Freedom From What: Bauman’s Notion of Emancipation
In the opening chapter of Liquid Modernity, Zygmunt Bauman offers a fairly bleak portrait of the relationship between the individual and “freedom” in the late modern (or what he calls “liquid modern” age).
Bauman’s notion of freedom follows Schopenhauer’s, wherein one “feels free in so far as the imagination is not greater than one’s actual desires, while neither of the two reaches beyond the ability to act” (17). In this sense, there are basically two paths to freedom: one either expands one’s ability to act (which Bauman calls “objective freedom”) or, one could confine one’s imagination and desires and imagination within the confines of the available range of action (i.e., “subjective freedom). In either sense, if some sense of balance between imagination/desire and potential action is achieved and sustained, the discourse of freedom becomes more of an abstract signifier, and less of an actual motivating force.
Where this becomes an issue, for Bauman, is that the consumer capitalist values of liquid modernity are basically built around a subtle reinscription of what it means to be “free”. We see artifacts of this in our daily Western lives: consider the general rise hedonistic self-interested consumption and decline in interest in “the public good”, or the increasing role of the public space as a platform for “exposing” or amplifying private concerns (the distinctly modern brand of celebrity, who exists in the public space primarily because he or she can entirely disolve his or her sense of privacy is a kind of interesting example of this). For Bauman, the causes of this shift are “rooted in the profound transformation of the public space and, more generally, in the fashion in which modern society works and perpetuates itself” (25).
This change is perhaps best exemplified in his discussion of Orwell’s 1984, which, he notes, functions as “an inventory of the fears and apprehensions which haunted modernity in its heavy stage” (26). The collapse of privacy and the individual, the schzitophenic notion of Doublethink, or the disappearance of non-normative histories into the “memory hole” were of deep concern to the modern public of the 1950s.
Less than 70 years later, though, those same anxieties don’t really resonate. As Bauman observes, we “no longer recognize [our] own chagrins and agonies, or the nightmares of [our] neighbours, in Orwell’s dystopia” (27). And this is surprising, considering much of what Orwell predicted as actually come to pass: consider our general indifference to being serveilled by various government agencies, or even, perhaps somewhat more sinisterly, our enthusiastic willingness to share that information in the first place: despite the fact that we know feeding personal information into facebook is basically just providing amunition for better targeted advertising, we do it anyway, because we feel, on some level, that sharing that information is an expression of our freedom.
Thus, and this is really the key point that Bauman wants to make, we are faced with “a wide and growing gap between the condition of individuals de jure and their control to become individuals de facto — that is to gain control over their fate and make the choices they truly desire” (39). Rather than the freedom to persue hedonistic consumption, the individual must endeavor to recapture some notion of “the public space”, wherein we, as empowered individuals (or, even better, empowered citizens) could work toward constructing a sense of community that actually reflects our examined and reasonable interests.
