Transcripts with permission NZ01

	Selves as Objects of Consumption
	This transcript is by permission of Professor Leonidas Donskis, Member of the European Parliament.

	Dramatis Personae (in order of first appearance)
LD	Professor Leonidas Donskis
ZB	Professor Zygmunt Bauman

p1	http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plWt1bDn5Iw

p1-00:11 LD	I think, and I do believe that, if we need in Europe people who make bridges, who bridge societies, cultures, sensibilities, sensitivities, political forms of sensitivity,
p1-00:25 LD	one of the most important bridges, at least as far as my experience is concerned, is Professor Bauman and his rich contribution to European intellectual life.
p1-00:35 LD	I remember, and I will never forget, an episode from our friendship of which I am very very proud, and very happy, that once [in Turin, in Italy] that Professor Bauman, myself and some other friends ... were sitting ... and ... some young people just started looking at Zugmunt Bauman. Finally, they approached him, and they had a copy of his book, and they asked [for] a signature.
p1-01:03 LD	And I thought to my self that, now, if this happens not [just to] a pop music star, but if this happens to an intellectual, to a writer, to an academic, [then] this gives hope that not everything is lost in our life. So that's why I'm very very happy to be able to present Professor Bauman - I don't think that we need any kind of excessive information. Everybody knows Professor Bauman's wonderful books. His books have been translated into Lithuanian and I think we have to thank Ms Giedrė Kadžiulytė, the head of Apostropha academic publisher ... which was ambitious and inteligent enough to start working with Professor Bauman's books some time ago, and that's how Professor Bauman's books "Globalization: The Human Consequences" [and] "Liquid Love" came into existence in Lithuanian, and now the new book is coming up, ... which is titled "Consuming Life"; [...] in Lithuanian. That's why, like in Shakespeare, Professor Bauman, enough of my words. Thank you so much for being with us tonight and let me just announce the title of the lecture: Selves as Objects of Consumption.
p1-02:25 LD	Professor Zugmunt Bauman.
p1-02:27 ZB	Thank you very much for an introduction. I'm afraid that too great expectations were aroused by the things said by the Director and my only title to glory, if there is any title to glory, is that I lived unfortunately long, and therefore I went through a very variegated life experience, and I've [become] ... one of the very few non-extinct-yet dinosaurs of your times.
p1-03:13 ZB	In this case, from the ... perspective of the topic of today's lecture, the old times ... mean [the] society of producers, because ... I am not going to speak about consumption; consumption is something very banal, very clear; something which we do every day, twenty-four hours a day seven days a week, and not just we, the human beings, but every living organism has to consume. There is nothing new about it, nothing particularly exciting. In order to remain alive, we need to exchange matter with nature, with the environment; I doubt whether in everyone's body here, there are very ... many molecules [that] were there say fourteen or fifteen years ago .... It .. all [has] been exchanged. It is, as I said, nothing particularly exciting. Well obviously, if I had [the] skills [and] education of a biologist or physiologist, I would be able to show you quite an interesting picture what is happening to the things which we consume, but ... I don't have the skills and I will limit myself to the phenomenon of, what I call not consumption but consumerism.
p1-04:51 ZB	Consumerism is a form of life, of [a] society of consumers, which we are now. Whereas ... nations, the conditions of human hapiness were measured by the number of industrial workers each country would have, and [the] number of potential soldiers which would defend the country in case of necessity, and I think the form of life of a society of producers was subjected to this particular double purpose of human community.
p1-05:35 ZB	After eleven September, if you remember, ... George W. Bush, the President of the United States of America appealed to Americans, ... to return out of this awful shock, to normal life, to ignore it, to express their enhanced patriotism, and I'm not sure whether by [a] slip of [the] tongue or because of his deep convictions, he formulated his call in the following way: "Go back shoping, again!"
p1-06:15 ZB	Sign of patriotism; my only proof, actually, of patriotism, and the meaning of normality; normal life means a life of shopping. ... You probably remember very well what you have been taught many times, ... about the vision of the world which accompanied the beginning of this great leap towards ordinary society, [the] big factory and the big conscript army which modernity wanted to create.
p1-07:00 ZB	Hobbes was the author of the famous statement that without society human life would be nasty, brutish and short. We are, by inclination, by birth, rather aggressive people, rather avaristic people, and in order to keep us under control, we need society, with its coercive power, which will prevent us from jumping to each other's throats and cutting each other's throats.
p1-07:36 ZB	There is an alternative to [the] Hobbesian vision of the world; the very opposite of it, as a matter of fact, which comes from the (I think) greatest ethical philosopher of [the] twentieth century, Emmanual Levinas.
p1-07:58 ZB	Emmanuel Levinas starts from the other ... end of human existence, of human position in the world. He says that we are all born with some sort of a moral impulse. The sight of the other person awakes the feeling of responsibility for the other human existence; for the other human['s] wellbeing. It comes to us somehow, subconsciously, ... without any coercion.
p1-08:41 ZB	The other ... human being whom we meet does not demand anything; I am not speaking about beggars acting for charity. It doesn't ... [come from] any kind of obligation. He is not a powerful person who is able to coerce us into the service; on the contrary, what Emmanuel Levinas says is that he ... calls us and commands us by his weakness and his ... or her silence; and it is a pre-social human condition, according to Emmanuel Levinas; the feeling, the impulse, the admission of responsibility for another human being.
p1-09:48 ZB	But this feeling, being [an] intuitive feeling, not codified, ... not written down in the form of law or something like that, is under-defined. We don't know what does it mean to be responsible for another human being.
p1-10:09 ZB	It is an unconditional responsibility which, in principle, would require sacrifice of everything personal for the sake of the other, but ... if that responsibility was taken in such absolutistic form, rights, suggests Levinas, will become impossible. You can't build society on this moral demand of absolute responsibility, unconditional responsiblity, for the other. He says quite frankly: look, this responsibility, if God created humanity and the universe, he created it for the saints ...; we ordinary people are not saints; we are not able to sacrifice everything for the other; and therefore to reduce this absolute responsibility ... to the level of human ability, your [or] my ability, society is necessary.
p1-11:32 ZB	Not to suppress our aggressiveness, but to make coexistence of moral people conceivable; otherwise it would be impossible. How does society do that? Well it supplies this underdefined, very generalistic, very fluid, very misty demand of exercising responsibility for other being[s'] welfare, it supplies that with a list of exact, specified, spelled out duties [and] obligations. Here is your universal moral obligations or here it ends. That is what you need to do, and that is what you can excuse yourself from doing.
p1-12:31 ZB	Well, it's [the] opening of a ... box of worms, of course, because from this point starts endless and insoluble discussion ... whether this particular spelling, whether this particular codification of what are duties is proper or not.
p1-12:57 ZB	There is a beautiful English saying that [a] guilty conscience does not need [an] accuser. In order to feel guilty, we don't need someone coming and telling us; we always feel that we .. didn't do enough ... we could do more. Whatever we do, there is always this bitter sediment, you know, this memory of some neglect, not necessary neglect. On the other hand, we seek desparately excuses, apologies. We very seldom say, I didn't do it because I didn't want [to]. We much prefer to say, I didn't do it because I couldn't. That leaves conscience a little bit more quiet; not completely, not entirely, mind you; but a little bit more quiet than otherwise it would have been.
p1-14:06 ZB	And here, ladies and gentlemen, I suggest to you, in this field, we can place consumerism, because consumerism is a contraption which in a sense, in a very perverse sense, to be sure, and not in a sense which Levinas himself expected, but it follows this intuition of Levinas; it makes living together livable when the challenges ... which ideally would require our considered reaction, are too high, too powerful, to be easily resolved with means at our disposal.

p2	http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G2JPQlOW50

p2-00:02 ZB	I would like, ladies and gentlemen, ... after this introduction, to concentrate first on three areas in which this job of consumerism is performed. I would say, three virgin lands, three earlier uncommodified areas of human daily life, or human experiences, which have been ... colonised like virgin lands by the culture of consumerism, and then I would wish to briefly discuss two, what I call, collateral casualties; unanticipated consequences of this operation performed by the consumerist way of life.
p2-01:10 ZB	Well, don't ask me, ... when it comes to discussion later, why I am so pessimistic; I am not pessimistic; I always ... when I hear this sort of charge, I would say that, in my view, optimists are people who believe that this one world is the best possible world, while pessimists suspect that, who knows, perhaps [the] optimists are right. So from this point of view, I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist, particularly [not a] pessimist. I suggest to you, ladies and gentlemen, that this division between optimists and pessimists is not exclusive; there is a third category, ... [which] is man hope or woman hope, ... and I would like very much to profess [that] I am in this category.
p2-02:18 ZB	The picture I will be, however, painting, won't be very pleasurable; sometimes ... even will ask to ...[give you a] guilty conscience, but I do it simply because you don't need me to tell you [a] big story about the pleasures of consumption; you know them very well, and that's everybody's experience, ... however what is not everybody's experience is, what is the price which we pay for the pleasures of consumption; ... what we have missed.
p2-03:03 ZB	The whole point of missing something is that we are not aware of it; you know, it's not there, simply; you have never interacted differently, and therefore you are not even aware [that] there could be something else, which you are just ... pushing aside, because you are preoccupied with something else.
p2-03:24 ZB	So that ... impression of pessimism may come from that, but I made ... a deliberate decision; I think that you have advertisers, you have commercials on TV, to tell you about the pleasures of consumerism; just for a change, for this one hour, I think we can switch off television and ... discuss the other side of the picture.
p2-03:55 ZB	Well the first area, the first virgin land which has been commercialised, is the area of human relations, ... which are ... becoming weaker, there is no question about [it]; they are becoming crumbly. They are losing, first of all, this long term perspective; they are eposodic; they are fragmentary; and they are confined to rather perfunctory interaction betweeen human beings. So when I was young, like you are now, I remember people were speaking about fastening, going into depth, knowing inside out, the other person with whom we were in relations; now the most commonly used expression, which you probably use .. very normally, without much thinking, is surfing. Surfing [does] not even mean swimming ... swimming you are getting wet, and you must do something about it; you must dry yourself up; you must have towels and so on; but in surfing, if you are a good surfer, you just ... run across the things without ... being stopped, without being opposed, without being interrupted.
p2-05:29 ZB	Just to give you the scale of the phenomenon, I got into all the sociological research which I released, which I went [back] through. 30 years ago, in [the] United States of America, which is at the forefront [or] in avant-garde of this movement, sixty percent of American families had ... their dinner at the same table; they gathered at least once a day when ... every member of the family reported all the joys and despairs of the day, and they seek each other['s] help, or whatever. What is more, they also consumed around this family table, partly products of their own shared productive activity in the kitchen.
p2-06:28 ZB	Thirty years later, the percentage of American families which gathers around a table is ... twenty percent, so it is three times less than it used to be thiry years ago; which means, in practice, that parents don't spend much time with their children. Probably it also means that children don't ... feel like spending more time with their parents, whether because they prefer sociation with unknown anonymous members of Facebook or Myspace or Twitter or whatever, or ... because they don't expect much from their ... parents. Parent live in [a] different world; they do not extend; they don't ask important questions; they're [not] interested; they are not assisting.
p2-07:43 ZB	There was [a] Bresson film, le diable probablement, (prophetic film) made something like forty years ago already, and ... on the screen you see only young people in their own company, trying to resolve terribly difficult existential questions, not with much success, but the important point [of the] Bresson ... film is that in ninety-odd minutes ... the length of the film, not once a single parent appears on the screen; a single adult; there are no adults. It's an imaginary world which consists only of the youngsters. Only once, the mentioning of parents happens, during ... this film when, after all of [this] discussion and debate and fight, just the youngsters are hungry, and then they remember that there is a fridge full of food, prepared by the parents, just for this occasion.
p2-09:04 ZB	That was the prophecy of commercialisation of inter-human relationship; commericalisation. If there is like a vicious circle, according again to quite a great number of researchers, it self-perpetuates; not only self-repairs, but it self-intensifies. The parents just find escape from their guilty conscience: "I didn't ask my children what is their homework. I didn't help them to do it. I'm not really listening to their problems. I'm not here; I'm working. I'm working; I'm away. I'm away from the office, even if I'm not away from the office, because I have [a] mobile telephone and I have [a] laptop, so wherever I am, I am in the office; I am at beck and call; I must receive the call if ... [the] boss is phoning, or [a] client is phoning."
p2-10:21 ZB	"So guilty conscience, I neglected by dearest and nearest. How to compensate for it? How to compensate?" Well ... [the] consumer market comes ready to help. There are gifts: [a] new kind of sneakers [that] no school-mate has, the latest in the fashion; the mobile telephone with gadgets which will make all your colleagues yellow with envy, because ... it is really the ... hot age of technology.
p2-11:01 ZB	Christmas, the greatest christian festival of the year, everywhere is losing it's religious character; no-one remembers ... among youngsters in the honour of what we are celebrating, but Christmas is [a] great commercial occasion; lavish gifts, expensive gifts; that is the form of self-sacrifice, isn't it? "I work very hard in order to give my children gifts, bought in [a] shop, which will make them happy. That is the compensation for my absence of self-sacrificing of my time, attention, love, care, and so on."
p2-12:03 ZB	So, if you remember what I told you about Levinas' vision of [the] function of society, well that's what it's doing then; it's cutting down the true responsibility (... misty; not defined very well; but nevertheless the inner ... felt-inside responsibility for others) to the measure of the conditions [and] possibilities which exist around.
p2-12:43 ZB	One could say that in this case, the gifts serve as ... moral pain-killers. Pain is [a] very unpleasant situation, it is true, but pain plays [a] trememdously important survival function of human beings, because pain signals that something is wrong with [the organism]: you should go to the doctor; you should take penecillin; you should cure yourself, and so on. If we suddenly lost our ability to feel pain, we would be in big trouble, because we wouldn't know when we are in danger.
p2-13:32 ZB	Now, guilty conscience is ... [the] equivalent of pain, in a sense, because ... it signals that something is wrong: "Look! ...[If you have some arguments] with other humans around you. You are not relating properly with them." Now, then come Christmas gifts, birthday gifts, you know, and all sorts of other gifts, which quash the [guilt], so they are moral pain-killers. Not only they ... weaken human relations, but in additon, you don't feel it ... that it is happening. You don't feel it; so you can go on and on.

p3	http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5el6-qaBbHs

p3-00:01 ZB	Well, working hard, in order to provide children with the gadgets that they dream of, and which is "must" in their company at school, you have to work harder. In order to work harder, you need to cut down even further ... the time which you dedicate to face-to-face being together with others. If you do that, then your guilty feeling will be even stronger. What you will need, you will need more expensive, more impressive gifts than before. In order to achieve that, you will have to work even harder than now, and it goes on and on and on, and that's why I mentioned at the beginning it's a sort of a vicious circle or Gordian knot, which you can only cut somehow, but you can't untie it.
p3-01:05 ZB	The second area is the area of, not so much identity, as the area of ... identification. I think it's much much more reasonable to discuss this matter in terms of [the] ongoing activity of identification, rather than ossified, given, ready-to-use identities, because the problem with identity, in general, in our time, is that it tries to square the circle.
p3-01:52 ZB	On the one hand we want, quite reasonably, to have our identity secure. What does it mean, secure? Firstly that we won't be kicked out suddenly by some catastrophe (social catastrophe, economic catastrophe) from the position which we occupy in society, which gives us entitlement to be self-confident and pleased with ... one's self, and so on.
p3-02:23 ZB	On the other hand, we want ... to have our identity flexible; we want to be able to become somebody else. Why? Well, very simple: the sets of opportunities out there in the world around us are changing so quickly [that] if we commit ourselves to one unchangeable identity once and for all then of course we will be unable to go where the grass is greener and as the English proverb says: [the] grass is greener always on the other side of the fence.
p3-03:14 ZB	So, you see, contradiction. Two demands which can't be met together. Hence the unending process of identification. On the websites like Facebook, like Second Life, MySpace, and so on, you can ... practice several different identities at the same time, and therefore it is ... [a] wonderful opportunity to do so, but offline, it is not that easy, as it is online, and here, really, [the] market is of great help because, how do you change your identity? Mostly by changing your image; by changing your looks; by showing that you are ... on the line of fashion; that you are at the head of the style heard.
p3-04:27 ZB	And we are bombarded, virtually, by information of the new products available, not that ... we [are] brutal, naive and ... that it will give you pleasure or whatever, but ... other times as the ways of changing your life. Changing your life means becoming somebody else ...
p3-05:02 ZB	... you can be one's self, and be someone else at the same time. You will [be] obtaining and parading and showing in public certain items available in shops. You can enforce, or at least influence, other people to recognise you for what you yourself want to be; that is how you want to be seen and you can actually cause that. There is [a] clear recipe attached to every product which you may find on the shop ... shelves.
p3-05:48 ZB	Third, well, that's a very very touchy question, and everybody will ask; there is some ... liking of pleasures, of personal pleasures. ... in extreme form, it's called by a derogatory term, hedonism: "amour de soi"; "I allowed myself ..." Well, ... here again, ... in consumerist ... culture, the culture of consumerism, the pattern ... of care ... which comes from this intuitive, but nevertheless very poignant, very strong (overwhelming sometimes) impulse of responsibility is simply turned the other way round, to the author, ... the other way.
p3-07:01 ZB	Well, if you are, willy-nilly, watching ... consumer market commercials [then] you will see very often the phrase appears: "You owed it to yourself. You deserved it; you earned it." Now you know ... what, that what which is there; you owe to yourself care of your own happy life, right?
p3-07:35 ZB	Margaret ... Thatcher one of her most silly ... published statement ... by which she is remembered was: Good Samaritan wouldn't be Good Samaritan if he didn't have money. ... but the other thing was that she was ... acting there as a spokeswoman of the ... consumer industry. You ... need to have all these posessions, not in order to justify your hedonism, but because you want to be a Good Samaritan for people whom you love; you owe that, you know; you must do it ... must ... yourself.
p3-08:35 ZB	Well, these are three areas in which very virgin lands of human experience, very common human experience, are (I would be last to deny that it's also my own experience; I also suffer of the same coditions as you ... are; the only difference between us perhaps is that I still ... remember other conditions, but you were born in this ... which seem to be normal since [the] creation of the universe).
p3-9:14 ZB	But two remaining issues which I wanted to disuss briefly are as I signalled in the beginning, collateral damages, ... which means that they are collateral because they are not necessarily products of deliberate decision. Sometimes there are [what are] called in sociology 'unanticipated consequences' of certain actions. They were not [on] purpose, but nevertheless, once you undertook this course of action, then inevitably they will appear.
p3-10:00 ZB	One ... [relatively] transparent collateral damage of consumerist culture is the way in which we treat the other human being in partnership. The dominant pattern of relatioship which we are trained to observe from the very beginning of our life, today at least, is the pattern which we apply to the treatment of commodities bought in the shop. When you buy a commodity in the shop, you don't swear loyalty forever, you don't undertake obligations 'till death do us part'. You quite clearly, unambiguously know, and quite justly, that tomorrow there will be an offer of product improved, so you dispose of this one, and take another. And that is well understood, without any further discussion.
p3-11:22 ZB	Besides, if the product which you obtain goes bust on you: it doesn't function as you expected, it doesn't fully satisfy... you; ... if what I'm talking about is a thing, ... a gadget bought in the shop, you don't go into all this rigmarole (all this trememdous effort; waste of time) repairing it, mastering how to use it, or learning the ... arcane rules ... of operating and so on; you just take it to the shop; give it back; some times they will ... give your money back; sometimes they won't; but you replace it with another object.
p3-12:17 ZB	Now I think that if we stop this sort of behaviour, we will probably ... [cause] an economic crisis, because a really satisfied ... customer, contrary to what is being said, is a night mare of consumer industry. Just imagine that you are so satisfied with an object that you don't ... think, even, about replacing [it] with something else. That would be the end of ... the consumer economy.
p3-12:50 ZB	But if you take this pattern and transplant it ... on relationship to your partner then we, not just you who does it, but all the rest of us, ... are in trouble. Anthony Giddens, the great British sociologist, ... calls it 'pure relationship'; he actually welcomes the advent of pure relationships. What are pure relationships? Pure relationships are relationships without strings attached. They are entered only for one purpose: expectation of satisfaction. ... like from the gadget which you bought at the shop, you expect, from the partner, satisfaction.
p3-13:54 ZB	If satisfaction is not forthcoming or, if it simply became already so regular that it is boring, there's no new excitement, and so on, then [there is] no reason whatsoever why you should prolong the relationship, because [it has] ... one purpose only. Partnerships, once upon a time, were thought to be the indispensible bricks of community, of society, and so on. Now, so you can't simply ... take one brick, because if a number of people did the same, then the whole building may collapse, ... is plain. But nevertheless, in this case, it's quite natural and understandable.

p4	http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyO8lo0iM7A

p4-00:03 ZB	An ...straction last. Alright. To make partnership, you need two persons at least, eh? Sometimes, it is menage-a-trois but normally two persons, right? Now, to break relationship, one is completely enough. That is the inner tension ... of long-term ... partnerships; that's why people are so careful to stamp it "that's forever, you know"; to go to church or to synagogue or to mayor or magistrate, you know, and swear loyalty from now on, forever.
p4-00:56 ZB	We prefer, today, just experimenting: "let's live together, and we'll see what comes out of it". Now what is wrong, necessarily, with that is simply if it changes your ... frame of reference; if you know that you will be meeting tomorrow, again, and next week and next month and next year and after five years and so on, then your willingness; it's difficult to imagine that such willingness will emerge in these experimental relationships but, under that condition... of long-term thinking ... you will be willing to negotiate ... to work. You won't treat love as a found object (you just bumped at it somewhere on the street) and once it looks ... you can dispose [of] it because there are many objects waiting to be found. But you see, ... probably love is something which needs to be reproduced almost from scratch day by day; it's a ... constant effort.
p4-02:29 ZB	Now, therefore, if you negotiate more of humanity, then you probably find in a major disagreement (because two human individuals together is a recipe ... for very many conflicts; repeatable conflict) and it won't ... undermine the part that, however tragic disagreeements may be, still, living with these disagreements is a better choice than losing each other ..., but if it is the question of experimental living, "let's move together under one roof and we'll see how it works", then every ... minor quarrel will ... arise to sky-high scale, and of course it won't be worth wasting more time as again, sorry, English saying: throwing good money after bad.
p4-03:50 ZB	And the last point here which I wanted to raise, the other collateral damage, is what is called popularly today ... sustainability ... of the planet. Fairly probably I will ... pronounce the most pessimistic sentence in my lecture; most pessimistic simply because it is inevitable; it is the naked brutal truth that in order to raise everybody in humanity to the level of consumption which we here in Europe or in North America enjoy, we would need, ladies and gentlemen, not one planet Earth but five planet Earths. Two and a half billion ... people, who currently live ... for less than two dollars a day, if they ever ... lifted ... themselves to this standard of living then the planet simply would not be able to survive. Therefore, ladies and gentlemen, we are confronting probably the biggest challenge in history.
p4-5:38 ZB	We are confronting coming nearly on the limits of endurability of our planet from the point of view of its resources, of ... conditions which it supplies for the living organisms, and so on. Nevertheless we behave daily as if ... that was not the case. We, of course, on ceremonial occasions, ... on what I call the carnivals of consciousness or carnivals of conscience, time and again we repeat: we have to protect [the] planet, we have to fight warming, we have to economise resources. But mostly all the participants of such anti-climatic change campaigns come to the meetings in their own private cars, and ... in the result add to the problem, rather than diminish it.
p4-06:53 ZB	But the important point is not there; the important point is that the whole way in which we conceive this situation in the world daily, not on ceremonial occasions but daily, in practice, goes against the grain here; it is contrary to the purpose of saving the planet.
p4-07:18 ZB	Saving the planet would require nothing less than reduction ... of our consumption. Not further increase. Not Americans reacting to 11 September, going massively to the shop and spending more money. Not going out of depression by increasing the consumer activity, going even deeper into debt using your credit cards and spending others' money. But on the contrary, living.
p4-07:53 ZB	But how do we measure, ladies and gentlemen, ... the good or bad economic situation in a country? By statistics of GNP; that is the major index which we all use, everybody: journalists, politicians; and we also read newspapers and listen to politicians' views.
p4-08:22 ZB	GNP: what is GNP? GNP is statistics of [the] amount of value we change hands; in other words, it is statistics of how much people spend on consumption. That's what it amounts to, with some curious results; for example, that if you fall under a car and then you require very expensive medical treatment, GNP goes up; this measurement of human happiness [or] national happiness goes up. But nevertheless, that is the major orientation point.
p4-09:00 ZB	We expect expressions of despair coming from on high whenever there is so-called zero growth, not to mention negative growth, which is [a] catastrophe; a catastophe like ...: "what we are going to do? How the ... whole order is trembling, you know, which is an earthquake; we are falling apart; the Armageddon is approaching; the prophecies of apocalypses finally will be implemented."
p4-09:38 ZB	Now that is, ladies and gentlemen, [an] issue which will have to be confronted with ... all seriousness; and it is not a farcical problem; not farcical. I know that it is trememdously difficult today, in the year 2010, to stretch our imagination and just conceive of a world which could be set in operation and give us ... a lot of pleasures without necessarily passing through shocks.
p4-10:21 ZB	... until the second half of [the] nineteenth century, all economists, [the] most famous among them, (James Mill, Ricardo, John Stuart Mill later, and so on) were convinced that there is a [set?] problem of human needs; you can actually quantify them; you can actually measure them. And once all of these human needs are satisfied, there is enough ... production to supply the amount of goods which is necessary to satisfy them, then it will be the end of economic growth; of all this trememdous effort building new factories, you know; this chore which everybody is subjected to, in order to bring production to the level of human need.
p4-11:24 ZB	Economic growth from their point of view was a temporary ...[event], until needs are satisfied. What's happened since then, as you know, probably very well, and so I only remind you very very briefly: by the end of the nineteenth century, a different turn started, a different direction started. "Why? What needs?" Needs almost disappeared from the language of economy, and instead what appeared was desire, wish to buy ..., intention of the buyer, desire.
p4-12:07 ZB	Unlike needs, desire[s], by definition, are flexible. If your needs are satisfied, they are satisfied, full-stop. But if your desire is satisfied, if at all possible, what does desire desire ...?
p4-12:31 ZB	Desire desires desire ...; which means that at least this situation is very well measured by GNP, the index of prosperity, because it shows that desire is still very much alive, and it is growing, that people ... need more today than yesterday, and probably the day after tomorrow we will need more than tomorrow.
p4-13:05 ZB	Just ... on the margin ..., I mention that even desire is already a somewhat old-fashioned concept in marketing philosophy, because desire is something you have to develop, you have to cultivate, you have to grow. It takes time to develop your desire into something which didn't exist yesterday, and what is even worse, desire is always aimed at something, desire of something; it is specific; it can't be easily generalised. You can't switch desire at ease from one object which we don't possess on [to] another.
p4-13:53 ZB	So slowly but relentlessly, it is replaced on the moment by the category of want; buying on want, on wish, on impulse; and please go around ... (I'm quite sure that in Vilnius you have) shopping malls (like in every other civilised place) so just have a look, how does [selection?] ... with the idea that whoever goes there in order to buy a shirt, because the old one needs repair, is bound to leave the shopping mall with the whole outfit. So buying things which are not on his or her mind when they entered there.

p5	http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJfacihHVAo

p5-00:01 ZB	"Shopping mall." "Mall." "Mall" is stolling; you know what's the meaning of mall: strolling. So it is a shopping strolling. You just go through all these boutiques with wonderful enticing smells, music (you know, sounds of music) and beautiful sights in the window shop, and on imulse you are overwhelmed with the need to be a proud possessor of it. Well, the major pleasure is in obtaining it because, very often, you take it home and you can't recall why you bought [it] for; you actually spent money on obtaining it for it's marginal effect, marginal ....
p5-00:53 ZB	And these are, ladies and gentlemen, in my view, the challenges; the challenges, I'm terribly sorry; I do want to help you in resolving them, because I'm ... any time left, but my humble prognosis is you will probably confront these challenges [and] contradiction[s] in the full ... gigantic ... size, as one of the major problems which we will have to resolve in your lives.

p5-01:34	[At this point, the meeting went to questions and discussion. The questions are, if anything, even harder to hear than the speaker. I have chosen to publish now, rather than continuing to transcribe. I do not have a time-scale for coming back to transcribe the remainder of the meeting.]

Transcripts with permission NZ01

Saturday, July 2, 2011

Selves as Objects of Consumption

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Introduction