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.

Reverse identity politics

Strangeness is yet again afoot. This particular strangeness I suspect many of you readers have taken note of on occasion, seeing as it is the topic of the day and has been for many days.

It concerns the liberal subject.

Since there is considerable confusion with regard to the exact meaning of both the word "liberal" and "subject", it would only be prudent to define their combination. Lest we be lost in the vagaries of the English language.

The liberal subject is what is visible to the bureaucracies of the liberal state. In an immediate sense, this takes the form of tax records, hospital journals, criminal records or other documents that in some way depict a person. In a less immediate sense, it is a person as it is defined in the code of laws that governs the land: their rights, their obligations and - most importantly - who they as citizens are supposed to be.

This is something else than who they are, in any sense of self or identity. This is a purely discursive construct, and exists only as an aggregate of small fragments that combine to make up a whole. One regulation here, one regulation there; small things. But these fragments add up, and the construct that emerges has real life implications.

An example of this are rights that a person has to actively claim in order to actually benefit from. There are any number of these, from municipal to national. In theory, all you as a person has to do is to fill out the proper paperwork and possibly do some talking to some bureaucrats, and then it's all yours. You as a liberal subject have it within your power to mobilize the apparatus of state on your behalf in this regard, should you but choose to do so.

You as an actual person more than likely have no idea that these rights even exist, and there is a non-zero percentage that no one in your neighborhood does either. You as an actual person have a limited knowledge about the finer points of legal print that surround you, and frankly I suspect that you have better ideas about how to spend your life than reading every rule and regulation there is based on some just in case basis.

But.

The difference between you as a liberal subject and you as an actual person does not exist as far as the liberal state goes. Who you are outside the rules and regulations literally does not matter - it does not exist, it is not visible, and it is not a proper justification for action of any kind. The actual you that walks around, breathes and has impressions of the world - does not exist. In the eyes of the law, you are a citizen. No more, no less.

This means that any failure on your part to act in the prescribed manner is your fault. Even if you had no idea you were supposed to do it, or were utterly oblivious to the fact that doing it existed as a possibility in the world.

Or, phrased slightly differently: if you did not claim your right, you actively chose not to claim it. Ignorance is no excuse.

I imagine that actual you might have objections to this state of things. Good. It means that you perceive the strangeness that is afoot.

Welcome to modernity, citizen.

No, actually, it is both sides

Sometimes, I get into brutally one-sided fights with individuals who want to argue that capitalism is better than communism. I say one-sided, since they are interested in arguing and I'm not, and I shift the brunt of the emotional labor involved in keeping an argument going squarely upon them. This is a patently unfair move, to be sure, but if you seek me out specifically to reiterate a high school debate, it's an unfairness brought upon yourself; unlike both communism and capitalism, it is within your individual power to avoid this particular structural unfairness.

A more interesting approach to the capitalism/communism divide is to see them both as possible manifestations of modernity, with shared roots, shared symptoms and shared absurdnesses. Modernity could go either of these ways (possibly others as well), and we are now armed with a century of empirical data to study and learn from. Declaring either alternative to be 'better' and ending one's analysis there is a failure to engage with the data; it's ideology.

Sometimes, my non-participation in these fights is interpreted as an ideological proclamation. Since I refuse to partake in these small moments of grandstanding against communism, I must be on team communism. And thus, they unleash the killer question, the question to end all questions:

Do you want to live like they did in the Soviet Union?

Funny you should ask.

There are a non-trivial amount of stories emerging from the US right now about how the current megastorms (Harvey, Irma) are impacting ordinary everyday citizens. Some are about price gauging, which is to say the process predicted by neoclassical economics wherein it becomes more expensive to survive the worse things get. Those stories are not surprising; economists have long referred to this as the cost of doing business. More surprising, however, are the stories of individuals fleeing the oncoming megastorms - and subsequently getting fired for not showing up to work.

If your frame of reference is that capitalism is better than communism, then you will be ill equipped to discuss this state of things. It makes no sense on the face of it to penalize workers for evacuating in the face of a storm encompassing whole states; the words force majeure spring to mind. No reasonable person would expect ordinary people to have to stay and die in the face of overwhelming natural forces for the sake of a contractual agreement. Those kinds of suicidal heroics for symbolic causes are the stuff of war legends, not of everyday workaday business as usual.

To be sure, die-hard ideological capitalists would probably not be surprised to hear of these things if they were told it happened in the Soviet Union. But it is happening now, in the United States, the self-avowed bastion of capitalist free enterprise. Why do we see the same disregard for individual liberty in both instances?

If you view communism and capitalism as two possible variations of the same overarching historical tendency, then these stories become less confusing. Seen in the light of increased bureaucratization and the insistence that formal rules trump informal actualities (e.g. megastorms), it makes sense. We may not agree with the practice of expecting employees to stand and die for companies that spend more money lobbying against increased minimal wages than it would cost to simply pay those minimal wages, but we have a framework for understanding that these demands do not spring from nothing. There are historical trends and forces at work, and you do not have to have read Kafka to understand them.

But it helps.

Who and what to know

A while back ago, I was attending a social gathering where people came, discussed for a while, and left. There was no fixed topic of discussion, or other purpose than the sheer getting together and talking. It was a fluid situation.

At one particular moment, those present got to talking about family relations and relatives. There were old folks present (persons in their sixties and upwards) who talked about their relatives and relations in terms of individuals. The reference points went along these lines: he was the one who was married to her, and they had that fancy car, remember? or: remember the old man who lived on that hill back in the days - he had a nephew, who married this other person who ran that store, and so on.

For those listening in on the conversation without knowing (and thus not remembering) these particular facts or persons, this line of describing who's who will remain a work in progress. More information is required about the nature of marriages, cars, hills and other aspects of local historical memory to make sense of it all. It is a situated knowledge about a specific cast of characters, and the only way to really become someone in the know would be to stick around long enough to become situated.

After a while of establishing who's who, someone asked one of the young persons present if they knew the children of those discussed. As it turned out, they did, in a way. They knew of these persons, but had never really interacted in any significant fashion. The most succinct summation of the situation put it thusly: oh yeah, him. He was in B, so I never talked to him.

This is a distinctly different way of relating to social relations. The B in this case refers to an administrative subdivision of school populations - 6A, 6B or 6C. These are all sixth grade, but for purposes of keeping group sizes manageable, divided into three groups. Referring to B as a known fact implies knowing these administrative subdivisions and their social implications, which is a radically different way of organizing who's who than the individual-to-individual approach outlined above.

The old folks present did not know the specific implications of the letter B. But, being old and wise, they picked up the gist that this letter somehow meant that the individuals in question did not know each other, and continued the discussion armed with this new nugget of contextual information.

The difference between young and old in this case is not subtle. In fact, it seems to be taken right out of some introductory textbook on sociology, wherein it describes the gradual expansion of bureaucracy into more and more aspects of our lives. The old ones thought in terms of individuals; the young ones in terms of administrative subdivisions. It was, in a single moment, a crystallization of modernity.

It was a strange moment, and I have pondered it ever since.

Grading EU on a curve

Technically, our local universities have a new grading system. This follows from the Bologna process, which aims to standardize grading systems across the EU (among other things). However, given the considerable autonomy our local universities have, the rate of implementation varies from university to university.

The reasons for this have little to do with the new grades in and of themselves, above and beyond the basic reluctance of institutions to change anything at all. Rather, it has to do with a peculiarity of the legal status given to the new grades, and what it means to be given a particular grade instead of another.

The old system had three grades: fail, pass and pass with distinction. The difference between passing and passing with distinction is often quite significant in terms of effort, and utterly irrelevant to anything at all outside of your sense of accomplishment. The important thing is whether you passed or not, and the range of important grades stops there.

This has implications for the legal status of these grades. Given that our local universities are government institutions, and you cannot challenge decisions by government institutions that are in your favor, this means that you cannot challenge the decision to give you a "pass" rather than a "pass with distinction". The difference between passing and passing with distinction is so miniscule that it makes no difference, but passing a course is beneficial to you. Thus, since passing a course is a beneficial governmental decision, it cannot be challenged.

(It is not unheard of for students to intentionally fail a test they know they'd only get a pass on, in order to redo it later to ensure they'd pass with distinction. These minmaxing daredevils are rare and far between, though.)

The grading system proposed by the Bologna process, however, has more steps in it, ranging from A to F(ail). This might seem like a minor point, and if your only aim is to get through the educational process in one piece, it is. However, since there are more steps in the new system, the legal status of any particular grade is slightly different compared to the old system.

Specifically, getting a B rather than, say, a C, is better all around. It makes a difference. It says something about you. Something that is left utterly implicit in the old system.

This means that it is possible to challenge grades given in the new system (given that they are not an A). And students do challenge grades, en masse. The universities can't revoke a grade due to a student being annoying, but they can raise a grade if badgered about it with sufficient paperwork. Thus, the paperwork commences.

Equally thus, universities are dragging their feet in implementing the new grade system. Because being badgered with paperwork is a chore. An easily avoided chore.

If you want to understand the process of EU integration, all you have to do is to take the state of affairs described above, and multiply it across all the institutions of all the countries.

All of them.

Modern ruins

We live in a world in ruins. Every day, we walk and talk amongst these ruins - everything around us is to some degree in a state of decay. Every day we can see how ideas that were once modern trace themselves in the ragged, tired faces of our peers. The idea of a perfected world is a ruin once revered as a castle, yet its inhabitants seem reluctant to leave; everyone knows that our current way of life cannot go on forever, yet we still assume we will. Everyone knows that status quo is a reminder from a past with greater ambitions than the present, yet the thought of being reminded frightens us more than a potential realization that we ever forgot.

You only have to look at contemporary politics to see more ruins than is warranted. There is, to be sure, talk of growth and new constructions, but when push comes to shove it's only the same old same old. The thought of eternal progress, categorical purity, apotheosis hiding just around the corner of the next megaproject. The thought that problems can be planned away, the thought of central control, of five year plans, of market efficiencies.

Always the same question lurks behind these thoughts, the one question every politician and ideologue does everything to avoid answering: are we there yet?

The biggest ruin of them all, whose inhabitants seem to be ever resistant to the notion of moving out, is of course the notion that there is something to arrive at. That there is a "there", but not yet. That the present is an anomalous state of being, a waiting phase before history proper begins. You are free to choose your own props: the revolution, the apocalypse, a state of full employment, the ethnically cleansed motherland - choose your telos. It is a good map to these ruins of ours, telos. Everything will be fine after the revolution; the world as we know it just has to end first.

It is one of the greatest ironies of these modern ruins of ours. They remain.

We are not only surrounded by political ruins. There's plenty of physical ones too. Small factory towns whose main factory closed its doors and was promptly attacked by green growing things and forget alike; wharves that do not ship anything but nostalgia; city centers that fall apart because no one looks after them. In Detroit, whole parts of the city are uninhabited, and there are plenty of other places where the past insists without the cooperation of the present.

One of the most insistent and oft repeated messages we bombard our kids with is that we are entering new times. Some say these new times began at the end of the Cold War, others point to the beginning of the War on Terror, others to the advent of the internet, others to the financial crisis. There's plenty of news regarding the times about to begin, and news aplenty regarding those about to end.

Things do not disappear just because they are not newsworthy. Usually, they end up in storage spaces of different kinds, out of sights and minds. Sometimes, they are used in ways never intended. In other cases, such as with furniture, they simply remain in people's homes without much further ado.

The present - that thing we do when we do what we do - is a collection of thousands upon thousands of solitary things that happened to become the way they became, who insists on remaining. In that sense, the present is one big ruin, moving slowly and majestically towards the triumph of entropy.

What separates modern ruins from ruins in general, is that we for the most part already know that they are in fact ruins. We know it to such an extent that we tell our children: the industrial society is fading out, the information society is fading in. Even if few are so blunt as to say it out loud, the thought occurs: that many of our fellow human being are but living ruins from another time, whose only way to contribute to our modern contemporary world is to make room for it by dying. To no longer remain.

Growing up among ruins is one thing. Wanting to take care of them quite another.

Our children know that they are expected to live in the ruins of waiting, in preparation for a future that is very much not like today. It is a phenomenon that goes together with the telos of the day. The future is always-already a little closer than it used to be. A whole new world is within reach. It is, to be sure, already here, and those of us who arrived earlier than the rest of humanity will be all the merrier once company arrives.

New times. Yet, at the same time, very much remains of the old times, regardless of news to the contrary.

Strange times.

There will be much discord between the old political ruins and the new ones. When the salvation of the revolution will be replaced by the salvation of the global communication networks, the revolutionaries and the netizens will have interesting things to say to each other. Or whichever telos you prefer - the thought of getting there soon does not have to be a revolutionary thought, after all.

Some talk about "digital natives", to differentiate those who were born into the new world from those of us who remember the old world. Those who never lived without instant constant global communications, from those who once had the joy of discovering them. It is an intuitive metaphor - one intuits that it is reasonable to think there's a difference between those who grew up with something and those who didn't. Yet, at the same time, the notion of historical materialism is not new, and it is not a challenge to find modern ruins based on it.

Things do not happen with historic necessity. But there is no lack of effort to instill and imprint a feeling of inevitability in our postdigital newborns. Through the constant imprinting and overcommunicating that the new generations are living in new times, a feeling of historical necessity intuits itself. A feeling of sufficient intensity to rule out that these new generations want anything to do with any searches for lost times.

Modernity has never been kind to earlier times. They are lost for a reason. And why should it begin to show kindness at this particular time? It's almost there, yet.

Political ruins. Physical ruins. A time in economic ruins. A manifold of social ruins.

It is not surprising that this new time of ours sometimes feels very old.

At times, I think what's missing is a certain feel for the weight of history. Not the historical overload that Nietzsche went on about, but a more general feeling that those things that happen happen because of previous happenings. Those things that are are not random: behind many of even the seemingly most modest of things are thousands of dreams and ambitions. That things turned out the way they did is often a result of chance, but the massive amounts of thought and effort that went into attempting to nudge the odds of historical probability are hard to dismiss as mere historical accidents. There is a weight to these things.

Many have dreamt of making the world a better place. Many have acted on these dreams. Many have succeeded, many have failed. As these attempts have happened - all of them, many as they were - many things have been created, used, forgotten and turned into the ruins we know today.

The present is the sum of million dreams never fulfilled. Dreams and the millions who dreamt them. Millions of teloses never arrived at, whose ambitions were inherited by those who followed.

The present is a monument to the past, consisting mainly of the ruins we are remaining in.

The ruins of tomorrow will be the sum of what we choose to do in the ruins we happen to live in. Neither the revolution, apocalypse, full employment or any other telos will differentiate us from our children, and they will (just like us) live in a time where it is possible to create a better tomorrow.

The world will not end. Endings are good in stories, which have clearly defined beginnings, middles and ends. Only in stories will we live happily ever after, and only in stories will everything be solved by the time our telos arrives.

Only politicians, ideologues and dreamers dream of the end of the world. We, realists, historians and literary theorists, are stuck in an eternal middle section, until we end.

That, at least, is worthy of a monument. A monument to finitude, signed Ozymandias, asking:

are we there yet?

Originally published February 14, 2011

Modernity is routine

Modernity is routine.

If you only take away one sentence from this, let it be that. It is the essence, the core, the Archimedean point - the point in general. The main theme and the main thrust. Not only of this text, not only of modernity, but also of that set of routines and recurrences that is your life.

Modernity is routine.

This sentence is, of course, not helpful in and of itself. Like all core statements, it needs to be surrounded by other statements that give it context and resonance. So that, when it is repeated, those in the know will nod and say "yes, that is indeed it, in more ways than I can recount".

Modernity is, to be sure, not just one thing. It is all the things, done over and over and over again, to the point that it has become - you guessed it - routine. But not just any old haphazard routine. No. It's designed routine, planned routine, large scale applied systemswide routine. Routine applied on stupendous scales, able to (re)produce desired results in the general case, and undesired side effects in many a specific case.

One of these systems is the worldwide road network, and the infrastructure that goes along with it. Especially the large scale megasuperhighways that scar the lands. If you look at them from the side, from beside them, they look ordinary enough, all grey and metal in motion and, most of all, boringly usual.

Routine.

Thing is, though, that they form a system. There's not just one road. There's lots and lots of them, and they are everywhere, and you can get from anywhere to just about everywhere else by following the road. Wherever you go, there you are, and you get there in a car.

This is trivial and boring. I am not telling you anything you don't already know.

I just want to underscore that modernity is boring. Routine.

If roads are anything, it is predictable. You can look at them on a map, and they will go where the maps say they go. Follow the directions, and you will get from point a to point b, wherever those might be. Looking at them from another angle, roads are predictable in that you pretty much know what you'll see before you've seen them. There's asphalt, there are cars in motion, and after a while there is a tremendous boredom at seeing the same thing over and over again: cars in motion passing by, replaced by other cars in motion, replaced by other cars in motion, replaced by other cars in motion, forever.

Boring. Routine.

If we want to understand modernity, this is the key image. It's the same thing happening over and over again, and it is happening over and over again in accordance with some plan that was once put in motion. In this case, someone built the road system and the cars that use it. It didn't just happen automagically - there's no such thing as a free lunch, and the prices at the drivethru are somewhat outrageous to those who are not used to them.

There's also nothing more modern than working at a fast food drive in. It is routine to the core, and it is routine in a way that communication isn't really necessary for it to function. There is a system in place, and those who want to use the system can usually follow the script provided by it to get the desired results. Those who want to drive just have to follow the general rules of traffic; those who want to order a Big Mac only have to utter the formulaic words that signals this. This is sufficient for things to progress: you get to where you're going, and you get the formulaic food that is proffered. And not just you - that queue in front and behind you can get the same results from the same actions,

Everything is routine. The need for communication and innovation is kept to a minimum, and things can proceed in a fast and efficient manner. Which is the whole point of fast food. Fast, efficient and utterly forgettable.

Boring. Routine.

This type of interaction - formulaic, standardized, rulebound - is the stuff of modernity. It is what makes up most of our interactions with most of the systems in our life. Especially bureaucracies, which impose any number of peculiar formulas, standards and rules which each have to be followed in an impersonal manner. It is very much not personal. That is the whole point, it is what makes roads, fast food joints and bureaucracies alike so efficient: nothing is personal, everything flows better if everyone acts as the script dictates. You get going, eating, papering all that much faster if you just play along.

Follow the formulas, even if they don't make sense. Become the mass produced standard unit of our time.

At this point, I figure at least someone will want to object to the use of the word 'efficient', with regards to either traffic jams, overcrowded slow serving fast food places or slowpaced bureaucracies. Which, to be sure, is a good and valid objection. In fact, it is part of my point: modernity is routine, modernity is boring, and modernity is dysfunctional.

Apply this to literally everything, and you know the ins and outs of modernity.

Bureaucracy is the most pervasive and hardest to capture aspect of this. On the one hand, most of us are in any number of ways defined by it (not least through our experiences with and documentation from the school system); on the other hand, it is often perceived as something natural, something that happens to everyone as a part of life. On the one hand, it defines us as persons; on the other hand, there's nothing less personal than paying taxes.

The main point of Kafka's writing is this tension. On the one hand, there is this incomprehensible bureaucratic machine that defines us and demands answers from us. On the other hand, there is this undefined traumatic core that is what we refer to as "ourselves", the thing in us that is not answerable or indeed even translatable into bureaucratic machine language. Yet the machine demands answers, and we must provide them, or else.

What this 'else' is, is seldom elucidated (in Kafka or elsewhere), and likewise the demand is oftentimes inscrutable as well. We have to live up to some standard, follow some formula, or else we will be found wanting.

The English language has a strange juxtaposition of meanings: the words "exam" and "test results" can refer to both schools and hospitals. There are exams for students, and for patients, and neither of the two can be said to eagerly await the test results

Do they measure up, or are they found wanting, deemed insufficient?

It's nothing personal. It's just what the rules and numbers say. And yet, at the same time, it is very personal. It's routine procedure, and no matter how good or bad the results, you have to move out to make room for the next group to go through the same procedure.

It is time to move on from roads and bureaucracies to other things. To many other things. Mass produced things, to be precise. Here, too, the same applies: it is the same thing over and over and over again, producing the same things in untold numbers of thousands or millions. It is very standardized and very formalized: the factory makes no allowances for innovation, and deviation is defection. If any one thing is not like the platonic ideal, it is defective and slated for destruction. The platonic ideal being the standardized blueprint laid out in advance, as planned by the specialists who plan such things.

You see the similarities here, I'm sure. Do they measure up, or are they found wanting? These standardized demands work just as well on inanimate objects as they do on people. The factory is but another name for the school, and vice versa: they are both routine sites of production.

No child left behind, as the bureaucratic demand states.

These demands, be they made of people or matter, do not spring from nothing. In fact, they spring from the most specific of circumstances, and can thus be both more specific and absurd than we imagine. The biggest example being the demands bureaucracies make of us. If you know the discourses and dynamics of these bureaucracies, the demands may seem more or less reasonable. If you know that they use a certain metric in their planning, measures to alter this metric makes sense. If you, as is most often the case, do not know these discourses and dynamics, these demands seem arbitrary.

To take a brutally down to earth example: dentists. If they find something wrong with your teeth, they can and will demand that you open your mouth and let them drill in you. As in, literally drill inside of you. If you ask them why, they will either tell you in general terms (you've got a hole, my friend!) or try to explain it in jargon so advanced and specific that you don't have any chance of following. In either case, you have to take them at their word that there really is something wrong, and that this wrong really needs drilling. You do not have access to the specialized knowledge that would enable you to make that call. You can either submit and get drilled, or refuse and wonder if you're broken.

Should you choose to submit, you will once again find that the procedure is utterly routine. It may not be routine for you, but it is for them. They are professionals, and treat the same problems over and over and over again. They know the routine, and all you need to do is to sit down and shut open. That is all input that is needed from your part. The rest is up to them and their specialized knowledge, and even more so to their incomprehensibly large arrays of specialized tools.

You have to trust the routine. Trust the system. Trust that these people, who see you as yet another replaceable standardized unit soon to be replaced by another just like you, know what they are doing, and that they will do it well. It's not personal.

Only, it is.

This goes for many other things, as I have tried to illustrate. Modernity is many things, and it's the same thing over and over and over again. It's not personal, it's just following procedure. Yet it is personal, as it is your name on those papers, and your mouth subjected to that drill. It is you driving that car and you ordering that burger, yet this fact is utterly irrelevant to the outcome, as it is meant to be the same for everyone. Standardization is the name of the game, and boring routine is just that: more of the same.

More of the same is also the main product of modernity. As each specialized field of knowledge - such as dentistry - become more and more inaccessible to outsiders, it becomes that much harder to improve things across fields. It is that much easier to change things inside them. It is, to use an example I've used elsewhere, easier to design new variants of ketchup than it is to solve complex multifaceted societal problems. There is also more money in ketchup design than there is in world improvement. Which is why there is umpteen variants of ketchup available in stores, and a seemingly empty void where there should be suggestions as to how to improve our society.

Any one specific specialized field of knowledge is, as you might imagine, specialized on its specific thing. Dentists want to improve dentistry, ketchupmakers want to improve ketchup, car manufacturers want to improve cars, and so on for each and every thing. Everyone wants to improve, tweak and optimize their own routines, and in this local optimization the global issues are left untended.

It is, to return to the image of traffic, as if everyone is focused on driving the best they can from point a to point b. Everyone is focused in individual performance, resulting in that everyone gets stuck in the same traffic jams, honking incomprehensibly to each other as gridlock grinds movement to a halt.

Day after day. The same boring routine. Over and over again. And then more of the same.

Modernity is many things.

Most of all, it is routine.