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ZYGMUNT BAUMAN: ORDER,

STRANGERHOOD AND
FREEDOM

Vince Marotta

ABSTRACT In the final decades of the 20th century, issues such as identity,
Otherness and the role of social and cultural boundaries have been prominent
in social theory, sociology and cultural studies. In this context, an analysis of
Bauman’s work is important because it raises pertinent questions pertaining to
the nature of social and cultural boundaries and the nature of boundary con-
struction under modernity. The metaphors of inside and outside and the idea
of the boundary are significant in Bauman’s critique of modernity’s search for
a meta-order and in his examination of strangerhood. The article illustrates how
this ordering process manifests itself at the individual and societal levels of mod-
ernity. Bauman’s contention is that modernity’s search for a meta-order leads
to the construction of boundaries and to exclusionary practices. It is the
presence of the Third, for Bauman, which threatens the certainty of order.
Different images of the stranger in Bauman’s work are identified and the ways
in which Bauman’s conception of freedom and ‘community’ is intrinsically
linked to his work on the ambivalent stranger are demonstrated.
KEYWORDS freedom • identity • modernity • order • the stranger

Zygmunt Bauman is a leading social theorist of modernity and post-

modernity. His work is used increasingly to enhance understanding of social,
cultural and political changes in western societies. Bauman’s reputation over
recent years has been enhanced by the publication of several books
(Beilharz, 2000; Smith, 2000) and scattered essays. Bauman has argued that
he is ‘incurably eclectic’ (Kilminister and Varcoe, 1992: 211); this has been
supported by a recent interpretation of his work which asserts that the ‘aim
of Bauman is to reflect life’s inconsistencies in his texts – and this cannot but

Thesis Eleven, Number 70, August 2002: 36–54

SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Pty Ltd
[0725-5136(200208)70;36–54;025318]
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Marotta: Zygmunt Bauman 37

make heavy demand on the composition of his writing’ (Nijhoff, 1998: 95).
For Nijhoff, the inconsistency in Bauman’s work is a positive trait, whereas
for others this inconsistency exposes the confusing and problematical nature
of some of Bauman’s ideas (Kellner, 1998: 78). This perceived inconsistency
– whether one interprets it as positive or negative – might exist because
Bauman draws on a variety of theoretical frameworks and writes on a broad
range of subjects which sometimes are not explicitly interrelated. At times
Bauman’s work draws on the critical Marxist tradition and the structural lin-
guistics of Saussure, especially as it is adopted by Lévi-Strauss. At other times
his work is informed by the first- (Adorno and Horkheimer) and second-
generation (Habermas) critical theorists, the ideas of Derrida and Foucault
and finally the theory of ethics as expressed in the work of Levinas and Jonas.
Juxtaposed with these diverse theoretical frameworks is Bauman’s interest in
a wide range of subjects such as class, culture, freedom, communism,
Marxism, Polish politics, modernity, the Holocaust, the stranger, hermeneu-
tics, postmodernity, death, consumerism, sex, the ‘new poor’, sociology, art,
religion, globalization and ethics. However, underlying Bauman’s apparent
‘inconsistency’ and ‘eclecticism’ are recurrent themes. These themes only
emerge when the whole of Bauman’s project is considered.
Underlying the diverse theoretical frameworks and the range of topics
are three specific ideas that bring consistency and predictability to his
thought. While it would be difficult to classify Bauman as a ‘systematic’ social
theorist, in the tradition of Habermas, Luhmann and Giddens, there is in his
work a theoretical framework that underlines his fragmented and diverse
project. This theoretical framework encompasses Bauman’s intellectual
interest in the ordering impulse, his use of the idea of strangerhood, and his
philosophical and political discussion of freedom.

STRUCTURE, STRUCTURING AND HUMAN AGENCY

Bauman’s intellectual curiosity regarding the ordering process is evident
in his writings from the mid-1950s. The source of this concern may be traced
back to his experience of the Communist Party in Poland and the bureau-
cratization of everyday life in Poland. Bauman notes that Polish political life
was undemocratic and dominated by bureaucratic rationality where red tape,
predictability and control were more important than encouraging an active,
aware and committed public (Satterwhite, 1992: 21). By the 1960s Bauman
begins to build his critique of bureaucratic rationality, and the ordering
process on which it is based, within a specific theoretical language. In
Bauman’s examination of the ‘process of structurization’ he begins to differ-
entiate between the ideas of ‘structuring’ and ‘structure’. The structurization
process ‘is comprised of two aspects: the passive, reproductive, orientational
one; and the active ordering one, which involves the elimination of some
alternatives and making others more probable’ (Bauman, 1968: 30). The
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38 Thesis Eleven (Number 70 2002)

active ordering dimension entails a process where oppression and exclusion

are necessary so that only one order reigns. More recently, Bauman has sug-
gested that ‘we feel the need of “condensing” the verb [ordering/structuring],
which refers to an activity, into a noun [order/structure], because we wish to
report the steadiness, regularity, resilience of the activity in question . . .’
(Bauman, 1989a: 44).
The distinction between structuring and structure, for Bauman, reflects
micro and macro processes. In the realm of everyday life, Bauman believes
that human activity is defined by its natural propensity to order. Social actors,
for Bauman, are boundary-constructing beings, because it is through ordering
that individuals make sense of their world. He asserts that ‘what is universal
here is this propensity, this inner push, to structure – and not any emergent
structure’. Bauman is thus critical of the view that there is such a thing as a
social structure and that there is ‘some final, ultimate underlying structure of
everything’ (Kilminister and Varcoe, 1992: 211). At the macro level, Bauman
argues that premodern and modern societies can be understood in terms of
their need to establish an order or structure and thus alleviate the ‘slimy’ or
the stranger that threatens the stability and coherence of this social order.
Although at both the individual and the societal levels structuring leads to
the imposition of social, cultural and symbolic boundaries, it is at the societal
level that the ordering process leads to the establishment of a meta-order,
thereby suppressing and excluding any individual or group that comes to
symbolize disorder or ambivalence.
In the early to mid-1970s Bauman viewed the function of culture not
as communication but ordering or ‘structuralizing’ (Bauman, 1973a: 70).
Similar to de Saussure’s insistence on understanding language as a system,
Bauman understands ‘the logic of culture as the logic of the self-regulating
system . . .’ (1973a: 80). The notion of culture also entails a radical project.
In Bauman’s critical examination of the British and American anthropological
notion of ‘culture’, he argues that these two perspectives view culture as an
autonomous entity that stands above individuals affecting their beliefs and
lifeworld (1973b: 115). In this rendition, culture refers to a meta-structure that
imposes itself on the individual. Rather than accepting this oppressive view
of ‘culture’, Bauman maintains that we should adopt a more emancipatory
notion of culture in which we acknowledge the freedom of the social actor.
Culture, concludes Bauman, is an activity, a process, and this activity or
process is linked to human praxis. Human praxis is the ‘idea of creativity, of
active assimilation of the universe, of imposing on the chaotic world the
ordering structure of human intelligent action’ (1973b: 118). Culture no longer
refers to a structure that imposes boundaries, but is seen as a critical process
in which individuals transcend boundaries. The ‘cultural stance’, for Bauman,
is a questioning position in which the existence of multiple realities is recog-
nized. In Culture as Praxis (1973b), however, Bauman acknowledges that
there is a dark side to the human praxis of structuring because, left
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Marotta: Zygmunt Bauman 39

unchecked, it can lead to imposition of a meta-structure. Cultural praxis is

the propensity to structure, and it is this propensity to structure and impose
order on the chaotic world that leads to exclusionary practices.
The theme of ordering and its relationship to freedom is further illus-
trated in Bauman’s analysis of socialist thought (Bauman, 1976). Bauman
argues that utopian thinking, characterized by its critical edge, its hope, and
its ability to engage with the possible (1976: 9–17), is clearly linked to the
modern mind’s craving for order. This is especially the case with the scien-
tific paradigm which insists ‘on limiting their programme to the design and
polishing of tools that are meant to introduce more human order into chaos’
(1976: 29). When the socialist project loses its utopian dimension and adopts
a positivist paradigm it becomes deterministic rather than hopeful and critical.
Although socialism is concerned with ordering/structuring, its utopian dimen-
sion is not about imposing a meta-structure. The utopian function of the
socialist project can be retained, argues Bauman, only if it is critical of both
socialist and capitalist reality (1976: 130). More recently the critical dimen-
sion of utopian thought reemerges in Bauman’s work on the new poor, where
a belief in alternatives can help question the prevailing order and dominant
norms (Bauman, 1998a). Utopian thinking or the support of utopian notions
like ‘justice’ and ‘the good society’ are acceptable as long as we recognize
that they represent open-ended conditions and projects (Bauman, 1997: 69).

MODERNITY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF BOUNDARIES

The drive for a meta-structure becomes particularly violent and destruc-
tive under modernity and nationalism. Bauman’s interpretation of modernity
is both descriptive and critical. In his descriptive account modernity refers to
a historical period that began in western Europe in the 17th century. It
achieved its ‘maturity’ with the emergence of the Enlightenment and capi-
talist and socialist industrial societies (Bauman, 1991: 3). Bauman writes that
modernity ‘may be best described as the age marked by constant change –
but aware of being so marked. In other words, modernity is an era conscious
of its historicity’ (Bauman, 1993a: 592). This descriptive account is over-
shadowed by a critique of modernity as a particular state of mind. Modernity,
claims Bauman, is the self-reflective moment, the time when one becomes
conscious of being conscious of the need for order for the world, for oneself
and for society (Bauman, 1991: 5). Modernity ‘is about the production of
order’ (1991: 15), and this search for order is associated with the suppression
and exclusion of strangers. The Other or the stranger, from the perspective
of the will-to-order, epitomizes chaos and thus is a potential threat to the
stable and fixed boundaries modernity has established. If social and cultural
boundaries are fluid then clarity, certainty and predictability are threatened.
At the very heart of the modern project is a paradox. Modernity seeks to
eliminate chaos and ambivalence, but reproduces them.
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40 Thesis Eleven (Number 70 2002)

Chaos and ambivalence, for Bauman, represent the true nature of the
modern social world. Bauman’s critique of modernity, therefore, represents
that modernity which was enthused by the rationalist stream of the Enlighten-
ment project. But the Enlightenment’s view of modernity is delusionary
because it did not reflect existing social reality. In contrast, Bauman’s con-
ception of the modern, a conception stripped of its delusions, encompasses
the contingent and ambivalent nature of modern life. We live in a world
where uncertainty and contingency constitute the very essence of the
modern, and it has only been certain groups – like les philosophes – and pro-
cesses, such as nationalism, that denied the fragmentary and fluid nature of
the modern condition. More recently, Bauman has distinguished the delu-
sionary and ‘authentic’ versions of the modern in terms of ‘solid’ and ‘fluid’
modernity (Bauman, 2000). Solid modernity refers to the belief that pre-
modern solids were not good enough and new and improved solids need to
replace them. Modernity’s urge to melt all that was solid ‘was the wish to
discover or invent solids – for a change – lasting solidity, a solidity which
one could trust and rely upon and which would make the world predictable
and therefore manageable’ (2000: 3). Bauman’s view that ‘solid’ modernity is
in a state of self-delusion is premised on the ambivalent relationship between
order and chaos. In contrast, ‘liquid’ or ‘fluid’ modernity does not set itself
the task of constructing a new and better order to replace the old defective
one. Bauman states that the ‘melting of solids’ is the permanent condition of
‘liquid modernity’ and ‘the liquidizing powers have moved from the “system”
to “society”, from “politics” to “life-politics” – or have descended from the
“macro” to the “micro” level of social cohabitation’ (2000: 7). Bauman
captures the dialectical nature of modernity, and with his notion of ‘solid’
and ‘liquid’ modernity, also alludes to the existence of ‘multiple modernities’
(Eisenstadt, 2000; Eisenstadt and Schluchter, 1998).

POSTMODERNITY AND CONSUMER SOCIETY

If ‘solid’ modernity can be characterized by a boundary-constructing
process which fears ambivalence and attempts to destroy it, then post-
modernity, for Bauman, is about embracing ambivalence, contingency and
uncertainty and thus transcending boundaries. Postmodernity can be associ-
ated with a state of mind; however, this state of mind is more self-reflective
and critical and thus undermines the universalistic tendencies of modernity.
It does not seek to replace one truth with another or one political or social
goal for another, rather ‘it splits the truth, the standard and ideal into already
deconstructed and about to be deconstructed . . . It braces itself for a life
without truths, standards and ideals’ (Bauman, 1991: ix). The postmodern
mind endeavours to recapture the contingent nature of the social world that
the rationalization of society has systematically suppressed. A postmodern
sensibility, argues Bauman, is a modern mind realizing that it cannot satisfy
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Marotta: Zygmunt Bauman 41

its original project of universalization and ordering, and that instead of

destroying ambivalence and pluralism modernity is producing them (1991:
98). Those who transcend boundaries are no longer perceived as a threat to
societal order because they signify the very ambivalence and contingency
that constitute the social world. This view of postmodernity has close affini-
ties to Bauman’s characterization of ‘liquid’ modernity, therefore modernity
and postmodernity are not viewed as distinct social, cultural, political epochs.
Although Bauman describes the postmodern or ‘liquid’ modernity as a
state of mind in which one is acutely aware of the fluid and relative nature
of social reality and modern identities, his account of postmodernity is not
without its critical moments. Bauman’s theoretical discussion of postmoder-
nity suggests that it has transcended the ‘false consciousness’ of the previous
social modality, and consequently has less need for the exclusionary prac-
tices that characterized ‘solid’ modernity; nonetheless, his social analysis of
the postmodern condition tends to suggest that the modern state’s obsession
with ordering and thus coercion and violence is now decentralized, diffused
and localized within neo-tribalism. These neo-tribes are ‘the contrived, made
up community masquerading as a Tönnies-style’ community. These ‘Kantian
aesthetic communities . . . have no other grounds but the individual decisions
to identify with’ (Bauman, 1992: 697, 1993: 16). Neo-tribes have a tendency
to intolerance and aggression because they have no solid ground to rest on
apart from individual decisions. New communities are kept together under
the territory classified as ‘culture’. The rejection of strangers in these com-
munities is ‘verbalized in terms of incompatibility or unmixability of cultures’
(Bauman, 1993b: 17).
Boundaries, in other words, are still being constructed to exclude
strangers. Modernity’s struggle against ambivalence has been transferred into
a ‘postmodern privatization of ambivalence’. The neo-tribes and funda-
mentalist sentiment are still fighting the war against ambivalence, but this war
against boundary crossing has moved from the state to ‘aesthetic communi-
ties’. In places Bauman’s discussion of postmodernity suggests that ambiva-
lence is tolerated and celebrated, while in other places the relationship
between postmodernity and ambivalence, especially when it is expressed
through neo-tribalism, is less innocuous. Consequently, although Bauman
writes that postmodernity is modernity emancipated from illusion, his social
analysis suggests that this state of illusion has been privatized and no longer
exists at the societal level. Bauman argues that paradoxically these new ex-
clusivist communities use the same language that was connected to the
inclusivist cultural discourse. It is not ‘cultural pluralism and separatism, but
cultural proselytism and the drive towards cultural unification that are now
conceived of as “unnatural”, as an abnormality to be actively resisted’
(Bauman, 1993b: 18).
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42 Thesis Eleven (Number 70 2002)

IDENTITY AND THE DISCOURSE ON STRANGERHOOD

Order and ambivalence are important themes in Bauman’s assessment

and interpretation of modernity and postmodernity. This concern with order
and ambivalence has led Bauman to explore how the stranger comes to sym-
bolize the very ambivalence that the ordering impulse is attempting to
destroy. Strangers threaten the boundaries that the ordering process requires
in order to impose stability and predictability on the social world. In
Bauman’s words, strangers ‘befog and eclipse the boundary lines which
ought to be clearly seen’ (Bauman, 1997: 17). Strangerhood is articulated in
multiple ways in Bauman’s thought and different conceptions of identity
underlie these multiple constructions. Bauman conceptualizes the stranger in
terms of the social Other, links strangerhood to the Jewish experience in pre-
modernity and modernity, implicitly connects the experience of strangeness
to the hermeneutical problem, and links the stranger to existential experi-
ence.
Bauman’s discussion of strangerhood demonstrates the relational or
intersubjective conception of identity, where the Self’s identity is constituted
through its opposition to the Other, that is, where identity is subject to a dif-
ferential logic of opposition in order to establish difference. In Thinking
Sociologically (1990) Bauman demonstrates how an ‘us and them’ mentality
underlies the construction of a collective identity and the ways in which the
stranger plays a pivotal role in this process. Identity, like language, can only
gain meaning through a system of signs. Each word or identity gains meaning
through its opposition to another. This understanding of strangerhood and
its relationship to identity construction is first evident in Bauman’s early
English language publications (Bauman, 1973b). More recently Bauman uses
this conception of strangerhood to understand the rise of nationalism.
Nationalism seeks unification and homogeneity and this is achieved through
the act of drawing boundaries between natives and aliens (Bauman, 1992:
683). For Bauman, the ‘ “we-ness” of friends owes its materiality to the “they-
ness” of the enemies’ (1992: 678).
Although Bauman argues that the function of the stranger is to enforce
social and cultural boundaries, his writings also suggest that this is not always
the case. When the stranger represents the cultural Other, boundaries become
porous and unstable. Drawing on the insights of Derrida, Bauman argues that
rather than reinforcing boundaries, the cultural Other problematicizes them
(Bauman, 1991: 55). The stranger in this dimension epitomizes an in-between
or ambivalent position. It is those in-betweens, the insiders-outsiders, argues
Bauman, who threaten the insider/native’s identity because social and
cultural boundaries become uncertain. Bauman calls these strangers the ‘third
element’ or ‘the true hybrids’ who cannot be classified and are unclassifiable
(1991: 58).
The hybrid stranger not only questions the opposition between friend
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Marotta: Zygmunt Bauman 43

and enemy but the very principle of opposition. While at one level hybrid
strangers ‘unmask[s] the brittle artificiality of division’, at another level they
are also threatened by the very same order that they question. The discourse
of the stranger in Bauman’s work therefore demonstrates how the stranger
is used both to reinforce and question the boundaries between Self and
Other. Bauman adopts a sociological reading of strangerhood which argues
that estrangement and solidarity are mutually constitutive, a postmodern view
of strangeness that questions the very basis of this relationship and an exis-
tential view of strangerhood that describes a state of homelessness.

THE STRANGER AS THE SOCIAL OTHER

In Memories of Class (Bauman, 1982) the social Other is represented by
the producer or labourer. Under feudalism, for Bauman, power was used
only sporadically to extract some of the product of labour, whereas indus-
trialism developed a type of power that controlled and administered labour
itself. Following Foucault, Bauman calls this new type of power ‘disciplinary
power’ (1982: 10–11). This new type of power sought to control the passion-
ridden mobs or ‘dangerous classes’ within and outside the factory. Accord-
ing to Bauman, the new system of social control was to make the dangerous
classes more visible. This concern with the visibility of the social Other had
‘something to do with the obsessive fear of darkness, invisibility, opacity’
(1982: 49). Once the dangerous classes were put into a space that was visible,
they internalized the public gaze and its disciplinary practices. This form of
control was extended to the factory system where workers were under total
formal submission to capitalists. Bauman suggests that this occurred because
the dominant rational self of the bourgeoisie wanted to suppress the ‘animal’-
like sensations of workers that could threaten the social order. For Bauman,
underlying this new type of power was a moral rather than an economic
objective. Bauman’s interpretation of capitalist exploitation shifts from some-
thing like political economy to a sociopsychological explanation. He indi-
cates that, in order to understand the true significance of the exploitation of
the working class, one has to look beyond materialist explanations. The
control and exploitation of the masses is both a desire for power and related
to the fear of the Other.
The sociopsychological approach also informs Bauman’s assessment
and description of the consumer society and the social Other on which it
depends. The social Other is at times represented by the ‘flawed consumer’
or the ‘new poor’ (Bauman, 1987, 1998a). Bauman contends that successful
consumers are controlled by disciplinary power and become seduced by the
free market into believing they are free. The ‘flawed consumers’, on the other
hand, are those who want to be ‘successful’ but, because of their economic
and social conditions, can only dream of what it is like to be a successful
consuming self. The ‘flawed consumers’, suggests Bauman, are the
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44 Thesis Eleven (Number 70 2002)

byproducts of consumer society, necessary for it to be sustained and repro-

duced (Bauman, 1988: 187). These ‘flawed consumers’ are sometimes cate-
gorized as the ‘new poor’ who are disempowered because they are
bureaucratically controlled and administered (1988: 185). Moreover, the
relationship between Self (‘successful consumer’) and Other (‘flawed
consumer’) is based on the Other reaffirming the identity of the Self. Here
Bauman returns to a discourse of strangerhood that conceptualizes identity
in terms of oppositions because ‘the self-identity of consumer needs the con-
stitution of non-consumers as its repugnants and destable opposition’ (1988:
186). The ‘non’ or ‘flawed’ consumers become the strangers of the consumer
society. Bauman depicts them as the ‘inner demons’ of consumer life that
need to be repressed and metaphorically exorcized (Bauman, 1997: 42).
Bauman concludes that the general consensus in western societies is that the
‘poor far from meriting care and assistance, deserve hate and condemnation’
(1997: 43). The strangers (flawed consumers) of the consumer era are thus
needed to reinforce the boundaries between Self and Other.
This relational view of strangerhood reappears when Bauman recounts
the difference between the tourist and the vagabond. Like the poor, the
vagabond becomes the Other of the tourist. However, unlike the vagabond,
who does not have the luxury of choosing to move or not, the tourist has
mobility and freedom of choice. The vagabonds are forced to move by a
force that is both powerful and elusive (Bauman, 1997: 92). The identity of
the vagabond is depicted in terms of opposition. They are described as ‘the
dark rooms reflecting the shine of bright suns; the mutants of postmodern
evolution, the unfit rejects of the brave new species. The vagabonds are the
waste of the world which has dedicated itself to tourists’ service’ (1997: 92).
Bauman utilizes the sociological stranger to conceptualize the identity of the
new poor, the flawed consumers and the vagabonds. The identities of these
individual types (the Other) are constructed in opposition to the dominant
Self, but the Self – the successful consumer and the tourists – in turn need
the Other in order to construct their own identities.

THE JEW AS THE CULTURAL OTHER

Bauman shows how the idea of the stranger serves to reinforce the self’s
identity, for example, the rational self of industrial society, the successful
consumer and the tourist of postmodernity. Nonetheless, the discourse of the
stranger in Bauman’s work also shows how the stranger as the cultural Other
destabilizes and questions those symbolic and cultural boundaries which the
native needs to constitute itself. The stranger, conceived in these terms, epit-
omizes the ambivalent in-between subject. In Culture as Praxis Bauman
draws on Lévi-Strauss’s work to illustrate how rules of exclusion provide not
only the necessary ground to establish and reinforce cultural order, but also
group cohesion. Exclusionary practices maintain the boundary between
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Marotta: Zygmunt Bauman 45

inside/outside and ‘we’/’they’. In this context Bauman first introduces the

notion of ambivalence that has become a central idea in his sociological and
philosophical analysis. The Jew as the cultural stranger, for Bauman, epito-
mizes the idea of ambivalence. This insider-outsider threatens the
insider/native’s identity because identity boundaries begin to blur, because it
is difficult to classify an individual who is neither friend nor foe. In the early
1970s Bauman depicted this in-between subject as the ‘hybrid of modernity’
who undermines ‘the harmonious build-up of the human universe’ (Bauman,
1973b: 135). Bauman has subsequently taken this notion of ambivalence and
used it as an explanatory concept to understand the role of Jews in the
modern world.
The Jewish experience, according to Bauman, can assist in identifying
some of the main characteristics of modern culture. Bauman has suggested
that the space that the Jews occupy is ‘nowhere’ and provides ‘an intellec-
tually fertile situation’ where ‘you are somewhat less constrained by the rules
and see beyond’. He also asserts that because of a historical accident it ‘so
happened that the Jewish experience had a special significance for under-
standing the logic of modern culture’ (quoted in Kilminister and Varcoe, 1992:
227–8). The Jewish experience, at least for Bauman, provides us with a more
complete understanding of the social world and modernity. The Jews, as rep-
resented in Modernity and the Holocaust (Bauman, 1989b) and especially in
Modernity and Ambivalence (1991), become the insiders-outsiders who have
access to a different type of knowledge not available to insiders.
Like Simmel (1964) before him, Bauman argues that the Jew is the
exemplary stranger. The Jews epitomize the ambivalent Simmelian stranger
because they are ‘always on the outside even when inside, examining the
familiar as if it was a foreign object of study, asking questions no one else
asked, questioning the unquestionable and challenging the unchallengeable’
(Bauman, 1989b: 53). The Jews are difficult for insiders to classify. They are
neither friend nor enemy. They undermine and destabilize the comfortable
antagonism between friend and enemy because the Jew can be friend or foe
or both. From the point of view of the Gentile, Bauman suggests that the Jew
as stranger ‘threaten[s] sociation itself – the very possibility of sociation’. The
stranger upsets the type of social interaction we have with others because
they question the very ‘opposition between friends and enemies’ and thus
leave nothing outside it (Bauman, 1991: 55).

THE ‘CONCEPTUAL JEW’

The Jews’ ability to upset boundaries and oppositions is less evident in
premodern societies because their Otherness did not prevent their accommo-
dation into the prevailing social order. In feudal societies, argues Bauman,
the Jews, although known as outsiders, did not threaten the established social
system or the boundary-drawing and boundary-maintaining processes
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46 Thesis Eleven (Number 70 2002)

(Bauman, 1989b: 35). The Jews were just one estate or one caste among
many. They were set apart, but like others in premodern society the process
of being set apart in no way made them exceptional. Nonetheless, the Chris-
tian discourse on the stranger, according to Bauman, produced the ambiva-
lence of the ‘conceptual Jew’. The ‘conceptual Jew’ threatened the temporal
and spatial boundaries of Christianity and the new secular modern world.
The ‘conceptual Jew’ epitomizes, for the secular modern world, all that is
slimy and all that defies the order of things. For the modern gardening state,
the Jews ‘as strangers not only incarnate ambivalence but were predestined
for the role of the eponymous weed’ (Bauman, 1998b: 153). Bauman con-
cludes that for both the Christian Church, and the new secular agencies of
social integration, the ‘conceptual Jew’ ‘visualised the horrifying conse-
quences of boundary-transgressing, of not remaining fully in the fold, of any
conduct short of unconditional loyalty and unambiguous choice; he was the
prototype and arch-pattern of all non-conformity, heterodoxy, anomaly and
aberration’ (Bauman, 1989b: 39). The ‘conceptual Jew’ did not represent
another order, but chaos and devastation. The Jews, at least for those living
through the transition from traditional to modern society, ‘epitomized the
awesome scope of social upheaval and served as a vivid obtrusive reminder
of the erosion of old certainties’ (1989b: 45) in which the visual and symbolic
boundaries between Gentiles and Jews were dissolving. The Jews under
modernity were dissolving old certainties, but concomitantly from the
perspective of the gardening state, the Jews represented what modernity
despised and feared: ambivalence. The stranger represented through the idea
of the ‘conceptual Jew’ was in a paradoxical situation. Jews were modern but
not modern enough. They signified the modern experience where all that
was solid was melting into air, but they also questioned modernity’s need to
impose order and predictability on this fluid social world.
The ‘conceptual Jew’ can occupy what Bauman calls the ‘frontierland’,
an ambiguous border where ambiguity and contingency are ever present
(Bauman, 1973b: 131). The ‘frontierland’ of cultures, a space where strangers
comfortably reside, is ‘the territory in which boundaries are constantly obses-
sively drawn only to be continually violated and redrawn again and again’
(Bauman, 1999a: xlviii). It is in this ‘frontierland’ that interpretation/trans-
lation never ceases, for Bauman, and where dialogue between Self and Other
leaves both social actors altered. Bauman identifies a knowledge gap or the
state of strangeness that exists between Self and Other (Bauman, 1995a: 126)
and does not perceive the hermeneutical gap or the condition of strangeness
as a condition of ‘distorted communication’, a position which he previously
held (Bauman, 1978: 224, 241). Strangeness is now conceptualized as an
intrinsic feature of cross-cultural communication that should be valued for its
own sake rather than suppressed or transcended. It is only through engaging
with strangeness and hence ambivalence that we understand that ‘know-
ledge’ or intercultural communication is a never-ending process. If there is
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Marotta: Zygmunt Bauman 47

an objective to cross-cultural dialogue then it lies within the process itself,

for instance, in maintaining an open-ended communication between Self and
Other.
The position of the Jews and what they represent, for Bauman, has
altered in postmodern times. In postmodernity the characteristics of Jewish-
ness, for example, homelessness, rootlessness and the necessity of self-
construction has now been extended to the non-Jewish community. The
Jews’ contingent and ambivalent position prepared them well for a post-
modern existence.
Later they found home, but not until the world itself turned postmodern. Then
they lost their distinctiveness – but only because the state of ‘being distinct’ has
turned into the only truly universal mark of the human condition. (Bauman,
1991: 159)

Difference, at least at a global level, is no longer seen as temporary

nuisance that needs to be exterminated; rather the variety and plurality of
forms of life constitute postmodernity. The Jews, like Italians and Germans
around the world, celebrate their difference whether they are in America or
Germany. The human condition under postmodernity consists in the ‘uni-
versally shared ability to establish and protect the identity distinctive from
other identities’ (Bauman, 1998b: 155).
The notion of the stranger allows Bauman an interpretive schema to
comprehend the changing pattern of sociality in premodern, modern and
postmodern society. In Bauman’s sociological hermeneutics the key to a
broader understanding of social interaction, identity and macrosociological
patterns is the idea of the sociological stranger. Moreover, when Bauman
analyses postmodern society, where he claims that ambivalence and contin-
gency are pervasive, he introduces an existential dimension to the discourse
of the stranger.

THE POSTMODERN STRANGER(S)

There are two versions of the postmodern stranger in Bauman’s depic-
tion of postmodernity. One version of the postmodern stranger is closely
related to a state of homelessness. In this respect Bauman ontologizes
strangerhood and it is at this point that strangerhood echoes an existential
condition. The second version of the postmodern stranger refers to the social
and cultural Other, but, unlike modern strangers, these strangers are not
excluded or earmarked for extermination, rather, they are embraced by us
for the aesthetic satisfaction they bring. Postmodern strangers are the ‘indis-
pensable signposts’ of a life itinerary that lacks design and direction (Bauman,
1995b: 13).
Before the publication of Modernity and Ambivalence the discourse of
the stranger in Bauman’s work exposed the power and exclusionary practices
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48 Thesis Eleven (Number 70 2002)

of what he later characterized as ‘solid’ modernity. In Modernity and Ambiva-

lence the discourse of the stranger takes an existential turn. In modernity, for
Bauman, not everyone is a stranger and this is why the Jew is particularly at
risk, while in postmodernity the experience of strangerhood is privatized.
Bauman calls this the universality of strangerhood or rootlessness.
[T]he mode of ‘being a stranger’ is experienced, to a varying degree, by all and
every member of contemporary society with its extreme division of labour and
separation of functionally separated spheres. (Bauman, 1991: 94)

Bauman contends that contemporary individuals are socially displaced

in a variety of social worlds. The result is that they are ‘ “uprooted” from each
and not “at home” in any’ (Bauman, 1991: 95). Ethical and value pluralism,
argues Bauman, leads to the existential condition of homelessness. For
Bauman, in his more pessimistic mood, any form of ‘solidarity’ in a post-
modern, post-functionalist society is no longer possible because no public or
private institution is willing to provide any ethical foundation for society as
a whole. In a postmodern society, for Bauman, existential ‘homelessness’ has
become the defining characteristic of contemporary individuals and this has
meant that physical proximity has been cleansed of its moral aspect (Bauman,
1990: 69, 70).
The discourse of the stranger in Bauman’s work shifts from describing
the experience of the sociological stranger, for example, the new poor under
‘glocalization’, to advocating that an increasing amount of people are experi-
encing a ‘privatization of ambivalence’. This latter type of strangerhood can
be associated with a ‘universal strangerhood’ and this universal strangerhood
is particularly evident in the experience of the postmodern flâneur (Bauman,
1993c: 177). In moments of homesickness the postmodern stroller recon-
structs social and cultural strangers ‘from temptation into threat, from source
of fleeting pleasure into the omen of ubi leones’’ (Bauman, 1995a: 136).
Although the existential homesick stranger and the postmodern sociological
stranger both experience ambivalence, the nature of this ambivalence takes
a different form. For the existential stranger ambivalence arises from living
in a fluid, uncertain postmodern society, while the native or host imposes
the ambivalence on the postmodern social and cultural Other.

COMMUNITY, FREEDOM AND DIFFERENCE

Bauman demonstrates that moderns and postmoderns find it difficult to
deal with strangeness. In Bauman’s writing we find a specific type of ‘com-
munity’ that moves beyond the oppressive community constructed by mod-
ernity and the postmodern neo-tribes. In contrast to the consumer freedom
that exists in contemporary society, Bauman’s community apparently
provides scope for a more substantive type of freedom to flourish where
boundaries are paradoxically sustained and transcended.
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Marotta: Zygmunt Bauman 49

Bauman notes that part of the human condition is both the desire for
security, which we gain from living in a ‘community’, and the need for
autonomy. These two desires cannot be reconciled nor satisfied simul-
taneously (Bauman, 2001: 5). This mutual tension between freedom and com-
munity exists because ‘freedom without community means madness, while
community without freedom means serfdom’ (Bauman, 1995a: 127).
Bauman’s support for a particular type of freedom becomes increasingly
evident as he critically examines ‘solid’ modernity’s attempt to resolve this
paradox. As Satterwhite (1992: 40) has shown, Bauman’s passion for freedom
can be traced back to his role in Polish revisionism of the 1950s and 1960s.
Bauman was one of several Polish thinkers for whom communism and
freedom occupied a central place in the conceptual framework of Polish
revisionism.
Bauman explores three types of freedoms. First, freedom, for Bauman,
does not refer to an inherent free will, rather it refers to a relation: one cannot
have freedom without dependency because to be free is to aspire to escape
from a form of dependency (Bauman, 1988: 9, 15–16). Apart from this formal
definition, Bauman discusses another type of freedom, for example,
consumer freedom as it exists in late capitalist modernity. Unlike some post-
modernists who celebrate consumer society, Bauman is more critical of this
type of freedom. Although consumer capitalism produces a society that
provides greater choices, and an individual who is more self-assertive, this
comes at a cost because the contest over power is channelled towards the
consumer market. Consumer freedom does not destabilize the existing power
structures. In Bauman’s words, ‘reproduction of the capitalist system is there-
fore achieved through individual freedom and not through its repression’
(1988: 61). The third type of freedom that Bauman discusses is political or
public freedom, which can only be attained in a certain type of political
association where moral responsibility and difference thrive.
In the early 1990s Bauman notes that there is not much hope for the
political freedom that existed in the Greek polis to be realized in contem-
porary society (Cantell and Pedersen, 1992: 141); he is also rather pessimistic
about how we can move from tolerance to solidarity in a postmodern world
where there is either indifference or heterophobia directed at strangers (1992:
138). Although Bauman does not explicitly put forward a systematic proposal
of how solidarity can be attained, there are moments in his work where the
ideas of community, solidarity and consensus become more prominent.
Bauman’s political philosophy is informed by the classical republican
tradition as understood by Hannah Arendt, and lately by the work of Cas-
toriadis. Vetlesen (1997) argues that unlike Habermas, Arendt believes that
participation in ‘politics’ is important for the self-realization of individuals.
This conclusion is also consistent with Bauman’s conception of politics.
Drawing on Arendt’s work, Bauman (1988) argues that the consumer freedom
that prevails under late capitalism is an illusion because it is not an authentic
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50 Thesis Eleven (Number 70 2002)

freedom. Therefore freedom, for both Arendt and Bauman, means freedom
to take part in public affairs, which Bauman calls ‘public freedom’. In this
sense ‘free consumers are poor’. The importance of public freedom and its
link to the classical republican view of politics is particularly evident in
Memories of Class (1982: 197), Freedom (1988), In Search of Politics (1999b)
and Liquid Modernity (2000). Bauman attempts to rescue the notion of ‘the
political’ from the economization of politics that began in the 1970s under
the idea of ‘corporatism’ (Bauman, 1982). He wants to de-economize the
political and replace the metaphor of the market with the idea of dialogue
that is central to the republican tradition (Vetlesen, 1997: 4).
In the 1970s Bauman draws on Habermas’ notion of communicative
rationality to theorize about the public realm or the body politic. In this
formulation a political community consists of open debate and negotiation
between equal groups without a structure of dominance distorting the com-
munication (Bauman, 1978: 243–5). In the 1990s Bauman utilizes John Rawls’
theory of an ‘overlapping consensus’ to argue that agreement can still be
reached when individuals, like those who used to meet in the public spaces
of the polis, take responsibility for their actions and accept differences.
Bauman maintains that ‘Whatever “overlapping consensus” there was’, for the
citizens of the Greek polis, ‘it was their common achievement, not the gift
they received – they made and made again that consensus as they met and
talked and argued’ (Bauman, 1995a: 284–5). In his most recent work Bauman
has been explicitly concerned with the disappearance of politics or the public
realm within postmodern consumer society. The realm of politics, for
Bauman, is where ‘private problems are translated into the language of public
issues and public solutions are sought, negotiated and agreed for private
troubles’ (Bauman, 2000: 39) and where genuine autonomy and capacity for
self-assertion is fostered (2000: 41).
Unlike the Greek polis, however, the political ‘community’ that Bauman
advocates is self-reflective, less homogeneous, more ambivalent, and sup-
posedly provides the conditions where individuals can be intimately con-
nected as autonomous, morally self-sustained citizens (Bauman, 1995a: 287).
Unlike the postulated communities of the neo-tribes in which ‘the air inside
would soon get stuffy and in the end oppressive’ (Bauman, 2001: 4),
Bauman’s political community attempts to foster moral responsibility rather
than suppress it. It is only through maintaining the identity of Others that the
diversity with which one’s own identity can thrive will be established. This
identity is not about exclusion because it is only by accepting and being
responsible for the Other that one’s ‘true’ identity is constituted. The dialec-
tical relationship between diversity and unity that leads Bauman to conclude
that an ‘overlapping consensus’ will allow differences to be transcended and
allow an ‘intimate connection’ based on a ‘common’ moral impulse that
accepts difference. Unlike the traditional sociological notion of community
where there is ‘no cognitive ambiguity, and so no behavioural ambivalence’
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Marotta: Zygmunt Bauman 51

(2001: 12), Bauman’s conception of community attempts to make ambiva-

lence, boundaries and differences coexist in a dynamic and vigorous manner.
In this conception of community it may be possible for one to both tran-
scend and maintain differences. Bauman’s political community works against
the classical sociological literature on community that was first expressed by
Tönnies and then later by Barth (1969) and Redfield (1971). In this literature
the constitution of community is understood in terms of maintaining cultural
and symbolic boundaries so that those within the community recognize and
exclude strangers.
Although Bauman is critical of the communitarian solution to a ‘risk-
free freedom’ whether in its nationalist or more recent tribal manifestations
(Bauman, 1996), in places a form of communitarianism still emerges. It may
not be a communitarianism that harks back to a ‘recovery of the revitaliza-
tion of some coherent value system’ (Benhabib, 1992: 50), but rather a ‘com-
munitarianism’ that is partly informed by a classical republican tradition and
thus adopts a ‘participationist view’. This type of ‘communitarianism’ views
the ‘problems of modernity less in the loss of a sense of belonging, oneness
and solidarity and more in the sense of a loss of political agency’ (1992: 50).
Bauman advocates the construction of a political ‘community’ that is defined
less by consumer freedom and more by public freedom where social actors
are empowered. Reminiscent of Arendt, Bauman implies that it is through
political agency that we define ourselves as individuals. Bauman’s ‘partici-
pationist view’ of community is both a gesture to the past and a step towards
the future.
For Bauman, the ‘community’ that was imposed by the traditionalism
of modernity can only lead to oppression because clarity, certainty and
homogeneity are its defining characteristics. The ‘aesthetic communities’ of
the postmodern tribes still search for certainty and order, but while they do
not impose a universal order, they continue to suppress the ambivalence
associated with the social and cultural stranger. Both these types of com-
munities assume that their only hope for solidarity is in establishing bound-
aries between themselves and the Other. In response, Bauman’s work
suggests that a third type of ‘community’ can be constructed where bound-
aries are porous rather than fixed, where difference and universality are
dialectically interwoven and autonomy and self-critique are the basis of an
autonomous political society (Bauman, 1999b). It is only under these con-
ditions that the social and cultural stranger will be accepted and effectively
contribute to the life of the community. With the help of Castoriadis, Bauman
theorizes the existence of an autonomous society where universality is not
the enemy of difference (1999b: 202). In an ambiguous political community
dialogue between strangers or different cultures does not result in distorted
communication, but in different communications. Within Bauman’s com-
munity a ‘cultural frontierland’ exists in which cultural borders are fluid and
cultures are unfinished projects, where ambivalence, confusion and
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52 Thesis Eleven (Number 70 2002)

uncertainty are mixed with tolerance and moral responsibility towards the
Other (Bauman, 1999a: I–Ii). This postmodern political community, claims
Bauman, reflects our shared experience in everyday life where we talk to
each other and successfully negotiate ‘mutually satisfactory solutions to joint
problems’ (1999a: Iii). It is within this ‘political autonomous community’ that
the sociological stranger with all its ambivalent connotations finds a home.

CONCLUSIONS
The condition of strangeness, and our relationship to the stranger,
allows Bauman to expose the universal and totalitarian tendencies of ‘solid’
modernity, to illuminate the ambivalence and contingency of postmodernity
or ‘liquid’ modernity, to conceptualize the human condition as moral and
ambivalent, and to expose the dark side of modernity. However, Bauman’s
use and conceptualization of the stranger shows us what is possible. Bauman
implies that ambivalence provides the possibility or the means with which
we seek freedom, especially for the excluded, and extend responsibility to
the weak and marginalized. Bauman does not treat ambivalence as an ethic,
but as a condition in which we live.
This ambivalent condition is found in both modern and postmodern
strangers. While modernity tries to marginalize or destroy hybrid strangers, it
actually depends on these individuals to constitute itself. Bauman has shown
that modernity’s will-to-order is both threatened by the cultural Other but is
dependent on them for its identity. Postmodern strangers, especially the new
poor, have taken over the role that the Jews had played under modernity. In
a period where ambivalence and contingency define contemporary society,
the desire for order, the desire to establish identity through difference, has
not waned. The constitution of the human condition, for Bauman, is intrin-
sically connected to strangerhood. We desire both security and freedom, com-
munity and individualism, and it is through these ambivalent feelings that
modern and postmodern strangers become paramount to our sense of
comfort or fear. This paradox can never be resolved and, for Bauman, any
attempt to resolve it has tragic consequences. Rather than resolve this
paradox we need to live with it in a more humane way. Bauman argues that
it is possible to live with the tension between order, strangerhood and
freedom when we accept our moral condition. While we can never move
beyond this tension, we should never lose sight of our moral responsibility
towards those who are ‘strange’. It is only by accepting this tension as part
of the human condition that we come to accept the universal nature of
strangerhood.
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Marotta: Zygmunt Bauman 53

Vince Marotta teaches sociology at Deakin University, Australia and has just
completed his dissertation on the relationship between modernity, sociology and mar-
ginality. [email: marotta@deakin.edu.au].

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