forthcoming
in American Journal of Sociology
Society Under
Siege. By Zygmunt Bauman.
Adrian Favell
Among the familiar names in European ‘social theory’, Zygmunt Bauman is often mentioned as the theorist of choice. On a sunny day in Café Europa, the latest Bauman will surely be enjoyed as another brisk romp of literary sociology by ‘one of the most original social thinkers writing today’. Some readers may indeed find his work inspirational: a light handed sociology of the new, that illuminates aspects of a fast moving contemporary globe. Like his primary competitors in the bazaar of social theory – Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, John Urry – Bauman shares the same brilliant looseness with sociological soundbites: the tireless invention of new metaphors to seize the modern condition. Here, we learn what was once postmodern is now ‘liquid’, and how we are all now ‘living and dying in the planetary frontier land’. The book ‘attempts to trace this transformation and to assess its consequences for the life conditions of ordinary individuals’. Bauman emerged late as a major theorist, his reputation resting on one book about modernity and the holocaust. In a few short years, he has emerged as one of the revered masters of a kind of social theory, that mixes a heady brew of structural political economy, continental philosophy, moral observation and critical theory.
The first half of the book traces the impact of globalization on modern society’s pretence to organize and control – even define – its own sovereign realm. It argues for the demise of territorial sovereignty alongside all managerial ambitions of the modern state. Many of the ideas are familiar from more substantive research efforts that have sought to actually document some of these phenomena empirically. The theme of permanent flexibility and impermanent managerial practices has been much better captured by Richard Sennett; the idea of there being new methods of conducting wars much better analyzed by Mary Kaldor; the new corporate cultures of soft capitalism much better studied by Nigel Thrift. Bauman’s method here is, rather, the tried and tested social theorist technique of ‘cut and paste’ synthesis, offering new jargon for empirical observations that others have made out of systematic research. This is possible because Bauman writes in a unconstrained publishing paradise, free from peer review or the publisher’s final cut, writing for a press owned by social theorists (Polity) that is dedicated to publishing more of their self-sustaining debates. Far be it for such a sociology to ever have to advance testable hypotheses, or engage in any kind of measurable observations of the past, present (or future) that other scholars might work with. Bauman just writes, and where evidence is needed, a quote or citation from a fellow social theorist will do. In this kind of sociology, you can wrap up the book rhapsodising about modern utopias of speed and acceleration, and a world beyond all territorial structure; and yet still be flexible enough to throw in some topical commentary about terrorists and a Donald Rumsfeld speech you just caught on late night TV. This is an intellectual’s utopia indeed.
The second half of the book refers to what Bauman calls ‘life politics’ after Giddens and Beck: how, amidst all this liquidity, actors might piece together a meaningful morality or politics, or achieve happiness socially. If anything, there is even less content here. The real failing is the delusion that Bauman has anything to say about the ‘life conditions of ordinary individuals’ (his words). No attempt is ever made to approach actual real live human ‘subjects’, or ask about the consequences of global transformations from their point of view. Were Bauman actually to talk to someone, he would quickly find that the langauge of analysis he uses is incomprehensible to such actors, whose own interpretative lifeworlds are thus routinely violated by the all-knowing professor. Bauman also fails to ask the obvious sociologial questions about institutions or social practices. Sections discussing recent trends in reality TV and political spin-doctoring, read like snapshot media reviews from a pretentious style magazine. We learn nothing about how these enterprises are organised, who populates these worlds, what power structures lie behind them, or how they actually impact on viewers and electorates. This is disgraceful scholarship by any standards. The book reaches a nadir of sorts when, in a brief discussion about Japanese furitas (the new young aimless generation of Japanese avoiding careers), Bauman briefly ‘quotes’ Yukio, a young Japanese person. On closer inspection, even this turns out to have been borrowed from a French newspaper article.
Bauman’s opening chapter poses the
disciplinary question of how sociology lost its imperial mission to understand
and organize society in its own image, and hence its inability now to grasp the
changes underway in society. Bauman in fact gets this whole story back to
front. It was not society changing that rendered sociology useless,
or even something deficient with sociology as such. Rather, the credibility of
the discipline was destroyed – in