marotta

ZYGMUNT BAUMAN: ORDER,STRANGERHOOD ANDFREEDOM

Vince Marotta

ABSTRACT In the final decades of the 20th century, issues such as identity,Otherness and the role of social and cultural boundaries have been prominentin social theory, sociology and cultural studies. In this context, an analysis ofBauman’s work is important because it raises pertinent questions pertaining tothe nature of social and cultural boundaries and the nature of boundary con-struction under modernity. The metaphors of inside and outside and the ideaof the boundary are significant in Bauman’s critique of modernity’s search fora meta-order and in his examination of strangerhood. The article illustrates howthis ordering process manifests itself at the individual and societal levels of mod-ernity. Bauman’s contention is that modernity’s search for a meta-order leadsto the construction of boundaries and to exclusionary practices. It is thepresence of the Third, for Bauman, which threatens the certainty of order.Different images of the stranger in Bauman’s work are identified and the waysin which Bauman’s conception of freedom and ‘community’ is intrinsicallylinked to his work on the ambivalent stranger are demonstrated.

KEYWORDS freedom • identity • modernity • order • the stranger

Zygmunt Bauman is a leading social theorist of modernity and post-modernity. His work is used increasingly to enhance understanding of social,cultural and political changes in western societies. Bauman’s reputation overrecent years has been enhanced by the publication of several books(Beilharz, 2000; Smith, 2000) and scattered essays. Bauman has argued thathe is ‘incurably eclectic’ (Kilminister and Varcoe, 1992: 211); this has beensupported by a recent interpretation of his work which asserts that the ‘aimof Bauman is to reflect life’s inconsistencies in his texts – and this cannot but

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make heavy demand on the composition of his writing’ (Nijhoff, 1998: 95).For Nijhoff, the inconsistency in Bauman’s work is a positive trait, whereasfor others this inconsistency exposes the confusing and problematical natureof some of Bauman’s ideas (Kellner, 1998: 78). This perceived inconsistency– whether one interprets it as positive or negative – might exist becauseBauman draws on a variety of theoretical frameworks and writes on a broadrange of subjects which sometimes are not explicitly interrelated. At timesBauman’s work draws on the critical Marxist tradition and the structural lin-guistics of Saussure, especially as it is adopted by Lévi-Strauss. At other timeshis work is informed by the first- (Adorno and Horkheimer) and second-generation (Habermas) critical theorists, the ideas of Derrida and Foucaultand finally the theory of ethics as expressed in the work of Levinas and Jonas.Juxtaposed with these diverse theoretical frameworks is Bauman’s interest ina wide range of subjects such as class, culture, freedom, communism,Marxism, Polish politics, modernity, the Holocaust, the stranger, hermeneu-tics, postmodernity, death, consumerism, sex, the ‘new poor’, sociology, art,religion, globalization and ethics. However, underlying Bauman’s apparent‘inconsistency’ and ‘eclecticism’ are recurrent themes. These themes onlyemerge when the whole of Bauman’s project is considered.

Underlying the diverse theoretical frameworks and the range of topicsare three specific ideas that bring consistency and predictability to histhought. While it would be difficult to classify Bauman as a ‘systematic’ socialtheorist, in the tradition of Habermas, Luhmann and Giddens, there is in hiswork a theoretical framework that underlines his fragmented and diverseproject. This theoretical framework encompasses Bauman’s intellectualinterest in the ordering impulse, his use of the idea of strangerhood, and hisphilosophical and political discussion of freedom.

STRUCTURE, STRUCTURING AND HUMAN AGENCY

Bauman’s intellectual curiosity regarding the ordering process is evidentin his writings from the mid-1950s. The source of this concern may be tracedback to his experience of the Communist Party in Poland and the bureau-cratization of everyday life in Poland. Bauman notes that Polish political lifewas undemocratic and dominated by bureaucratic rationality where red tape,predictability and control were more important than encouraging an active,aware and committed public (Satterwhite, 1992: 21). By the 1960s Baumanbegins to build his critique of bureaucratic rationality, and the orderingprocess on which it is based, within a specific theoretical language. InBauman’s examination of the ‘process of structurization’ he begins to differ-entiate between the ideas of ‘structuring’ and ‘structure’. The structurizationprocess ‘is comprised of two aspects: the passive, reproductive, orientationalone; and the active ordering one, which involves the elimination of somealternatives and making others more probable’ (Bauman, 1968: 30). The

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active ordering dimension entails a process where oppression and exclusionare necessary so that only one order reigns. More recently, Bauman has sug-gested that ‘we feel the need of “condensing” the verb [ordering/structuring],which refers to an activity, into a noun [order/structure], because we wish toreport the steadiness, regularity, resilience of the activity in question . . .’(Bauman, 1989a: 44).

The distinction between structuring and structure, for Bauman, reflectsmicro and macro processes. In the realm of everyday life, Bauman believesthat human activity is defined by its natural propensity to order. Social actors,for Bauman, are boundary-constructing beings, because it is through orderingthat individuals make sense of their world. He asserts that ‘what is universalhere is this propensity, this inner push, to structure – and not any emergentstructure’. Bauman is thus critical of the view that there is such a thing as asocial structure and that there is ‘some final, ultimate underlying structure ofeverything’ (Kilminister and Varcoe, 1992: 211). At the macro level, Baumanargues that premodern and modern societies can be understood in terms oftheir need to establish an order or structure and thus alleviate the ‘slimy’ orthe stranger that threatens the stability and coherence of this social order.Although at both the individual and the societal levels structuring leads tothe imposition of social, cultural and symbolic boundaries, it is at the societallevel that the ordering process leads to the establishment of a meta-order,thereby suppressing and excluding any individual or group that comes tosymbolize disorder or ambivalence.

In the early to mid-1970s Bauman viewed the function of culture notas communication but ordering or ‘structuralizing’ (Bauman, 1973a: 70).Similar to de Saussure’s insistence on understanding language as a system,Bauman understands ‘the logic of culture as the logic of the self-regulatingsystem . . .’ (1973a: 80). The notion of culture also entails a radical project.In Bauman’s critical examination of the British and American anthropologicalnotion of ‘culture’, he argues that these two perspectives view culture as anautonomous entity that stands above individuals affecting their beliefs andlifeworld (1973b: 115). In this rendition, culture refers to a meta-structure thatimposes itself on the individual. Rather than accepting this oppressive viewof ‘culture’, Bauman maintains that we should adopt a more emancipatorynotion of culture in which we acknowledge the freedom of the social actor.Culture, concludes Bauman, is an activity, a process, and this activity orprocess is linked to human praxis. Human praxis is the ‘idea of creativity, ofactive assimilation of the universe, of imposing on the chaotic world theordering structure of human intelligent action’ (1973b: 118). Culture no longerrefers to a structure that imposes boundaries, but is seen as a critical processin which individuals transcend boundaries. The ‘cultural stance’, for Bauman,is a questioning position in which the existence of multiple realities is recog-nized. In Culture as Praxis (1973b), however, Bauman acknowledges thatthere is a dark side to the human praxis of structuring because, left

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unchecked, it can lead to imposition of a meta-structure. Cultural praxis isthe propensity to structure, and it is this propensity to structure and imposeorder on the chaotic world that leads to exclusionary practices.

The theme of ordering and its relationship to freedom is further illus-trated in Bauman’s analysis of socialist thought (Bauman, 1976). Baumanargues that utopian thinking, characterized by its critical edge, its hope, andits ability to engage with the possible (1976: 9–17), is clearly linked to themodern mind’s craving for order. This is especially the case with the scien-tific paradigm which insists ‘on limiting their programme to the design andpolishing of tools that are meant to introduce more human order into chaos’(1976: 29). When the socialist project loses its utopian dimension and adoptsa positivist paradigm it becomes deterministic rather than hopeful and critical.Although socialism is concerned with ordering/structuring, its utopian dimen-sion is not about imposing a meta-structure. The utopian function of thesocialist project can be retained, argues Bauman, only if it is critical of bothsocialist and capitalist reality (1976: 130). More recently the critical dimen-sion of utopian thought reemerges in Bauman’s work on the new poor, wherea belief in alternatives can help question the prevailing order and dominantnorms (Bauman, 1998a). Utopian thinking or the support of utopian notionslike ‘justice’ and ‘the good society’ are acceptable as long as we recognizethat they represent open-ended conditions and projects (Bauman, 1997: 69).

MODERNITY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF BOUNDARIES

The drive for a meta-structure becomes particularly violent and destruc-tive under modernity and nationalism. Bauman’s interpretation of modernityis both descriptive and critical. In his descriptive account modernity refers toa historical period that began in western Europe in the 17th century. Itachieved its ‘maturity’ with the emergence of the Enlightenment and capi-talist and socialist industrial societies (Bauman, 1991: 3). Bauman writes thatmodernity ‘may be best described as the age marked by constant change –but aware of being so marked. In other words, modernity is an era consciousof its historicity’ (Bauman, 1993a: 592). This descriptive account is over-shadowed by a critique of modernity as a particular state of mind. Modernity,claims Bauman, is the self-reflective moment, the time when one becomesconscious of being conscious of the need for order for the world, for oneselfand for society (Bauman, 1991: 5). Modernity ‘is about the production oforder’ (1991: 15), and this search for order is associated with the suppressionand exclusion of strangers. The Other or the stranger, from the perspectiveof the will-to-order, epitomizes chaos and thus is a potential threat to thestable and fixed boundaries modernity has established. If social and culturalboundaries are fluid then clarity, certainty and predictability are threatened.At the very heart of the modern project is a paradox. Modernity seeks toeliminate chaos and ambivalence, but reproduces them.



Chaos and ambivalence, for Bauman, represent the true nature of themodern social world. Bauman’s critique of modernity, therefore, representsthat modernity which was enthused by the rationalist stream of the Enlighten-ment project. But the Enlightenment’s view of modernity is delusionarybecause it did not reflect existing social reality. In contrast, Bauman’s con-ception of the modern, a conception stripped of its delusions, encompassesthe contingent and ambivalent nature of modern life. We live in a worldwhere uncertainty and contingency constitute the very essence of themodern, and it has only been certain groups – like les philosophes – and pro-cesses, such as nationalism, that denied the fragmentary and fluid nature ofthe modern condition. More recently, Bauman has distinguished the delu-sionary and ‘authentic’ versions of the modern in terms of ‘solid’ and ‘fluid’modernity (Bauman, 2000). Solid modernity refers to the belief that pre-modern solids were not good enough and new and improved solids need toreplace them. Modernity’s urge to melt all that was solid ‘was the wish todiscover or invent solids – for a change – lasting solidity, a solidity whichone could trust and rely upon and which would make the world predictableand therefore manageable’ (2000: 3). Bauman’s view that ‘solid’ modernity isin a state of self-delusion is premised on the ambivalent relationship betweenorder and chaos. In contrast, ‘liquid’ or ‘fluid’ modernity does not set itselfthe task of constructing a new and better order to replace the old defectiveone. Bauman states that the ‘melting of solids’ is the permanent condition of‘liquid modernity’ and ‘the liquidizing powers have moved from the “system”to “society”, from “politics” to “life-politics” – or have descended from the“macro” to the “micro” level of social cohabitation’ (2000: 7). Baumancaptures the dialectical nature of modernity, and with his notion of ‘solid’and ‘liquid’ modernity, also alludes to the existence of ‘multiple modernities’(Eisenstadt, 2000; Eisenstadt and Schluchter, 1998).

POSTMODERNITY AND CONSUMER SOCIETY

If ‘solid’ modernity can be characterized by a boundary-constructingprocess which fears ambivalence and attempts to destroy it, then post-modernity, for Bauman, is about embracing ambivalence, contingency anduncertainty and thus transcending boundaries. Postmodernity can be associ-ated with a state of mind; however, this state of mind is more self-reflectiveand critical and thus undermines the universalistic tendencies of modernity.It does not seek to replace one truth with another or one political or socialgoal for another, rather ‘it splits the truth, the standard and ideal into alreadydeconstructed and about to be deconstructed . . . It braces itself for a lifewithout truths, standards and ideals’ (Bauman, 1991: ix). The postmodernmind endeavours to recapture the contingent nature of the social world thatthe rationalization of society has systematically suppressed. A postmodernsensibility, argues Bauman, is a modern mind realizing that it cannot satisfy



its original project of universalization and ordering, and that instead ofdestroying ambivalence and pluralism modernity is producing them (1991:98). Those who transcend boundaries are no longer perceived as a threat tosocietal order because they signify the very ambivalence and contingencythat constitute the social world. This view of postmodernity has close affini-ties to Bauman’s characterization of ‘liquid’ modernity, therefore modernityand postmodernity are not viewed as distinct social, cultural, political epochs.

Although Bauman describes the postmodern or ‘liquid’ modernity as astate of mind in which one is acutely aware of the fluid and relative natureof social reality and modern identities, his account of postmodernity is notwithout its critical moments. Bauman’s theoretical discussion of postmoder-nity suggests that it has transcended the ‘false consciousness’ of the previoussocial modality, and consequently has less need for the exclusionary prac-tices that characterized ‘solid’ modernity; nonetheless, his social analysis ofthe postmodern condition tends to suggest that the modern state’s obsessionwith ordering and thus coercion and violence is now decentralized, diffusedand localized within neo-tribalism. These neo-tribes are ‘the contrived, madeup community masquerading as a Tönnies-style’ community. These ‘Kantianaesthetic communities . . . have no other grounds but the individual decisionsto identify with’ (Bauman, 1992: 697, 1993: 16). Neo-tribes have a tendencyto intolerance and aggression because they have no solid ground to rest onapart from individual decisions. New communities are kept together underthe territory classified as ‘culture’. The rejection of strangers in these com-munities is ‘verbalized in terms of incompatibility or unmixability of cultures’(Bauman, 1993b: 17).

Boundaries, in other words, are still being constructed to excludestrangers. Modernity’s struggle against ambivalence has been transferred intoa ‘postmodern privatization of ambivalence’. The neo-tribes and funda-mentalist sentiment are still fighting the war against ambivalence, but this waragainst boundary crossing has moved from the state to ‘aesthetic communi-ties’. In places Bauman’s discussion of postmodernity suggests that ambiva-lence is tolerated and celebrated, while in other places the relationshipbetween postmodernity and ambivalence, especially when it is expressedthrough neo-tribalism, is less innocuous. Consequently, although Baumanwrites that postmodernity is modernity emancipated from illusion, his socialanalysis suggests that this state of illusion has been privatized and no longerexists at the societal level. Bauman argues that paradoxically these new ex-clusivist communities use the same language that was connected to theinclusivist cultural discourse. It is not ‘cultural pluralism and separatism, butcultural proselytism and the drive towards cultural unification that are nowconceived of as “unnatural”, as an abnormality to be actively resisted’(Bauman, 1993b: 18).



IDENTITY AND THE DISCOURSE ON STRANGERHOOD

Order and ambivalence are important themes in Bauman’s assessmentand interpretation of modernity and postmodernity. This concern with orderand ambivalence has led Bauman to explore how the stranger comes to sym-bolize the very ambivalence that the ordering impulse is attempting todestroy. Strangers threaten the boundaries that the ordering process requiresin order to impose stability and predictability on the social world. InBauman’s words, strangers ‘befog and eclipse the boundary lines whichought to be clearly seen’ (Bauman, 1997: 17). Strangerhood is articulated inmultiple ways in Bauman’s thought and different conceptions of identityunderlie these multiple constructions. Bauman conceptualizes the stranger interms of the social Other, links strangerhood to the Jewish experience in pre-modernity and modernity, implicitly connects the experience of strangenessto the hermeneutical problem, and links the stranger to existential experi-ence.

Bauman’s discussion of strangerhood demonstrates the relational orintersubjective conception of identity, where the Self’s identity is constitutedthrough its opposition to the Other, that is, where identity is subject to a dif-ferential logic of opposition in order to establish difference. In ThinkingSociologically (1990) Bauman demonstrates how an ‘us and them’ mentalityunderlies the construction of a collective identity and the ways in which thestranger plays a pivotal role in this process. Identity, like language, can onlygain meaning through a system of signs. Each word or identity gains meaningthrough its opposition to another. This understanding of strangerhood andits relationship to identity construction is first evident in Bauman’s earlyEnglish language publications (Bauman, 1973b). More recently Bauman usesthis conception of strangerhood to understand the rise of nationalism.Nationalism seeks unification and homogeneity and this is achieved throughthe act of drawing boundaries between natives and aliens (Bauman, 1992:683). For Bauman, the ‘ “we-ness” of friends owes its materiality to the “they-ness” of the enemies’ (1992: 678).

Although Bauman argues that the function of the stranger is to enforcesocial and cultural boundaries, his writings also suggest that this is not alwaysthe case. When the stranger represents the cultural Other, boundaries becomeporous and unstable. Drawing on the insights of Derrida, Bauman argues thatrather than reinforcing boundaries, the cultural Other problematicizes them(Bauman, 1991: 55). The stranger in this dimension epitomizes an in-betweenor ambivalent position. It is those in-betweens, the insiders-outsiders, arguesBauman, who threaten the insider/native’s identity because social andcultural boundaries become uncertain. Bauman calls these strangers the ‘thirdelement’ or ‘the true hybrids’ who cannot be classified and are unclassifiable(1991: 58).

The hybrid stranger not only questions the opposition between friend



and enemy but the very principle of opposition. While at one level hybridstrangers ‘unmask[s] the brittle artificiality of division’, at another level theyare also threatened by the very same order that they question. The discourseof the stranger in Bauman’s work therefore demonstrates how the strangeris used both to reinforce and question the boundaries between Self andOther. Bauman adopts a sociological reading of strangerhood which arguesthat estrangement and solidarity are mutually constitutive, a postmodern viewof strangeness that questions the very basis of this relationship and an exis-tential view of strangerhood that describes a state of homelessness.

THE STRANGER AS THE SOCIAL OTHER

In Memories of Class (Bauman, 1982) the social Other is represented bythe producer or labourer. Under feudalism, for Bauman, power was usedonly sporadically to extract some of the product of labour, whereas indus-trialism developed a type of power that controlled and administered labouritself. Following Foucault, Bauman calls this new type of power ‘disciplinarypower’ (1982: 10–11). This new type of power sought to control the passion-ridden mobs or ‘dangerous classes’ within and outside the factory. Accord-ing to Bauman, the new system of social control was to make the dangerousclasses more visible. This concern with the visibility of the social Other had‘something to do with the obsessive fear of darkness, invisibility, opacity’(1982: 49). Once the dangerous classes were put into a space that was visible,they internalized the public gaze and its disciplinary practices. This form ofcontrol was extended to the factory system where workers were under totalformal submission to capitalists. Bauman suggests that this occurred becausethe dominant rational self of the bourgeoisie wanted to suppress the ‘animal’-like sensations of workers that could threaten the social order. For Bauman,underlying this new type of power was a moral rather than an economicobjective. Bauman’s interpretation of capitalist exploitation shifts from some-thing like political economy to a sociopsychological explanation. He indi-cates that, in order to understand the true significance of the exploitation ofthe working class, one has to look beyond materialist explanations. Thecontrol and exploitation of the masses is both a desire for power and relatedto the fear of the Other.

The sociopsychological approach also informs Bauman’s assessmentand description of the consumer society and the social Other on which itdepends. The social Other is at times represented by the ‘flawed consumer’or the ‘new poor’ (Bauman, 1987, 1998a). Bauman contends that successfulconsumers are controlled by disciplinary power and become seduced by thefree market into believing they are free. The ‘flawed consumers’, on the otherhand, are those who want to be ‘successful’ but, because of their economicand social conditions, can only dream of what it is like to be a successfulconsuming self. The ‘flawed consumers’, suggests Bauman, are the



byproducts of consumer society, necessary for it to be sustained and repro-duced (Bauman, 1988: 187). These ‘flawed consumers’ are sometimes cate-gorized as the ‘new poor’ who are disempowered because they arebureaucratically controlled and administered (1988: 185). Moreover, therelationship between Self (‘successful consumer’) and Other (‘flawedconsumer’) is based on the Other reaffirming the identity of the Self. HereBauman returns to a discourse of strangerhood that conceptualizes identityin terms of oppositions because ‘the self-identity of consumer needs the con-stitution of non-consumers as its repugnants and destable opposition’ (1988:186). The ‘non’ or ‘flawed’ consumers become the strangers of the consumersociety. Bauman depicts them as the ‘inner demons’ of consumer life thatneed to be repressed and metaphorically exorcized (Bauman, 1997: 42).Bauman concludes that the general consensus in western societies is that the‘poor far from meriting care and assistance, deserve hate and condemnation’(1997: 43). The strangers (flawed consumers) of the consumer era are thusneeded to reinforce the boundaries between Self and Other.

This relational view of strangerhood reappears when Bauman recountsthe difference between the tourist and the vagabond. Like the poor, thevagabond becomes the Other of the tourist. However, unlike the vagabond,who does not have the luxury of choosing to move or not, the tourist hasmobility and freedom of choice. The vagabonds are forced to move by aforce that is both powerful and elusive (Bauman, 1997: 92). The identity ofthe vagabond is depicted in terms of opposition. They are described as ‘thedark rooms reflecting the shine of bright suns; the mutants of postmodernevolution, the unfit rejects of the brave new species. The vagabonds are thewaste of the world which has dedicated itself to tourists’ service’ (1997: 92).Bauman utilizes the sociological stranger to conceptualize the identity of thenew poor, the flawed consumers and the vagabonds. The identities of theseindividual types (the Other) are constructed in opposition to the dominantSelf, but the Self – the successful consumer and the tourists – in turn needthe Other in order to construct their own identities.

THE JEW AS THE CULTURAL OTHER

Bauman shows how the idea of the stranger serves to reinforce the self’sidentity, for example, the rational self of industrial society, the successfulconsumer and the tourist of postmodernity. Nonetheless, the discourse of thestranger in Bauman’s work also shows how the stranger as the cultural Otherdestabilizes and questions those symbolic and cultural boundaries which thenative needs to constitute itself. The stranger, conceived in these terms, epit-omizes the ambivalent in-between subject. In Culture as Praxis Baumandraws on Lévi-Strauss’s work to illustrate how rules of exclusion provide notonly the necessary ground to establish and reinforce cultural order, but alsogroup cohesion. Exclusionary practices maintain the boundary between



inside/outside and ‘we’/’they’. In this context Bauman first introduces thenotion of ambivalence that has become a central idea in his sociological andphilosophical analysis. The Jew as the cultural stranger, for Bauman, epito-mizes the idea of ambivalence. This insider-outsider threatens theinsider/native’s identity because identity boundaries begin to blur, because itis difficult to classify an individual who is neither friend nor foe. In the early1970s Bauman depicted this in-between subject as the ‘hybrid of modernity’who undermines ‘the harmonious build-up of the human universe’ (Bauman,1973b: 135). Bauman has subsequently taken this notion of ambivalence andused it as an explanatory concept to understand the role of Jews in themodern world.

The Jewish experience, according to Bauman, can assist in identifyingsome of the main characteristics of modern culture. Bauman has suggestedthat the space that the Jews occupy is ‘nowhere’ and provides ‘an intellec-tually fertile situation’ where ‘you are somewhat less constrained by the rulesand see beyond’. He also asserts that because of a historical accident it ‘sohappened that the Jewish experience had a special significance for under-standing the logic of modern culture’ (quoted in Kilminister and Varcoe, 1992:227–8). The Jewish experience, at least for Bauman, provides us with a morecomplete understanding of the social world and modernity. The Jews, as rep-resented in Modernity and the Holocaust (Bauman, 1989b) and especially inModernity and Ambivalence (1991), become the insiders-outsiders who haveaccess to a different type of knowledge not available to insiders.

Like Simmel (1964) before him, Bauman argues that the Jew is theexemplary stranger. The Jews epitomize the ambivalent Simmelian strangerbecause they are ‘always on the outside even when inside, examining thefamiliar as if it was a foreign object of study, asking questions no one elseasked, questioning the unquestionable and challenging the unchallengeable’(Bauman, 1989b: 53). The Jews are difficult for insiders to classify. They areneither friend nor enemy. They undermine and destabilize the comfortableantagonism between friend and enemy because the Jew can be friend or foeor both. From the point of view of the Gentile, Bauman suggests that the Jewas stranger ‘threaten[s] sociation itself – the very possibility of sociation’. Thestranger upsets the type of social interaction we have with others becausethey question the very ‘opposition between friends and enemies’ and thusleave nothing outside it (Bauman, 1991: 55).

THE ‘CONCEPTUAL JEW’

The Jews’ ability to upset boundaries and oppositions is less evident inpremodern societies because their Otherness did not prevent their accommo-dation into the prevailing social order. In feudal societies, argues Bauman,the Jews, although known as outsiders, did not threaten the established socialsystem or the boundary-drawing and boundary-maintaining processes



(Bauman, 1989b: 35). The Jews were just one estate or one caste amongmany. They were set apart, but like others in premodern society the processof being set apart in no way made them exceptional. Nonetheless, the Chris-tian discourse on the stranger, according to Bauman, produced the ambiva-lence of the ‘conceptual Jew’. The ‘conceptual Jew’ threatened the temporaland spatial boundaries of Christianity and the new secular modern world.The ‘conceptual Jew’ epitomizes, for the secular modern world, all that isslimy and all that defies the order of things. For the modern gardening state,the Jews ‘as strangers not only incarnate ambivalence but were predestinedfor the role of the eponymous weed’ (Bauman, 1998b: 153). Bauman con-cludes that for both the Christian Church, and the new secular agencies ofsocial integration, the ‘conceptual Jew’ ‘visualised the horrifying conse-quences of boundary-transgressing, of not remaining fully in the fold, of anyconduct short of unconditional loyalty and unambiguous choice; he was theprototype and arch-pattern of all non-conformity, heterodoxy, anomaly andaberration’ (Bauman, 1989b: 39). The ‘conceptual Jew’ did not representanother order, but chaos and devastation. The Jews, at least for those livingthrough the transition from traditional to modern society, ‘epitomized theawesome scope of social upheaval and served as a vivid obtrusive reminderof the erosion of old certainties’ (1989b: 45) in which the visual and symbolicboundaries between Gentiles and Jews were dissolving. The Jews undermodernity were dissolving old certainties, but concomitantly from theperspective of the gardening state, the Jews represented what modernitydespised and feared: ambivalence. The stranger represented through the ideaof the ‘conceptual Jew’ was in a paradoxical situation. Jews were modern butnot modern enough. They signified the modern experience where all thatwas solid was melting into air, but they also questioned modernity’s need toimpose order and predictability on this fluid social world.

The ‘conceptual Jew’ can occupy what Bauman calls the ‘frontierland’,an ambiguous border where ambiguity and contingency are ever present(Bauman, 1973b: 131). The ‘frontierland’ of cultures, a space where strangerscomfortably reside, is ‘the territory in which boundaries are constantly obses-sively drawn only to be continually violated and redrawn again and again’(Bauman, 1999a: xlviii). It is in this ‘frontierland’ that interpretation/trans-lation never ceases, for Bauman, and where dialogue between Self and Otherleaves both social actors altered. Bauman identifies a knowledge gap or thestate of strangeness that exists between Self and Other (Bauman, 1995a: 126)and does not perceive the hermeneutical gap or the condition of strangenessas a condition of ‘distorted communication’, a position which he previouslyheld (Bauman, 1978: 224, 241). Strangeness is now conceptualized as anintrinsic feature of cross-cultural communication that should be valued for itsown sake rather than suppressed or transcended. It is only through engagingwith strangeness and hence ambivalence that we understand that ‘know-ledge’ or intercultural communication is a never-ending process. If there is



an objective to cross-cultural dialogue then it lies within the process itself,for instance, in maintaining an open-ended communication between Self andOther.

The position of the Jews and what they represent, for Bauman, hasaltered in postmodern times. In postmodernity the characteristics of Jewish-ness, for example, homelessness, rootlessness and the necessity of self-construction has now been extended to the non-Jewish community. TheJews’ contingent and ambivalent position prepared them well for a post-modern existence.

Later they found home, but not until the world itself turned postmodern. Thenthey lost their distinctiveness – but only because the state of ‘being distinct’ hasturned into the only truly universal mark of the human condition. (Bauman,1991: 159)

Difference, at least at a global level, is no longer seen as temporarynuisance that needs to be exterminated; rather the variety and plurality offorms of life constitute postmodernity. The Jews, like Italians and Germansaround the world, celebrate their difference whether they are in America orGermany. The human condition under postmodernity consists in the ‘uni-versally shared ability to establish and protect the identity distinctive fromother identities’ (Bauman, 1998b: 155).

The notion of the stranger allows Bauman an interpretive schema tocomprehend the changing pattern of sociality in premodern, modern andpostmodern society. In Bauman’s sociological hermeneutics the key to abroader understanding of social interaction, identity and macrosociologicalpatterns is the idea of the sociological stranger. Moreover, when Baumananalyses postmodern society, where he claims that ambivalence and contin-gency are pervasive, he introduces an existential dimension to the discourseof the stranger.

THE POSTMODERN STRANGER(S)

There are two versions of the postmodern stranger in Bauman’s depic-tion of postmodernity. One version of the postmodern stranger is closelyrelated to a state of homelessness. In this respect Bauman ontologizesstrangerhood and it is at this point that strangerhood echoes an existentialcondition. The second version of the postmodern stranger refers to the socialand cultural Other, but, unlike modern strangers, these strangers are notexcluded or earmarked for extermination, rather, they are embraced by usfor the aesthetic satisfaction they bring. Postmodern strangers are the ‘indis-pensable signposts’ of a life itinerary that lacks design and direction (Bauman,1995b: 13).

Before the publication of Modernity and Ambivalence the discourse ofthe stranger in Bauman’s work exposed the power and exclusionary practices



of what he later characterized as ‘solid’ modernity. In Modernity and Ambiva-lence the discourse of the stranger takes an existential turn. In modernity, forBauman, not everyone is a stranger and this is why the Jew is particularly atrisk, while in postmodernity the experience of strangerhood is privatized.Bauman calls this the universality of strangerhood or rootlessness.

[T]he mode of ‘being a stranger’ is experienced, to a varying degree, by all andevery member of contemporary society with its extreme division of labour andseparation of functionally separated spheres. (Bauman, 1991: 94)

Bauman contends that contemporary individuals are socially displacedin a variety of social worlds. The result is that they are ‘ “uprooted” from eachand not “at home” in any’ (Bauman, 1991: 95). Ethical and value pluralism,argues Bauman, leads to the existential condition of homelessness. ForBauman, in his more pessimistic mood, any form of ‘solidarity’ in a post-modern, post-functionalist society is no longer possible because no public orprivate institution is willing to provide any ethical foundation for society asa whole. In a postmodern society, for Bauman, existential ‘homelessness’ hasbecome the defining characteristic of contemporary individuals and this hasmeant that physical proximity has been cleansed of its moral aspect (Bauman,1990: 69, 70).

The discourse of the stranger in Bauman’s work shifts from describingthe experience of the sociological stranger, for example, the new poor under‘glocalization’, to advocating that an increasing amount of people are experi-encing a ‘privatization of ambivalence’. This latter type of strangerhood canbe associated with a ‘universal strangerhood’ and this universal strangerhoodis particularly evident in the experience of the postmodern flâneur (Bauman,1993c: 177). In moments of homesickness the postmodern stroller recon-structs social and cultural strangers ‘from temptation into threat, from sourceof fleeting pleasure into the omen of ubi leones’’ (Bauman, 1995a: 136).Although the existential homesick stranger and the postmodern sociologicalstranger both experience ambivalence, the nature of this ambivalence takesa different form. For the existential stranger ambivalence arises from livingin a fluid, uncertain postmodern society, while the native or host imposesthe ambivalence on the postmodern social and cultural Other.

COMMUNITY, FREEDOM AND DIFFERENCE

Bauman demonstrates that moderns and postmoderns find it difficult todeal with strangeness. In Bauman’s writing we find a specific type of ‘com-munity’ that moves beyond the oppressive community constructed by mod-ernity and the postmodern neo-tribes. In contrast to the consumer freedomthat exists in contemporary society, Bauman’s community apparentlyprovides scope for a more substantive type of freedom to flourish whereboundaries are paradoxically sustained and transcended.



Bauman notes that part of the human condition is both the desire forsecurity, which we gain from living in a ‘community’, and the need forautonomy. These two desires cannot be reconciled nor satisfied simul-taneously (Bauman, 2001: 5). This mutual tension between freedom and com-munity exists because ‘freedom without community means madness, whilecommunity without freedom means serfdom’ (Bauman, 1995a: 127).Bauman’s support for a particular type of freedom becomes increasinglyevident as he critically examines ‘solid’ modernity’s attempt to resolve thisparadox. As Satterwhite (1992: 40) has shown, Bauman’s passion for freedomcan be traced back to his role in Polish revisionism of the 1950s and 1960s.Bauman was one of several Polish thinkers for whom communism andfreedom occupied a central place in the conceptual framework of Polishrevisionism.

Bauman explores three types of freedoms. First, freedom, for Bauman,does not refer to an inherent free will, rather it refers to a relation: one cannothave freedom without dependency because to be free is to aspire to escapefrom a form of dependency (Bauman, 1988: 9, 15–16). Apart from this formaldefinition, Bauman discusses another type of freedom, for example,consumer freedom as it exists in late capitalist modernity. Unlike some post-modernists who celebrate consumer society, Bauman is more critical of thistype of freedom. Although consumer capitalism produces a society thatprovides greater choices, and an individual who is more self-assertive, thiscomes at a cost because the contest over power is channelled towards theconsumer market. Consumer freedom does not destabilize the existing powerstructures. In Bauman’s words, ‘reproduction of the capitalist system is there-fore achieved through individual freedom and not through its repression’(1988: 61). The third type of freedom that Bauman discusses is political orpublic freedom, which can only be attained in a certain type of politicalassociation where moral responsibility and difference thrive.

In the early 1990s Bauman notes that there is not much hope for thepolitical freedom that existed in the Greek polis to be realized in contem-porary society (Cantell and Pedersen, 1992: 141); he is also rather pessimisticabout how we can move from tolerance to solidarity in a postmodern worldwhere there is either indifference or heterophobia directed at strangers (1992:138). Although Bauman does not explicitly put forward a systematic proposalof how solidarity can be attained, there are moments in his work where theideas of community, solidarity and consensus become more prominent.

Bauman’s political philosophy is informed by the classical republicantradition as understood by Hannah Arendt, and lately by the work of Cas-toriadis. Vetlesen (1997) argues that unlike Habermas, Arendt believes thatparticipation in ‘politics’ is important for the self-realization of individuals.This conclusion is also consistent with Bauman’s conception of politics.Drawing on Arendt’s work, Bauman (1988) argues that the consumer freedomthat prevails under late capitalism is an illusion because it is not an authentic



freedom. Therefore freedom, for both Arendt and Bauman, means freedomto take part in public affairs, which Bauman calls ‘public freedom’. In thissense ‘free consumers are poor’. The importance of public freedom and itslink to the classical republican view of politics is particularly evident inMemories of Class (1982: 197), Freedom (1988), In Search of Politics (1999b)and Liquid Modernity (2000). Bauman attempts to rescue the notion of ‘thepolitical’ from the economization of politics that began in the 1970s underthe idea of ‘corporatism’ (Bauman, 1982). He wants to de-economize thepolitical and replace the metaphor of the market with the idea of dialoguethat is central to the republican tradition (Vetlesen, 1997: 4).

In the 1970s Bauman draws on Habermas’ notion of communicativerationality to theorize about the public realm or the body politic. In thisformulation a political community consists of open debate and negotiationbetween equal groups without a structure of dominance distorting the com-munication (Bauman, 1978: 243–5). In the 1990s Bauman utilizes John Rawls’theory of an ‘overlapping consensus’ to argue that agreement can still bereached when individuals, like those who used to meet in the public spacesof the polis, take responsibility for their actions and accept differences.Bauman maintains that ‘Whatever “overlapping consensus” there was’, for thecitizens of the Greek polis, ‘it was their common achievement, not the giftthey received – they made and made again that consensus as they met andtalked and argued’ (Bauman, 1995a: 284–5). In his most recent work Baumanhas been explicitly concerned with the disappearance of politics or the publicrealm within postmodern consumer society. The realm of politics, forBauman, is where ‘private problems are translated into the language of publicissues and public solutions are sought, negotiated and agreed for privatetroubles’ (Bauman, 2000: 39) and where genuine autonomy and capacity forself-assertion is fostered (2000: 41).

Unlike the Greek polis, however, the political ‘community’ that Baumanadvocates is self-reflective, less homogeneous, more ambivalent, and sup-posedly provides the conditions where individuals can be intimately con-nected as autonomous, morally self-sustained citizens (Bauman, 1995a: 287).Unlike the postulated communities of the neo-tribes in which ‘the air insidewould soon get stuffy and in the end oppressive’ (Bauman, 2001: 4),Bauman’s political community attempts to foster moral responsibility ratherthan suppress it. It is only through maintaining the identity of Others that thediversity with which one’s own identity can thrive will be established. Thisidentity is not about exclusion because it is only by accepting and beingresponsible for the Other that one’s ‘true’ identity is constituted. The dialec-tical relationship between diversity and unity that leads Bauman to concludethat an ‘overlapping consensus’ will allow differences to be transcended andallow an ‘intimate connection’ based on a ‘common’ moral impulse thataccepts difference. Unlike the traditional sociological notion of communitywhere there is ‘no cognitive ambiguity, and so no behavioural ambivalence’



(2001: 12), Bauman’s conception of community attempts to make ambiva-lence, boundaries and differences coexist in a dynamic and vigorous manner.In this conception of community it may be possible for one to both tran-scend and maintain differences. Bauman’s political community works againstthe classical sociological literature on community that was first expressed byTönnies and then later by Barth (1969) and Redfield (1971). In this literaturethe constitution of community is understood in terms of maintaining culturaland symbolic boundaries so that those within the community recognize andexclude strangers.

Although Bauman is critical of the communitarian solution to a ‘risk-free freedom’ whether in its nationalist or more recent tribal manifestations(Bauman, 1996), in places a form of communitarianism still emerges. It maynot be a communitarianism that harks back to a ‘recovery of the revitaliza-tion of some coherent value system’ (Benhabib, 1992: 50), but rather a ‘com-munitarianism’ that is partly informed by a classical republican tradition andthus adopts a ‘participationist view’. This type of ‘communitarianism’ viewsthe ‘problems of modernity less in the loss of a sense of belonging, onenessand solidarity and more in the sense of a loss of political agency’ (1992: 50).Bauman advocates the construction of a political ‘community’ that is definedless by consumer freedom and more by public freedom where social actorsare empowered. Reminiscent of Arendt, Bauman implies that it is throughpolitical agency that we define ourselves as individuals. Bauman’s ‘partici-pationist view’ of community is both a gesture to the past and a step towardsthe future.

For Bauman, the ‘community’ that was imposed by the traditionalismof modernity can only lead to oppression because clarity, certainty andhomogeneity are its defining characteristics. The ‘aesthetic communities’ ofthe postmodern tribes still search for certainty and order, but while they donot impose a universal order, they continue to suppress the ambivalenceassociated with the social and cultural stranger. Both these types of com-munities assume that their only hope for solidarity is in establishing bound-aries between themselves and the Other. In response, Bauman’s worksuggests that a third type of ‘community’ can be constructed where bound-aries are porous rather than fixed, where difference and universality aredialectically interwoven and autonomy and self-critique are the basis of anautonomous political society (Bauman, 1999b). It is only under these con-ditions that the social and cultural stranger will be accepted and effectivelycontribute to the life of the community. With the help of Castoriadis, Baumantheorizes the existence of an autonomous society where universality is notthe enemy of difference (1999b: 202). In an ambiguous political communitydialogue between strangers or different cultures does not result in distortedcommunication, but in different communications. Within Bauman’s com-munity a ‘cultural frontierland’ exists in which cultural borders are fluid andcultures are unfinished projects, where ambivalence, confusion and



uncertainty are mixed with tolerance and moral responsibility towards theOther (Bauman, 1999a: I–Ii). This postmodern political community, claimsBauman, reflects our shared experience in everyday life where we talk toeach other and successfully negotiate ‘mutually satisfactory solutions to jointproblems’ (1999a: Iii). It is within this ‘political autonomous community’ thatthe sociological stranger with all its ambivalent connotations finds a home.

CONCLUSIONS

The condition of strangeness, and our relationship to the stranger,allows Bauman to expose the universal and totalitarian tendencies of ‘solid’modernity, to illuminate the ambivalence and contingency of postmodernityor ‘liquid’ modernity, to conceptualize the human condition as moral andambivalent, and to expose the dark side of modernity. However, Bauman’suse and conceptualization of the stranger shows us what is possible. Baumanimplies that ambivalence provides the possibility or the means with whichwe seek freedom, especially for the excluded, and extend responsibility tothe weak and marginalized. Bauman does not treat ambivalence as an ethic,but as a condition in which we live.

This ambivalent condition is found in both modern and postmodernstrangers. While modernity tries to marginalize or destroy hybrid strangers, itactually depends on these individuals to constitute itself. Bauman has shownthat modernity’s will-to-order is both threatened by the cultural Other but isdependent on them for its identity. Postmodern strangers, especially the newpoor, have taken over the role that the Jews had played under modernity. Ina period where ambivalence and contingency define contemporary society,the desire for order, the desire to establish identity through difference, hasnot waned. The constitution of the human condition, for Bauman, is intrin-sically connected to strangerhood. We desire both security and freedom, com-munity and individualism, and it is through these ambivalent feelings thatmodern and postmodern strangers become paramount to our sense ofcomfort or fear. This paradox can never be resolved and, for Bauman, anyattempt to resolve it has tragic consequences. Rather than resolve thisparadox we need to live with it in a more humane way. Bauman argues thatit is possible to live with the tension between order, strangerhood andfreedom when we accept our moral condition. While we can never movebeyond this tension, we should never lose sight of our moral responsibilitytowards those who are ‘strange’. It is only by accepting this tension as partof the human condition that we come to accept the universal nature ofstrangerhood.



Vince Marotta teaches sociology at Deakin University, Australia and has justcompleted his dissertation on the relationship between modernity, sociology and mar-ginality. [email: [email protected]].

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