Ethics of Individuals Author(s): Zygmunt Bauman Source: The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, Vol.

25, No. 1 (Winter, 2000), pp. 83-96 Published by: Canadian Journal of Sociology Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3341912 . Accessed: 13/08/2011 14:36
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Canadian Journal of Sociology is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie.

http://www.jstor.org

Note on Society/Note de societe

Ethicsof Individuals
ZygmuntBauman

"Privatelanguage,"as Ludwig Wittgenstein(1995) insisted, is an oxymoron - or, if one prefers Latin to Greek, a contradictio in adiecto. Language assumes a talkingcommunity,a collectivity-in-communication; language is a "form of life," but of a life shared, life lived together. Most obviously, a similar claim can be made about ethics. Were it not for a network of interdependenciesbetween individuals,the idea of ethics would make no sense. A single being, whose life is unaffected by other beings nor is affecting their lives, would be a non-ethicalbeing - neithergood nor bad, neithermoral nor immoral, since ethicality has nothing to do with what a single being does to itself, but everythingto do with what humanbeings do to each other.But then a "single being" could not be a human being either. As already Aristotle pointed out, only a beast or an Angel are capable of solitary existence. A Sein which is not (as MartinHeidegger(1993) put it) urspriinglichMitsein, is an incongruity.Since it is MitseinthatconstitutesSein, and since there is no Sein which is not already Mitsein, we may say that all is potentially ethical: the necessaryconditionof the ethicalityof human-being-in-the-world had been - is - met before (and whetheror not) the concepts of good and evil were coined and a moral code writtendown. Mitsein is indeed the necessary condition of morality - but not its sufficient condition. Mitsein, as EmmanuelLevinas quipped,may well mean no more than Zusammenmarschieren. The fact that "we are all in the same boat," share space and time, meet face to face and hear abouteach otherdoes not by itself make us moral beings.
CanadianJournalof Sociology/Cahierscanadiensde sociologie 25(1) 2(XX)

83

84 Canadian of Journal Sociology Ethics, Levinas insisted, is before ontology; this prioritydoes not apply, though, to moral selves. We may say that unlike the "ethical casting" (ethicalityas an existentialconditionor, more precisely, as the condition of existence) which is "alwaysalreadythere"becauseit needs no more thanthe company of others,moral selves are not "given";they need yet to be made. We sharethe world, and so we willy-nilly affect each other's lives; what we do or abstain from doing is not indifferent to the life of others. That circumstance alreadymade us responsiblefor each otherand by the same has token it has alreadymade us ethical beings. But we may or may not take up which is ours whetherwe know it or not responsibilityfor thatresponsibility and whetherwe wish it to be oursor not. Only when takingthatresponsibility the self turnsmoral;only then the moralself is coming to life; precarious life, to be sure. The moral self is born when Mitsein is lifted to the level of Fiirsein ("pour-etre," "being-for"). Taking up responsibilityfor the Other (therebyembracingthe alreadyexisting, existential responsibility)is the birth-actof morality. It is not, though,a one-of event. The birthis re-enacted repeatedly(or failing to be reenacted,as the case may be) in the life of the moralself. Morality,which has the actionsof moralpersonsfor its sole substance,has to be rebornever anew in the course of successive humanencounters- as their accomplishment. Once born,its survivalis neverassured.But the chancesof continuousrebirth, the sole form which the survivalof moralitymay take, vary. The likelihood of encountersand the shape they take dependon the natureof Mitsein;since of that naturedepends in turnon the character the society in which humans form live (we distinguishone type of society fromanother its characteristic by of Mitsein) - we may say that the chances of the continuousre-birthof and moralityandmoralselves varydependingon the way society is structured the way it fashions individual lives. Any society is the togetherness of potentiallymoral beings. But a society may be a greenhouseof morality,or a barrensoil in which only few uniquelystrongmoral selves can take root. to society has been long suspectedof being inhospitable Modern-capitalist morality.Two reasons for being suspicious (two varietiesof Wahlverwandschaften between capitalism and immorality)were most often quoted by worriedethical thinkers.One and most frequently quotedwas the ideology of and personalenrichment the happinessto be attainedthroughacquisitionand possession of goods, related to the capitalist, or "bourgeois"characterof relatedto the the modernsociety. And another: instrumental-rational mentality, of moderncharacter the capitalistversionof bourgeoissociety. The ideology and was chargedwith promoting with preoccupation self-interest cast the other selves as, primarily, manythreatsto thatinterestand potentialcompetitors so in the pursuitof happiness;having linked happinessto the sharein the finite volume of goods, that ideology cast the pursuitof happinessas a zero-sum

Noteon Society/Note soci6te 85 de game. The mentality,on the otherhand,stood accused for having no room nor time for disinterestedself-sacrifice, that corner-stoneof Fiirsein, nor for the spontaneous and non-calculatedmoral acts. Because of its apparent nonand instrumentality unpredictability, morally-guidedconduct seemed to be at odds with the prerequisitesof rationalaction. It was for these two reasons that few ethical philosopherstrustedmodern without active and society to generatemoralityby itself and matter-of-factly, of deliberateintervention superiorand ethicallyconscious (and conscientious) at powers. Their mistrustwas daily corroborated the time when the routine, subliminalregulationof humancohabitationfell aparttogether with "ancien state of affairsturnedinto regime"and "social order"from the unproblematic and seen through.By a curious a task that had to be consciously undertaken reversal of perspective, this lack of trust in the moral potential of modern bourgeois society was however projected on "humannature,"which most ethical philosopherscame to detest or view with suspicion - as at best amoral, at worst im-moral: humans were not naturallypredisposed to take moralattitudesand act morally.Unless somethingwas done to induceor force them to behave morally, they would be at each other throatsand rejoice in each other's misfortunes.Immoralitycame to the humansnaturally;morality could come only at the other end of long and strenuousbattle and would not be made secure without continuouscoercion. Sympathy,pity and care were according to that story contrived and acquired qualities, which had to be "insertedfrom outside"- taught or imposed first so that they could guide human interactionslater. From Hobbes on, the assumptionof inborn selfishness of human indivito duals served as the legitimationof state prerogatives demandobedience and its origins in the social contractcraved and sought, as a discipline. Claiming safe haven, by the lonely and frightened individuals despaired of "nasty, brutishand short"life - society and its strongarm,the state with its coercive were looked at as the only defences capableto protectits members apparatus, and subjects from the dire consequences of their own a-social or anti-social human condition failed to do, instincts or predilections.What the "natural" would need to be compensated for by deliberate actions of the legislators, advised by ethical philosophers and helped by preachers and teachers: by sanctions which would make immoral behaviourtoo costly to be seriously that being moral does pay contemplatedand/orby convincing demonstration and so is worth the try. Paradoxically,the appeal was to be made in both cases to the same self-interest which had been blamed for the immoral predispositions of the raw, unrefined and uncultivated, "state of nature" individuals.It came to be believed that the lack of naturalmoral predispositions needs to be repairedby ethical code designed and legislated into a set and and of obligatoryprescriptions proscriptions, then policed throughthe co-

Journal Sociology of 86 Canadian operationof law-and-orderforces and moral educators.In the absence of inborn moral impulse, it was the conformity to the rule, reinforced by sanctions penalising the nonconformists,that had to take care of the moral standardsof humantogetherness. This was, essentially, the "ethicalproblematics" modernsociety in the of first two centuriesof its history.The task of raisingmoralstandards human in interactionwas articulatedas the question of proper societal control over individualconduct, while departure from moralstandards was blamedon the faults of the ethical code or the laxity of the organs of its promotionand enforcement.In much of the present-dayethical philosophythe moral drawbacks and their therapycontinue to be problematised line with this long in establishedhabit,oblivious to the radicaltransformation meanwhileundergone by modern society. And yet, even if the overlooked and unreflectedupon departuresdid not necessarily create radically new causes of moral inadequacy, what they have done beyond doubt was to lay bare and make salient the causes left out of sight by the orthodoxproblematics ethicalphilosophy. of One of the first twentieth century thinkers who intuited the heretofore neglected dangerswas WalterBenjamin.As Susan Buck-Morss(1993: 318319), a most incisive interpreterof Benjamin's work, has written in the contextof Benjamin'squerellewith the surrealists (who struggledto represent the dream-likequality of modernrealities as primarily,perhapsexclusively, a matter of subjective, utterly individual, experience), it was not in the dreaming individual, but in the dreaming collective that the mystery of atomistic society lied, long waiting to be discovered. The collective was "dreaming"because "it was unconscious of itself, composed of atomised to individuals,consumerswho imaginedtheircommodity-dreams be uniquely all objectiveevidence to the contrary), who experienced and personal(despite their membershipin the collectivity only in an isolated, alienatingsense, as an anonymouscomponentof the crowd." To put this in the nutshell - the collective was "dreaming" because it made the individualswho composed it unawareof the collective origins of their individualqualitiesand experiencesand of the collective natureof their troublesand so also of the conceivableremediesof the troubles.As seen by Benjamin,modern society engenderedconformityin people's lives "butnot social solidarity, no new level of collective consciousness concerningtheir commonality,and thus no way of waking up from the dreamin which they were enveloped" (Susan Buck-Morss 1993: 318-319). Society exerted, one may say, a soporific influence;it preventedindividualsfrom awakingto their "mutualdependencies"and so to theirmutualresponsibilities and thus to their ethicality. The chances of the awakening(Levinas writes of "sobering by up") to the ethical core of the self are continuallyundermined a "communitas abscondita,"by a collective which holds its members together by

de Noteon Society/Note societe 87 making itself invisible or of no consequence;the retreatof the individualto concerns and preoccupationswith the self is the outcome of that "vanishing act." It needs to be pointed out, however, that the invisibility of the collective has the effects describedby sociologists (afterW. I. Thomas) underthe name if of "self-fulfilling-prophecy": individualsbehave as if their experience and no collective ramifications,that assumptiontends to become true in fate had its consequences. First the collectivity disappearsfrom view, and then, as solidarity fades, it vanishes from living reality. In other words: it is not that the solidary life is in trouble because of the inborn self-interest of "inadequately socialised" individuals.The opposite is the case: individuals tend to be self-centred and self-engrossed (and so morally blind and ethically uninvolved or incompetent)because of the slow yet relentless waning of the collectivities to be solidary with. It is because there is little reason to be solidary, "the others"turn into strangers- and of the strangers,as every motherkeeps telling her child, one should beware;and best of all keep one's distance and not talk to them at all. This is what Jonathan Raban (1988: 15), the author of Soft City, the remarkable study of the ways and means of living among strangerswhich our contemporaries design and follow, has to say of Bixby Hall, a small residentialdevelopment at the outskirtsof Los Angeles:
There nice people have erectedtheir $150 000 homes inside a fortified stockade,eight feet high, patrolledby heavily armed security guards, with an electronic communicationsystem installed in every house. In a TV programme about this armour-platedghetto a shrill housewife, surroundedby hardwareand alarm-buttons, said: "We are trying to preservevalues and morals here that are decaying on the outside."And her husband,a comfortableBabbity figure, told the "WhenI pass by the guardin the evening, I'm safe, I'm home, it's just a lovely feeling, reporter: it really is."

Bixby Hall is just one of the "armour-plated ghettos"mushroomingfor the last twenty years or so in all Americancities and recently constructedon an acceleratingpace in countriesas distantfrom each other as South Africa and France.This new mediumof living is, like othermedia, a message - and the particular message which this mediumconveys is that"valuesand morals"are for domestic use only and that the sole way to preservethem and practice is to separate,to disengage, to exclude and to withdraw.The universe of moral commitments is shrinkingfast, and the task of people concerned with their well-being is to make it shrinkfaster still. in Having scrutinisedthe ethical effects of individualisation the form it has democracies,Joel Roman (1998: 171) suggests that acquiredin contemporary the somber premonitionsof Alexis de Tocqueville have come, finally, true: nowadays, the individual turns to be indeed "the citizen's worst enemy." individualstend to recoil from collective engagements,from "Contemporary social and political responsibilities"- from all those attitudes and actions

88 Canadian Journal Sociology of which define a citizen, memberof the polity. Individuals told to attendto are theirown business,to face theirtroublesalone andcope with them using their own wits and industry, and to take pride in their loneliness: the polity promisesnot to interfere,askingthe individualsin exchangenot to expect, let alone demand,from public institutionswhatthey have neitherwish norability to deliver. "Dependency" fast becominga termof censureand reprobation, is while "needing more space" and "getting "it" (the scruples of guilty conout science, the tanglednetworkof commitments, obligations,attachments) of one's system"become names of individualself-assertion.But dependencyis and will remain forever the other face of moral responsibility,while moral selves may grow and thrive solely in the close proximityof others- not in a closed system suspendedin empty space. "Individualization" UlrichBeck (1998: 34) pointsout, "iscollective fate, as not an individualone." Individualityis identifiedas limitlessnessof choice, but being cast as individual- working alone and bearingalone the consequences reputedlybroughtabout by one's own work - is not a matterof descends upon men and women as fate, inscrutable choice. Individualization and intractable:like those "conditionsnot of one's choice" under which, according to Marx, people find themselves while making history. As Beck (1995: 83) puts it:
Enlightenmentends in the fatalism of developed industrialsociety, which, on the one hand, transformseverything into something that can be done and, on the other hand, sanctifies and blesses its nearly total paralysisof action [...]. Protests,no matterhow insistent and desperate, theme of irresistibility and irreversibility. only confirmthe fundamental

The essence of "individualization" consists not so much in the setting of and individualsfree from restrictions wideningthe rangeof theirlife-choices, as in the decoupling of the field of individualchoices and actions from the working of the system as a whole; making the "system,"the conditions of action, by and large immuneto the decisions takenby the individualsin the course of their daily life. With the systemic setting of individual selfconstitution removed at a safe distance from individual choices and put beyondthe reachof the individualdecisions whereit may stay unaffectedand unscathed, it falls upon the individuals and to the resources which they individuallycommandand manageto cope (or not, as the case may be) with the consequencesof systemic contradictions. They may only try to mitigate the impact of those contradictionsupon their individualwell-being without being able to weaken theirgrip on theirlife-condition,let alone resolve them. Paradoxicalresults were poignantlysummarised Claus Offe (1996: 12): by
"Complex"societies have become rigid to such an extent that the very attempt to reflect normatively upon or to renew their "order,"that is, the nature of the co-ordinationof the processes which take place in them, is virtuallyprecludedby dint of their practicalfutility and thus their essential inadequacy.

Noteon Society/Note societe 89 de The new immunityof the systemic conditions to the impact of individual actions is perversely perceived, and all too often theorized, as the rising freedomof the individual;it seems that"nearlyall factorsof social, economic, and political life are contingent,elective, and grippedby change"- but on the other hand "the institutional and structuralpremises over which that contingency runs" are "removed from the horizon of political, indeed of to intellectual,choice." It is because of its non-vulnerability the individualor severally undertaken- actions that the "system" may afford its singly indifference,silence, mistakenas absence of restrictions. lofty "tolerance": GerhardSchulze (1993), for instance seems to take that ostentatiousdisinterest of the system for a new autonomy, a radical breakthroughin individual self-asserting powers, and to blame the torments of liberated individuals on the dearthof clear guidelines which ought to be, but are not tradition.In GoranDahl's (1999: 180) rendering supplied by institutionalized of Schulz's view, "individuals have to constructtheirown biographieswithout able to use social normswhich could give rise to a self-evident identity. being Less and less is "given"or transmitted from social and historicalcontexts [...]. Individualizationdoes not only mean freedom, but also the burdenof living without self-evidence."By this view, freedomand its pains have two separate causes, and one does not affect the qualityof the other:the disengagementof the system may make the liberatedindividualsunder-informed therefore and often lost and confused, but does not detract from their freedom; at the utmost, it makes their ineptitudeand blundersmore costly. It is different in Offe's interpretation:the retreat and non-interferenceof the system, the deregulationin which it manifests itself and the manufactured flexibility and contingency of humanconditionthatfollow make individualfreedoma sham, since this kind of individualfreedom comes together with impotence. What that freedom leaves most decisively out of reach is the chance to negotiate, even more to alter, the systemic frameworkin which individualsstruggle to constructtheir lives. Pascal fathomedonce the tragic consequencesof the "retreat God," of of with Deus absconditus, "God in hiding." Beck (1992: 137), we may living say, spells out the consequence of living with a "system in hiding," system absconditus: "how one lives becomes the biographical solution of systemic contradictions" "expertsdumptheircontradictions conflicts at the feet and of the individualand leave him or her with the well intentionedinvitationto judge all of this critically on the basis of his or her own notions [...]. At the same moment as he or she sinks into insignificance,he or she is elevated to the apparentthrone of a world-shaper." This is a persistent theme in Beck's writings: the curious, paradoxical plight of being utterly, unqualifiedly "responsiblefor yourself' and at the same time "dependenton conditions which completely elude your grasp"Such contradiction-ridden intellectuallyand, more to the point, pragmatically.

of 90 Canadian Journal Sociology individualization conjuresup a sharplydifferentLebensweltfrom that which conceived of and modernitypromisedto build: Enlightenment
Theuntrod tracks be followed in a loosecrowd fellowindividuals in exactlythe to here of lead direction thatin which to has so the of enlightenment pointed far.It is no longer matter opposite natural developing material laws, understanding technologies, building production, up increasing the socialandpolitical and circumstances onlyafterall thatfinally wealth, altering economic, men fromtheirdrudgery. Instead lastin thelineis brashly the to liberating andwomen pushed and the front; effecton yourmarriage, developyourown personality, this will havea lasting and our work officialdom thewaywe alltreat resources ourworld. and career, colleagues, family, 1995: (BeckandBeck-Gemsheim 43-44)

Let us note that such puttingof the cart before the horse is not a recent was invention.The "innerdevelopment" guidedby a "life-project" a defining attributeof the "moder man"and the hub of modernlife strategysince the beginning.The classes which in moderntimes came to replacethe hereditary as estatespositionedthemselves,howevercounter-factually, the telos, not the it cause of life's itinerary: was each andevery one "pilgrim throughlife" who was chargedwith the task of selectingthe rightturnson each successive roadof junction and blamed or praisedfor the trajectory the road passed and for construedinnerand cumulativelogic: its retrospectively
of with and When ethical the culture modernity; its codesof personal responsibility life purpose, not is carried a societywithout into institutional thereappears prideof self, but a shelters, in on corof in of Growth theneweconomy dialectic failure themidst growth. depends gutting of bureaucratic from size,ending guarantees, porate profiting thefluxandextensions economic 1999: networks. dislocations Such cometo knowas their ownlackof direction. (Sennett people 21-22)

leaves individuals"alone with their "Shrinkingof institutionalsupports" sense of responsibility." That sense does not make them, however, bold and determined,let alone alert to the socially-shapedconditions of their shared lives; it only results in acute self-concernand obsessive self-accusationand self-reprobation. We are all, by socially carriedyet anonymouslypassed decree, in "Baron now. But the hairby which we are admonishedand Minchhausen"quandary expected to pull ourselves out of the quagmireare croppedaccordingto the latest hair-style designs and styled with the help of currentlyadvertised, invariably"new and improved"conditioners.The task of the individual(as we, the individuals,are repeatedlytold) is to locate the right shop, find the right shelf, and reachfor the right box or tube in the dazzling and confusing display. "It is all up to you" - so we are daily reminded;and yet the things most crucialin shapingour own and otherpeople's life are evidentlynot "up to us." These things are not for sale and one would searchthe shop-shelves for them in vain. That is, one would - if one knew what to look for.

Noteon Society/Note societe 91 de Elusiveness of the finishing line only makes the runnersstretchmore and run faster; and, above all, it hardly ever allows them to avert eyes from the dexterityof one's own body and the attentionfrom the fitness of one's sinews and muscles. "Thecliches of moderncounselling are,"as John Carroll(1998: 9) points out, "thatyou need to believe in yourself, feel good about yourself, not put yourself down." You need to believe in yourself because there is hardly anythingelse left to believe in, when your search for satisfying life is at stake and when it comes to investing your life pursuits with meaning. It matterslittle that the same necessity which renderedyour "belief in yourself' your last-resorthope would seldom if ever give you the chance to "feel good about yourself." What does matteris that only "you yourself' figure in the counselling formula.The omnipotenceof "yourself' boosts the ego - but, to quote Carroll(1998: 95) once more, "a preoccupationwith ego is in danger of stifling the soul." "Stiflingthe soul" gives, to be sure, anotherboost to the ego: "if we cannot have the food we truly crave, spiritualfood, then we shall accumulatethe goods of this world on a vast scale." We are locked in a vicious circle from which there is no evident exit. "Soul"is not a householdtermin the land of social science; nor is it likely to be heard often in the land of modernphilosophy. When spoken about, it is only in the capacity of a term without obvious referentof its own; a trope for paucity and void - for something missing, visible only throughits absence defined (to report his successive approachesto the elusive entity, Carroll needs to resortto negative terms:"have not," "do not," "is not there."In that narrative,soul is what the ego is not, what the ego is desperately trying to turn into, but fails - since only soul could make ego as potent as it claims to be and as it needs to be to reach the life-fullness it is after.).In the context of the ethical consequences of individualized existence, the "soul" whose malaise may demise or neglect Caroll singles out as the root of contemporary be taken to signify the absence of engagement with the world; the tendency of the self to recoil from commitments,or its refusal to enter commitments to anythingexcept the self's own well-being. The absence in question is that of ethicality. In other words, the stifling on the "soul" stands here for the responsibility neglected, abandoned, or refused to be taken; in brief, for indifference. Polish philosopherJadwiga Mizinska (1999: 135-146) begins her treatise on indifferencefrom ascertainingthe rarely noted fact that the philosophical is predicamentof "indifference" itself anothercase of absence: it is by and missing in axiological discourse. Philosophy is, so to speak, curiously large indifferentto the gruesomepowers of indifference.One explanationis thatthe idea of "indifference"is all too often mistakenlythought to be synonymical with mere inactivity:with taking no sides, refrainingfrom (always potentially

of 92 Canadian Journal Sociology coercive) interferencefor the sake of civility. This is not, though, what indifferenceis about.Indifference meansa thoroughlyactive stance:it comes in the wake of decision to exclude certain areas of life, and above all the beings who populate such areas, from the set of legitimate reasons to be concernedand to take sides. "Indifference" stands for an active rejectionof for ethical un-concern.Indifference the attitudetakentowards is engagement, the objects,also (above all) such as happento be humansubjects,which have been first banishedfrom the universeof moral obligation. Mizinska quotes from The Revelationof John: "You are neitherhot nor cold. How I wish you were eitherhot or cold! But becauseyou are lukewarm, neitherhot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth"(3, 15-17). The wrath and contemptof God, that supremeethical legislator,is directedagainst the lukewarm,the "neitherhot nor cold" - Mizinskacomments.God does not punish the lukewarm,like He does the sinners - He "spits them out"; a The lukewarmdo not err gesture signifying "disgust,loathing,repugnance." as only the "hot"or the "cold"can - they have opted out from the company of humansin which the differencebetween right and wrong, good and evil, comes into its own andfrom which it drawsits meaning.By theirindifference to those others whom they cast off the limits of engagementthey did not commit a moral sin: what they in fact do is to put themselves outside the realm of the ethical. In lay or secularterms:the indifferentare not guilty of errors which only moral persons, once they have taken up their ethical responsibility,may commit. What is wrong with them is their un-ethicality: not taking up responsibilityfor theirresponsibility. What makes indifference "vicious" or "wicked,"says Mizinska, is the insensitivity to the bodily, psychic and spiritualsuffering of other people which follows it. For that reason, indifferencecould be justly brandedas soullessness. Soulless indifference transformsthe interpersonalspace into Totensraum;no room there for either compassion or hostility, for love as much as for struggle,for good or ill will. Where soulless indifferencerules, humanbonds wilt and fade. Using the termcoined by the ChurchCouncilsin the MiddleAges, I called the "adiaphorization" tendency to trim and cut down the category of acts amenableto moral judgement, to obscure or deny the ethical relevance of certain categories of action, and to refure the ethical perogativesof certain can targets of action. "Adiaphorization" take the form of an act of overt exclusionfrom the universeof moral obligations,but more often than not it and boils down to the tacit, even surreptitious pre-reflexiveratherthan subconscious "effacing the face": staving off the very possibility of certain category of others appearingas targetsof ethically meaningfulaction. This the throughout historyof the modernera,though tendencyhas been prominent its roots and vehicles have shifted over time.

Noteon Society/Note societ6 93 de Having separated(economically and socially as well as spatially)business from household (and so laying an entirelynew foundationfor setting apartthe ecclesia from the oikos), modernityopened up enormous expanse free from traditionalconstraints:from limits imposed by Rechtsgewohnheiten,by old routinesand customary,ethically saturated patternsof humaninteraction.The new space was "ethicallyempty";a virgin land, waiting to be laid out, plotted, mapped, signposted and turned into a carefully and thoughtfully designed gardenby the legislators of new rules and the executors of their will. A foremost feature of the design was to wall off the new territoryagainst the conmotives and purposes tinuousthreatof penetration all and sundry"foreign" by will and intention- ethical which could sap the monopoly of administrative considerationsfiguringmost prominentamongthe "undesirables." Demanding from its officials a consistently sine ira et studio approachto the job at hand, undivided loyalty to the statute book and suspension of their personal emotions and commitments for the time spent inside the administrative has building or on official errands,modem rationalbureaucracy proved to be de corps was all the ethic which the past master of adiaphorization. Esprit would not tolerateany other ethics. bureaucracyneeded - and bureaucracy was an epitome of modernityin its first - "heavy,""solid" Bureaucracy and with and "hardware" stage, obsessed with order-designing order-building, relations obligatory while prohibiting some patternsof interpersonal making all the rest. At that stage, the panoptic-stylesurveillance and linear-vertical managementwere the principaltools of social controland order-maintenance. Elsewhere (in LiquidModernity,forthcoming)I attemptedto trace the accelerateddismantlingof the institutionsof panopticalcontroland the replacement of normativeregulationwith seduction and coercion with precariousnessas Bulky, awkward and prime techniques of control and order-maintenance. of artificial necessity is giving way to much less cumbercostly production some game of volatility, flexibility and insecurityand is falling out of fashion. James Burnhamnoted in his time the tendency of capital owners to shift the burden of the day-to-day running of things to hired managers;it seems that administrativechores were never coveted by people rich and powerful revolution,"as Burnhamfamously enough to avoid them. The "managerial dubbed the ceding of "real power" to the professional managers, might or might have not happenedhalf a centuryago, but there is little doubt that our own times are markedby the amazing zeal with which the ostensibly triumphant managers shed the fruits of their victory (or at least do their best to limit what they come to see as damage).The managerialtasks are increasingly de-coupledfrom the prerogativeof decision-makinganddelegatedto the silent yet intractablepressuresof diffuse forces of marketcompetition.The hub of free to the new managerialstrategyis disengagement:letting the subordinates their own ways of attendingto their interests while washing their shape up

of 94 Canadian Journal Sociology own handsof all responsibilityfor theirfate is becomingthe favouritemeans of pursuing managerialaims and getting all those whose co-operation is neededto fall into line. The new managerial wisdom is to avoid at all cost the need to set and superviseroutineof work and to coerce employees into following it blindly stampingout all resistance.Putting services to tender on marketterms is coming to replacelong-termand mutuallybindingcontracts of employment.The change is praised as the way to liberate the untapped resourcesof humantalents, initiativeand ingenuity- but the secret of the growing popularityof the new strategyis the chance to decouple power, the coveted value, fromthe obligationsandresponsibilities which used to be seen as its unwantedbut unavoidableprice; the price which the managerssee no more reasonto pay, given the new and improved,and above all far less costly methods of achieving their purposes. The bond of mutual long-term obligations is a setting for never-fullyresolved conflict of interestsand continuousstruggle;but also for negotiation and compromise, and above all for hotly contested, yet for that reason seriously debated and argued ethical precepts. The consequences of each of side's conduct for the predicament the other side are all too evident, and so are the responsibilitiesthat follow. Fragility of short-termand easily terminated engagements(firstandforemost,the facility of optingout fromthe makes the spelling out engagementaltogetheronce it feels too cumbersome) redundant. of obligationsandresponsibilities Carlyle's"cashnexus"has been neverbefore so thoroughly,as is today,cleansedof the last vestiges of all but "Theprice is right,""valuefor money"(with cost-and-effectsconsiderations. will proviso, of course, of "no stringsattached") do nicely as the chalks with which to draw the line dividing properfrom improperconduct,all the more so for being the only drawingimplementsavailablein shops. As Pierre Bourdieuobserved, there is little chance to embarkon future projectionsif the grip on the present is missing. But when precariousness becomes an endemic trait of humanconditionand marksevery facet of the place currentlyoccupied in the networkof social dependenciesand commitments, one's hold on the presentis most painfullymissing - it falls in fact the first casualty.It does not make much sense (thereis little inducement)to if weave complex canvassesof humancommitments every weft painstakingly and woof is of dubious quality, liable to be torn at the first pull. The careermaderecentlyby the phrase"I need more space"faithfully spectacular reflects the dominantmood of our time: escaping consequencesof previous actions and recoiling from previously entered obligations is the insurance policy attachedto the growing numberof humanrelations. at the attempts "newbeginning," "starting again," Disengagement, recurrent "being born again," are the most popular even if regularly frustrating de responses to the discomfortsof life. "Individualization jure" (with which

Noteon Society/Note societe 95 de individualizationde facto tries to catch up in vain) is a self-reproducingand self-enhancingcondition:it gestatesresponseswhich only reinforceits effects and beget the need for more responses of the same kind. Once set in motion, the falling (or tearing) apart of social bonds (legitimized by the matter-offactly voicing of the "I need more space" demand) becomes self-propelling and acquires a momentumentirely of its own. My "needing more space" is bad news for the Other. It portendshis/her eviction from my universe of moral obligations. And there is no obvious reason for which the execution of the verdict should be stayed, let alone the selfish and would not be bothered verdict quashed.Not that I am particularly the well-being of the Otherwhen my own interestsare at stake;it is rather by that I and the Other are similarly individuals - we are both self-sustained entities, or at least holding self-sufficiency up as the ideal pattern of life, simultaneouslyits aim and condition- and so mutualdependencywould be degradingand demeaningfor the Otheras much as it is for me. The need of my care and responsibilityfor the Other was once argued in ethical philosophy and moralizing homilies by reference to the reciprocity of gains; the need to keep my distance is similarlyarguedin terms of reciprocity- but of losses. By my help, the Otherwould be divertedfrom the paths properto the individuals, from the need to rely on one's own resourcesand wits and them alone; and by making the Otherdependenton my assistanceI would become demands of another dependent in my own turn on the overt or adumbrated of choice and self-assertionwould be trimmedin the being; my own freedom result. Both sides of relationship, so the story goes, would lose. Refusing responsibilityfor the Otheris a wise and noble thing to do; and I should be grateful to all the others who reciprocatein the same manner. This variantof adiaphorization. This is the second, specificallylate-modern, late-modern (or "liquid modern" - see my book under the same title) and marktwo"worksthrough disengagement self-distantiation, "adiaphorization which presumedtight in sharp distinction from the past, bureaucratic form, engagement as the condition of ubiquitoussurveillance,regularmonitoring, normativeregulationandroutinecoercion.The results,though,areprettymuch are similar:growingchunksof humaninteraction "ethicallydefused"- exempt from insidiousmonitoringand correcfrom moralevaluationand emancipated tive impact of moral conscience. This is often celebratedas anotherhuge leap forward in the progress of freedom. Its cost is, though, another large step of towardsdisintegration humanbonds. If in its originalrenditionadiaphorization served the tighteningof bonds and (thoughin a perverseway) was meant mark two" effects dissipation of to promote integration,the "adiaphorization interactivenetworkswhile simultaneously rather, the sametoken)putting (or, by the network of dependencies out of reach of human interference.The two they can only be tackledtogether. processes are intertwinedand inseparable;

96 CanadianJournalof Sociology

References
Beck, Ulrich London:Sage. 1992 Risk Society: Towardsa New Modernity. New Hampshire: HumanitiesPress. 1995 Ecological Enlightenment. Enemies.Cambridge: 1998 Democracy Without Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich and ElisabethBeck-Gersheim 1995 The Normal Chaos of Love. Cambridge: Polity Press. Buck-Morss,Susan 1993 "DreamWorld of Mass Culture:Walter Benjamin's Theory of Modernityand the Dialectics of Seeing."In David MichaelLevin (ed.), Modernity and the Hegemonyof Vision, pp. 318-319. Berkeley:UniversityPress. Carroll,John 1998 Ego and Soul: The ModernWestin Search of Meaning.Sydney: HarperCollins. Dahl, Goran 1999 "TheAnti-reflexivistRevolution:On the Affirmationism the New Right."In Mike of and Scott Lash (eds.), Spaces of Culture:City-Nation-World. Featherstone London: Sage. Heidegger,Martin 1993 Sein und Zeit. Tubingen:Max Niemeyer. Mizinska,Jadwiga 1999 "Obojetnosc."In Tadeusz Szkolut (ed.), Wartosci i antywartos?ci kontekscie w przeobratzenkulturywspdlczesnej,pp. 135-146. Lublin: Maria Curie-Sklodowska UniversityPress. Offe, Claus 1996 Modernityand the State: East, West.Cambridge: Polity Press. Raban,Jonathan 1988 Soft City. London:Collins. Roman, Joel 1998 La democratiedes individus.Paris:Calmann-Levy. Schulze, Gerhard 1992 Die Erlebnisgesellschaft. Frankfurt: Campus. Sennett,Richard 1999 "Growth and Failure: The New Political Economy and its Culture." In Mike Featherstoneand Scott Lash (eds.), Spaces of Culture:City-Nation-World. London: Sage. Wittgenstein,Ludwig 1995 "Philosophische In Band 1, S. Untersuchungen." LudwigWittgenstein,Werkausgabe 225-618. Frankfurt Main: Suhrkamp. a.