Transformations of Consumer Culture in Zygmunt Bauman's Works

The article analyzes consumer culture transformations in the works of Zygmunt Bauman. It examines the differences between social norms and the prevailing value systems of the 1960s welfare society and the 2000s neoliberalism - revision of social solidarity, the growth of hybrid identities and consumerist aesthetics, uncertainty and risk, as well as changes in temporal sensibility in contemporary society. Speaking about the culture of risks and insecurity, Bauman means not so much new local conflicts, the “shock doctrine” and the political “state of exception”, but rather changes in self-identity, the boundaries of which are constantly revised, which provokes a feeling of precariousness, vulnerability, uncertainty. Consumerism has changed not only the cultural superstructure, but also the mechanisms of production of subjectivities and the entire system of space-time coordinates of our time. That is why radical neo-Marxist criticism of consumerism does not work today and even contributes to its adaptation at new markets - in Russia, China, Latin America. Consumerism of the 2000s increasingly transforms the legacy of the modern era (including the welfare society projects of the 1960s) into a popular rhetorical reference, a sought-after cultural commodity. The recognition that consumption has penetrated the very fabric of our everyday life, subjugated aesthetics and temporal representations, is important for understanding the situation of uncertainty, which is not only used by neoliberalism, but can also become the basis for other strategies of social and cultural development that are significantly different from the consumer ideal. Bauman speaks of this as a “future with a hope for change”. On the other hand, the analysis of consumerism shows that the extremely wide spread of leisure practices requires in the future a rejection of the binary opposition of self and other, provoking segregation, conflicts, and violence, and not allowing to go beyond the culture of a consumer society.

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