The U-turn of utopia – Utopia,socialism and modernity in Zygmunt Bauman’s social thought

Introduction

Zygmunt Bauman’s social thought has been trailblazing in the last decades of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st century. Few other social thinkers have exerted an influence comparable to Bauman’s on how to understand contemporary social life and the human condition. In addition to the breadth and philosophical depth of Bauman’s thought, what persistently stands out in his writings is the engagement with the issue of social change. This remained an imperative in his different interpretations and sociological explorations throughout the years, something which was never abandoned vis-a-vis different prospects and situational possibilities. Particularly, in Bauman’s case, the issue of social change amounts to thinking about alternatives to the status quo. His works on postmodernity and liquid modernity repeatedly stressed that the relative disappearance of alternatives and the unwillingness to perceive the existing social order as containing possibilities for change is one of the crucial shortcomings of the current era. Even when the possibility of alternatives seemed in considerable doubt, remaking the world persisted as a task. Social change may be a tall order, yet Bauman’s sociology refused to give up on the challenge of making the world more hospitable in the sense of less hostile, disintegrated and unjust.

Importantly, Bauman’s sociological outlook contains what could be called a critically affirmative conception of and a longstanding engagement with utopia. In a nutshell, the utopian spirit of his 1970s writings, which culminated with Socialism: The Active Utopia (Bauman, 1976), returns to his thought with the advent of liquid modernity that according to Bauman is an era particularly hostile to utopian thinking (Bauman, 2000). It informs and accompanies much of the theorizing undertaken under the arch metaphor of liquidity and also pertains to Bauman’s discussions of the relation between power and politics and the perceived rise of nostalgia. Utopia is thus pervasive in his social thought. It is no epiphenomenon but a central, if somewhat neglected, theme. In other words, ‘[d]espite being often overlooked in delineations or interpretations of Bauman’s work, utopia thus remains a hallmark of his perspective and utopia constitutes, as it were, a ubiquitous metaphenomenon in his sociology, permeating every nook and cranny of his writings’ (Jacobsen, 2008: 209). The fact that Bauman’s (2017) last book before his death – Retrotopia – is dedicated to utopia is, then, by no means an accident. Instead, it is more than apt considering its persistent presence in his writings.

This article endeavours to provide an in-depth and long-term study of the transformations that utopia underwent in Bauman’s sociology. We do this in order to arrive at a new and overarching understanding of his sociology. The appeal of his writings owes a lot to their uncompromising character; be it the analysis of consumerism or the support for the cause of the marginalized and downtrodden (Bauman, 2007, 2011). Considering utopia, the turns and shifts are no less conspicuous. In the 1970s writings, utopia in the form of culture and socialism functions to de-naturalize society and propel us towards a different future. In the 1980s writings, modernity’s inherent futurism in the form of being an ongoing, incomplete project is deemed dystopian and self-defeating. The postmodern turn of the 1990s gave precedence to morality as the main harbinger of utopia. And finally, Retrotopia sought to rescue utopia from nostalgia and re-imagine utopia as a catalyst for a different future (see Bauman, 2017). In this article, we inquire into the theoretical meaning of these shifts in theorizing. While Bauman never adhered to the principle of coherence – his work has even been dubbed downright inconsistent by interpreters as well as by himself (Bauman, 2008: 235; Morawski, 1998) – it nevertheless matters with respect to his sociology; his arguments rest on premises, which can be analysed, and which we argue are revealing about his work as a whole. In a nutshell, while (postmodern) morality is an important part of Bauman’s later sociology and has traces before the postmodern turn, then much of the reconstructive, alternative and disclosing theorizing from 1990s onwards presupposes a normative content of modernity, which is absent from his acclaimed critical works on modernity that established his reputation and paved way for the later work (see Bauman, 1987, 1989, 1991). As we will argue, there is an undialectical disparity between Bauman’s critical oevre and the modern norms upon which his critique and sociology of alternative rests.

The article has several theoretical cues. The first of these is Jürgen Habermas’s analysis of Michel Foucault’s as well as Theodor W Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s theories of modernity in his The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987). We outline how these influenced Bauman’s theoretical transition in the 1980s and shaped his own ‘dialectic of modernity’ (see Beilharz, 2000). We analyse Bauman’s discourse in light of Habermas’s criticisms of totalizing critique in order to better understand the modern/postmodern juncture and its importance for utopia. Secondly, Peter Wagner’s (2012) views on the conflictual tendencies of modernity in terms of ‘liberty’ (freedom, autonomy and democracy) and ‘discipline’ (domination, mastery and subjugation) and Jeffrey Alexander’s (2013) study of the ‘dark side of modernity’ inform this article. The first section of the article on Bauman’s early utopianism focuses on the ‘liberty’ side of his utopian thinking in the form of socialism and culture. The following section of the discourse of modernity engages with the ‘subjugation’ or the dark side of utopia as dystopia. The third section of the article studies the transformation of utopia from ‘liberty’ to morality, i.e. the transformation of utopia from a social to moral–philosophical phenomenon. However, as we argue, Bauman’s earlier socialism endured his postmodern turn. And, finally, we sketch Bauman’s most recent reading of the darkening of utopia in the form of moral indifference towards refugees and nostalgic clinging to an imagined past to escape the anxieties of the present.

By doing so, we aim to arrive at an overarching understanding of Bauman’s engagement with utopia, which covers the entirety of his writings in English from 1973 to 2017. We endeavour a long-term perspective. Utopia enables such a perspective because it was part of his sociological investigations throughout these years. Utopia also deserves to be the prism through which to take another look at Bauman’s sociology, because it sheds much light on his well-known sociological iconoclasm and sense of possibilities (see Jacobsen, 2017; Tester, 2004). In particular, the late book Retrotopia (Bauman, 2017) warrants a new study of utopia, as it is the coda to a long and convoluted road of utopian explorations. The tide in 2018 is steadily turning against ‘free markets’, but the same cannot quite be stated with respect to utopia yet. In her book, Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstruction of Society, Ruth Levitas (2013: 217) argues that utopia is too often an embarrassing subject matter in sociology, and that this needs to change if sociology is to help bring about a better society. There have been developments in the direction that Levitas considers necessary: The ‘real utopias’ project by the American sociologist Erik Olin Wright (2010) is one of the good examples of greater openness towards utopia within the discipline of sociology. ¹ We are still, however, only seeing the first signs of what can be called a rapprochement between utopia and sociology. Much more work by sociologists as well as scholars of utopia is still needed in order to achieve such a rapprochement. The conception of utopia that has emerges from this study goes some way to exemplify utopia in terms of the possible and the critical. We find that Bauman’s works state the case for utopia in a compelling way, yet we intend to offer our own assessment on this subject matter, which ought to break new ground in Bauman studies.

Previous research on Bauman’s utopianism has explored the ambivalent character of his views on utopia, meaning that utopia for Bauman is on the one hand a catalyst for progressive change and creativity but on the other hand contains the danger of turning into a dystopia (Jacobsen, 2016). We have recently studied Bauman’s understanding of utopia in relation to the towering utopian philosopher of the 20th century, Ernst Bloch (Aidnik and Jacobsen, 2017). The study finds the utopianism of both Bauman and Bloch to be critical and humanistic as well as forward looking and relevant in our era where (neo)liberal capitalism faces a deep crisis. This article goes beyond the previous research by focusing more on the assessment of the different transitions (from the earliest 1970s books to the latest Retrotopia) in Baumann’s sociology vis-a-vis utopia. Drawing on Habermas (1987), we approach Bauman’s work as participating in the philosophical discourse of modernity and analyse the implications of Bauman’s discourse. We bring to the fore the vital continuum that exists between the early and the late works as the normative content of modernity. We conclude with ideas for further research on utopian thinking.

Bauman’s early utopianism – Culture and socialism

Utopia has never been an obvious or conventional concern for most mainstream sociologists. In fact, for many years the topics of utopia and utopianism – even as an object of sober analysis – were regarded with ill-conceived suspicion, because they were seen (alongside notions of ideology, politics and morality) as oozing of dangerous normativity and value judgments (see, e.g. Goodwin, 1978; Hacker, 1955). Even though times have indeed changed, and many heretofore sequestered themes and topics have now gained ground, utopia still remains at the outskirts of sociological theorizing. For Bauman, however, utopia – together with other sociologically neglected topics such as the Holocaust, morality, death and immortality – has remained a continuous preoccupation, at times explicitly mentioned, while at other times hiding in the dark or relegated to a sub-level of analysis. In his early writings – the pre-exile Polish texts as well as the early English pieces – he contested many of the ideas that the prevailing positions of positivism, functionalism or orthodox Marxism at that time advanced and instead conducted sociological analysis armed with a humanistic, anti-positivistic and critical perspective (see, e.g. Tester and Jacobsen, 2005). Even though Bauman initially embraced a ‘Marxist worldview in the light of the utopian belief and hope that the Soviet Union was genuinely a country of justice, equality, freedom; that an ethnic pedigree really did not matter’ (Morawski, 1998: 30), he became increasingly convinced that utopia was not to be understood as a concrete social order ever to be arrived at, but rather a mentality or a presence that was immanent in the very human way of being-in-the-world. So although Bauman did not share the vision of Ernst Bloch – the grandmaster of socialist utopianism – of the desirability of an actually existing ‘concrete utopia’, he nevertheless supported the idea that utopia as such represents mankind’s hope of shaping and improving the world (Aidnik and Jacobsen, 2017).

For example, at a time when functionalist (and often anthropological) notions of ‘culture’ prevailed within the social sciences, Bauman instead proposed a much more iconoclastic and activist understanding of culture. Culture as Praxis (1973/1999) is Bauman’s contribution to understanding culture as a more diversified and potent concept than what was common at that time. His book presents a dense discussion and analytical separation between culture as ‘structure’ and culture as ‘praxis’. ‘Culture as structure’ is the conventional structural functionalist view that culture consists of an ordered and patterned system of symbols, serving as orientation points for individuals. In such a view, the primary purpose of culture is to sustain the status quo and to avoid disruptions or anomie, and even though the cultural system is never static or completely integrated, it is nevertheless concerned with maintaining the important balance between the social and personality systems. Contrary to this view, ‘culture as praxis’ – borrowing equally from Karl Marx, Georg Simmel and Antonio Gramsci – sees culture as something people actively do – they are always involved in structuring activities in order to create and shape the world they inhabit. In his critique of positivist/functionalist notions of culture, Bauman thus states about the utopian potentials of culture as praxis:

Culture constitutes the human experience in the sense that it constantly brings into relief the discord between the ideal and the real, that it makes reality meaningful by exposing its limitations and imperfections … Contrary to positive science, culture stands and falls on the assumption that the real, tangible, sentient existence – the one already accomplished, sedimented, objectified – is neither the only nor the most authoritative. (Bauman, 1973/1999: 136)

In his more recent reflections on the historical peregrinations of the concept of ‘culture’, Bauman also shows how culture continuously reflects the changing character of human society and thus also mirrors the shifting dreams, hopes and aspirations of the people inhabiting it. When the concept of ‘culture’ was first conceived during the 18th century, it was primarily used to describe an agent of change rather than a preserver of the status quo. Culture was intended to change the world – for better or worse – by cultivating those who by the powers that be were deemed uncultured or uncivilized. During the 20th century, culture increasingly came to denote a conserving or functional force – it became a homeostatic mechanism whose primary function was to maintain the stability, equilibrium and durability of the existing system (e.g. of possessions, values, education, wealth, status and power). Culture, in Bauman’s words, had since its first formulation thus been transformed from a stimulant to a tranquilizer (Bauman, 2011: 10). With the arrival of contemporary liquid-modern consumer society, culture – that was previously conceived as a collective phenomenon – has once again been transformed but now into a device intended to secure individual freedom of choice and to ensure that the responsibility for this choice is borne solely on individual shoulders. In this way, ‘culture’ has taken many U-turns from its premodern and solid-modern to its contemporary liquid-modern incarnations. No matter what its concrete embodiment has been, culture always reflects the utopian aspirations of the society by which its name is invoked. Culture in Bauman’s view is therefore utopian as it is always work in progress, always – in Bloch’s memorable terms – ‘not yet’. As Bauman once stated:

I think social life cannot in fact be understood unless due attention is paid to the immense role played by utopia. Utopias share with the totality of culture the quality – to paraphrase Santayana – of a knife with the edge pressed against the future. (Bauman, 1976: 12)

Bauman’s main manifesto regarding utopia is undoubtedly Socialism – The Active Utopia (1976), from where the above quotation is taken. In this book, which reads as a report on the overlooked utopian potentials of socialism, Bauman sides with the so-called ‘utopian socialists’ against the ‘scientific socialists’ (and their economic determinism) stressing that utopianism is not incompatible with the socialist project, although he remains skeptical about the possibility and desirability of legislating or creating utopia as an end-state to history or a happy community (such as in some of the communist communes and ideal societies proposed, for example, by the likes of Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, Edward Bellamy or William Morris). In Bauman’s admittedly rather broad understanding, the main characteristics of utopias are that they ‘relativize the present’, ‘seem to be little concerned with pragmatically conceived realism’, ‘break with historical continuity’, ‘are those aspects of culture … in which the possible extrapolations of the present are explored’, they ‘always materialize in a group-specific form, representing a group experience and invariably partisan yearnings’, and finally utopias ‘exert enormous influence on the actual course of historical events’ (Bauman, 1976: 13–17). In short, utopia is about critically transcending – in thought as well as in action – that which currently ‘is’ in order to pave the way for that which ‘could be’ or ‘should be’. Even though Bauman regards the utopia that socialism represents as an ‘active utopia’ or ‘living utopia’, it is, as mentioned, important to him to stress that its transcendence of reality ultimately remains unfulfilled and unrealized. Bauman thus continuously warns that there is an unmistakable totalitarian tendency inherent in utopia if it is ever put into practice. He is therefore neither a supporter of conventional utopian blueprints for ‘the good society’ nor of utopia merely understood as fanciful pipedreams of science fiction. To Bauman, utopia is an ‘activating presence’ that allows us to consider how we may create a society that qualitatively differs from the current one.

Bauman’s critical discourse of modernity

There is a distinct disparity in Bauman’s social thought, which has been hitherto largely neglected, and which thus deserves more in-depth exploration. On the one hand, Bauman acquired acclaim in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a critical theorist of modernity. Legislators and Interpreters (1987), Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) and Modernity and Ambivalence (1991) were the three books with which his theoretical inquiry shifted from previous preoccupations with culture, socialism and class to modernity. All of these three works each in their way scrutinize the primacy of reason in the post-traditional West rooted in Enlightenment. The increasing dominance of reason augured its own new and distinct horizon of strategies. Social engineering together with purposeful action, power and repression were identified as central to the emerging social formation, which came to the fore in the West in the 17th century (Bauman, 1991: 7). The administrative and technological resources of modernity coupled with an absence of any perceived limits to human endeavour facilitated this excess. Modernity’s ‘quest for order’ meant declaring war to difference, pluralism and non-Western forms of life. Bauman’s critical theory (although he never associated himself with the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School tradition) leaves little room for any emancipatory potential in modernity and instead concentrates overwhelmingly on what Alexander (2013) has called the ‘dark side of modernity’. Such was Bauman’s identification of modernity with social engineering and control that the fall of Soviet Communism is understood as a decisive and final defeat for modernity’s grand ambitions (Bauman, 1992: 178). Bauman’s initial enthusiasm for postmodernity – as exemplified in books such as Intimations of Postmodernity (1992) and Postmodern Ethics (1993) – was a direct consequence of the disillusionment with social experiments and social engineering in the 20th century. Rather than a defeat or a temporary failure, postmodernity suggested the coming abandonment of the modern quest for order; even the emancipation of modernity from false consciousness (Bauman, 1992: 188).

On the other hand, even in his subsequent postmodern writings, Bauman’s firm belief in the need for social change persisted, and the nature of this social change was paradoxically itself distinctly modern rather than postmodern. To grasp the progressive (or bright) side of modernity, we will turn to the work of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas’s (1987: 336) defense of modernity vis-a-vis what he termed radical critique (of reason) is instructive for an inquiry into Bauman’s social thought as a whole. Of the thinkers Habermas addresses in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, it is Michel Foucault and Theodor W Adorno and Max Horkheimer that Bauman draws on in his studies on modernity, especially in Legislators and Interpreters (1987) and Modernity and Ambivalence (1991) – and also in Freedom (1988) Foucault is one of the central figures. These matter because, together with Modernity and the Holocaust, they form the basis for later works. In order to understand and assess Bauman as a utopian thinker, as we aspire to do in this article, his in-depth engagement with modernity in these theoretically ambitious works ought to be revisited. What is at stake is the later vision of utopia all the way to Retrotopia. As we shall see, Bauman’s radical critique did not result in a postmodern celebration of difference or retreat of the problem of a hospitable and just social world. Rather, these issues hinge decisively on the conception of modernity because it is in modernity where remaking the world more than anything else comes to the fore. Modernity’s technological and intellectual transformations undid the previous immutability of human cohabitation (Bauman himself acknowledged this frequently, see, for example Bauman, 1976, 1991).

What are the Foucauldian and Frankfurt School motifs at this stage in Bauman’s work? The inquiry into the rise of surveillance institutions and disciplinary power in Legislators and Interpreters is clearly Foucauldian. Foucault’s social history appears at the stage of Bauman’s writing where there is a pressing need for rethinking his understanding of history. According to Peter Beilharz (2004: 250), the origins of this turn are apparent already in the earlier Memories of Class (Bauman, 1982), which anticipates the critique of Enlightenment and intellectuals in Legislators and Interpreters (1987). Modernity could not be understood as the age of capitalism because disciplinary power preceded capitalism. Instead of the 1970s Gramscian Marxist reading of history focusing on class and culture, Foucault’s reading of history as the rise of the Panopticon and what Bauman terms the ‘sociogenesis of the power/knowledge syndrome’ (Bauman, 1987, chapter 3) is at stake here. In Bauman’s account, this syndrome meant the rise of one-sided, expert-practiced surveillance together with pastoral and proselytizing power. Bauman’s Foucauldian optics remained distinct for the focus on the factory as the locus of Panopticon instead of the clinic or prison (as in Foucault’s own work). It was in this sense that Bauman’s earlier studies of British labour history persisted. In addition, the problem of surveillance is first and foremost one of conformism and normality, the same archenemies of utopia we also find in Socialism: The Active Utopia (see Beilharz, 2004: 251).

Regarding Horkheimer and Adorno, Bauman states in the introduction of Modernity and Ambivalence that

[t]his book attempts to wrap historical and sociological flesh around the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’ skeleton. But it also goes beyond Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s propositions. It suggests that Enlightenment, after all, has spectacularly failed in its drive to ‘extinguish any trace of its own self-consciousness’ (Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s own work is, to be sure, one of the many vivid proofs of that failure), and that myth-shattering thinking (which the Enlightenment could not but reinforce instead of marginalizing) proved to be not so much self-destructive, as destructive for the modern project’s blind arrogance, high-handedness and legislative dreams. (Bauman, 1991: 17)

Bauman committed himself to a ‘postmodern rhetorical overkill’ following both Foucault and Adorno and Horkheimer. Nothing like what Habermas (1987: 336) calls ‘the normative content of modernity’ can be found in his uncompromising critique. Self-determination and self-realization, or solidary self-determination of all achieved together with the self-determination of each are conspicuously on the margins as constituents of modern self-understanding in Bauman’s key treatises we have engaged with (see, e.g. Habermas, 1987: 337–338). Habermas’s (1987: 338) observation that in critical theories of modernity, Enlightenment and manipulation, forces of production and forces of destruction, truth and ideology flow into one can also illuminate Bauman’s interpretation. It is democracy and state power, science and classification, philosophy and Western superiority as well as power and subjugation which, as Habermas says, flow into one. Whatever progress modernity did achieve in terms of democratic participation, forms of equality such as gender and racial equality, comprehensive education and human rights are hardly mentioned by Bauman at all.

Lastly, in the period under consideration, Bauman’s provides an underwhelming account of socialism as well. In Socialism: The Active Utopia (1976), let us recall, socialism was, in addition to being the counter-culture of modernity, perceived as emancipatory; as being at its core about liberating human nature from the limitations and humiliations of capitalist wage labour. By the time that modernity had acquired the decisive significance in the late 1980s and early 1990s, socialism was still the counter-culture but only in the sense of grander ambitions of control and mastery. In other words, it had become the excess of industrial-capitalist social engineering that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously describe in The Communist Party Manifesto (1848). This re-evaluation of socialism no doubt had to do with the exhaustion of ‘actually existing socialism’ in the Eastern Bloc and its globally perceived failure as a credible alternative to capitalism. The historical episode of the collapse of the Soviet Union is used to illuminate the truth and failure of socialism (or communism) without much consideration of the theoretical diversity of socialism and other historical experiments on a lesser scale. Socialism, therefore, is argued to be a ‘bankrupt form of modernity’ (Bauman, 1990a: 23).

Such an assessment of socialism in the early 1990s still did not mean that it had no progressive role in postmodernity. Bauman was concerned with revising socialism in small articles such as ‘The Left as the Counter-Culture of Modernity’ (1986) and ‘From Pillars To Post’ (1990a). Particularly, this meant a recalibration of socialism vis-a-vis postmodernity as a de-politicized consumer society in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The idea of socialism (or the Left more broadly) as a counter-culture emerged in that period as well (Bauman, 1986, 1990a). Postmodernity called for more politics, not less, only then would the postmodern rendition of freedom mean more than a consumer freedom and tolerance more than indifference. Socialism as a counter-culture was meant to make this call audible. As Bauman puts it,

[i]t is up to the socialist counter-culture to make sure that the emancipatory potential of postmodern values becomes true and that proper means for this purpose; so that, in the end, the quality of society by may improved by improving the lot of its weakest members. (Bauman, 1990a: 25)

The coordinated social life together with a democratic polity were a reworked version of socialism as the counter-culture of capitalism. Furthermore, the idea that the market economy has colonized spheres of society (welfare, public sphere, education) implies a normative modern consciousness (see Callegaro, 2017). There is an undialectical disparity between the declared normative but inherently dystopian notion of ‘order’ (of control and mastery) on the one hand and on the concealed norms upon which Bauman’s critique rests on the other hand (see Habermas, 1987: 337; Delanty, 1999: 120). Moreover, Bob Cannon (2014: 64) has recently contested Bauman’s interpretation of the Holocaust, arguing that the critique of Holocaust rests on democracy, equality and humanism, i.e. what we may term the normative content of modernity. ² Thinking with Cannon, it is not only the critique of modernity’s ‘dark side’ but also his postmodern and later humanist social thought which would be unimaginable without this specific normative content. And, finally, Ali Rattansi argues in his recent depth study of Bauman’s work, titled Bauman and contemporary sociology: A critical analysis (2017: 89, 99), that Bauman (1987, 1989, 1991) one-sidedly focused on the disciplining and Panopticon-like side of modernity. This, coupled with lack of consideration of liberalism and liberal democracy, gives his interpretation of modernity a staunchly authoritarian cast. A more considerate treatment of modernity, which would have done justice to both this normative content and the dark, regressive side, would have given Bauman’s utopianism a much tighter theoretical coherence. Societal change, for which utopia is a catalyst, is a core issue for Bauman. Bauman’s imaginary of societal change as well as utopia draw on exactly the same values that as his interpretation of Holocaust – democracy, equality and humanism. It is evident that modernity (at best) allowed only their partial realization in democratic capitalist arrangements: Socialism: The Active Utopia (1976) very much argues this. The discrepancy between theory and practice gave socialism its impetus. In the critical discourse of modernity, these values are rather benchmarks against which to measure the dark side. We argue that the shift from partial realization of the normative content to non-existent benchmarks against which to measure reality is theoretically erroneous in Bauman. Modern values enabled his investigations.

The appeal that Bauman’s sociology holds undoubtedly has in a significant sense to do with its persistently critical and illuminating character; in part due to the rhetorical overkill of the critique and sudden turns in thinking. From solid-modernity via postmodernity to liquid-modernity, different social formations are subjected without exception to critique, i.e. critique persists in his different turns in thinking. Above all, their human costs are investigated and scrutinized. Yet for Bauman as a social and humanist thinker – as opposed to merely ethical and utopian thinker – equality and democracy were too important to be abandoned at the gates of difference, contingency and even morality. It is morality to which we are going to turn next.

Morality as utopia’s counterpart

Postmodernity, according to Bauman’s initial hope, was the dawn and not the twilight of morality. The reason behind this hope is the re-personalization of morality, meaning that it is again rooted in the way human beings are (Bauman, 1993: 34). The implication is that modernity approached morality as an impersonal code of conduct: something that had to be prescribed and socially overseen. Modernity meant ‘adiaphorization’, meaning the neutralization of moral impulse and conscience by social distance (exemplified by modern bureaucracy). As sociology was for Bauman very much part and parcel of modernity with its value neutrality and scientific procedures, the turn to ‘postmodern ethics’ was a movement towards continental philosophy and stepping back from the sociological universe. (It is for this reason that, in Bauman’s view, sociology has had little to say about the Holocaust.) ³ Ojvind Larsen captured this well:

In the shadow of Auschwitz, Bauman radicalizes the sociological issue of the origin of norms to such an extent that he is forced to transcend the sociological point of view. Our moral capability is not to be found within the societal sphere, meaning the sphere in which social relations are mediated through institutions. Our moral capability is not a result of overly individualized bodies of learning and enforcement, meaning it is not result of a societal context. According to Bauman, our moral capability should be sought in the sphere of the social, meaning in the spontaneous and immediate meeting between one person and the Other. (Larsen, 2014: 527)

In addition, Bauman’s (and Lévinas’s) socially unfounded morality is contentious because it relies on the belief that, left on their own, individuals more often than not make the right choice. His point of departure is that ‘humans are morally ambivalent: ambivalence resides at the heart of the ‘primary scene’ of human face-to-face’ (Bauman, 1993: 10). Ambivalence means a situation of uncertainty. Humans can – and will – act immorally once free from codes of conduct. ⁴ Lévinas’s influence on Bauman is indispensable for grasping the utopian character of morality in postmodernity. As it has been recently argued: ‘[i]t is from Lévinas that Bauman derives his conception of morality as being-for-the-Other, as a personal act of responsibility and commitment’, and ‘Lévinas offers a utopia that is not about a ‘classless society’ or ‘the great society’ and that instead of insisting upon change as Marx famously did in his 11th thesis on Feuerbach, rather thematises our continued and indeed ceaseless moral relation to the Other’ (Aidnik and Jacobsen, 2017: 149–150). It is this ceaseless relation that becomes a utopia of its own, outside the quest for systemic social change. This face-to-face relation is primarily an intersubjective one and only vaguely a social one.

The morality as being-for-the-Other is not necessarily, however, limited to the moral party of two. In Postmodern Ethics, Bauman muses about the utopian humankind-wide moral unity and inquiries into its possibilities (Bauman, 1993: 14–15). Despite the turn away from socialism, there are distinct continuities between Bauman’s 1990s moral philosophy and the socialist social thought of Socialism: The Active Utopia (1976). In both cases, there is the ‘ought’ which is argued to be more significant to human being-in-the-world than the ‘is’. In the earlier period, the ‘ought’ is a socialist society beyond capitalist alienation and Weberian iron cage; in the later period, it is the unconditional moral responsibility and the ethics of proximity. Ethics of proximity, we add, can be understood to call for a change in the power relations of society in Bauman’s view: ‘[t]he “moralization of politics”, attainable through the dismantling of the most awesome monopolies of coercive power and through democratic control of the rest of socially available resources of action, seems to contain some possibility of generating such an ethic’ (Bauman, 1990b: 35). ⁵ The ethical ‘ought’ is predominant in the 1990s but, as we see, Bauman’s thinking is not confined to it. For Bauman, ethics as a micro-level reality leads back to social formations, the macro-level, that are so indispensable for utopia, which is something to which we will return in the Conclusion section (see Hirst, 2014). Nevertheless, the ‘ethical turn’ continued to be salient in Bauman’s writings up to the 2010s, when social formations had once again become objects of inquiry. It was a salient concern and enabled commentaries and normative assessments on contemporary social tendencies. The latest of these assessments concerned arguably the most pressing of contemporary human(itarian) issues – the (so-called) refugee crisis – to which we are going to turn next.

Excursus: Strangers at Our Door

Strangers at Our Door (2016), one of Bauman’s last acts of public sociology, is an intervention into the almost torrential arrival of mainly North African refugees and migrants on Europe’s shores. ⁶ The collapse of the Syrian state together with deprivation and violence in the region have given rise to an exodus, which has divided Europe and raised serious questions about the continent’s hospitality. In explaining the surging numbers of people embarking on hazardous journeys in order to find a safe shelter, the book postulates calamitous and anarchy-sowing military expeditions to Iraq and Afghanistan as some of the root causes of current migration. This response, unprecedented as it appears, should be understood as a time-honoured human reaction to de-stabilization and the frenzy of violence; seeking a safe shelter is an understandable response under such circumstances. Bauman rightly argues that the rising and potentially eruptive tensions reside in European austerity ravaged societies. Austerity has steadily eroded Europe’s social security, forcing on the earlier welfare system an economic paradigm incompatible with shared humanitarian responsibility. The migrants who succeed at reaching Europe’s shores find in Europe, which they associate with prosperity, in plight of existential insecurity. Europe’s official liberal centre of the EU (which itself has not lived up to much vaunted ‘European values’) faces an uphill battle vis-a-vis insurgent nationalism, strongman (or strongwomen) politicians and the rapid deterioration of public opinion. Security concerns together with national governments’ perceived violation of territorial sovereignty have seen a hitherto unforeseeable rise in fences and controlled borders.

Considering Bauman’s enduring commitment to disenfranchised and marginalized groups, it is unsurprising that his is a moral dissection with the unfolding events and the responses these have triggered within politics, media and public opinion. Indifference and fearmongering in the form of moral panics are both sharply criticized. The human suffering due to reasons of displacement, inhumane concentration camps and bereavement calls for solidarity and responsibility. Refugees are strangers. ‘Strangers’ is an important term in Bauman’s sociological investigations because ‘[t]he stranger is ambivalence incarnated; it is the tangible, visible, audible representation of the ambivalence of being’ (Bauman, 2016: 137). They arrive without our consent and stay without us our agreement. Their presence suggests our lack of territorial sovereignty – our involuntary receptiveness to the side-effects of global processes. Hence, refugees as strangers are perceived all-too-often as intruders whose presence is alarming, resulting in aversion. In a Lévinasian vein, the presence of strangers endangers and subsequently reinforces ‘Being’, understood as self-preservation, at the cost of being-for the Other or morality. Lévinas does appear in Strangers at Our Door; this time as a perspective-shifting philosopher of the primacy of ethics vis-a-vis politics (the administration of society). Unlike in the 1990s in-depth theory-building readings of Lévinas, Bauman this time does concede that humans as moral subjects often do not live up to the saintly Levinasian image. ‘Being’, or acting in ways negligent of our responsibility, is human (all-too-human) after all. However, this cannot be taken to mean that certain groups of people are unworthy of our moral concern. Morality is not compatible with such divisions and nor can it survive them (Bauman, 2016: 8–17, 76–83).

In hindsight, the aforementioned ‘ethical turn’ persisted well into Bauman’s last writings. Considering the works in English, already Socialism: The Active Utopia (1976), where the modus operandi of utopia is inclusion or dialogue, anticipates the later Levinas-inspired turn to ethics. Richard Kilminster (2017) has recently put forward the thesis that suffering and humiliation of the proletariat in Marx becomes the universal suffering and humiliation of the excluded, of the outsiders and surplus populations. Bauman’s symbolic ‘farewell to postmodernity’ in Postmodernity and Its Discontents, thus ends with a reference to Albert Camus: ‘there is no beauty without solidarity with the humiliated’ (Bauman, 1997: 208). The self-understanding of academic sociology could indeed gain something from this insight. Bauman sounded more credible in deciphering postmodernity as containing an ethical promise than he did in reflecting upon a postmodern autonomous polity. It may be argued, though, that such an ethical promise reflected Bauman’s own conviction of ethics as socially and humanly indispensable. Bauman’s discussion of the relationship between ethics and politics indicates the need for addressing ‘the Third’, i.e. society, and going beyond the moral party of the two. We now turn to Bauman’s late sociology in order to discuss the final form of his utopianism and how this relates to both the normative content of modernity and postmodern moral philosophy.

Retrotopia – The rise of ‘restorative nostalgia’

In one of his last books before his death, Retrotopia (2017), Bauman revisited the topic of utopia that had, as we have shown, been an underlying and continuous presence in his work for almost half a century (Jacobsen, 2004), but now it was utopia wearing a new (or perhaps rather old) and somewhat bizarre outfit. The denizens of ‘Retrotopia’ are concerned with the past and how the perceived greatness and the imagined golden age of years gone by may be retrieved and revived. ‘Retrotopia’ is about how to re-invent the past in the present – how to revive that which was lost when liquid modernity with its ‘tyranny of the moment’ (Eriksen, 2001) squeezed out its solid-modern predecessor and in the process also left the past behind. Retrotopians are disillusioned and dissatisfied with the prospect of a future that holds nothing in store for them. They prefer the problems – now almost forgotten or romantically re-imagined as manageable hardships – of the past to the insecurities of the future at any time.

In the book, Bauman observes how such ‘‘Retrotopias’ are currently emerging as visions located in the lost/stolen/abandoned but undead past, instead of being tied to the not-yet-unborn and so inexistent future’ (Bauman, 2017: 5). In this way, ‘Retrotopia’ represents the exact opposite of the aforementioned ‘active utopia’ of, for instance, modern socialism that was concerned not only with how to shape the future but also with showing that utopian ideas can shatter the apparently impenetrable deadlock of the present. Whereas many modernist utopias promised a better society waiting somewhere ahead if mankind struggled hard enough to make it materialize, Bauman’s active utopia instead rests on the idea that utopia is not a destination to be finally arrived at, but rather it is an orientation that can inspire critical thinking and acting in the present. Not so with Retrotopia. In Bauman’s words, Retrotopia is the ‘negation of utopia’s negation’ (Bauman, 2017: 8), meaning that whereas utopia negates the reality that currently is, Retrotopia negates that very future which utopia represents and replaces it with the past that once was. It is noteworthy that to retrotopians, the past in not dead – it can be resuscitated and used for present purposes. Bauman thus speaks of a ‘U-turn’ in utopian mentalities that he specifies as follows:

[F]rom investing public hopes of improvement in the uncertain and ever-too-obviously un-trustworthy future, to re-reinvesting them in the vaguely remembered past, valued for its assumed stability and so trustworthiness. With such a U-turn happening, the future is transformed from the natural habitat of hopes and rightful expectations into the site of nightmares. (Bauman, 2017: 6)

They derive, according to Bauman, their allure and stimulus from the long-lasting hope of finally reconciling the two meta-values of modernity – values that have often lived in open conflict with each other – namely freedom and security (Bauman, 2017: 8). It is a deliberately re-invented, re-hashed, re-imagined and re-fabricated past serving the specific purpose of promising recognizability, community, stability and security. However, when the past strikes back, when returning to or restoring the past becomes as an all-consuming concern, then the ability to deal with the present is lost. For example, in a chapter of Retrotopia teasingly titled ‘Back to the Womb’, Bauman critically dissects the current tendency towards people retreating from the social into a still more narcissistic mentality (not understood as a ‘personality disorder’ but as a ‘social disorder’) bolstered by the social media, but finding there nothing but loneliness, superficiality and self-blame.

Bauman’s useful notion of ‘Retrotopia’ closely resembles (and specifically quotes) Svetlana Boym’s (2001) idea of ‘restorative nostalgia’ – the desire to restore the past in the present. The present is therefore not only pregnant with the future, as so many modernist utopians would say, according to restorative nostalgics it also bears the beloved yet neglected and forgotten child of the past. In Boym’s apt description, restorative nostalgia ‘puts emphasis on nostos (returning home) and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps’ (Boym, 2001: 41). This return to the past is not just a thought experiment, but rather something actively pursued, because, as Boym states, ‘[r]estorative nostalgia takes itself dead seriously’ (Boym, 2001: 49). The retrotopians or restorative nostalgics sorely miss the warmth of the cosy tribal fire of the past, whose members are now in danger of being extinguished by the inflood of illegal immigrants, economic insecurity, the sense of personal insufficiency and a host of other societal pathologies. Such restorative nostalgic notions often end up catering for nationalistic sentiments or traditionalistic values. In sum, Bauman was deeply unimpressed by retrotopian yearning as a response to the current problems and grievances.

Conclusion

Reading Retrotopia, it becomes evident that the world is out of joint. This state can perpetuate itself but would not be resolved without daring, far-sighted intervention. A new constellation between society, politics and economy is necessary. Ten years after the financial crises, the question of alternatives to capitalism looms large, yet remains elusive in concrete terms. As ever, theoretically, utopia is about ‘the hope that we may collectively build a world of peace, justice, cooperation and equality in which human creativity can find its full expression’ (Levitas, 2011: 231). The truth – in addition to the topicality – of such a utopia is the affirmative stance towards the 19th century bold and imaginative socialist utopianism. Social change is again a matter of utopia more than a matter of science. Sociological utopianism as a counter-culture to consumer capitalism in Retrotopia (2017) resorts back to Culture as Praxis (1973/1999) and Socialism: The Active Utopia (1976), where the emancipatory currents within modernity (in the form of socialism and culture) were explored. The transition from the socialist utopianism to the study of modernity in the 1980s was influenced, as we have argued, by the turn to Foucault and Adorno and Horkheimer. In Legislators and Interpreters, Modernity and the Holocaust and Modernity and Ambivalence, the dark side of modernity is overwhelmingly at the fore. While these books arguably understand modernity as containing multiple developmental potentialities (including socialist or social democratic), they present a critique that bears strong resemblances to the totalizing critique which equates modernity with subjugation and mastery. Modernity made utopia as a ‘real place’, instead of the Morean ‘no place’, possible. Modernity’s decline, Bauman (1991) argued, was the decline of its most ardent champion – communism. Here, the theory of utopia in the form of communism is no more than its ostensible practice. Yet socialism as an ‘active utopia’ of coordinated social life and welfare provision persisted well into and beyond the postmodern period. This ought to be dubbed a distinctly modern consciousness, which Bauman scholarship has hitherto largely neglected due to the identification of the ‘modern’ with the dialectic of Enlightenment (or order and ambivalence) in the aforementioned three critical works (see Blackshaw, 2005; Jay, 2010). The failure of postmodernity to live up to the expectations of moral rejuvenation lead to the return of social utopia in the 21st century that culminates with Retrotopia. Bauman’s distinctive plea for solidarity with those who are suffering – most recently with refugees and asylum seekers in Strangers at Our Door – is, despite the Levinasian influence, a humanist current of sociology and furthermore in his case a socialist championing of the cause of the weak and vulnerable. ⁷

Socialism represents the continuity in Bauman’s social thought and endures as a utopia. The postmodernist period known for the trilogy of Legislators and Interpreters, Modernity and the Holocaust and Modernity and Modernity and Ambivalence does not necessarily discredit the socialist utopia; socialism is understood to have a counter-cultural role in postmodernity in the same period from which the trilogy dates. The idea is, however, marginal and underdeveloped compared to the dissection of socialism as a form of self-defeating modern order building. In addition, counter-cultural socialism meant post-modern socialism, free of the social engineering ambitions of modern socialism. The latter, similarly to modernity, is understood by Bauman as containing no normative content or bright side of its own. This has previously been argued by Mikael Carleheden, who observed:

A more reasonable point of view is to acknowledge the importance of different – both dark and bright – tracks on different levels in the modern development of society that some are in contradiction with others, while others play a reinforcing role. Undoubtedly, the emphasis on the dark tracks of modernity is of great importance in light of historical dominance of Enlightenment philosophy’s naive optimism about social progress and its lack of self-criticism. But if critical social science does not want to draw the radical conclusion from its self-diagnosed insignificance and complete silence, then it must seek out connections through studying alternative tracks in modernity such as the development of human rights and the equivalent developments in terms of value and institutional change. (Carleheden, 2008: 190)

This assessment ought to pave way for further explorations of utopian thinking in social theory. Critique of Enlightenment – foregrounded and influenced by the aforementioned work of Foucault and Adorno and Horkheimer – has long been an influential trope in social theory (see Wolin, 2004). Explorations in utopian thinking ought to avoid the rhetorical overkill of this trope and engage more with the normative content or the alternative tracks of modernity. This should entail a reconsideration of Enlightenment for utopian thinking.

In sum, Zygmunt Bauman is relevant for utopian thinking because his work is marked by a distinct future horizon, an intimation of the ways and tasks still ahead. The ways and tasks are embedded in the current form of social life; and they are embedded (characteristically for Bauman) in the particular ‘history-making’ capacity of the human being-in-the world:

[A]nd if we, human creatures, ‘made’ the market, we can just as well ‘unmake’ it, or give it a more gentle and friendly form. It is not necessary for the world to be an amphitheatre for kill-or-be-killed gladiators; or a racetrack where the runners only care about forcing their way to the front and not letting anyone else catch up. It is also not necessary for neighbours to compete with each other and ruin their cities in the process, and for national economies to race instead of jogging in each other’s company. None of this is pre-ordained – and certainly not a final – choice. We can still hold out hope that the words will become flesh. But we can also invest our hope in rolling up our sleeves and transforming the word into flesh. (Bauman and Obirek, 2015: 50)