THE GRAND UNIFIED THEORY

Pump-house of the heart: Zygmunt Bauman argues in Liquid Love that in the consumer age, human relationships are caught between our irreconcilable needs for security and freedom. Stuart Jeffries fears he may be right (Stuart Jeffries, April 19, 2003, The Guardian)

We're all uprooted and anxious now. Such, at least, is the contention of Zygmunt Bauman in this riveting and important book. Admittedly there's little in the way of specific class analysis here, for it is Bauman's view that all our traditional bonds are loosening their choke-holds. Those purportedly fixed and durable ties of family, class, religion, marriage and perhaps even love (we'll come back to that tricky notion) aren't as reliable or as desirable as they were. [...]

But the tone of Liquid Love isn't elegiacal, or not often. Rather, Bauman's book is a hymn to what he calls our liquid modern society. The hero of the book has no kinship ties and constantly has to use his skill, wits and dedication to create provisional bonds that are loose enough to stop suffocation, but tight enough to give a needed sense of security now that the traditional sources of solace are less reliable than ever. Bauman likes his hero's ingenuity, his upbeat determination never to be the odd man out like Hoggart's clever but doomed scholarship boys.

The metaphor of liquid courses through the book. Relationships are like Ribena for the new uprooted and anxious - taken undiluted, they are nauseating. Our deepest wish is to prevent our relationships from curdling and clotting (that, we fear, is what marriages used to be about). That's not to say that we're all hipster SDCs (semi-detached couples), the self-styled romantic revolutionaries who want separate pads from their partners and a Rolodex filled with ready lovers. We don't all want to pour water on troubled rela tionships, and the SDCs, so emblematic of the liquid modern age, provoke as much hostility as identification.

Instead, we're torn, as Freud recognised, between freedom and security, and Bauman's book is about how we try to create a livable balance between the two. Those who tilt the balance too far to freedom, are often to be found by Bauman rushing for home, desperate to be loved, eager to re-establish communities. But that's not to say that the liquid moderns want their old suffocating security back. They want the impossible: to have their cake and eat it, to be free and secure.

Sisyphus had it easy. The work of the liquid modern is likewise never done, but it takes much more imagination. Bauman finds his hero working everywhere - jabbering into mobile phones, addictively texting, leaping from one chat room to another, internet dating (whose key appeal, Bauman notes, is that you can always delete a date without pain or peril). The liquid modern is forever at work, forever replacing quality of relationship with quantity.

What's the significance of all this anxious work? For Bauman, the medium isn't the message - the new gadgets we use hardly determine who we are. Nor are the messages that people send each other significant in themselves; rather, the message is the circulation of messages. The sense of belonging or security that the liquid modern creates consists in being cocooned in a web of messages. That way, we hope, the vexing problem of freedom and security will disappear.

We text, argues Bauman, therefore we are. "We belong," he writes, "to the even flow of words and unfinished sentences (abbreviated, to be sure, truncated to speed up the circulation). We belong to talking, not what talking is about . . . Stop talking - and you are out. Silence equals exclusion." Derrida was on to something when he wrote " Il n'y a pas dehors du texte," though not for the reason he supposed. It is that the fear of silence and the exclusion it implies makes us anxious that our ingeniously assembled security will fall apart.

-EXCERPT: from CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS by Sigmund Freud

The existence of this tendency to aggression which we can detect in ourselves and rightly presume to be present in others is the factor that disturbs our relations with our neighbours and makes it necessary for culture to institute its high demands. Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another. Their interests in their common work would not hold them together; the passions of instinct are stronger than reasoned interests. Culture has to call up every possible reinforcement in order to erect barriers against the aggressive instincts of men and hold their manifestations in check by reaction-formations in men's minds. Hence its system of methods by which mankind is to be driven to identifications and aim-inhibited love-relationships; hence the restrictions on sexual life; and hence, too, its ideal command to love one's neighbour as oneself, which is really justified by the fact that nothing is so completely at variance with original human nature as this. With all its striving, this endeavour of culture's has so far not achieved very much. Civilization expects to prevent the worst atrocities of brutal violence by taking upon itself the right to employ violence against criminals, but the law is not able to lay hands on the more discreet and subtle forms in which human aggressions are expressed. The time comes when every one of us has to abandon the illusory anticipations with which in our youth we regarded our fellow-men, and when we realize how much hardship and suffering we have been caused in life through their ill-will. It would be unfair, however, to reproach culture with trying to eliminate all disputes and competition from human concerns. These things are undoubtedly indispensable; but opposition is not necessarily enmity, only it may be misused to make an opening for it.

The Communists believe they have found a way of delivering us from this evil. Man is wholeheartedly good and friendly to his neighbour, they say, but the system of private property has corrupted his nature. The possession of private property gives power to the individual and thence the temptation arises to ill-treat his neighbour; the man who is excluded from the possession of property is obliged to rebel in hostility against the oppressor. If private property were abolished, all valuables held in common and all allowed to share in the enjoyment of them, ill-will and enmity would disappear from among men. Since all needs would be satisfied, none would have any reason to regard another as an enemy; all would willingly undertake the work which is necessary. I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communistic system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is advantageous and expedient. But I am able to recognize that psychologically it is rounded on an untenable illusion. By abolishing private property one deprives the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, a strong one undoubtedly, but assuredly not the strongest. It in no way alters the individual differences in power and influence which are turned by aggressiveness to its own use, nor does it change the nature of the instinct in any way. This instinct did not arise as the result of property; it reigned almost supreme in primitive times when possessions were still extremely scanty; it shows itself already in the nursery when possessions have hardly grown out of their original anal shape; it is at the bottom of all the relations of affection and love between human beings--possibly with the single exception of that of a mother to her male child. Suppose that personal rights to material goods are done away with, there still remain prerogatives in sexual relationships, which must arouse the strongest rancour and most violent enmity among men and women who are otherwise equal. Let us suppose this were also to be removed by instituting complete liberty in sexual life, so that the family, the germ-cell of culture, ceased to exist; one could not, it is true, foresee the new paths on which cultural development might then proceed, but one thing one would be bound to expect, and that is that the ineffaceable feature of human nature would follow wherever it led.

Men clearly do not find it easy to do without satisfaction of this tendency to aggression that is in them; when deprived of satisfaction of it they are ill at ease. There is an advantage, not to be undervalued, in the existence of smaller communities, through which the aggressive instinct can find an outlet in enmity towards those outside the group. It is always possible to unite considerable numbers of men in love towards one another, so long as there are still some remaining as objects for aggressive manifestations. I once interested myself in the peculiar fact that peoples whose territories are adjacent, and are otherwise closely related, are always at feud with and ridiculing each other, as, for instance, the Spaniards and the Portuguese, the North and South Germans, the English and the Scotch, and so on. I gave it the name of' narcissism in respect of minor differences, which does not do much to explain it. One can now see that it is a convenient and relatively harmless form of satisfaction for aggressive tendencies, through which cohesion amongst the members of a group is made easier. The Jewish people, scattered in all directions as they are, have in this way rendered services which deserve recognition to the development of culture in the countries where they settled; but unfortunately not all the massacres of Jews in the Middle Ages sufficed to procure peace and security for their Christian contemporaries. Once the apostle Paul had laid down universal love between all men as the foundation of his Christian community, the inevitable consequence in Christianity was the utmost intolerance towards all who remained outside of it; the Romans, who had not rounded their state on love, were not given to lack of religious toleration, although religion was a concern of the state, and the state was permeated through and through with it. Neither was it an unaccountable chance that the dream of a German world-dominion evoked a complementary movement towards anti-semitism; and it is quite intelligible that the attempt to establish a new communistic type of culture in Russia should find psychological support in the persecution of the bourseois. One only wonders, with some concern, however, how the Soviets will manage when they have exterminated their bourgeois entirely.

If civilization requires such sacrifices, not only of sexuality but also of the aggressive tendencies in mankind, we can better understand why it should be so hard for men to feel happy in it. In actual fact primitive man was better off in this respect, for he knew nothing of any restrictions on his instincts. As a set-off against this, his prospects of enjoying his happiness for any length of time were very slight. Civilized man has exchanged some part of his chances of happiness for a measure of security.

One finds it terribly disturbing to find onself agreeing--mostly--with Sigmund Freud. The whole need-to-satisfy-aggressive-tendencies schtick seems absurd, but the notion that Man is torn between competing desires to be free on the one hand but secure on the other is, we think, the tension that has driven all of human history and permeates every political issue. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 21, 2003 10:41 PM