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Stranger (Part 2)

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by frrr.

Article by Thessayist Network

Part 2: Bauman’s Contemporary Reply to Simmel

(This discussion draws from Zygmunt Bauman ‘Strangers: The Social Construction of Universality and Particularity’ Telos No. 78, Winter 198809, pp. 7-42) available in E-Reserve.

Features of the Category of the Stranger

Bauman is interested in putting Simmel’s classic piece into conversation with a diagnosis of our contemporary conditions. He argues that Simmel’s 19th century account of the significance of the stranger no longer holds good in the sociological conditions of the late 20th century. Bauman insists that the sociological conditions (the main organising structures and realities of our everyday lives), have led to the dominance of the construction of the stranger as a barbarian. This, as we saw, is a construction of the stranger that Simmel wants to reject.

Underpinning Simmel’s account of the significance of the stranger is the suggestion that ‘we’ locals, ‘we’ members of the group had unproblematically and unreflectively acquired our identities from a process of assimilation of the norms and mores of the nation, the class, or the ethnic grouping. In this connection, the stranger might appear as a relationship to the other which forced us out of our dogmatic attitudes.

But, according to Bauman the late modern individual no longer feels that the nation, the class etc offers him/her a home through which his / her whole sense of self can be shaped. The modern individual feels homeless and insecure to an extent that would have been unthinkable for the individual at the turn of the 20th century. On the contrary, he/she feels that his/her found context is unable to provide any support or to provide any sense of community. According to this description of the late modern age, the modern condition is one of disorientation and purposeless amongst individuals who see themselves as being fundamentally unsupported by any group or community orientation.
And, says Bauman, because we all want to recapture this sense of belonging we must find a mechanism through which this kind of lost experience of community might be artificially reconstructed.

The problem for the late modern individual is, then, very different, quite unlike the experience facing his/her counterpart at the turn of the century. The category of stranger appears to us as a means for artificially reproducing a sense of lost community (rather than a means by which claustrophobic aspects of this community life might be opened up to new potentials). Because we still want to feel this sense of belonging, we are constantly tempted to create this sense of belonging artificially by a process of boundary drawing, setting up distinctions between ‘them and us’, those who supposedly belong and those who are strangers.

So, unlike Simmel’s stranger who is both a figure operating within the group and a character who comes from the outside, the stranger for Bauman is wholly constitutive of the group/The stranger is a construct which the group depends upon for its very (fictional) existence.

In order to cope with the isolating trends of life in a fast-moving world dominated by market-relations, we are, according to Bauman, tempted to try and rebuild a sense of belonging. A major strategy for building up a sense of group identity is to set it up in a relationship of hostility to some outsider group- the stranger as barbarian.

According to Bauman, for populations that feel themselves to be rootless, without substantial a sense of belonging or perhaps grieving for a lost sense of belonging, to construct the idea of the stranger/barbarian is to artificially provoke a sense of their own group identity.

We saw that, for Simmel, the presence of the stranger helps us to achieve an increasing self-reflection. It shakes us out of our dogmatism and facilitates a greater self-knowledge. According to him, the presence of the stranger helps us to recognise our prejudices and to develop a more objective perspective freer of dogmatism.

Firstly, the group doesn’t exist in any real, organic sense as an historical grouping but constructs itself in a mythology about its identity. It uses the idea of the stranger to give itself shape. (We will return to this theme in a later in the unit when we look at Ghassan Hage’s account of the ‘paranoid nationalism’ that he thinks has gripped contemporary Australian cultural life).

Bauman insists that the category of the stranger cannot work to constitute the group simply by locating the other outside group. Because the group is an artificial construct, it has to constantly give shape to itself by constituting the outsider as a threat to itself, a threat which can only be warded off by the group’s insistence on its differences from the loathed and dangerous features of those who are others.

Secondly, the category of the stranger is hemmed around with mythologies and prejudices about the so-called outsider. For the group to constitute itself as the ‘normal’, the stranger must be constituted as the abnormal. He/she is, then, surrounded by a range of stigmas- the stranger becomes the untouchable.

The stranger is constituted as a perpetual danger to the integrity and the so-called purity of the ‘normal’ group.

This is what Bauman says:

‘Keeping the stranger apart does not- suffice to neutralise his inherent and dangerous incongruity. That danger must be posted; the natives must be warned and kept on alert lest they succumb to the temptation of compromising the separate ways that make them what they are. This can be attained by discrediting the stranger; by representing the outward, visible and easy to spot traits of the stranger as signs of less evident, yet truly dangerous qualities’. (page 13)

Bauman’s ‘Solution’ to the Problem of the Stranger

Bauman’s first point here is that the idea of the stranger doesn’t work. Appealing to the idea of the loathed and feared outsider can’t in the end really ever succeed in providing the timid and insecure individuals of a late modern society with a home. He thinks that we need to acknowledge that for us modern individuals there can be no hope of a secure ‘home’ we can never hope to recapture that experience of secure fixed purpose and closed community which the traditional community experience had provided.

The group itself will always be an unstable entity in modern society – subject to forces which require change (eg the idea of the unique history, identity and future of independent nation states is rocked by the forces of globalisation)
Also we modern individuals can never find ourselves completely ‘at home,’ completely described in all our complexity by our membership with any one group. As modern individuals we have many diverse, sometimes competing attachments. So for example, even if we try and build our sense of ourselves around a group loyalty – a homosexual ‘scene’ or a tight-knit religious group – we have to function in a range of roles (as workers and as culture consumers) that pull us out of these closed identifications.
What conclusion, then, does Bauman draw from this?

If none of us can find a home then it seems that we are all strangers; all outsiders.
And, accordingly if we can recognise that we are all strangers then none of us are. Once we accept that the world is not divided into those who ‘belong’ and those who are excluded because none of us ‘belong’ then it seems that the idea of the stranger can no longer function as a site of oppression. We are all strangers to each other. And once we acknowledge this our difference will cease to be a source of tension to us.


Bauman’s ‘Solution’ to the Problem of the Stranger

CONSIDER
What can we say about the two perspectives on the idea of the stranger that we have been looking at? Some considerations:
Bauman argues that once we acknowledge that we are all strangers to each other (because none of us ‘belong’ in any organic, unproblematic sense) then there can be no sense of the stranger as the outsider to the group. We are all strangers and none of us can constitute ourselves as the ‘normal’, able to judge and assess those who are ‘abnormal’. With this acknowledgement we have, it seems, the end of oppression itself.
But is it that this notion that we are all strangers really the basis of a respect for those who are different?





Posted by Manuel Marino | Filed Under Sociology 

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