The transition from postmodernity to liquid modernity in the writings of Zygmunt Bauman

The attempt to summarize the trajectory of an authorship can take different forms. One such form is to begin at the beginning, with the very first books of the author in question, and then gradually move forward in chronological order until there are no more books. This has the advantage of being both complete and comprehensive – the theoretical seeds that lay dormant in the early works can be seen to blossom in the later ones, and the potential blooms that did not come to pass can be noted by virtue of their absence. There is a trajectory, which exists in the form of the works published, an irrefutable empirical fact just waiting to be revealed through methodological observation – the method being the orderly progression through time.

The orderly progression through time is a key theme in Bauman’s work. It is one of the key aspects of modernity (and the way in which he characterizes its self-image and self-justification). As he notes at length with regards to the physical countenance of the Leeds town hall (Bauman 2000, p. 130ff), the inscription “Forward” is not merely an idle slogan meant to convey a vague sense of anticipation for what is to come. It is a direct invocation of the project of modernity and its promise of eternal progress; the movement forward is both a temporal and developmental affair. The work performed today will lead to a better tomorrow, whose improved conditions can be harnessed to lay the groundwork for an even better day after tomorrow. The immediate roadmap for moving ahead is laid out in planning documents, visions of a better ordered society and ever increasing statistics measuring the quality of life; the slightly more distant and future trajectory is dotted with utopian promises that are impossible today, but which will inevitably be possible once the future materializes through the efforts of today.

The counterpoint to this orderly progression through time is the specter of chaos, ornately developed dead-end inventions, and societal visions which do not quite manage to survive the transition into social practice. While Bauman characterizes modernity as the (both perceived and actualized) steady drumbeat of accumulated improvements, he also contrasts it with the ever more present condition of postmodernity and/or liquid modernity, wherein plans are held onto until better alternatives arrive, and the scope of future visions have been reduced to a pragmatic and frantic ad hoc crisis management of the immediate present. The confident forward momentum along a predetermined plan towards a clearly envisioned goal, a hallmark of modernity, is a maladaptive strategy under the conditions of postmodernity and liquid modernity. Modernity turned everything pre-modern that was solid into liquid, and then kept going as new modern institutions began to solidify. The only constant feature is change, but where modernity envisioned itself the architect of this change, liquid modernity finds itself sculpted (and defined) by knowing neither how things are nor how they are going to be moving forward. The steady progression into a bright future turned into a constant state of ambiguous uncertainty, a condition quite opposite to what was promised.

This, of course, has repercussions for how to read Bauman and the trajectory of his work over the years. Not only would it be a mistake to see it as an orderly progression from beginning to end, unambiguously and inexorably moving towards a clear conclusion; such an undertaking would also not quite be in the spirit of his thought. Bauman dwells in and upon the ambiguous, uncertain conditions wherein one course of action is as valid as any other, and the only difference between them is the self-imposed sense of right and wrong we bring to the table. We will, like so many of the hypothetical individuals described throughout his work, have to find our own way through it. To quote from Liquid Evil (2016):

What one can – and needs to – do, when aiming at its fullest possible representation, is to discover the river’s sources and its most copious tributaries, trace the trajectory of the riverbed (or, if such needs arise, its multiple – coexisting or alternating – trajectories), and map them both (even if being aware that what can ultimately be achieved is more of the nature of a snapshot than of the conclusive, lasting image of the phenomenon in question). (pp. vii-viii)

To be sure, Bauman did not primarily intend these words to be instructional with regards to how to read his works, but – as has already been suggested – things do not always turn out the way they were intended.

One way of taking a snapshot of the trajectory, as it were, is to take a quick look at the book titles as they have been phrased over the years. In the 90s, we saw titles like Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), Modernity and Ambivalence (1991), Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (1992), Postmodern Ethics (1993), Life in Fragments (1995), Postmodernity and its Discontents (1997), Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (1998), In Search of Politics (1999), The Individualized Society (2001), and Society Under Siege (2002). A cursory glance indicates that there seems to be some kind of unifying direction or theme to these works, albeit the exact nature of this common trajectory will have to be explored through closer reading. In the 00s and 10s, we find a more explicitly unified set of titles, such as Liquid Modernity (2000), Liquid Love (2003), Liquid Life (2005), Liquid Fear (2006), Liquid Times (2007), 44 Letters From the Liquid Modern World (2010), Culture in a Liquid Modern World (2011), Liquid Surveillance (2012), Liquid Evil (2016), and Nati Liquidi (2017). While the exact nature of this common trajectory also requires and deserves closer reading to uncover, it should be a fairly straightforward proposition to suggest that some sort of change took place between the one set of titles and the other. As Foucault famously noted, whenever there is a discontinuity, there is probably also something interesting afoot.

A more ambitious text would now say something along the lines of “and over the course of the next several chapters and hundreds of pages, we will discuss this in extensive detail”, but alas, we only have a few pages to go about this snapshot. The snapshot will take the form of a brief summary of a number of books from the first category – Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (1992), Postmodern Ethics (1993) and Postmodernity and its Discontents (1997) – followed by a brief look at some later works. The result will, naturally, not be a complete and comprehensive account of before and after, but it is in the nature of these things that no amount of effort is ever sufficient; there is always more to be done.

The postmodern period

Bauman of this period was very keen on exploring the relationship between individual and structure, or between micro and macro. Unlike Habermas or Bourdieu – or even Giddens, his contemporary – however, Bauman is not striving to give a stringent theoretical account which connects all the dots and crosses all the t’s, thus explaining how the two interrelate. Rather, his project is to show how the two do not connect, and how individual attempts to cross or bridge the gap may or may not succeed at performing the task. He is less interested in showing how to comprehensively describe the current state of things through elaborate theoretical models, than he is in showing that all attempts at this feat would necessarily result in the snapshot mentioned above; the river shifts and moves even as it is being mapped, making the resulting map slightly less obsolete than its predecessors. The inexorable passage of time is not methodologically irrelevant, as it were.

In Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (1992), Bauman explores the situatedness of individual lives within the larger context of cultures and institutions. No man is an island, and everyone is to some degree shaped by the situation they find themselves in. Not even the most fiercely independent and individualistic of persons can escape the necessity of using tool, frameworks and languages already put in place at the time of their birth by the forces of history. As Heidegger puts it, humans are thrown into the world and have to sort things out in medias res. History does not begin with the individual, and it does not end with the individual. Life is short, but art is very long indeed.

This state of things implies the question of the meaning of life. Barring a few select individuals, most actually existing humans have lived, worked and died without making a notable dent in the formation of history. The vast majority of human lived experience were never recorded, documented or in any other way remembered. Upon death, activity ceases and the process of forgetting begins. Biographical fates are not historical fates, and most biographies – should they have been written – would be rather unremarkable in the grand scheme of things. The question then becomes: given this inexorable march towards death and epistemic oblivion, what meaning does it all have?

For Bauman, the answer lies precisely in the longevity of art and human institutions. Being able to look back on past generations and centuries and see what has come before, provides a context for one’s lives and actions. On a small scale, this can mean looking at family traditions and the community created through their perpetuation; the larger family unit becomes immortal where the individual is not. The same tendency is borne out writ large with regards to intellectual or artistic traditions, where individual efforts are able to inscribe themselves into a shared history by continuing the work into the present. The great ones of the past (like Habermas and Bourdieu, and perhaps even Giddens) provide an existential anchor upon which to rely. When death inevitably comes, it will bookend a life lived in service of something greater than oneself.

The crux of the matter is – as is often the case for Bauman – that these life strategies do not always work, and that contemporary society is (more than anything else) characterized by a sense of discontinuity and disconnectedness from the past. The great family units of the past have disintegrated, the means by which to inscribe oneself into the tradition of the old masters tend to be ever so slightly unattainable, and the jobs with which one pays the rent is more often than not utterly orthogonal to any sense of meaning or purpose whatsoever. The strategies employed to ensure survival are not the same as those employed to give a meaningful account of one’s life, which only serves to accentuate the disconnect. This is a theme which will recur in later works.

In Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), the gap between personal biographies and historical tendencies is explored in the context of the Holocaust. For Bauman, the holocaust is not the result of a resurgence of barbarism in the civilized world, a momentary lapse of reason in an otherwise orderly progression towards a better future. Rather, it is a symptom of modernity, an outcome inherent as a possibility of the modern condition as such. The Holocaust was not the result of a large multitude of Germans unifying in their unrelenting hatred of the Jews; rather, it was the result of ordinary people going about their ordinary days in an ordinary manner. The salary office clerk, train maintenance worker and time table organizers did more or less what you would expect them to do today – ensured that salaries were paid on time, that the trains kept rolling, and that they did so in a manner which was both predictable and efficient. The fact that the salaries happened to go to the staff members of concentration camps and that the trains were bound for Auschwitz is, when it comes to understanding modern division of labor, an irrelevant but deeply morally disconcerting detail.

Much has been made of the figure of Adolf Eichmann, the administrator responsible for ensuring that trains arrived at the concentration camps in an orderly fashion. His work had a direct impact on the lives and deaths of those sent to these camps, and if he did his work well this meant more people would arrive there than if he did it poorly. Yet despite these effects of his work, he did not think particularly ill of the Jews. According to Arendt – who Bauman quotes and discuss at some length – Eichmann did not think anything particular about anything at all. He did not have to – his ethical and moral dispositions were orthogonal to his work of optimizing the train time tables. He famously said that all he wanted to do was to perform his duties; the results and consequences were quite literally above his pay grade.

Eichmann may be an extreme case, but his situation is not uncommon in a modern society. There is a fundamental decoupling of moral agency and the functions performed whilst at work. At the Nuremberg trials, it was concluded that merely following orders was not a sufficient defense against the charge of having committed war crimes. Nevertheless, “just doing one’s job” is still to this day an acceptable excuse when having to perform some ethically questionable task whilst on the clock. The moral and ethical responsibility is routinely delegated to whomever gave the order, who more often than not have received their own orders from even higher up the chain. When Bauman says that the Holocaust is an inherent possibility of modernity, rather than a one-off anomaly contained within a particular historical circumstance, he is referring to this mode of social organization. For Bauman, it is an ethical imperative to not settle for being another Eichmann, content in performing whatever task is set before him with efficient alacrity.

This has implications for what we saw above with regards to life strategies, but it does not provide a clear course of action moving forward. In Postmodern Ethics (1993), Bauman sets out to explore the ethical conditions we find ourselves in, not just post-Holocaust but post-modernity in general. When we can no longer inscribe ourselves into the tradition of relentless progress towards a better tomorrow – the Holocaust was indeed performed using better tools and at higher levels of organization than previous efforts of a similar nature, but it would be repugnant to call it progress – we have to try to find our own way best we can. Bauman characterizes modern ethics as a universal, one size fits all framework which is applicable to any and all situations, a final solution to the question of morals, whereas postmodern ethics have to make do with provisional, ad-hoc and quite possibly temporary solutions to immediate, contextual problems.

On the very first line of the book, Bauman makes it clear that this is a work about contemporary ethics rather than contemporary morals. The distinction between ethics and morals is crucial. Ethics is defined as the rigorous thinking that goes into determining whether something is right or wrong, praiseworthy or deplorable, good or bad; the system of values that determine which actions, past or future, are to be recommended or advised against. Morals, in contrast, are defined as what you do in an actual, immediate situation which requires your attention and participation. This distinction between ethics and morals makes the decision to limit the book to the realms of ethics quite understandable – the former can be assessed by reading and observing the zeitgeist, whilst the latter requires extensive empirical investigations to determine. The results of such investigations would also be subject to the passage of time; again, the river moves whilst being mapped out.

One way to visualize the distinctions – both between modern and postmodern, and between ethics and morals – is the trolley problem. In its modern form, it consists of a trolley moving along the tracks towards a group of ten people. By pulling a lever, our hypothetical ethical agent can divert the trolley onto another track, where it will only hit a single person. The ethical discussion then consists of various attempts at determining whether pulling or not pulling the lever is the correct choice, and the reasons for making such a judgment. Everything is very hypothetical and ethical. A postmodern rendition, however, would place you on a trolley, packed with people going about their day, nothing out of the ordinary. Suddenly, you discover that the person sitting across from you seems to be silently crying. You are now in a situation where you, personally, are called upon to act. What do you do? Do you ask what is wrong, do you pretend not to notice, give some other sort of emotional support,  or – and this is a very real possibility – do you become immobilized by indecision, unable to act one way or another until the other person gets up and exits at the next stop?

The modern trolley problem is characterized by access to perfect information. It is known that the trolley will hit those people, and it is known where the lever is and how it works. The postmodern trolley problem, to the contrary, is characterized by an overwhelming lack of information. We do not know who the other person is, what kind of situation they are in, whether our intervention would be helpful or detrimental, how to find out what is going on, or even which stop they are going to. All we know is that we are in a moral situation and have to act now, based on the limited amount of information available to us in the immediate moment, lest the moment slips by and we have missed the opportunity to make a difference. It is a very immediate situation, where inaction speaks as loud as action.

For Bauman, moral situations are not just exceptions to an otherwise ordered social reality. Every situation has an inherent potential to become a moral intervention (good or bad) into the lives of others, and the project of the book is to expand the realms of ethics from particular, well-defined situations to the messy muddle of everyday life. To simplify almost to the point of absurdity: where Modernity and the Holocaust is an appeal to not be an Eichmann at work, Postmodern Ethics expands it to the whole realm of human experience. What, given the postmodern lack of certainty, are we to do?

The question returns in Postmodernity and its Discontents (1997), where Bauman turns his attention to processes of inclusion and exclusion. Given the aforementioned lack of certainty, new categories are found or invented as focal points for social organization. The specifics differ from context to context, but the general tendency is to create ever subtler social distinctions where even minor variations become intensely significant and lead to tangible consequences. This turning of attention to what seems to be minor details has the double effect of providing certainty and a clear sense of direction as to what to do next. The thing to do, of course, being to redouble one’s efforts in ensuring that one continues to fulfil the criteria for inclusion, whilst also taking comfort in not belonging to the group of those excluded.

The ‘discontent’ of the postmodern condition is, of course, a term applicable to both those included and those excluded. The former have to work ever harder with ever more enthusiasm to maintain their status as still being allowed inside, while the latter face the consequences of exclusion. An employed person might find themselves working overtime as a result of the implied (sometimes not so implied) threat of losing their job, where an unemployed person find themselves the subject to any number of bureaucratic checks and controls to ensure they are not somehow cheating the system. Neither position is particularly comfortable, yet they are endured nevertheless; if nothing else, it is a survival strategy.

As the mechanisms for exclusion become more effective and intrusive, they also become more expensive. Given the contemporary tendency to decrease budgets whenever possible (in the name of using taxpayer money more efficiently), there is a systemic incentive to push people out of the system altogether. Not giving someone social security is cheaper than giving it to them, and so ever stricter rules are put in place regarding who counts as a legitimate recipient. These stricter rules are then used as leverage to keep those still included (albeit on a permanently temporary basis) on their toes; it is a self-reinforcing cycle where those who inevitably drop out are the examples used to scare new employees into new levels of work performance (a theme further explored in Bauman 1998).

Needless to say, there are inherent dangers to these processes. If the population of excluded individuals becomes too large, it has to be dealt with somehow. Any one particular individual makes little difference, but in sum total they can become perceived as an existential threat to the fabric of society. The fact that their status as excluded is a byproduct of how society is organized is beside the point – they are seen as a problem that has to be dealt with, and history has proven ample example of how such problems prompt final solutions (see also Bauman 1991). There is cause to be discontent indeed.

The liquid period

Having read thus far, readers would not be surprised at any of the themes brought up in Liquid Modernity (2000). Modernity in its liquid state has overwhelming similarities to modernity in its post-prefixed state, with the same discontents and perils. It would be possible to trace each and every theme back to a previously published work (an effort which would be educative as an excuse to read said works, but whose end result would not be an interesting read). What does differ is the metaphorics, whose implications are both more and less obvious than it would seem at first glance. The obvious implication is of course the letting go of the term “postmodern”, and the connotations it bears to heavy-duty theory and difficult-to-read books. A less obvious implication, related to the first, is a commitment to reaching and engaging with a wider audience. The metaphor of liquidity is easy to come to terms with and apply to lived experience – things used to be stable and solid, but now things change in ever new and inscrutable ways. What the metaphor loses in terms of being traceable to the postmodern lineage, it gains in terms of simply being able to hand someone the book and being confident in their ability to read it.

The significance of this shift can be gleaned from the evocatively titled What Use is Sociology (2014). Here, Bauman extensively discusses the continued relevance of the social imagination (as envisioned by C. Wright Mills), and the role sociology has in connecting personal issues with societal and structural problems. The move from postmodernity to liquid modernity is a measure taken to give ordinary people access to the tools of the trade. What use is sociology – pun very much intended – if it is locked away behind jargon? Moreover, what use is it if it reduces itself to a mere hunt for statistically significant correlations which, upon being presented to the public, only results in an indifferent shrug so profound as to move mountains? The purpose of sociology is to be relevant and of use, a purpose which should be reflected both in the chosen subject matter and the way it is conveyed. The metaphor of a world turned to liquid seems to cover both of these bases, warranting its extended use.

In Moral Blindness (2013), Bauman and his interlocutor Donskis return to the themes laid out in the last chapter. The blindness refers to the capacity of normal human beings – unremarkable in every way – to perform acts of unspeakable cruelty during the course of their normal lives, be it to ignore the physical presence of those in need (beggars come to mind, but also prisoners) to report someone to the secret police for minor infractions out of a sense of duty and loyalty to the system. Again, we see the theme of doing what you are supposed to, and of following orders. Here, the different ethical threads explored in the previous works are brought together with a clarity afforded by hindsight and familiarity with the new liquid metaphorics. The ethics are still, in essence, postmodern, in the sense that actual situations humans find themselves in are still defined by a radical lack of certainty and an ever growing sense that something has to be done. Our technical capacity to act on this impulse has grown since the publication of Postmodern Ethics (1993), without a corresponding growth of our ethical sensibilities. Indeed, innovations such as the internet and social media have given individuals the capacity to find more information about the issues and problems of the day, but it is not the kind of information that makes for radical ethical empathy. Rather, it allows for the ever finer pinpointing of the identity of the excluded Other, and the coordination of unsavory activities pointed their way. To use an example not found in Bauman, but relevant in our Swedish context: it allows for the mobilization of ordinary people in burning down housing units intended for refugees, arson in the name of nationalism. Only this time, no one gave the order; it just emerged as the moral thing to do.

In Liquid Evil (2016), the tendency of technology to dissociate morality and the potential to commit evil is discussed in more explicit terms. To quote:

One of the consequences of [liquid modernity] has been to render redundant mass participation in state-initiated, state-commanded and state-monitored evils. We no longer have massive conscription armies; murder has turned into a task for professional soldiers – and those soldiers have turned mostly into fully programmed attachments to smart technological contraptions. […] Smart missiles and drones have chased away battleships and fighter pilots. Ever more seldom do the killers face the killed – and so the demands of obedience come unto direct confrontation with moral scruples much less than they used to – if at all. (p. 33)

The turn to discussing these technological developments explicitly in terms of evil might seem hyperbolic, but as Bauman’s own work has shown, the atrocities committed by man against man far transcends the realms where any other term becomes insufficient. Rather than locating the evil at particular agents – the Germans in the case of the Holocaust, the soldiers in the cases alluded to in the quote above – Bauman locates it as a possibility inherent in each and every one of us, aided and abetted by the new technological means which allow us to do it ever more efficiently with ever less risk of facing the consequences, legally or even physically. This, and nowhere else, is where the orderly progression implied in the slogan “Forward” has taken us. In no uncertain terms.

A conclusion of sorts

As I hope has been clearly shown in the snapshot given above, Bauman is not in the business of giving us fixed and universally applicable answers. Rather, his project is to create a framework for ethical (and sociological) reflection, and to make it available to those in need of it. Which, as it turns out, is each and every one of us. If there is one hopeful message that shines throughout Bauman’s work, it is that with the capacity to do evil also comes the capacity to do good. There is still a human subjectivity capable of making ethical judgments, and thus there is still a humanity left to make ethical appeals to. It would be very easy to look upon the world as he describes it, and despair. Yet despair is not a very effective emotion; it does not spark feats of ethical prowess. Fortunately, the race is not over yet – there are still things to be done. There is still an alternative. There is still time. We can still choose to be ethical.

A second, more literal conclusion

In Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman (2001), published relatively soon after Liquid Modernity (2000), Bauman expresses a growing unease with the term “postmodernity”. Not only because of its gradual falling out of popularity, but also because it implies that modernity came to an end in some undefined way. It is an accurate description to say that modernity took one form and then changed into another form, but Bauman wanted to convey that they were both of a kind. Postmodernity was, in a sense, the most modern we have ever become, the logical conclusion of the transformative process initiated by the modern project. These two tendencies conspired into finding a different metaphor for describing both the transformation of modernity and the changes to the transformations of modernity. Which is a more literal, but slightly less ethically interesting, answer to the question of why the shift in terminology from postmodernity to liquid modernity occurred. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

References

Bauman, Z. (1989). Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (1991). Modernity and Ambivalence. Oxford: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (1992). Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (1993). Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell.

Bauman, Z. (1995). Life in Fragments. Oxford: Blackwell.

Bauman, Z. (1997). Postmodernity and its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (1998). Work, Consumerism and the New Poor. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Bauman, Z. (1999). In Search of Politics. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (2001). The Individualized Society. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. & Tester, K. (2001). Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (2002). Society Under Siege. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (2003). Liquid Love. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (2005). Liquid Life. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (2006). Liquid Fear. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (2007). Liquid Times. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (2010). 44 Letters From the Liquid Modern World. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (2011). Culture in a Liquid Modern World. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. & Donskis, L. (2013). Moral Blindness. Cambridge. Polity.

Bauman, Z. & Lyon, D. (2013). Liquid Surveillance. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. Hviid Jacobsen, M. & Tester, K. (2014). What Use is Sociology?. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. & Donskis, L. (2016). Liquid Evil. Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. & Leoncini, T. (2017). Nati Liquidi. Sperling & Kupfer.