cooperation, the social individual, cooperative consumption

Jason Read:

The individual of the sphere of circulation may be the isolated individual of freedom, equality, and Bentham, but the individual of production is a “social individual,” an individual whose capacities and abilities can only come into being with the necessary presence of others. The cooperation of these individuals constitutes a particular kind of surplus, a social surplus above and beyond the difference between necessary and surplus labor. Moreover, this surplus is obscured by the dominant representation of capital, by the images produced by the sphere of production, which present only isolated individuals contracting in their mutual interest. To the extent that this surplus appears at all, it appears as the power of capital, its miraculous capacity to produce surplus, what Marx refers to it as a “free gift to capital.”[xxiv] Thus, the sphere of circulation becomes a truly miraculous power, it generates the image of society made up of isolated individuals, and appropriates whatever exceeds this, by making it appear as capital itself....
there is the cooperative social individual of the hidden abode of production. However, this second individual does not appear, does not see itself in institutions and structures, instead what is immediately visible is the fetishism of commodities, money, and the power of capital itself.

Consumerism posits a value system that makes commonality read as inconvenient -- sharing and human interaction and all that are only so much hassle. This allows capital to appropriate the surplus value from cooperation that takes place anyway, under the guise of contested social relations, under the guise of status games and competitive identity displays?

Does collaborative consumption upset this ideological balance, making explicit the ways in which the benefits of cooperation are stolen by capital, or is it a way to attempt to preserve that value for "social individuals"? Or is an attempt to recapture the cooperative surplus and recirculate it as a commodity while leaving the underlying ideological construct of a society of atomized individuals intact?

Read argues that "never have human beings been more social in their existence, but more individualized, privatized, in the apprehension of their existence." As capitalism subsumes more of everyday life, sociality, etc., this contradiction widens, perhaps reaches an untenable level of dissonance. Pursuing the social life deepens one's isolation under capital. At some point the individual will cease to pursue the social within such a system and seek a way to escape or destroy it.

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Pop optimism and the guerrilla self

From Ellen Willis, "Tom Wolfe's Failed Optimism":

Pop sensibility -- loosely defined as the selective appreciation of whatever is vital and expressive in mass culture -- did more than simply suggest that life in a rich, capitalist consumption-obsessed society had its pleasures; the crucial claim was that those pleasures had some connection with genuine human feelings, needs, and values and were not -- as both conservative and radical modernists assumed -- mere alienated distraction.... Pop implied a more sanguine view of the self as a guerrilla, forever infiltrating territory officially controlled by the enemy, continually finding new ways to evade and even exploit the material and psychic obstacles that the social system continually erected.

I find that a seductive position. I want to have a guerrilla self. I want to fight the cultural industry with the weapons it forged for my appropriation.

It's a very glamorous reconfiguration of what I am doing when I am, say, watching Game of Thrones. I am exploiting psychic obstacles and subverting the enemy on its terrain at the same time as I am watching two slave-whores make out.

But Willis's definition raises more questions than answers. The largest and most obvious problem, it seems to me, is the invocation of "genuine" needs and feelings. Consumerism produces needs, and "genuineness" is one of its most successful and desirable products. Alienated distractions are just as genuine as anything else. Embedded in the privileging of some mythical genuine need is the idea that we are all on a quest to find our "real self" through the right cosmic combination of goods that unlock our inner potentialities. It is assumed that pleasures are typically reducible to the pleasures of increasing self-knowledge, but isn't it more often the case that pleasure is a matter of forgetting? And that pop pleasures in particular are about surrendering the pursuit of authenticity in favor of merging with the palpable zeitgeist? The guerrilla self is still the individualistic hero of romanticism, amid the "masses" but never merging with them, instead redeeming their presumptive mediocrity, which offers the background against which the guerrilla self can stand out.

Other terms in Willis's phrasing are just as ambiguous. On what basis is the "selective appreciation" conducted by pop connoisseurs? What makes this "exploitative" or subversive? What constitutes "vitality"? Is it simply an ineffable sensation of life itself? A measurable amount of energy amid the "masses"? A personal and private feeling of having been energized? A sense that one has been swallowed by mass enthusiasm? It seems like a mystification to me.

The same with "expressive" -- what isn't expressive in the pop-cultural milieu? The whole edifice is shot through with significations of status, information asymmetries that create and consolidate cultural and social capital. Social class can't be undone by democratizing tastes; the material bases for class distinctions always generate new ways of expressing cultural distinctions. A "liberated" taste for pop "trash" is inescapably an expression of habitus; one can't consume pop culture in some sort of politically populist way. Consumer society gives us ample access to its particular modes of pleasure that guarantee our consent and effort in reproducing it as a system. There is no subversive way of consuming its products; subversion would consist of ignoring them. I don't think these are particularly radical claims, post-postmodernism.

That's not to say that we don't long for pop culture to be a means for experiencing belonging. Through pop participation we hope to dissolve the agonies of isolated identity in a collective expression of enthusiasm even as we look to deploy these widely recognized cultural signifiers in a unique and distinctive way. "Pop" is an especially ironic label for the material culture of consumerism. It masquerades as a democratic forum for "pleasures" but arguably the chief pleasure of engaging in the milieu is finding vicarious satisfaction in status, or winning the zero-sum battles of uniqueness in expressions of personal identity. Pop culture may mimic forms of collectivity, but in a consumer society, consumption is always an arena of self-expression. The price of pop pleasures is the surrender of the ability to consume neutrally, to consume without sending a message about what sort of person you are or what sort of social and cultural capital you are putting in play. The "guerrilla self" Willis describes -- an idea that often underpins much of the enthusiasm for "prosumerism" -- always threatens to become the sort of hipster cultural capitalist that, for example, Rob Walker profiled in Buying In. The guerrilla self becomes the cultural entrepreneur.

Social media has made this evolution harder to resist, as it gives even casual participants in cultural production the necessary platform for distribution and reputational accounting. Social media is the "territory" that the guerrilla self now seeks to occupy, and the owners of that territory are more than happy to have us invade. The whole business model of social media depends on such invasions. The "psychic obstacles" presented by capitalism become necessary, cherished spurs for personal self-development -- they refigure planned obsolescence in fashion and style as renewed opportunities for us to become better selves. Novelty becomes our "genuine" value, not capital's -- we demand the new because choice among new options is what we experience most viscerally as "vital" and "expressive" freedom. Consuming the "new" is how we experience personal growth; novelty becomes the basis of identity.

Prosumerism is not an expression of evasion and subversion; instead it is a core principle of post-Fordist capitalism. The productivity of the pursuit of personal identity, as captured in digital networks, advances the subsumption of everyday life to its highest degree yet. The radical ontological insecurity -- the "gig economy" and precarity and so on -- is normalized and valorized as the opportunity to unlock inner troves of personal creativity. Yet this creativity can take on only a limited and arguably degraded form. It can only conceive capitalistic aims: So we have the facile manipulation of signs to grow quantified, reified measures of influence -- which is limited to the ability to influence others to "spend" their attention or money.

Of course, that may seem to posit some "genuine" form of creativity outside of capitalism. But I don't mean to imply it is more genuine, only that it is different, that it would anchor a different kind of society, with different ways of conceiving and organizing collective identity. Instead of proliferating hierarchies of taste and competitive feats of prosumerism, why not something else, something worthy of optimistic hopes? Rather than a mass of guerrilla selves fighting a phony war against one another for who can lay the most genuine claim to pop pleasures, why not accept that taste can't be democratic and worry instead about those aspects of social participation that can be. We could spend less time worrying about what we like -- and what we "Like" through social media -- and see what sort of social pleasure lies beyond that.

"The Soviets of the Multitude" -- interview with Paolo Virno

This interview with Virno, conducted by Alexi Penzin (of chto delat), helped clarify some things for me about how the collectivity of the multitude is supposed to work in theory. The idea is still predicated on what seems to me a faith-based notion of the general intellect, but here the general intellect becomes a political organizational principle, leading to neo-Soviets that challenge the state's monopoly on decision-making by co-opting its provisional functions.

1. Penzin describes artists as the ultimate expression of post-Fordist "living labor": "contemporary art provides the quintessence of virtuosic practices: the subjectivity of the contemporary artist is probably the brightest expression of the flexible, mobile, non-specialized substance of contemporary 'living labor.' " Interesting. This is part of my suspicion of performance artists, and narcissist art: at its core, it is an expression of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism perfected would consist of a world where we are all performance artist-entrepreneurs creating value through their innovative lives, all of which will be atomized and mediated and reprocessed within the various commercial/advertising social-media networks -- a world where the perpetual making of personal subjectivity is the generalized productive process powering the economy. (A legitimate question is whether that is so bad -- the question Virno, et al., pose by reconfiguring such uber-neoliberalism as a sort of communist liberation.) I think there is something sinister in the real subsumption of selfhood, the condition in which we can only have identity on such terms, as a mediated, reified consumer-good-like product -- one that comes with a great deal of insecurity and unmitigatable risk. (Has there ever been an alternative?, cynics might ask.)

2. Penzin describes Virno's view of subjectivity by way of Gilbert Simondon: "You take as a point of departure Gilbert Simondon’s conception of the collective as something that is not opposed to the individual but, on the contrary, is a field of radical individualization: the collective refines our singularity. Recalling Marx’s notion of the 'social individual,' which presupposes that the collective (language, social cooperation, etc) and the individual coexist, you elaborate quite a paradoxical definition of Marx’s theory as a 'doctrine of rigorous individualism.' " Virno refers to Vygotsky. But the premise is the same before the I comes a primordial us. Vygotsky: "the real movement of the development process of the child’s thought is accomplished not from the individual to the socialized, but from the social to the individual." Virno posits that this is an ongoing move that echoes throughout our lives: "We constantly have to deal with the interiority of the public and with the publicity of the interior." This view of subjectivity corresponds to the idea of capitalist society providing the preconditions to experience a particular form of possessive individualism as subjectivity, one that is then represented in ideology as being "natural" and/or "rational." We must be socialized into individualism, as paradoxical as that may sound. For Virno, virtuosic post-Fordist labor is the performance of this transformation, of the social becoming simultaneously individuated in a group of subjects working together: "The virtuosic execution stages this transformation. If we think of contemporary production, we must understand that each individual is, at the same time, the artist performing the action and the audience: he performs individually while he assists the other’s performances." The emphasis on "performance" is not accidental -- his theory basically posits the performance of the self's individuality among others as the main mode of production, as the way post-Fordist production happens.

3. Penzin sums up Virno's theory of "human nature" as permanent precarity under neoliberalism:

As you say, what we nowadays call “human nature” is the basic “raw material” for the capitalist production. “Human nature” interpreted as a set of “bio-anthropological invariants,” as a kind of potentiality referring to the faculty of language, to neoteny as the retention of juvenile traits in adult behavior, to “openness to the world” (i.e. the absence of fixed environment), etc. You state that these anthropological invariants become sociological traits of a post-Fordist labor force, expressing themselves as permanent precariousness, flexibility, and the need to act in unpredictable situations. Post-Fordist capitalism does not “alienate” human nature, but rather reveals it at the center of contemporary production, and by the same move, exposes it to apparatuses of exploitation and control. Former ways of easing the painful uncertainty and instability of human behavior through ritual mechanisms and traditional social institutions melt into air.

Neoliberalism takes some aspects of our species and configures them as mandatory atomization and competitive entrepreneurialism, as requisite and ongoing insecurity, as the "permanent revolution" of capitalism in action.

4. I wish I understood what this meant in practical terms: Virno says, "If examined as productive realities, the micro-collectives you mention have mainly the merit of socializing the entrepreneurial function: instead of being separated and hierarchically dominant, this function is progressively reabsorbed by living labor, thus becoming a pervasive element of social cooperation. We are all entrepreneurs, even if an intermittent, occasional, contingent way." How exactly do these ad hoc collectives socialize the entrepreneurial function? Is he talking about nonprofits replacing for-profits? Or something more nebulous? If we are all entrepreneurs, what is wrong with neoliberalism harnessing that potential? What good is it to characterize creativity as entrepreneurial? That seems to imply zero-sum competition for economic resources via innovation, spurious or otherwise. Seems like cooperation would replace entrepreneurship rather than emulate it. I need someone to explain this passage to me -- has something to do with these new work organizational forms as enacting an "enterprising subtraction from the rules of wage labor." Seems like he is talking about free labor, collaborative consumption, crowdsourcing, wealth of networks kind of thing. The freely supplied labor of many is whittled down to something productive/useful that is "owned" collectively.

5. That's how Penzin seems to develop the idea anyway:

under the conditions of post-Fordism, collective work can be organized through “subtraction” when the result of the work is inferior to the sum of the collective effort. This becomes a sort of exception, an unexpected innovation (“the whole is less than the sum of the parts”). On the other hand, if not considered in terms of products, such collective work produces a feeling of strong subjectivity and strength, valorizing each member of the collective.

The last bit is a hopeful assertion, it seems to me; that those whose effort is subtracted will still feel like a meaningful part of the team and affirmed in their individual contribution. Virno replies with a similar faith-based claim, that this mode of production creates a ghostly surplus, a sort of accursed share: "Nowadays, the quota of collective intelligence that is thrown away in the production of goods is not physically destroyed, but somehow remains there, as a ghost, as a non-used resource that is still available. The power that is freed by the sum of the parts, even if not expressed in its whole, meet a very different destiny. Sometimes it becomes frustration and melancholic inertia, or it generates pitiless competition and hysterical ambition. In other cases, it can be used as a propeller for subversive political action." He just asserts that this energy exists, waiting to be unleashed or corralled or channeled or dissipated. It may very well be that the extra collective intelligence in social production is wasted, used up, extinguished, dissipated in the act of production and does not linger, does not generate a resource for resistance. This supposed energy is akin to Shirky's digital surplus -- a theoretical possibility that may not manifest itself.

6. Penzin and Virno have an exchange about real vs. formal subsumption of the general intellect. Penzin attributes to Virno the idea that formal subsumption has returned with post-Fordism, in contrast to the Negrian view that real subsumption has proceeded further, subsuming more of everyday life. "Referring to Marx’s dichotomy, you say that this means a return to 'formal subsumption.' Therefore, capitalists do not organize the whole chain of production process, they just capture, and commodify, spontaneous, 'self-organized' social collaborations and their products." I think that is how understand the business model of social-media companies -- they provide the playing field for self-creating labor that can be harvested for other purposes, made profitable for the field providers. Facebook is the social factory. Virno articulates it using a motif Zizek has also used: contemporary work conditions "order us to be spontaneous" -- this contradiction, Virno calls formal subsumption. It seems to me that to the degree that this command is general, you get the sort of psychic maladies that Bifo talks about in his nutty e-flux articles. Living that contradiction is psychic precarity; it is a manifestation of capital's impossible demands for endless innovation, endless accumulation, appropriating and devouring everything subjects need to sustain themselves spiritually (to get all metaphysical myself).

7. I thought Virno's summation of his intellectual tradition was pretty compelling:

The critique of that modern barbarity that is wage labor, dependent on the employer, the critique of that “monopoly of the political decision” that is the State — these were our references in the 1960s and 1970s, and they still are today. These references made us enemies of the real and ideal socialism. From the beginning, our tradition longed for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the CPSU. It was divorced from the culture and the values of the “labor movement,” and this allowed it to understand the meaning of the labor fights against the wage. It recognized capitalism’s devotion to “permanent revolution,” to the continuing innovation of the labor process and ways of life, in order to avoid astonishment or lament, since the production of surplus value is no longer connected to the factory and sovereignty does not coincide any more with the nation-states.

He goes on to connect this with the new soviets, how they can work to dismantle the state. "The leagues, the assemblies, the soviets — in short, the organs of non-representative democracy — give political expression to the productive cooperation that has at its core the general intellect. The soviets of the multitude produce a conflict with the State’s administrative apparatuses, with the aim of eating away at its prerogatives and absorbing its functions." I wish that came with specific concrete examples too. Does he mean the way Palestinian groups and the Taliban provide welfare services to win consent? Does he mean something more spontaneous and less tactical? Such a view can easily devolve into compassionate conservatism, where the state retreats from welfare-state functions but retains the monopoly on violence and power, using it to protect capitalist interests and the "level playing field" market and the legitimations that stem from it.

Bauman's Consuming Life, cont'd

The corpse of this text has grown cold for me -- read it to long ago to make much sense of my notes at this point. But I won't be able to let it go until I dutifully record them here.

See if I can remember where I left off -- the book is open on my desk to this marginal note: "consumption to consumerism -- life organized around consumption as work, not as an opposition, though, but an integration." Bauman is extrapolating from Mary Douglas's work on the uses of consumption to organize communities and identity, to illustrate who is inside and who is outside and so on. Identity derives not from performing some useful production for society but from consuming in an overtly meaningful way respected by the community. Whether one has thee capability to consume in this way may or may not be a consequence of having done some productive work at some point. Bauman stresses that identity derives from consuming rather than producing in consumerist societies; I think it leads to consuming being synonymous with producing, albeit on the level of signs -- as Baudrillard's work suggests, consumerism is a matter of the production and circulation of signs; it requires a society in which signs are fungible, readily malleable, liquid, as Bauman would say.

This leads to a liquid self-identity, to insatiability as an index of one's capacity for "life" -- which is quantified in terms of commodities consumed.

On the road to the society of consumers, the human desire for stability has to turn, and indeed does turn, from a principal systemic asset into the system’s major, perhaps potentially fatal liability, a cause of disruption or malfunction. It could hardly be otherwise, since consumerism, in sharp opposition to the preceding forms of life, associates happiness not so much with the gratification of needs (as its ‘official transcripts’ tend to imply), as with an ever rising volume and intensity of desires, which imply in turn prompt use and speedy replacement of the objects intended and hoped to gratify them; it combines, as Don Slater aptly put it, an insatiability of needs with the urge and imperative ‘always to look to commodities for their satisfaction’

Consumer societies rely on subjects who are compelled to accelerate their consumption as a way of experiencing it as pleasurable and meaningful; this compulsion requires vigorous ideological support, as such behavior generates a great deal of insecurity, ontological and otherwise. "Consumer society thrives as long as it manages to render the non-satisfaction of its members (and so, in its own terms, their unhappiness) perpetual." (47) It must manufacture frustration and make it seem like an appealing new commodity.

The ideologically glorified acceleration leads to an accompanying feeling of perpetual harriedness. pleasure-disappointment cycles accelerate with consumption, which fragments into a series of disconnected moments, each an attempt to achieve a "big bang" of retail joy. Bauman suggests that integration of desires over time into a coherent identity becomes secondary to this impulsivity. At the same time, this fragmentation masks the effort required to sustain pleasure from consumption. It militates against connoisseurship as effort, offers connoisseurship as superficial cataloging of experiences. (36) He quotes Eriksen: "information society offers cascades of decontextualized signs...it becomes increasingly difficult to create narratives, orders, developmental sequences. The fragments threaten to become hegemonic."

Procrastination emerges as a form of quasi resistance, necessary for keeping options open in accordance to consumerist ethos, but generally experienced as shameful. Sustained effort on one particular endeavor is at the same time a forfeiture of other consumption chances; procrastination is a flawed attempt to pre-empt inefficient consumption. Bauman, anticipating Bifo, identifies "melancholy" as another involuntary mode of resistance. Both are ways to suspend investment and flatten affect in response to an overload of information and resulting combinatory possibilities for identity construction. Bauman calls melancholy the "life strategy of last resort" that results from "the fatal encounter between the obligation and compulsion to choose/the addiction to choosing, and the inability to choose" (42).

Bauman claims that in consumerist societies "the pursuit of happiness – the purpose most often invoked and used as bait in marketing campaigns aimed at boosting consumers’ willingness to part with their money (earned money, or money expected to be earned) – tends to be refocused from making things or their appropriation (not to mention their storage) to their disposal." Bataille's concern with expenditure perhaps ties in here -- the hidden yet compelling need to waste and destroy through consumption that on its face presents itself as a mode of accumulation of stuff for consumers. Always the hidden tension between consumerism as amassing material property and consumerism as effective demand and consumption -- clearing the surplus for subsequent cycles of capitalist production. I think this is the best way to understand the elevated cultural profile of hoarding. Damaged subjects refuse to inhabit the mandatory contradiction and begin accumulating without wasting.

"Expenditure" (waste, deciet, etc.) thus serves the collective purpose of supporting a capitalist system even if it appears irrational, impulsive, destructive, gratuitous, etc., at the individual level. These are not malfunctions, but proof of functioning.

In consumer societies, "frictionless" exchange serves as a model for sociality, since affective labor (like all labor) can't be regarded as pleasurable in its own right. All performance, Bauman notes, are "solo performances." Instead of the pleasures of collaboration, consumerism seeks to structure such affective labor involved in cooperation, politeness, etc., as a competitive attention war, a game of status. The ethic of convenience that accelerates consumption hypostatizes and becomes a way to interpret affective labor as something that one must capitalize on, not "give away" for its own sake, or sake of collective solidarity.

Hence this disturbing observation:

It is just as Emmanuel Levinas adumbrated when he mused that rather than being a contraption making peaceful and friendly human togetherness achievable for inborn egoists (as Hobbes suggested), ‘society’ may be a stratagem to make a self-centred, self-referential, egotistic life attainable for endemically moral human beings – through cutting out, neutralizing or silencing that haunting ‘responsibility for the Other’ which is born each time the face of the Other appears; indeed, a responsibility inseparable from human togetherness . . .

Being "social" in consumer capitalism means being empowered to be selfish in the face of what Levinas believes are self-evident moral obligations. Society lets discard them in the name of productivity, etc. "Society" means permitting individuals to rationalize their choice of convenience over responsibility to others, calling it productivity. (Seems applicable to this.) Convenience is the means by which more and more of everyday life is subsumed to the individualist ethos and morality of endlessly acquisitive capitalism.

The second chapter of Consuming Life deals with "flawed consumers," the have-nots who are held responsible for their own condition because to think otherwise would be to upend the ideology about consumer choice being equivalent to democracy. It would expose the hollowness of one's own power.

Consumption, again, is not for pleasure. Bauman suggests that consumers view goods as personal-brand investments. Consumption has become production; attention to semiotic value of goods a kind of necessary capital. But the key effect for Bauman is self-commoditization -- regarding oneself as a consumer good in a society that only knows how to measure the value of consumer goods:

The crucial, perhaps the decisive purpose of consumption in the society of consumers (even if it is seldom spelled out in so many words and still less frequently publicly debated) is not the satisfaction of needs, desires and wants, but the commoditization or recommoditization of the consumer: raising the status of consumers to that of sellable commodities.... Members of the society of consumers are themselves consumer commodities, and it is the quality of being a consumer commodity that makes them bona fide members of that society. (57)

We have no choice but to self-brand because it is the only way to take the measure of ourselves.

The entrepreneurial risks involved with self-commodification and identity building cannot be defrayed by government -- they are beyond the welfare state and can be argued by neoliberalists to obviate it. Social success on the measure of identity invalidates collectivity as a goal -- the point is to be recognized as a unique individual who has invested in personal brand wisely, who has consumed well, whose consumption tastes are valuable.

In consumer societies, groups are supplanted by leaderless "swarms" held to together by mediated imitation and tactical conformity. As a result, "Consumption is a supremely solitary activity (perhaps even the archetype of solitude), even when it happens to be conducted in company." It generates no "lasting bonds," Bauman avers, in the face of cultural theorists who claim consumption communities around culture-industry products. Bauman is thinking more about things like fast food:

We may suppose that the ‘unintended consequence’ of ‘fast food’, ‘take-aways’ or ‘TV dinners’ (or perhaps rather their ‘latent function’, and the true cause of their unstoppable rise in popularity) is either to make the gatherings around the family table redundant, so putting an end to the shared consumption, or to symbolically endorse the loss, by an act of commensality, consuming in company, of the onerous bondtying and bond-reaffirming characteristics it once had but which have become irrelevant or even undesirable in the liquid modern society of consumers. ‘Fast food’ is there to protect the solitude of lone consumers. 

Lost community is recast as convenience, which is designed to protect the subject's ability to consume rather than confer and consort with others.

In chapter three Bauman discusses "consumerist culture," which is distinguished by the inversion of productivist virtues, like procrastination, duration, endurance, etc. "The ‘consumerist syndrome’ is all about speed, excess and waste." Hence, you can see hoarder shows as ideological training in this perspective. "The nightmares that haunt Homo consumens are things, inanimate or animate, or their shadows – the memories of things, animate or inanimate – that threaten to outstay their welcome and clutter up the stage . . . (99)"

He quotes Bourdieu on how "coercion" has been replaced by "stimulation" -- a variant on the Frankfurt School/Foucauldian theme that people are dominated through pleasure and gratification. New desires are aroused and graitfied as a mode of control, as opposed to the inculcation of ascetic etiquette. This is sold as a kind of personal responsibility to please oneself -- "you owe it to yourself to consume like you deserve."

‘Responsibility’ now means, first and last, responsibility to oneself (‘you owe this to yourself’, ‘you deserve it’, as the traders in ‘relief from responsibility’ put it), while ‘responsible choices’ are, first and last, those moves serving the interests and satisfying the desires of the self.

This is the application of "enlightened self-interest" in consumerist terms -- playing on the concept of the rational as the self-serving. And it's our duty to be rational, after all.

Consumerist subjectivity also hinges on making waste rational, on instituting the pleasures of destruction and wasting, the relief of clearing the deck for further consumption, the necessity of being up to date in what you consume. "The ‘presentist culture’ ‘puts a premium on speed and effectiveness, while favouring neither patience nor perseverance.’ We may add that it is this frailty and apparently easy disposability of individual identities and interhuman bonds that are represented in contemporary culture as the substance of individual freedom." Convenience is freedom from human interaction is freedom in general, an escape into the present away from death, responsibility. Then communications technology develops to accommodate this -- allowing for control over disconnection (107). "The safety device that allows instantaneous disconnection on demand perfectly fits the essential precepts of the consumerist culture; but social bonds, and the skills needed to tie them and service them, are its first and principal collateral casualties."

Identity ceases to be an incremental developmental process, but becomes liquid assembly of static signs, a constant burden requiring service, requiring display for validation, strategic development, etc. (111). "Rather than a gift (let alone a ‘free gift’, to recall the pleonastic phrase coined by marketing advisers), identity is a sentence to lifelong hard labour."

Here's a summary paragraph of the book's ideas -- producerism has given way to consumerism; work no longer anchors identity but consumerism and mastering its code and manufacturing identity in media is an effort to restabilize it:

Contemporary society engages its members primarily as consumers; only secondarily, and in part, does it engage them as producers. To meet the standards of normality, to be  acknowledged as a fully fl edged, right and proper member of society, one needs to respond promptly and effi ciently to the temptations of the consumer market; one needs to contribute regularly to the ‘demand that clears supply’, while in times of economic turndown or stagnation
being party to the ‘consumer-led recovery’. All this the poor and indolent, people lacking a decent income, credit cards and the prospect of better days, are not fi t to do. Accordingly, the norm broken by the poor of today, the norm the breaking of which sets them apart and labels them as ‘abnormal’, is the norm of consumer competence or aptitude, not that of employment.

So is the answer a general boycott? a refusal to be effective demand to sustain consumerism? What induces subjects formed by consumerism to surrender the pleasures of it, if they are in a rough equilibrium with its insecurities and depredations?

Bonus notes:
Bauman quotes Alain Ehrenberg on the idea that suffering comes from a surfeit of possibility rather than from prohibitions. Seems a little myopic not to consider material deprivation.

Reputation systems are a mode of social deskilling.

Pictures of clouds