Zygmunt Bauman

Tony Blackshaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415355056
• eBook ISBN: 9781134255955
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

This timely book provides the definitive concise introduction to the phenomenon of Zygmunt Bauman. After introducing the man, his major influences and his special way of 'thinking sociologically', author Blackshaw traces the development of Bauman's project by identifying and explaining the major shifts of emphasis in his work – the break with Marxism and the postmodern 'turn', and the subsequent refocusing on 'liquid' modernity – as well as offering a clear and accessible guide to the key conceptual hinges which move the reader on.

This book, the only concise introduction to Bauman's work on the market, goes on to explain the importance of the full range of persistent themes concerning Bauman, dealing specifically with individualization, freedom, identity, community, social control, consumption and waste, building a penetrating understanding of why these issues matter for this Key Sociologist.

Bauman's ideas have impacted beyond sociology into criminology, political theory, cultural studies, leisure studies and so forth, and have also now penetrated outside the walls of the academy into social policy, welfare reform, social work and politics. Making use of pedagogical features such as boxed sections, chapter summaries, an annotated bibliography and links to further reading, this well-written text assumes no prior familiarity with Bauman's work and will appeal to anyone in any of these fields wishing to get acquainted with the ideas of one of the world's most wide-ranging thinkers.

1
An Interim Career Report

Zygmunt Bauman will be 80 years young this year and in this book I want to argue that, while he took longer than his contemporaries to make his mark, he not only stayed the course but also became the sociology-sovereign of his generation. No sociologist writing today, not one that I know of, not one, is more in touch with the Zeitgeist than Bauman. When I first studied sociology in the late 1980s, Anthony Giddens was generally understood as the most important sociologist in the English-speaking world. However, it is without any hesitation that I suggest that Bauman has not only now replaced him, but in the process has also become twenty-first century sociology’s foremost interpreter, its professor of professors.

This urbane, pipe-smoking sociologist is older than Giddens but the significance of his work in the academy was initially much slower in coming. His career evolved, gathering momentum as it went along. The evidence of Blackwell’s and Polity Press’s back catalogues shows that Bauman really found his stride after his ‘retirement’ from the University of Leeds in 1990, and so too did his approach to sociology, which he has incrementally been developing with every new publication in what has become nothing less than a stupendous output: books on topics such as modernity, the Holocaust, postmodernity, liquid modernity, freedom, consumer culture, death and life strategies, globalization, poverty, community, love, waste, identity and Europe. If Bauman can’t write about everything that is to do with how we live now, it seems as if he’s saying ‘it won’t be for the want of me trying’.

If there was an award for ubiquity, Bauman would win it hands down. To this day he continues to maintain a punishing pace of academic activity, more often than not publishing two or three books in a year, or so it seems. Over and above that, he keeps on turning out essays and reviews for journals, edited collections, and newspapers as well as accepting countless invitations for interviews and to present to university departments and conferences around the globe. He might write with the speed of a Las Vegas card dealer shuffling his pack but for all their regularity Bauman’s publications are always arduous, subtle and prolonged exercises in the sociological imagination. Bauman subverts a truism in sociology, because with his tremendous output it is not less, but actually more that is more. Indeed what is impressive about Bauman’s project is how rigorously his ideas continue to be sustained.

The words ‘sociologist’ and ‘superstar’ rarely come together, but what other combination would you use to describe a sociologist who is by now a global phenomenon–world sociology’s most convincing and authoritative voice–and who for a decade has been firmly established in his role as the chronicler par excellence of modernity, as well as being the major exponent and developer of social theory writing during the same period. For his growing band of followers, there is no doubt that Bauman is a superstar. The man himself would reject such a label not least because of its implications–Bauman is an intellectual, complete, uncompromising in his rejection of the pop and pap that comes with celebrity; his eye is not on any audience for his work but set on interpreting and trying to change for the better the multitudinous world that we today inhabit, and he’s got his finger right on its pulse.

Theoretically gifted but with real-world know-how, the Polish-born sociologist emerges in this book as an accomplished intellectual of more talent than genius. It is the ability to universalize that distinguishes the best sociology and Bauman’s is a universal remedy to awaken the sleeping sociologist in all of us. The writing is as fluent as the analyses of the contemporary world are compelling and to this extent Bauman is that novelty in British sociology: somebody who can write. But what is even more startling is that he is an exemplary writer in English despite the fact that it is not his first language. He isn’t a sociologist in any conventional sense either. As a writer of sociology Bauman has a special skill for telling stories–not many sociologists are good story-tellers. Having said that, to the uninitiated, the writing style can appear difficult, and for a moment seem out of touch with the quotidian, the Zeitgeist and what Bauman himself calls its ‘mechanism and momentum’. But if the reader persists they will find that Bauman’s is in fact straightforwardly the most ‘in tune’ sociology there is and will see that his concerns and ideas that leap from the countless pages are intense and fascinating, but also disturbingly immediate and pressing.

Like the world he depicts in the pages of his books, Bauman’s sociology is constantly in flux, and to employ a metaphor from Egyptian mythology, it’s as if since his ‘retirement’ he has been intent on changing the orthodox sociological template by turning around the Isis and Osiris fable. If orthodox sociology was his Osiris, Bauman began to cut it into pieces for resisting the changing contemporary world around it, while we, his Isis, began to search for sociology after him, picking up each fragment that we found in his new writings in order to give our own sociological imaginations a new part and a purpose.

Indeed, Bauman’s sociology, like all other living art, is always on the move; it is a work that is always in progress; it is a work of interlocking parts and these parts are in constant movement. To wish for an unchanging Bauman would be to wish for an obsessive more than a thinker who is always prepared to engage with new ideas. To read his work is also to be moved by the grace of his sentences, the ease of his wit, the suppleness of his narrative thread and the complexity and inventiveness of his ideas. For the work to be fixedly consistent would also deny its power as the most powerful record of modern life, with all that that entails: anxiety, uncertainty, risk, fragmentation, contingency and ambivalence. Bauman’s work is in the Enlightenment sense a meticulous project, but it is so in a way that is not unmediated by its author’s imperfections, a grandiose scheme of work sabotaged by the liquid ambivalence of the ideas of its own mastermind.

The ability to take a subject we all thought we knew and to turn our taken-for-granted assumptions about it on their heads with common sense as well as painstaking scholarship, is the mark of Bauman’s sociology. To paraphrase that most perceptive of social commentators, Roland Barthes, Bauman follows the dictum that knowledge is coarse, life is subtle, and sociology matters because it corrects this distance. Indeed, Bauman turns the rhythms of everyday life into an erudite and critical practice that burns itself into the sociological imagination. Most of us perhaps recognize many of the themes that Bauman deals with in his sociology, but he is a master of bringing them into narratives about real people and their lives. The hinges which take us from one book to the next are always themes of the most pressing kind–freedom, security, responsibility, poverty, love, identity, community–which hold a deep and continuing resonance for their author and his readers.

POINTS OF EMPHASIS

This book signals a new direction in Bauman studies. It parts company with the other key introductions, such as Dennis Smith’s (1999) Zygmunt Bauman: Prophet of Postmodernity, Peter Beilharz’s (2000) Zygmunt Bauman: Dialectic of Modernity and Keith Tester’s (2004) The Social Thought of Zygmunt Bauman, each of which follow a similar intellectual trajectory by mapping Bauman’s project, chronologically, from his Marxist beginnings, throughout his ‘postmodern’ turn to the emergence in his writings of the idea of liquid modernity. Although each of these books more than ably addresses many of the topics, issues and concepts that concern Bauman, they each rely too heavily on the notion that Bauman’s key ideas will speak for themselves if they are presented in sufficient detail. In this sense they collectively fail to place Bauman’s special way of going about sociology in a context which is accessible to undergraduates and other readers who are not conversant in social theory. This is a book which if it is critical in its focus it is not so polemical as to forget the interests and needs of the reader who is coming to Bauman for the first time, or who wants step-by-step guidance.

In order to achieve my own objective of making Bauman more accessible, in the main I steer clear of the chronology and the content of his major book-length studies where the typical mode of narration involves too much excursus and the backdrops for the analyses often feature Greek mythology and Biblical metaphors. Bauman wants to challenge his readers but for the uninitiated these books are too densely packed with esoteric vocabulary and foreign–mostly German–terms as well, and the sentences, like the paragraphs and chapters, are often long, meandering and at times as difficult to unravel as a Gordian knot. If not wilfully obscure, some of these books are difficult to understand not merely because of the intricacy of the ideas, theories, themes and concepts which Bauman endeavours to express in his writing, but also because of their sheer scope, which encompasses a massive range of erudition. Moreover his wanting his readers to hold on to ideas previously developed in his work, such as, for example, the ambivalence of modernity, means that he is not the easiest of social theorists to grasp. So rather than trying to cut the knot with Alexander’s sword, for the most part I try to develop the discussion with Bauman’s most accessible work, which means the interviews and the more recent publications published in Polity’s Themes for the 21st Century series. The direct quotations used are almost always drawn from interviews too, which provide the reader with a Bauman that, if he is not as precise as the one found in his more essayistic book publications, is much more welcoming.

Readers will find in this book then an alternative way of understanding Bauman, its purpose not being to provide yet another rendition of the writings to what is ostensibly a professorial audience, so much as a guide for the introductory reader, designed to shed some light on the scope of his sociological vision. With this objective in mind, I knew from the outset that if I was going to be successful I would have to put in sufficient spadework so as to get into the head of my subject. Bauman was my own discovery of perspective–he gave me a kind of sociology I could think with–and as the project developed it became more and more evident to me that if I was going to be really successful in getting a sense of this across to my readers, I would not only have to demonstrate that I have the appropriate sociological imagination to look at the world through Bauman’s eyes, but also that I would have the ability to convey something of the extent of the inimitable possibilities of that experience. The reader will of course be the judge of my success in fulfilling this purpose.

SOME MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT BAUMAN

I reasoned that this approach would also allow me to deal with the commentaries that board but do not capture Bauman’s work and which as a result are often ambiguous, contradictory and in places simply inaccurate. As a consequence, a great cloud of fame seems to surround his name in sociology today but within it there are too many pockets of obscurity. As Peter Beilharz¹ has pointed out, just as ‘Gramsci was reinvented by local radicals as an Englishman via the work of the Birmingham School’, so some equally energetic but misconceived interpreters have locked Bauman in a triumvirate with Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck. However, there are two more basic and equally serious misconceptions about Bauman that I need to deal with before this introduction can proceed. The first is that he is a postmodernist and the second is that in his analyses he puts too much emphasis on the individualization of everyday life.

Bauman, postmodernity and postmodernism

The idea that Bauman is a postmodernist is a misconception made most particularly in three camps: those who dismiss him and don’t get past the front covers of his books, those who find his work too difficult to understand, and/or those who fail to read him carefully and misrepresent his views. The reader needs to grasp from the outset that Bauman is not a postmodernist in the negative use of the concept and he never has been. However, they need to be aware that Bauman has always cast his net wide in developing the many avenues of new inquiry pursued in his sociology and he has been influenced a great deal by thinkers whose work has been described as postmodern in orientation.

In understanding the relationship between the work of these thinkers and Bauman’s own, it is instructive to consider the career of the term ‘modernity’ in the sociology literature. Sociologists only first began talking about the idea of modernity as a concept of significance in the late 1980s. Evidence for this can be found in the dictionaries and specialist glossaries of the time. For example, in Raymond Williams’s (1983) revised edition of Keywords (London: Fontana) there is barely any recognition of ‘modernity’, other than it being a derivative of the word ‘modern’, whereas there are a full nine pages devoted to ‘social class’. Sociologists only really started to talk about the idea of modernity with the emergence of theories of postmodernism and from this point modernity merged into a dialectic (modernism in opposition to postmodernism and modernity in opposition to postmodernity), and the concept achieved a new independence. As Keith Tester² points out, in his own analyses Bauman borrowed the idea of the distinction between modernity and postmodernity from the work of the architect Charles Jencks and when he

took up discussion about the postmodern, [but] inevitably he shifted the context of the word. He took the aesthetics of postmodernism and turned it, instead, into an inspiration and competent part of a sociology of postmodernity. In these terms, postmodernism is about aesthetics and artistic production, whereas postmodernity, ‘refers to a distinct quality of intellectual climate, to a distinctly new meta-cultural stance, to a distinct self-awareness of the era’.³

In defining postmodernity in these terms, Bauman’s arguments differed fundamentally from postmodernism,⁴ which postulates the argument that it is the infinite questioning of rationality that leads to the demise of the ‘grand narrative’ of modernity. It is the postmodern view that, in trying to find the ultimate truth, in seeking ground for its knowledge, rationality unavoidably lays the foundations for its own destruction. In this postmodern world, it is rationality that produces nihility, which is the ultimate consequence of hyper-rationality. And once rationality has been banished from the ‘business of life’, there can no longer be any single objective reality, nor any observation that is not merely postulation; what we have is nothing more than ‘the play of signifiers … in which the code⁵ no longer refers back to any subjective or objective “reality”, but to its own logic’.⁶ Postmodernism’s postmodernity is a depthless, hyperized asociality, where individual agency is irrelevant and which gives priority to the ‘code’ over subjective ideas and in the process marks the victory of the ‘anti-social sign over the social sign’.⁷

The view Bauman developed suggested that, contrary to Baudrillard’s postmodernism, rationality and social agency still inspire the enthusiasm and enticement for the good life in postmodernity, but they are guided by a ‘will to happiness’ which is progressively more individualized and social relationships are increasingly lifted out of their more traditional contexts to form new habitats, which ‘unbind’ time and weaken the coercive impact of the past,⁸ a process which Bauman has described, using one of Giddens’s metaphors, as ‘the continuation of disembedding coupled with dis-continuation of re-embedding’.⁹ In a nutshell, with postmodernity life was increasingly coming to be experienced as discontinuous, more comparable to a collection of moments or a series of episodes, which are ‘constantly in-the-state-of-becoming, unfinished and revocable … [and] eminently “dismantlable”’.¹⁰ In this way Bauman’s interpretation of postmodernity had more in common with Lyotard’s more concise definition of postmodernism, which suggested that this shift in modernity involved a rejection of all grand narratives, or big stories, for new ways of living that undermined the old ‘certainist’ ways of life associated with modernity.

George Ritzer is to a large extent correct in suggesting that Bauman’s sociology of postmodernity is continuous with classical sociology in its strategy of providing both systematic and rational accounts of the social world.¹¹ However, Ritzer overlooks the point that Bauman is also ambivalent towards classical sociology. For in his role as the postmodern interpreter, Bauman remains unconvinced of any sociology that is based on purely systematic thought, rationality and reason; notions which, for Bauman, must always be understood as the slaves of difference.

It should be understood that Bauman’s sociology of postmodernity draws on orthodox sociological accounts, but as I will demonstrate in the following pages it also draws on a broad range of thinking, including social philosophy, hermeneutics, cultural studies, literature, post-structuralism and especially postmodern understandings to develop extant sociological theories to help to understand the profound changes underlying our contemporary social condition. Despite the obvious advantages of the vocabulary of postmodern sociology, though, Bauman also recognizes its limited utility for social analysis in that it ‘denies its kinship with a specific stage in the history of social life’.¹² Bauman’s key point is that by re-imagining sociology as a sociology of postmodernity we are able to overcome the limitations of postmodern sociology because we do not overlook the problem of social structure in relation to the nature of large-scale socio-historical transformations, and the role of individual actors within these processes.¹³

For postmodernists of Baudrillard’s persuasion, Bauman’s sociology might be conceived as merely an affirmation and preservation of an outdated modern enterprise, but by acknowledging clearly that sociology must come to terms with the ways in which the world has changed around it, Bauman offers an extraordinary way to re-interpret and assimilate the most useful of some ‘older’ sociological postulations with ‘new’ theoretical insights to make sense of these new times. Very simply, Bauman allows us to see more, facilitating the sort of thoroughgoing interpretation that is only achieved when the world is ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Zygmunt Bauman
• Key Sociologists
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• 1: An Interim Career Report
• 2: Bauman’s Sociology: His Theory of Modernity
• 3: The Ways and Means of the Dragoman
• 4: Freedom and Security in the Liquid Modern Sociality
• 5: Consumerism as the Liquid Modern Way of Life
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Notes