Tactical Insights on Social Control from Zygmunt Bauman
Posted Sep 28, 2007 3 comments
It was through the Grey Lodge Occult Review that I got ahold of Zygmunt Bauman's great paper Ideology and the Weltanshaunng of the Intellectuals. By the way, Weltanshaunng is German for (approximately) "world-view." I first tried reading it shortly after high school, before I'd read anything so academic, and I had to set it aside for several years. I'm glad I returned to it, because despite being obnoxiously dense and heavily caked over with mere concepts, it's still an amazing read. Bauman draws upon a lifetime of learning in a world of disciplines, and despite my instincts towards the highbrow, I've spaced out his paragraphs considerably for the excerpt below.
Zygmunt Bauman was a Polish sociologist who was hounded into exile in the UK for the rest of his life. (Because the Communists were trying to drive out the Jews in the 70s...History makes less sense the more you learn about it, huh?) Although his personal politics -- from support of Karl Marx and Israel to his undeniably elitist bite -- might raise your eyebrows, he's a great source of insight about the large, mostly invisible mechanisms of social control, and the history behind how those came to exist.
I also recommend his equally fascinating essay The Dream of Purity, and if you're really digging it, try his book: Alone Again: Ethics After Certainty
"The new, much more ambitious, ubiquitous, all-penetrating order cannot rely on the ritual invokation of the Divine Sovreign. It can rule only in the name of the norm, of a pattern of normality, with which it identifies itself.
Since normality means in the end a continuous rhythm of bodily exertion and the unbroken chain of repeatable choices, it can be maintained only be a dense web of interlocking authorities in constant communication with the subject -- and in proximity to the subject, which permits a perpetual surveillance of his life-process.
Old forms are transformed into such authorities, and new authorities are brought to life. Thus families and sexual functions of the body are deployed in the new role: churches become teachers of business virtues and hard work; factories instill the habit of continuous effort; idiosyncrasy and non-rhythmic life is criminalized, medicalized or psychiatrized; any individual training by apprenticeship is replaced with a uniform education aimed at instilling universal skills.
No single power is now total...but nevertheless, this web of authoritative relations reaches the kind of totality no single power even dreamed of taking before.
In the course of this struggle, the human condition aquired a new conceptualization. It appeared now as a drama of Manichean forces of passion and reason, of the crude and the refined, of the beastly and the human. The subjugation of the animal in man came to be a major concern for humans. One had to life oneself to the human condition; being a human came to be a task, an accomplishment, a duty."
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Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.1. same on Oct 01, 2007 at 8:44 PM permalink
Multisyllabic words aside, you’re right, this was well “stated”
I recall a quote, prior to these current times, that “Society loves
its living conformists;and, dead rebels”.
I think of this as not so much a product of intellect, as human social development. The forming and enforcement of norms is the stuff of “teenage agnst”. Phraseology, costumes. social behavior
patterns (especially recognition of local pecking-orders) are common to all social groupings. Other animals do it. Baboon politics.
2. Thirtyseven on Oct 02, 2007 at 4:33 PM permalink
That’s a good point—this is rendered in far more readable prose and real-world detail in more recent work, especially Howard Bloom’s classic “The Lucifer Principle.”
I’ve always found the model of Complex Adaptive Systems to be an invaluable tool for analyzing reality—the 5-fold pattern of:
1. Conformity Enforcers
2. Diversity Generators
3. Utility Sorters
4. Resource Shifters
5. Intergroup Tournaments
Thus does mother nature shape her children.
3. Charles J Fitzsimmons on Oct 05, 2007 at 1:05 PM permalink
My guess is that I will get a Bloom book; or, two.
I’m as uncertain of nature as nurture.
Recently, geneticists have said that human genes are not 99.9% the
same. They are 99.0%. As complex as it is, I recall that one cannot change ‘just one thing’.
What would nine-tenths off become ?
“A beginner’s mind sees infinite possiblities, the expert’s mind sees few” Systems and models filter information to meet the need of the models and systems. They’re useful; and, the target of pranks and hoaxes.