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Of Straw Dogs and Straw Men - Contrast, compare and evaluate the arguments Zygmunt Bauman and Ulrich Beck make about 'individualisation' and'community'

I. Introduction

Lao Tse compared humans to strawdogs (Gray: 2004:3), emphasising the insignificance of the human animal. Such aview would come as a shock to the two authors in question in this essay. BothBeck and Bauman make the mistake of placing man at the centre of the world, asthe sole self-constituting agent for his actions: in doing so they replicatethe binaries of modernity that they wish to escape. In order to feign thisescape from modernism, they construct a structural homology. Just as theindustrial society disembedded man from his links in the Feudal system, so oursecond modernity is now disembedding us from family, gender and class basedlinks. In order for this to be convincing, both Beck and Bauman construct aseries of straw men that they move through in order to arrive at thepost-modern (or liquid modern, or second modern, depending on your choice oftheorist) man. This essay's central contention will be that the centralarguments of Bauman and Beck regarding the new forms of individualisation andcommunity rely on a series of category mistakes. The primary mistake boththeorists make is that they confuse discourse for experience in the world'shistory: a mistake with a great many repercussions.

Both theorists talk a lot aboutsociology's purpose: which, according to Bauman, is to give people tools withwhich to think (1993:6). Both scholars attempt to do this by addressing thecentral concern of sociology: the relationship between society and theindividual. This concern cuts to the heart of what sociology is concerned with:it addresses the tension between the one and the many. How does the one (thesociologist) speak about the many (the object of study); what is therelationship between the one (acting subject) and the many (collective body);how does one get from the one (the particular, a person, or a culture) to themany (the universal, or a larger culture of group). In addressing thesequestions, both theorists trace a path from the pre-modern man to the emergenceof post-modern man. This essay will first examine the pre-modern man upon whichtheir schemes rest, before considering, comparing, and evaluating theirarguments on the emergence of individualisation and the current possibility ofcommunity.

II. The FirstStraw Man: Premodern Man.

The author would be interested tomeet premodern man as he is constructed in the work of Bauman and Beck. Baumanargues that premodern man had no uncertainty in his life: his life was dictatedentirely by the broader social and religious categories into which he was born.Bauman asserts that the major uncertainty in premodern man's life is theuncertainty over his own death. It is not simply that this depiction issimplistic and ahistorical: for such a depiction of premodern man contains somemajor flaws of argument that imperil the possibility of the rest of Bauman'sargument.

The first can be put simply: is itnot the case that it is from the uncertainty of death that we derive all otheruncertainty. What is the pressing ontological reason for action if it is not anawareness of our own finitude? If one were to take Dewey's' (1929:45) notion ofhow one manages risk: it is precisely physical direct risk, such as death, thatprovokes such great need for the myth and large social structures Bauman andBeck claim are at the centre of premodern life. Bauman asserts, like Beck, thattoday we live in a risk society. Yet, in this light the collapse of grandnarratives of social structure onto which we can attach our identities(identity in Bauman functions rather like a coat one can attach to coathangers) seems more indicative of the absence of risk. Here one could betempted to reverse the old Marxist argument. Rather than superstructuralreligion providing the opium for infrastructural economic inequality, is it notcontentedness and material opulence that today provides a satisfaction for alack of aim and direction. What we see in premodern society, if we accept thesimplifications of Beck and Bauman, is a great deal of risk.

To develop this argument, it iswise to look at words of Benjamin (1999:248), who argues: The tradition of theoppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not theexception but the rule. The state of emergency also refers to (as well assovereignty), how transitory meanings are: how clearly one can see through thediscursive order of a sovereign power to the founding violence (Agamben:1995:17) that lies beyond it. In every system of organisation where there ishierarchical power there will be the uncertainty of the violence (that which,as Agamben notes, does not need law to create law) that lies concealed as thebasis of sovereignty. It is precisely from this sense of uncertainty that onederives risk: the risk of being both simultaneously inside and outside ajuridical order. Here one feels the 'state of emergency', and to quote anotherBenjamin (1999:86) essay, it is from this frailty of existence that one derivesthe possibility of myth.

Bauman would no doubt reply to thisargument that while premodern man had a great deal of uncertainty in his life,it could be dealt with by being placed into social categories and so it wouldnot have the same power as the risk that today we see as being inherent to ourown existence. Yet, this assumes that for the premodern, the famine would beattributed to the unknown, or to the Gods. Yet, if we look to Evans-Pritchard'swork on the Azande (1977:42), we see that most disasters or problems arelocated in the socially relevant sources. All problems that can be are blamedon witchcraft: thus, it would be apparent that uncertainty is also bound up inthe way the Zande understand the cosmos, much like us secondary moderns. Thus,already we see the simple dichotomisation made by Beck and Bauman, that todayrisk is internal, while before it was a property of the unknown, can simply notstand up to the evidence.

There are further problems withBauman's analysis. He frequently confuses two points. It is one thing to saythat premodern man had more solid social structures than our liquid modernity;it is another to say that he did not deal with risk and uncertainty becausethese categories were placed within social structures. The root of this problemis that in claiming modern man makes himself, Bauman forgets the great lessonof Heidegger (1962:148), that being is a dwelling. Because Bauman argues thatliquid modern man is rootless and borderless, he is forced into reversing thepolarity in premodern man. Yet, in making this juxtaposition he forgets thegreat similarity of premodern thought to liquid modern thought. Furthermore, heneglects, as the essay will develop later, that being of any sort isnecessarily being in time and space, which, as Heidegger, notes, is theprecondition for language.

All three 'men' we will look atplace doubt and uncertainty simultaneously within categories internal to himand yet constructed by the society as a whole in which he is always already amember. The Zande who blames his neighbour for bewitching the tree stump onwhich he stubbed his toe, is not so different from the man reaching out forscientific explanations of how trains become derailed, and blaming decades ofunder investment: both construct, from social constituted categories,explanations relevant to social action.

Finally, the fixity of categorythat Beck and Bauman assign to premodern man is simply not tenable. It is onething to say that a society assigns someone rigid positions. It is another tosay that they do not experience identarian crises over these positions. Theplacing of cosmologies and social hierarchies as blueprints for action in theworld always creates puzzles and anomalies, especially as the lived worldchanges. Furthermore, to take the foremost interpreter of Lacan, Laplanche, onecan see that this uncertainty about identity is property of the relationshipbetween a subject and hegemony on a broader level. As Laplanche (1989:130)notes:

[It] is an encounter betweenan individual whose psycho-somatic structures are

situated predominantly at thelevel of need, and signifiers emanating from an

adult. Those signifierspertain to the satisfaction of the child's needs, but they also

convey the purelyinterrogative potential of other messagesand those other

messages are sexual. Theseenigmatic messages set the child the difficult, or even

impossible, task of masteryand symbolization and the attempt to perform it

inevitably leaves behindunconscious residues. I refer to them as the sourceobjects

of the drives.

These arguments are not as marginalto understanding how Beck and Bauman construct the modern world as they mightappear. For if it is the case that premodern man, in all his diverse forms, ismuch closer than we think to post-modern man, then many of the shifts that areposited by Beck and Bauman either must be illusory or merely shifts of degree.Further, in some of the comparisons given here, the author hopes to show thatthe great problem with both theorists in question is that they forget theimportance of place. They accept tacitly two discourses that should becritically examined. They accept that postmodern man is rootless and makes hisown history, which, as the next two sections show, is not the case, and theyaccept the discourse of modernity that ascribes fixity to premodern man. Itshould be noted that the latter discourse was the very same discourse used tojustify the modernist political project, and in light of this, it seems evenmore surprising they have accepted it so uncritically. Given these argumentshave little basis, it becomes apparent that our current notions ofindividualisation and community do not adhere to phenomenon as they appear inthe real world.

III. The SecondStraw Man: Modern man

In contrast to our premodernfriend, rooted in his absolute structures of social hierarchy and religion, ourmodern man is rooted in grand sets of ideas and ideologies. These are whatLyotard (1995:23) calls grand narratives. These are those larger narrativesagainst which one can anchor one's being to give it tone and definition. Thesevery same narratives are those that Lyotard contends are no longer possibletoday. The modernist project was a project of grand transition. Beck (1998:10)comments that just as modernisation dissolved the structures of feudal societyin the 19C and produced the industrial society, modernity today is dissolvingindustrial society and another modernity is coming into being. We can see theprinciple leitmotif in both authors at work here: as feudal society is toindustrialisation, industrialisation is to second modernity.

The grand narrative emerged withthe rise of the nation-state. For Bauman, identity emerges totally dominated bynationalism. The nation state erases difference between individuals throughplanned activity. Such a social order makes government intervention appear asnatural; modernity, as Bauman (1999:15) notes, being an ordered totality.Both authors here owe a lot to the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault (1979,1980) elaborates a change in the order of authority, an epistemic break,whereby sovereign power begins to act directly on the body of citizens. Ratherthan simply deciding over death, sovereign power begins to constitute what islife, and as such constructs the notion of the individual and of the community.Foucault shares with Beck and Baumann the notion of modernism as orderedtotality. The problems that emerge in Foucault's work, however, are far greaterwhen brought into the work of Beck and Bauman. For while Foucault is practicingdiscursive analysis, Beck and Bauman claim to be practicing sociology.

As such, there are a number ofquestions they leave unanswered. It is not enough to describe an orderedtotality in discourse to prove it exists in reality. If, in two hundred yearstime, sociologists were to read Bauman (1988:807), would they be content tobelieve that: in the present day society, consumer conduct (consumer freedomgeared to a consumer market) moves steadily into a position of simultaneously,the cognitive and moral focus of life, integrative bond of society, and thefocus of systemic management. Not only would such an assumption be untrue, itwould be an error of analysis. To account for the homogeneity of discourse isnever to understand whether procedures mirror the coherency of such adiscourse. To begin to understand such a question, it would be necessary toanswer the following questions, which Foucault, Beck and Bauman fail to do

• Given the apparent emergence of an 'ordered totality', it is evident that it could also have been possible that other epistemes could have emerged. How are we to explain the privileged development of the episteme we call modernity?
• What then, is the status of all the other series of discourses that constitute a society without being their paradigmatic episteme? It is not enough to assume societies homogeneity without looking at the massed ranks of series that are not used: that constitute the first principle for the possibility of their heterogeneity. As a relevant modern example: what place does the Christian legacy have in secular Europe today?
• It may well be the case that certain of these other, silent, epistemes, survive silently in practices that are not foregrounded by a hegemonic discourse. It is simply arrogant, for instance, to argue that feudalism simply vanished.
• Both Beck and Bauman also fail to address the point made by Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1979), that the practices instigated by the discursive procedures of modernity actually displace the ordered totality of discourse.

Through these questions, the authorhopes to indicate that the notion of modern man that Beck and Bauman have setup is a straw man, against which they wish to place their new second modern manwith greater resolution. Given that modernity had far greater heterogeneitythan we would like to believe, it become apparent that the notions that Beckand Bauman claim to emerge simply do not exist as suddenly emergent. Thus,their project needs to be completely reconceptualised.

IV. The ThirdStraw Man: Postmodern man, hypermodern man, liquid modern man, second modernityman or the simulacrum.

As we have noted above, in theschemes of Bauman and Beck, modern man existed in ordered totality, hisidentity deriving from the structure of the state and the ideologies attachedto the mode of production in industrialisation. Evidently, something happenedrecently. For now, Bauman states, postmodern man has a

'painful and sickening feeling ofperpetual uncertainty in everything regarding the future' (1997:192). Baumanasserts this is because now nothing is certain anymore: all the grandnarratives have collapsed, and we have nothing in which to believe. Postmodernman then, is not in a feeling of uncertainty because he is placed within asystem of capitalist extraction that increases and perpetuates a systematichierarchical inequality. He is not uncertain but he is hungry, or because hefeels oppressed at work, or because his children go to school where only 30% ofpeople pass their GCSE's. No. He is uncertain of his identity. His identity isuncertain because he no longer knows anything apart from consumerism; there areno longer any alternate poles onto which to base existence. This uncertaintyresembles nothing if not Sartrean nausea. Though the author does not have timeto develop the notion here, it could indeed be suggested that no only do theauthors in question unquestioningly take the legacy of modernism, their anxietyover their postmodern existence structurally mirrors Sartrean (1989:361) nauseaover bourgeois existence. Beck mirrors Bauman in his description of theuncertainty of our disembedded identity. This section will set out to answer animportant question: does postmodern man exist? If he does exist, where can Ifind him?

Bauman notes (1988:807) in thepresent day society, consumer conduct (consumer freedom geared to a consumermarket) moves steadily into a position of simultaneously, the cognitive andmoral focus of life, integrative bond of society, and the focus of systemicmanagement. Because of this dominance of the consumer society, a strongprocess of individualising occurs. Given there is no longer any notion ofcommunity upon which to base one's action, people increasingly treat theiridentity like a set of consumer goods: picking and choosing what one wishes. Itis in consumerism that one finds the moral focus of life that in modernism wasprovided by ideology and in the premodern world by religion. Indeed, Baumannasserts that in the present day the peak experience (the experience which bindspeople together in a community) has ceased to be religious service but can nowbe found in consumerism.

This thesis is not tenable.Religious experience provides an orientation into something that is constructedas outside oneself (I live for God), whereas consumerism provides afortification of the self (now I can be a new person with my new shoes: I livefor me). Religion provides one with a community into which one is orientated asan integer: consumerism, while one might share a moment of joy with a friendover a new bra, asserts that one is self-created and thus not integral tosomething outside of oneself. This is not to suggest that today we have no peakexperiences create a sense of community. Rather, it is to suggest that Baumanis looking in the wrong place to find them and in doing so has fundamentallymisunderstood the process of individualisation today.

Furthermore, for someone who hassupposedly emerged from out of the essentialist assumptions of the discourse ofmodernity, Bauman has amazingly essentialist views of consumerism. Informulating such views, he forms straw men out of the stuff of the present age.To read Bauman on consumerism is to think that we sit in front of adverts andsay 'now I must buy that' and that we go to the mall and revel in our newfoundconsumerism and the ease with which we can find new identities. Contrary to thenotion that the dominant leitmotif in society is consumerism, a number ofpoints can be raised.

• A system of signs never totalises the meanings that can be made from it. It is not the case that people accept the meanings of consumerism uncritically. They form their own meanings out of them. Goods such as trainers, food and hair clips are formed into personal stories and broader narratives that far exceed their meaning as consumables. This emphasises Appadurai's (1986:15) points that commodification is not an essentialist property of an object but rather a stage in its life trajectory: likewise, people are consumers for only a period of their life, and use consumer goods in all sorts of ways outside of the way the system constrained them.
• Bauman states that market dependency has replaced articulated legitimacy. The state, it seems, no longer exists as an effective force because, in Foucauldian fashion, people are self-governed into accepting market dependency and their identity as uncertain, risky consumers. Yet, it is the articulated legitimacy of the state that makes market dependency possible. As Hardt and Negri (1999:112) note, the market has always been reliant on the state for support.
• Not only is the market dependent on state violence for its continued functioning, and as such is still necessary, but people do not self-govern themselves into perfect consumers. As De Certeau (1999:23) notes, in society there are all sorts of example of the way people distort and manipulate the system: silent ways of resisting market mentality. He gives the example of la perroque: the way in which people will steal items from their work place or use work time as their own time. In fact, the perspective of the timeless space less individual that is apparently postmodern seems to emerge from the same notion as Sartre: a bourgeois individual who does not encounter the direct violence of articulated legitimacy nor indulges in the tactics of resistance the oppressed (who we should note, are always told they have a place) are forced to use.

Yet, according to Bauman, in thisnew society (2001:98) all limits are off limits. We resemble the perfectdecontextualised, unembedded consumer, unencumbered by history or restrictionand free to indulge in maximum consumerism. While the author might concur withBauman that this is suggested by the discourse of postmodernity, the authorwould argue that it is precisely at the meeting point between this discourseand lived reality that the signifying stress of postmodern man occurs. He soonrealises that there are limits (it is just they are off - hidden - limits).Limits to the amount of beneficial existence virtual reality can give him.Limits to consumerism; posed, in the end by death. It is in this signifyingstress between our role as free consumers and the limits we place, and thehidden limits we find, that mean the possibility of breaking out of thisdiscourse is imaginable, and indeed, frequent.

Bauman asserts with Beck that wehave moved from social individuals determined by modernism to individualisedindividuals. This move explains why (2001:12) the stories told today do notreach beyond the narrow and painstakingly fenced off enclosure of the privateand subjective self. One could add: it is amazing we can still talk to eachother. This individualisation is not a choice (ibid), but a biographicalsolution to systemic contradictions. Bauman asserts that this individualself-definition is the only possible solution to the systemic pressures ofliquid modernity. In the state of fragmentation, Bauman claims, religion cansimply not provide a satisfactory explanation that encompasses the liquidmodern condition. This will come as news to many Americans, who use a religiousframework (often, if one listens to George W. Bush's pronouncements, in a verytotalising fashion) as a guide to modern life. The problems of Bauman'shypothesis are greater however, than simply the empirical reality of the world.Bauman leaves us no room in which to form communities: and yet, astonishingly,communities exist. Not virtual communities, not communities on the internet:but communities centred in place. In these communities, stories reach beyondthe private self. They do so because they are drawn, as Benjamin (1999:84)notes of the story, from experience. Were Bauman to look at the world we livein, rather than discourse, he would realise that, as De Certeau (1999:118)notes, amid the murmurings of the system, people produce their own meanings.

So while Bauman is correct to notethat individualisation as a discourse has led to a discursive contraction ofpublic life, a tapering the art of public life down to a public display ofprivate affairs and public confessions of private sentiment, it is simply anerror of analysis to understand this contraction of the public sphere as it wasunderstood in the 19C as the contraction of the public sphere as a whole. Inclassical political theory, the political emerges in the city. Publicinstitutions are designed to moderate the demands of private individuals (thisis not a problem in agrarian society where private interests are bound uptogether). Thus, the emergence of the public sphere is bound up to thepossibility of transcending private interest. Rather than being a qualititivespace, this relationship became quantified: this retraction of the public spaceis actually what we find in the liberal discourse of the postmodern individual.However, in the singularities of the city we find public spaces emerging. Inthe cries of the sans papier; which is not a claim for inclusion withinthe postmodern discourse but a universalist claim, that, as Rancière (2003:40)notes: is not a group that 'becomes aware' of itself, finds its voice, imposesits weight on society. It is an operator that connects and disconnecteddifferent areas, regions, identities, functions and capacities. In much lessprosaic ways this public space occurs: it occurs because the totalisingdiscourse of mobility that is the leitmotif of modernity since Machiavelli (andis not at all postmodern as Bauman supposes) is just that: discourse. Meanwhilepeople live in place and space, and in such spaces, private interests arealways transcended.

Bauman's most important mistakethen, is an ontological one. He claims (1991:255)

individuals are self-constitutingwithin their habitat (complex system): there is no goal setting byinstitutions. What is important to note here is that individuals are notself-constituting: they are thrown (gewortenheit), as Heidegger (1962:45)would have it, into their social world and given roles before they are evenself-conscious. The institution of the social world one is in dictates onebefore one is conscious. Indeed, one can say that Bauman's analysis stems fromthe possibility of viewing the world as self-created. But of course it mustappear so within the terms of any discourse, because the background practicesthat construct the self are necessarily left in the background.

Bauman (2001:48) finally claimswith relish: we must learn to live with ambivalence. Here the author must admitsome confusion: did we not live with ambivalence before? Was it misplaced inearlier times, or forgotten, or is it a recent invention? As stated in theprevious two sections, the inability of Bauman, and, as we shall soon see,Beck, to draw historical continuities into modern experience leaves theiranalysis as shallow and overstated.

Sadly, Beck repeats all of Bauman'serrors. While for Bauman we must learn to live with ambivalence, Beck claims wemust learn to live with risk. Now, Beck asserts, that we have been disembeddedfrom the certainties of family, gender and sex; we must invent our owncertainties and become individualised individuals. This (1997:94) he termssubpolitics. This individualising process is structurally parallel to Bauman'sindividualisation. In both, the previously rich institutions of modernism aremysteriously emptied of content and we inhabit a double world between theseinstitutions which no longer control any aspect of identity, and our newreflexively modern (for Beck, second modernity is equivalent to Bauman's LiquidModernity) selves. For Beck, this is the reverse of the industrial revolutions,where strong institutions dictated to people (also mysteriously emptied of content).

Like Bauman's forcedindividualisation, now for Beck, every decision is a personal one. Notions ofcommunity for Beck emerge from the bottom up, from freely chosen links betweenpeople, rather than the top down total ordering that he finds in modernity. Wehave already noted for Bauman that modernity was not totalising, and that theidea of community being born of free individuals ignores the fact one is alwaysalready within a community. For Beck, these new communities challenge the ideaof a community linked to a single locality. He then gives many examples, likethe Hmong community outside of Vietnam. What is noticeable for the author aboutthe Hmong community is the extent to which despite the global separationof its members it necessarily connects to a place. As Heidegger (1962:120)notes, all being, indeed all language, is connected to place and how oneinhabits it.

Hmong members, like the rest of thesecond modern world, determine themselves in terms of risk. Rather than thenotion of risk being an unknown, as apparently it was for the moderns, riskbecomes a property of ourselves: we become risky. For instance, Beck gives theexample of nuclear waste as an example of a recent phenomenon that is aproperty of our action itself. He notes (1998:53): in class position beingdetermines consciousness, while in risk positions, conversely, consciousness(knowledge) determines being. Which is to say: we determine our being throughour knowledge. What this ignores, as Bauman also ignores, is that we are neverfully the masters of our own acts. Man is found in a world that exceeds him.The possibility of the signifying stress laid out above is because man is actedon by forces of his own creation, and these forces are never conterminous withthe sphere of lived experience. Beck claims that today (ibid: 183):

The sources of danger are nolonger ignorance, but knowledge; not a deficient but perfect mastery overnature; not what eludes the human grasp but the systems of norms and objectiveconstraints established with the industrial epoch. Given what is argued above:it should be apparent that the norms and objective constraints of theindustrial epoch are precisely what elude the human grasp.

V: Many StrawMen form small Straw Dogs: the coming community.

Both Bauman and Beck are positivepolitical thinkers. While they chronicle the apparent demise of previousnotions of community, and chart the rise of individualisation, they are alsohopeful for new forms of community to emerge; what Beck calls a re-embedding.Yet, for the thinkers of postmodernity, the answers to what form community willtake are surprisingly old. Bauman, who we shall analyse first, gives what wewill call the premodern answer, while Beck, the modernist reply.

Bauman, evidently worried about allthis unrestrained individualism, calls up a new weapon: morality. For Bauman(1993:13): moral responsibility is a mystery contrary to reason. Bauman usesa train of thought that has its origins in Aristotle, but is then used by bothArendt, and more latterly, Levinas. With Levinas, Bauman argues (ibid)awakening to being for the other is the awakening the self, which is therebirth of the self. This is remarkably similar to Arendt (1964:256) when shenotes:

It seems that a man who is nothingbut a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for others totreat him as a fellow man.

The argument would run here thatthe very possibility of humanity is given by the recognition of the otherwithin you: that your concurrent existence is the basis for being. Yet, Levinas(1999) and Arendt are using a legacy here completely incompatible with Baumanand his notion that we are either tourists or vagabonds (condemned to movearound, some with pleasure some with pain). He claims this place (or acceptingthe other) can be called communtarianism and is (1997:189) a point from whichall things can be seen in true proportions. In this schema, community precedeschoice: a community is formed and then we come to a decision. I will not repeatarguments made elsewhere in the essay, but merely note that the ontologicalbase for the argument of Levinas can be found in Jewish thought which requiresprecisely the silence of a commitment to something outside of yourself:precisely not that given by postmodern discourse.

While Bauman takes Levinas and useshim in an incoherent way, perhaps reflecting the inability of postmoderndiscourse to find good frameworks for coming communities, Beck utilisesmodernism in an amazingly unchanged way. In a recent essay (2004), Beck attacksuniversalism as making all cultures equivalent and attacks relativism asignoring the interconnection of cultures and leading to mutual ignorance asneither side admits the possibility of knowing the others truth. After attackingthese straw men, he proposes his solution: realistic cosmopolitan realism. Whatwould such long words mean? It would necessarily (ibid: 430) embraceuniversalist standards 'in order to protect one's basic principles', andrealistically accept that 'it may in some circumstances be necessary to violatethem. Beck's sociology here runs aground on several counts. He assumes thatthere are basic principles without proving it, and uses the example of thedebate de la Casas had on whether the Amerindians had souls. What isinteresting here, is that at the same time, as Levi-Strauss (1955:84) notes,the indians were having a conference on whether the Spanish had bodies, andsubjecting them to rigorous testing by drowning.

The point to derive from this storyis that such standards of basic principle assume the world La Casas hadassumed: a single cosmos with a single notion of the body and of the world. Inthis sense, the modernist thinkers had made the globe a discursive unity. Nowthe globe seems like a pressing unconceptualised reality, and within thisreality cries for pragmatism mixed with basic standards fail to answer any ofthe pressing problems of the world today. Beck notes (ibid: 438):cosmopolitanism, again, means a recognition of otherness, both external andinternal to any society: in a cosmopolitan ordering of society difference areneither ranged in a hierarchy nor dissolved into universality but areaccepted. The pressing questions of how they are accepted, or why, or whichdifferences, are all left unanswered.

VI. Conclusion

This essay has analysed the way inwhich the two authors in question have made use of a common mythico-history ofthe world. This mythico-history is a legacy of a modernist project that wantedto place the premodern man in the realm of myth and fantasy, and place themodern man at the height of rationality. In some senses, Beck and Baumancontinue the critique of modernity that began in Adorno (1972). They criticisereason and the enlightenment project: but they do so from within reason. Thereal task that is necessary in order to assess what it means today to be anindividual, and what it means to be within a community, is to understand theways in which modernism was not an ordered totality but a heterogeneous arrayof procedures and practices. Once this task is achieved then we can start tothink about the liquid modern individual. Sadly, neither of the authors inquestion have begun that task.

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