Z. Bauman: Stories of Self and Individuality in Modern Society
Outline
1. Introduction
2. Bauman on the emergence of modern society:
class, control and politics
3. Bauman’s theory of self, culture and society:
following Durkheim’s footsteps?
4. Bauman on the individualized society and second
modernity
5. Conclusion
Z. Bauman: Self and Individuality in Modern Society
Suggested Readings
1. Z. Bauman, Memories of Class. Routledge &
Kegan Paul 1982. Ch.1 & 6.
2. Z. Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and other Life
Strategies. Polity Press 1992. Ch.1.
3. Z. Bauman, The Individualized Society (readings
suggested for tutorial)
4. Z. Bauman, Liquid Love (readings suggested for
tutorial)
5. R. Kilminster & I. Varcoe (eds.), Culture, modernity,
and revolution : essays in honour of Zygmunt
Bauman London : Routledge, 1996.
6. Z. Bauman & K. Tester, Conversations with Zygmunt
Bauman. Polity Press, 2001
Z. Bauman: Self and Individuality in Modern Society
1. Introduction
•
Bauman’s concerns: the ‘eclectic’ Bauman
•
Bauman’s concerns as situated in other
contemporary theorists’ themes
•
Bauman’s style
•
Our approach
Z. Bauman: Self and Individuality in Modern Society
2. Bauman on the origins of modernity
• ‘Memories of Class’: the 18th century, old order and new
means of control; factory system as disciplinary power
(mind and bodies); protest against control (saving
autonomy) as generated by memories of the old order;
• Modernity is very much a matter of ordering relationship,
of removing unpredictability (the weak as subdued to a
situation where they could not longer count as a source of
unpredictability), of imposing control, of a civilizing crusade
(very much assisted by the state)
• Modernity based on capitalism is not so much about the
control and management of surplus as about the control
over the mind and bodies of the producers; protest, i.e.
class conflict is at first, and primarily, about reclaiming the
autonomy, and only later shifted to a struggle over the
distribution of surplus
Z. Bauman: Self and Individuality in Modern Society
Origins of modernity, cont’d
• The concept of power: Foucaldian; stressing the
fact that culture is not something static, some
general code influencing and regulating behaviour;
but culture is seen as a cultivating effort; the
example of control and culture in the emergence of
class society (most of the rules have little to do with
the efficiency of production)
• Culture and power are often one and the same
thing, or two levels of the phenomenon of the
civilizing process
• For B, the thing of modernity that concerned him
most is the loss of bearing, of familiarity and
security (e.g., the loss of these things experienced
by the apprentice-master as they witnessed the
triumph of the factory/routine system)
Z. Bauman: Self and Individuality in Modern Society
Origins of modernity, cont’d
• From the ‘classic’ class society to contemporary society:
from producer to consumer; the logic of global capitalism is
not to appeal to the motivation/compliance of the producer,
but to the consumption desires of the consumer; thus the
four categories of labour (first, symbolic manipulators ‘who
invent ideas and ways to make goods desirable and sellable’;
second, those engaed in the ‘reproduction of labour’
(educators, social workers…); third, ‘people employed in
‘personal services’ (face-to-face encounters with recipients
of service); fourth, ‘routine labourers’ (assembly line,
attendants at computer networks…)) ---- the last category of
labour is eclipsed
• the classic labour movement is no longer viable, and for
the ‘new’ categories of labour, they are subject to the
precariousness and vulnerability of a global economic
system that emphasized ‘travel light’ and ‘leave at short
notice’, ‘downsizing’, ‘delayering’, ‘no long term’, etc. etc.
Z. Bauman: Self and Individuality in Modern Society
The vulnerability of labour, cont’d
• Capitalism as explosion or implosion, but both
results in the same thing: all that is solid melts into air,
and then becomes liquefied resources to be molded in
bigger, more rational and efficient structures
• Labour in heavy modernity (big, rational production
systems, Fordism (intentions and practices, tying both
capital and labour, each heavily dependent on the
other; time horizons are long term)
• Labour now liquefied again: disengagement
between capital and labour; the hold on to the present
is weakened; the high and mighty travel light; flexibility,
unencumbered, undermined faith in the holding power
of the past frame;
• implications/connections: trust, confidence, political
will; speed of movement vs. entrapment; capital more
global, workers more local
Z. Bauman: Self and Individuality in Modern Society
3. Lives, Self and Society
a. Lives told and lives lived
•
B as telling different stories about the many faces and
aspects of modern living; these stories are mainly about the
trade in life meanings (whether and in what ways modern
selves could find anchorage in modernity and second
modernity;
•
In nature and out of nature (in society); society as liberating
(Durkheim); society as saying right and wrong (Durkheim);
but society also promising something more than ephemeral
(through customs, habit and routine, society takes the sting
out of the finality of life); self has this transcendence energy;
the energy is capitalized and channeled, and stratified (as
resources) to different categories of people; morality
(Durkheim) and mortality (Bauman)
Z. Bauman: Self and Individuality in Modern Society
Telling stories of the self, cont’d
• Conditions and narratives: the boundary between
condition beyond choice and choice, if seen as given, will
mean that conditions become a no-choice matter;
whenever on says option x is not an alternative, X
becomes part of the non-negotiable conditions.
• Articulation: opens and closes options; need to
enlarge and keep the width of possible options
• Central questions: why do our life-telling experiences
remain closed in fenced-off subjective self? How to make
the connection between action and conditions; recording
and mapping the interconnections, dependencies, etc.
often rendered invisible to our very individual experience
• Lives told affect lives lived; and this makes story telling
more important than usually thought; one could (and
should be) be helped in articulating new linkages,
discovering new resources… thus pushing further away
the boundary of conditions
Z. Bauman: Self and Individuality in Modern Society
b. Culture, order and chaos
• Culture as reducing ambivalence, as order-creating
(removing uncertainties); culture-making is order-making;
culture as manipulating the probabilities of events (B as
taking a different shot at culture)
• Culture as about classifying, drawing boundaries
(Bourdieu)
• Choice as power: the more you could become an
unknown variable in the calculations of others, and the
less you could make them have the same ability in your
calculations, the more freedom of choice you have, and
thus more power; this is the use of chaos (or absence of
order in the bid for power)
• Inherent in the concept of order, there is power (or the
bid for power), because the different parties to order try to
reduce the element of uncertainty in the other, to make
the other more predictable, while reserving for oneself
more freedom of choice
Z. Bauman: Self and Individuality in Modern Society
• Order is about mutual engagement, that both
parties are interdependent (though asymmetrical),
and both know that they are tied; both the
management and the workers know that they are
tied to the company’s welfare, and that they’d better
sit at the negotiation table and see the bargain
through
• But that kind of order is fast disappearing, for the
high and mighty might move fast, leave the table at
short notice; lightness and volatility have replace
weighty and ominous presence as the main
techniques of domination
• The old order with normative regulation is fast
becoming a relic
Z. Bauman: Self and Individuality in Modern Society
• When order is placed on to the issue of globalization,
then order becomes the index of powerlessness and
subordination; globalization thrives on the nomads, not
the settled (again the high and mighty travel light); this is
what B called the devaluation of order (second modernity
as ‘subverting’ order)
• Order in the past often associated with community
(density of communication and intensity of everyday
intercourse); place mattered then, place as a site of
intellectual/emotional/spiritual togetherness; but now this
place is punctuated, invaded by mobile phones, by longdistance stock market information, by the whole
avalanche of cyber-age; this is the devaluation of place
• Flexibility, vulnerability, precariousness, unpredictability:
all these are characteristic of the present age of
globalization; flexibility for those at the top requires and
generates traits of exuberant, energetic, spontaneous
character; it only turns self-destructive for those who
work lower down the flexible regime (p.39)
Z. Bauman: Self and Individuality in Modern Society
• B and Giddens on time and space: for G, the
separation of the two meant it is now possible to lift
social activities out of the local context, recombine
them across a much larger span of time and space; it
makes for instantaneous communication, expanded
production and distribution of goods, it undermines the
territory-maintaining efforts of groups and nation states;
it is ultimately dynamic and liberating; for B, he
emphasizes more on the uprootedness, the dislocation,
the vulnerability and unpredictability that this generates
• And this time-space transformation makes for a new
stratifying order; there is a new meta-factor in social
stratification, viz. mobility of movement (speed of
mobility, ability to act effectively regardless of distance,
and the freedom to move offered by the absence of
localized commitments) has become the major
stratifying factor on the global as well as on the local
scale
Z. Bauman: Self and Individuality in Modern Society
• Psychological and political ramifications of the second
modernity: the hold on the present must be there before
the capacity for future projections is possible
(revolutionary project); but the hold on the present is
conspicuously missing in the second modernity
• Losing one’s bearings: this is the common
predicament for the many nowadays; more and more
‘alternative X’ has moved to those conditions where one
feels one has no control or knowledge about
• This means ultimately the weakening of the political
will
Z. Bauman: Self and Individuality in Modern Society
4. Individuality
•
As self-assertion capacity and as fate of modernity
•
Individuality and individuation (the former is a fate, a fact of
modern living; the latter is about the practical capacity for selfassertion); the former is an inevitable state of affairs; the latter
about the loss of available means for self-assertion
•
Modern society and individuality are inseparable (‘to speak of
individualization and of modernity is to speak of the same social
condition’, p.149); individuality is accentuated once ascriptive,
inherited and inborn determination gives way to autonomy and
initiative, i.e. from a given into a task (p.144); from ‘human nature’
to ‘identity’, from predestination to life project
•
class is a byproduct of individuals given differential access to the
resources for self-assertion; working class naturally
compensates for the lack of resources by joining ranks
(numbers), while the upper class orientation is more partial and
derivative, and only comes to the fore when interests or values
are challenged
Z. Bauman: Self and Individuality in Modern Society
• Individuality and politics/democracy: Individual as enemy of
citizen: because he will be lukewarm about ‘good society’, ‘just
society’, ‘common cause’; these things are not central (and
must follow the fulfulling of individual wants) to the essence of
individuality; also, the troubles for modern man do not often
add up; there is little about them that would facilitate them to
be enjoined into a common cause; also individualization
means that one is ultimately responsible for oneself; for one’s
success, just as for one’s failure; individualization thus fills up
(colonizes) the public space; politics becomes the revealing of
the private lives of the public figures and public confessions of
private sentiments
• Individualized society: hard fact is that one is left to struggle
on one’s own; one is told to be responsible for yourself, but
also are dependent on things beyond control/knowledge; one’s
life is a biographical solution of systemic contradictions; no
more salvation from society; the self is always (and is to be )
relying one its own
Z. Bauman: Self and Individuality in Modern Society
5. Conclusion
•
Though Giddens (Beck) and Bauman share many similarities
in their views of modernity (the present age as ‘radicalized’ or
‘second modernity’), and the implications for self,
interpersonal relationships, love and trust, etc., Bauman is
more interested in the dislocating impact on the self,
especially the search for meanings
•
Bauman recognizes the more positive side of this stage of
modernity (e.g., break with tradition, skepticism of grand
narratives or universal claims, perpetual experimentation…),
he fears the dark side even more (vulnerability,
precariousness, the loss of the hold on the present, etc.)
•
Bauman is optimistic to the extent that he is confident about
the pooling of ‘life stories’, and the expanded horizons that this
creates: we might find parallels and sustenance from other
people’s stories; other people’s life strategies might help us to
uncover hidden resources, forging new connections, etc., i.e.
conditions are pushed back, and choice regained