Seduced and Repressed

The division between the “seduced” and the “repressed” is to the consumer society what the division between the bourgeoisie (“the bosses”) and the proletariat (“the workers”) was to the producer society (industrial capitalism). This terminology, coined by Zygmunt Bauman, represents far more than a semantic exercise in relabeling existing social classes. It implies a fundamentally changed social structure, arising from mass production's reduced dependence on mass labor, such that most members of advanced capitalist societies engage with, and participate in, economies as much, if not more, in their roles as consumers than as producers. Those so engaged are seduced into compliance with a system that requires only that they act out the role of consumers, their demand for goods, services, and experiences ensuring that the expanded reproduction of consumer capitalism continues unabated. Those not so engaged—“failed consumers”—remain subject to the same kind of repression that kept “failed workers” in line with an earlier social system—which, from their point of view, may hardly appear to have altered very much.

Capitalism today, at least in portions of the globe characterized as fully fledged consumer societies, functions on the basis that “people are consumers first—and workers only a very distant second” (Bauman 1997, 24). Such societies have witnessed “a substantive change in the mode of domination central to social integration” (Bauman 1987, 167). Whereas the majority of people in a producer society were subject to a repressive mode of domination, the majority of members of the consumer society are seduced by the public relations that replace state policies, and advertising comes to substitute for state authority. The “stick” of repression has been widely replaced by the “carrot” of seduction. A consumer society works to promote a lifestyle based on choice to the extent that the seduced have little choice but to choose a consumerist lifestyle, which has become a condition of membership within advanced capitalist societies. Beyond the seduced majority is a substantial minority who, nonetheless, remain subject to the same repressive mechanisms that once applied to the majority. The repressed minority may appear insignificant, but they too are dominated by consumer markets. While the repressive gaze of panoptic surveillance remains fixed on the repressed, the rest of society's members focus their attention elsewhere. The cult of celebrity reverses the direction of the notorious panoptic gaze, giving way to a “telepanoptic gaze” (Étienne Allemand's term), whereby the many watch the few: Endemol's Big Brother gains wider currency than George Orwell's.

If the structure of consumerism is constituted by the opposition between seduction and repression as means of social integration and control, it is vital to appreciate the way in which these two forms mutually constitute each other. Their duality ensures that the repressed are not just the poor under a new name: they are the “new poor” (Bauman 1998). With poignant irony, the new poor are structurally closer to the proletariat of ancient Rome than were the massed ranks dubbed the “proletariat” by the critics of industrial capitalism. Being out of work in a producer society was bad enough—although flawed producers could potentially be rehabilitated (and were deserving of care if they could not)—and the poor played a vital “inner-systemic role” as an industrial reserve army. But being poor in a consumer society is a fate yet worse, because mass production no longer requires “mass labour[,] and so the poor, once a ‘reserve army of labour,’ are re-cast as ‘flawed consumers.’ This leaves them without a useful social function—actual or potential” (Bauman 1998, 2)—except, that is, as an object lesson for the seduced majority to be thankful for their lot. Little wonder that the repressed—the victims or collateral damage of consumerism—should be dubbed an underclass, evoking an “image of an aggregate of people who have been declared off-limits in relation to… the class hierarchy itself” (Bauman 2007, 122–123, emphasis added).

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