[P2P-F] red pepper on the new hedonism

Mon Sep 12 18:20:20 CEST 2011

thanks Denis ... right-click all is a all or nothing proposition, useful to
read via email, not not for selective quoting, except indirectly perhaps ..

Michel

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 5:25 PM, Denis Postle <d.postle at btinternet.com>wrote:

> **
> 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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