This is not a Diary

Zygmunt Bauman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745661025
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This is not a diary: while these observations were recorded in autumn 2010 and spring 2011 in the form of dated entries, they are not a personal reflection but an attempt to capture signs of our times in their movement - possibly at birth, at a stage when they are still barely perceptible, and in any case before they have matured into common, all too familiar forms, escaping our attention due to their banality. Some will perhaps settle in our daily life for a long time to come, others will fade and vanish before they would otherwise have a chance to be noted, recorded and explored in depth: in our fast-moving, protean and kaleidoscopic world, it is hardly possible to predict their future course and to decide in advance which of them will grow in volume and significance and which will prove to have been still-born. Whatever their fate, the author tried to take a leaf from William Blake's precept of seeing the universe in a grain of sand - and, having done so, alert us to what is or may be happening to our individual lives, forms of togetherness, shared prospects; to the ways we perceive and relate to each other, the forces that shape our life chances and itineraries; and to the ways we try to control, or at least influence, and sometimes even reform for the better, some or all those dimensions of our existence.

These timely meditations by one of the most perceptive social thinkers of our time will appeal to a wide range of readers.

February 2011

2 February 2011

On glocalization coming of age

One is tempted to say that social inventions or reinventions – such as the newly invented or discovered possibility of restoring to the city square its ancient role of the agora in which rules and rulers were made and unmade – tend to spread ‘like a forest fire’. One would say that if it were not for the fact that globalization has finally invalidated that time-honoured metaphor. Forest fires proceed by spreading. Today’s social inventions progress by leaping.

Geographical distances no longer matter. Distances are no longer obstacles, and their lengths no longer determine the distribution of probabilities. Nor do neighbourhoods and physical proximity – this is why the metaphor of the ‘domino effect’, implying close proximity, indeed contiguity of cause and effect has lost much, perhaps even most, of its accuracy. Stimuli travel independently of their causes: causes may be local, the reach of their inspirations is global; causes may be global, their impacts are shaped and targeted locally. Entangled in the world-wide web, copycat patterns fly almost randomly in extraterritorial space – without scheduled itineraries and encountering few if any barriers or checkpoints – but they invariably come down on locally built landing strips. You can never be sure in advance on which strip they will land, by which of the innumerable control towers they will be spotted, intercepted and guided to a local airfield, and how many crash landings they will suffer and where. What renders time spent on predictions wasted, and prognoses unreliable, is the fact that the landing strips and control towers share the habits of things that float – they are constructed ad hoc, to catch a single selected trophy, hunt a single quarry, and tend to fall down the moment the mission is accomplished. Who is that ‘al-Shahid’ (‘martyr’ in Arabic) who single-handedly summoned the crowds to transform the Tahrir Square for a few days into a (temporary, ad hoc) agora? No one had heard of her or him before (read, she or he was not there before), and no one recognized the man or woman on the square beyond the nickname (read, she or he was not there) when the crowds answered the call … The point is, though, that this hardly matters.

The distinctions between far away and close by, or here and there, are made all but null and void once they are transferred to cyberspace and subjected to online or on-air logic; if not yet in the notoriously inert, lagging and sluggish imagination, then in their pragmatic potency. This is the condition towards which glocalization, the process of stripping locality of its importance while simultaneously adding to its significance, was aimed from its very start. The time has come to admit that it has arrived there: or, rather, that it has brought (pushed or pulled) us there.

Stripping place of its importance means that its plight and potency, fullness or emptiness, the dramas played in it and the spectators they attract can no longer be considered as its private matter. Places may (and do) propose, but it is now the turn of the unknown, uncontrolled, intractable and unpredictable forces roaming in the ‘space of flows’ to dispose. Initiatives continue to be local, but their consequences are now global, staying stubbornly beyond the powers of the initiative’s birthplace to predict, plan or steer, or the powers of any other place for that matter. Once launched, they – like the notorious ‘intelligent missiles’ – are fully and truly on their own. They are also ‘hostages to fate’, though the fate to which they are hostage is nowadays composed and perpetually recomposed from the ongoing rivalry between landing strips locally laid out and hastily paved for ready-made copycats. The current map and rankings of established airports are of no importance here. And the composition of a global air-traffic authority would be similarly unimportant were such an institution to exist – which it does not, as the pretenders to such a role currently learn the hard way.

‘Every time the administration uttered something, its words were immediately overtaken by events on the ground,’ said Robert Malley, Middle East and North Africa programme director for the International Crisis Group. ‘And in a matter of days, every assumption about the United States’ relationship with Egypt was upended’, – according to today’s issue of the New York Times. And according to the latest information on Egypt from Mark Mardell, the BBC’s North America Editor,

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has telephoned the new vice-president and intelligence chief of two decades, Omar Suleiman, to tell him immediately to seize the opportunity for a transition to a more democratic society. That transition must start now. She said that the violence was shocking and told him that they must investigate the violence and hold those responsible accountable.

A few hours later, leaders of the countries believed to be the most important places in Europe – Merkel, Sarkozy, Cameron, Zapatero and Berlusconi – in an uncharacteristically unanimous declaration, repeated Hillary Clinton’s appeal/demand. They all said what they did at roughly the same time that Al-Jazeera’s cameras caught a demonstrator carrying a placard saying ‘Obama, shut up!’ The significance of place, rising independently of its importance, is precisely in its ability to accommodate the carrying of such placards and the people who carry them. Hands too short to meddle with things in global space are just long enough (or at least seem to be long enough) to embrace the locality and press it close, while (hopefully) fending off intruders and false pretenders.

One day after Hillary Clinton’s announcement, the New York Times informs us of the full recasting of American foreign policy: ‘The Obama administration seemed determined Wednesday to put as much daylight as possible between Mr. Obama and Mr. Mubarak, once considered an unshakable American supporter in a tumultuous region.’ Well, that global power would hardly have made such an acrobatic volte-face had not the distant locality decided to make use of its new-found significance. As Shawki al-Qadi, an opposition lawmaker in Yemen, suggests, it is not the people who are afraid of their governments, which surrendered their powers to ‘global forces’ in exchange for shedding their obligations to their own people. As he puts it: ‘It is the opposite. Governments and their security forces are afraid of the people now. The new generation, the generation of the internet, is fearless. They want their full rights, and they want life, a dignified life.’ The knowledge that governments in the form in which they have been squeezed by ‘global forces’ are not a protection against instability but instability’s principal cause has been forced into the heads of the self-appointed ‘world leaders’ by the spectacular display of glocalization’s illogical logic in action.

‘Glocalization’ is a name given to a marital cohabitation that has been obliged, despite all the sound and fury known only too well to the majority of wedded couples, to negotiate a bearable modus co-vivendi, as separation, let alone divorce, is neither a realistic nor a desirable option. Glocalization is a name for a love–hate relationship, mixing attraction with repulsion: love that lusts for proximity, mixed with hate that yearns for distance. Such a relationship would perhaps have collapsed under the burden of its own incongruity had it not been for a pincer-like duo of inevitabilities: cut off from global supply routes, place would lack the stuff from which autonomous identities, and the contraptions keeping them alive, are nowadays made; and without locally improvised and serviced airfields, global forces would have nowhere to land, restaff, replenish and refuel. These are inevitabilities doomed to cohabit. For better or worse. Till death do them part.

4 February 2011

On what to do with the young

‘Increasingly viewed as yet another social burden, youth are no longer included in a discourse about the promise of a better future. Instead they are now considered part of a disposable population whose presence threatens to recall repressed collective memories of adult responsibility’: so writes Henry A. Giroux in an essay of 3 February 2011 titled ‘Youth in the era of disposability’ (see http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2011/Giroux-Youth.html).

As a matter of fact, the young are not fully, unambiguously disposable. What salvages them from straightforward disposability – if only just – and secures a measure of adult attention is their present and still more their potential contribution to consumer demand: successive echelons of youth mean a perpetual supply of ‘virgin land’, unspoilt and ready for cultivation, without which even the simple reproduction of the capitalist economy, not to mention economic growth, would be all but inconceivable. Youth is thought of and paid attention to as ‘yet another market’ to be commodified and exploited. ‘Through the educational force of a culture that commercializes every aspect of kids’ lives, using the Internet and various social networks along with the new media technologies such as cell phones’, corporate institutions aim at ‘immersing young people in the world of mass consumption in ways more direct and expansive than anything we have seen in the past’. A recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that ‘young people aged 8 to 18 now spend more than seven and a half hours a day with smart phones, computers, televisions, and other electronic devices, compared with less than six and a half hours five years ago. When you add the additional time youth spend texting, talking on their cell-phones or doing multiple tasks, such as watching TV while updating Facebook, the number rises to 11 hours of total media content each day.’

One can go on adding ever new evidence to that collected by Giroux: a gathering volume of evidence of ‘the problem of youth’ being cast fairly and squarely as an issue of ‘drilling into consumers’ and of all other youth-related issues being left on a side shelf – or being effaced altogether from the political, social and cultural agenda. On the one hand, as I already noted a few days ago, severe limitations imposed on governmental funding of higher education coupled with equally savage rises in university fees (indeed, the state deciding to wash its hands of its obligation to ‘educate people’, blatantly so in the case of ‘cutting edge’, bridgehead or frontline areas, but also somewhat more obliquely – as shown by the idea of replacing state-run secondary schools with ‘academies’ run by the consumer market – at the levels destined to determine the overall volume of knowledge and skills at the nation’s disposal as well as their distribution among categories of the population) testify to the fading of interest in youth as the future political and cultural elite of the nation. On the other hand, Facebook, for instance, and also other ‘social websites’ are opening quite new vistas for agencies bent on focusing on youth and on tackling them primarily as ‘virgin land’, waiting to be conquered and exploited by the advancing consumerist troops.

Thanks to the happy-go-lucky and enthusiastic self-exposure of Facebook addicts to thousands of online friends and millions of online flâneurs, marketing managers can harness to the consumerist juggernaut the most intimate and ostensibly the most ‘personal’ and ‘unique’, articulated or half-conscious – already simmering or only potential – desires and wants; what will pop up on the screens fed by Facebook will now be a personal offer, prepared, groomed and caringly honed ‘especially for you’ – an offer you can’t refuse because you are unable to resist its temptation; after all, it is what you fully and truly needed all the time: it ‘fits your unique personality’ and ‘makes a statement’ to that effect, the statement you always wanted to make, showing you to be that unique personality that you are. This is, indeed, a genuine breakthrough, if ever there was one, in the fortunes of marketing.

It is well known that the lion’s share of the money spent on marketing is consumed by the exorbitantly costly effort of detecting, instilling and cultivating in prospective shoppers suitable desires to be reforged into a decision to obtain the particular product on offer. A certain Sal Abdin, a marketing adviser active on the web, grasps the essence of the task to be confronted when he addresses the following advice to adepts of the marketing art:

if you sell drills, write an article on how to make better holes, and you’ll get lots more sales leads than merely advertising information about your drills and drill specifications. Why does that work? Because nobody who bought a drill wanted a drill. They wanted a hole. Offer information about making holes and you’ll be much more successful. If you’re selling a course on losing weight, sell the benefits of being slim, of being more healthy, of feeling better, the fun of shopping for clothes, how the opposite sex will respond … know what I mean? Sell the benefits of the product and the product will sell itself when buyers reach the sales page. Mention its features but really emphasize what it can do for the buyer to make life better, easier, faster, happier, more successful … get my drift?

This is not a promise of an easy life, to be sure. Nor of a short, smooth and fast road to the target, which is a meeting between a customer wishing to buy and a product wished to be sold. Developing a desire for beautiful holes, and linking it to the drill promising to make them, is not an impossible task, perhaps, but it will take time and a lot of skill to settle it in the reader’s imagination and lift it close to the top of the reader’s dreams. The wished-for encounter will probably happen, but the road leading to that glorious moment of fulfilment is long, rough and bumpy, and above all there is no guarantee of reaching the destination until you’ve got there. And in addition, that road needs to be well paved and wide enough to accommodate an unknown number of walkers, although in all probability the number of those actually deciding to take it won’t justify the huge expense of making it so broad, pleasurable to walk on, tempting and inviting.

This is precisely why I called the Facebook opportunity ‘a genuine breakthrough’. It is an opportunity to do nothing less than cut out the costs of road-building from the marketing budget altogether – or almost. As in the case of so many other responsibilities, it shifts the task of developing desires in prospective clients from the (marketing) managers to the clients themselves. Thanks to the databank which Facebook users volunteer (unpaid!) and expand daily, marketing offers can now unfailingly spot customers who are already ‘prepared’, mellowed and matured, complete with right kind of desires (and who therefore hardly need lecturing on the beauty of holes); they can reach them directly in a doubly attractive disguise – flattering in addition to being welcome – offering a blessing that is ‘your own, made especially for you, to meet your own, personal needs’.

Just an inane question for our inane times: perhaps the last barrier standing between youth and its disposal is its newly discovered and enabled capacity to serve as a disposal tip for the excesses of the consumer industry in our era of disposability?

8 February 2011

On the virtues not for everyone

The credit collapse, bank giants on the verge of bankruptcy and pushing their clients over that verge, must have shocked savers and happy-go-lucky borrowers alike – but, as the latest figures show, not for long.

Lessons, even shocking ones, seem to be forgotten well before they manage to settle in the memory, let alone sediment into habits and predispositions. Whereas in the third quarter of 2009 Americans set aside 7 per cent of their incomes in saving accounts (a huge, 400 per cent rise compared to their pre-shock custom), by the end of 2010 their savings had fallen again, to just 5.3 per cent. In the same period, borrowing started climbing again, and so did shopping and spending. Hopes of a cultural revolution, or a mini-revolution at least, in the life patterns of the society of consumers seem to have come to nothing – no sooner aroused than quashed. The way to a resurrection of at least some of those puritan values that, as Max Weber kept repeating, ushered the world into the modern, capitalist adventure, from rags to riches and from good to better, has proved to be barricaded and blocked much more solidly than many an observer would have deemed likely. From top to bottom, Americans are returning in throngs to their second nature – contrived and acquired – as spenders, fast shutting the door on their past as savers. Or so at least the statistics of savings books and credit cards, respectively, suggest.

How to explain this? By invoking the demise of virtues and the stubbornness of appropriated and instilled personal vices among the savers turning into debtors who are sticking to their choice through thick and thin? Or blaming people’s learning difficulties? Or laying the blame at the door of the deceitful and unscrupulous, yet insidiously, cunningly, craftily seductive marketing agencies? There seems to be some truth in all these explanations. Some truth, but not the whole truth. Merging the statistics of falling savings and growing consumer credit hides two different social realities. Those people who have stopped saving are not the same ones as the people who have started reaching for their credit cards again: those people can afford neither to save nor to live on credit, both for much the same reason.

No doubt there are plenty of people between the Atlantic and the Pacific shores of the United States who feel firmly enough settled and provided for securely enough to allow themselves and their nearest and dearest to be rewarded with a bit more cossetting and self-indulgence. But there is no doubt either that there are plenty of others who are not creditworthy and are unable to save. According to the most recent survey conducted by the American Payroll Association, around 67 per cent of Americans are dependent on their next paycheck to meet current living expenses, and the majority of US employees would be hard-pressed to meet their financial obligations if their next paycheck came even a week late … No room for savings here.

A labour lawyer from Chicago, Thomas Geoghegan, suggests in today’s New York Times that 43 million Americans living in poverty (proportionally equivalent to the number of poverty-stricken in Egypt) are unlikely ever to be able to save however hard they try; and then he adds a few observations of his own, drawn from his protracted and extensive practice among Illinois workers – active, retired and unemployed – to explain why this is the case. Thirty years ago, two-thirds of workers were in pension plans with guaranteed lifetime benefits; now the proportion is one in five, and rapidly falling. Well, in the 1960s and 1970s labour unions ‘had their glory days – before they were smashed’; they served as ‘the nation’s financial planners’. But the world of those ‘glory days’, Geoghegan says, ‘has turned upside down’. And he observes, caustically, that after ‘US style banking’ ‘has destroyed social democracy’ in certain countries, ‘our pundits’ would be likely to go on insisting that ‘we can all save – even the poor’. They could point out that in C. L. R. James’s classic The Black Jacobins, even some slaves from San Domingo managed to save enough to buy freedom – and then would say, ‘See, you can do it.’ Just save your money. That’s the only hope … To which Geoghegan responds:

For most people at the median or below, savings is a matter of luck. Yes, I can pick up the self-hel...