고통의 지구화와 서발턴의 연대: 지그문트 바우만의 유동적 모더니티에 대한 트랜스모던적 비판 (The Solidarity of the Subaltern against the Globalization of Suffering: A Transmodern Critique of Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity)

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초록

This paper attempts to critically examine Zygmunt Bauman’s concepts of liquid modernity and the globalization of capital in terms of Enrique Dussel’s transmodernity. Bauman’s reasoning of liquid modernity and globalization unmasks amazingly well how fast human life and institutional forms like state and community are transforming. His analysis on the production of wasted lives and redundancy illustrates succinctly how much human suffering the globalization of capital creates and how fast their anxiety and pain increases with the shift of responsibilities from society to individuals. His delineation on the wasted lives of the underclass, migrants, and refugees, who are pushed to the margins as useless existences for making no contribution to society, presents an important theoretical reflection on how many subalterns are created by the globalizing capital.
Despite his excellent reflection and analysis, however, the alternatives and solutions suggested by Bauman seem to be pessimistic and rather weak, relative to the sharpness and richness of his analysis. In my view, the reason why he cannot present a realistic alternative and a specific solution is that his analysis dwells too much on the liquid modernity which produces countless wasted lives and the grandiose unilateral process of the globalization of capital and overlooks the existence of various confrontational lives and the creation and continuation of values against the tide of the grandiose process within society. For him, the redundant are powerless and their lives are isolated from those of others. Paying so much attention to the one-way process in which the underclass, refugees, and migrants are represented in ‘wasted lives,’ he fails to recognize the fact that they have the potential capacity to debunk the logical fabrication of society which creates them or represents them as redundancy and refuse.
We need to look at the globalization of capital from an opposite standpoint from Bauman, that is, that of the subaltern. Bauman speaks on the creation of redundancy and waste from the view of the globalization of capital, but we have to look at it from the view of the subaltern. Bauman has a top-down stance, but we need a bottom-up approach. This shift in position means more than having a different perspective; it enables us to posit a completely different understanding of suffering, namely the politics of solidarity. The globalization of capital makes living labor into refuse and waste, but at the same time, it creates the subaltern of living labor around the world. An alternative way to confront the globalization of capital would be to connect their suffering and not individualize it.

영어초록

This paper attempts to critically examine Zygmunt Bauman’s concepts of liquid modernity and the globalization of capital in terms of Enrique Dussel’s transmodernity. Bauman’s reasoning of liquid modernity and globalization unmasks amazingly well how fast human life and institutional forms like state and community are transforming. His analysis on the production of wasted lives and redundancy illustrates succinctly how much human suffering the globalization of capital creates and how fast their anxiety and pain increases with the shift of responsibilities from society to individuals. His delineation on the wasted lives of the underclass, migrants, and refugees, who are pushed to the margins as useless existences for making no contribution to society, presents an important theoretical reflection on how many subalterns are created by the globalizing capital.
Despite his excellent reflection and analysis, however, the alternatives and solutions suggested by Bauman seem to be pessimistic and rather weak, relative to the sharpness and richness of his analysis. In my view, the reason why he cannot present a realistic alternative and a specific solution is that his analysis dwells too much on the liquid modernity which produces countless wasted lives and the grandiose unilateral process of the globalization of capital and overlooks the existence of various confrontational lives and the creation and continuation of values against the tide of the grandiose process within society. For him, the redundant are powerless and their lives are isolated from those of others. Paying so much attention to the one-way process in which the underclass, refugees, and migrants are represented in ‘wasted lives,’ he fails to recognize the fact that they have the potential capacity to debunk the logical fabrication of society which creates them or represents them as redundancy and refuse.
We need to look at the globalization of capital from an opposite standpoint from Bauman, that is, that of the subaltern. Bauman speaks on the creation of redundancy and waste from the view of the globalization of capital, but we have to look at it from the view of the subaltern. Bauman has a top-down stance, but we need a bottom-up approach. This shift in position means more than having a different perspective; it enables us to posit a completely different understanding of suffering, namely the politics of solidarity. The globalization of capital makes living labor into refuse and waste, but at the same time, it creates the subaltern of living labor around the world. An alternative way to confront the globalization of capital would be to connect their suffering and not individualize it.

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