In Search of Politics

Zygmunt Bauman

Polity Press

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 1999 by Polity Press
in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Reprinted 2000, 2006

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 In Search of Public Space

A prowler around the house • The cauldron of Unsicherheit • Insecure security • Uncertain certainty • Unsafe safety • Fears on the move • The cooling-off of the human planet

2 In Search of Agency

Fear and laughter • How free is freedom? • The deconstruction of politics • Where the private and the public meet • The agora under attack: the two invasions • Memories of paideia

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

The second reformation and the emergence of modular man • Tribe, nation and republic • Liberal democracy and the republic • A parting of the ways • The political economy of uncertainty • The cause of equality in the uncertain world • The case for a basic income • Recalling universalism from exile • Multiculturalism – or cultural polyvalence? • Living together in the world of differences

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

It has been ten years since I first was offered the benefit of David Roberts’s insightful, indefatigable and emphathetic editorial cooperation. I cannot refrain from using this occasion to thank him for all he has done to smooth up the communication between the author and his readers.

Introduction

Beliefs do not need to be coherent in order to be believed. Beliefs that tend to be believed these days – our beliefs – are no exception. Indeed, we consider the case of human freedom, at least in ‘our part’ of the world, to be open and shut, and (barring minor corrections here and there) resolved to the fullest conceivable satisfaction; at any rate, we do not feel the need (again barring occasional minor irritations) to take to the streets to claim and exact more freedom or better freedom than we feel we already have. But, on the other hand, we tend to believe equally firmly that there is little we can change – singly, severally, or all together – in the way the affairs of the world are running or are being run; and we believe too that, were we able to make a change, it would be futile, even unreasonable, to put our heads together to think of a different world from the one there is and to flex our muscles to bring it about if we consider it better than the one we are in. How these two beliefs can be held at the same time would be a mystery to any person trained in logical thinking. If freedom has been won, how does it come about that human ability to imagine a better world and to do something to make it better was not among the trophies of victory? And what sort of freedom is it that discourages imagination and tolerates the impotence of free people in matters which concern them all?

The two beliefs fit each other ill – but holding both of them is not a sign of our logical ineptitude. The two beliefs are by no means fanciful. There is more than enough in our shared experience to support each of the two. We are quite realistic and rational when believing what we do. And so it is important to know why the world we live in keeps sending us such evidently contradictory signals. And it is also important to know how we can live with that contradiction; and, moreover, why most of the time we do not notice it and are not particularly worried when we do.

Why is it important to know that? Would anything change for the better once we obtained this kind of knowledge? This, to be sure, is by no means certain. An insight into what makes things to be as they are may prompt us to throw in the towel just as much as it may spur us into action. The knowledge of how the complex and not readily visible social mechanisms which shape our condition work cuts notoriously both ways. Time and again, it prompts two quite distinct uses, which Pierre Bourdieu aptly called ‘cynical’ and ‘clinical’. Knowledge may be used ‘cynically’: the world being what it is, let me think of a strategy which will allow me to exploit its rules to my best advantage; whether the world is fair or unjust, likeable or not, is neither here nor there. When it is used ‘clinically’, the same knowledge of how society works may help you and me to fight more effectively what we see as improper, harmful or offending our moral sense. By itself, knowledge does not determine which of the two uses we resort to. This is, ultimately, a matter of our own choice. But without that knowledge there would be no choice to start with. With knowledge, free men and women have at least some chance to exercise their freedom.

But what is there to know? It is with this question that this book tries to come to grips. The answer it comes up with is, roughly, that the growth of individual freedom may coincide with the growth of collective impotence in as far as the bridges between private and public life are dismantled or were never built to start with; or, to put it differently, in as far as there is no easy and obvious way to translate private worries into public issues and, conversely, to discern and pinpoint public issues in private troubles. And that in our kind of society the bridges are by and large absent and the art of translation seldom practised in public. In the absence of bridges, the sporadic communication between the private and public shores is maintained with the help of balloons which have the vexing habit of collapsing or exploding the moment they land – and, more often than not, before reaching their targets. While the art of translation is in its present sorry state, the sole grievances aired in public are sackfuls of private agonies and anxieties which, however, do not turn into public issues just for being on public display.

In the absence of strong and permanent bridges and with translating skills unpractised or altogether forgotten, private troubles and pains do not add up and can hardly condense into common causes. What, under the cicumstances, can bring us together? Sociality, so to speak, is free-floating, seeking in vain solid ground in which to anchor, a visible-to-all target on which to converge, companions with which to close ranks. There is a lot of it around – wandering, blundering, unfocused. Lacking in regular outlets, our sociality tends to be released in spectacular one-off explosions – short lived, as all explosions are.

Occasion for release is sometimes given by carnivals of compassion and charity; sometimes by outbursts of beefed-up aggression against a freshly discovered public enemy (that is, against someone whom most members of the public may recognize as their private enemy); at other times by an event most people feel strongly about at the same time and so synchronize their joy, as in the case of the national team winning the World Cup, or their sorrow, as in the case of the tragic death of Princess Diana. The trouble with all these occasions is, though, that they run out of steam quickly: once we return to our daily business things by and large come back, unscathed, to where they started. And when the dazzling flash of togetherness goes out, the loners wake up just as lonely as before, while the shared world, so brightly illuminated just a moment ago, seems if anything still darker than before. And after the explosive discharge there is little energy left for the limelights to be lit again.

The chance of changing this condition hangs on the agora – the space neither private nor public, but more exactly private and public at the same time. The space where private problems meet in a meaningful way – that is, not just to draw narcissistic pleasures or in search of some therapy through public display, but to seek collectively managed levers powerful enough to lift individuals from their privately suffered misery; the space where such ideas may be born and take shape as the ‘public good’, the ‘just society’ or ‘shared values’. The trouble is, though, that little has been left today of the old-style private/public spaces, whereas new ones able to replace them are nowhere in sight. The old agoras have been taken over by enterprising developers and recycled into theme parks, while powerful forces conspire with political apathy to refuse building permits for new ones.

The most conspicuous feature of contemporary politics, Cornelius Castoriadis told Daniel Mermet in November 1996, is its insignificance, ‘Politicians are impotent … They no more have a programme. Their purpose is to stay in office.’ Change of governments – of ‘political camps’ even – is no watershed; a ripple at most on the surface of a stream flowing unstoppably, monotonously, with dull determination, in its own direction, pulled by its own momentum. A century ago the ruling political formula of liberalism was a defiant and impudent ideology of the ‘great leap forward’. Nowadays, it is no more than a self-apology for surrender: ‘This is not the best of imaginable worlds, but the only real one. Besides, all alternatives are worse, must be worse and would be shown to be worse if tried in practice.’ Liberalism today boils down to the simple ‘no alternative’ credo. If you wish to find out what the roots of the growing political apathy are, you may as well look no further. This politics lauds conformity and promotes conformity. And conformity could as well be a do-it-yourself job; does one need politics to conform? Why bother with politicians who, whatever their hue, can promise nothing but more of the same?

The art of politics, if it happens to be democratic politics, is about dismantling the limits to citizens’ freedom; but it is also about self-limitation: about making citizens free in order to enable them to set, individually and collectively, their own, individual and collective, limits. That second point has been all but lost. All limits are off-limits. Any attempt at self-limitation is taken to be the first step on the road leading straight to the gulag, as if there was nothing but the choice between the market’s and the government’s dictatorship over needs – as if there was no room for the citizenship in other form than the consumerist one. It is this form (and only this form) which financial and commodity markets would tolerate. And it is this form which is promoted and cultivated by the governments of the day. The sole grand narrative left in the field is that of (to quote Castoriadis again) the accumulation of junk and more junk. To that accumulation, there must be no limits (that is, all limits are seen as anathema and no limits would be tolerated). But it is that accumulation from which the self-limitation has to start, if it is to start at all.

But the aversion to self-limitation, generalized conformity and the resulting insignificance of politics have their price – a steep price, as it happens. The price is paid in the currency in which the price of wrong politics is usually paid – that of human sufferings. The sufferings come in many shapes and colours, but they may be traced to the same root. And these sufferings have a self-perpetuating quality. They are the kind of sufferings which stem from the malfeasance of politics, but also the kind which are the paramount obstacle to its sanity.

The most sinister and painful of contemporary troubles can be best collected under the rubric of Unsicherheit – the German term which blends together experiences which need three English terms – uncertainty, insecurity and unsafety – to be conveyed. The curious thing is that the nature of these troubles is itself a most powerful impediment to collective remedies: people feeling insecure, people wary of what the future might hold in store and fearing for their safety, are not truly free to take the risks which collective action demands. They lack the courage to dare and the time to imagine alternative ways of living together; and they are too preoccupied with tasks they cannot share to think of, let alone to devote their energy to, such tasks as can be undertaken only in common.

The extant political institutions, meant to assist them in the fight against insecurity, offer little help. In a fast globalizing world, where a large part of power, and the most seminal part, is taken out of politics, these institutions cannot do much to offer security or certainty. What they can do and what they more often than not are doing is to shift the scattered and diffuse anxiety to one ingredient of Unsicherheit alone – that of safety, the only field in which something can be done and seen to be done. The snag is, though, that while doing something effectively to cure or at least to mitigate insecurity and uncertainty calls for united action, most measures undertaken under the banner of safety are divisive; they sow mutual suspicion, set people apart, prompt them to sniff enemies and conspirators behind every contention or dissent, and in the end make the loners yet more lonely than before. Worst of all: while such measures come nowhere near hitting at the genuine source of anxiety, they use up all the energy these sources generate – energy which could be put to much more effective use if channelled into the effort of bringing power back into the politically managed public space.

This is one of the main reasons why there is such a meagre demand for private/public spaces; and why the few remaining ones are empty most of the time, and so the favourite target for downsizing, or better still phasing-out. Another reason for their shrinking and wilting is the blatant inconsequentiality of anything that may happen in them. Assuming for a moment that the extraordinary happened and private/public space was filled with citizens wishing to debate their values and discuss the laws which are there to guide them – where is the agency powerful enough to carry through their resolutions? The most powerful powers float or flow, and the most decisive decisions are taken in a space remote from the agora or even from the politically institutionalized public space; for the political institutions of the day, they are truly out of bounds and out of control. And so the self-propelling and self-reinforcing mechanism will go on self-propelling and self-reinforcing. The sources of Unsicherheit will not dry up, seeing to it that the daring and the resolve to challenge them would not be immaculately conceived; the real power will stay at a safe distance from politics and the politics will stay powerless to do what politics is expected to do: to demand from all and any form of human togetherness to justify itself in terms of human freedom to think and to act – and to ask them to leave the stage if they refuse or fail to do so.

A Gordian knot indeed – one that is too tangled and twisted to be neatly untied, and so can only be cut … The deregulation and privatization of insecurity, uncertainty and unsafety seem to hold the knot together and so to be the right spot to cut through, if one wants the rest of the loop to fall apart.

Easier said than done, to be frank. Attacking insecurity at its source is a daunting task, calling for nothing less than rethinking and renegotiating some of the most fundamental assumptions of the type of society currently in existence – assumptions holding all the faster for being tacit, invisible or unmentionable, beyond discussion or beyond dispute. As the late Cornelius Castoriadis put it – the trouble with our civilization is that it stopped questioning itself. No society which forgets the art of asking questions or allows this art to fall into disuse can count on finding answers to the problems that beset it – certainly not before it is too late and the answers, however correct, have become irrelevant. Fortunately for all of us, this need not happen – and being aware that it might happen is the warrant that it won’t. This is where sociology enters the stage; it has a responsible role to play, and it would have no right to make excuses if it shed that responsibility.

The frame in which the entire argument of the book is inscribed is the idea that individual liberty can be only a product of collective work (can be only collectively secured and guaranteed). We move today though towards privatization of the means to assure/insure/guarantee individual liberty – and if this is a therapy for present ills, it is such a treatment which is bound to produce iatrogenic diseases of most sinister and atrocious kinds (mass poverty, social redundancy and ambient fear being most prominent among them). To make the present plight and the prospect of its repair more complex yet, we live also through a period of the privatization of utopia and of the models of the good (with the models of the ‘good life’ elbowing out, and cut off from, the model of the good society). The art of reforging private troubles into public issues is in danger of falling into disuse and being forgotten; private troubles tend to be defined in a way that renders exceedingly difficult their ‘agglomeration’, and thus their condensation into a political force. The argument of this book is an (admittedly inconclusive) struggle to make the translation possible again.

The changing meaning of politics is the topic of the first chapter; the troubles which beset the existing agencies of political action and the reasons for their falling effectiveness are discussed in the second; and the broad outlines of a vision which may guide the much-needed reform are sketched in the third. The prospects of ideology in a post-ideological world, of tradition in the post-traditional world, and of shared values in a society tormented by ‘value crisis’ are broached in separate sections.

Much of this book is contentious and meant to be such. The most controversial, though, are probably the issues discussed in the last chapter, and this for a double reason.

Visions born and floated in an autonomous society or a society aiming to become autonomous are and must be many and diverse, and so, were one to wish to avoid controversy, one would have to refrain from thinking of alternatives to the present – let alone alternatives arguably better than the present. (Evil, as we know, has its best friend in banality, while banality takes the routine for ultimate wisdom.) But what makes the chapter more controversial still, is that visions as such have nowadays fallen into disrepute. ‘The end of history’ is all the rage, and the most contentious issues that haunted our ancestors are commonly taken to have been settled, or treated as settled by not being noted (at any rate noticed as problems). We tend to be proud of what we perhaps should be ashamed of, of living in the ‘post-ideological’ or ‘post-utopian’ age, of not concerning ourselves with any coherent vision of the good society and of having traded off the worry about the public good for the freedom to pursue private satisfaction. And yet if we pause to think why that pursuit of happiness fails more often than not to bring about the results we hoped for, and why the bitter taste of insecurity makes the bliss less sweet than we had been told it would be – we won’t get far without bringing back from exile ideas such as the public good, the good society, equity, justice and so on – such ideas that make no sense unless cared for and cultivated in company with others. Nor are we likely to get the fly of insecurity out of the ointment of individual freedom without resorting to politics, using the vehicle of political agency and charting the direction which that vehicle should follow.

Certain orientation points seem to be crucial when planning the itinerary. The third chapter focuses on three of them: the republican model of the state and of citizenship, a basic income as universal entitlement, and stretching the institutions of an autonomous society far enough to restore its enabling capacity – by catching up with powers that are at the moment exterritorial. All three points are discussed in order to provoke and foment deliberation, not to offer solutions – which in an autonomous society anyway can come only at the far end of, not at the beginning of, political action.

I happen to believe that questions are hardly ever wrong; it is the answers that might be so. I also believe, though, that refraining from questioning is the worst answer of all.

August 1998