Event Horizon: Utopia-Dystopia in Bauman’s Thought

Abstract

In this chapter I explore what I call the event horizon of Bauman’s analyses of contemporary global society. In theoretical physics the idea of the event horizon describes a boundary, or limit, in space–time that blocks the transmission of light. More or less no light passes through this boundary. As such, the event horizon tends to mark the outer limit of the impossible space-time of the black hole that crushes everything that enters its gravitational field. But how does the notion of the event horizon relate to Bauman’s thought? My contention is that an exploration of Bauman’s recent works, from Liquid Modernity (2000) through Society Under Siege (2002) and Wasted Lives (2004a) to Liquid Fear (2006), reveals a dystopic image of contemporary globalization characterised by enormous poverty, explosive violence and crippling anxieties about the new insecure world we inhabit. In the wake of interpretations of the evolution of modern capitalism, such as those of Saskia Sassen (2006), I believe that it is possible to root Bauman’s theory of liquidity in explanations of the rise of what Edward Luttwak (1999) calls turbo capitalism. However, we must be careful in our use of terms which suggest an undialectical theory of the mobility of contemporary society. Consider Paul Virilio’s (2005b) work on speed. Virilio’s works explain that the coincidence of neoliberal capitalism, finance markets and new media technologies should not lead us to imagine that contemporary society is completely mobile.