In Search of Politics

Zygmunt Bauman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745621722, 9780745621715
• eBook ISBN: 9780745656977
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

We live in a world which no longer questions itself, which lives from one day to another managing successive crises and struggling to brace itself for new ones, without knowing where it is going and without trying to plan the itinerary. And everything important in our lives - livelihood, human bonds, partnerships, neighbourhood, goals worth pursuing and dangers to avoid - feels transient, precarious, vulnerable, insecure, uncertain, risky. Is there a connection between the shape of the world we inhabit and the way we live our lives? Exploring that connection, and finding out just how close it is, is the main concern of this book.

What is at stake in this inquiry is the possibility of re-building the"'private/public" space, where private troubles and public issues meet and where citizens engage in dialogue in order to govern themselves. Individual liberty can only be a product of collective work, it can only be collectively secured and guaranteed. And yet today we are moving towards a privatization of the means to secure individual liberty. If seen as a therapy for the present ills, this is bound to produce effects of a most sinister kind. The act of translating private troubles into public issues is in danger of falling into disuse and being forgotten. The argument of this book is that making the translation possible again is an urgent and vital imperative for the renewal of politics today.

This new book by Zygmunt Bauman - one of the most original and creative thinkers of our time - will be of particular interest to students of sociology, politics and social and political theory.

1

In Search of Public Space

Commenting on the widely reported events triggered in three different towns of the West Country by the news that paedophile Sidney Cooke had been released from prison and returned home, Decca Aitkenhead,¹ a Guardian reporter blessed by a sociological sixth sense, of whose rich harvest we shall repeatedly avail ourselves here, observed:

If there’s one thing guaranteed to get people out on the streets today, it is the whispered arrival of a paedophile. The helpfulness of such protests is increasingly being questioned. What we haven’t asked, however, is whether these protests actually have anything to do with paedophiles.

Aikenhead focused on one of these towns, Yeovil, where she found that the variegated crowd of grandmothers, teenagers, and businesswomen who had seldom, if ever, expressed any previous wish to engage in a public action had now laid protracted siege to the local police station, being not even sure that Cooke did indeed hide in the besieged building. Their ignorance concerning the facts of the matter took second place only to their determination to do something about them and to be seen to be doing it; and their determination gained enormously from the haziness of the facts. People who had all their lives steered clear of public protests now came, and stayed, and shouted ‘Kill the bastard’, and were prepared to keep vigil for as long as it took. Why? Were they after something other than the secure confinement of one public enemy whom they never saw and of whose whereabouts they were far from confident? Aitkenhead has an answer to that baffling question, and it is a convincing one.

What Cooke offers, wherever he is, is a rare opportunity to really hate someone, loudly, publicly, and with absolute impunity. It is a matter of good and evil … and so a gesture against Cooke defines you as decent. There are very few groups of people you can respectably hate any more. Paedophiles are the very thing.

‘At last I’ve found my cause’, said the chief organizer of the protest, herself a woman with no previous experience of any public role. ‘What Debra had probably found’, comments Aitkenhead, ‘is not “her cause”, but common cause – the sensation of communal motivation.’

Their demonstrations have shades of political rallies, religious ceremonies, union meetings – all those group experiences which used to define people’s sense of selves, and which are no longer available to them. And so now [they] organise against paedophiles. In a few years, the cause will be something else.

A prowler around the house

Aitkenhead is right again: a shortage of new causes is a most unlikely prospect, and there will always be enough empty plots at the graveyard of old causes. But for the time being – for days, rather than years, allowing for the mind-boggling speed of the wear-and-tear of public scares and moral panics – the cause is Sidney Cooke. Indeed, he is an excellent cause to bring together people who seek an outlet for long-accumulated anxiety.

First, Cooke has a name attached to him: this makes him into a tangible target, which fishes him out of the pap of ambient fears and gives him a bodily reality few other fears possess; even if unseen, he still can be construed as a solid object that can be handled, tied down, locked up, neutered, even destroyed – unlike most threats, which tend to be disconcertingly diffuse, oozy, evasive, spilt all over the place, unpinpointable. Second, by a happy coincidence Cooke has been placed on a spot where private concerns and public issues meet; more precisely, his case is an alchemical crucible in which love for one’s children – a daily experience, routine, yet private – can be miraculously transsubstantiated into a public spectacle of solidarity. Cooke has become a gangplank of sorts, however brittle and provisional, leading out of the prison of privacy. Last but not least, that gangplank is wide enough to allow a group, perhaps a massive one, escape; each lonely escapee is likely to be joined by other people escaping their own private prisons, and a community can be created just by using the same escape route and which will last as long as all feet are on the gangplank.

Politicians, people supposed to operate in the public space professionally (they have their offices there, or rather they call ‘public’ the space where their offices are), are hardly ever well prepared for the invasion by intruders; and inside the public space anyone without the right type of office, and who appears in the public space on anything other than an officially scripted, filed and stage-managed occasion and without invitation, is, by definition, an intruder. By these standards Sidney Cooke-bashers were, no doubt, intruders. Their presence inside the public space was from the start precarious. They therefore wished the legitimate inhabitants of the public space to acknowledge their presence and endorse its legitimacy.

Willie Horton had probably lost Michael Dukakis the American presidency. Before running for president, Dukakis served for ten years as governor of Massachusetts. He was one of the most vociferous opponents of the death penalty. He also thought prisons to be, predominantly, institutions of education and rehabilitation. He wished the penal system to restore to criminals their lost or forfeited humanity and prepare convicts for a ‘return to the community’: under his administration the inmates of state prisons were allowed home leaves. Willie Horton failed to return from one of those leaves. Instead, he raped a woman. This is what can be done to us all when the soft-hearted liberals are in charge, pointed out Dukakis’s adversary, George Bush – a staunch advocate of capital punishment. The journalists pressed Dukakis: ‘If Kitty, your wife, was raped, would you be in favour of capital punishment?’ Dukakis insisted that he would not ‘glorify violence’. He bade farewell to his presidency.

Victorious Bush went on to be defeated four years later by the governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton. As governor, Clinton authorized the execution of a retarded man, Ricky Ray Rector. Some commentators think that just as Horton lost Dukakis his election, Rector won Clinton’s. This is probably an exaggeration: Clinton did other things that also endeared him to ‘middle America’. He promised to be tough on crime, to hire more policemen and to put more policemen on the beat, to increase the number of crimes punishable with death, to build more prisons and more secure prisons. Rector’s contribution to Bill Clinton’s success was merely to serve as the living (sorry: dead) proof that the future president meant business; with such a feather in Clinton’s cap, ‘middle America’ could not but trust his words.

The duels at the top were replicated further down. Three candidates for the governorship of Texas used their allocated speech time at the party convention trying to outbid each other in their dedication to the death penalty. Mark White posed in front of the TV cameras surrounded by photographs of all the convicts who had been sent to the electric chair while he was governor. Not to be outdone, his competitor Jim Mattox reminded the electors that he personally supervised thirty-three executions. As it happened, both candidates found themselves outsmarted by a woman, Ann Richards, the vigour of whose pro-death-penalty rhetoric they obviously could not match, however strong their other credentials. In Florida the outgoing governor, Bob Martinez, made a spectacular come-back after a long period of losing steadily in popularity polls, once he reminded the electors that he had signed ninety decrees of execution. In California, the state which used to pride itself that it had not executed a single prisoner for a quarter of a century, Dianne Feinstein made her bid for office by declaring herself to be ‘the only Democrat in favour of the death penalty’. In response the other competitor, John Van de Kamp, hastened to let it be known that though ‘philosophically’ he is against execution, which he considers ‘barbaric’, he would put his philosophy aside once elected governor. To prove the point, he had himself photographed at the opening of a state-of-the-art gas-chamber for future executions and announced that when in charge of the state Department of Justice he put forty-two criminals on Death Row. In the end the promise to betray his convictions did not help him. The electors (three-quarters of whom favoured the death penalty) preferred a believer – a convinced executioner.

For more than a decade now, promises to be tough on crime and to send more criminals to their death have figured matter-of-factly at the top of the electoral agenda, whatever the political denomination of the candidate. For current and aspiring politicians, the extension of the death penalty is the prize-winning ticket in the popularity lottery. Opposition to capital punishment means, on the contrary, a self-inflicted political death.

In Yeovil the vigilantes pressed for a meeting with their MP, Paddy Ashdown. He refused to give them the legitimation they sought. Being himself of an uncertain public-space position, and certainly not one of its appointed/elected managers, he could only embrace the protesters’ cause at the expense of further jeopardizing his own public-space credentials. He chose to speak his mind, whatever he believed to be the word of truth, comparing the Cooke-bashers to ‘lynch mobs’ and resisting all pressures to endorse their actions and to put the stamp of a ‘public issue’ on their not quite clear private grievances.

Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, could not afford this sort of luxury. As one of the protest leaders declared, ‘What we would like to do now is link up with other campaigns. There are lots of little voices in lots of areas around the country. If we can get a big voice things might move a bit quicker.’ Such words portend an intention to settle in the public space for good; to claim a permanent voice in the way that space is administered. It must have sounded ominous to any politician currently in charge of the public space, though any seasoned politicians would know well that ‘linking up campaigns’ and ‘connecting little voices’ is neither easy to accomplish nor likely to happen; neither little (private) voices nor (local, one-issue) campaigns add up easily, and one could safely assume that this specific hope/intention to do so, like so many similar hopes and intentions before, would soon run its natural course, that is run aground, capsize, be abandoned and forgotten. Straw’s problem boiled down to showing that the administrators of the public space do take the little voices seriously – that is, that they are willing to take measures which will make it unnecessary for the little voices to be voiced; and, hopefully, that they should be remembered for showing that willingness. And so Jack Straw, who in all probability shared privately Paddy Ashdown’s publicly expressed opinion, said no more but that ‘It is vital that people do not take the law into their own hands’ (reminding us thereby that the law is meant to be handled by chosen hands only) and then went public, declaring that perhaps measures will be taken to ‘keep dangerous criminals behind bars indefinitely’. It may be that Jack Straw hoped to be remembered as a caring/sharing, listening administrator of public space; the previously quoted protest leader, after all, passed her verdict on the non-cooperative Paddy Ashdown: ‘I just hope that people don’t have short memories when it comes to the election.’²

Perhaps (a big ‘perhaps’, given the vigilance of the European Court of Human Rights) the dangerous criminals (that is, whichever criminals happen to attract and focus upon themselves the public fears of danger) will be kept behind the bars ‘indefinitely’; and yet getting them off the street and out of the headlines and the limelight will not make the fears, which made them the dangerous criminals they are in the first place, less indefinite and undefined as they are, as long as the reasons to be afraid persist and as long as the terrors they cause are suffered in solitude. Scared loners without a community will go on searching for a community without fears, and those in charge of the inhospitable public space will go on promising it. The snag is, though, that the only communities which the loners may hope to build and the managers of public space can seriously and responsibly offer are ones constructed of fear, suspicion and hate. Somewhere along the line, friendship and solidarity, once upon a time major community-building materials, became too flimsy, too rickety or too watery for the purpose.

Contemporary hardships and sufferings are fragmented, dispersed and scattered; and so is the dissent which they spawn. The dispersion of dissent, the difficulty of condensing it and anchoring it in a common cause and directing it against a common culprit, only makes the pains the more bitter. The contemporary world is a container full to the brim with free-floating fear and frustration desperately seeking outlets. Life is over-saturated with sombre apprehensions and sinister premonitions, all the more frightening for their non-specificity, blurred contours and hidden roots. As in the case of other over-saturated solutions, a speck of dust – a Sidney Cooke, for instance – is enough to trigger a violent condensation.

Twenty years ago (in Double Business Bind, Baltimore University Press, 1978) René Girard considered hypothetically what could have happened in equally hypothetical pre-social times when dissension was scattered throughout the population, and feud and violence, fed by the cut-throat competition for survival, tore communities apart or prevented their coming together. Trying to answer that question, Girard came forward with a selfconsciously and deliberately mythological account of the ‘birth of unity’. The decisive step, he ruminated, must have been the selection of a victim in whose killing, unlike other killings, all members of the population would take part, thereby becoming ‘united in murder’ by turning into helpers, accomplices or accessories after the fact. That spontaneous act of co-ordinated action had the potential of sedimenting the dispersed enmities and diffuse aggression as a clear division between propriety and impropriety, legitimate and illegitimate violence, innocence and guilt. It could bind the solitary (and frightened) beings into a solidary (and confident) community.

Girard’s story is, let me repeat, a fable, an etiological myth, a story which does not pretend to historical truth, only to making sense of the unknown ‘origins’. As Cornelius Castoriadis pointed out, the pre-social individual is, contrary to Aristotle, neither god nor beast, but a pure figment of philosophers’ imaginations. Like other etiological myths, Girard’s story does not tell us what actually did happen in the past; it is but an attempt to make sense out of the current presence of a phenomenon which is bizarre and difficult to comprehend, and to account for its continuous presence and rebirth. The true message of Girard’s story is that whenever dissent is scattered and unfocused, and whenever mutual suspicion and hostility rule, the only way forward or back to communal solidarity, to a secure – because solidary – habitat, is to pick a joint enemy and to unite forces in an act of joint atrocity aimed at a common target. It is solely the community of accomplices which provides (as long as it lasts) a guarantee against the crime being named a crime and being punished accordingly. What the community will therefore not suffer lightly are such people as refuse to join the hue and cry, who by their refusal cast doubt on the righteousness of the act.

The cauldron of Unsicherheit

Exactly seventy years ago Sigmund Freud wrote Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, translated into English, somewhat awkwardly, under the title Civilization and its Discontents. In that seminal book Freud suggested that ‘civilization’ (what he meant, of course, was our, Western, modern civilization; seventy years ago the term ‘civilization’ seldom appeared in the plural – and it was only the Western type of existence that gave itself the name of ‘civilization’) is a trade-off: one cherished value is sacrificed for another, equally imperative and close to heart. We read in the English translation that the gift that civilization brings is security – security from the many dangers which come from nature, one’s own body and other people. In other words, civilization offers freedom from fear, or at least makes the fears less awesome and intense than they would otherwise be. In exchange, however, civilization puts constraints – sometimes severe, as a rule oppressive, always irksome – on individual liberty. Not everything that their hearts desire are human beings allowed to pursue, and almost nothing can be pursued to the fullness of one’s heart’s desire. Instincts are kept within bounds or suppressed altogether, an unhappy condition – pregnant with psychic discomfort, neuroses and rebellion. The most common discontents and types of order-threatening behaviour stem, Freud implies, from sacrificing a lot of individual freedom for whatever we have gained, all together and each one of us, in terms of individual security.

I have suggested in my Postmodernity and its Discontents (Polity Press, 1997) that, were Freud writing his book seventy years later, he would probably need to reverse his diagnosis: the most common present-day human troubles and discontents are, like their predecessors, products of a trade-off, but this time it is security which is sacrificed day by day on the altar of ever-expanding individual freedom. On the way to whatever passes for greater individual liberty of choice and self-expression we have lost a good deal of that security which modern civilization supplied, and even more of the security it promised to supply; worse still, we have almost stopped hearing promises that the supply will be resumed, and instead hear more and more often that security goes against the grain of human dignity, that it is much too treacherous to be desired and much too dependency-breeding, addictive and altogether quagmire-ish to be cherished.

But what is it actually that we are told not to bewail, but which we miss nevertheless and the missing of which makes us anxious, fearful and irate? In the German original Freud writes of Sicherheit, and that German concept is in fact considerably more inclusive than the ‘security’ of the English translation. In the case of Sicherheit the German language is uncharacteristically frugal; it manages to squeeze into a single term complex phenomena for which English needs at least three terms – security, certainty and safety – to convey.

Security. Whatever has been won and gained will stay in our possession; whatever has been achieved will retain its value as the source of pride or respect; the world is steady and reliable, and so are its standards of propriety, the learned habits to act effectively as well as the learned skills needed to stand up to life’s challenges.

Certainty. Knowing the difference between reasonable and silly, trustworthy and treacherous, useful and useless, proper and improper, profitable and harmful, and all the rest of the distinctions which guide our daily choices and help us take decisions we – hopefully – will not regret; and knowing the symptoms, the omens and the warning signs which allow us to guess what to expect an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 In Search of Public Space
• 2 In Search of Agency
• Excursus 1: Ideology in the Postmodern World
• Excursus 2: Tradition and Autonomy in the Postmodern World
• Excursus 3: Postmodernity and Moral and Cultural Crises
• 3 In Search of Vision
• Notes
• Index