Zygmunt Bauman
Some thoughts from a sociologist for a chilly Wednesday
Just because of the current state of the world, I thought I’d pull together some chunks from various books by or with the late Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman that have stuck with me.
First is (to me) a hopeful take from Babel, which is essentially a (short) book-length conversation with a journalist Ezio Mauro.
We are not predetermined. Nothing of what we do is inevitable and inescapable, lacking an alternative. Against external pressures clamouring for our obedience and insisting on our surrender, we can rebel - and all too often we do. This, however, does not mean that we are free to act as we would wish or dream: having done with the bugaboo of necessity, we find ourselves confronted face-to-face by the all-to-real dilemma of feasibility. It is the feasibility - or more precisely the accessibility - of our goals, inflected and tempered by the chances of their attainment, that draws the line between realistic and fanciful options and varies the likelihood of alternative individual choices. People choose, but within the limits drawn by the feasibility of goals - a factor not open to choice. 'Being realistic', according to Gramsci, is indeed an ambivalent stance: it enhances the probability of success - but at the price of desisting from the pursuit of other goals, cast off-limits and so beyond reach. Above all, it renders starkly visible the disconcerting complexity of the task - though only to nudge for more effort, not to prompt its abandoning and resignation. Manipulating the odds, the powers-that-be may make some choices exceedingly costly and so reduce their chances of being taken - though they could hardly succeed in the effort to render them impossible to make. The world of humans is a realm of possibilities/probabilities, not determinations and necessities.
These bits are from Globalisation - The Human Consequences. His original work is (I think) more than 20 years old and you can see how things have turned out since. A lot of this makes me think about loyalty (to people, place, organisation etc) which I’ll try to return to in future.
All of us are, willy-nilly, by design or by default, on the move. We are on the move even if, physically, we stay put: immobility is not a realistic option in a world of permanent change. And yet the effects of that new condition are radically unequal. Some of us become fully and truly 'global'; some are fixed in their 'locality' - a predicament neither pleasurable nor endurable in the world in which the 'globals' set the tone and compose the rules of the life-game.
Being local in a globalised world is a sign of social deprivation and degradation....
An integral part of of the globalising process is progressive spatial segregation, separation and exclusion. Neo-tribal and fundamentalist tendencies, which reflect and articulate the experience of people on the receiving end of globalisation, are as much legitimate offspring of globalisation as the the widely acclaimed 'hybridisation' of top culture - the culture at the globalised top. A particular cause for worry is the progressive breakdown in communication between the increasingly global and extraterritorial elites and the ever more 'localised' rest.
Among all [those] who have a say in the running of the company, only 'people who invest' - the shareholders - are in no way space-tied; they can buy any share at any stock exchange and through any broker, and the geographical nearness or distance of the company will be in all probability the least important consideration in their decision to buy or sell.
In principle there is nothing space-determined in the dispersion of the shareholders. They are the sole factor genuinely free from spatial determination. And it is to them and them only, that the company 'belongs'. It is up to them therefore to move the company wherever they spy out or anticipate a chance of higher dividends, leaving to all others - locally bound as they are - the task of wound-licking, damage-repair and waste-disposal. Whoever is free to run away from locality, is free to run away from the consequences. These are the most important spoils of victorious space war.
What looks.. like flexibility on the demand side, rebounds on all those cast on the supply side as hard, cruel, impregnable an unassailable fate: jobs come and go, they vanish as soon as they appeared, they are cut in pieces and withdrawn without notice while the rules of the hiring/firing game change without warning - and there is little the job-holders and job-seekers may do to stop the see-saw. And so to meet the standards of flexibility set for those who make and unmake the rules - to be 'flexible' in the eyes of investors - the plight of 'suppliers of labour' must be as rigid and inflexible as possible - indeed the very contrary of 'flexible': their freedom to choose, to accept or refuse, let alone to impose their own rules on the game, must be cut to the bare bone.
The fashionable term 'nomads', applied indiscriminately to all contemporaries of the postmodern era, is grossly misleading, as it gloss over the profound differences which represent the two types of experience and render all similarity between them formal and superficial.
As a matter of fact, the worlds sedimented on the two poles, at the top and bottom of the emergent hierarchy of mobility, differ sharply; they also become increasingly incommunicado to each other. For the first world, the world of the globally mobile, the space has lost its constraining quality and is easily traversed in both its 'real' and 'virtual' renditions. For the second world, the world of the 'locally tied', of those barred from moving and thus bound to passively bear whatever change may be visited on the locality they are tied to, the real space is fast closing up.
Anyone working in responsible investment probably recognises some of the above…
And these bits are from State of Crisis, with Carlo Bordoni. This was written post financial crisis, but again much of it still rings true.
[T]he mistrust of all and any order, synchronic and diachronic alike; questioning of the idea of 'order' as such; the tendency to raise 'flexibility' and 'innovation above 'stability' and 'continuity' in the hierarchy of values; melting with no moulds prepared in which to pour the molten metal. All this suggests the prospect of the present interregnum lasting for a rather long time. And let's remember that one of the most prominent traits of a period of interregnum is that anything, or almost anything, can happen, though nothing, or almost nothing, can be done with any degree of confidence and self-assurance.
Our fathers could quarrel about what needs to be done, but they all agreed that once the task had been defined, the agency would be there, waiting to perform it - namely, the states armed simultaneously with power (ability to get things done) and politics (the ability to see to it that the right things are done). Our times, however, are striking for the gathering evidence that agencies of this kind are no longer in existence, and most certainly not to be found in their previous usual places. Power and politics live and move in separation from each other and their divorce lurks around the corner. On the one hand we see power safely roaming the no-man's-land of global expanses, free from political control and at liberty to select its own targets; on the other, there is politics squeezed/robbed of nearly all its power, muscles and teeth.
Our 'interregnum' is marked by the dismantling and discrediting of the institutions which have till now serviced the processes of forming and integrating public visions, programmes and projects. After being subjected, together with the rest of the social fabric of human cohabitation, to the process of thorough deregulation, fragmentation and privatisation, such institutions remain stripped of a large part of their executive capacity and most of their authority and trustworthiness, with only a slim chance of getting them back.