After Lévinas

The ‘ethical turn’

Can the moral party of two survive beyond the arrival of the Third? It is this question that has troubled Bauman since his earliest encounters with Lévinas (1989, 1992a, 1992b, 1995; Bauman and Tester, 2001), and which has persisted throughout his numerous texts on politics, globalization and consumerism (1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2008b, 2010; Bauman and Donskis 2013). However, it is perhaps the title of Bauman’s Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? (2008b) that best expresses this problematic. Expanding the title somewhat, we may say that the question that Bauman (2008b) asks is: How can ethics, as an experience which emerges within my encounter with the other, and which places me under an infinite and inalienable responsibility to that other, be instantiated within a set of social structures which have rendered so many processes, individuals and questions, beyond the immediate concern for one’s own self-satisfaction, both morally and politically adiaphoric? This question will remain at the centre of my discussion. However, in order to respond to it, I will first of all explore how Bauman conceives of the history of ethical reason.

For Bauman (1987, 1989, 1993), the question of ethics has tended towards positing a fixed code or norm which ought to be followed. Within orthodox religion, monarchist or absolutist regimes, ethics simply requires obedience to a set of rules made and enforced by someone else (Bauman, 1987, 1993). The structure of ‘solid’ modernity was also underpinned by such logic. Everything was to be ordered in accordance with a strict set of codes and norms in order to force the great multitude into shape. Again, ethics was posited as simply the following of these norms; an attempt to erase ambivalence, uncertainty and the ‘nonaporetic’ (Bauman, 1993: 9), which, as we will see, are for Bauman at the centre of the human condition. For modern legislators, however, the human was conceived as inherently disorderly, and in need of cultivation. Thus, ‘to assure that free individuals do what is right, some form of enforcement had to be necessary’ (Bauman, 1993: 7). Placing some in the position of legislator, those with the legitimacy to develop and enforce the norms, and others in the camp of those to be legislated on the behalf of, those who lacked the reason to release themselves from, as Immanuel Kant (2007: 29) would say, their ‘self-incurred tutelage’, was a necessary part of the modern will-to-order (Bauman, 1987).

This history of legislative reason has been presented by Bauman (1987, 1989, 1991) in a number of places and constitutes a consistent theme within his work. As a way to counter these rigid ethical frameworks, Bauman has repeatedly affirmed that the activity of humanity exceeds the setting in which it is enacted. In books such as Culture as Praxis (1973), Socialism: The Active Utopia (1976a) and Towards a Critical Sociology (1976b), the ‘ought’ is often elevated over the ‘is’; possibility over actuality; and ‘active utopia’ over ‘utopia’ as a blueprint for society which can be actualized in the world through force. What is to be done becomes a question detached from a commitment to the ‘is’, and the human is conceived as ‘he-who-hopes’ (1976b: 112), forever pushing forward into a future termed as yet to come, and always moving beyond its finite limitations (1976a). Some of these expressions are, as we will see, familiar from Bauman’s (1993) postmodern ethics, but as a brief glance over his earlier work shows, they were not specific to his postmodern or ethical turn. Rather they were already developed to some degree in the preceding decades through the concepts of utopia, possibility and hope, attributed to thinkers including Saint Paul (Bauman, 1976b) and Ernst Bloch (Bloch, 1986). It could be suggested that these ideas made Bauman hospitable to Lévinas (1979, 1981), in particular concerning the opposition (if we can use this word so lightly!) between ontology and ethics, or totality and infinity. Nevertheless the encounter with Lévinas greatly changed the character of these ideas. It will be the aim of this section to show how.

The explicit turn towards Lévinas is made in the Afterword to Modernity and the Holocaust (Bauman, 1989). Here Lévinas is identified as providing an alternative to the society-deification of Emile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons, as well as the existentialism and individualism of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. For Bauman, Lévinas provided a possible passage between the Scylla of sociological determinism and the Charybdis of philosophical solipsism or postmodern relativism; ‘a starting point for a truly different and original sociological approach to morality, able to disclose and articulate such aspects of modern society as the orthodox approaches leave invisible’ (Bauman, 1989: 182). Following the fall of ‘actually existing socialism’, the intensification of processes of globalization, and the emergence of postmodern styles of thought, the world which was emerging after 1989 contained for Bauman (1993: 13–14) a chance, if not a promise, of displacing the ‘solid’ ethics of modernity with the ‘fluid’ morality of a thinker like Lévinas. Such an ethics, reformulated as having its foundations on an innate, yet incredibly fragile and elusive, moral impulse would constitute a release of human energies; a new way of dethroning and overcoming the ‘is’, or of having done with the gardening state ethics of ‘solid’ modernity (Bauman, 1987, 1991).

Indeed, the displacement of ontology is the central idea of Lévinas (1979), formed through his engagement with and against the thought of the towering figures of German philosophy, Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl. Against Husserl, Lévinas opposes the philosophical strategy of bracketing the ‘I’ to discover its irreducible and singular essence, with the notion of the ‘radical otherness of the other’ (Waldenfels, 2002: 63). Thus, rather than treating the other as the intentional content of thought, or merely an object of perception, the other is situated as fundamentally primary, anarchically displacing my claims to autonomy and self-legislation. Against Heidegger, Lévinas (1979) opposes the ontologically structure of being-with (Mitsein), which is said to operate on the assumption of symmetry and sameness, with the ethical demand of being-for (Fürsein), which assumes asymmetry and difference. According to Lévinas (1979), Heidegger’s ontology had little to say about the other, and as such could not respond to the radical demand contained within the structure of being-for (Fürsein). Ethics is therefore rearticulated as ‘first philosophy’, as it is the disruptive experience of the other which comes before thought, language and Being (Lévinas, 1979).

This notion of being-for, understood as a primordial ethical encounter with the other as Face, is articulated through the concept of responsibility. For both Lévinas (2006) and Bauman (1993), the story of Cain and Abel provides a way of elucidating this concept. Unlike writers such as René Girard (2004), the main focus is on the moment at which ‘someone’ (Lévinas, 2006: 94) asks Cain where his brother Abel is, and Cain’s response, which echoes throughout the history of humanity: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ According to Bauman (1993), such a response is the birth of immorality, as the possibility of not being for the other is raised. As Lévinas states, ‘Cain’s response is sincere. Only the ethical is absent there; the answer is solely from ontology; I am I and he is he. We are beings ontologically separate’ (Lévinas, cited in Bauman, 1993: 70). Being-with understood from this perspective therefore includes being-separate-from, as being a singular, unique and autonomous self who has nothing to do with the other.

Being-for-the-other is therefore situated as a very particular encounter with an-other, but at the same time exceeds this particularity and points to infinity (Lévinas, 1979, 1981). But it is also based on an idea of precariousness, that is, the necessity of one human to care for another without demanding anything in return. As Lévinas (cited in Bauman, 1993: 85) states, ‘reciprocity is his affair’. This notion of giving without expectation of return, or disinterestedness, is an idea which fuels the notion of charity (caritas) within the theological tradition of thinkers from St Paul to St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas (Armstrong, 1999). Yet it also operates as the conditio sine qua non of moral responsibility for Bauman (1993) and Lévinas (1981), though Junge (2001: 113) has attempted to contest this nonreciprocal element in Lévinasian thought, stating that: ‘This basis for the constitution of sociality is extremely weak.’

Nevertheless, for Bauman (1993), this asymmetry and non-reciprocity are essential to ethics, as to demand something in return would be to refuse my obligation to the other, defined through the other’s weakness rather than his or her strength. For both Bauman and Lévinas, ‘What can you offer me in return?’ is a question which has nothing to do with ethics. As we saw with Cain, at the moment at which one’s acts become conditional or based on a notion of reciprocity (in the case of Cain, God’s approval), one is no longer acting ethically. Summing up the extreme status of this demand, Lévinas (cited in Robbins, 2001: 1) states that: ‘One must yield to the other the first place in everything, from the après vous before an open door right up to the disposition – hardly possible, but holiness demands it – to die for the other.’ What is worth noting in this is the impossibility, not the ease, of this demand. Therefore, as Bauman will affirm regarding Lévinas: ‘morality is the transcendence of being’ or rather ‘the chance of such transcendence’ (Bauman, 1993: 72). Bauman here is again taking up the language of Bloch (cited in Bauman, 1976a: 35) who writes of ‘transcending without transcendence’, therefore highlighting the ever-renewed and ever hoped-for chance of overthrowing ontology, rather than its certainty or even its possibility; ‘hardly possible’, as Lévinas says, but necessary. However, whereas in Socialism: The Active Utopia (Bauman, 1976a), this had been seen as part of the dynamics of human culture, and was therefore a collective process, it is now attributed to the ‘moral self’ and its capacity to ‘rise above being, through its defiance of being’ (Bauman, 1993: 72).

A sociological morality?

Despite Bauman’s (1989, 1993, 2001) claim that the position he cultivates is not in opposition to traditional sociological assumptions, as Manni Crone (2008) has observed, Bauman’s stance on morality is nevertheless incompatible with the Durkheimian tradition, wherein morality operates as a social fact which places constraints on potentially harmful or irrational individual actions. Indeed, such a strain of thinking can be found in Durkheim’s (2002) lectures on moral education where it is stated that without the inculcation of a moral sentiment which accords with the goals and orientation of the nation—in Durkheim’s case, the Third Republic (Tiryakian, 1988)—the individual will be emotionally maladjusted, intellectually lost and thoroughly asocial. Morality is therefore conceived by Durkheim as restraining the non-social side of individuals, and is a necessary social force in the maintenance of a just order (Bauman, 2005). Bauman’s opposition to this position is of course thoroughly Lévinasian, as for him the individual often has an obligation to resist socialization, or rather the elevation of society to the level of the sacred (Bauman, 1989, 1993; Caruana, 2002).

However, the move towards a philosopher such as Lévinas in the articulation of a ‘sociological’ ethics is a curious move for a self-proclaimed sociologist to make, especially considering the degree to which society (or in Lévinasian terms ‘the Third’) is suspended in the development of what is, more or less, a pure ethics. We should therefore ask whether, and to what extent, one can simply ‘bracket away’ what for a sociologist such as Norbert Elias (1978) must be taken as a given, that is, the fundamental interdependence of large groups of human beings, reliant on each other for a variety of reasons, in a variety of circumstances and in a variety of ways. Surely a sociological morality must at the very least assume the historical, cultural and interdependent character of any moral position and as such always think such a morality in collective (though not necessarily collectivist) terms? It is precisely this question that has been directed at Bauman by theorists as varied as Casanova (1995), Shilling and Mellor (1998), Vetlesen (2007), Crone (2008), and Campbell and Till (2010). Yet it also captures the general critique of Lévinas formulated by Alain Badiou (2001) and Slavoj Žižek (2002, 2006, 2007).

As such, many secondary texts on Bauman’s turn to Lévinas have tended to focus on and contest the ahistorical approach to both morality and the individual (Campbell and Till, 2010); the reliance on the individual as the site of ethical responsibility and ultimate culpability (Shilling and Mellor, 1998; Vetlesen, 2007); his attempts to claim that the moral party of two is a universal ethical experience (Casanova, 1995); his lack of clarity around the use of theological motifs and general failure to enact the choice between God or Society—the Durkheimian question par excellence (Casanova, 1995)—as well as the empirically and theoretically unqualified statement that ethics is better than ontology (Campbell and Till, 2010). For such writers, Bauman’s ethics contains an almost pre-sociological, if not a theological, inflexion, and one which ought to be supplemented, or replaced entirely, by an approach that stresses the dynamic and historical character of human beings, an approach consistent with his earlier, more explicitly sociological, outlook (Junge, 2001; Campbell and Till, 2010). For Campbell and Till (2010) this is to be achieved through situating Bauman as a thinker of resistance, a concept which for them is already contained within the structure of being-with-others and being-in-the-world. Ethics is therefore seen as arising out of the dynamics of social formations, and resistance is that which provides a limit to the exercise of power without having to rely on an a priori individual experience (Campbell and Till, 2010). Ethics is here secondary, with the analysis of the relations of power in which it is possible for one to act or resist becoming of primary importance.

Returning to the question which opened the first section of this discussion, it could be argued that along the lines of these various criticisms, there seems to be a problem contained within the question itself. To what extent, may we ask, can the realm of ethics be said to be separate from the world in which it ought to be instantiated, or in which it ought to be given a chance (Bauman, 2008b)? Despite the attempt to imbue sociology with a moral purpose, Bauman’s strategy for doing so appears to rely on the phenomenological a priori distinction between ethics and society, or the individual moral impulse and social formations (the Third). If, as Bauman perhaps believes to be the case, society and ethics, or in Lévinas’s (1979) terminology, totality and infinity, comprise two different orders (the Third and the moral party of two), with the second having priority over the first, then it would seem that society can only ever be a devaluation or negation of the ‘primordial’ I–Thou relation. As Bauman (1993: 116) states, society even threatens to efface this relation completely, providing support for the moral self ‘much like the rope supports the hanged man’. Even when society is at its best, it is still perennially incapable of becoming as good as the ‘kindness’ which sustains it (Lévinas, 2006; see Bauman, 1993), continually risking, as Lévinas (2006: 199) has put it, the fall ‘into a totalitarian and Stalinist regime’.

Bauman’s response to this may be that such a criticism comes from ontology, and not ethics which gives pride of place to sensation and the non- or pre-discursive (Bauman, 1993). In stressing the un-sociological character of Bauman’s project, we then perhaps risk giving too much credit to ontology, or ‘society’, therefore ignoring the radical demand contained within his ethical vision: to be for the other. Again, Bauman’s (1993, 1995) opposition to ontology via Lévinas has a continuity with claims made in books such as Culture as Praxis (1973) and Socialism: The Active Utopia (1976a) where the ‘ought’ is affirmed over the ‘is’, and that it is the condition of always being ahead of itself that defines humanity, the constant opening into the not-yet or constantly receding horizon (Bauman, 1976a). As Bauman (1995: 67) says, ‘the good is in the future’; it is always to come, and it impels us towards it through our ethical encounter with the other. At the moment at which the good, or the other, is no longer placed in the future to come, ‘they are no more’ (1995: 67).

In affirming the primacy of the other, Bauman (1993, 1995) therefore affirms the incompleteness of the present; that there is always an injustice to be challenged, that there is always another to whom I am responsible, and that one should not be content with merely having followed one’s legal or finite duties. As such, the position that Campbell and Till (2010) attribute to Foucault’s concept of resistance and his ‘hyper- and pessimistic activism’ is, in part, applicable to Bauman’s ethics: ‘there is always something to do’ (Foucault, cited in Campbell and Till, 2010: 178). Like Foucault’s thoughts on political resistance, this requires a constant engagement and a choice by the individual against the ‘government of individualisation’ (Foucault, 2002: 330). However, unlike Foucault, it responds to a singular demand arising from the other, constituting what Simon Critchley (2012: 221) has called the ‘resistance of that which has no resistance’. As Critchley (2012) puts it, the other resists my demands for autonomy and self-sufficiency, undoing my ontological claims to authenticity, and places me under a responsibility to care for the other, a responsibility which is always in excess of my finite capacities. According to Bauman (1989), sociology has hitherto been incapable of articulating this excess, its moral imagination tending to rely far too much on the already existing circumstances of society. Lévinas therefore allows Bauman to think this excess through a concern for the impossible and infinite demand of being-for-the-other; a demand which is never completed.

Formulating a response to the ethical demand

It is for this reason that we cannot separate the ethical demand from the political response, as it is precisely my response-ability which is called for. As Jacques Derrida (1999: 30–1) puts it: ‘the Third does not wait; it is there from the “first” epiphany of the face in the face to face’. In Derrida’s stress on the omnipresence of the Third in the ‘first’, we could then suggest that the other not only demands a political response, but must always be received through a certain set of linguistic, cultural and social frameworks. Both Judith Butler (2012) and Todd May (1997) have been particularly emphatic on this point, albeit in different ways, stating that the Third can only be bracketed away for so long. Even Lévinas himself maintained that ethics must always be ‘incarnated in the life of the political realm’ (Critchley, 2004: 173), and cannot be separated from the secular world or placed within the comforting and safe space of what Ernst Bloch (2009: 120) has called the ‘post-mortal beyond’. Rather it is always related to the here and now, even if it is not always reducible to it (Caygill, 2002). As such, there is a necessity of the Third, the necessity of ‘comparison, coexistence, contemporaneousness, [and] assembling’ (Lévinas, cited in Derrida 1999: 30)—in short, the necessity of politics and justice. It is this move that Critchley (2004) has seen as both necessary and disquieting.

If this ‘disquieting’ movement between ethics and politics underpins the thought of Lévinas, then it is a tension which is arguably carried over into Bauman, and is maintained in his work from the end of the 1980s onwards. As Bauman has stated, his work on politics was the result of a ‘journey’ which began with Lévinas, forming the basis for his conviction that the moral choice and the action cannot be separated: ‘Lévinas’s decision to locate the issue of good and evil in human condition … leads to politics’ (Bauman and Tester, 2001: 131). Yet, just how the two are related is not so clear. Is the ‘journey’ from ethics to politics a journey between two separate spaces, and one which leaves Lévinas behind in search of pastures new? Or does Lévinas accompany Bauman on this journey? Although Bauman writes that Lévinas produces a new ethics which requires ‘a new politics’ (1995: 281), it ought to be asked: what is the character of this so-called ‘new’ politics?

Like Lévinas (1979), Bauman (1993, 1995, 2001) often displays a deep suspicion towards communitarianism and the movement of collectives in general. This wariness is perhaps due to the violent memory of the twentieth century, a memory which also underpins the thought of Lévinas (2006). One would therefore no doubt find hovering in the back of Bauman’s mind the violence entailed in the General Strike (Sorel, 1999); the war enthusiasm of figures such as Georg Simmel and Max Weber in 1914 (Rabinbach, 1997); the Nazi rallies at Nuremburg in the 1930s; the love of war and joyful dissolution of the self in Marinetti’s (1971) Futurism; and the street marches of the Black Shirts in Italy during the 1920s and 1930s (Bauman, 1999: 94). In these instances, the collective, the crowd or the group becomes a force which carries the individual away; a form of immanent transcendence, or what Durkheim (2001) calls ‘collective effervescence’, which relieves the individual of his or her responsibility and agency through elevating the collective to the level of the sacred (Bauman, 1995).

In Bauman’s (1993) first attempts to move from the moral party of two to the Third, the choices he presents between social organization and sociality, or structure and counter-structure (Turner, 1995) are ‘as far as morality is concerned … much the same’ (Bauman, 1993: 132). In the case of social organization, one must limit, organize, and lay down laws and norms. As Bauman (1993: 120) states, social organization is ‘the vehicle of classification and differentiation’, a pure expression of the will to order. In the case of sociality, on the other hand, one becomes concerned with ‘rendering the discursive redemption of rules problematic, and cancelling the instrumental meaning of action’ (1993: 119). This second possibility creates a rupture in the will to order characteristic of social organization. However, both are said to ‘enforce and obtain obedience—though one by design, the other by default’ (1993: 132): in the case of the first, through the principle of legislative reason or obedience to social norms; and in the case of the second, through the destructive and Dionysian energy of the crowd or group mind (Bauman, 1993). The appeal to the group therefore hinders the moral self, while nevertheless allowing ‘the self to survive in the wide, strange world that has no home for morality’ (1993: 132, my emphasis). Of course, as we have seen, mere survival is for Bauman not an ethical stance: one must be willing to die for the other (Bauman, 1992a; Lévinas 2006).

With this statement—‘the world that has no home for morality’—we again arrive back at the starting point of this discussion, attempting to find a world in which ethics would have a chance. Yet it would seem that with the attempt to move from the moral party of two to the Third, every path is fraught with danger and as such thoroughly insufficient. In moving from the two to the Third, the individual always becomes caught up a maelstrom which either thrusts it into the violence of the crowd—for Bauman (1993: 132), in the sociality of the crowd ‘we dance together, we punch together, we burn together, we kill together’—or the ethical indifference of the legislator or bureaucrat, transforming everyone into a potential Eichmann. Despite this, Keith Tester (2004) has made the case for a distinction between the pre-social and pre-societal, referring to the interchangeable nature of these in Bauman’s work as a ‘terminological slippage’ (2004: 144). For Tester (2004), Bauman is not arguing that morality is pre-social, but rather ‘pre-societal’, as morality entails a form of human togetherness or sociality which is lost upon the appearance of society and is as such ‘rooted in relationships of togetherness that ontologically and epistemologically precede societal intervention and manipulation’ (2004: 145, my emphasis).

This position was ‘bolstered’ by Bauman’s reading of Lévinas, for whom ‘responsibility is the essence of human togetherness’ (Tester, 2004: 145). Through this reading, social morality and responsibility for the other become bound to one another, said to resist the encroachment of societal imposition and external management in favour of a spontaneous, cooperative form of sociality. Responsibility for the other is therefore made possible by the cultivation of forms of social togetherness which have been increasingly diminished by processes of both ‘solid’ and ‘liquid’ modernity, creating a situation of ethical indifference towards, or fear of, the other. Stated otherwise, liquid modernity prevents the humane entry of the Third as justice into the moral party. This barrier towards social justice and the tendency towards ethical indifference have only intensified in the late twentieth and into the twenty-first century (Bauman, 1999, 2008, 2012). With the transformation of society from a society of producers to a society of consumers, responsibility for others and hence social justice has been transformed into responsibility for self (Bauman, 2008, 2012). This process Bauman sees as starting in the 1980s, as non-political agencies became more and more significant in shaping the lives of individuals, transforming the potential citizen into a mere ‘consumer of goods’ (Bauman and Tester, 2001: 151).

According to Bauman (1999), we have witnessed a growing lack of public space, or even a public which could be said to occupy it; the gradual ‘separation and increasing gap of power and politics’ (1999: 97); the rise of the society of consumers and the spread of a consumer mindset which emphasizes individual gratification over long-term collective projects (Bauman, 2008); but also an increasing list of global crises to which we ought to respond, ranging from the economic to the environmental (Bauman, 2012). Furthermore, as Judith Butler (2004) has observed, we are today confronted with endless images of faces of all kinds, endless demands from others, to such an extent that we simply cannot bring ourselves to respond. We are thrown back on our own resources, more and more incapable of knowing to whom and how to respond (Butler, 2004, 2012). Within this setting, we are required to formulate our own responses, to seek out our own solutions, but more often than not only in those areas that concern our immediate happiness, far removed from the inhibiting and suffocating demands of others (Bauman, 1999, 2000, 2008). Today it is no longer—if it ever really was—our failure to respond to others that is called into question, but our failure to achieve individual happiness (Bauman, 2004, 2008).

Describing a dual process, Bauman (1999) writes that, on the one hand, we are witnessing the growing incapacity for political agencies to make the kinds of decisions which would engender meaningful change. Such decisions instead exist on a global level and are motivated by the interests of capital rather than the protection or cultivation of meaningful and dignified human lives. On the other hand, we have witnessed a growing decline of political will on the behalf of both politicians and the population, as well as a decline in the belief that the world could be better or different from today. Advocates of the ‘TINA (“there is no alternative”) syndrome’ (Davis, 2008: 165) are therefore charged with a concern only for the finite, of privileging what ‘is’—individual desire, consumerism, the eternal present of ‘liquid’ modernity—over what might be. This, we could argue, is due in part to the adiaphorizing effects of consumer capitalism, which places more and more things outside of the moral conscience of individuals, while at the same time taking decision-making powers out of the hands of political agencies; a situation summed up by Bauman (2012: 24) as one of ‘impotence’.

One of the solutions to this crisis is seen to be in the restoration of the agora; the space in which the private and public meet ‘in a meaningful way’ (Bauman, 1993: 3). As Mark Dawson (2012) has recently argued, the choice to be for or against the other has to be enacted in a space in which it could be heard, and through which it could take effect on larger social and political agencies. Thus, the possibility of making the choice requires the creation of a ‘fully developed democratic sphere’, or the ‘expansion of institutionalised moral responsibility’ (Dawson, 2012: 565): the expansion of the agora. This emphasis on the creation of a new agora has perhaps led Bauman towards a conception of politics which remains within the sphere of legislation and government, or what Lévinas (1981: 198) calls archic concerns: moments of foundation, beginnings and sovereignty. As Bauman (in Bauman and Tester, 2001: 145) puts it, politics ‘requires … a system of laws that guards human rights’, as well as ‘the restoration of the commensurability of power and politics … that can be performed solely … by (alas not yet existing) global law-making, executive and juridical institutions’ (Bauman, 2010: 204). However, to do this we first ‘need to raise ourselves to the status of the “global people”’ (Bauman, in Bauman and Tester, 2001: 153). The recognition of our global humanity is said to be the precondition for the creation of the agora space (Dawson, 2012). Yet, precisely what is designated by ‘we’ and ‘our’ in these statements is often unclear.

Such concerns about what kind of approach needs to be adopted run alongside Bauman’s (2010, 2012) recent reflections on the ‘current interregnum’, the moment of uncertainty when the old King has died and the new one has not yet been crowned, a term translated by Gramsci into the language of ‘the socio-political-legal order’ (Bauman, 2012: 50). This may not necessarily be a new politics for Bauman’s (1993, 1995, 2008) new ethics, but it is certainly a kind of response to the new conditions of increasing global interdependence which requires individuals to think beyond their own finite settings. Nevertheless, both Crone (2008) and Carleheden (2008) have taken issue with Bauman’s conception of politics throughout the last decade, and Campbell and Till (2010: 186) have refused what they see as Bauman’s legislative turn, favouring instead his earlier work on the active utopia as a permanent critique of the present.

For Carleheden (2008: 188), Bauman’s political sociology ultimately falls flat due to the ‘far too simple’ contrast between the agora and consumer society, constituting a negative form of utopianism which fails to discuss how it could be ‘realized in a modern complex society’. Furthermore, Bauman’s analysis is said to reduce the individual in society to a ‘stimulus response machine’ (Carleheden, 2008: 188), situating it as simply lost or swallowed up in the crowd, and willingly casting off its responsibility and potential for agency in exchange for more security and greater pleasure. Such an approach has been witnessed above in relation to Bauman’s analysis of the crowd, and, according to Carleheden, stands in stark contrast to his more utopian formulations which establish a ‘limit to how far the individual can be pacified and objectified in this world’ (2008: 189). This means that Bauman ends up presenting two completely different images of the individual; on the one hand, the individual endowed with a moral impulse of Lévinas and, on the other, the individual of classical sociological reason who merely moves, or even becomes one with the crowd (Wrong, 1995; Borch, 2012), finding any opportunity to cast off its moral responsibility and capacity for agency (Carleheden, 2008). To put it another way, the individual all too often makes the wrong choice.

As has been shown throughout this discussion, Bauman presents a sociologically malnourished account of ethical responsibility. In the move from his earlier work on socialism as an active utopia to the preoccupation with Lévinas, Bauman (1993) carries over the notions of openness, possibility and hope, but in doing so places them within the pure space of the moral party of two and individual impulse. It is this moment that produces an interesting continuity between the active utopia and being-for-the-other, as I am placed under an ethical obligation to resist totality for the sake of the other, who in turn resists my attempts at autonomy. Yet, as Carleheden (2008) shows, at the moment the ‘I’ becomes ‘we’, the individual, automaton-like, casts off its responsibility and enters the anarchic flow of the crowd, no longer capable of making any demands where they might make a difference. Collections of individuals are therefore situated as harmful to morality, and Bauman (1999) seemingly moves towards a more legislative position in order to bypass a positive analysis of collective actions.

Furthermore, despite Tester’s (2004) attempt to create a distinction between pre-social and pre-societal morality, it nevertheless remains the case that for Bauman sociality is not necessarily synonymous with morality. As has been shown above, sociality also entails exclusion and a refusal to be for the other if that other is a threat to one’s collective. This argument remains consistent with his objections to Durkheim, discussed at length in Postmodern Ethics (1993) and cited above. It may be argued that the category of the other contains some kind of reference to society; that as the individual must make a choice in relation to an-other, there is a social relation already implied in the other. Yet if we were to follow through with this argument, then the moral demand which the other solicits from ‘me’ must be understood through reference to social forms, and, by extension, the ways in which it is possible for me to respond, or even to recognize the other as another person (May, 1997). This primacy of the social, we may even call it society, therefore makes the case for a reappraisal and possible return to the Durkheimian tradition as the moral demand from the other could be seen as a moral demand coming from society. Therefore, Tester’s (2004) distinction seems more like an attempt to avoid the messiness and often sociological incoherence of Bauman’s ethics through collapsing humanity, the sphere of the social and the singular relation to the other into one. It is due to this lack of clarity around what the other is that Casanova (1995) has seen as central. If the other is not simply the other person, but constitutes an excess, then is this excess God or Society? Finally, although Bauman’s hopes for raising us to the level of a ‘global people’ are no doubt necessary, without any conception of politics beyond a vague allusion to the agora, or without any conception of a more active form of subjectivity which could exist beyond the moral party, Bauman’s thoughts on these issues become increasingly abstract, and are perhaps caught up in the same kind of impotence that characterizes the current separation of the ‘ought’ of politics and the ‘can’ of power.

Conclusion

This discussion has attempted to demonstrate the way in which Bauman took up the Lévinasian position at the end of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s. The first encounter with Lévinas was seen as a chance of unseating the rigid ethical frameworks of solid modernity, and replacing it with a much more fluid and open style of ethical thought. Thus, in an attempt to renew the ethical imaginary of postmodern society, Bauman emphasizes the individual as the site of responsibility, and as the one who should be called upon to respond to the demands of the other. As has been argued, this had a continuity with Bauman’s (1976a, 1976b) earlier position on utopia, possibility and hope, but became articulated through a conception of the individual as always in a position of responsibility to the other. Thus, the individual’s attempts at self-legislation are continually undone as there is always something more to do, a responsibility not yet responded to, or even anticipated.

For Bauman (1989, 1993), this provided a way of arguing for the necessity of resisting the claim that society is the origin of the good, affirming instead that the good is always yet to come. However, as we have seen, the move from ethics to politics is significantly under-developed. This, as has been argued above, is due to Bauman’s failure to conceive of collectives in a particularly positive way. As Carleheden (2008) has argued, on the movement to society, the individual becomes nothing more than a ‘stimulus-response machine’, no longer providing a limit to its objectification. Furthermore, Bauman relies on a notion of the agora and democracy which is significantly under-theorized, ultimately deferring responsibility to the international agencies, law-makers and governments of an ill-defined future. As such, though the question of ethics necessitated a move towards politics for Bauman, it did not necessarily demand a rethinking of the scope of politics, or what could count as a political gesture. In fact, Carleheden (2008) has even described Bauman’s politics as remaining within the boundaries of classical republican thought.

Nevertheless, Bauman’s emphasis on possibility, hope, the critique of the self-enclosed rational subject, and the necessity of responsibility offers a credible challenge to sociology, and demands a reinvigoration of its ethical imagination. Questions still remain about whether Lévinas is a possible way to do this, or whether his ethics remains trapped within a phenomenological tradition which fails to conceptualize anything beyond the individual’s experience. As a final thought, it may be worth comparing the notion of resistance and an-archy presented by Lévinas (1981: 194) with the idea of resistance which emerges within Campbell and Till’s (2010) reading of Bauman’s ‘active utopia’ alongside Foucault, alluded to earlier in this discussion. For them, socialism is ‘unrealizable on a state level’ as it should only be used ‘as a critical tool for challenging state governance’ (Campbell and Till, 2010: 182). This would perhaps renew the critical function of Bauman’s sociology, which is not concerned with acts of governance or with universalized moral impulses, but with a permanent act of disobedience, a permanent critique ‘directed against all reality’ (Bauman, 1976a: 130).