[P2P-F] red pepper on the new hedonism

Mon Sep 12 12:25:06 CEST 2011

Michel,
If this is what you were looking for... here it all is...
Denis

  Relax: alternative hedonism and a new politics of pleasure

        Kate Soper on re-imagining fulfllment

A predictable consequence of the current recession has been a renewal of 
interest in the politics of welfare and community values. As they seek 
to patch up a fresh consensus amidst the fallout from the latest crisis 
of capitalism, both sides of the party political divide have come up 
with new narratives about wellbeing, communal belonging and social 
cohesion. On the right, in a warmed-over, chummier version of the 
Thatcherite politics of empowerment, David Cameron is pushing the idea 
of the 'big society', with its cost-cutting culture of voluntarism, 
philanthropy and social action. To the left, Blue Labour has 
rediscovered Aristotle on the 'good life' as a traditional (albeit 
long-neglected) component of Labour thinking, and is campaigning for the 
party to adopt the idea of a 'good society' based on reciprocity, 
mutuality and solidarity. Across the board, then, there is rather more 
acknowledgement than before the crash that neoliberalism is not quite 
the panacea it was held out to be, and that relentless commodification 
is bad for the soul both of the individual and of the community.

These moves suggest that there is now some awareness among mainstream 
politicians of the underlying contradictions between growth economics 
and social -- and individual -- wellbeing. But to date there has been no 
attempt seriously to challenge the definition of the 'good life' 
associated with affluent consumer culture. When launching his new 
'happiness index', Cameron told us that economic growth isn't everything 
and that there are aspects of life that 'can't be measured on a balance 
sheet'. But since then we have heard a great deal from him about the 
need to return to growth and very little about the good life conceived 
in any other terms.

Maurice Glasman, a key influence on Blue Labour, is critical of the 
unfettered market. Invoking an 'organic community' as the agent of 
opposition to commodification, he wants a return to skilled labour, 
co-operatives, mutual societies, local banks and the like. There is much 
to welcome in this. But he, too, appears still to see the nation state 
as locked in competition with others for economic advancement through 
ongoing production, and says rather little about the wider social and 
environmental consequences of national success conceived in those terms.

An alternative good life

This global dimension needs to be more widely acknowledged by those 
seriously committed to an alternative politics of community and the 
'good life'. For in the end there can be no successful promotion of 
happiness at home without attending to the misery caused elsewhere by 
our current consumerist lifestyle. This includes the millions injured or 
made homeless in recent decades through disasters triggered by global 
warming for which they are largely not responsible; the many more 
condemned to what Mike Davis has called 'informal survivalism' in the 
ever-expanding slums of the new mega-cities; the near slave conditions 
of workers locked overnight in Bangladeshi factories to meet the 
timelines of the fashion industry; the quasi-apartheid between those who 
enjoy and those who service the global playgrounds of the wealth-makers 
-- and this is to name but a few examples.

It is, then, only by means of an altogether more equitable distribution 
of both resources and the burden of pollution that we can accommodate 
future ecological constraints and thus lay the foundations for an 
alternative 'politics of prosperity'. This in turn means accepting the 
need to move beyond the 'work and spend' dynamic of a profit-oriented 
global economy and the time scarcity it generates for so many people. 
Just when we need it least from the point of view of human or 
environmental wellbeing, we are committed to an economic system that can 
only flourish if people keep spending -- which means they must keep 
working, which means they have less time to do things for themselves, 
which means they have to buy more goods and services to make up for the 
time deficit.

Instead of making use of enhanced productive efficiency to shorten the 
working week, so that we could enjoy growing and preparing more food for 
ourselves, companies profit from selling us 'fast food', ready-cooked 
meals, pre-washed salads and the like. Instead of giving us the leisure 
and facilities to walk or go by bike, we are co-opted into buying short, 
sharp exercise sessions in the gym. Instead of longer holidays in which 
we could travel more slowly and experience more genuine relaxation, the 
tourist and therapy industries profit hugely from their provision for 
mini-breaks and stress-relieving services.

Now more than ever, the consumer society is dependent on a collective 
preparedness to spend the money we earn by working too hard and too long 
on provision to compensate for the more diverse, enriching and lasting 
satisfactions we have sacrificed through overwork and overproduction. 
Yet it is far from clear that this reflects some innate desire of people 
constantly to work and consume more. If it did, the billions spent on 
advertising, and on grooming children for a life of consumption, would 
hardly be necessary. Nor would the government pressure us to keep 
spending: the injunctions to 'patriotic shopping' in the aftermath of 
9/11; the car scrappage schemes to keep the motor industry on track; the 
anxieties lest increased VAT reduces sales in the malls.

Opportunity in crisis

Everyone knows, in some sense, that the system is ultimately 
unsustainable. (Does anyone really believe the growth economy can 
continue for another hundred, let alone thousand, years?) It is in this 
context that I have argued that the present crisis, for all the pain it 
is causing, also provides an opportunity to question a way of living 
that is not just environmentally disastrous but in many respects 
unpleasurable and self-denying.

Our so-called good life is a major cause of stress and obesity. It 
subjects us to high levels of noise and stench, and generates vast 
amounts of junk. Its work routines and modes of commerce mean that many 
people, for most of their lives, begin their days in traffic jams or 
overcrowded trains and buses, and then spend much of the rest of them 
glued to the computer screen, often engaged in mind-numbing tasks. A 
good part of its productive activity locks time into the creation of a 
material culture of ever-faster production turnovers and built-in 
obsolescence, which pre-empts more worthy, enduring or entrancing forms 
of human fulfilment.

Anyone who has spent hours trapped in motorway traffic, or who regularly 
commutes, or who lives in noisy and polluted and heavily industrialised 
environments will be well aware already of the dystopian aspects of 
modern life. As I have argued in various writings around the concept of 
'alternative hedonism', many people, even in the more affluent areas, 
are now beginning to regret what has been sacrificed in the pursuit of 
the dominant model of the good life. Implicit in contemporary laments 
over lost spaces and communities, the commercial battening on children, 
the vocational dumbing-down of education, the ravages of 'development', 
the cloning of our cities, and so forth, is a hankering for a society no 
longer subordinate to the imperatives of growth and consumerist 
expansion. Diffuse and politically unfocused though this may be, it 
speaks to a widely felt sense of the opportunities squandered in recent 
decades to create a fairer, less harassed, less environmentally 
destructive and more enjoyable way of life.

To defend the progressive dimension of this kind of yearning (I have 
elsewhere termed it 'avant-garde nostalgia' ) against the exigencies of 
'progress' is not to recommend a more ascetic existence. On the 
contrary, it is to highlight the puritanical, disquieting, and 
irrational aspects of contemporary consumer culture. It is to speak for 
the forms of pleasure and happiness that people might be able to enjoy 
were they to opt for an alternative economic order. It is to open up a 
new 'political imaginary': a seductive vision of alternatives to 
resource-intensive consumption, centred on a reduction of the working 
week and a slower pace of living.

By working and producing less we could improve health and wellbeing, and 
provide for forms of conviviality that our harried and insulated travel 
and work routines make impossible. A cultural revolution along these 
lines would challenge the advertisers' monopoly on the depiction of 
prosperity and the good life. It would make the stuff that is now 
seriously messing up the planet -- more cars, more planes, more roads, 
more throwaway commodities -- look ugly because of the energy it 
squanders and the environmental damage it causes.

Such reconfiguring of the good life could alter conceptions of 
self-interest in affluent societies, highlighting the downsides of 
over-development and inviting reappraisal. If we have a cosmopolitan 
care for the wellbeing of the deprived people of the world and a concern 
about the quality of life of future generations, then we need to 
campaign for new attitudes to work, consumption, pleasure and 
self-realisation in the more affluent nations. Such a campaign would 
envisage forms of social transformation and personal epiphany analogous 
to those brought about through the feminist, anti-racist and 
anti-colonialist movements of recent history.

Hedonism and the left

Needless to say, the mainstream parties have offered no encouragement to 
think in such terms. In the case of the Conservatives, this is hardly 
surprising. They have traditionally represented those who depend for 
their power and wealth on maintaining the status quo -- which today 
means keeping consumer culture on course. The parliamentary left, 
however, might have done more to advance alternative conceptions of the 
good life and provide a more hedonist frame in support of a new 
political agenda.

The Marxist left has always been associated with a critique of 
commodification. Yet despite Marx's own insistence on the free time that 
socialism could release, its main concern has not been with the ways the 
market has pre-empted other structures and forms of consumption, but 
with the constraints it has placed on fairer access to an already 
existing range of goods. Production was seen as the sole site of 
mobilisation against the capitalist order. Resistance, it was argued, 
was a matter of worker militancy prompted by the exploitations of the 
workplace. Consumption was problematic only because it tended to 
reconcile people to the existing order rather than firing them to oppose 
it.

In its dominant and orthodox form, this politics was directed primarily 
at transforming the relationships of ownership and control of industrial 
production rather than at the content and nature of production as such. 
It was about equalising access to consumption, rather than questioning 
the consumer society. In this situation, trade union activity in the 
west became confined to protection of employees' income and rights 
within the existing structures of globalised capital, and did little to 
challenge, let alone transform, the 'work and spend' dynamic of affluent 
cultures. Communist regimes in the USSR and eastern Europe, meanwhile, 
aspired to 'catch up and overtake' the form of industrial development 
associated with capitalism rather than promote a different kind of 
prosperity.

Even when the left has in the past addressed issues of need and 
consumption more directly, it has often veered towards asceticism and 
paternalism (suggesting baldly that people are ideologically manipulated 
into thinking they need more than they really do), or proved divided and 
confused on issues of consumer autonomy and accountability (both 
endorsing popular choice and exposing its false forms of construction by 
the market). Too often the discourse of the left on consumption has 
confined itself to an argument on needs, defining those as rather 
minimal and fixed by a statically conceived human nature. In its 
critique of consumerism, attention has been paid to the 'excesses' of 
the market rather than to the forms of indulgence, sensual pleasure and 
spiritual enhancement that could come from escaping its control.

In other words, reductive and 'simple life' versions of human need and 
fulfilment have tended to preclude more complex imaginative reflection 
on the potentialities of human pleasure, and the rich and subtle forms 
of their possible realisation in a post-capitalist society. The left has 
also found it hard to openly acknowledge the complexities of a social 
formation in which consumers are neither complete dupes of the system 
nor able readily to escape its forms of conditioning or to extricate 
themselves from dependency on what it provides.

Today, however, there is every reason for the left to reconsider its 
reluctance to address the politics of pleasure, and to associate itself 
with the promotion of a steady state economy and 'alternative hedonist' 
political imaginary. This would be consistent with the Blue Labour 
critique of commodification and allow it to connect with and give voice 
to the political desires implicit in the forms of disaffection with 
consumerism outlined above. It would also be consistent with much recent 
empirical research, which has undermined the presumption that increased 
wealth leads to increased happiness and indicated that there is 
something inherently self-defeating in the pursuit of ever more 
consumption.

Estimating happiness

It is true that the lack of a simple correlation between higher income 
and increased reported life satisfaction does not in itself indicate 
that increased consumption has not improved wellbeing. The standards 
used by people in assessing their level of satisfaction may themselves 
become more stringent as their life experience changes with increased 
income. Nor are feelings of satisfaction always the best guide to how 
well people may be faring. Education has often exposed alienation and 
served the cause of personal emancipation precisely by generating 
discontent. The learning of skills may lead to increased dissatisfaction 
and demands on the self as one makes progress in their acquisition.

All this indicates that happiness is an elusive concept, and it is 
difficult to pronounce on its quality or the extent to which it (and its 
associated states of pleasure, wellbeing or satisfaction), has been 
achieved. What should count in the estimation of the 'good life'? The 
intensity of its isolated moments of pleasure, or its overall level of 
contentment ? The avoidance of pain and difficulty or their successful 
overcoming? And who, finally, is best placed to decide on whether 
personal wellbeing has increased: is this entirely a matter of 
subjective report, or is it open to objective appraisal?

Questions of this kind, about what counts as the good life, how it can 
be measured, and who is best placed to do the measuring, have long been 
at the centre of debates between utilitarianism and Aristotelianism. 
Where the former has looked to a 'hedonic calculus' of subjectively 
experienced pleasure or avoidance of pain in assessing life 
satisfaction, the more objectively oriented Aristotelian focus has been 
on capacities, functions and achievements (with what one has been 
enabled to do with one's life) rather than with its more immediate 
feelings of gratification. Where the utilitarians calculate a person's 
happiness as an aggregate of pleasurable sensations (or avoidance of 
pain), the Aristotelian concern is with the overall fulfilment and 
happiness (what Aristotle called eudaimonia) of a life taken as a whole.

In defence of this stance, Aristotelians will argue that if we disallow 
any objective knowledge of another person's wellbeing or of what makes 
for a life well spent, we shall also be deprived of grounds to criticise 
personally self-destructive or selfish and environmentally vandalising 
forms of pleasure-seeking. It has also been claimed, relatedly, that a 
'happiness' conceived or measured in terms of subjective feeling 
discourages the development of the republican sentiment and 
inter-generational solidarity essential to social and environmental 
wellbeing.

On the other hand, the 'hedonic calculus' for its part need not rule out 
the more civically oriented forms of felt pleasure, or the subjective 
gratifications of consuming in socially and environmentally responsible 
ways. The pleasure of many activities, after all -- riding a bike, for 
example -- includes both immediately personal sensual enjoyments and 
those which come from not contributing to social harms -- in this case, 
the danger and damage of car driving. Moreover, it is difficult in the 
last analysis to legitimate claims about wellbeing without some element 
of subjective endorsement on the part of those about whom they are being 
made.

There is, then, a tension in discussions of hedonism and the good life 
between the utilitarian privileging of experienced pleasure and the 
objective bias of the eudaimonic tradition (objective because more 
sceptical about accepting people's self-reporting on their level of 
happiness). The focus on good feelings risks overlooking the more 
objective constituents of the good life and the good society; the 
Aristotelian emphasis does justice to those constituents but runs the 
risk of patronage and condoning the superior knowingness of experts over 
individuals themselves.

But to accept the complexity involved in gauging claims about the 
quality of life and personal satisfaction is one thing. To deny that 
there is any evidence of the self-defeating nature of ever-expanding 
consumption would be quite another. Both sides to the hedonist debate 
are in fact in general agreement that happiness does not lie in the 
endless accumulation of more stuff. And although it cannot -- and does 
not -- aspire finally to resolve the philosophical issues in this area, 
the alternative hedonist perspective, by highlighting the narratives 
about pleasure and wellbeing that are implicit in the emerging forms of 
disaffection with affluent culture, seeks to open up a post-consumerist 
optic on the good life while still respecting felt experience.

Another way of living

'Alternative hedonism' is not a theory about what ought to be needed, or 
desired, or actually consumed. It is a theory about what some consumers, 
in their experience of the stress, overwork, ill-health, congestion, 
noise and pollution that accompany affluence, are themselves beginning 
to discover about the 'anti' or 'counter' consumerist aspects of their 
own needs and preferences. Its main interest is thus in an emerging 
'structure of feeling', to invoke Raymond Williams' concept, that is at 
once troubled by forms of consumption (such as car use or air flight) 
that were previously taken much more for granted, aware of former 
pleasures gone missing and sensing for the first time the summons of 
another way of living.

The alternative hedonist argument thus moves from an experienced 
ambivalence regarding existing patterns of consumption towards the 
alternative structure of satisfactions that are arguably latent within 
it, rather than presupposing the existence of needs for which there is 
no evidence in the conscious responses of people.

Nor does it presume that the 'excesses' of modern consumption can be 
corrected through a return to a simpler, objectively knowable, and 
supposedly more 'natural' or traditional way of being. It does not deny 
the sophistication of human desires, nor the need to accommodate the 
distinctively human quests for novelty, excitement, distraction, 
self-expression and the gratifications of what Rousseau termed amour 
propre -- the need to be esteemed by others. It can even allow that the 
'fureur de se distinguer' -- the zeal for self-distinction which 
Rousseau associated with amour propre -- is most easily supplied through 
material acquisition (at least if you have the money for it).

But what comes easiest, of course, is not necessarily the most rewarding 
or fulfilling, and the alternative hedonist case is that in deflecting 
more 'spiritual' demands on to materialist forms of display and 
competition, consumerism offers a reductive, limited and partial rein to 
desire. It offers too little rather than too much, reconciliation rather 
than transcendence. To invoke Adorno's metaphor, it offers a society in 
which 'everyone lives in aeroplanes' but remains obedient to the edict 
'Thou shalt not fly.'

On 12/09/2011 10:25, Michel Bauwens wrote:
> http://www.redpepper.org.uk/relax-alternative-hedonism/
>
>
> Dear Franco,
>
> it seems red pepper only allows one paragraph copy-pasting, which is 
> too cumbersome for my kind of curating,
>
> do you know what can be done?
>
> Michel
>
> -- 
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