Reflections on Zygmunt Bauman: Visibility,privacy and prepositional sociology

Introduction

The emergence of digital technology, and social media in particular, has led Zygmunt Bauman to diagnose people's willing relinquishment of privacy. For him, attention becomes the scarcest of goods in our individualised attempts to fashion a self-determined life. The rise of social media seems to validate Bauman's diagnosis of a kind of ‘DIY servitude’ to the demand for visibility at the cost of privacy. But as in all things modern, here too ambivalence appears to be the only certainty: in our confessional culture, demands for the protection of informational privacy abound. In this paper I reflect on the ambivalent tensions between the need for privacy and the need for visibility for which the large-scale, voluntary public disclosure of private information is a central indicator. A sketch of Bauman's argument is followed by a brief discussion of visibility as an evolutionary, anthropological fact, as central to the intersubjective granting or withholding of recognition and significant to a vibrant public domain that has been radically altered by digital communication. On that basis, and drawing inspiration from an aside by Maria Markus, I constructively engage with Bauman's thought-provoking diagnosis and suggest that his pessimism undervalues the persistent capacity of people to construct a meaningful life despite societal developments that threaten to undermine its conditions. For this reason, a truly critical sociology is always also a ‘prepositional sociology’ – a sociology of the ‘despite’, the ‘nonetheless’ and ‘yet’ – that has one eye on the modern malaise and the other on those practices we engage in for their own sake. Friendship, I suggest, belongs to that register.

Bauman's consternation

Observing not only the emergence of digital media as a generalised form of interaction but also technologically mediated communications whose ubiquity fundamentally alters our relations to ourselves and the world, Zygmunt Bauman responded insightfully as ever. He was especially concerned about four interrelated social trends: (1) enhanced surveillance techniques used by state authorities and organisations, to which we can add surveillance in the intimate sphere ('Show me your recent text messages and I might show you mine’) in keeping with the fraying of intimate bonds Bauman (2003) identified in Liquid Love; (2) modes of self-presentation embedded in a confessional culture that denies the value of secrecy; (3) the emergence of attention-seeking behaviours and practices which, in turn, give rise to (4) an acute need for visibility, so that indifference to self-publicity is cast as individual failure. Anonymity, along with privacy, is dead (Bauman and Donskis, 2013: 26). In all of this, the critical key to Bauman's diagnosis of our digital times is his assertion that ‘we submit our rights to privacy to slaughter on our own will’ (Bauman and Donskis, 2013: 48). Complicit in the denigration of privacy we willingly submit to ‘DIY servitude’ (27).

These are suggestive arguments. However, reflected upon from a perspective that considers the routine, (extra)ordinary accomplishments of everyday life, Bauman's critique of digital modernity appears to be incomplete, especially considering his long-standing concern with everyday experience. I am not entirely convinced by the argument that attention-seeking for its own sake explains the apparently easy acquiescence and active participation in the denigration of privacy. After all, public and scientific discourse on the need for the protection of privacy is as prevalent as the celebration of publicity and the need for visibility as the basis for attention-seeking self-promotion.

Visibility and sociality

To address Bauman's diagnosis, it is helpful to turn to visibility as an intrinsic element of the human condition, of our sociality. Beyond the dynamics of digital modernity, visibility has long structured our relations to ourselves, to others and to the world. Hans Blumenberg (2006) attributes to our visibility to others a fundamental significance. Enabled by a bipedal erect posture, it is both an advantage and a risk. We are exposed to others – friends as well as foes – just as they are to us. Our visibility makes us experts not only at self-presentation but also at self-concealment (Blumenberg, 2006: 789). This, in turn, significantly determines our orientation to self, to the world and even to what may lie beyond it. Having attained a distant horizon in the literal sense we have come to expect the unknown to cross it – literally and then metaphorically – at any moment; it has enabled us to imagine and orient ourselves to that which is absent and even to substitute it with other media (e.g. money). Blumenberg sensitises us to visibility as more than a desire for its own sake driven by individualism, technological innovation and social mandates. It is but a small step from here to a consideration of visibility's role in the mutual accordance of respect.

Axel Honneth takes ‘the eyes of others’ seriously indeed and elaborates affirmative visibility as no less than ‘the elementary form of all social recognition’ (2003: 119). Seeing and being seen serves as a means to accord respect to some and withhold it from others. The disrespected are rendered socially invisible to those who determine their status. The example of the servant in whose presence master and mistress know no shame, of the person who, on account of their age, cultural background, perceived (dis)ability, gender and other identity markers and their various intersections, feels looked through rather than looked at, ignored rather than acknowledged, illustrates our ‘capacity to show our disregard to persons who are present by behaving as if they were not’ (2003: 112). Visibility and invisibility are reliant on our cognitive capacities but go beyond them as means of social distinction. Like Blumenberg, who accords our visibility developmental primacy over reasoning, Honneth accords priority to recognition over cognition. Visibility plays a significant role in the social dynamics of recognition not least because ‘it is the prominent status of gestures and facial expressions with which we demonstrate to one another in general a motivational readiness to be guided in our actions by the moral authority of another person’ (2003: 126). From this follows that potentially injurious acts resulting from treating others as if invisible constitute ‘a deformation of the human capacity for perception with which recognition is connected’ (2003: 126; original italics). In sum, both Blumenberg and Honneth affirm the centrality of visibility to our anthropological constitution and sociality.

For Hannah Arendt, the human political condition depends on our ‘plurality’ which enables us to act in concert for our freedom. To act together is to do so openly, visibly, in public where ‘everything … can be seen and heard by everybody’ (Arendt, 1958: 50). For her, a well-functioning public sphere needs both plurality and visibility, for plurality without visibility describes a society in which people exist side by side without facing one another, bereft, that is, of a basic precondition for mutual recognition. For Arendt, then, visibility is a prerequisite for free political activity while its obverse is not only the condition of loneliness but of oppression (Berger, 2009).

In John B Thompson's (2005) account, Arendt's prerequisite becomes institutionalised in modern media. Thompson makes the connection between visibility as a constitutive aspect of our political condition and the uses of various communication media. At issue is what he refers to as ‘mediated visibility’, both a tool for political power but also a means by which to hold accountable those who wield it (2005: 31). But not only did the development of late-modern communication media transform the relationship between political incumbents and their constituency, it opened the way for the presentation of self in the public domain to become a social phenomenon at large; it ushered in what Thompson calls ‘ “the society of self-disclosure”: a society in which it was possible, and indeed, increasingly common for … individuals to appear before distant audiences and lay bare some aspect of their self or their personal life’ (2005: 38). The influence of digital communication technology has precipitated a qualitative transformation of the public, which ‘has become a complex space of information flows in which words, images and symbolic content compete for attention as individuals and organizations seek to make themselves seen and heard’. This intensifies dramatically both the possibilities of political visibility but also of obscurity and so mobilizes ‘struggles for visibility’ in the public domain (Thompson, 2005: 49).

Although, if we follow Beate Rössler (2005), the value of privacy may indeed lie in its connection with liberal notions of autonomy, on the level of routine, everyday interactions such considerations are likely to be far from people's minds. This raises another concern: that especially online practices and modes of self-presentation undermine a shared understanding of privacy from the ground up, if you will, and so weaken its legal defensibility. The perceived danger is that far from mere self-presentation and self-promotion; public disclosing behaviour becomes the default. Those who do not join the game are then rendered losers in the competition for publicity as a valued resource. This anxiety fundamentally underpins Bauman's critique. It also resonates strongly with Foucault's argument that in panoptical society visibility is not only a trap, but that we are each implicated in constructing the trap for ourselves and others. As for Bauman so for Foucault, the modern subject becomes ‘the principle of its own subjection’ (Foucault, 1991: 203).

Performing visibility/disclosure

Bauman's critique narrows its scope to the performative and disciplinary logics of self-disclosure. Taking into account the current digital redefinition of privacy, Bauman's story appears incomplete. Although visibility is integral to human recognition and social life, it is also entangled with performances of concealment, with strategic self-presentation – dynamics that complicate the narrative of voluntary, narcissistic self-disclosure. We might ask: when we assume that people are trading in their privacy for the sake of individualised self-promotion, what are people – what are we – trading in for what?

There can be little doubt that we are willing to divulge the kinds of personal information we were once at pains to keep from public eyes and ears (remember the phone booth?). Bauman's ‘solid modernity’ was, amongst other things, also characterised by civility, discretion and decorum which, in the Western context, developed over centuries and was shored up by shared and growing feelings of shame (Elias, 2012). In liquid modernity it seems that this process is being reversed; that decadent shamelessness is on the rise. This is accompanied by the collapse of public role-playing alongside demands for emotional authenticity, an ‘intimate tyranny’ that weakens institutions, erodes protective public personas and breeds distrust of the rituals that once enabled civic life (Sennett, 1977: 337). On the other hand, there is greater freedom to express personal experiences and desires, but also fewer spaces into which to retreat to avoid crudeness and ‘too much information’.

Whatever the complexities, a few things need to be kept in mind. Obviously few if any people open the full range of private behaviours, practices and attitudes to public scrutiny. More importantly, when people do disclose aspects of themselves and their private lives to others in (digital) public forums, they perform. Erving Goffman's (1959) depiction of human behaviour seems to make more explicit sense today than it did at the time when he wrote his seminal text because digital platforms are essentially performance platforms. Performance, however, includes various degrees of theatricality, dissimulation, intentional misrepresentation, deception, camouflage and subterfuge. In other words, we cannot assume that even the most shameless marketers of the self, the most prolific of Bauman's attention-seekers, or the most shameless disclosers of private information show their authentic selves or their private lives at all. Visibility and dissimulation go hand in hand. This is true even, or perhaps especially, in circumstances where visibility and disclosure are mandated to the extent that privacy is reduced to mere remnant slivers of possibility. As the excesses of Stalinism have shown, whole cultures have thrived on dissimulation as a mode of everyday communication, as a survival tactic in conditions of imperative confession and denunciation (Figes, 2007; Fitzpatrick, 1999). Under the ‘liquid modern’ mandate of visibility, something similar if far less dramatic obtains: we might be disconcerted by what we see, but we cannot be sure as to whom or what we are looking at.

Notes on prepositional sociology

Recognising the performative complexities of visibility invites a broader reconsideration of how individuals negotiate the conditions of modern life. Rather than viewing them solely through the lens of domination, resignation or capitulation, it is crucial to continue to attend to the everyday practices through which people creatively sustain meaning. Some years ago, Maria Markus, in response to her students’ complaints about the state of the world, said something to the effect of ‘everybody tries to live as best as they can. How they do it, despite it all we also need to think about.’ I imagine that this is what she may have said to Bauman to moderate some of his more dire pronouncements about people (about us?) and their (our?) motivations. As a preposition, Markus' ‘despite’ introduces a relationship of concession, contrast or opposition. I can imagine a dialogue between the two Polish sociologists on the theme of ‘prepositional sociology’, a sociology that remains aware that its concepts and diagnoses are at every turn outpaced by the extraordinary creativity of so-called ‘ordinary’ people (us?). They might even agree that a prepositional sociology demands methodological humility not only vis-à-vis other disciplines’ attempts to understand the world, but especially with respect to everyday endeavours to build meaningful lives; that sociology cannot be content with judging individual successes and failures against prevailing societal standards any more than we want them (ourselves?) to cave in to the demands for ‘biographical solutions to systemic contradictions’ (Beck quoted in Bauman, 2001: 101); that a prepositional sociological sensibility continues to take seriously everyday efforts to turn ‘fate … into destiny’ (Heller and Fehér, 1988: 27).

Remaining open to a prepositional methodological attitude that takes seriously the ‘despite’, the ‘and yet’ and ‘nonetheless’ as elaborated in practices is in fact not something Bauman was a stranger to. In Towards a Critical Sociology (Bauman, 2010), he outlined the limitations of conventional sociology, critiquing its acceptance of societal structures as ‘nature-like’ and unchallengeable. Arguing for a sociology rooted in emancipatory reason, which aims to question and transcend the routines and assumptions embedded in commonsense, Bauman's version of critical sociology emphasises human liberation by addressing the constraints placed on action and consciousness by societal norms. But is also charges us to keep endeavouring to understand those everyday practices that always already transcend or creatively reconstruct the norms social scientists identify. The intent here is not to advocate for toxic positivity in the face of real problems, but to advocate for ongoing attempts at trying to understand and explain concrete examples of ‘ordinary’ practices that resist – just so – the more dehumanising social dynamics of modernity.

Friendship, or the subtle anarchy of doing things for their own sake

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt makes the following observation:

From the point of view of totalitarian rulers, a society devoted to chess for the sake of chess is only in degree different and less dangerous than a class of farmers for the sake of farming. Himmler quite aptly defined the SS member as the new type of man who under no circumstances will ever do ‘a thing for its own sake.’ (2017: 422)

Friendship occupies a unique position in capitalist modernity. Rooted in everyday life, friendship is both a private and a public relationship. Because it is non-institutionalised, it allows for an exceptional degree of relational co-construction, shaped by the idiosyncrasies of each person. Unavailable for ‘socially reproductive’ purposes, ‘a democratized arena of elective affinities, in which persons culturally value each other for their true, that is their unproductive selves’ (Silver, 1989: 295), friendship is built on no more than the difficult-to-articulate quality of mutual liking. These are elements that resonate strongly with intimacy as ‘emotional, spiritual and bodily closeness as a chosen form of life’, providing ‘a space for mutual disclosure, recognition, communication, and for an innovative formation of the relationship … on the basis of mutual trust and respect’ (Markus, 2010: 95–96; original italics). That intimacy is at the heart of friendship's generative freedom whose preconditions were already articulated by Hegel: we ‘possess this freedom’, he writes, ‘in the form of feeling (Empfindung), for example in friendship and love’, for here, ‘we are not one-sidedly within ourselves, but willingly limit ourselves with reference to another, even while knowing ourselves in this limitation as ourselves’, so that we gain ‘self-awareness only by regarding the other as other’ (1991: 52).

Although Honneth (1992) integrates Hegel's conception into his theory of recognition in which this type of intimacy is treated as a fundamental human need, he does not parse the different expectations that pertain to institutionalised love and non-institutionalised friendship (Blatterer, 2018). Bauman's (2003) sharp critique of ‘the frailty of human bonds’, on the other hand, sidelines friendship. Not so Agnes Heller. Reflecting on how to lead a satisfied life in dissatisfied society, she echoes Hegel: ‘We can succeed at least on one count: we can shape our personal relationships, for example friendships, as relationships of self-determination’, for it is here that ‘we have already a social space of self-determination where our own self-determination and that of others presuppose one another’ (Heller and Fehér, 1988: 37). Belonging to the register of modern needs that are not subsumable under the rubric of the wants for fame, wealth or power, friendship resists precisely those instrumental values that nourish the culture of capitalism.

In this respect, friendship bears a latent affinity with prefigurative politics, a kind of politics that calls for the enactment of alternative forms of life that subvert the dominant order not merely through direct opposition, but through the material and affective realisation of alternative ways of being (Monticelli, 2021). And yet, friendship is not a relationship that is necessarily orientated towards politics. Whether or not it is harnessed to political projects is personal and private business. At the same time, there is nothing about friendship to prevent political engagement. But friendship can just as easily be privatistic, exclusionary or disengaged from broader structures of domination. That too belongs to its freedom. And as well it might. For, as Heller reminds us, the ‘need for non-participation’ needs to be included in radical democratic projects, since the imposition of political participation ‘would amount to a constraint on human needs which is itself detrimental to autonomy’ (Heller and Fehér, 1988: 41; original italics).

The critical moment to remain aware of, rather, is this: friendship continues to exist as a form of intimacy qua freedom. It does so despite modernity's alienating drift because it is both of it and its other. Adorno writes:

The practical orders of life, while purporting to benefit man, serve in a profit economy to stunt human qualities, and the further they spread the more they sever everything tender. For tenderness between people is nothing other than the awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose, a solace still glimpsed by those embroiled in purposes; a legacy of old privileges promising a privilege-free condition. (2005: 41)

I imagine Maria, having poured her friend Zygmunt a generous glass of Campari Soda, raising her glass and, with a mischievous glint in her eye, proposing a toast: ‘Here's to “the despite”.’