The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman

Challenges and Critique

Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Poul Poder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754670605
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317015215
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Zygmunt Bauman is one of the most inspirational and controversial thinkers on the scene of contemporary sociology. For several decades he has provided compelling analyses and diagnoses of a vast variety of aspects of modern and liquid modern living. This book considers the theoretical significance of his contribution to sociology, but also discusses and adopts a critical stance towards his work. The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman introduces and critically appraises some of the most significant as well as some of the lesser known of Bauman's contributions to contemporary sociology. An international team of scholars delineates and discusses how Bauman's treatment of these themes challenges conventional wisdom in sociology, thereby revising and revitalizing sociological theory. As a special feature, the book concludes with Bauman's intriguing reflections and contemplations on his own life and intellectual trajectory, published here for the first time in English. In this postscript aptly entitled 'Pro Domo Sua' ('About Myself'), he describes the pushes and pulls that throughout the years have shaped his thinking.

PART 1
Methodological Issues

Chapter 1

Bauman on Metaphors – A Harbinger of Humanistic Hybrid Sociology

Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Sophia Marshman

“The greatest thing by far is the command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted to another: it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances”

– Aristotle: The Poetics

“A novel examines not reality, but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he is capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility”

– Milan Kundera in Lubomir Doloźel: Heterocosmica

Introduction

The influence of the great works of literature on the sociology of Zygmunt Bauman is every bit as evident as the influence his own acutely observed sense of the ‘moral’ and the ‘humane’ has had on his practice of sociology. For while Bauman’s work is infused with literary references, elegant prose, unfolding narratives and metaphors which are at once delicate and powerful, it is the ends to which he uses these devices that reveals his uncommon and constant commitment to ‘humanity’. Throughout his work, Bauman consciously and consistently blurs the sacredly upheld dividing line between theory and method by way of literary means and poetically inspired techniques. Thus, his sociological imagination is simultaneously a poetic imagination. As a consequence, many contemporary biographers, commentators and sociologists (such as Keith Tester, Peter Beilharz, Dennis Smith and Tony Blackshaw) have focused their attention on the unorthodox or alternative angle of Bauman’s way of practicing sociology. Bauman’s work today lingers, not uneasily as one should perhaps expect, but rather comfortably between social science and literary exposition or storytelling. He himself recently revealed in an interview with Maaretta Jaukkuri how “there is a striking similarity between the sociological and the artistic vocations. They operate on the same ground, they feed from the same table; hence one would expect them to be engaged in some sort of ‘sibling rivalry’, but also to complement, correct and inspire each other and learn from each other”. In his writings, Bauman therefore consciously dissolves such artificial oppositions and collapses them into a unique, distinct and humanistically inspired hybrid sociological voice and in his whole way of diagnosing society and describing the plight of people inhabiting it, his work often comes closer to the novel than to the conventional and often prosaic sociological exposition (Jacobsen, Marshman & Tester 2007). Therefore, apart from describing the intrinsic ambivalence of human living, his own work also oozes with ambivalence – ambivalence between sociological description and literary decoration. As Tony Blackshaw recently asserted as a characteristic of Bauman as a so-called ‘poet-intellectual’:

It is not so much that Bauman is a relativist unfazed by the prospect of mixing the ‘fantastical’ or the ‘magical’ together with the ‘real’, so much that he works with the assumption that it would be ridiculous to think that anybody – not just a sociologist – could work under the illusion that ‘fantasy’, ‘magic’ and ‘reality’ are something apart (Blackshaw 2006:295).

This much neglected narrative, poetic or literary aspect of Zygmunt Bauman’s work, this hybridity between the magical and the real, and his ability to merge prosaic sociological interpretation with more poetically inspired insights constitute the topic of this chapter.

Dutch sociologist Pieter Nijhoff once remarked how “it should be conceded from the start that Bauman’s style of working might be threatening to some conventions among scholars” (Nijhoff 1998:87). Indeed, Bauman’s far from traditional approach to practicing and writing sociology has led some to question his methodology, yet Bauman is not concerned with methodological issues as such. He fully recognizes and embraces the inherently schizophrenic and often neglected nature of his discipline lingering somewhere between science and literature/art (Lepenies 1988; Nisbet 1976) and the fact that there are many different ways of doing sociology. Thus, Nijhoff’s characteristic of Bauman continued by observing how his

argumentation does not follow the clearly marked and narrow road of connected concepts. His discourse combines terminology from different contexts: by transferring expressions – concrete and abstract, colloquial and esoteric, narrative and analytical – he dovetails in fact all sorts of separate spheres and sectors (Nijhoff 1998:96).

Nowhere is this dovetailing tendency more evident than in Bauman’s extensive use of metaphors in his analysis of the human beings inhabiting and the social forms constituting the different types of modernity forming and transforming throughout the last couple of centuries. The main purpose of his metaphors, as the metaphors of many equally prominent sociologists, is to try to capture the intricate connections between social structure and lived experience and by proposing metaphorical labels poetically and poignantly mirroring such lived experience from the vantage-point of those human beings being described. Thus, the only prerogative is that the sociologist – no matter what his specific subject matter or topic, no matter his choice of methods or research strategies – utilizes his sociological and moral imagination. Essentially, Bauman is not ‘hung up’ on distinctions between the worlds of science and of literature, he is not concerned with reducing his work to the tasks of a ‘research technician’ who, in the apt words of Charles Wright Mills, meticulously grinds social reality in the ‘fine little mill of The Statistical Ritual’ while worshipping ‘The Scientific Method’ (Mills 1959:72). Mills, like Bauman, was extremely critical of this image of the research technician with his ‘human engineering’ and ‘social prediction’ buttressing ‘the bureaucratic ethos’ as a role model for sociology because the consequences would prove disastrous and detrimental to moral and human existence:

To say that ‘the real and final aim of human engineering’ or of ‘social science’ is to ‘predict’ is to substitute a technocratic slogan for what ought to be a reasoned moral choice. That too is to assume the bureaucratic perspective within which – once it is fully adopted – there is much less moral choice available (Mills 1959:117).

Thus, as soon as one examines Bauman’s use of metaphor, it becomes immediately clear that he is not such a technician, nor would he desire to be. According to Mills, such men suffer from a ‘methodological inhibition’ making them utterly ill-suited for understanding the social reality they claim to capture with their ‘abstracted empiricism’. Let us also recall the well-chosen words of Peter L. Berger insisting that “in science as in love a concentration on technique is quite likely to lead to impotence” (Berger 1963:24). Such impotence, however, is absent from Bauman’s heterodox and humanistic sociology. What is being attempted is not a fusion of the literary and the sociological for the sake of grandiloquence alone; rather Bauman is attempting a kind of humanization through metaphor. Put simply, Bauman uses metaphor as a device to recall us to our common humanity, as a means of reawakening our sense of responsibility for the Other and of human possibility.

Therefore, the poetically inspired sociological imagination may potentially also contain the seeds not only of hermeneutical understanding but also of political mobilization and social transformation, as it may kindle the political imagination of scholars and practitioners alike. It might be argued that Bauman’s chief concern when writing and practicing sociology is to demolish common sense assumptions about the world and everyday life, whether they be the imaginary ‘social fantasies, of ‘ordinary’ people, as Norbert Elias once dubbed them, or the unreflected ‘domain assumptions’ of academics, as asserted by Alvin W. Gouldner. One realizes that the beauty of Bauman’s writing lies not in it’s utilization of ‘pretty’ language, or in its allusions to the ‘great and the good’ of the literary world. Bauman’s erudition is so powerful because his writing suggests that this kind of sociology can have a transformative capacity, can make people think about things more deeply, can shock the reader out of their moral ennui, and can – at least potentially – instigate social action.

This chapter then, is an exploration of the stakes of Zygmunt Bauman’s use of metaphors. Attention is paid to how Bauman’s sociological style connects with a sociological concern to emancipate human potential from the constraints of the supposedly ‘necessary’, ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’. It is Bauman’s hope that the world might become a site and a product of human action, as opposed to a prison house of heteronomy. The purpose of this piece is fourfold. In the first part, the chief focus is with Bauman’s ‘sociology of possibility’. The key question here relates to the ‘catch’ of his metaphorical approach? Just as the fisherman casts a net into the sea in order to catch fish, so too Bauman casts his net of metaphors into the social world to ‘catch’ insights into our daily lives which have previously slipped through the sociological ‘net’. In the second part of the piece, the discussion moves on to an appraisal of the implications of this strategy for the practice of sociology itself. Bauman does not present himself as an ‘expert’, as somebody who knows all the answers. His approach utterly avoids any tendency towards the hubristic or lethal ‘what is to be done’ mode. Instead, Bauman’s sociology is about dialogue, communication, and essentially bringing together that which institutions and common sense normally keep apart. As Bauman asserts, being ‘moral’ invariably means going against the grain of prevailing social climate, not with it. As he iconoclastically states: “Clearly then, moral acts meant breaching rather than following the socially designed and monitored norms” (Bauman in Bauman & Tester 2001:53). In this, Bauman had been heavily influenced by Hannah Arendt’s belief that “the ability to go against one’s society could be a prerequisite of a moral act” (Bauman in Bauman & Tester 2001:34). In the third part, we will examine the moral ‘content’, as it were, of Bauman’s metaphors and how they may guide us – as individuals and as society – in creating a more human social order. In order to do so, we need to recognize – and act upon – the ubiquity of human suffering. In the final part, we will seek to gather the strings by focusing on Bauman’s so-called ‘humanization through metaphors’ whereby we wish to point to the inherently moral character of his metaphors – metaphors invented and utilized in the service of human responsibility and possibility. In view of the concerns of Bauman’s work, this piece is less an exercise in exegesis and intended more to be an invitation to return to the original texts.

The ‘Catch’ of Metaphors, Mark One: Capturing Inclusion and Exclusion

Bauman’s use of metaphor is part and parcel of his wider ‘sociology of possibility’, his confidence that literature, or literary and artistic techniques, open up horizons instead of closing them down and that such devices may assist in denaturalizing the world. Metaphors are not only conceptual devices – they are potentially reality-shattering and agenda-changing social acts aimed at presenting an image of how the world ‘ought’ to be or ‘should’/‘could’ be. Therefore, metaphors play a crucial role in Bauman’s practice of moral sociology. He uses metaphors in order to develop and practice critical social thought. This might be said to fit very well with the unmistakable utopian strand in Bauman’s work; with the idea that humanity could/should embrace the open-ended possibilities rather than surrendering to the idea that things ‘are as they are’ and ‘there is no alternative’ (Jacobsen 2004, 2006). Bauman’s metaphors are intended to make us see and think more clearly about what is happening, but also about what could happen. His metaphors make us reconsider the world around us. They are inherently moral, they give voice to the voiceless, they recall us to our inescapable human and moral responsibility for ‘the Other’ and point to the hidden possibilities behind the immediately observable reality, to a world not yet closed down by mechanical models, mathematical reasoning or rational argument, to a world capable of being re-enchanted and transformed. Like utopia or morality, metaphor points to imagination rather than logic, to infinity rather than totality, to possibility rather than probability. In the case of Zygmunt Bauman, his metaphors are methods of possibility pointing to a world existing parallel to reality as we know, recognize and perceive it. He encourages us to see things differently, and here metaphors belong to or exemplify Bauman’s favourite sociological strategy: defamiliarization. Defamiliarization consists of making the obvious non-obvious, looking at life from unexpected and unexplored angles, constructing the well-known as strange, but “most importantly, it may open up new and previously unsuspected possibilities of living one’s life with more self-awareness, more comprehension” (Bauman 1990:15). Metaphor is the archetypal linguistic weapon in such defamiliarization strategy. Armed with it, Bauman seeks to transcend and transform our commonsensical and doxic assumptions about the apparent inevitability, naturalness or immutability of the world we inhabit, its history, its direction, its possibilities and our positions within it. Bauman observes that we live in a society “which no longer recognizes any alternative to itself and therefore feels absolved from the duty to examine, demonstrate, justify (let alone prove) the validity of its outspoken and tacit assumptions” (Bauman 2001:99).

As a consequence of man’s (and indeed also sociologists’) inability to ‘see the whole of society’, metaphors fruitfully perform, at least, four interrelated functions in social science research or writings. First, they are transforming – by their invocation they creatively change our conception of the world as it is and allows us to catch a glimpse of a world redeemed from the limitations of realism. Second, they are transferring – they use the language of one domain and transfer it to another, often in a quite absurd fashion (take as an example Erving Goffman’s metaphor of the theatre to highlight aspects of social interaction in everyday life), thereby creating fruitful resemblances. Third, they are transmuting – they reorganize and reconfigure our ingrained ideas and notions about the social world and its fundamental workings whereby we may perceive it more clearly or more creatively. Finally, they are transcending– they allow us to transcend conventional academic doxa or common sense with refreshing perspectives or surprising juxtapositions. In short, with metaphors sociologists may hope to see further or deeper than they would be allowed to without metaphors (Antoft, Jacobsen & Kupferberg 2007).

Metaphors, however, are but one example of Bauman’s overall methodological embeddedness somewhere along – or transcending – the dividing-line between social science and literature. Although the way that Bauman writes is tremendously significant, what he writes about is obviously of paramount importance. One might argue that Bauman’s extensive and frankly awe-inspiring body of work has by and large addressed the plight of those ‘cast out’ from society, those who have been marginalized, forgotten, and ultimately ‘wiped out’. Bauman’s own personal experience of exile undoubtedly aids his ‘outsider’ perspective, yet the longevity and passion of his commitment to the plight of the underdog suggests a deeper and more worthy source for this concern. The way that Bauman practices sociology is informed by his compassion, his instinctive sense of what is ‘right’ in the face of much easier and ‘economically viable’ yet also less ‘humane’ options. Bauman’s metaphors deal with the ‘big issues’ like the Holocaust or globalization, yet their relevance and utility extends into our everyday lives, informing the ways in which we daily negotiate our shared humanity. Thus, Bauman’s many metaphors and archetypes – e.g., of humans (‘tourists’, ‘vagabonds’ and ‘gamblers’), of societies (‘solid’ and ‘liquid’ modern) and of utopias (‘gamekeeping’, ‘gardening’ and ‘hunting’) (see Jacobsen & Marshman 2008) – urge us to look at the human failings and historical catastrophes of the not so distant past and present in order to exercise greater personal and societal vigilance and responsibility in the present and in the future which is not yet. Let us briefly look as some selected metaphors from Bauman’s cornucopia.

Notions of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ dominate most of Bauman’s writing, questions of who is to be ‘excluded’ and who is to be ‘included’; of who can be incorporated into the ‘ideal’ order and who remains forever unassimilable. Bauman addresses the question of which individuals constitute the ‘waste’ of liquid modernity, and his use of the ‘disposal’ metaphor calls to mind a more sinister history, that of Jews as ‘weeds’ and Nazis as ‘gardeners’. Bauman’s gardening metaphor was used to maximum effect in his appraisal of the Holocaust as the ‘natural’ (for modernity was intrinsically anti-nature) and inevitable product of modernity. Bauman observed that modern society was managed like a garden. By following a strict plan/design/blueprint, a pipedream of purity, a perfect garden/society could emerge; one that was purged of any wild, undesirable elements. The ‘gardeners’ of modernity, of which the Nazis were the very best/worst example, were armed “with a vision of harmonious colours and of the difference between pleasing harmony and revolting cacophony; with determination to treat as weeds every self-invited plant … with machines and poison adequate to the task of exterminating the weeds” (Bauman 1989:57). In the era of ‘solid modernity’, it was the Jews who were defined as weeds that were unable to be “incorporated into the rational order, whatever the effort” (Bauman 1989:65). Such ‘weeds’ were fit only for extermination. Here we encounter the danger of metaphors when in the wrong hands. The term ‘weed’ was as much a euphemism as a metaphor. The Nazis used such metaphorical language to remove the Jews from the sphere of moral consideration and human obligation. This links to Bauman’s powerful work on adiaphorization, on the social production of indifference. Bauman – following the lead from Raul Hilberg – cautions us that such seeds of indifference are sown in gradually reinforced stages; first a group of people are ‘classified’ as other, then they are cast-out of our moral/social order: they are not ‘people like us’, the normal rules governing the ‘moral’ treatment of others do not apply to them. Bauman asserts that once such people have been removed from sight morally (through categorization and demonization) and physically (in the era of solid modernity by removing them to concentration camps and in the era of liquid modernity by confining them to refugee camps and the no-go-areas of social housing), the bureaucracy and industrial techniques honed in the era of solid modernity are more than equal to the task of removing them from the world without leaving a trace, full stop.

In keeping with this, Bauman’s work on postmodernity/‘liquid modernity’ has been dedicated to providing a voice for the ‘new weeds’; the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman – Challenges and Critique
• Part 1 Methodological Issues
• Part 2 Ethics
• Part 3 Social Integration
• Part 4 Politics
• Index