frecuentes y la posibilidad de “quedarse fuera”, forzándonos a estar en permanente estado de alerta, no dejando espacio a casi nada más:

The consuming life is a game of snakes and ladders; the roads from the bottom to the top, and even more the roads from the top to the bottom, are abominably short – the rises and falls are as swift as casting a die, and happen with little or no warning.

to save yourself from the embarrassment of lagging behind, of being stuck with something no one else would be seen with, of being caught napping, of missing the train of progress instead of riding it, you must remember that it is in the nature of things to call for vigilance.

A lo largo de todo el libro, Bauman describe distintos ángulos desde los que somos golpeados por esta situación. Una de las dificultades del libro quizá sea que no hay una exposición más o menos ordenada de estos aspectos ni la relación entre ellos, aunque esa complejidad quizá viene en parte de la propia realidad.

Distintos aspectos de la vida líquida

Consumismo

Una de las consecuencias de vivir sumidos en la inseguridad es que somos mucho más vulnerables a soluciones mesiánicas que nos prometen la solución, entre ellas principalmente somos vulnerable al consumo. Estamos entonces afectados por el “síndrome consumista”:

The consumerist syndrome consists above all in an emphatic denial of the virtue of procrastination and of the propriety and desirability of the delay of satisfaction.

Pero eso sí, con un deseo permanente, nunca satisfecho.

The promise of satisfaction remains seductive, however, only so long as the desire stays ungratified; more importantly, so long as there is a suspicion that the desire has not been truly and fully gratified. Setting the targets low, assuring easy access to goods that meet the targets, as well as a belief in objective limits to ‘genuine’ and ‘realistic’ desires – these would sound the death-knell of consumer society.

En esta sociedad nosotros mismos somos también objetos de consumo, y nuestro valor es tal en tanto que objetos de consumo.

Only as commodities, only if they are able to demonstrate their own use-value, can consumers gain access to consuming life. In liquid life, the distinction between consumers and objects of consumption is all too often momentary and ephemeral, and always conditional. We may say that role reversal is the rule here, though even that statement distorts the realities of liquid life, in which the two roles intertwine, blend and merge.

The lands of identity-making and remaking are not the sole conquests of the consumer syndrome outside its high street and shopping mall kingdom. Gradually yet relentlessly, it takes hold of interhuman relationships and bonds. Why should partnerships be an exception to the rest of life’s rules? To work properly and to deliver the satisfaction promised and expected, partnerships need constant attention and dedicated service, and the longer they last the more difficult it is to keep the attention focused and muster the day-to-day service needed. Consumers used to consumer goods that age fast and are speedily replaced will find it cumbersome and time-wasting to bother, and if they decide to continue nevertheless, will lack the necessary skills and habits.

Distanciamiento social

Para más inri, hay una cascada de problemas derivados que nos complican aún más la existencia. Uno de los más importantes es que el tejido social se debilita por múltiples frentes, no solo porque el propio acto de consumir sea un acto individual. ****Precisamente las relaciones sociales son uno de los puntos por los que Bauman apuesta para evolucionar a otro tipo de sociedad:

Metafóricamente… y ahora también físicamente

In a liquid, fast-flowing and unpredictable setting we need firm and reliable ties of friendship and mutual trust more than ever before. Friends, after all, are people we can count on for understanding and a helping hand in case we stumble and fall, and in the world we inhabit even the fastest surfers and the most sprightly skaters are not insured against that eventuality. On the other hand, though, those self-same liquid and fast-flowing settings privilege those who can travel light; if changed circumstances require a fast move and starting anew from scratch, long-term commitments and any ties difficult to untie may prove to be a cumbersome burden – ballast that needs to be thrown overboard. There is no good choice, then. You cannot have your cake and eat it – but this is precisely what you are pressed to do by the setting in which you try to compose your life. Whatever choice you make, you are storing up trouble.

As Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux have recently reminded us, democracy is imperiled as individuals are unable to translate their privately suffered misery into broadly shared public concerns and collective action.

Si tenemos que estar continuamente adaptándonos, es difícil que tengamos “ancho de banda” para algo más:

The trend is self-sustained and self-invigorating. The focusing on self-reform self-perpetuates; so does the lack of interest in, and the inattention to, the aspects of common life that resist a complete and immediate translation into the current targets of self-reform. Inattention to the conditions of life in common precludes the possibility of renegotiating the setting that makes individual life liquid. The success of the pursuit of happiness – the ostensible purpose and paramount motive of individual life – continues to be defied by the very fashion of pursuing it (the only fashion in which it can be pursued in the liquid modern setting). The resulting unhappiness adds reason and vigour to a self-centred life politics; its ultimate effect is the perpetuation of life’s liquidity. Liquid modern society and liquid life are locked in a veritable perpetuum mobile.

Además, ante la inseguridad, uno de los parches que intentamos aplicar a la situación es un proxy de seguridad un tanto burdo… de manera física tanto a través de muros como en nuestro cuerpo, reforzando aún más este feedback loop:

Each extra lock on the entry door in response to successive rumours of foreign-looking criminals on the rampage, each revision of the diet in response to the next ‘food panic’ makes the world look more treacherous and fearsome and prompts more defensive actions – that will, alas, surely do the same. Our fears have become self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing. They’ve also acquired a momentum of their own.

It is the tendency to withdraw from public spaces and to retreat into islands of sameness that turns in time into the major obstacle to living with difference – by causing the skills of dialogue and negotiation to wilt and fade.

Educación

Uno de los capítulos que más me ha gustado del libro es “Learning to Walk on Quicksand”, que trata precisamente sobre el rol de la educación en la vida líquida. Curiosamente, tiene muchos puntos en común con 📖 Range:

Learning from experience in order to rely on strategies and tactical moves deployed successfully in the past is for that reason ill advised: past tests cannot take account of the rapid and mostly unpredicted (perhaps unpredictable) changes in circumstances.

Pero me quedo especialmente con algo que últimamente me obsesiona bastante. Va más allá de la noción de que la educación superior, tal cual está planteada, acrecienta las diferencias de clase. El problema es aún peor: no hay seguridad sobre la calidad de lo que se vende como educación. Especialmente porque a los que nos equivocamos no nos conviene llamar la atención sobre ello:

This is a supplier’s market, prospective clients being by definition in no position to judge the quality of the commodities on offer or to be choosy if they risk making a judgement. Knowledge that is inferior or useless, sometimes outdated or even downright misleading, is easily sold, and the more of it is bought, the less likely are the cheated to call the suppliers’ bluff.

Pero hay muchísimo en juego:

Future twists of market demand are not easily predictable, however artful the forecasters and methodologically refined their prognoses. Errors are, to be sure, a notorious and probably incurable ailment of all ‘scientific predictions’ of social trends, but in this case, when people’s life prospects are at stake, mistaken judgements are exceptionally damaging. Surrendering human efforts of self-assertion and self-improvement to essentially unpredictable and so known to be unreliable visions of the future needs of volatile and chaotic markets portends a lot of human suffering – of frustration, dashed hopes and wasted lives.

Y es injusto que el Estado se lave las manos ante esta cuestión que claramente pertenece al estado del bienestar:

that in these stringent neo-liberal times, the notion of self-directive learning lends itself to a discourse that allows the State to abdicate its responsibilities in providing the quality education to which every citizen is entitled in a democratic society.

domination through deliberately cultivated ignorance and uncertainty is more reliable and comes cheaper than rule grounded in a thorough debate of the facts and a protracted effort to agree on the truth of the matter

Y tantos otros: pequeños extractos potentes

Este libro es complicado de resumir por la plétora de cuestiones relacionadas que trata y la profundidad con que lo hace sin ser muy extenso. Recojo aquí algunas otros fragmentos que también me han gustado mucho.

Las ciudades

El capítulo “Seeking Shelter in Pandora’s Box, or Fear, Security and the City”, es fantástico. En él describe cómo a las ciudades, otrora sinónimo de protección, se les está dando la vuelta en el diseño de sus espacios hasta parecernos sinónimo de peligro, donde por ejemplo las urbanizaciones privadas se construyen como pequeñas fortalezas en la ciudad pero al mismo tiempo camuflando sus elementos y normalizando el estado de emergencia. Como todos los que nos vinimos por convicción a la capital intuimos:

The trouble is, though, that when insecurity goes, spontaneity, flexibility, the ability to surprise and the offer of adventure, all the main attractions of urban life, are also bound to vanish from the city’s streets. The alternative to insecurity is not the bliss of tranquillity but the curse of boredom. Is it possible to vanquish fear while escaping tedium?

El fitness

Most perplexing and haunting of the many challenges is the far-from-pleasurable regime to which your body, as the tool with which the pleasurable sensations are to be forged, needs to be subjected in order to make production continuous. You can only pray and hope that after a solid dose of that regime has been administered to the body in its capacity as a pleasure-producing tool, that body – this time in its capacity as a connoisseur of sensations – will be still ready to serve as a good-tempered, dexterous, efficient and grateful receptacle of the pleasures as they come.

Individualismo y nacionalismo

One might therefore expect that for those many whose chances of jumping on the bandwagon of individualization are at best distant, and more likely non-existent, a tooth-and-nail resistance against ‘individuality’ and all that it stands for will not only seem to be a more reasonable option, but will indeed be a ‘natural’ outcome of their predicament. ‘Fundamentalism’, choosing to hold fast to inherited and/or ascribed identity, is a natural and legitimate offspring of planet-wide enforced individualization.

while those at the receiving end of the identity wars and smarting under the burden of coercive stereotyping, cut off from desirable choices and too intimidated by their own insecurity to seriously contemplate a challenge to the rules of the game, opt for identity as a birthright, an indelible mark and inalienable possession.

(Nos suena de algo esto aquí en España, precisamente, con los recientes acontecimientos).

Marie Kondo como privilegio de clase

Flirting between flowers in search of the most fragrant is not their option; they are stuck to places where flowers, fragrant or not, are rare – and so can only watch haplessly as the few that there are fade or rot.

La crianza, más incómoda que nunca

Having a child is like jumping headlong into a gambling den, giving hostages to fate or mortgaging your future with no inkling of how large the repayments on your mortgage loan will be and how long it will take to pay it off. One signs a blank cheque and takes responsibility for tasks one doesn’t know and cannot anticipate. The total price is not fixed, the obligations are not explained, and there is no ‘money-back guarantee’ in case one is not fully satisfied with the product.

Sin embargo…

since as a rule people tend to listen the most eagerly to the messages they most crave to hear (…) the soi-disant disenchantment of childhood can be traced back to ‘adults labouring under the logic of an allegedly pure market system that, in reality, only pays lip service to individual freedom while undermining the bonds of social life and social obligations’.

Cultura y management

‘Culture’ appeared in the vocabulary less than a hundred years after another crucial modern concept, that of ‘managing’, meaning according to the Oxford English Dictionary ‘to cause (persons, animals, etc.) to submit to one’s control’, ‘to operate upon’, ‘to succeed in accomplishing’; and more than a hundred years before another, synthesizing sense of ‘management’, ‘to contrive to get along or pull through’. To manage, in a nutshell, meant to get things done in a way people would not follow on their own and unattended. It meant to redirect events according to one’s own design and will. In other words, ‘to manage’ (to control the flow of events) came to mean the manipulation of probabilities: making certain conduct (openings or responses) of ‘persons, animals, etc.’ more likely to take place than it would otherwise be, while making some other moves less likely or preferably utterly unlikely to happen. In the last account, ‘to manage’ means to limit the freedom of the managed. If ‘agriculture’ is the vision of the cornfield as seen from the perspective of the farmer, the idea of ‘culture’ metaphorically applied to humans was the vision of the social world as viewed through the eyes of the ‘farmers of humans’: the managers. The postulate or presumption of management was not a later addition and not an external intrusion: from the beginning and throughout its history it has been integral to the concept of human culture. Deep in the heart of the ‘culture’ concept lies a premonition or tacit acceptance of an unequal, asymmetrical social relation – the split between the actors and the recipients or sufferers of action, between the acting and bearing the impact of acting; between the managers and the managed, the knowing and the ignorant, the refined and the crude.

La transferencia de valor en el branding

‘many of today’s best-known manufacturers no longer produce products and advertise them, but rather buy products and “brand” them.’10 The brand and the logo attached (it is the shopping bag with the name of the gallery that gives meaning to the purchases inside) do not add value, they are value, the market value

¿Cómo hemos llegado a esto?

No parece en el interés de Bauman el analizar cómo hemos llegado hasta aquí. Este libro es un retrato, una pintura del momento… pero por más que me gustaría, no he encontrado la reflexión sobre el origen.

Como mucho, Bauman expone que venimos de una sociedad prácticamente opuesta, la sociedad de productores.

Almost everything that the society of producers considered a virtue in a producer’s body would be seen by the society of consumers as utterly counterproductive and thus deplorable in a consumer’s body, the consuming body. The second kind of body differs sharply from the first by being an end-value, or a destination-value, instead of carrying a merely instrumental significance. The consumer’s/consuming body is ‘autotelic’, its own purpose and a value in its own right; in the society of consumers, it also happens to be the ultimate value. Its well-being is the foremost objective of all and any life-pursuits, and the final test and criterion of utility, advisability and desirability for the remainder of the human world and any one of its elements.

Tampoco me queda claro a quién responsabiliza Bauman de esto. Según él, no podemos responsabilizar solo a la industria… que es que estamos pidiendo esto nosotros también:

It would be of course as unjust as it is unwise to lay the blame for the plight in which cultural creation finds itself today on consumer industry and consumer industry alone. That industry is well geared to the form of life which I call ‘liquid modernity’. That industry and that form of life are attuned to each other and reinforce each other’s grip on the choices the men and women of our times may realistically make.

¿Ha sido nuestro ansia por la eternidad, junto a avances en tecnología que la ofrecen como posible?

The trick is to compress eternity so that it may fit, whole, into the timespan of individual life.

Esto me recuerda a la última temporada de The Good Place (please watch it): la eternidad también la podemos consumir.

one can now stop worrying about things eternal and lose nothing of eternity’s wonders – indeed one can exhaust whatever eternity could possibly offer, all in the timespan of one mortal life.

¿Cómo salimos?

Aquí tampoco se moja mucho Bauman. Es curioso, en tanto que hacia el final nos encontramos con este mensaje:

We feel, guess, suspect what needs to be done. But we cannot know the shape and form it will eventually take. We can be pretty sure, though, that the shape will not be familiar. It will be different from everything we’ve got used to.

No sé si interpretarlo, como se sugirió en el club de lectura, como que en el fondo todos sabemos verdaderamente qué necesitamos hacer, y que el único problema es uno de Teoría de Juegos: coordinarnos porque necesitamos que sea una acción común. Por otro lado, según él, no es su papel como intelectual el plantear soluciones:

So where does all that leave the intellectuals, the guardians of the unfulfilled hopes and promises of the past, the critics of a present that is guilty of forgetting them and abandoning them unfulfilled?

By common opinion, inaugurated it seems by Jürgen Habermas and contested by only a few among Adorno scholars, and only relatively recently, Adorno’s answer to these and similar questions is best conveyed by the image of a ‘message in a bottle’. Whoever wrote the message and put it in, sealed the bottle and threw it into the sea had no idea when (if ever) the bottle would be spotted and which sailor (if any) would fish it out; and whether that sailor, once he had uncorked the bottle and pulled out the piece of paper, would be able and willing to read the text, understand the message, accept its content and put it to the kind of use the author intended.

La apuesta más fuerte de Bauman pasa por recuperar los espacios públicos, la vida social, como expresan las notas recogidas en “Distanciamiento social” y otros fragmentos:

It is the tendency to withdraw from public spaces and to retreat into islands of sameness that turns in time into the major obstacle to living with difference – by causing the skills of dialogue and negotiation to wilt and fade.

Y, coincidiendo con Harari en 21 lecciones para el siglo XXI, yendo más allá del ámbito de “país”.

Our present-day misery and present-day problems in all their many forms and flavours have planetary roots and call for planetary (if any) solutions.

Eso sí, con armonía pero sin homogeneidad:

Although all residents of the planet are, so to speak, in the same boat from the point of view of their survival prospects (their only choice being between navigating together or sinking together), their immediate tasks and so their preferred destinations differ sharply, making the actions and purposes which inform them jarringly out of joint – breeding antagonisms where solidarity is the imperative of the day.

Opinión

  • Es un libro que tiene un principio… difícil. El lenguaje que usa Bauman en algunos capítulos es claramente de academic journal, frente a otros más cercanos a la divulgación.
  • Invita a la reflexión sobre muchos temas, las pinceladas son ricas, pero la estructura es complicada y el hilo conductor muchas veces no visible. Me ha resultado difícil de resumir (aunque precisamente esto creo que es una característica de un libro bien escrito: sobra poco).
  • También hay un poco de coitus interruptus en esto de simplemente observar la situación. Lo de que los intelectuales lancen mensajes en una botella y ahí te apañes… da un poco de bajona.
  • Ha sido muy rico para un club de lectura porque nos ha llevo a hacernos preguntas complicadas y a rendirnos cuentas.

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