44 Letters From the Liquid Modern World E-Book

Zygmunt Bauman

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 315

Beschreibung

This liquid modern world of ours, like all liquids, cannot stand still and keep its shape for long. Everything keeps changing - the fashions we follow, the events that intermittently catch our attention, the things we dream of and things we fear. And we, the inhabitants of this world in flux, feel the need to adjust to its tempo by being 'flexible' and constantly ready to change. We want to know what is going on and what is likely to happen, but what we get is an avalanche of information that threatens to overwhelm us. How are we to sift the information that really matters from the heaps of useless and irrelevant rubbish? How are we to derive meaningful messages from senseless noise? We face the daunting task of trying to distinguish the important from the insubstantial, distil the things that matter from false alarms and flashes in the pan. Nothing escapes scrutiny so stubbornly as the ordinary things of everyday life, hiding in the light of deceptive and misleading familiarity. To turn them into objects of attention and scrutiny, they must first be torn out from that daily routine: the apparently familiar must be made strange. This is precisely what Zygmunt Bauman seeks to do in these 44 letters: each tells a story drawn from ordinary lives, but tells it in order to reveal an extraordinariness that we might otherwise overlook. Arresting, revealing, disconcerting, these snapshots of life by the most brilliant analyst of our liquid modern world will appeal to a wide readership.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

1 On writing letters – from a liquid modern world

2 Crowded solitude

3 Parents and children conversing

4 Offline, online

5 As the birds do

6 Virtual sex

7 Strange adventures of privacy (1)

8 Strange adventures of privacy (2)

9 Strange adventures of privacy (3)

10 Parents and children

11 Teenager spending

12 Stalking the Y generation

13 Freedom’s false dawn

14 The arrival of child-women

15 It is the eyelash’s turn

16 Fashion, or being on the move

17 Consumerism is not just about consumption

18 Whatever happened to the cultural elite?

19 Drugs and diseases

20 Swine flu and other reasons to panic

21 Health and inequality

22 Be warned

23 The world inhospitable to education? (part one)

24 The world inhospitable to education? (part two)

25 The world inhospitable to education? (part three)

26 Ghosts of New Years past and New Years to come

27 Predicting the unpredictable

28 Calculating the incalculable

29 Phobia’s twisted trajectories

30 Interregnum

31 Whence the superhuman force – and what for?

32 Back home, you men?

33 Escape from crisis

34 Is there an end to depression?

35 Who says you have to live by the rules?

36 The phenomenon of Barack Obama

37 Culture in a globalized city

38 The voice of Lorna’s silence

39 Strangers are dangers . . . Are they, indeed?

40 Tribes and skies

41 Drawing boundaries

42 How good people turn evil

43 Fate and character

44 Albert Camus Or: I rebel, therefore we exist . . .

Copyright © D-la Repubblica delle Donne

Copyright © This volume Polity Press, 2010

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5056-2 (hardback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5057-9 (paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5964-0 (Single-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5963-3 (Multi-user ebook)

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1

On writing letters – from a liquid modern world

Letters from the liquid modern world … This is what the editors of La Repubblica delle Donne asked me to write and send to its readers once a fortnight – and what I have been doing for almost two years (2008 and 2009; they are collected here in an edited and somewhat extended version).

From the ‘liquid modern’ world: that means from the world you and I, the writer of forthcoming letters and their possible/probable/hoped for readers, share. The world I call ‘liquid’ because, like all liquids, it cannot stand still and keep its shape for long. Everything or almost everything in this world of ours keeps changing: fashions we follow and the objects of our attention (constantly shifting attention, today drawn away from things and events that attracted it yesterday, and to be drawn away tomorrow from things and events that excite us today), things we dream of and things we fear, things we desire and things we loathe, reasons to be hopeful and reasons to be apprehensive. And the conditions around us, conditions in which we make our living and try to plan our future, in which we connect to some people and disconnect (or are disconnected) from others, keep changing as well. Opportunities for more happiness and threats of misery flow or float by, come and go and change places, and more often than not they do all that too swiftly and nimbly to allow us to do something sensible and effective to direct or redirect them, keep them on course or forestall them.

To cut a long story short: this world, our liquid modern world, keeps surprising us: what seems certain and proper today may well appear futile, fanciful or a regrettable mistake tomorrow. We suspect that this may happen, so we feel that – like the world that is our home – we, its residents, and intermittently its designers, actors, users and casualties, need to be constantly ready to change: we all need to be, as the currently fashionable word suggests, ‘flexible’. So we crave more information about what is going on and what is likely to happen. Fortunately, we now have what our parents could not even imagine: we have the internet and the world-wide web, we have ‘information highways’ connecting us promptly, ‘in real time’, to every nook and cranny of the planet, and all that inside these handy pocket-size mobile phones or iPods, within our reach day and night and moving wherever we do. Fortunately? Alas, perhaps not that fortunately after all, since the bane of insufficient information that made our parents suffer has been replaced by the yet more awesome bane of a flood of information which threatens to drown us and makes swimming or diving (as distinct from drifting or surfing) all but impossible. How to sift the news that counts and matters from the heaps of useless and irrelevant rubbish? How to derive meaningful messages from senseless noise? In the hubbub of contradictory opinions and suggestions we seem to lack a threshing machine that might help us separate the grains of truth and of the worthwhile from the chaff of lies, illusion, rubbish and waste …

In these letters, I’ll try to do just what the threshing machine (absent now, alas, and probably for some time) would have done for us had it been in our possession: to begin, at least, to separate the important from the insubstantial, things that matter – and are likely to matter more and more – from false alarms and flashes in the pan. But since, as mentioned before, this liquid modern world of ours is constantly on the move, we all are willy-nilly, knowingly or not, joyfully or plaintively, perpetually carried along in travel even if we try to stay still and hold on to one place. The letters, therefore, could not be other than ‘travel reports’ – even though their author has not budged from Leeds, the city in which he lives; and the stories they will be telling will be travelogues: stories from and of travels.

Walter Benjamin, a philosopher with an eye uniquely sharpened to spot any hints of logic and system in apparently diffuse and random cultural tremors, used to distinguish between two types of stories: sailors’ stories and peasants’ stories. The first are tales of things bizarre and unheard of, of far-away places, never visited and probably never to be visited, of monsters and mutants, witches and sorcerers, gallant knights and scheming evil-doers – people jarringly different from the people listening to the story of their exploits, and doing things which other people (particularly those who listen, enchanted and bewitched, to the sailor’s tale) would never contemplate or imagine doing, let alone dare to do. Peasants’ stories, on the contrary, are tales of ordinary, close-by and apparently familiar events, like the ever-repeated annual cycle of seasons or the daily chores of the household, farm and field. I said apparently familiar, since the impression of knowing such things thoroughly, inside out, and therefore expecting there to be nothing new to be learned from and about them, is also an illusion – in this case coming precisely from their being too close to the eye to see them clearly for what they are. Nothing escapes scrutiny so nimbly, resolutely and stubbornly as ‘things at hand’, things ‘always there’, ‘never changing’. They are, so to speak, ‘hiding in the light’ – the light of deceptive and misleading familiarity! Their ordinariness is a blind, discouraging all scrutiny. To make them into objects of interest and close examination they must first be cut off and torn away from that sense-blunting, cosy yet vicious cycle of routine quotidianity. They must first be set aside and kept at a distance before scanning them properly can become conceivable: the bluff of their alleged ‘ordinariness’ must be called at the start. And then the mysteries they hide, profuse and profound mysteries – those turning strange and puzzling once you start thinking about them – can be laid bare and explored.

The distinction made by Benjamin almost a century ago is no longer as clear-cut as it originally was: sailors no longer have a monopoly on visiting bizarre lands, while in a globalized world in which no place is really separate and secure from the impact of every and any other place on the planet, however far away it might be, even the tales told by an erstwhile peasant may be difficult to distinguish from a sailor’s story. Well, what I am going to try for in my letters will be, so to speak, sailors’ stories as told by peasants. Tales drawn from the most ordinary lives, but as a way to reveal and expose the extraordinariness we would otherwise overlook. If we wish them to become truly familiar, apparently familiar things need first to be made strange.

This is a difficult task. Most certainly, success is anything but guaranteed, whereas full success is, to say the least, highly doubtful. But this is the task which we, the writer and the readers of these 44 letters, shall try to pursue in our shared adventure.

But why 44? Does the selecting of this number rather than any other have a special meaning of its own, or has it been an accidental, arbitrary decision, a random choice? I suspect that most readers (perhaps all of them, unless they are Polish … ) would ask the question. I owe them some explanation.

The greatest of Polish romantic poets, Adam Mickiewicz, conjured up a mysterious figure, a blend or a hybrid of, on one hand, a plenipotentiary of Freedom, its spokesman, holder of its power of attorney, and, on the other, its governor or vice-regent on earth. ‘His name is Forty-Four’: this is how that recondite creature was introduced by one of the characters in Mickiewicz’s poem in his announcement/premonition of its imminent arrival. But why that name? Many historians of literature, immensely better equipped to find an answer than myself, have tried in vain to crack that mystery. Some have suggested that the choice is the sum of the numerical values of the letters in the poet’s name if written in Hebrew – perhaps an allusion, simultaneously, to the poet’s high stature in Poland’s struggle for liberation and the Jewish origin of the poet’s mother. The most widely accepted interpretation, though, thus far has been that Mickiewicz chose that sonorously, majestic-sounding phrase (in Polish: czterdziésci i cztery) simply in the heat of inspiration – motivated (if not altogether unmotivated, as most flashes of inspiration tend to be) by a care for poetic harmony rather than an intention to convey a cryptic message.

The letters collected here under a single cover have been composed over a period of almost two years: How many of them should there be? When and where to stop? The impulse to write letters from the liquid modern world is unlikely ever to be exhausted – that kind of world, pulling ever new surprises out of its sleeve, daily inventing new challenges to human understanding, will see to it that it isn’t. Surprises and challenges are scattered all over the spectrum of human experience – and so every stopping point for reporting them in letters, and by the same token limiting their range, must inevitably be arbitrarily chosen. These letters are no exception. Their number has been arbitrarily chosen.

Why this number, though, and not any other? Because the 44 figure, thanks to Adam Mickiewicz, has been made to stand for the awe of, and hope for, the arrival of Freedom. And so this number signals, if in an oblique manner and only to the initiated, the guiding motif of these missives. The spectre of freedom is present in every one of these 44 otherwise thematically varied letters – even when, as is the nature of spectres true to their name, invisibly.

2

Crowded solitude

On the website of the Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com) you could read recently about a teenage girl who sent 3,000 text messages in one month. That means she sent on average a hundred messages a day, or about one every ten waking minutes – ‘morning, noon, and night, weekdays and weekends, class time, lunchtime, homework time, and toothbrushing time’. What follows is that she’s hardly ever been alone for more than ten minutes: that means she has never been just with herself – with her thoughts, her dreams, her worries and hopes. By now, she’s probably forgotten how one lives – thinks, does things, laughs or cries – in one’s own company, without the company of others. Or, more to the point, she has never had a chance to learn that art. As a matter of fact, it is only in her incapacity to practise that art that she is not alone …

The pocket-size gadgets sending and receiving messages are not the sole tools needed by that girl and others like her to survive without that art. Professor Jonathan Zimmerman of New York University notes that up to three out of four American teens spend every minute of their available time glued to the websites of Facebook or MySpace: chatting. They are, he suggests, hooked on making and receiving electronic noises or screen flashes. The chat websites are, Zimmerman says, new potent drugs to which teens are now addicted. You’ve heard about the withdrawal torments of people, young and not so young alike, addicted to other kinds of drugs; you can therefore imagine the agony those teens would go through were some virus (or their parents, or their teachers) to block their internet connections or put their mobiles out of operation.

In our unpredictable, constantly surprising and stubbornly unfamiliar world, the prospect of being left alone may indeed feel horrifying; one can name a lot of reasons to conceive of solitude as a highly uncomfortable, threatening and terrifying condition. It would be as unjust as it is silly to blame electronics alone for what is happening to people born into a world woven from cabled, wired or wireless connectivity. Electronic contraptions answer a need not of their own making; the most they could have done was render a need already fully formed yet more acute and salient, as the ways of acting on it have come tantalizingly within everybody’s reach, and call for no more effort than pushing a few keys. Inventors and sellers of ‘Walkmans’, the first mobile gadgets allowing you to ‘hear the world’ whenever and wherever you wished, promised their clients: ‘Never again (will you be) alone!’ Obviously, they knew what they were talking about, and why that advertising slogan was likely to sell the gadgets on offer – as it did, in uncounted millions. They knew there were millions of people in the streets who felt lonely, and who detested their solitude as painful and abhorrent; people not just deprived of company, but grieving over its absence. With ever more family homes empty during the day, and with family hearths and dining tables replaced by TV sets in every room – with people, we may say, ‘each trapped in their own cocoon’ – fewer and fewer people could count on the enlivening and invigorating warmth of human company; though without company they did not know how to fill their hours and days.

Dependence on uninterrupted Walkman-emitted noise only deepened that void left behind by the vanishing company. And the longer they stayed sunk in that void, the less they were able to use the means before high-tech, such as their own muscles and imagination, to climb out of it. With the arrival of the internet, that void could also be forgotten or covered up, and thereby detoxified; at least the pain it caused could be assuaged. That company that had all too often been missing, and was increasingly being missed, seemed to have returned, though through electronic screens rather than wooden doors, and in a new analogue or digital – but in both cases virtual – incarnation: people scrambling out of the torments of loneliness found this new form to be a considerable improvement on the vanished face-to-face and hand-in-hand variety. With the skills of face-to-face interaction largely forgotten or never learned, all or almost all of what might have been resented as a shortcoming of online, virtual ‘connecting’ was widely welcomed as an advantage. What Facebook, MySpace and their like offered has been greeted as the best of both worlds. Or so, at least, it seemed to people who longed desperately for human company yet felt ill at ease, inept and hapless when they found themselves among it.

To start with, there is no longer any need, ever again, to be alone. Every minute – 24 hours a day, seven days a week – it takes just one push of a button to conjure up company out of a collection of loners. In that online world, no one is ever away, everyone seems to be constantly at one’s beck and call – and even if she or he accidentally falls asleep, there are enough others to send a message to, or just twitter for a few seconds, for the temporary absence to pass unnoticed. Secondly, ‘contact’ may be made with other people without necessarily initiating an exchange that would threaten giving hostages to fate, taking a course one might not enjoy. ‘Contact’ can be broken at the first sign of the exchange taking a turn in an unwelcome direction: no risk therefore, and also no need to find excuses, apologise and lie; a gossamer-light touch of the finger, totally painless and risk-free, will suffice. There is neither any need to be afraid of being alone, nor a threat of exposure to other people’s demands, of a demand for sacrifice or compromise, of having to do something you don’t feel like doing just because others wish you to do so. That comforting awareness can be retained and enjoyed even when you are sitting in a crowded room, loitering in the densely packed passageways of a shopping mall, or strolling on the street among a large pack of friends and fellow-strollers; you can always ‘make yourself spiritually absent’ and be ‘on your own’, as well as notify the others around you that you are willing, here and now, to stay out of touch; you can put yourself outside the crowd by keeping your fingers busy kneading a message to someone who is physically absent and therefore momentarily undemanding and unengaging, safe to ‘contact’, or by glancing over a message just received from such a person. With such gadgets in your hand, you could even make yourself alone inside a stampeding herd if you wished to; and instantly – the moment the company crowds you and gets too oppressive for your taste. You don’t swear loyalty till death do you part, and you can expect everyone else to be ‘available’ whenever you need them, without, however, having to bear the unsavoury consequences of being constantly available to others …

So paradise on earth? Dream coming true, at long last? The admittedly haunting ambivalence of human interaction – comforting and exhilarating, yet cumbersome and full of pitfalls – finally resolved? Opinions on that matter stay divided. What seems beyond dispute, however, is that there is a price to pay for all that – a price that may prove, if you think about it, too high to be willingly paid. Because once you are ‘always on’, you may never be fully and truly alone. And if you are never alone, then (to quote Professor Zimmerman once more), ‘you’re less likely to read a book for pleasure, to draw a picture, to stare out the window and imagine worlds others than your own … You’re less likely to communicate with the real people in your immediate surroundings. Who wants to talk to family members when your friends are just a click away?’ (and they come in inexhaustible numbers and fascinating variety; there are, let me add, five hundred or more Facebook ‘friends’).

Running away from loneliness, you drop your chance of solitude on the way: of that sublime condition in which one can ‘gather thoughts’, ponder, reflect, create – and so, in the last account, give meaning and substance to communication. But then, having never savoured its taste, you may never know what you have forfeited, dropped and lost.

3

Parents and children conversing

On the origins of one of his remarkable short stories, ‘Averroes’ Search’, the great Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges said that in it he tried ‘to narrate the process of failure’, of ‘defeat’ – as when a theologian seeks the final, irrefutable proof of God’s existence, an alchemist seeks the philosopher’s stone, a technology buff seeks a perpetuum mobile, or a mathematician searches for the way to square a circle. But then he decided that ‘a more poetic case’ would be one ‘of a man who sets himself a goal that is not forbidden to others, but is to him’. He picked the case of Averroes, the great Muslim philosopher, who set out to translate Aristotle’s , but ‘bounded within the circle of Islam, could never know the meaning of the words and ’. Indeed, ‘without ever having suspected what theatre is’, Averroes would be bound, inescapably, to fail when trying ‘to imagine what a play is’.