Category: Zygmunt Bauman

>Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity: A Review, Part II

~ Clarissa ~ 3 Comments

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I want to dedicate the second part of my review of Liquid Modernity to those of its parts that I found to be objectionable. My problem with the entirety of Bauman’s work is that whenever he talks of people, humanity, or mankind at large, he always ends up making statements that are only true for a certain part of humanity, namely, white heterosexual males. Let’s take, for example, the following statement, in which the erasure of women is so complete as to be shocking:

‘Work’ so understood was the activity in which humanity as a whole was supposed to be engaged by its fate and nature, rather than by choice, when making its history. And ‘work’ so defined was a collective effort of which every single member of humankind had to partake. All the rest was but a consequence: casting work as the ‘natural condition’ of human beings, and being out of work as an abnormality; blaming departure from that condition for extant poverty and misery, deprivation and depravity. (137)

These statements are, of course, completely true if by “humanity as a whole” and “every single member of humankind” we refer exclusively to men. For women, the situation was and still is the exact opposite. Working mothers are routinely blamed for causing “extant poverty and misery, deprivation and depravity” of their poor, abandoned children. Women are constantly exhorted to “opt out” of the workplace and demonized for not doing so. Working conditions are geared towards making the life of working women as inhospitable as possible. If we keep this in mind, Bauman’s references to “humanity as a whole” become egregiously offensive.
In a similar vein, Bauman bemoans the disintegration of the patriarchal family, which brought about the liberation of all those pesky females he loves to erase. He becomes as preachy as any fundamentalist when he begins to lament the evils of divorce, especially when people who dare to abandon loveless marriages are not rich:

There is little doubt that when ‘trickled down’ to the poor and powerless, the new-style partnership with its fragility of marital contract and the ‘purification’ of the union of all but the ‘mutual satisfaction’ function spawns much misery, agony and human suffering and an ever-growing volume of broken, loveless and prospectless lives. (90)

How dare you, poor and powerless folks, look for satisfaction outside of the confines of the patriarchal family? You need to sit tight, patently bearing your miserable, loveless marriages.
What Bauman prefers to overlook in his anti-divorce rants is that, in the absolute majority of cases in the developed countries, it is women who seek the divorce (in 2010 in the US it was 72% of divorces petitioned for by women to 28% by men). The situation is even more clear-cut among college-educated couples where, according to the data provided by American Law and Economics Review, women file for divorce in about 90% of cases. This is not at all surprising since marriage is still a losing proposition for women even in the most developed countries. Women are still stuck with more housework, the greatest burden of child-rearing and very little gains coming out of being married other than some dubious prestige the TV shows try to convince us exists for women who get married. Married women live shorter lives than single women, while married men live longer than single men. For this reason, in real life (as opposed to what we are being told by television and newspapers) men are a lot more interested in marriage than women. The disintegration of the patriarchal family that bothers Bauman so much is, indeed, robbing men of power. At the same time, it liberates women. Women, however, are not a group that Bauman ever notices. 
It is often difficult for me to distinguish whether on this topic Bauman is being purposefully obtuse or if he genuinely, sincerely does not realize how biased his statements are. This is one of the foremost thinkers of our times. Is it possible that the whole history of women has passed him by? Look, for instance, at the following statement:

It is no longer the task of both partners to ‘make the relationship work’ – to see it work through thick and thin., ‘for richer for poorer’, in sickness and in health, to help each other through good and bad patches, to trim if need be one’s own preferences, to compromise and make sacrifices for the sake of a lasting union. (164)

Can Bauman really not know that to suffer in silence, practice resignation, trim one’s own preferences, compromise and make sacrifices was only and exclusively the task of a woman in patriarchal family structures? Can he possibly have missed the entire history of manuals for married women that proliferated from the Middle Ages until today and that exhorted (and still do) women to sacrifice themselves for the good of the family in the very terms that Bauman employs here? Is he being disingenuous with full knowledge of what he is doing, or is he truly this blind to the situation of an entire half of humanity? Note also the slippage into the Christian rhetoric that is quite unexpected in a Communist and a Jew. Apparently, Bauman’s need to push women back into the confines of the patriarchal family structure is so overwhelming that he forgets even the Marxist dogma that religion is the opium of the people.

>Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity: A Review, Part I

~ Clarissa ~ 1 Comment

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Liquid Modernity (2000) is probably Zygmunt Bauman’s most important work. This is where the philosopher introduces concepts that will inform his Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (2003), Liquid Life (2005), Liquid Fear (2006), Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (2006), etc. Since Bauman is one of my favorite contemporary philosophers (probably the second favorite after Žižek), I hope eventually to post reviews of all these books on my blog. As usual, I will dedicate the first part of my review to going over some of the ideas from Liquid Modernity that I found to be useful. Later, I will publish the second part of the review that will discuss what I consider to be flawed parts of Bauman’s argument.
The main idea that Bauman advances in this book is that it is a mistake to see modernity as a monolithic period that stretches more or less unchanged from the late XIXth century until today. Bauman distinguishes between two stages of modernity:
1. The first stage of modernity, according to Bauman, is the “solid” stage. This is the moment in history of our Western civilization where solid certainties of pre-modern times had disintegrated to such an extent that the only thing to do was to sweep these rotten underpinnings of pre-modern societies out of the way completely. The goal of this first stage of modernity was to erect its own solid certainties in the place of the ones that were going to be swept away by change. If we think about the trajectory of the Soviet approach to modernity, we will see that it fits Bauman’s argument perfectly. The transformative push of the first few years of the revolution led to an impenetrable fortress of a repressive Communist regime.
Bauman points out that the main fear of this first stage of modernity was that totalitarianism would emerge from its push to create a new set of certainties on the wasteland of the old society that had been destroyed by the advent of modernity. Orwell’s 1984, says Bauman, is a perfect example of what this solid stage of modernity saw as its worst-case scenario. As we know all too well today, totalitarian regimes did, in fact, flourish during this first stage of modernity.
2. Bauman refers to the second stage of modernity as “liquid.” At this stage, there is no more effort to replace a set of old rules, certainties and identities with a new one. The freedom to switch identities as often as we want, move around, transform ourselves is now seen as an end in itself and the most prized characteristic of our existence. Bauman’s goal in Liquid Modernity is to analyze the main concepts that inform this liquid stage of modernity and to point out the limitations of this freedom.
One of the main struggles of individuals in pre-modern societies consisted of defending their private sphere from the encroachment of the public sphere. People belonged to their families, their clans, guilds, social classes. Their identities that were assigned to them at birth were inexorable and inescapable. If you were born a woman, for example, this very fact implied a set of roles, behaviors and life strategies that was pre-ordained and that you could try to escape at your own peril. If you look at the history of art, you will see that it isn’t until the birth of the Romantic movement in late XVIII century that individual emotions and minute shades of personal feelings start being discussed as something valuable. It is only at the end of the XIXth century that we begin to see a slow process of liberation from identities one is assigned at birth.
Today, however, Bauman maintains, it is the public sphere that needs to be salvaged from the constant encroachment of the private sphere. According to the philosopher, our public sphere has been eroded by a constant parade of exhibitionist private issues that there isn’t any public sphere left to speak of. Think about the following statement by Bauman in terms of what we are witnessing in today’s politics:

What are commonly and ever more often perceived as ‘public issues’ are private problems of public figures. . . Not one among the ‘great and mighty’, let alone the offended ‘public opinion’, proposed the impeachment of Bill Clinton for abolishing welfare as a ‘federal issue’. (70-1)

We can see that this tendency has become even more pronounced today, 11 years after the publication of Bauman’s Liquid Modernity. To give just one example, there is a huge group of people whose political activism is limited to a painstaking investigation of whether Sarah Palin’s child is truly hers (I blogged about these folks here), as if her motherhood had anything whatsoever to do with whether she will make a good presidential candidate. We get regaled with endless stories about Michelle Obama’s personality, President Obama’s shoes, George W. Bush’s daughters, Donald Trump’s ex-wives. In the meanwhile, a discussion of what it is they are doing as politicians gets relegated to the realm of the inconsequential. 
While we are concentrated on discussing the private issues of others and exhibiting our own private sphere to the world (blogging and Facebook are a perfect example of this), we fail to notice that the very nature of power has changed. Formerly, those who possessed the greatest masses of land were the most powerful. Power was bogged down by the enormous apparatus of hardware and people needed to maintain it. Today, says Bauman, power has become liquid:

We are witnessing the revenge of nomadism over the principle of territoriality and settlement. In the fluid stage of modernity, the settled majority is ruled by the nomadic and exterritorial elite. Keeping the roads free for nomadic traffic and phasing out the remaining check-points has now become the meta-purpose of politics. (13)

The power today is hard to pinpoint in every sense of the word. As everything else, it has become mobile and uprooted.

(To be continued. . .)

>Zygmunt Bauman’s Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?: A Review, Part II

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

As I mentioned in the first part of this review, Bauman’s vision of today’s world is, at the very least, flawed. The impression his analysis often makes on me is one created by a person who is so afraid of certain aspects of life that he never ventures outside of his ivory tower. He hides from reality and theorizes about it from the
place of his fear. As a result, a lot of what he has to say bears no relation to reality. For instance, Bauman sees us as constantly moving away from coercion and towards freedom. He observes (or he believes that he observes)

the ever more evident dismantling of the system of normative regulation, and thereby the releasing of ever larger chunks of human conduct from coercive patterning, supervision, and policing, and relegating ever larger numbers of previously socialized functions to the realm of individual “life politics.”

I thought about this statement for a long while, but for the life of me I can’t see how anybody can say that the world today is moving away from supervision and policing. I don’t want to keep belaboring the point of those new airport scanners ad infinitum, but what about the US Patriot Act? If that is non-invasive and non-coercive, I honestly don’t know what is.

Bauman spends quite a lot of time attempting to construct an argument on the basis of this perceived disappearance of coercion and its substitution with something else:

Coercion is being replaced by stimulation, forceful imposition of behavioral patterns by seduction, policing of conduct by PR and advertising, and the normative regulation, as such, by the arousal of new needs and desires.

I have no idea why Bauman needs to present PR and advertising on the one hand and policing and coercion on the other as mutually exclusive. Coercion and advertising are part of the same system, two sides of the same coin. The arousal of new needs and desires is a product of both PR and policing. If we know that we will be policed (say, at an airport), we are very likely to provide ourselves with a kit that will make the process of being policed easier. People who travel a lot nowadays have a special personal grooming and make-up kits that come in small bottles and that are packaged separately. Before your trip, you can just grab your pre-packaged kits and head to the airport. In a similar fashion, one could give many examples of coercion and stimulation working together to impose new behavioral patterns. Advertising often serves not so much to provoke new desires as to give us a justification for accepting the needs imposed on us by coercion.
Another topic where Bauman’s argument is wide of the mark, is his description of an ideal employee for big corporations. For some reason, he has decided that in order to be competitive on the job market one has to be single, unattached, and not burdened with responsibilties:

Bosses tend nowadays to dislike having employees who are burdened with personal commitments to others-particularly those with firm commitments and especially the firmly long-term commitments. The harsh demands of professional survival all too often confront men and women with morally devastating choices between the requirements of their career and caring for others. Bosses prefer to employ unburdened, free-floating individuals who are ready to break all bonds at a moment’s notice and who never think twice when “ethical demands” must be sacrificed to the “demands of the job.”

Nothing in this statement makes sense. A commitment-free individual, unburdened with a mortgage and dependent family members, is the worst nightmare of repressive employers. Such an employee feels free to leave the second she feels unhappy with the conditions of her employment. A “free-floating” individual doesn’t scare as easy as the one who is the only breadwinner for a group of people. If I have several mouths to feed, I am more likely to swallow a lot of shit coming from my bosses in order to keep my job at any cost. If, however, I don’t owe anything to anybody, I will leave the company without a second thought and will have no trouble moving to a different city, state, or even country. This is precisely why we are so constantly brainwashed into marrying and having children. Free people pose the greatest danger to the system. Why Bauman would wish to claim the opposite is incomprehensible to me.
In his desire to signal his rejection of the way the world is today, Bauman allows his argument to become sloppy. For instance, the philosopher bemoans the lack of interest in politics in today’s world:

All over the “developed” and affluent part of the planet, signs abound of fading interest in the acquisition and exercise of social skills, of people turning their backs on politics, of growing political apathy and loss of interest in the running of the political process.

He fails to mention, however, when that happy age of political participation that is “fading” today actually took place. I believe that any argument about things getting much worse absolutely has to mention the time period with which today’s reality is being compared. Otherwise, there is no value to this line of reasoning.
To summarize, Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? offers an insightful discussion of identity construction. However, as soon as Bauman begins to theorize about the subjects of ethics and consumerism, he cannot avoid the need to massage reality into the confines of his flawed system.

Zygmunt Bauman’s Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?: A Review, Part I

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

Zygmunt Bauman is one of my favorite contemporary philosophers. His interest in the mechanisms of identity construction is enough to make me follow his work with great dedication.

Bauman’s recent Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? (Institute for Human Sciences Vienna Lecture Series) made a dubious impression on me. Everything Bauman has to say about identity is really good. Everything he has to say on other topics, however, is really not. This is unusual, since normally philosophers are provoked by the topic of identity into uttering strings of annoying platitudes. Bauman avoids this danger and talks about identity in a thought-provoking and profound way. The other subjects he addresses in Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? , though, are analyzed in a much weaker way. Unfortunately, a moment comes in everybody’s life when our brain cannot process change as effectively as it used to when we were younger. As a result, we see any change in our world as at worst terrifying and at best negative. This is, sadly, what happens to Bauman. His fear of today’s reality taints his analysis and robs it of any intellectual value. I have no patience with anybody whose sexism and racism do not allow them to recognize that life today is without a shadow of a doubt better than at any other point in history. Bauman’s lamentations about some unspecified past when everything was better, fresher, and sweeter are a testimony to his nostalgia for his lost youth. This nostalgia is so strong that it overruns the obvious ethical considerations that should have helped Bauman remember that the current historical period he dislikes so much is characterized by an incredible progress in the rights of women, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities.

In this review, I will first address the parts of Bauman’s argument that I really liked. Then, I will proceed to discuss the much weaker second half of this book.

Bauman starts his discussion of identity formation by observing how much the task of creating an identity is linked to fear, anxiety, and constant insecurity:

Identities exist today solely in the process of continuous renegotiation. Identity formation, or more correctly their re-formation, turns into a lifelong task, never complete; at no moment of life is the identity “final” There always remains an outstanding task of readjustment, since neither conditions of life nor the sets of opportunities and threats ever stop changing. That built-in “nonfinality,” the incurable inconclusiveness of the task of self-identification, causes a lot of tension and anxiety.

The idea that identity today is negotiable, fluid, and non-static has, of course, turned into something of a favorite platitude among the theorists of identity. What is different in Bauman’s analysis is that his thinking does not stop there. He realizes that the qualities of fluidity and variability of contemporary identities do not in any way rob them of their potential to do harm. It is a given that everybody today moves seamlessly between identities. This mere fact, however, does nothing to alleviate the dreadful burden of identity.

By its very nature, collective identity requires a common enemy. The ever-growing complexity of today’s world makes the need for this enemy stronger, instead of weaker:

The act of selecting a group as one’s site of belonging in fact constitutes some other groups as alien and, potentially, hostile territory: “I am P” always means (at least implicitly, but often explicitly) that “most certainly, I am not Q, R, S, and so on.” “Belonging” is one side of the coin, and the other side is separation and opposition-which all too often evolve into resentment, antagonism, and open conflict. Identification of an adversary is an indispensable element of identification with an “entity of belonging”-and, through the latter, also a crucial element of self-identification. Identification of an enemy construed as an incarnation of the evil against which the community “integrates,” gives clarity to life purposes and to the world in which life is lived.

Consequently, when the world becomes less clear and more complex, a group needs to construct an enemy who is more and more evil with every passing day. Thus, those who believe that we live in a post-identity world are completely wrong. I have no idea whether these people even follow the news or turn on the television. There are no structures in place today that would dilute the strength of collective identifications. Just the opposite.

After this impressive discussion of identity, Bauman proceeds to talk about the actual subject of his book, which is the relationship between ethics and consumerism. And here, unfortunately, his argument begins to fall apart. In order to introduce the topic of ethics, the philosopher comes out with the following bizarre statement:

In order to have self-love, we need to be loved or to have hope of being loved. Refusal of love-a snub, a rejection, denial of the status of a love-worthy object-breeds self-hatred. Self-love is built of the love offered to us by others. Others must love us first, so that we can begin to love ourselves.

It honestly took me a while to realize that the author was completely serious in this statement. When I finally saw that no punch line was coming and this is exactly what he meant to say, I felt pretty embarrassed for Bauman. You cannot proceed to theorize on the basis of your psychological insecurities and neuroses. Of course, we can never escape them, but the least we could do is avoid projecting them onto the entire world. The kind of self-love that is so dependent on the aceptance and approval of others is beyond unhealthy. A theory constructed on the basis of this vision cannot convince anybody.