Books have their own fate, and it is a mark of the perspicacity of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s perception that his 2003 work on the commodification of dating culture at the turn of the century should turn out to actually be about the tech takeover of higher education in 2026.
Anyone may be forgiven for never having heard of Liquid Love. A Princeton academic (who must rename nameless) recently compared the cover to a 90s lube advert. Early critics grumbled about the short (162 pp.) book’s meandering style and lack of unified message. But, from the vantage point of 2026, its goofy appearance and amorphous interior turn out to have been nothing but camouflage for smuggling an important message into the future. Not that Bauman necessarily intended this of course. But books like children have their own fate quite apart from the intentions of their progenitors.
Written 10 years before the boom in dating apps, much of this book already describes the effects of a market economy mindset on interpersonal relationships, with a special focus on romantic relationships. Bauman uses the phrase ‘market economy’ to indicate an existential stance that thrives on first enclosing commons and then charging for access to pale imitations of the goods those commons used to produce. He describes the tactics of the market economy:
“First, as many aspects as possible of the market-independent moral economy are commodified and recast as aspects of consumption. Second, anything in the moral economy of the communitas that resists such commodification is denied relevance to the prosperity of the society of consumers; it is stripped of value in a society trained to measure values in currency and to identify them with the price tags carried by sellable and purchasable objects and services; and ultimately it is pressed out of public (and, it is hoped, individual) attention by being struck out of the public accounts of human well-being.” (pp. 74-75).
Mutatis mutandis - changing what must be changed, from the focus on romantic love to a focus on what is variously referred to as education, learning, or simply “intelligence” - the acoustics of the contemporary educational landscape amplify these words in deeply resonant ways. For one response to the question of “what are the humanities?” is that they are that kernel of the moral economy of learning that ‘resists commodification’ and which is thereby ‘denied relevance’ until ‘it is pressed out of public attention’ and decoupled from any conception of human well-being.
There is a lot to say in relation to all this. For instance, how “intelligence” comes from a word meaning not “to know” or “have knowledge” but rather “to understand” (intellegere, literally “to read between”), and thus belongs to those disciplines which seek to further understanding rather than to impose control. There is much to say about the monstrous philosophy of “reality privilege” which fills Silicon Valley heads with rot, holding up one standard for ‘human well-being’ for the elite, who may enjoy the goods of life directly, and another for the masses, who must content themselves with simulacra. This poisonous credo motivates the market economy to commodify the goods of the moral economy - to make an app that allows anyone to find love, to a make chatbot that allows anyone to reap the benefits of human knowledge. It sounds good, doesn’t it? But it doesn’t feel good, does it.
Bauman goes on, and here it seems more than ever that he is speaking to our moment, in which the humanities - the disciplines which promote the unprejudiced cultivation of attention - are being suffocated by an inhuman desire for control:
“The outcome of the present war is anything but a foregone conclusion, though thus far there seems to be only one side on the offensive, with the other side in an almost continuous retreat. Communitas has lost a lot of ground […]. Loss of territory is an ominous and potentially disastrous development in every war, but the factor that ultimately decides the outcome of hostilities is the fighting ability of the troops. Lost territory is easier to recoup than a loss of fighting spirit and a fading of trust in the purpose and chances of resistance.” (p. 75)
Bauman was probably not one to use the language of war lightly. As a Pole born in 1925 he saw his country swallowed up by fascists, participated in the Battles of Kolberg and Berlin aged only 19, and after the war became one of the youngest majors in Polish history.
“[…] The major and probably the most seminal success of the market offensive so far has been the gradual (and by no means complete and unredeemable) but persistent crumbling away of the skills of sociality [mutatis mutandis, the skills of independent thought]. In matters of interpersonal relations [m. m., in matters of intelligence, or independent thinking], the deskilled actors find themselves ever more often in ‘agentic mode’ - acting heteronomously, on overt or subliminal instructions, and guided primarily by the wish to follow the briefings to the letter and by the fear of departing from the models currently in vogue. The seductive allure of heteronomous action consists mostly in a surrender of responsibility; an authoritative recipe is purchased in a package deal with a release from the need to answer for the adverse results of its application.” (p. 75)
What Bauman calls ‘the seductive allure of heteronomous action’ is what psychoanalyst Erich Fromm described as ‘the escape from freedom’, a phrase he used to describe the mass flight into fascism by millions in Europe in the 1930s. It is also the explicit desire of Marcello Clerici, the titular “conformist” in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 Il Conformista, who when asked what he hopes to gain for himself in joining Mussolini’s secret police answers only, “la normalità” - a sense of normality, of belonging. But as Clerici learns, as he is sent to Paris to assassinate his old philosophy professor, and falls in love with the professor’s wife, there is no such thing as ‘a surrender of responsibility.’ And if I drink oblivion of a day, so shorten I the stature of my soul - but I do not thereby rid myself of the trouble of having one. I only make it harder to find it. The major success of the market offensive, or the secret to its continued success, is its infectious blindness to the unquantifiable, to those realities of this life which communicate before they are understood.
The world in which these things are denied is the world of the Lager, the Concentration Camp. Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo asks us if someone deprived of their dignity, stripped of their clothes, their hair, their rights, is a human being like you or me. By his own account, what saved his life in Auschwitz was exchanging some lines of Dante with a fellow prisoner: ‘fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza’ (you were not made to live like animals, but to follow virtue and knowledge, Inferno, XXVI, ll.119-120). This world exists still, it is the world in which much of humanity presently lives. Must we see this world again on our very doorstep before we are finally ready to call out the lies we are daily fed by corrupt politicians and mad billionaires?
