Zygmunt Bauman on Education in Liquid Modernity

Shaun Best

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351003162
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Zygmunt Bauman on Education in Liquid Modernity evaluates the contribution that Bauman has made to education studies. It outlines the central themes within social analysis in Bauman's writings, and examines how researchers have applied his key ideas to explore current theoretical issues.

The book focuses on Bauman's ideas in relation to the management and consumption of education, including topics such as student voice and individual identity; relationships and inclusive education. Identifying and discussing underpinning assumptions about Bauman's work and its application to education, the book addresses the connection between his work and wider debates, providing a critical and clarifying re-examination of Bauman's contribution to the role of education within solid, post and liquid modernity.

This book will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students of education theory and the sociology of education. It will be of great interest to readers seeking a critical appreciation and application of Bauman's work to an educational context and Bauman scholars interested in the application of contemporary social theory to education and its role in identity formation in areas such as sex and relationships education.

Chapter 1

The transition from solid to liquid modernity

Bauman’s work is not “sociology, as we know it”

(Tester 2018: 107)

Zygmunt Bauman’s post-2000 writings are based upon the premise that a seminal change in the common experience of being-in-the-world has taken place (Bauman 2002: 26) because a once solid modernity has given way to a form of modernity that is liquid in nature. Liquefaction refers to the process by which solids become saturated and are transformed into a liquid form. Bauman makes it clear to his reader that the process of liquefaction cannot be halted or effectively resisted at a local level. Consumerism and the ‘pursuit of happiness’ that accompanies consumerism is identified by Bauman (2008: 30) as the prime psychological factor in the transition from solid to liquid modernity. Liquid times are brought about by a significant decline in the power and significance of the nation state and the absence of any effective global regulation to stop the “global tide of income polarization” which is identified by Bauman as unjust “a wrong crying out to be repaired” (Bauman 2007: 6). Our post-Fordist and post-Keynesian liquid times are the consequence of the unregulated activities of capitalists, the deregulated military and a negative form of globalisation unleashed by the coming of age of Popper’s ‘open society’ (Bauman 2007: 6–7). In liquid modernity the individual does not act but is acted upon by the “steady, thorough and apparently irreversible, even if as yet incomplete” external forces of deregulation and privatisation that underpin the processes of liquefaction (Bauman 2007: 8).

Solid modernity

There is surprisingly rich variety of societal formations that Bauman discusses under the banner of solid modernity: communism; Stalinism; fascism; social democracy; liberal democracy, including Popper’s open society; Parsons’ social system and Durkheim’s mechanical and organic solidarity, to name but a few. One of the central principles of solid modernity was to take responsibility from employees and other supervisees to the degree that the only real responsibility that supervisees had was to follow the rules and orders set by the people at the top of the organisation. Bauman refers to this as the ‘crown model’ or ‘Panopticon’: “good supervision meant cutting down on the choices of the supervisees” (Bauman 2004: 4). The solid modern state in Bauman’s analysis has ambitions to become the ‘orderly state’ and panoptical control is identified as the favoured mode of domination within solid modernity:

The Panopticon served as the ideal pattern for all modern powers from the top level to the bottom. As long as power was of the panoptical kind, the objects of constant surveillance might be obedient and refrain from insubordination, let alone acts of rebellion, because all deviation from the rule was too costly for them to be seriously considered.

(Bauman and May 2001: 111)

The population are manipulated by the state observation and the constant treat of punishment. The role of the panopticon is to provide durability; it is also central in the processes of social inclusion and social exclusion in an effort to encourage compliance and complacency. One of the clearest statements of solid modernity is found in Consuming Life (2007b), where solid modernity is characterised by: managerial spirit of normative regulation; hierarchy of authority; coordination of labour; division of labour; conformity to supervision, i.e. a product of “training and drilling discipline into its ‘human units’” (Bauman 2007b: 76); strength of meaning, i.e. solid moderns had the ability to recognise what they saw in the world and apply the correct term that had universal meaning with a common frame of reference; replication of patterns of conduct; robustness of identities and relationships that were durable and long lasting. However, the solidity within solid modernity was only ever a desire for the modern ‘gardening state’, never a concrete societal formation.

Within solid modernity, nation states were said by Bauman to seek out engineering solutions to the problem of the people who do not fit the design; the wild and uncultivated elements within the population. Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) established Bauman reputation as a critic of modernity, a major European social thinker and public intellectual. In the book Bauman distances himself from what he was later to call the monster hypothesis (Bauman 2011); Bauman’s argument is that people who were part of the genocidal Nazi bureaucratic machine were not monsters but ordinary people doing ordinary jobs that one would find in any normal modern society. For Bauman the Holocaust was conducted by a rational bureaucratic machine that had the ability to circumvent the moral agency of perpetrators by the imposition of what Bauman describes as adiaphoric processes of rationalisation that generated an agentic state. Drawing upon a gardening metaphor, Bauman explored the idea that the Nazi state was the first example of a gardening state; a state that used its monopoly of violence to introduce effective engineering solutions to what the Nazi leadership identified as social problems, influenced by scientific management’s emphasis on technical efficiency, division of labour and good design to shape and control society. For Bauman the adiaphoric processes are rooted in a hatred of impurity. However, it was not until 2016 that Bauman explicitly explained why modern people favour purity over impurity. Bauman’s answer to the question of why people in solid modernity like order revolves around Mary Douglas’s conceptions of clean and dirty. Bauman suggests that within each person there is an element regarded as slime or dirt that the solid modern person would like to expel from the body. This contaminated, dirty and slimy element is externalised, excluded from self and placed into the body and essence of a category of person who does not belong, the Other or the stranger. As Bauman explained this is like the process of removing Mr Hyde from Dr Jekyll’s innards (Bauman 2017); expelling the Other within me.

Bauman’s well-known argument is that the Holocaust was organised and managed in such a way that morally distasteful and ethically challenging actions were broken down into simple actions that in themselves raised no moral or ethical concerns for the individuals concerned – actions such as mining coal, driving trains, designing buildings, etc. Drawing upon a secular reading of Emmanuel Levinas, Bauman argues that proximity is moral and face-to-face acts of cruelty are morally problematical for the vast majority of people. Perpetrators have to deface the victim, and the most effective way of defacing the victim is for the killing of victims to be conducted a great distance away from decision-makers and people performing their bureaucratic tasks. Bauman assumes that the majority of perpetrators did not come into face-to-face contact with victims of their actions. Bauman gives a convincing account of desk killers. Adolf Eichmann, for example, viewed himself as an individual who was not involved in murder or genocide but was simply responsible for the movement of cargo from point A to point B. The fact that this cargo was composed of individual human beings who were being transported to their deaths was not Eichmann’s personal responsibility, nor the responsibility of his department. The killing of people was the responsibility of superiors in the organisation.

The solid modern state used the idea of the contaminated Other as a resource to provide stability and counter any and all forms of ambiguity or ambivalence. In the same way that weeds are the waste of gardening, the uninvited Other or stranger disrupts the garden design and is often characterised by ambivalence. Such people are regarded as waste created by the solid modern state’s attempt to create order. The gardening state is about encouraging useful plants as determined by the gardener’s design and excluding weeds and other forms of waste. To support this view Bauman quotes biologist Erwin Bauer and Bauer’s colleagues at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Breeding Research, Martin Stammler and Konrad Lorenz, who all echoed Frederick the Great’s comment:

It annoys me to see how much trouble is taken to cultivate pineapples, bananas and other exotic plants in this rough climate, when so little care is given to the human race. Whatever people say, a human being is more valuable than all the pineapples in the world. He is the plant we must breed, he deserves all our trouble and care, for he is the ornament and the glory of the Fatherland.

(cited in Bauman 1991: 27)

Bauman also cites R. W. Darre, who was to become the Nazi Minister of Agriculture:

He who leaves the plants in a garden to themselves will soon find to his surprise that the garden is overgrown by weeds and that even the basic character of the plants has changed. If therefore the garden is to remain the breeding ground for the plants, if, in other words, it is to lift itself above the harsh rule of natural forces, then the forming will of a gardener is necessary, a gardener who, by providing suitable conditions for growing, or by keeping harmful influences away, or by both together, carefully tends what needs tending, and ruthlessly eliminates the weeds which would deprive the. better plants of nutrition, air, light and sun … . Thus we are facing the realization that questions of breeding are not trivial for political thought, but that they have to be at the centre of all considerations… We must even assert that a people can only reach spiritual and moral equilibrium if a well conceived breeding plan stands at the very centre of its culture.

(cited in Bauman 1991: 27)

Drawing on Levi-Strauss, Bauman (1997) outlines two complementary strategies that have been used by the solid modern state when dealing with people who do not fit the state’s societal design. First, the anthropophagic approach or the strategy of assimilation or conformity. This approach involves attempting to remove what is different about the Other and encouraging the Other to adopt ways of thinking and acting that are like those of the locals; asking the stranger to reject their own cultural traditions, language and loyalties. On the face of it, the liberal message of assimilation sounds like a call to end stigma because it appears to challenge the ascriptive nature of inferiority. However, the task of ‘homogenizing’ reinforces the position of the Other as a defective object and reaffirms the authority of the nation state as the body responsible for fulfilling the designing/ordering/gardening ambitions of modernity.

The second strategy Bauman identifies is described as anthropoemic or a strategy of exclusion: this is the imposition of prohibitions such as confining the strangers within ghettos or expelling the strangers beyond the nation state’s territory. In the case of Nazi Germany, when neither of these measures was seen as feasible or acceptable, the anthropoemic strategy became one of physically destroying the Other.

For Bauman the moral agency of the perpetrator was bypassed by the adiaphoric processes of rationalisation. Rationalisation appeared to generate a ‘substitute conscience’ within the perpetrator. The rational social processes underpinning the perpetrators’ decision-making impacted directly upon the central nervous system of the individual and acted as a determining or conditioning force external to the individual, suspending the individual’s moral agency to the degree that the moral content of an action is placed outside of the consciousness of the human agent. Rationalisation entered the mind of the individual in a similar fashion to an uninvited guest, making decisions that bring about a set of behaviours without the moral agency of the individual being affected by the experience: “the process of rationalization facilitates behaviour that is inhuman and cruel in its consequences, if not in its intentions. The more rational is the organization of action, the easier it is to cause suffering – and remain at peace with oneself” (Bauman 1989: 155).

For Bauman, all forms of solid modernity, not just the Nazi state, are rooted in an obsession and compulsion for order-making. The solid modern state rested on a ‘tripod’ of three sovereignties, military, cultural and economic, that are now broken by the ‘anonymous forces’ of globalisation: “operating in the vast – foggy and slushy, impassable and untamable – ‘no man’s land’, stretching beyond the reach of the design-and-action capacity of anybody’s in particular” (Bauman 1998: 60). The carefully plotted garden of the solid modern society has been transformed from order into chaos, with regularity transformed into randomness. The passage from a ‘solid’ to a ‘liquid’ period of modernity then describes a situation in which social structures that previously shaped and limited individual choices, via institutions that imposed rational routines and patterns of acceptable behaviour, are no longer able or expected to keep their shape. Liquid moderns can no longer have a predictable or carefully planned life project. Liquid modern lives are divided into a series of short- term projects and experiences. The structures that previously limited individual choices, and the institutions that successfully maintained the routines, patterns of acceptable behaviour are no longer effective. The liquid modern life is consuming life. In Consuming Life (2007a), Bauman argues that in a society of consumers people must “recast themselves as commodities” (6), that “men and women must meet the conditions of eligibility defined by market standards … making themselves ’fit for being consumed’ – and market-worthy” (62), that “consumers are driven by the need to ‘commoditize’ themselves – remake themselves into attractive commodities” (111). People engage in consumerism to lift themselves

out of that grey and flat invisibility and insubstantiality. Making themselves stand out from the mass of indistinguishable objects. The consumer must engage in: “perpetually resuscitating, resurrecting and replenishing the capacities expected and required of a sellable commodity … . In a society of consumers, turning into a desirable and desired commodity is the stuff of which dreams, and fairy tales are made.

(Bauman 2007a: 12–13)

Consumerism also has a significant impact on relationships within liquid modernity, as partners, especially life partners, do not fit neatly into the society of consumers: “just as on the commodity markets, partners are entitled to treat each other as they treat the objects if consumption … partners are cast in the status of consumer objects” (Bauman 2007a: 21). Solid modernity was a stratified society, and the excluded underclass in solid modernity was identified by Bauman (1998) as vagabonds, forced to live in a world constructed around the interests of the affluent. All liquid modern people may be cast in the role of consumer but not all people have the skills or the resources to effectively participate in the market place as a consumer. The vagabond is the conceptual forerunner of the liquid flawed consumer. Vagabonds are regarded as ‘useless’, their lives are precarious in a world of consumers where they are not in a financial position of consume. Their behaviours are subjected to processes of criminalisation and their lives are often prisonised. This process of the criminalisation of the lives of poorer people has further developed within the context of greater liquefaction.

In essence, the ‘liquid’ phase of modernity society has come to be regarded as a fluid ‘network’ rather than a hard ‘structure’, characterised by the eroding of social bonds and transnational mobility:

In my opinion, community has been replaced by networks. Every day you contact many more persons that you do not actually see than persons who you do see. You contact them by email, Twitter or via ‘likes’ on their ‘profile’, but you do not feel them physically. You belong to the community, whereas networks belong to you: community considers you as its property, whereas your network hardly notices your existence. On social networks, for example, you are completely free to kick any network-related individual out at any time, by stopping to use the network or by pressing the ‘un-friend’ button.

(Bauman and Tablet 2017: 143)

The global processes of liquefaction bring about a severance of power from politics. As we have already stated, for Bauman the state in solid modernity was an agency that sought to manage space and the people within that space by erecting institutional barriers around the nation, preventing unauthorised human movement and seeking to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: The relevance of Zygmunt Bauman for education studies
• 1. The transition from solid to liquid modernity
• 2. The role of the school in solid and liquid modernity
• 3. The contribution of Bauman to our understanding of inclusive education
• 4. Sex and sexuality education in the context of ‘liquid love’
• 5. Consuming education: The impact of consumption on educational leadership, school improvement and school effectiveness research
• Index