Bauman's Gardener metaphor

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 .

Meaning of Bauman's liquid modernity explained

Zygmunt Bauman coined the term of liquid modernity to denote current times, based on the concepts of fluidity, change, flexibility, adaptation, among others. Bauman affirms that the "liquid" is a ruling metaphor of the modern age, since it undergoes continuous and irrecoverable changes. Likewise, the liquid is not fixed in space or tied to time, it moves easily, it cannot be stopped easily; and all these are at the same time fundamental characteristics of the current daily routines.

In the past, we were in a predictable and controllable world, a solid one. The routine, the short-term vision, the customs, the communities were some of its characteristics. All this panorama began to “melt”, changing that society that was stagnant and was too resistant to changes, for a liquid and malleable one. Bauman, exposes 5 items in which he develops the concept of liquid modernity: emancipation, individuality, space-time, work and community. 

According to Bauman, with the arrival of modernity, everything became individualized. Being modern meant being eternally one step ahead of yourself; that is, we had to transform ourselves into what each one is. As Jean Paul Sartre said : "It is not enough to be born a bourgeois, you have to live life as a bourgeois." Modernity changed the rules. The critical theory that defended individualism before the State that at that time oppressed everything, now the opposite happens. Today we seek to recover the public, since the individual has encompassed all strata. We live in a society of individuals because "everything has been individualized." Such a large system has been formed that now each individual is guilty of his destiny, of what happens to him or not.

Although Bauman is considered a "postmodern" thinker, he does not fit the term " postmodernist ", since he uses the concepts " solid modernity " and " liquid modernity " to characterize what he considers two sides of the same coin.

Bauman on Modernity and the Holocaust

The Holocaust, argues sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, poses a challenge that cannot be ignored for our conception of modernity and of human history as a whole. In his book Modernity and the Holocaust, Bauman developed the argument that the Holocaust should not be seen only as an event in Jewish history or as a regression to pre-modern barbarism. Similar to Theodore Adorno, Bauman's claim that the Holocaust breaks the assumption that humanity is evolving towards better and better versions of itself. The Holocaust should not be understood as a retreat in the process of human development but, and it is much more frightening, as a result of it. It must be seen that the Holocaust is deeply connected with modernity and its orderly efforts. Procedural rationality, the division of labor into smaller and smaller tasks, the sorting classification of different species and the tendency to see obedience to rules as something morally good, all played a role in carrying out the Holocaust. Bauman noted that for this reason modern societies have not fully understood the lessons of the Holocaust. The Holocaust, according to Bauman, looks like a painting hanging on the wall of human history without learning anything from it.