»Liquid Modernity«, »Society Under Siege« and, recently, »Liquid Love« – these are the titles under which Zygmunt Bauman has been analysing current social and cultural changes year after year. Bauman, who was born in the Polish town of Poznan in 1925 and has been living in Leeds in England since 1971, was himself confronted early on in life by radical political changes and deracinations – something that led to his later interest in the modern age and the Holocaust, among other things. When, in 1968, he again became the victim of an anti-Semitic expulsion, this time from the Warsaw University, he settled in Israel for a time before taking up the offer of a chair at Leeds University, where he was Head of Sociology for a long period. Since then, Bauman’s theoretical expositions, highly topical and analytical, have accompanied what he once called the »great transformation of our time«: the steady disappearance of formerly stable social relationships, the increasing degree of individualisation within Western culture, and finally, the way politics is being sidelined in more and more flagrant fashion from global arenas of power. Whereas, as early as 1998, Baumann already emphasised the »human consequences« of globalisation, his most recent works explore lines of development in the »society under siege« in ever greater detail. One of these lines leads to the question of how best to counter the new, global structures of power, what form the path from the precarious status of mere »onlooker« to active intervention could take without there being even more destruction in the global china shop, and what a time OF, or FOR, action could look like.

[b]Christian Höller[/b]: Some of your most recent work is focused on the issue of »society under siege«. You particularly see contemporary society – Western societies, for that matter – as being under attack by two major forces that at first sight, seem to be quite different and distant from each other: One is the major pressure »from above« commonly termed as globalisation, the other one being a more and more fragmenting push from below, recognizable in the increasing diversity of individualized life-styles, or in short, »life politics« as you call this phenomenon. With respect to these two pressures, you also diagnose an increasing cleavage between them – an extending void in which the possibility of an emancipative, democratic politics seems to vanish. What affinities, if any, and what significant disjunctures are there between the two forces that contribute to this picture, and what are their most dramatic effects on society?

[b]Zygmunt Bauman[/b]: Indeed, for a long stretch of modern history it seemed that power and politics were »natural partners« destined to marry and remain wedded »till death do them part« (more precisely, divorce would mean the demise of both – no partner would survive the death of its partner). Equally, the state in its specifically modern form of a »nation-state« was seen as the natural residence of the couple. No marital infidelity, let alone adultery was tolerated: following Max Weber’s hint, the state was an institution claiming monopoly of coercion, and since capacity to coerce was the defining feature of power and since politics was assumed to be in the last account about the accumulation, distribution and deployment of power, it followed that the monopoly in question won’t be reached and preserved unless it is extended over the administration of power and politics. This model was never of course implemented in full – but it marked the horizon of the modern efforts to re-shape human togetherness and reposition it on a more solid and longer lasting, safer and rational basis. Striving towards that model was commonly described as the essence of the »civilizing process«, the declared purpose and inner logic of all »modernization«.

At present both partners are leaving their shared household or staying there but part time. Power evaporates upwards from the state into the supra-state, no-man’s land of global extraterritoriality, while politics drips and trickles down into the space of life-politics. The two processes are not just interconnected – they are inconceivable in separation, as they invigorate, accelerate and intensify each other’s course. The less power is left in the house of the state, the less is expected from the fast weakening state organs by the political actors, and fewer political aims are realistically and with conviction addressed toward the state. The more the state is deserted by politics, the less it is able to hold whatever remains of its once sovereign powers, now free to go and eager to emancipate from vexing political controls. In the result, there is now a split between power free from politics and politics unsupported by power, with the half-empty house of the state in-between; one of its walls is threatened by demolition, the other by falling apart – hardly an attractive site for the power & politics cohabitation.

The global space is the realm of power free from political constraints. The individual life is the realm of politics with no power of self-assertion. One consequence is a sort of a global china-shop wide open to any willing bull; the other – individual lives struggling in vain to resolve private problems and fight back the private risks into which public issues, once handled and tackled by the powerful state, have crumbled.

[b]Höller[/b]: With respect to the force of globalisation, there seem to be two quite significant but apparently contradictory moments at work. On the one hand, one recognizes an increasingly »master-less world« in which all sovereignty appears more and more evacuated and in which, as you say, »everything may happen, but nothing can be done«. On the other hand, a new global rule seems to establish itself in the wake of globalisation processes – one that seems to depend on progressive political fragmentation (of states, territories, etc) as well as on the uninhibited enforcement of free trade. How are these two tendencies within globalisation connected? Is there, in other words, a »systematic« pattern behind the »new global disorder«?

[b]Bauman[/b]: Your description of the present predicament is flawless; I can hardly improve on your portrayal that is exemplarily succinct while comprehensive. Indeed, the weaker are the political actors »down there« and the less consequential become their comings and goings, the less constrained feel the power players »up there« and are more eager to behave accordingly. And so a process reminiscent of Gregory Bateson’s »schismogenetic chain« is set in operation: the more unscrupulous and arrogant one side of the confrontation, the meeker and more submissive becomes the other – and its sorry look adds further to the audacity and insolence of the first, which presses the second into more servility yet – and so on and on, with no clear end in view.

One feature I would add however to your picture: the bullying – the notion not accidentally derived from the bull’s habits. Increasingly deregulated and uninhibited free trade is the prime mover, purpose and outcome of the schismogenetic sequence – the principal cause of stripping the states of the resources and prerogatives they need to exercise an effective power; but the naked force of coercion, military might, capacity to maim and kill, must constantly be kept ready to use and periodically deployed (in a most spectacular way possible) to crush an occasional condensation of counter-veiling force before it turns heavy enough to break through the bossing/bootlicking chain. Discrepancies in the military might, rather than the differences of economic potentials, are the main resource that allows global powers to go on successfully resisting the emergence of a planetary set of checks-and-balances, an expanded version of the equilibrating mechanism which used to sustain the mutually strengthening and mutually constraining interaction of power and politics at the level of nation-states.

All talk of a »global system« is, to say the least, grossly premature. The most striking feature of the new planetary disorder is precisely its non-system-ness. Social totalities can be sensibly described as »systems« (that is, regular, rule-obeying, »patterned« and so by and large predictable and in principle controllable) thanks to that checking-and-balancing impact of mutually attuned »subsystems« – political, military, economic, juridical, cultural (let us note that they can be called »subsystems« only if they are »coordinated in such a way). On a planetary plane however some elements once integrated into the social systems of the nation-states are spectacularly absent, and such elements as are wholly or partly present are clearly out-of-joint, »going it alone« and acting at cross purposes. There is no global culture, no global judiciary, no global law, whereas emergent global politics and the globally preached ethical principles of human coexistence go against the grain of everything that the globally acting economic forces and globally aiming military forces stand for.

[b]Höller[/b]: Globalisation is characterized, among other things, by the condition of extra-territoriality. Extra-territoriality is crucially based on the resource of mobility which is shared across the different social strata – from the power elites to impoverished refugees – but which is quite unequally distributed. In this regard, you speak of a certain structural »likeness« of global players and refugees, of tourists and vagabonds. How is this likeness to be understood as regards the increasing difference between the two extremes? And how can the significance of these two exemplary figures (the tourist and the vagabond) be assessed when – as you state – mobility is not an option for 98 per cent of the world population altogether?

[b]Bauman[/b]: Likeness? Both extremes of the emergent global hierarchy are already on the move. In that they differ sharply from the wide middle stratum which they erode on both sides and prompt to day-dream of joining the upper stratum (of global players and/or tourists) yet be haunted by the nightmare of falling into the bottom category (of vagabonds and/or refugees). Yes, the overwhelming majority of humankind continues to stay put, but as you know from elementary physics any movement is always a »movement in relation to …«; an object »moves« when its distance from/to another object changes. When the »movement« concept is metaphorically transferred from the physical to social space, physical (or geographical) distances are replaced by »social distances« plotted in the »space« of social relations. In the social space you can move without making a single step in the physical space – without ever leaving bodily/physically your home.

This will happen if someone transforms the web of connections and interaction which defines your place in the world. For instance, the company you worked for has been swallowed by another, went bankrupt or decided to »downsize« thereby making you redundant; or the skills that used to be the foundation of your social position and your self-esteem became obsolete; or the cause in which you inscribed your projected identity has faded or has been discredited; or the values you pursued have been publicly devalued; or the dividing line between proper and improper you learned to observe has been shifted and what you came to hold dear has been denigrated; or the imagined community which you considered your home and to which you believed to belong has become impotent to support you or turned its back at you. If anything of that happened – you would become a vagabond, an unwilling tourist – forced to look for sustenance elsewhere and to leave behind what you naively trusted to remain »your world« as long as you live or until »something better«, more attractive and more promising, comes about. And however secure your »placement in the world« may feel at the moment, you know that all that may happen, and that if it does, you won’t be able to do much to avert the disaster, let alone fight it back and reverse.

However tiny the category of refugees/vagabonds may already be, its impact is therefore much greater than its size would imply. Everybody may stumble, and bad luck delivers its blows at random, and so the vagabonds-by-the-decree-of-fate which you cannot avoid seeing around are vivid reminders of the plight that may befall you at any moment. This is, perhaps, why we dearly wish to »send them back home« or lock them up, to chase them away – out of sight and out of mind…

There seems to be but one way to escape the fate of »unwilling tourists«: to become a willing one… Committing oneself firmly to one particular place means exposing yourself to enormous risk, making yourself a hostage to an unknown fate, inviting trouble. Is it not better to keep all ties loose, all engagements temporary, all emotional involvements shallow, all commitments short-term and instantaneously revocable – so that you can easily move on at the time of your choice to a place of your choice the moment the old place becomes too shaky for comfort? Given the facility with which inscrutable, uncontrolled and unpredictable forces of fate may »unfix« even the apparently foolproof »fixes«, is it not better to resist »being fixed« in the first place – so that once the blow is aimed in your direction you are ready to forestall it or at least soften the blow and mitigate its consequences?

Being stretched between the poles of »global tourists« and vagabonds/refugees generates a steady mental pressure likely in a longer run to engrave its trace on all aspect of living – and most prominently on the shape of preferred life strategies and distribution of life concerns. One option conspicuously missing in that pressure is that of resisting the globalizing logic – since both extremes, the resented and the attractive one alike, convey the same message of unavoidable extraterritoriality. This is why the statistics of people in-travel and those admittedly sedentary and firmly settled may mislead. They are at best snapshots, recording a momentary state of affairs cut out from its dynamic setting. It gives no information about the trends, but above all is mute about the intentions, hopes, fears and mental strivings of people caught in the picture.

[b]Höller[/b]: In your approach to globalisation, you compare contemporary global space (or the new kind of territory constituted by the »space of flows«) to a »frontier-land«. In this contested territory, adversaries are constantly on the move, political coalitions are – as for instance Donald Rumsfeld famously put it – strategically shifting and only temporary, everything seems to be pretty much in flux. At the same time, this new global space is also characterized by more and more refugees set in motion by forced displacement, and accordingly, more and more refugee camps – developments that seem to terminate in the establishment of more rigid border regimes than ever. How to these two tendencies within the planetary frontier-land go together?

[b]Bauman[/b]: They are phenomena generated on two opposite ends of the new global hierarchy which is formed, marked and measured by the unequal distribution of one freedom mostly: freedom to move, freedom of mobility. Being free to move (in geographical space and in the »network of social relations« alike) is the most coveted and cherished value – since it is the essential currency in which one can purchase all other values; among them, security: physical and bodily security as much as the security of social position.

The most common strategy in the contemporary power struggles boils down to the removing one by one the obstacles to one’s own mobility and limiting as much as possible the movement of others, particularly the mobility undertaken on the others« own initiative – the »unauthorized« movements, »illegal« movements. These two ostensibly opposite attitudes to »moving freely« are in fact mutually complementary. They need each other, they supplement each other in the contemporary version of power struggle. No universally available quality could be a privilege, and without a selectively and sparsely offered quality there will be no deprivation – and it is the privileges and the deprivations that give meaning and purpose to power struggles.

The stake of power struggle at all times was the privilege of »getting it my way« – in opposition to others who were doomed to suffer a lot not of their choosing. And at all times to be powerful meant to have a freedom of manoeuvre, freedom to make unexpected, irregular, extraordinary moves which because of being erratic and capricious constituted the element of uncertainty and unpredictability in the situation of others (making such moves, called »miracles«, is in all religions the prerogative of gods); whereas powerlessness went together with fixity, with perpetual submission to a routine and the resulting monotony of conduct. Repetitive behaviour of rule-obeying actors made them utterly predictable. Their regularity allowed the power-holders to treat them as a »constant«, not a »variable« in the calculation of their own moves.

This universal feature of all power relations and power struggles is presently manifested primarily in the opposition between freedom to come and go versus spatial confinement. »Freedom to come and go« permits the deployment of a »hit-and-run« tactics, the delivery of unexpected (and so impossible to pre-empt) blows – as well as washing hands of their consequences. Both possibilities make the position of the »settled« (glebae adscripti, in fact) frail and permanently vulnerable. Mobility would not be a privilege and a formidable power resource were it not complemented by territorial fixity of the powerless.

In the eyes of the »locals« (of the settled populations that have no wish to move places but fear that because of the unfettered mobility of the powers-that-be they may be uprooted against their will), the migrants already uprooted elsewhere and trying now to penetrate their hermetically sealed borders are vivid embodiments of their own fears. The sheer presence of the migrants within the field of view may be a cause of insomnia; it makes the dashing or placating own fears all that more difficult, as it bears an indisputable testimony to the awesome uprooting powers at loose. In addition, the homeless migrants, squeezed out of their domicile yet barred access to any other, are »sitting ducks« – easy targets for unloading the accumulated anxiety generated by the whirlwind of uncontrollable, seemingly blind and contingent transformations encapsulated in the idea of »globalization«. They offer a sort of a safety valve through which the seething concoction of fear and anger can be, and is, channelled away from its genuine causes: that is, away from the forces operating at the other, unreachable and elusive, extreme of global hierarchy.

[b]Höller[/b]: With respect to globalisation, you also state the end of »the era of space« and the rise of »the era of speed«. You particularly view the events of September 11, 2001 as marking the »symbolic end of the era of space«. Concerning the long aftermath of these events (as we are now witnessing), it would be interesting to learn more about the overall »role« of terrorism in relation to this crucial shift (viz. the end of the era of space). On the one hand, territorial considerations may well have played an important role in the September 11 attacks (the selection of US landmarks, hitting the enemy on its own homeland, etc.). On the other hand, it was dramatically demonstrated (as you yourself analyse) that even the new power structure of (territorially unbound) speed and acceleration does not offer more immunity than the »old regime« of territorial solidity.

[b]Bauman[/b]: »Free trade« which no local powers are able to stop and not allowed to interfere with is meant to render physical occupation and administration of a territory unnecessary for the exploitation of its riches, and therefore eminently avoidable. That new opportunity is taken by the global powers with a sigh of relief; administration of the territory, running its daily affairs and servicing law and order is a chore – awkward and costly – that be better left to the minions (»Iraqis themselves«, »Afghans themselves«, or junior »partners of the coalition«). There are but few exceptions of that rule, like oil fields, notorious for their scarcity and exceptional vulnerability to the terrorist blackmail yet quite central to the »mode of life« which global powers wish to preserve as their privilege and in which defence they wage their global wars.

The other point is that terrorism is extraterritorial, just as the global forces it assaults, and that territorial wars are for this reason largely irrelevant to its spread and activity – even if the general staffs of the globally acting armies would not admit it lest they seriously undermine their reason d’être. Terrorists are the least likely casualties of territorial wars: the self-proclaimed »anti-terrorist wars« destroy well-nigh everything except the terrorism, their declared targets. Having torn or frayed the web of social bonds supporting life routines, such wars make the assaulted territory more hospitable to terrorists than ever before.

The terrorism, just like other global forces, thrives on being non-localizable, »un-pinpoint-able«, and on steering clear from the regular frontlines and battlefields. Its speciality is surprise; sporadic hit-and-run blows interspersed with intervals of invisibility. Its strength lies precisely in its knack for breaking the routine, in its ability to deliver blows unexpectedly and at places where they have been least expected. Terrorism comes very close to the model of »miracle making«, the notorious feature of the divine (or satanic, depending on the church to which one belongs) and of the sublime – the objects of, simultaneously, terror and fascination. Against such phenomenon, territorial actions are helpless. It is easier to find a needle in a haystack: unlike the terrorists, needles do not move and can be found exactly where they hurt.

Fight for »security« understood as an insurance against the unexpected and once hoped to be brought to a victorious end by tightening the defensive city walls and digging deeper moats, is unwinnable in the post-spatial era. Its most tangible (perhaps the only tangible) effect today consists in lubricating the wheels of global forces, of which the terrorism is the alter ego, a copycat imitation or caricature. Terrorism is perhaps an un-anticipated, but all the same inescapable consequence of extraterritoriality and the rule of speed. Another side effect is the spectacular growth of »security industry«, guaranteed a long and unstoppable progress thanks precisely to its ineffectiveness.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones (Introduction)

 

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