Society under Siege E-Book

Zygmunt Bauman

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

Seitenzahl: 523

Beschreibung

Society is under siege - under attack on two fronts: from the global frontier-land where old structures and rules do not hold and new ones are slow to take shape, and from the fluid, undefined domain of life politics. The space between these two fronts, until recently ruled by the sovereign nation-state and identified by social scientists as 'society' is ever more difficult to conceive of as a self-enclosed entity. And this confronts the established wisdom of the social sciences with a new challenge: sovereignty and power are becoming separated from the politics of the territorial nation-state but are not becoming institutionalized in a new space. What are the consequences of this profound transformation of social life? What kind of world will it create for the twenty-first century? This remarkable book - by one of the most original social thinkers writing today - attempts to trace this transformation and to assess its consequences for the life conditions of ordinary individuals. The first part of the book is devoted to the new global arena in which, thanks to the powerful forces of globalization, there is no 'outside', no secluded place to which one can retreat and hide away, and where the territorial wars of the past have given way to a new breed of 'reconnaissance wars'. The second part deals with settings in which life politics has taken hold and flourished. Bauman argues that the great challenge facing us today is whether we can find new ways to reforge the human diversity that is our fate into the vocation of human solidarity.

Leseprobe

Society under Siege

Zygmunt Bauman

polity

Copyright © Zygmunt Bauman 2002

The right of Zygmunt Bauman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2002 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Reprinted 2003, 2005, 2006

Polity Press

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ISBN 978-0-74562-984-1ISBN 0-7456-2985-7 (pbk)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and has been applied for from the Library of Congress.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part I Global Politics

1  Chasing the Elusive Society

The managerial imagination•The collapse of social engineering•Surfing the network•Society? Difficult to imagine•Will the dead rise?

2  The Great Separation Mark Two

Aristotelian meditations•Politics as critique and a project•The modern state as institutionalized critique•The price of emancipation•Big Brother's new avatar•At the receiving end of the New Big Brother's calls•Uncertainty: the prime root of political inhibition•The second secession•The prospects of global politics

3  Living and Dying in the Planetary Frontier-land

Global frontier-land•Reconnaissance battles•Asymmetrical wars•War as a vocation•Living together in a full world•Refugees in a full world

Part II Life Politics

4  (Un)Happiness of Uncertain Pleasures

Senecan meditations, or happiness as eternal life•Happiness as everybody's option•Happiness: from reward to right•Waiting for happiness•Satisfactions in search of needs•Desires shunning satisfaction•Neither having nor being•Happiness of (disposable) bonds

5  As Seen on TV

Speed versus slowness•Private versus public•Authority versus idolatry•Event versus policy

6  Consuming Life

Consumers and consumer society•Needing, desiring, wishing•The reality principle and the pleasure principle strike a deal•Holism made fallacy•Choosing reassurance, reassuring choice•Feeding uncertainty, feeding on uncertainty

7  From Bystander to Actor

Being a bystander in a world of global dependency•Excursus: What can we learn from the story of ‘animal rights’?•On the difficulty of becoming the one who acts•Chasing the ‘political moment’ in the globalized world

Conclusion: Utopia with No Topos

The sedentary imagination•The transfixing imagination•The nomadic imagination•The disengaged imagination•Imagination privatized

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

I am deeply in debt to John Thompson for his initiative, friendly advice and critical comments that led to the composition of this volume – as well as for the title of the book. And to Ann Bone, for her unique combination of empathy, perseverance and care.

Introduction

Sociology was born as a modern project, and like all other modern projects followed from the start and through all (or at least most) of its history the Comtean triune task of savoir pour prévoir, prévoir pour pouvoir. Sociology aimed to know its object in order to guess unerringly where it tends to move and so to find out what could and should be done if one wished to prod it in the right direction. And the object to be known, to be seen through and eventually moulded, was ‘human reality’ – that condition under which (to take a hint from Marx's famous phrase) humans made their biographical/historical choices from which the condition itself is however exempt (having been for that very reason called ‘reality’). It was that exemption from choice that challenged sociological imagination. Modern practice being an exercise in transgression of boundaries and in transcendence of limits, anything resistant to the human power of choice was an offence, a casus belli and a call to arms.

One needed to know one's object because knowing one's object was tantamount to disarming it. Stealing the object's mystery was like stealing Jupiter's thunder. A known object would not put up any more resistance; or at least one could anticipate such resistance as the object may put up, take the necessary precautions and pre-empt its impact. This is why reconnaissance is the conditio sine qua non of forcing the adversary to submit. Information is the best of weapons, and the more thorough and comprehensive it is the more completely and irrevocably the enemy, robbed of its secrets, will be disempowered. Once known, its assets will become its liabilities.

Modern science positioned itself as the intelligence branch of modern practice, for which the extant reality (read: the as yet impenetrated, opaque and obscure, and therefore uninterfered with and for the time being unmanageable segment of the action-setting) was the enemy. Throughout the past two centuries, sociology strove to be recognized as a science by joining in the performance of that role and demonstrating that it was capable of doing so.

Practice is what agents do, and it is another agent determined to act that constitutes the adversary, and it is the objective which the agent sets for its action that provides the principle by which relevance is ascribed or denied to the many attributes of that adversary. The gathering of information would make no sense – indeed, would be inconceivable – unless there was an agent engaged in purposeful action: setting objectives and pursuing them. In the case of sociology, such an objectives-setting-and-pursuing agent was the sovereign state, and sociology constituted itself as the intelligence branch of its practice.

Disarming reality in order to render it softer, more tractable and receptive to change was the defining feature of the modern spirit, but the right and ability to do so was a matter of contention between modern institutions; it was also the most coveted prize of the modern power struggle. The modern state had been defined by Max Weber as the institution claiming monopoly on permissible (‘legitimate’, no-appeal and no-compensation) coercion: in other words, as an institution that claims to be the only agency entitled to deploy coercive action in order to force the extant state of affairs to be different from what it has been and would continue to be if left alone.

Action is coercive if and when in pursuing its objectives it takes no account of its object's ‘natural tendencies’. In the case of a sensuous and agent-like object, ‘coerciveness’ of action means that the object's intentions and predilections are rendered illegitimate by being classified as motives arising from ignorance or criminal inclinations. ‘Legitimacy’ of coercive action means that the agency that applies it denies its object the right to resist coercion, to question its reasons, to reply in kind or sue for compensation. That legitimacy was itself a stake of coercion. No matter how much coercion was applied, though – that legitimacy, and particularly the monopoly of legitimate coercion, was never immune to contest and therefore for most of the time it was seen as an ideal state not-yet-achieved; as an unfinished project and a battle-cry calling to the struggles ahead. There was an agency, and there was an objective, and there was the determination, and resources, and a reasonable hope of reaching the goal. There was therefore a vacancy for an intelligence unit – and sociology applied for the job.