Liquid Sociology

Metaphor in Zygmunt Bauman’s Analysis of Modernity

Mark Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317104704
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Zygmunt Bauman's 'liquid sociology' confronts the awesome task of reminding individual men and women that an alternative way of living together is within our eminent capabilities, if only we start to think differently about our world. The metaphor of 'liquidity', which has become such a prominent feature of his writings since 2000, provides us with just such a new interpretation, with a novel 'way of seeing'. Each chapter in this unique collection takes seriously Bauman's analysis of modernity as 'liquid', throwing new light upon global social problems, as well as opening up a space for assessing the nature of Bauman's contribution to sociology, and for understanding what may be gained and lost by embracing an artistic sensibility within the social sciences. With contributions from internationally renowned scholars, this book will appeal to all those interested in Bauman's work, especially within sociology, social, political and cultural theory, and to anyone curious about the value of metaphor in interpreting the social world.

Chapter 1
Liquid Sociology – What For?

Mark Davis

I am tempted to suggest that this is a book that ‘needs no introduction’.

After all, Zygmunt Bauman is one of the most prominent social thinkers of our times, frequently described as one of the world’s most influential sociologists. His work, which now spans six decades, addresses such timeless aspects of the human condition as freedom, consumerism, responsibility, morality, identity, community, uncertainty, and love. It is well-known that in his most recent work, Bauman has employed the metaphor of ‘liquidity’ in order to capture the dramatic social changes taking place in our everyday lives. In this way, he seeks to convey the increasing absence of ‘solid’ structures that once provided the foundations for human societies.

Furthermore, the demands placed upon a formal Introduction have been expertly accomplished by the quality and accessibility of the contributions to this collection. It is there that the reader will find numerous insights into the role of metaphor in sociology, with special consideration given to the validity and utility of Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of ‘liquid modernity’ (2000; 2003; 2005; 2007, 2010a). Each chapter was prepared independently by the authors and so can be read as self-contained essays, although there is much to be gained from reading across the collection as a whole. Michael Hviid Jacobsen has conducted a perceptive interview with Bauman, which opens up the discussion on metaphor, and Peter Beilharz had provided a thoughtful engagement with each of the chapters by way of concluding the book. Beyond thanking everyone involved for the enthusiasm, goodwill and commitment that they have shown by participating in this project, which I do sincerely, what is there left for me to contribute by way of framing what follows? I have heard that I occupy a relatively unique position from which to assess the nature and extent of the global contribution made by Zygmunt Bauman’s sociology, given I founded an Institute in his name. I am certainly aware of Bauman’s influence in the obvious circles of academia, policy think tanks and the anti-globalisation movement, as well as the rather less obvious circles of government departments, business and financial institutions. I am also acutely aware that what I have to offer is just one interpretation amongst many, often far more perceptive and eloquent than my own thoughts on the matter at hand. Perhaps my duty here ought simply to involve offering a brief synopsis of ‘liquid modernity’, for the reader fortunate enough to have discovered Bauman for the first time. I also wish to offer a few thoughts in response to the question that I’ve chosen to frame these remarks, however, namely ‘Liquid Sociology – What For?’, taking its lead from Bauman’s (1990) Thinking Sociologically. Fully aware of the trap of ascribing an essentially unknowable intentionality to an author, I will sketch some of my own initial thoughts on Bauman’s possible motivations for developing what I am choosing to call his ‘liquid sociology’. I note his desire for sociology to communicate to others as a form of speech, and for sociology to (re)connect with moral questions. The reader will also find some of these ideas explored in more depth, and with far greater skill, in the chapters that follow.

Liquid Modernity

Bauman regards the age of ‘liquid modernity’ as being dominated by the twin social processes of globalisation and individualisation. They are related because there has emerged a global figuration in which all human activity is bonded together primarily by an individualised free-market framework within which we act as individual consumers, rather than collectively as individual citizens. In this context, men and women are increasingly solely responsible for micro-managing every aspect of their everyday lives, and this situation leads to feelings of isolation and exclusion, and so also fear, anxiety and uncertainty. Amongst other things for sure, ‘liquid modernity’ is taken to signal the progressive separation of power from politics (Bauman 2010b). Capable solely of policing their own geographic territories, State governments are unable or unwilling to provide an effective brake on the freedom of a global economic elite, a fact seemingly confirmed by the truly remarkable creation of what Bauman has called a ‘welfare state for the rich’ (Bauman 2010b: 21) in the aftermath of the global recession of 2008. Assembled in an instant to protect the vested interests of an elite few, the legitimate daily demands of the many were once again brushed aside and left for another day. Whilst the regular ‘welfare state for the poor’ continues to be underfunded, left to fall into disrepair, or deliberately dismantled in favour of yet more market-based solutions, no such fate was to await the global finance sector, who promptly rewarded a worldwide display of benevolence through public taxation by refusing to suspend its usual ‘bonus culture’, even amongst widespread indignation. Collective insurance against individual misfortune appears to be a perfectly sound principle when applied to the rich, much too troublesome an idea when considering the welfare of the poor. As Bauman (2010c) suggests, if power and politics are not yet quite fully separated, they are certainly in the process of a difficult divorce.

A further aspect of ‘liquid modernity’ is that, as social bonds are liquidated, fragmented and weakened by its twin processes of globalisation and individualisation, the experience of social life is also acutely accelerated. Like all liquids, our society cannot stand still and keep its shape for long. Everything seems to change – the fashions we follow, the events that catch our attention, the things we dream of and the things we fear. Not only are both powerful politicians and global financiers deemed to be far beyond our democratic reach, but there is also a fleeting and fluid quality to the immediate social settings in which we act out our daily life-politics (Bauman 2010a). Our successes today will apparently count for nothing tomorrow, fuelling an anxiety in which we must constantly prove to ourselves and to others that we are worthy of being included in a world seemingly obsessed with excluding whole sections of humanity from the realm of moral obligation (Bauman 1998; 2004). In the ‘liquid modern’ world, Bauman argues, shopping is amongst the few remaining social skills, with individuals knowing only how to manage their increasingly privatised concerns as consumers by hoping to find solutions to their individual issues on the high streets or through online megamalls. Having largely ceased to act collectively as citizens who share common troubles, which were once brought to the fore in a public sphere of civil society that resided in that important space between Market and State, the capacity to manage the endemic uncertainty of this ‘liquid modern’ world is measured in terms of the freedom to choose as a consumer. The more choice as a consumer (i.e. the more resources one has, including both time and money, as the essential ingredients to realising that choice in practice) the more able to negotiate (i.e. to shop around for the market solutions to) the daily troubles and frustrations that are a part of everyday life today. In sum, consumer choice has become the meta-value of the ‘liquid modern’ world. In this context, Bauman (2010b: 57) asks whether such notions as equality, democracy and self-determination can survive when society is seen less and less as a product of shared labour and common values and far more as merely a container of goods and services to be grabbed by competing individual hands. The increasing decline of welfare provision and the retreat of the democratic State in favour of deregulation and privatisation, and the sense of a growing preference for ‘online’ rather than ‘offline’ life, are each seen as a consequence of an individualised form of life-politics that champions consumer freedom over and above hard won human rights and civil liberties.

Furthermore, ‘liquid modernity’ offers a social setting in which we live a curiously hurried life experienced as a series of fleeting and (dis)connected episodic moments (Bauman 2008). In desperately trying to cope, let alone to ‘get ahead’, we have widely embraced new communications technologies because of their basic promise to do things far more swiftly for us, and by allowing us to circumnavigate the allegedly tedious, awkward and time-consuming business of having to encounter other human beings in their physical proximity (Bauman 2010a). By seeming to prefer ‘online’ instead of ‘offline’ life, Bauman is keen to remind us that we are increasingly devoid of any meaningful face-to-face contact in the course of our daily lives, preferring the multifarious screens that seem to dominate our every waking moment, including televisions, mobile phones, internet forums, emails, blog posts, comments threads, and those large digital screens that have ever so quietly taken up residence in our shared public spaces in order to offer us a cocktail of breaking news headlines and advertisements. As I will consider in more detail shortly, Bauman believes that meaningful face-to-face contact is fundamental to an ethical life lived in the company of others and so its growing absence from our everyday lives presents a moral problem unique to our ‘liquid modern’ times. Living life at such incessant speed, often in the pursuit of greater financial resources to fund our inflated consumer lifestyles, we are seldom aware of the seriousness with which we need urgently to address the fact that we are now living on both borrowed money and on borrowed time (Bauman 2010b). Snatching what we can of both, the tempo of social life in ‘liquid modernity’ appears to follow the rhythm established in the Red Queen’s advice to Alice in Wonderland, in that we know it takes all the running we can do just to keep in the same place, and that if we want to get somewhere else, well, we must run at least twice as fast as that ...

Liquid Sociology as Art?

In seeking to understand Bauman’s ‘liquid sociology’, we might start by saying that amongst his many achievements, and one of the reasons for his global popularity, is that his writing captures what it feels like to live in the human societies of the twenty-first century. In making such a claim, it is helpful to recall Robert Nisbet’s remark that sociological theories ought to be ‘tested as much by their reach as their grasp, their importance as their validity, and their elegance as their congruence with such facts as may be at hand’ (1962: 67). I propose that Bauman’s ‘liquid sociology’ is best judged by its reach, importance and elegance. My experience of discussing his work with others, both within and without the walls of academic institutions, is that Bauman’s analysis of ‘liquid modernity’ speaks to people, it connects around the world, helping people to make sense of their increasingly globalised and individualised lives. Again, it was Nisbet who argued that sociology perhaps shares more with art than it does with science precisely because art is interested in ‘throwing light upon reality, and in somehow communicating this light to others’ (1962: 68). Somewhat crudely put, then, Bauman’s work ‘travels’ and this is surely aided in its journey by the relative accessibility of his writing, its literary and poetic qualities. Through the extended use of ‘liquidity’ as a guiding metaphor, his books appear as a form of art, an aesthetic experience.

This is perhaps one of the reasons why Bauman enjoys a greater reputation globally than he does here in the UK, where his form of ‘liquid sociology’ seems more often than not to foster irritation rather than inspiration. One often hears in the UK that Bauman is ‘not a proper sociologist’, that he is instead a ‘social or moral philosopher’, typically because his work lacks methodological rigour, the aesthetic sensibility of his work seemingly too imprecise for more empirical tastes. And yet this aesthetic quality is one of the reasons that Bauman’s sociology ‘travels’ so well and reaches as many people as it does. His work is full of references to literature, popular culture, television, and newspapers, often at the expense of citing formal sociological research housed in professional academic journals.¹ Following his formal retirement from the University of Leeds in 1990, Bauman seems gradually to shift from a situation in which his primary readership is intended to be other professional academics, to one in which he is writing for an engaged and critical public. His style of writing becomes still more literary in style, his references balanced between the academic and the popular, and the format of his ‘little books’ seemingly intended for the curious reader on a train journey or in the hours just before sleep, rather than for laborious daily study in a University library. There is repetition too, for sure, with certain turns of phrase or entire sections re-appearing in articles and books that address the same subject, perhaps acknowledging that his public readers may have neither the time nor the inclination to study the breadth of his writing and so may have missed this or that particular insight. To give a sense of this, within the first few pages of Liquid Life (2005), the reader encounters a discussion of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Italo Calvino, Lewis Carroll, Georges Perec and William Shakespeare. Across his many writings on ‘liquid modernity’, there are references to The Guardian and Observer newspapers, the Big Brother and The Weakest Link television shows, to Adam Curtis’ acclaimed documentary series The Power of Nightmares, to the Monty Python film The Life of Brian, and to chat shows and soap operas. When asked the ‘desert island discs’ question in conversation with Keith Tester, Bauman chooses to be accompanied by the literary works of Perec and Calvino, as well as Robert Musil and Jorge Luis Borges, rather than to share his exile with any canonical texts of sociology (Bauman and Tester 2001). His work therefore appears to be much closer to Nisbet’s ‘sociology as art’ than to ‘sociology as science’, asking to be judged by its (analytical) reach rather than its (empirical) grasp, and this has resulted in many finding Bauman an awkward and ambivalent presence within sociology.

This problematic status of Bauman-as-sociologist is acknowledged by Jacobsen and Tester (2006), who have suggested that Bauman has always been rather ill-equipped to ‘do sociology’. They note that, were Bauman to be judged solely by the conventions of a professional sociological discipline, he is actually ‘a very poor sociologist’. What Jacobsen and Tester have in mind here is C. Wright Mills’ (1959) famous distinction between the possibility of ‘doing sociology’, thus following the diktats of an institutionalised and bureaucratised discipline, and that of ‘being a sociologist’, embraced as an entire way of life, a mode of human being-in-the-world. Commonly heard (though seldom written) criticisms of Bauman include the lack of an empirically-grounded sociology to inform his thinking, the absence of objective data to support his observations on the human condition, and his tendency to paint the ‘liquid modern’ landscape in relatively broad brushstrokes. All of these criticisms are valid responses to his work. And yet, if seen through the lens of Nisbet’s distinction, Bauman’s sociology makes sense as an art form seeking to shed light upon reality.² The decision to reformulate his sociological analysis of modernity into one that rejects the semantic complications of the prefix ‘post-’ in favour of the metaphor of ‘liquidity’ can be seen as an artistic, literary decision rather than as a scientific one. Just as with Marx’s ‘base/superstructure’ distinction, or his remark concerning ‘all that is solid melts into air’, not to mention Weber’s ‘iron cage’ and Tönnies less well-known ‘flussige begriffe’ (translated as ‘fluid reality’, and a pertinent idea in this context), Bauman’s work on ‘liquidity’ continues an art of sociological thinking as old as the discipline itself. Sociology, as with human understanding in general, has made frequent use of metaphor; it is simply that this has become a far more explicit analytical tool in Bauman’s ‘liquid sociology’ period. By making extended play of the characteristics of ‘liquidity’ as the metaphor that informs his thinking on a wide variety of subjects, the scope of his own sociological imagination is liberated and not limited to the confines of methods manuals exhorting the rules for how best to ‘do sociology’. Bauman’s sociology has never been a search for empirical answers and has never professed to be so. As he outlined in Hermeneutics and Social Science (1978), human understanding is not a linear progression from vulnerable to less vulnerable forms of knowledge, but is rather a circular process that denies the possibility of ever arriving at a universally and eternally established truth. The dialogue that Bauman’s sociology opens up between himself and his readers, and his commitment to creating such poly-vocality, suggests that, for him at least, sociology is a particular form of speech intended to relate to and be critically discussed by others. This is fundamental to understanding his ‘liquid sociology’ and, I now propose, is revealed through two motivations that we can see emerging across his work.

Liquid Sociology as Interpretation?

The first motivation can be seen as the outcome of a line of thinking that states the task of sociology today is precisely to interpret the world rather than to legislate within it. In Legislators and Interpreters (1987), Bauman notes that the role of intellectuals coincides with the birth of the Enlightenment and that the presence of State power in human life becomes increasingly problematic. Seeking at this time to understand better the apparent transition from modernity to post-modernity, the clue seemed to lie in the shifting of intellectual styles, or rather the differing roles that intellectuals were to perform. The idea of modernity presumed an image of the world as an ordered totality, open to the possibilities of empirical explanation, prediction and control. Social engineering is taken to be the formal basis of this control, planning a mastery over both Nature and the human world guided by the light of intellectual reason and scientific investigation. Thus, the typically modern strategy of intellectual work is best characterised by the role of the ‘legislator’, who possesses final authority and ultimate knowledge. The power of the intellectual rests on the axis of ‘those who know’ and ‘those who do not know’ and makes claims to the validity and integrity of scientific research as the basis for this authority. In essence, it is the role of the ‘intellectual as public administrator’, providing technically useful knowledge to bureaucracies within State institutions, facilitating and legitimating the intervention of State power in the rational, efficient, controlled and planned administration of human lives.³

In contrast, Bauman sees the post-modern intellectual as a translator of the human world, rather than as a final arbiter on the right or wrong way to proceed in relation to a given empirical or policy problem. In this role, the intellectual offers an informed interpretation of the social world, exposing its contingencies, its power relationships, the latent functions of its institutions, and avoids making the truth-claims associated with modern legislating intellectuals. Ultimately,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Liquid Sociology – What For?
• 2 Blurring Genres: A Conversation with Zygmunt Bauman on Metaphors, Science versus Art, Fiction and Other Tricks of the Trade
• 3 Bauman’s Challenge: Metaphors and Metamorphoses
• 4 Bauman’s Travels: Metaphors of the Token and the Wilderness
• 5 ‘Welcome to the Hotel California’: Bauman and Virilio on Utopia, Dystopia, and Globalisation
• 6 The Heineken Effect: Bauman, Baudrillard and Žižek as Metaphorical Thinkers of Liquidity
• 7 On the Liquidity of Evil: Modernity and the Dissolution of Ethics in Bauman’s Social Theory
• 8 Strangers, ‘Others’ and the Unstable Metaphors of Race Representation in Liquid Modernity: The Case of the Gypsy Weddings
• 9 Risk, Nichtwissen and Fear: Searching For Solidity in Liquid Times?
• 10 From ‘Solid’ Producers and Consumers to ‘Liquid’ Prosumers
• 11 The Question of a Sociological Poetics: Metaphors, Models and Theory
• 12 ‘Metaphormosis’: On the Metaphoricity of Zygmunt Bauman’s Social Theory
• 13 Conclusion: Liquid Sociology
• Index