Interview with Zygmunt Bauman: From the Modern Project to the Liquid World

Simon Tabet (ST): I wanted to ask you first about your intellectual background, at the University of Warsaw: after studying there during the 1950s, you were appointed to the Chair of Sociology and became a prominent figure of the ‘School of Warsaw’, critical about state socialism and in search of a heterodox Marxism. What remembrance do you have from this period?

Zygmunt Bauman (ZB): I would like first to make a warning: it is that when people, in retrospect, speak about what role they played or what was important for them, it is not trustworthy. You cannot eliminate what you learned after that, and when you recall and re-read the past, you forget that it was not present then.

So, judging from my whole life biography and university experience, I think I was very lucky to be at Warsaw University. At that time – something which you can hardly imagine – Warsaw University was actually the only one, both in the East and the West, in which you could learn about all existing sociological currents, standpoints, attitudes, and theorists. Those Marxists and so-called anti-Marxists, you know, all schools of sociology were present. Such a thing was not available anywhere else at that time. Overall, universities were divided by parties and attitudes, which were very limiting and very constraining.

It is true that in 1968 already in America there was an opposition to the domination of Talcott Parsons: other conceptions of sociology, such as the tremendously important professor Charles Wright Mills, but also Alvin Gouldner, for example, were advocated. Those people were disputing the dictatorship of this dreadful, morbid, structural functionalism of Talcott Parsons. But it was when I was already out of Warsaw, in exile in England, that this was happening. Therefore, I would say that, as long as I was at the University of Warsaw, it was the only academic institution, both in the East and in the West, actually offering to its students a world with the full survey of contemporary social science. It allowed them to make their own selection, synthesis and combination, or whatever form of personal hybridization.

So again, I was very lucky to be in Warsaw, for it was a very open atmosphere. Censorship was there of course; it was a ‘half-totalitarian’, ‘not completely’ or ‘gently-totalitarian’ country I would say. But censorship was limited: you could not write something bad about Soviet Russia, that was prohibited, and you could not criticize the latest decisions of the Polish government. Just the latest ones though, and since it changed its views very frequently, you could easily criticize the old ones; only the present ones could not be criticized. Moreover, this censorship did not interfere with social study; this is a crucial point. It was simply not seen as relevant for the party ruling the country.

And I must say that, when I came from Warsaw to Leeds, I was really astonished to realize that I knew much more about world sociology than they did here. I did not expect to find such a limited scope in their curriculum at that time. French or German sociologies, for example, were completely unknown. I actually remember struggling to introduce to my colleagues the concept of hermeneutics: they had never heard of it! So, I think I have been grateful all my life for the background, as you put it, that I received in Warsaw. I was immune there against the ambition of stating final and ultimate absolute truths. This flexibility is not relativism, but rather scepticism: it is the acceptance that we are always in a process of ‘becoming’. We can never achieve the last word of knowledge and after that go to sleep. So constant inquiry, constant inquisition, constant searching were, I think, the legacy which I took from Warsaw, which I owe to my teachers.

ST: In 1968 though, following the student revolts that shook the country, the Polish government excluded you from the University of Warsaw (along with five other Jewish colleagues) and deprived you of your nationality. Could you please say a few words on that period, to add to this description of your intellectual itinerary?

ZB: Well, you probably know that I spent three years in Israel, from 1968 to 1971. I spoke about it, I wrote about it, and there is nothing new I can say about it: I found it unbearable. I was looking for a job elsewhere and, I do not know how, miraculously, I got an invitation from Leeds. Up to this very moment, I have no idea who recommended it: he or she never revealed him or herself.

There is a British habit, when they advertise a chair or a professorship: they write to representatives of this profession within the country, and they ask them about ideas. Who could or should be approached? It is a competition for the chair, but I never applied for the chair. One day, I just received a telegram on which was written: ‘Are you interested in teaching at the University of Leeds?’ So I replied by telegram: ‘Yes I am’. And that’s it.

But to answer your question, I think I found this episode unbearable because, as a victim of nationalism in Poland – a very unpleasant kind of nationalism – I could not bear the fact that I was asked, forced and pressed to become nationalist myself in Israel. And this nationalism was not at all of a better kind. So it was out of the question for me to stay: I was completely out of place. And on the first occasion I came here.

ST: Speaking about your arrival in Leeds, you declared in an interview: ‘I had no intention of living the second half of my life off the first’. Nevertheless, you explicitly and rapidly took your distance with this ‘classical’ trajectory of communist dissidence, converted to anti-Marxism and liberalism. How would you define your position today on that matter?

ZB: Look, my interest and my concerns are profoundly different from Soviet dissidents. When I arrived in this country, I was approached by many institutions of so-called ‘sovietology’. There were plenty of them, all over the place; it was the only branch of social science which was wafted in fans, with numerous world conferences. And I was suggested to become a sovietologist myself.

But it did not concern me because – and that is probably my fault – ever since I began to do and practise sociology, I was interested in the critical side of any kind of society, contrarily to dominant sociology at that time, let’s say, may it be the Marxist school or the functionalist one. They both agreed on one point: ‘This is a perfect, self-equilibrating and self-reproducing society; the only aim now is to study its pattern’. How come these models reject deviation, departures, changes and so on? My intellectual interests were – and I do not know why I cannot explain it – exactly the opposite. Even in a relatively stable society, I was mostly interested in what was wrong.

In France, Cornélius Castoriadis is my main influence: he did not know that he was my teacher, but I read his work with great interest. And he is famous for saying that ‘what is wrong with society is that it stopped questioning itself’. Therefore, I was always questioning everything: that was the problem. In my previous situation I became revisionist since I criticized the way communism was implemented in Poland, and when I came here, I naturally went on, first with the critique of modernity and now the critique of postmodernity. But my goal remains unchanged; it is critique, always critique. This is the reason why I would have felt completely out of place if I joined the sovietologists.

Sovietologists had two unshakeable intellectual foundations: one was the condemnation of communist society, or more precisely socialist society, while the other was the assumption that all the remedies had to be found in capitalism, the free market, and so on. The picture was thus automatically in black and white. But it was actually black and white on both sides of the divide in sociology, only the colours were changed: what was black there was white, what was white there was black. I could not fit in – this was repulsive to me.

That is, moreover, the perfect recipe to exclude sociology from relevance in social life. What is important in sociology, to me, is this incessant and continuous conversation with all the various human experiences of living in a particular society. So, as a sociologist, you need to be open-minded and you ought to remember that you are not here in this business to tell stupid, ordinary people that they are wrong. Rather, you are here to teach them some truths and to learn from them. What we, sociologists, are doing is to recycle normal human experiences of being in the world. I think that this answers your question.

ST: The intellectual posture that you are describing is very close to what Edward Said called the ‘outsider status’, which he inherently linked to biographic exile. You have yourself been coined as an outsider: how do you feel about this?

ZB: Well, again, I am just fortunate. Fate was kind to me, because in terms of thinking and in the intellectual world, being an outsider is a privileged position. Being untied, ‘unfixed’ so to speak, underdetermined, underdefined. The fact that I could bring together my experience of different kinds of society, none of them being completely my ‘home’ in which I feel fully chez moi, that is very helpful. To be in exile, to be a foreigner or to be a stranger in England can be very comfortable, depending on your social position of course. For example, there are many people in the suburbs of London who, because they are speaking with a different accent, because their skin has a slightly different colour, suffer from discrimination. But, at the university it is different, you are tolerated.

I think that the Czech – now French – writer Milan Kundera writes very important things, not only in his novels but also in his essays. In the collection of essays Testaments Betrayed, for example, he speaks about ‘tearing up the curtains’: he says that the vocation, the mission, the purpose, the obligation of a writer is to tear up the curtains. Because, normally, very cleverly and very traitorously, curtains are woven out of concepts, stereotypes, assumed truths, unchecked facts and so on. Curtains, instead of opening your eyes, obscure reality from your eyes. So, in a sense, sociology is a destructive work: it needs to destroy these very thick veils of prejudices and stereotypes which predetermine our view of the world before we start thinking.

We are already prepared, particularly today, in the age of mass media, in the age of the computer and informatics so to speak: we are exposed all the time to being bombarded with the ‘talk of the town’, which today is obligatory and which we have forgotten to reject. We have no time to actually sit down, reflect, analyse and come to some conclusions. Just look at computer language: you do not speak about swimming or diving but rather surfing, on the surface. So sociology is an unfinished and, I believe – I am afraid – an unfinishable job, since the curtains, once torn up, are continuously soldered together again and again. That is a permanent job so to speak. If you start thinking sociologically, you can be assured that you will never be unemployed. In the sense of salary, of course, you may be; but in thinking, there will always be a job to do.

ST: Your anglophone work was profoundly shaped, at the end of the 1980s, by a founding trilogy: Legislators and Interpreters (1987), Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) and Modernity and Ambivalence (1991). The notion of modernity is obviously central to these three books, as it is to all your work. Could you please come back to it?

ZB: You know, I am obsessively concerned with the topic of modernity, towards which I still do not feel finished asking and providing satisfactory answers. I am always coming back to the question ‘what is the substance of modernity?’. You mentioned my trilogy: that was only the beginning. If I am asked today what is the most dangerous element in the ‘modern project’, if we can use that word, my answer is twofold.

The first aspect concentrates on what is left from this gardening society, namely the obsession and the compulsion of order-making. Putting things in order means, practically, to categorize, classify, separate and demographize people. And, of course, whenever you build an order, whenever you have to order something, you always produce, whether you like it or not, redundant people. Some people cannot adapt and do not fit. That is what order is about: separate useful plants from waste. This is the first looming danger of modernity: the constant ambition of modernization, which implies that every act of creation of modernity contains the element of destruction – ‘creative destruction’, as we say, or rather ‘destructive creativity’.

The second aspect lies in the underlying hegemonic philosophy of modernity, as Antonio Gramsci would say. He indeed spoke about hegemonic philosophies (and not ideologies) which penetrate in a ‘capillary way’ the whole society, as Michel Foucault would say. In this sense, there are philosophers, sitting up there, writing very sophisticated books, whose work trickles down, thus permeating the whole society. Individuals then assume, consequently, certain things without checking. This process is, for that matter, best represented by the term doxa, which can be defined as a thought with which you think, but about which you do not think. These elements of doxa are just preconceptions, prejudgments.

Now, the hegemonic philosophy of modernity, as I see it, is constituted by the following assertion: the purpose of historical development, progress or whatever, is making life comfortable and convenient. By proxy, what follows is that you have to eliminate things that are unpleasant, discomforting, inconvenient. Again, when applied to society, it is a question of eliminating certain kinds of human beings, or ways of life of human beings. And ultimately, we are as if approaching the necessary finishing line of this pursued convenience or comfort.

We are living now in an entertainment society, or rather, with a new term that recently appeared, in a ‘wellness’ society. There is a contemporary obsession with wellness, which is in absolute opposition to what my beloved Emmanuel Lévinas says: you have moral duties towards yourself and you need to take care of yourself, which implies sometimes to do repellent things which will not directly contribute to your wellness. Our obsession with collecting pleasurable moments and impressions is therefore very problematic.

ST: Modernity and the Holocaust [published in 2002 in France by La Fabrique Editions] was one of the books that greatly contributed to creating an international audience for your work, partly through the polemics engendered by your peculiar reading of the Jewish genocide as a symptom of totalitarian trends of modernity. The French historian Enzo Traverso, in his afterword to the re-edition of this book [by Complexe Editions in 2008], speaks about two intellectual figures looming over this text: one is the thought of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the second is the sociology of Max Weber. Yet you hardly refer to them throughout the book; why?

ZB: I deeply respect the thoughts of the intellectuals you just named. Nevertheless, as far as my critical inspiration about modernity, as seen through the prism of the Holocaust, is concerned, I would say that I owe more to Hannah Arendt. She indeed wrote analyses of the modern human condition, the sources of totalitarianism, the sources of mass murder, etc., and brought them down to the level of daily life. This is a crucial element which is widely present in a scattered form in Hannah Arendt’s thought, whereas virtually absent from Horkheimer and Adorno’s thought, since they only went as far as the artistic and cultural life was concerned. In doing so, they did not look for the sources of these phenomena in the tissue of human bonds, which Hannah Arendt, on the contrary, came very close to doing. Of course, she was influenced by Heidegger, which is a great advantage on that matter.

I thus tried to follow this intellectual path and to find the sources of this murderous inspiration, murderous inclination of the modern way of life, in what is really happening at the level of individual experience. Hence my interest in Emmanuel Lévinas, and hence the centrality of the figure of the stranger. The stranger is ambivalence incarnated; it is the tangible, visible, audible representation of the ambivalence of being. Then, since modernity represents the war declared on ambivalence, a murderous penchant automatically follows. But this central element is precisely missing in Horkheimer and Adorno’s thought.

As for Hannah Arendt, I must say that I am not in full agreement with her, and particularly with her idea of the ‘banality of evil’. I really think that our catastrophe does not consist in the banality of evil but rather in the ‘rationality of evil’. Evil is always made ‘in order to’. Albert Camus wrote that, for the first time in history, atrocious things are done under the most beautiful slogans, such as emancipation, freedom, self-assertion. Beautiful slogans indeed! You cannot say anything against them; but under this cover, awful things are done.

Eventually, it is not even rationality of evil which is central, it is rather our modern insistence to be rational. We leave the purpose, the end, the objective out of moral considerations – like Max Weber said: only God can quarrel about values – and what is left to us is to select the most economical and the most effective means to achieve these purposes. From this point of view, Adolf Eichmann was a rational person: he had a goal, which was to destroy the Jews, and he organized railways, camps, crematoria… all these rational things which served his purpose. As simple as that! So, I think that I am not fully accepting either Adorno and Horkheimer or Hannah Arendt, because of these points of contention. But otherwise I agree; I am their little disciple in a sense. They were giants, they posited very important issues: I learned from them and tried to develop their ideas.

ST: The covering of the Eichmann trial by Hannah Arendt is a striking example of ‘intellectual commitment’ which you seem to regret today. Almost 30 years after the publication of your book on the role of intellectuals (Legislators and Interpreters), how do you perceive its evolution throughout modernity?

ZB: Speaking about contemporary intellectuals can be very flattering. Michel Foucault, in many respects, was the pioneer: he first noted what was happening, speaking about the new figure of the ‘specific intellectual’. He coined this term, in opposition to ‘universal intellectuals’ who belonged to the past. He was surprisingly and suspiciously lukewarm about saying that: he simply asserted that it is the new form of the old struggle for power and domination. Now, surgeons are defending hospitals, actors defend theatres, academics defend universities… specific you see? These intellectuals are still in conflict with power, but each in a selected area.

Yet, when Georges Clemenceau wrote in L’Aurore about intellectuals, and to some extent coined the word, what he had in mind was that the intellectual differs from other less enlightened people, in the sense that he or she goes beyond his profession. In a way, this conception of the intellectual implies that he or she is taking responsibility for the whole of societal affairs. Values of the nation, preservation of humanity… these sorts of things, you know. Now, ‘specific intellectual’, from this point of view, is contradictio in adjecto, an oxymoron. You cannot be ‘specific’ and intellectual at the same time: intellectual means that you are going beyond the narrow field in which you have personal interests in getting more income, salary, advantage to do your job and things like that. And I am afraid that the premonition of Michel Foucault came true, because the learned elite is now concerned with professional affairs, in a very selfish way. You hear very few people – you can count them on one hand – who take responsibility for the future of society as a whole. And the problem is even bigger today, since we ought to take responsibility for the future of the planet, because we are now devastating it.

So, this is why I granted to intellectuals, 30 years ago, the function of interpreters. That role is crucially decisive, particularly now, in the age of diasporas in which people of different cultures, languages, faiths, and so on live on the same street, close to each other. It is not an abstract issue! It is a question of daily practices, daily lives, rather than this big and empty question of ‘the war of civilizations’. So, the issue of interpretation, of translating the experience, which means the culture, is tremendously important. But intellectuals do not do it, unless they are professional anthropologists: in this case they must write articles in journals which no one reads, apart from people working on the same level in university. To conclude, I am rather, in the short run anyway, pessimistic about the roles that intellectuals play in society, not in theory but in practice. Today, we are actually lacking people who would sketch a meaningful scenario of the future. Intellectuals, normally, pointed their fingers at possible futures: I do not hear such voices nowadays.

ST: During an interview published at the end of your book Intimations of Modernity (1992), you made a crucial distinction between a ‘sociology of postmodernity’ and a ‘postmodern sociology’. The porosity of the boundary between the two explains for that matter the main reason why you dropped the postmodern vocabulary: while you were labelled as a ‘postmodern sociologist’, you wanted, vainly, to escape this categorization to give rather a ‘critical analysis of postmodernity’. What meaning had, to you, the term ‘postmodern’ at that time?

ZB: Well, I think that Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Lipovetsky (his 1980s writings more than his latest essays) or The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord are representative, to me, of a postmodern sociology which simply reflected the existing situation by mimicry. This sociology was conducted the same way that life was conducted then: fragmented, episodic, half-joke, half-serious… you know these sorts of things. They also had a general welcoming attitude towards what was coming. Contrarily, I was very cautious not to fall into this trap; I do not know if I was successful or not, but I tried. I would indeed like to define my work as a ‘sociology of postmodernity’: here is a reality which is called postmodernity, and we are analysing it like we analyse any kind of culture, i.e. not taking partisan stands but simply trying to diagnose and come to some conclusions.

ST: The theorization of what you called ‘liquid modernity’ came in your work to replace the term postmodernity, at the end of the 1990s. Almost 20 years later, how would you evaluate this theoretical model, and how would you define it today?

ZB: I still fail to answer the question ‘what is liquid modernity?’, which I have been asking since the publication of Liquid Modernity in 2000. Is liquid modernity a new kind of society, which is here to stay until replaced by something else, or is it what I came later to call a state of interregnum? Even if interregnum is a transitory state, it is better to employ this term than to speak simply about transition, since the latter is a much abused concept. It is indeed used, in contemporary political language, as a name for the passage from one known state to another known state. In this sense, people are just passing from an old-fashioned – or abandoned or rejected or collapsed – way of life to a new one which they know, in advance, how it would look when they finally arrive there. The only questions are the speed with which they move and, as the old and faithful Max Weber said, the rationality applied, i.e. ‘the selection of the right means to the given end’. What is crucial here is the word ‘given’.

I intentionally selected the term interregnum to qualify our era precisely because we do not know what is at the end of the road. We know that we are on the ropes, we know what we want to get rid of, but we absolutely do not know what kind of better society we want to substitute. In our times, people avoid discussions about the shape of a ‘good society’: they can just react to crises, namely the last crisis and the current one. Because, as you know, we are living under the tyranny of time, the crises replace each other very quickly: before resolving the last one, you already fall into a new one. A good example to illustrate this is the experience of what I have called the ‘square people’, i.e. individuals who go to squares, stay there, demonstrate, shout, sign petitions. By so doing, they want to influence the course of events and they consider that as their contribution to politics. These movements are very diverse but they share at least one common denominator: they do not have any leader. They are not like political parties which have a leader, may he be elected, appointed or self-appointed: someone who sets the agenda.

They are rather experiencing some sort of completely equalized society: everybody has a voice, who shouts louder is better… they have no formal structure. I was wondering why it is so: the argument of most political scientists and observers is to say that they cannot go far (which is partly right) unless they subordinate themselves to some leadership. My opinion, however, is that it is actually the absence of leadership which makes the ‘square people movement’ feasible. Why? Because leaders have ideas, ideas lead to programs, and programs lead to drawing boundaries – between us and them.

Leaders are dividing and parties are defending their ranks, this is how traditional politics works. Now if ‘square people’ had a leader with ideas and the ability to draw lines, borders and so on, they would not survive for a moment: they simply would not stay, not only several weeks or months, but even several days or hours. Because the condition sine qua non of their, as I call it, ‘explosive solidarity’ is that they suspend their differences and remain silent on them. Indeed, they are coming from all corners of life: some are coming from slums while some are the offspring of rich people, and all are bringing some grievances which eventually coalesce.

Take for example the idea of a ‘rainbow coalition’, which the British Left once launched: it proved a complete failure. They wanted to gather under one banner people representing all sorts of complaints, but you cannot make out of that a unified ideology. For example, they wanted to defend the interests of homosexuals, who suffered great discrimination, and, at the same time, of another discriminated group, the Muslims. But the two claims cannot merge into a unified voice, since the communities and the problems involved are very different, even if they can sometimes overlap. This is a very blatant example but it goes all the way: ‘square people’ are not united by the model of life they desire. To come back to your question, it means, I guess, that we are going to stay in the state of interregnum for quite a long time.

ST: In this context, how would you situate this theoretical framework within the constant evolutions of today’s world? More specifically, what global processes are, to you, the most decisive ones, and how do they relate to this interregnum and this process of liquefaction?

ZB: There are voices, such as Richard Sennett among others, which reject and somehow pronounce the death of liquid society: looking around, they see everywhere the emergence of political forces which want stability, toughness, clear-drawn borders and fortifications, thus contributing to what can be seen as a re-solidification of political life. I admit that such forces appear in more and more countries, even in traditionally social-democratic countries, like Sweden, Denmark or Finland. But it does not mean that the actual social reality becomes tough, well-structured and stable. I think rather that the emergence of these movements, which want to locally resolve globally-generated problems – which in my view is impossible – actually adds to the liquidity of the total scene. Because precisely the scene on which we are all forced to act is the global scene: introducing an element of disorder (such as the deregulation of capital) into this global stage while trying to vainly correct it with local political ‘strong’ actions (like the ‘strengthening’ of human borders) is just making disorder even more disordered, and liquid modernity even more liquid than before.

I often insist on what I have called the phenomenon of ‘pendulum turning’. If we consider that two essential values, freedom and security, are structuring our social and political life, most of my personal life occurred in the time when people wanted more freedom and were ready to surrender part of their security in order to get more freedom. Now the pendulum is turning. That far I go with Richard Sennett, as far as people’s preferences and values are concerned: today, people often prefer to surrender part of their freedom in order to get more security. But at the same time, I insist on saying that this tendency adds to the deregulated reality of globalization, since, in the last instance, the roots of liquidity are global and this pendulum turning process does not apply to this systemic level. By cutting ourselves off from the global realities and ‘taking care of our own local security’, we only deprive ourselves instead of solving globally-produced issues. In sticking to our own small ‘gardens’, we prefer hypocritical and reassuring solutions, which will eventually turn out to be inconsistent.

Let me put it this way, quoting the late Ulrich Beck, who made the following diagnosis: ‘We are already living in a cosmopolitan situation; but what we are missing is a cosmopolitan mentality or awareness’. All these phenomena of populism, which fundamentally depend on politicians pretending and falsely promising to defend local interests – whereas they are in reality unable to alter the local and global realities alike – actually increase this gap between a cosmopolitan situation which requires cosmopolitan awareness in order to be handled, and on the other hand a cosmopolitan awareness which is conspicuous only by its absence.

I remember when I was young, anthropologists were elaborating the concept of ‘cultural lag’, mostly used in a structural perspective in which culture ‘lags behind’ the structure. According to them, social and economic realities are changing, and after a long while, culture catches up with what has already happened. At that time, I was not sure that it was true: to me, there were some sort of mutual feedbacks between the two. But now I am tempted to use again this idea of cultural lag, and that is exactly what Ulrich Beck had in mind when he said that our consciousness is well behind realities. But the idea of cultural lag has one weak spot: it assumes that it is the predetermined task of culture to catch up with reality. And I am not sure that this is indeed the question; I rather think that culture influences reality more than it is influenced by it. But this is another story.

ST: Speaking about Richard Sennett, you often refer to the model of local-scale solidarity he sketches, based on what he calls ‘informal, open and cooperative discussions’. It appears that you value these sorts of initiatives but, at the same time, you tend to affirm that the global scale represents the sole decisive element to think any significant change. So, could you clarify your view on the link between these two scales and their mutual imbrication?

ZB: You are asking a very complex question: how do we go from a local solidarity to a global one? But let me ask an even more difficult one: is local solidarity feasible? You see, conditions of life during the mid-20th century were different: people went to work in huge factories, 20,000 people under one roof, doing the same movement at the same time, guided by the same time schedule, etc. They were given, most of the day, visual lessons about the commonality of their interest – whose spirit can be grasped in the words of Alexandre Dumas: ‘One for all, all for one’. The ability of an employer to lay off one person was a threat to all of them; hence the emergence of institutions of solidarity, like collective bargaining, getting cooperative or mutual loans. Several decades ago, the whole apparatus of social democracy in western societies created a solidary world, in which people hit by social misfortunes could be protected through a comprehensive safety net. People who were victims of deprivation and discrimination were able to get access, in fact, to all the values universally enjoyed and cherished, such as education or health.

The situation today is completely different: the contemporary workplaces do not promote solidarity but rather mutual suspiciousness and competition. Joining forces becomes senseless, because of the new philosophy of management. Management is mobile today: if they do not like the social or political situation in Leeds, they could quite easily go to Bangladesh or elsewhere. They are no longer dependent on local labourers, and local labourers cannot follow them. People who are actually on the receiving side of this asymmetrical relationship – one side is free, the other is tied to the ground – are just reacting rationally: they compete with each other for the same tasks. Imagining the next blow of cuts, austerity measures, restructuring plans or outsourcing, I simply prefer that you are dismissed rather than me. Somebody will surely be made redundant: God help me that it will not fall upon me. This situation creates tendencies to become selfish, suspicious of your neighbour and violently competitive. Indeed, you have to prove to your bosses that you are better than others: the unique contemporary rule is ‘I am better than s/he is’.

So, in this context, what does local solidarity mean? I am not quite sure. Our starting point is that we are all talking about solidarity but we are not practising it in daily life. I do not remember the name of this very clever and original American sociologist and urbanist who has found out that the most significant achievements in architecture during the last decades have not been made in the art of developing conditions for collectiveness, but rather for separation. The greatest recent architectural improvements are answering the following question: how do you build in such a way as to be independent from your surroundings and to omit the fact that they exist? Therefore, unfortunately, I am a bit disillusioned about local solidarity.

ST: Still, despite the dominant social setting you just described, it seems that there has been in recent years a resurgence of different forms of solidarity. Even if contemporary hegemony is more inclined to separate than to unite individuals, initiatives such as community organizing, temporary autonomous zones, or even forms of local self-management could be depicted as small-scale laboratories for future forms of solidarity. What do you think about these attempts?

ZB: In my opinion, community has been replaced by networks. Every day you contact many more persons that you do not actually see than persons who you do see. You contact them by email, Twitter or via ‘likes’ on their ‘profile’, but you do not feel them physically. You belong to the community, whereas networks belong to you: community considers you as its property, whereas your network hardly notices your existence. On social networks, for example, you are completely free to kick any network-related individual out at any time, by stopping to use the network or by pressing the ‘un-friend’ button. Of course, community is also an abstract phenomenon: it is an ‘imagined totality’ which does not have a real existence as such. But I agree that solidarity matters much for contemporary minds; everybody dreams about solidarity.

The Korean-born and German-based thinker Byung-Chul Han, in his book The Burnout Society, argues that we are all tired by this tremendously competitive world around us. He says that we all dream about rest, and what he means by rest is very simple and brutal: it is not about holidays, but rather about ‘not looking around suspecting that your neighbour is spying on you because he wants to take your job’. But this dream of solidarity, this desire, is made endurable precisely by the institution of what I call ‘explosive or carnival solidarity’, which is very typical of our times. Square people are one very good example of that: they go to public squares for a few days like they go to a carnival. In a carnival, you are completely free; everything is upside-down, everything can happen, and you enjoy this moment of freedom.

Contemporary carnivals consist in something slightly different: going to public squares and sit-in represents the new carnivals, celebrating solidarity rather than freedom. Indeed, once these moments of togetherness are over, they all go back to their individualized and restless daily routine. The function of the carnival, though, remains exactly the same: square people are better prepared to surrender to this solitary routine since they have unloaded all the anger accumulated in them, because of this world full of suspicion and competition. They felt for a few days linked to like-minded people who shouted the same slogans: they were brothers and sisters… for three days! Then, after these three days they go home, to their ordinary life and workplace, and they do not find brothers and sisters there – only competitors. So, these events are the expression of the deep need of a solidary alternative, but we do not have ways of transforming these deep needs into action, which is the necessary step to restructure reality.

ST: The recent rise of populism and terrorism at the European scale put the notion of insecurity on the frontlines, as well as media front-pages. In your work, you said once that our contemporary societies are first and foremost the product of a ‘political economy of insecurity’. How would you describe nowadays the link between politics and insecurity?

ZB: Very tight. Actually, these two notions are intimately close and their link is tremendous. My starting point is this: the legitimation of the power-holders, when they demand discipline, is that they provide security. And they did provide it, in the historical form of the Welfare State, before it was dismantled piece by piece. Besides, if governments of my youth competed with each other in promising full-employment, today no serious politician promises it. And I cannot say that they are wrong, because of the basic fact that no political institution has full control over the economic situation of their own country. They are formally sovereign, but there is always so much they cannot do. Take the example of Greece: they tried to push their sovereignty too far but were rapidly reminded by transnational economic forces that they had to comply with pre-established rules. So, I think we can fairly say that governments are not properly in control of their own affairs; consequently, they are right when they say that they cannot abolish unemployment. The only medicine they can offer to their electors against insecurity is even more insecurity: labour market deregulation, job flexibility, etc. The traditional definition of modern government simply no longer makes sense: it has to be replaced by something else.

The English language has an advantage over French, because, apart from the word security, it has the word safety. What I am trying to say here is that the issue of security, which is related to the existential condition, has been transferred, in a sense, or smuggled into the issue of safety. Safety is being physically secure from unpleasant and undesirable people who may do you some harm. You would get safety, for example, when you go to gated communities: you hire armed guards at the entry, and you can be pretty sure that no intruder will interfere with your blissful life. But this is only safety, and safety is not what people actually need: instead they want a stable and viable status in society. A status which they can even transfer to their children – in other words, they want their achievements in life to be guaranteed.

This fallacious substitution can be strikingly, unpleasantly but correctly exemplified with the case of the Israeli government. This is an extreme example: all governments dream of doing something like it, but not every government has this occasion. Israel is, in a very cynical sense, lucky somehow: it has been easy for Israel to make its people believe that the government and the terrorists need each other, the same way as the police need thieves. Were thieves to disappear, the police would disappear, because their raison d’être is to fight the thieves. If terrorists stopped sending bombs and knifing people, not only the government but the whole idea of the Israeli state would collapse, and people would then realize that this government has created, for instance, tremendous inequalities in society. Sixty years ago, Israeli society was one of the most equal societies in the world; now it is one of the most unequal societies, in which plenty of people are living in permanent poverty and few people are making fairy-tale fortunes. As a result, the way the government justifies its presence today – and its demand for surrender and discipline – is precisely that of securing safety, rather than security in a broader sense. Terrorists, in a way, took upon themselves all the resentment of the daily insecurity of people’s lives,

But this is not only true for the Israeli government: take the example of France’s ‘state of emergency’, declared after the night of the terrorist outrages in Paris, on 13 November 2015. The effects provoked by the Head of State (along with the ‘security’ organs he commands) flexing his muscles in public were fast coming: a fortnight or so later, front-pages told us that ‘François Hollande’s Popularity Soared to Highest Level in Three Years’. The sight of broken doors, swarms of uniformed police officers breaking up meetings and entering homes without asking their residents’ agreement, soldiers patrolling the streets in broad daylight… all of this makes a powerful impression of a government determined to get to ‘the heart of the trouble’ and to allay or disperse the pains of insecurity haunting their subjects. ‘Securitization’ is a conjurer’s trick, consisting in – and exactly calculated for that purpose – focusing the anxiety generated by problems which the governments are incapable of handling, or are not keen to try handling, on problems which governments may be seen, daily and on thousands of screens, to be eagerly (and sometimes successfully) tackling.