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what divisions can be like when communities commit themselves to
adhere to a set of values in such an emphatic sense. And as he indicates
further, the result of such tyranny and absolutism is oppression, which
results from the pressure to keep the intended flock in the fold & the
craved-for cosiness of belonging is offered as a price of unfreedom .64
Bauman goes further to suggest that oppression is carried out through
strategies that do not merely seek to exclude outsiders, but also to polarize
them. Borrowing from Lévi-Strauss, Bauman argues that at every level
of society, social groups employ, conjointly, anthropophagic and
anthropoemic strategies of oppression towards outsiders; the two strategies
are only effective precisely because they are used in conjunction.
Communities employing anthropophagic strategies gobble up, devour,
and assimilate outsiders who they perceive to carry powerful, mysterious
forces .65
In marked contrast, those employing anthropoemic (from Greek: to
vomit) strategies towards outsiders, metaphorically throw them up, casting
them into exile, away from where the orderly life is conducted & either
in exile or in guarded enclaves where they can be safely incarcerated
without hope of escaping .66 The two strategies work as one:
The phagic strategy is inclusivist, the emic strategy is exclusivist.
The first assimilates the strangers to the neighbours, the second
merges them with the aliens. Together, they polarize the strangers
and attempt to clear up the most vexing and disturbing middle-
Freedom and Security in the Liquid Modern Sociality 107
ground between the poles of neighbourhood and alienness
between home and abroad , us and them . To the strangers
whose life conditions and choices they define, they posit a genuine
either or : conform or be damned, be like us or do not overstay
your visit, play the game by our rules or be prepared to be kicked
out from the game altogether. Only as such an either or , the two
strategies offer a serious chance of controlling the social space.
Both are therefore included in the tool-bag of every social
domination.67
Community as consumerism
What community also stands for in liquid modernity is a freeze-framed
representation, merely the click of a lens on a fluid, fleeting landscape of
temporary togetherness, whose pattern is always shifting from one event
to the next who or what is currently in favour with the public: the death
of a princess, a cup final, a charity concert, the list is unlimited. In this
sense liquid modern community has a gift for yoking personal enlighten-
ment to entertainment. Though not really tied to tradition, liquid moderns
recognize a need for habit if not ritual through which individuals can
come to know themselves and honour those like them. Sports fans, for
example, have such ceremonies through which they excel at creating their
own sense of symbolic community.
In this sense, community is 80,000 people in the open air on a May
afternoon at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff lustily singing along to
You ll Never Walk Alone , united with the rest of their community
through television and the incessant text messages, communicating who s
scored. The liquid modern version of the sport fan community is not the
terrace crowd of yore, but is one inhabited by individuals who are
repulsed by the thought of the disease and toxic substances that they
might come into contact with if their bodies touch or get too close to
other men and women they don t know and don t really want to get to
know.68 This is a community that comes to life in the all-seater stadium,
which with the architect s forward planning is co-extensive with the liquid
modern imagination in its capacity to bring individuals together 80,000
individual spaces that accommodate 80,000 individuals for only 90
minutes who with the help of a compere, some razzmatazz and a big
screen running the highlights of the spectacle in hand, are ushered through
a series of emotions that are all to do with the performance of community.
The liquid modern football ground is a site where fans can individually
perform their allegiance to their team like extras on a film set. In this
sense, they are an ersatz but demonstrably performative community of
108 Zygmunt Bauman
individuals seeking individual attention while getting some time off from
the uncertain and risk-sodden world of liquid modernity. This spectacular
version of community may seem something like an enclosed world, but
this is not the kind of community which remains binding and compelling
long after it has disintegrated.
In its sport and leisure manifestations, liquid modern community is a
copy so closely modelled on the real thing that it even has the ability to
send shivers down the spines of anyone who is taken in by its appeal. It
seems authentic, something like the equivalent, which hints at deep
themes, but which turns out to have only a depth of hidden shallows: a
superb imitation, but one entirely free of the demands of the real thing .
This kind of community may be inauthentic, but Bauman acknowledges
that in its magic moments it can turn the quotidian into something ethereal,
particularly when it takes place in alcohol- or ecstasy-fuelled circles, for
example, in pubs and clubs.
This is also the kind of community that is ambivalent through and
through; its members can be irresponsibly individualistic, they can drink
and take drugs, be loved up , and at the same time feel deliciously at
home, both together but apart. As I found in my own study of the leisure
life-world of the lads in Leeds, its members can have a community of
sorts which although it comes without any harsh demands on their
commitment allows them to
have a solid modern leisure life coupled with a liquid existence.
A solid life, which has gone but is redeemable and a liquid
existence, now, which has to be endured. There the leisure life-
world operates, tucked snug, if a little out of place, into the weekend
nightlife of Leeds. It could simply have grown of its own accord,
you feel made from the very heart of Leeds. As if it were very
much a production of a time and a place, suspended in the nightscape
like a time capsule, with its machinery intact, in spite of everything
around it humming their own different tunes.
The ultimate appeal of this leisure life-world for the lads is
that for each of them it fulfils both a need, which is their mutual
longing for home and security , and a concomitant desire for the
quotidian of the non-rational in the form of leisure, play and
pleasure. For the lads , the leisure life-world is the pivotal point
in a fragmented life, which allows them to fashion a sense of order
out of the disorder of the everyday world of liquid modernity. The
price of the freedom offered to the lads by liquid modernity is the
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