Hybridization

In his pungent recent book, Liquid Life (Polity, 2005), the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman describes the divergence between the “teaching” and the “taught” classes within the global economy. What he calls the “knowledge classes” are experts at seeking and achieving satisfaction, and have mastered the communications and transportation technologies that enable them to move faster and more gracefully than “others.” They are adepts at “composing, decomposing and recomposing their identities and cannot but be pleasantly impressed by the facility and relative cheapness with which the job is being done daily.” They are the great exemplars of what Bauman calls “homo eligens” – choosing man. Those who make and remake themselves have been described as “cultural hybrids,” and the process as “hybridization.” It might be called “cultural prostitution.”

This phenomenon of “hybridization,” though often identified as a kind of cultural “mixing” aims in fact, Bauman argues, at separation. It is “an ideological gloss on achieved or claimed extraterritoriality” – the freedom to trespass and cross boundaries, and the freedom to enter and exit at will. Members of the knowledge classes “grow indignant” when others seem resistant to follow their lead, but “all the puzzlement and indignation notwithstanding, perhaps the circumstance that ‘the others’ do not and cannot follow their example adds to the attractions of hybridity and to the satisfaction and self-esteem of thsoe who can and do embrace it.” Hybridization is a declaration of autonomy, a freedom from any single defined meaning or identity or community; “‘hybrid culture’ seeks its identity in not belonging: in the freedom to defy and neglect the borders that bind movements and choices of lesser, inferior people – the ‘locals.’” Bauman intriguingly defines “fundamentalism” as the choice to “hold fast to inherited and/or ascribed identity.”

Behind all this, according to Bauman, is the aporia of modern individuality. On the one hand, being an individual means being different from everyone else; on the other hand, we live in a society of individuality, where “everyone must be individual.” Individuality is a task set by the society of individuals. Modern people are no longer raftsman, carried by the current of culture in pre-assigned directions; they are sailors, who need to chart their own course. To the extent that people conform to the societal demand for individuality, to that extent they fail to be individuals, since they are simply doing what everyone else does. To the extent that they fail to conform, they also of course fail to be individuals, since they permit themselves to be defined by something outside themselves. Bauman describes this dilemma as a gap between de jure individuality (ie, the identity and task assigned by the society of individuality) and de facto individuality (actual freedom to make choices).

In the effort to realize this elusive individuality, people turn within themselves, guided by various experts and self-help gurus, but this inward turn often results in becoming enslaved to the ideology of the guru, and undermines rather than realizes individuality. Consumption is another socially approved method for achieving individuality. For Bauman, “a consumer economy must also be an economy of fast-ageing objects, almost instant obsolescence and the rapid rotation of goods, and so also of excess and waste.” To be successful in building a bridge from de jure to de facto individuality requires one to be up-to-date, not caught dead with last season’s goods or fashions: “Success and failure in the chase for uniqueness depends on the speed of the runners, their adroitness in promptly getting rid of things that have been relegated form premiership league – although the designers of new and improved consumer products are all too willing to promise a second change to the hapless competitors who have been eliminated in the previous race.” Homo eligens and the market are mutually parasitic: “The market would not survive if customers held on to things. For the sake of its own survival, it cannot stand clients who are committed and loyal, or who just hold to a consistent and cohesive trajectory that resists being distracted and bars sideward sallies; apart, that is, from those who are committed to shopping and loyal to the trajectories that lead through the shopping malls.”

Rejection of teleology is at the core of hybridization: “In the last account, ‘hybridization’ stands for a movement aimed towards a perpetually ‘unfixed,’ indeed ‘unfixable,’ identity. At the unreachable, stubbornly receding horizon of the process looms an identity defined solely by its distinction from all the rest: from each and any of the identities named, known and recognized, and for that reason apparently fixed.” Its lack of any “preselected target” toward which the process moves is “compensated for only by an excess of cultural markers and a steady effort to hedge all bets and keep all options open.”

In such a context, genuine radicalism means “staying put” or what Eugene Peterson described as a “long obedience in one direction.”