Society under Siege

Zygmunt Bauman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745629858, 9780745629841
• eBook ISBN: 9780745657271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Society is under siege – under attack on two fronts: from the global frontier-land where old structures and rules do not hold and new ones are slow to take shape, and from the fluid, undefined domain of life politics. The space between these two fronts, until recently ruled by the sovereign nation-state and identified by social scientists as 'society' is ever more difficult to conceive of as a self-enclosed entity. And this confronts the established wisdom of the social sciences with a new challenge: sovereignty and power are becoming separated from the politics of the territorial nation-state but are not becoming institutionalized in a new space. What are the consequences of this profound transformation of social life? What kind of world will it create for the twenty-first century?

This remarkable book – by one of the most original social thinkers writing today – attempts to trace this transformation and to assess its consequences for the life conditions of ordinary individuals. The first part of the book is devoted to the new global arena in which, thanks to the powerful forces of globalization, there is no 'outside', no secluded place to which one can retreat and hide away, and where the territorial wars of the past have given way to a new breed of 'reconnaissance wars'. The second part deals with settings in which life politics has taken hold and flourished. Bauman argues that the great challenge facing us today is whether we can find new ways to reforge the human diversity that is our fate into the vocation of human solidarity.

Part I
Global Politics

1
Chasing the Elusive Society

Now, as in C. Wright Mills's times, the job of the sociological imagination is a simultaneous reciprocal translation between private and public stories: translation of individually faced and privately tackled problems into public, collectively confronted issues, and of public interests into individually pursued life strategies. Since its inception, the place of sociology has been in the agora, that private-public meeting place, where (as Cornelius Castoriadis kept reminding us) the oikos and the ecclesia come face to face, hoping to make themselves understood to each other through a principled yet benevolent, and above all attentive dialogue.

The raw stuff processed by the sociological imagination is human experience. The end-product of the sociological imagination called ‘social reality’ is cast of the metal smelted from the ore of experience. Though its chemical substance cannot but reflect the composition of the ore, the product's contents also bear the mark of the smelting process which divides the ore's ingredients into useful product and waste, while its shape depends on the mould (that is, the cognitive frame) into which the melted metal has been poured.

The products of the sociological imagination, imagined social realities, may therefore vary in composition and shape even if the same experience supplies the raw material for the processing. It is not just any social reality, though, that can be melted and moulded from the given ore of human experience; one may expect contemporaneous products, however different they might otherwise be, to carry a ‘family resemblance’ betraying their common origins. But we can also suppose that once the deposits of a certain kind of ore are depleted and a different type of ore is fed into the furnaces, the smelting techniques would sooner or later be modified and the moulds recast.

I suggest, and I wish to argue, that the roots of the present-day reorientation of sociological inquiry, the shifts in our understanding of the products to be sought and the techniques likely to lead to their finding, are best understood if traced to the seminal change in the common experience of being-in-the-world.

The managerial imagination

The kind of imagination destined to lead to the ‘orthodox consensus’ (so dubbed by Anthony Giddens) which still prevailed in most sociological departments a couple of decades ago was triggered and set in motion by the experience of life carried on (to quote Talcott Parsons for a change) inside a ‘principally coordinated space’. Following the habit of Minerva's owl, known to spread its wings by the end of the day (that is, not very long before the sun rises on not just another, but a different, day), Parsons summed up the history of social thought as a consistent, even if overly long, vitiated and contorted, effort to crack what he considered to be the principal mystery of all human existence, first hinted at by Hobbes: how come that the actions of voluntary actors are nevertheless not random, and that out of the yarn of individually motivated actions regular and lasting patterns are woven? As if following Karl Marx's maxim that ‘the anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of the ape’, Parsons was also to rewrite the history of sociology as a long pilgrimage towards a preordained destination, namely his own discovery of the ‘system’ as the desperately sought ultimate and conclusive answer to the Hobbesian query. A ‘system’ with two strong arms: one (the ‘structure’) gripping actors from outside and setting limits to their freedom; the other (‘culture’) reaching into the actors’ interior, that place where wishes and purposes are sown and incubate, and kneading free will into a shape which makes the steeliest of structural grips feel like a comfortable, caring embrace.

To that ‘system’ Parsons imputed a purpose, and that purpose was the system's own survival: staying alive for as long as possible in a form as little changed as possible. Whatever else the system could be ostensibly concerned with, it aimed first of all at its own stability over time. For this purpose, the system ‘maintained its pattern’ by managing – defusing and neutralizing – the tensions which threatened it. Whatever served this task, whatever helped to preserve the status quo and its immunity to tangential or shearing forces, was ‘functional’; whatever contravened the managing efforts, pressed for change and so added tension was ‘dysfunctional’. The system was in a good state of health (defined by Parsons as homeostatic ‘self-equilibration’) if and only if it successfully cultivated the first category of attributes and fought back the second. Structure and culture were the principal contraptions serving the twofold task. They operated differently and used different tools, but converged on the same target. They cooperated and complemented each other in the ongoing war of attrition waged against randomness and contingency, as well as against mutations of the pattern. Both were essentially conservative forces, meant to keep things in a steady shape.

However odd that picture of social reality may seem to us who happen to live in the ‘software’ rather than ‘hardware’, ‘liquid’ rather than ‘solid’ phase of modernity, it did square rather well with the society imagined after the pattern of an administrative office. In the ‘hardware’, ‘solid’ phase of modernity, much of the experiential evidence pushed imagination in that direction. The main pressure to which men and women of that society were likely to be subjected was the requisite of conformity to standards and of following the routines ascribed to the allotted statuses and roles. That kind of society might have had little time and even less sentiment for inherited constraints and shown little restraint in sweeping them out of the way, but it was bent on constructing ‘new and improved’ constraints of its own and at any rate did not take lightly any individual tinkerings with the norms. The borderline between norm-following and deviation was clearly drawn and well guarded. Antiquity of custom might have been devalued as a title to authority, but new routines were brought into being – meant to bind tighter yet, and unlike the dilapidated and putrefied routines they came to replace, bind for a very long time to come. Individual human plants might have been uprooted and forcibly ‘disembedded’ from the beds in which they had been left to germinate and sprout in the ancien régime, but solely in order to be ‘re-embedded’ (and earnestly seek ‘re-embedment’) in the beds laid out in a better planned and rationally designed societal garden.

Modernity was a response to the gradual yet relentless and alarming disintegration of the ancien régime with its archipelago of loosely linked and essentially self-reproducing local communities, capped by supralocal powers known for their enormous greed but fairly limited managerial ambitions and capacities. That was, in Ernest Gellner's memorable phrase, a ‘dentistry state’ – specializing in extraction by torture. By and large, the managerial skills of princes were confined to the creaming off of surplus produce; they stopped well short of intervening in its production.

The ‘wealth of the nations’ – if that idea cropped up at all – was viewed by the rulers of the premodern state as something one may enjoy or suffer, but should placidly accept in the way one did the other inscrutable verdicts of Providence. It only came to be seen as a task, and so an object of scrutiny, concern, design and action, at the time when the monotonous self-reproduction of the conditions under which goods used to be produced – and above all the solidity of what came to be viewed as the ‘social’, as distinct from the divine, order – could no longer be relied upon. As Alexis de Tocque-ville demonstrated, the ancien régime collapsed well before the French revolutionaries boldly went where no one dared to go before, or thought it necessary or rewarding to go – into the heretofore unexplored territory of legislating a new, artificially designed, monitored and administered, man-made order into messy and unwieldy human affairs.

Modernity was born under the sign of such order – order seen as a task, as a matter of rational design, close monitoring and above all pernickety management. Modernity was bent on making the world manageable, and on its daily management; the zeal to manage was whipped up by the not altogether groundless conviction that when left to themselves things will go bust or run amuck. Modernity set about eliminating the accidental and the contingent. If the notorious ‘project of modernity’ can be adumbrated at all, it can only be envisaged as a retrospective gloss on a firm intention to insert determination in the place where accidents and games of chance would otherwise rule; to make the ambiguous eindeutig, the opaque transparent, the spontaneous calculable and the uncertain predictable; to inject the recognition of purpose into things and then make them strive for the attainment of that purpose.

Reflecting, recycling and reprocessing the modern experience, social science, itself a modern invention, set about exploring the mysterious ways in which free will is deployed in the production of regularities, norms and patterns – those ‘social facts’ of Émile Durkheim: external, coercive, blind to individual tussle and deaf to individual yearnings. In their practical application, so the incipient social science hoped, such findings would be of use in the construction of new and improved regularities, norms and patterns and in making them stick and hold once they had been put in place. Social thought shared with the rest of modern science the urge to ‘know nature in order to master it’ and so make it more suited to the needs of the human species; in the case of social science though, ‘mastering nature’ meant primarily mastering the human species itself, and that meant guiding and streamlining the moves of every and any individual member of that species.

I remember being taught social psychology half a century ago mostly by the results of laboratory experiments with rats, in which hungry rats were sent through twisted corridors of a skilfully constructed maze in search of food, while the speed with which they learned, through trial and error, the shortest way to the target was carefully monitored. The less time they took to reach the pellet of food which was their reward, the more successful their learning process, the royal road to survival, was concluded to be. I was lucky to have had sensible teachers and none of them suggested that ‘rats are like humans’; but there was tacit agreement among us all, teachers and students alike, that from the rats’ behaviour in the maze we could learn a lot about the logic of our own human life in our own maze-like world; not because the rats were ‘like humans’, but because the maze constructed in the experimenters’ laboratory seemed so similar to the world in which we, the humans, searched for, discovered and learned our ways in our daily life. Like the maze, our world seemed to be made of solid, impenetrable and impervious walls that could not be broken through and that would last without change of shape if not forever, then surely for the duration of our learning; like the maze, our world was full of forking paths and crossroads – each one with a single turn that was right but many seductive yet deceptive turns leading to a blank wall or away from the target; as in the laboratory maze, the reward for finding the right passage was, in that world of ours, placed each time in the same spot; learning the way to that spot and then following it with relentless monotony was apparently the sole art that needed to be mastered.

To cut a long story short: the laboratory maze was a miniature replica of the ‘big world’ of humans; more exactly, of the visualization of that world by the countless humans who experienced it daily. Constructors of the maze were ‘within reason’, or at least not wide of the mark, when they insisted that whatever goes on in a rat's head cannot be established with any degree of certainty, but that this is only a minor irritant, since the mysterious things called thoughts or emotions can be left out of account without damage to the precision with which the learning process can be measured and the course of streamlining, regularizing and routinizing the learning creatures’ behaviour can be modelled. Taking a shortcut from the stimulus to the response might have been dictated by technical necessity, but no harm is done once that shortcut is taken to be the sole thing which counts as the quantifiable relation between ‘input’ and ‘output’ – the forces operating ‘out there’, in the world, and the learners’ reactions to such forces.

Émile Durkheim, the advocate of ‘external’ and coercive ‘social facts’ as the genuine driving force of individual conduct, and Max Weber, the advocate of an ‘understanding sociology’ bent on ‘explanation at the level of meaning’, might have suggested and deployed cognitive strategies in many ways incompatible, but there was an underlying agreement between them on at least one point: individual actors are not good judges of the causes of their own actions, and so their individual judgements are not the stuff of which good sociological accounts of ‘social reality’ can be made, and are better left out of account. What really makes individuals tick, including their genuine, not self-assessed, motives, is located in the world outside and more often than not eludes their grasp. According to Max Weber:

In the great majority of cases actual action goes on in a state of inarticulate half-consciousness or actual unconsciousness of its subjective meaning. The actor is more likely to ‘be aware’ of it in a vague sense than he is to ‘know’ what he is doing or be explicitly self-conscious about it. In most cases his action is governed by impulse or habit. Only occasionally, and, in the uniform action of large numbers, often only in the case of a few individuals, is the subjective meaning of the action, whether rational or irrational, brought clearly into consciousness …

[I]t is the task of the sociologist to be aware of this motivational situation and to describe and analyse it, even though it has not actually been concretely part of the conscious ‘intention’ of the actor: possibly not at all, at least not fully.¹

While according to Durkheim, the representations which we, the ordinary and sociologically unenlightened folks, ‘have been able to make in the course of our life’ of the ‘facts properly so called’,

having been made uncritically and unmethodically, are devoid of scientific value, and must be discarded. The facts of individual psychology themselves have this character and must be seen in this way. For although they are by definition purely mental, our consciousness of them reveals to us neither their real nature nor their genesis. It allows us to know them up to a certain point… [I]t gives us a confused, fleeting, subjective impression of them, but not clear and scientific notions of explanatory concepts.²

Each one of the two great codifiers of the rules by which the game of sociology was to be played for many years to come might have ignored the significance of the other codifier's propositions and failed to acknowledge his participation in the same game, and yet both saw eye to eye when it came to the dismissal of the effectively independent role of individuals as autonomous agents. That dismissal was, after all, what the project of the modern order was about, and the role of sociology, overtly proclaimed or tacitly presumed, was to smooth the way to the implementation of that project in practice. The sociologists’ bird's-eye view – external and thereby ‘objective’ and wertfrei - of the springs, causes and effects of individual actions can be seen in retrospect as a theoretical gloss over the managing agencies’ treatment of society at large, the whole of society as well as its variously cut-out segments, as objects of normative regulation and administration. The strategy of sociological work had to be legislative and monological if the promise to render that work of any use to managerial needs was to be held to – but also to retain its credibility: its reasonable correspondence with daily reiterated lay experience.

The founders of modern sociology had their doubts as to the wisdom of the project they examined and described as social reality. Sometimes, not unlike God who was unsure about the quality of His man-making experiment and uncharacteristically abstained from describing it as good, they were haunted by a dark premonition that something of ultimate value was left out of account once humankind embarked, or had been pushed, on the road on which the ordering/rationalizing zeal had kept it moving ever since. Weber famously agonized about the slow yet relentless erosion of individuality; Durkheim equally famously bewailed the threats to the ethics of solidarity.

Not so, though, the lesser minds who followed the path which the founders, prudently, spattered with warning signs and used intermittently both the bright and the sombre colours of the palette to sketch. The managerial perspective which the founders studied in the fashion of entomologists examining the bizarre ways of an insect species was whole-heartedly embraced by most of their followers and made their own. Paul Lazarsfeld's sole worry was that sociology, presumably because of its youth, was not yet fit to raise human society to the level of reliability and predictability of a machine – the idea which he expressed with exemplary clarity in his 1948 speech to Oslo students (as quoted by Mills):

[S]ociology is not yet in the stage where it can provide a safe basis for social engineering…. It took the natural sciences about 250 years between Galileo and the beginning of the industrial revolution before they had a major effect upon the history of the world. Empirical social research has a history of three or four decades.

For Talcott Parsons, on whose work, in his own conviction, the history of social thought, barring a few regrettable errors and silly deviations, converged with implacable logic, system management was already the essential truth of social reality, and therefore unravelling the secrets of managerial wisdom as embodied in the system's daily works was the prime task of sociological theorizing. In C. Wright Mills's translation from Parsons's notoriously esoteric language into plain English, that wisdom consisted in supplying the system with all the means needed for self-equilibration, that is for remaining steadfastly, come what may, identical with itself:

There are two major ways by which the social equilibrium is maintained, and by which – should either or both fail – disequilibrium results. The first is ‘socialization’, all the ways by which the newborn individual is made into a social person…The second is ‘social control’, by which I mean all the ways of keeping people in line and by which they keep themselves in line. By ‘line’ of course, I refer to whatever action is typically expected and appr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Global Politics
• Part II Life Politics
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover