Abstract
In his preface to the book, Eric Ferris describes Zygmunt Bauman as a conversationalist, whose work engages with many other thinkers, purposefully interrogates their ideas to help his reader think through issues and acts as their point of departure. Each of the eight chapters is organised around a central theme found in Bauman’s work and applied to schooling.
Bauman’s work must be understood against what he describes as a passage from a solid to a liquid form of modernity. In contrast to the ‘order-obsessed’ gardening state of solid modernity, liquid modernity signals 'a radical change in the arrangement of human cohabitation and in social conditions under which life-politics is nowadays conducted' (Bauman, 2000: 10). Liquid modernity is characterised by, above all, ‘the divorce of power from politics, and the shifting of functions once undertaken by political authorities sideways, to the markets, and downward, to individual life-politics’ (Bauman, 2010: 398). Consumerism and the ‘pursuit of happiness’ that it is assumed to bring with it is identified by Bauman (2008: 30) as the prime psychological factors in the transition from solid to liquid modernity. The transition is reflected in a dissolution of ‘the social’, an embracing of neoliberal individualism, a rejection of state planning and investment. The social state (welfare state) designed to provide security and stability is becoming gradually more deregulated, individualised, and privatised. Personal problems are no longer seen as public issues, and individuals are now solely responsible for dealing with the hardships and uncertainties they face. In Bauman’s liquid turn writings, the general dissolution of human bonds and culture is presented as a random collection of connections and disconnections, shaped by negative globalisation, deregulation, consumption, and unpredictable market forces, with individual lives taking the form of short-term projects and episodes.
Ferris explains that the individual’s ability to interpret the world and act is limited by the social context in which they find themselves. As a compulsory socialising agent, schooling is then a key institution in terms of enabling people to develop the skills to make sense of the world. Schools reproduce ideas and ideologies. From Ferris’s perspective, for Bauman, order is unique to humans, and even though order is never fully attainable, schools have an ordering function helping to remove ambiguity and ambivalence whilst building the learner’s intelligibility. Liquid modernity favours creating order through seduction rather than force. Bauman is quoted as saying that order is about making: 'individuals wish to do what the system needs them to do for it to reproduce itself' (Bauman, 2008: 149 italics in original). One of the roles of the school in the ‘gardening state’ of solid modernity is then to mitigate the subjectivity of the learner as a possible source of disorder.
Monitoring learners online is central to maintaining order and Ferris is critical of the role of surveillance software such as Gaggle. Gaggle is a learner surveillance software system principally used in American K-12 school districts to identify often unrecognised problems that an individual learner may be experiencing. The role of Gaggle is said by Ferris to generate conformity and encourage learners to fit themselves into a vision of the accepted generalised other rather than the unaccepted and unwanted other.
As with several other Bauman scholars, Ferris regards Bauman’s ‘lost’ Polish text Sketches in the Theory of Culture, a collection of essays that were originally due to be published in 1968 but was confiscated as Bauman left Poland for exile, as important in terms of making sense of Bauman’s intellectual development. The manuscript was later found and published in 2018.
In Sketches, Bauman takes his starting point from Simmel’s understanding of the relationship between ‘form’ and ‘content’ and identifies ‘innate drives’ that underpin the ‘cultural mechanisms for organising the world’ into categories that usually take the form of ‘either or’. These ‘cultural mechanisms’ suppress ambiguity to allow the person to select material that provides clear meaning or ‘semantic unequivocality’ with any ‘cultural field’. The larger the group of people that the individual must contend within everyday life, the greater the number of semes a person needs to orient themselves meaningfully to eliminate indeterminacy. A seme is the minimum unit of significance that a person can draw upon in transmitting their intended sense of meaning.
In chapters 5 and 6, there is an interesting and informed discussion of the role and purpose of education from the perspective of Donald Trump who appointed the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission (2021) to investigate and report on replacing what Trump views as the anti-American, ideologically motivated, left wing indoctrination found in the social studies curriculum of American schools that allows history teachers to spread false truths, with a more ‘patriotic education’ that presented the ‘true’ American story. Ferris compares the views of the 1776 Commission with the approach adopted by the 1619 Project which has a focus on teaching about the history of slavery and the continuing consequences of slavery in American life. For the reader unfamiliar with the politics of education in the United States, the chapter gives an informed insight into the Trump’s cultural politics.
From a Bauman perspective argues Ferris, both the 1776 Report and the 1619 Project attempt to ‘culture’ individuals in different ways, both encouraging learners to adopt customs and meanings to make ordered life intelligible.
Ferris acknowledges that Bauman’s work has drawn criticism, but he has chosen not to engage with Bauman’s critics. Ferris acknowledges that even commentators that are sympathetic to Bauman’s contribution to social analysis have identified that issues in relation to gender and sexuality are 'blind spots in his work' (page 12) and Ferris points to comments from Bauman’s friend and colleague Griselda Pollock (2020).
Chapter 7 is focused on the plight of transgender and nonbinary learners in the American education system and provides an account of transgender and nonbinary exclusion that applies Bauman’s conception of the stranger. Ferris provides a detailed account of the anti-LGBTQ+ legislation adopted in the Trump years and the legal forms of discrimination transgender and nonbinary learners face. For Ferris, learners who identify as transgender or nonbinary are subjected to a process of othering within the curriculum and institutional practices, including forms of bullying and physical intimidation in schools and colleges. Such practices are constructed to encourage the school and college populations to view transgender and nonbinary learners as strangers, people who are regarded as human waste and less than human, in the way that Bauman has explored across his writing.
In Liquid Love (2003), Bauman applied his understanding of the transition from a solid to liquid modernity to the fields of sex, sexuality, and intimate relationships. Sexuality was identified by Bauman as one of the areas of social life where the liquid modern state had withdrawn from regulation. Consequently, Bauman argues that within liquid modernity a consumer driven, sexual free for all emerged, rooted in a form of adiaphoric, unregulated consumerism. Bauman did not approve of this greater sexual freedom and regarded the liquefaction of sexual engagements as the product of unmatched moral irresponsibility disguised as sexual liberation. For Bauman, this greater sexual freedom undermined the social and biological imperatives of reproduction. In an interview with Feona Attwood, Bauman defended heterosexuality, marriage, and the family, against what he identifies as the threat of liquid sexuality. When asked about same-sex marriage, he remarked: ‘Why not, therefore, allow people to play family?’ (Attwood, 2017: 6). The assumption being that gay parents can never have the status of heterosexual parents. Ferris presents a coherent and convincing argument about the plight of transgender and nonbinary learners; however, this argument is contrary to Bauman’s position of a sexual free for all and demonstrates the continuing role of the state in the regulation of peoples’ behaviours in liquid modernity.
Since 2003 in the United Kingdom, for example, several new legislative measures became law such as the Sexual Offences Act 2003. Under the 2003 Act, activities such as sexual activity with a child, causing or inciting a child to engage in sexual activity, sexual activity in the presence of a child and causing a child to watch a sexual act all became offences. The 2003 Act also introduced several preventative orders such as the Risk of Sexual Harm Order that criminalised the ‘grooming’ of children and young people; possession of indecent photographs of a child; exposure and voyeurism. Additional sexual offences in relation to the ‘abuse of position of trust’ were introduced to criminalise some sexual relationships, including consensual relationships between 16- and 19-year-old learners and their teachers. Schools and other education institutions have additional obligations with relation to safeguarding under the 2003 Act. In contrast to Bauman’s thesis, an increasing number of sexual activities have become criminalised, or placed within a more strongly defined legislative framework in which people will become defined as the Other if they deviate and have their most intimate of behaviours subjected to greater policing.
There is only one mention of the agentic state in passing by Ferris on page 158. A major omission in Ferris’s account is a discussion of Bauman’s understanding of the agentic state and adiaphora as applied to schools and schooling. The agentic state and adiaphora are central to Bauman’s work before and after his liquid turn. Bauman himself was very keen throughout the different phases of his intellectual journey on identifying forces external to the individual such as bureaucratic rationalisation, individualisation, consumption and liquefaction, and the different forms of adiaphorization associated with solid modernity, postmodernity and liquid modernity pressing individuals to conform. The emphasis on testing, benchmarking such as Attainment 8 and achieving imposed objectives has come to dominate teaching and learning. The quality of education is judged on the achievement of externally imposed bureaucratic objectives and not on the intrinsic quality of what is generated in the classroom.
Adiaphorizing mechanisms, such as the process of bureaucratic rationalisation, mean that individuals within the agentic state judge their actions on the extent to which their actions fulfil a bureaucratic objective rather than on the moral content of the actions they engage in. The agentic state is the opposite of autonomy, in which the motivation to act is located externally to the individual human agent. For Bauman, moral agency was bypassed by the adiaphoric processes of rationalisation, and as such people are not individually or personally culpable for their cruel or even genocidal actions. With the concept of adiaphora, it is almost impossible to identify the conditions under which acts of resistance can come into play.
Ferris concludes his account by arguing that schools are 'tools in the mechanistic ordering of society' – a view which he rightly described as deterministic and that 'flies in the face of Bauman’s work' (page 210). As the argument suggests that in liquid modernity, schools render all individuals objects of order and design. For Ferris, the human agent at a psychological level can do little than merely respond to the processes of liquefaction and are powerless to shape or determine the global process within liquid modernity. Contrary to Bauman’s understanding of social life dominated by the processes of liquefaction, Ferris’s account, as reflected in his concluding comments, demonstrates the continuing role of the state in the regulation of peoples’ behaviours in liquid modernity.
