More thoughts on Bauman: September/October notes

 In Consuming Life, Bauman writes about the consumer society's emancipation and responsibility, noting that, "The arrival of freedom...tends to be viewed as an exhilarating act of emancipation....Soon after freedom has settled in and turned into another daily routine, a new kind of horror...makes memories of past sufferings and grudges pale:  the horror of responsibility" (87).   So, society's rules and prohibitions, "were prompted by recognition of the physical threats and spiritual burdens endemic to the condition of freedom" (88).  But, he goes on to propose two very opposite views of "societal coercion."   Are we (as Hobbes and Durkheim suggest) prone to societal coercion to protect human togetherness against "war of all against all,"  or are we (as Levinas suggests) using "normative regulation" to make our responsibility for "the Other" conditional and limited instead of unconditional and unlimited? (89). //  I am taking liberty in over-simplifying this, but Bauman goes on to talk about how "the advent of consumerism" has changed our ideas about responsibility and obligation.  "Ever larger chunks of human conduct have been released from explicitly social patterning, supervision and policing....In a deregulated and privatized setting which is focused on consumer concerns and pursuits, the responsibility for choices, the actions that follow the choices and the consequences of such actions rests fully on the shoulders of individual actors.  As Pierre Bourdieu signalled as long as two decades ago, coercion has by and large been replaced by stimulation..." (90-91)   Bauman goes on, "The concepts of responsibility and responsible choice, which resided before in the semantic field of ethical duty and moral concern for 'the Other,' have shifted or have been moved to the realm of self-fulfillment and the calcultion of risks.  In the process, 'the Other' as the trigger, the target and the yardstick of a responsibility recognized, assumed and fulfilled has all but disappeared from view, elbowed out or overshadowed by the actor's own self. 'Responsibility' now means, first and last, responsibility to oneself ('you owe this to yourself'. 'you deverse it', as the traders in 'relief from responsibility' put it), while 'responsible choices' are, first and last, those moves serving the interests and satisfying the desires of the self" (92).  

How does this touch upon the workings of educational institutions?  Who is the 'other' in the school?  To whom do administrators and teachers feel responsible?  How do districts find loopholes in the "mandated" programs, and how do we get caught in mandated programs which we know are leaving plenty of people behind?  Yearly, I watch children slip through cracks because they do not 'qualify for' (as an example) special services.  More and more people I know are opting for home-schooling and on-line high school education; yet,  when the time comes for post-secondary acceptance, I see no accountability or continuity when it comes to interpreting / accepting / evaluating the so-called "college credit" which students take with them to college campuses.  We hear that we are slipping behind in the global race to educate our population;  it is easy to believe if when I yearly see the tremendous language talents of our foreign-exchange students.   

In Consuming Life, Bauman goes on to say, that, "The life of consumer...is not about acquiring and possessing.  It is not even about getting rid of what was (sic)  been acquired the day before yesterday and proudly paraded a day later. It is instead...about being on the move" (98).  Furthermore, he declares that if Max Weber was right about the ethical principle of the production life being the delay of gratification, then the ethical guidelines of the consuming life has to be to avoid staying satisfied (98).  

I see a tie between these ideas in Consuming Life and what Bauman talks about in Globalization as well.  As people continue to pursue opportunities to consume, Bauman points out that these consumers are growing more and more mobile.   The money-holders -"people who invest" - are not tied to the locality. And,  "if they have no connection to the employees,  if they feel "freedom from the duty to contribute to daily life and the perpetuation of the community" (Globalization 9), then they are members of the mobile, consumers in a global society who can be nameless and faceless.  The "Other" doesn't need to be "engaged with."  As Bauman puts it in Chapter One (Time and Class,) " Capital can always move away to more peaceful sites if the engagement with 'otherness' requires a costly application of force or tiresome negotiations. No need to engage, if avoidance will do" (11).

Is this what occurs when people go school-shopping?  Is this an avoidance of community?

Later in Chapter Four (Tourists and Vagabonds) he goes on to talk about the modern world without any 'natural borders' (77).  We know that we could be somewhere else (no matter where we are.)  Tourists move because they want to, and vagabonds move because they have to.

"...the vagabond," says Bauman, " is a flawed consumer....not really able to afford the kind of sophisticated choices in which consumers are expeted to excel; their potential for consumption is as limited as their resources....They spoil the fun simply be being around, they do not lubricate the wheels of the consumer society, they add nothing to the prosperity of the economy turned into a tourist industry.  They are useless....and because they are useless, they are also unwanted....they are natural objects for stigmatizing and scapegoating....(96).

Who spoils the fun in our educational institutions?  Who are the unwanted and the useless?  Who leaves and why?  Who gives the governmental programs devised for educational institutions a "bad name"?

This concept becomes even more mesmerizing when Bauman goes on to say that "...tourists have a horror of the vagabonds for much the same reason that the vagabonds look up to the tourists as their gurus and idols: in the society of travellers, in the traveling society, tourism and vagrancy are two faces of the same coin.  The vagabond...is the alter ego of the tourist.  The line which divides them is tenuous and not always clearly drawn.  One can easily cross it without noticing....the sight of the vagabond makes the tourist tremble - not because of what the vagabond is but becaue (sic) of what the tourist may become.  While sweeping the vagabond under the carpet -- banning the beggar and the homeless from the street, confining him to a far-away, 'no-go' ghetto, demanding his exile or incarceration -- the tourist desperately, though in the last account vainly, seeks the deportation of his own fears" (96-97).

In our educational institutions, who are the vagabonds?  Who are the tourists?  

More on Bauman (Wasted Lives:  Modernity and its Outcasts) to follow.