The Gardener metaphor is a concept introduced by Zygmunt Bauman . It refers to the contrast between cultures grown, produced, directed and designed on the one hand and wild or "natural" cultures on the other. In the former, the need for a power that exercises an artificial design prevails, since the garden in which society has become does not have the necessary resources for its own sustenance and self-reproduction, so it is dependent on this power. In wild cultures, on the other hand, the resources for self-reproduction were in the society itself and in its community ties, which allowed them to know what the weeds were, the weeds, and how to eliminate them.
These weeds that grow on the peripheries of society will be the poor understood as dangerous classes, on whom the forces of pastoral power are applied and fall , in Foucauldian words , although Bauman , in a more disturbing way, has pointed out that the complete realization The gardener state is found in the totalitarian state of the twentieth century, which finds its weeds either in the Jew or in any possible subject of the genocide. Ultimately, genocide would be the ultimate achievement of social gardening, the purification of weeds based on the concretion of an image of what the garden should be. Note that this metaphor is affirmed in the notion of Biopower and Biopolitics, and his anatomopolitical and biopolitical techniques, by Michel Foucault .
