Bregham Dalgliesh

Zygmunt Bauman and the Consumption of Ethics by the Ethics of Consumerism

This article focuses on the ethical quandary of Zygmunt Bauman’s interpretation of modernity as a double logic that heralds both emancipation and domination. After outlining his liberation sociology and the liquid moral ontologies he discerns, it argues Bauman’s solution to the consumption of ethics by consumerism demands too much, too late. Firstly, Bauman misappropriates Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction. The actual outcome is the dissipation of the Levinasian centrifugal self, whom Bauman wants to uphold as a cure for the Nietzschean centripetal self. Secondly, as Daniel Miller shows, totalizing critiques of consumerism – such as Bauman’s – blind us to forms of moral self-constitution within consumption. And, thirdly, Bauman’s concept of the autonomous agent overlooks the power relations that are inherent to the constitution of subjectivity. Notwithstanding, Bauman highlights the need to articulate an ethics of freedom, and the article concludes with Foucault’s aesthetics of existence to meet this challenge.

Critique as Critical History

Chapter 7 recapitulates the approach of Anglo-American thinkers through the intellectual praxis of the philosopher. The latter is either a legislator at dawn, as with Kant and Rawls, or an interpreter at dusk, like Hegel and Taylor. However, as they uphold a singular path to enlightenment, they hold Foucault responsible for the death of the philosopher and critique. In reply, Foucault’s role as a critical historian is elucidated. Here, engagement is characterised by a Kantian ethos and a Nietzschean becoming. It enables us to reinterpret enlightenment via a critique that targets thought in its historicity—specifically, regimes of truth and knowledge, power and ethics that comprise them—out of a concern for freedom as an agonistic practice in respect of the limits that confront us.

Critical History and Ethics

This chapter begins with Foucault’s interpretation of power as governmentality and its inheritance from pastoral-power of a technology of political rationality, which links the exercise of somato- to bio-power and produces subjection. This leads Foucault to the notion of critical history and his demarcation of ethics-oriented from code-oriented moralities. In the former, subjectivity is constituted through a practical relation to the self, whereas in code-oriented moralities it is produced via a mediated hermeneutics of the self. In The Use of Pleasure, ethico-political practices of the self demand an agonistic relation to oneself, whereas in The Care of the Self ethico-social practices of the self require a reciprocal ethos. Together, they offer a model for maturity in the face of games of truth in the present.

Critique and the Subject of Knowledge

In this chapter looks at the epistemological critique grounded in the subject. It locates the origin in Hobbes and Locke, who conceive of freedom as the non-interference in the autonomous subject who desires and knows, respectively. The contrasting position of Rousseau is shown, for whom knowledge and language co-evolve, such that autonomy requires processing through recognition. The discussion then turns to Kant’s account of enlightenment as an obligation to be mature, which he furthers with a metaphysics of experience and the idea of freedom that links autonomy to Morality. This is the spur for Hegel’s attempt to alleviate diremption through a phenomenology of the objective experience of Spirit, together with the moderation of the subject’s recognition in Ethical Life.

Genealogy and Power

In this chapter first examines Madness and Civilisation as a proto-genealogy that critiques the cost of autonomy and recognition in terms of the confinement of those who are different. Although proto-genealogy implies knowledge acts in the service of power, Foucault embodies two assumptions of the theory of power, namely, that its mechanisms are repressive and its nature is state-centred. Consequently, it is argued that Foucault cultivates a genealogical critique of capillary power in Discipline and Punish, where genealogy unearths the technique of examination and the mechanisms of discipline that constitute the body, or somato-power. Likewise, through an analysis of The History of Sexuality it is demonstrated how Foucault excavates the technique of confession and the mechanisms of regulation that foster life, or bio-power.

Archaeology and Knowledge

In this chapter analyses Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge. To this end, it charts the entry of Kant and Hegel into French philosophy, the connotations of the Dreyfus Affair for the practice of critique, and the existential and Marxist interpretations of Hegel by Kojeve and Hyppolite. Following an outline of Foucault’s nominalist archaeology, The Order of Things is studied to show how he dethrones the Kantian and Hegelian formal a priori subject from his epistemological pedestal. Subsequently, Foucault’s alternative in The Archaeology of Knowledge of the historical a priori is considered. In response to the events of May 1968, however, Foucault situates an archaeology of knowledge within a genealogy of power. The chapter thus concludes with an analysis of the interrelationship between knowledge and power.

Critique and the Subject of Right

Chapter 3 explicates how contemporary philosophy of the subject thinkers conceive of a subject of right as the foundation of political critique. It focuses on Rawls and Taylor. Through their critique in the name of political liberalism or a politics of recognition, they uphold notions of the subject’s autonomy and recognition. Further, although they are seen as philosophical antagonists, it is claimed they share a kinship that derives from a shared view of freedom as the antithesis of power. It is argued that a conceptual compromise of freedom as textual autonomy ultimately prevails, both in mainstream Anglo-American political theory and the corpus of thought that criticises it, viz., identity politics.