Zygmunt Bauman wasted lives; Modernity and its Outcasts

Introduction
1.in the beginning was design - Or the waste of order-building
2.are there too many of them? - Or thr waste of economic progress
3.to each waste its dumping site
4. culture of waste

Introduction
1. This book tells the story of modernity, but in a different way
2. –
3. Is modernity fashion or waste?is fashion throwing out of the old, or
theintroduction of something more beautiful? Is the ugly thrown out,
or is it ugly because it has become garbage? “The answers would
depend on stories echoing between the walls that rose out of the
memories of the stories told, repeated, listened to, ingested and
absorbed.” (note; the duality inherent to modernity and stories)
4. Waste is not merely technical problem
5. The planets full-not physically, but in human behaviour; there is no
more ‘no man’s land’, territory devoid of administration, lands
previously used as waste lands, dumping grounds for wasted humans
that are inevitably inherent to modernization: the side effect of, a)
order-building or the rejection of the undesirable, and of, b) economic
progress, the degradation of previously effective ways of doing things.
6. The disposal of wasted human is at the core of colonization and
imperial conquest, inevitable through the inequality of
developmentbetween thepriviledge part of the’ world, and the rest)
that allowed a global solution to a local problem.unavailability of no-
mans land means a need for local solutions to what has become a
global problem; globalization has become the third (but most prolific
and least controlled) source of wasted humans.
7. “familiar colonialist pressures but reversed in direction” immigrant,
asylum-seeker, and related security fears, the wasted humans have a
central role in modern consumerist culture , and thereby colouring
life in all its aspects and relationships:”They saturate all the most
important sectors of social life, tending to dominate life strategies and
colour the most important life activities prompting them to generate
their own sui generis waste : stillborn, unfit, invalid, on unviable
human relationship S, born with the mark of impending wastage.”
(note: sort only order and organization defines modernity, but also
waste, and weak relationships)
8. _
9. Chapter 1 In the beginning was design
10.Unemployment
11.The world is full of Sollen or shoulds, ideas with the need to realize
themselves;” Modern history stood out from then preceding stretcher
of human history by laying its ‘shoulds’ open, making them explicit
and resolving to ‘live towards them’ [.. . J orienting itself ‘toward the
Beyond in which everything in the Here would find its meaning and
conclusion’ ._” but all the competing ‘shoulds’ that mark this society,
revolve around the central role of employment
12.Redundant is disposable, redundant as opposed to unemployed
redundant is ^ a useless resource, a financial problem, to be provided
for, unable to survive on their own.
13.But biological survival is not the same as social survival
14._
15.Progress was supposed to mean more happiness for more people,
instead the generation X is characterized by redundancy worries,
confusion we don’t really know what to do with
16.An age of elusive ends instead of a struggle for means
17.on stories stories select the relevant from the irrelevant include
through exclusion, illuminate by casting shadows, an abstract of a
reality that cannot be reconstructed.
18.To know is to chose eliminating is a positive ordering of the
environment. Everyone constructing a stable world, a vision, followed
by an effort to change the world to become this vision
19.–
20._
21.Creating the new can be like farming, perpetual, continuous, nothing
lost, death followed by rebirth-or it can be like mining , discontinuous,
ruptural, creation by discarding and destructing, access by removing
layer after layer of soil ,removing slag and cinders from the ore,
leaving slag and landscape as waste
22.–
23.Modernity is the knowledge that the world can be changed, rejecting
the way the world is, defying sameness, becoming different.
24.Modernity has no shortage of designs but always a the price of
unpredictable and and undesirable consequences, usually ignored at
the designing stage. New design S are often an effort remove the
damage from past designs. 9 designing is selecting and simplifying, ‘
the foolproof design does not exist
25.Design, because of its inherent faults, begs more design; design is
continuous, and continuously expanding in volume
26._
27.The story (note: which is design, and creates waste) has no interest in
waste
28.–
29.Designing makes sense because the world is not all it should, and
especially, not all it could be, designing makes more room for the
good and less room forth bad. “humanity was one part of the world
that managed to ignore, to its own peril, the laws of nature, and to
replace them by man-made laws”. Modernity is the “ necessity for
reason to take where human spontaneity spectacularly failed”
30.Replacing the”unruly history with new, designed from scratch, reason
dictated, made- to- order and monitored (refined, civilized polices)
patterns of human togetherness” “modernity […] is a state of
perpetual emergency […] ‘a sense that someone has to give orders if
all is not to be lost‘ [..] without preventive actions […] a catastrophe.
The alternative to a pre- designed future is the rule of chaos . Things
human cannot be left to their own course. Modernity is a condition of
compulsive, and addictive, designing.” Designing is order building,
to” dispose according to rule; to regulate, govern, manage” but the
prospect of order draws out the ogre of chaos
31.and,” with no abode and no function strider the barricade separating
order from chaos. Its excision is then last act of creation before the
completion of order building labours. “there can be order without
chaos and imperfection. Chaos is limitedness inclusion to order’S
limited space and procedures, law (following Agamben) rules only
over what it includes through exclusion. For Bauman,” rule precedes
reality. Legislation precedes the ontology of the human world. The
law is a design”, [where it seems to me to be clearly the other way
around, and design, law and order is a reaction to chaos, the world,
injustice, ontology] but a good point is, and maybe that is what B
auman means, that law not only excludes, but can also be withdrawn,
suspended, refused.
32.And to Bauman, This possibility of refusing and withdrawing is what
enables law to “reach universality” create “universal category of the
exempted”, that which is not its concern,- thr outlaws, refugee,
refused, human waste. Agamben’s homo sacer, with neither human
non divine significance, without law, without rights. Political
sovereignty based on exclusion.
33.In modernity the nation-state presides over the distinction between
order and chaos
34.Chapter 2 are there too many of them? Or the waste of
economic progress
35. Always too many of ‘Them’. According to Malthus growth of
population will always be faster than the growth of e food supply. Of
course this goes against the modern thought that everything is
curable, that we can close the gap between ‘ is’ and ‘ought’. To
philosophers and politicians of modernity [I8th -19th century] “human
happiness may and will be achieved by more human power (primarily
industrial and military power) […] territories waiting for conquest and
colonization; but huge, fully manned industrial plants and formidable
armies where needed to invade and hold them. Big was beautiful- and
profitable. Big populations meant big power.” There cannot be too
many of us. Local problems, global solutions.
36._
37. From the beginning modernity is coupled with great migrations
surplus population, technological and military superiority, 30-50
million natives .80 percent of their-total population wiped out
between the first settlement and the 20th century
38.The aboriginals making way for ‘ Europe’s surplus population’, the
American savages making way for civilization, the resettling of
_lsraeli Negev Bedouin to make- room for the next generation of
Jewish Immigrants
39.Overpopulation adds to cost-not to gain
40.“’market demands’,’ competitive pressures,’ ‘productivity,’on’
efficiency,’ requirements” able to survive biologically but not socially,
41.“their voice no longer heard”
42._
43.“the Netherlands can support its record-breaking density of
population precisely because so many other lands cannot” because
like other rich nations it can draw the resources and energy from the
rest of the world-
44.The problem is not that there are so many poor people, but that there
are so many rich
45._
46._(on cosmic fear)
47._
48._.
49._
50.“Human vulnerability and uncertainty are the principle raison d’etre
of all political power”
51.Submission to the state was an insurance against individual
mischance,but the welfare state is being phased out, constraints on
businesses and the market removed
52.An apathy towards politics
53.And a politics focussed on fear of the outside
54.–
55.–
56.–
57.–
58.–
59.Toxic waste always runs down the path of least economic resistance
60.–
61.The contradiction of “airtight borders and of access to cheap,
undemanding docile labour”
62.and quoting Naomi Klein: “How do you stay open to business and
closed to people?” (by expanded perimiters – mexico for the US,
eastern ueroope for Europe – and lock down of borders between the
rest of the wolrd
63.Chapter 3: to each waste its dumping site, or the waste of
globalization
64.Increase of mafia, stimulated by politics-free areas, (quoting Richard
Rorty) “the absence of polity means that the super-rich can operate
without any thought of any interest save their own”.
65.“all operations in the global space follow […] the pattern heretofore
associated with mafias”
66.That elite, like the asylum seekers and economic migrants, are shift,
unpredictable
67.–
68.Departure of politics from the economic arena, to a role focused on
penal intervention, and the ever more rigid boders between them and
us, assymetrical membrames that allow exite, but guard against
illegal entrance
69.Two trends that are caused by the global spread of modern life
70.–
71.–
72.Developing countries are now forced to find a local solution to global
problems
73.–
74.–
75.–
76.Refugees are transients, with indefinite provisional settlement, camps
withnames, but no place on a map
77.With the humanitarian worker (“a device designed to [...] absolve the
guilty”) ends up an assistant to the ethnic cleanser
78.–
79.–
80.when thousands perish when camp and hospitals are closed, wells
dismantles and food delivery stopped.
81.–
82.–
83.–
84.–
 85.Dismantling the social state in favour of protecting the transnational
corporation
86.–93
94 culture of waste
95. In God’s design nothing can be redundant
96.
97. it would be impoissible to live with the thought of dying, were it not for
culture, the hero system, to induce hope and belief.
100. eternity is one of the genuine universals introduced by culture
A result of language, we also use language (another human universal) to create
alternate worlds, infinity
102. But god and immoratlity have been replaced by reason
What is lost in duration is gained in intensity
103. can this hell be the road to paradise, can reason be a road to wisdom?
109. why wait and debt, the norm for the middle class and the only long term
commitment