Zygmunt Bauman (‘Ziggy’), like Bowie, was constantly reinventing himself, though I suspect he saw more continuity through his multiple publications (50+ books) than may be apparent to others. Starting from a firmly theoretical perspective, he wrote initially on stratification and social class and the likes of hermeneutics (understanding/interpreting) in social science, following up with a remarkable book on Modernity and the Holocaust. This last work is in my view rightly lauded as a significant contribution to sociological scholarship. Bauman here emphasized the fear of the stranger. Drawing on Arendt and Adorno, he argued that the Holocaust was not so much a retreat into premodern barbarity, as a phenonemon intrinsic to modernity. It epitomised a Weberian bureaucratic/‘iron cage’ excision of, in this case, Jews as strangers. Modernity remains susceptible to such purges.
No brief blog can do justice to Bauman’s many reinventions and interests. I will concentrate here on aspects of his later work. He can, as Ritzer has observed (in his Contemporary Sociological Theory and its Classical Roots), be regarded either as a modern or a postmodern theorist. ‘Ambiguity’ has settled in as a Bauman theme, if that isn’t a contradiction. We live in a time of new possibilities and new dangers. On a positive note, he testifies to a ‘postmodern’ acceptance of the messiness of the world. Yet this heralds a new level of multiple uncertainties. Moreover these uncertainties have become individualized or ‘private’ matters. Ritzer writes:
‘faced with private fears, postmodern individuals are also doomed to try to escape those fears on their own. Not surprisingly, they have been drawn to communities as shelters from these fears. However, this raises the possibility of conflict between communities. Bauman worries about these hostilities and argues that we need to put a brake on them through the development of solidarity’
In an era characterized as ‘neotribal’, I would add that it is unsurprising that people who find themselves ‘desterted’ and ‘alone’ in a postmodern, relativised culture seek refuge in fundamentalisms (and what kind of toleration is it that tolerates fundamentalisms?).
Ritzer goes on to report that Bauman outlines four principal forms of contemporary politics. The first is ‘tribal politics’, which asserts that postmodern tribes exist symbollically as imagined communities; and these tribes compete via rituals and spectacles to win approval and support. The second is a ‘politics of desire’, which refers to tribes’ commitment to and commendation of certain types of behaviour. It is a politics of seduction: tribes compete to lodge their tokens in people’s minds as objects of desire. Third is the ‘politics of fear’, which derives from a scepticism and mistrust of the pronoucements and counsel of assorted political agencies. Finally comes the ‘politics of certainty’, which encompasses a mistrust of those ‘experts’ who, if only they could (still) be trusted, might proffer solutions to pressing problems of purpose and self-identity.
Many of these ideas and claims are epitomised in Bauman’s pivotal concept of liquid modernity. Revealingly, the subtitle of his Liquid Times is ‘living in an age of uncertainty. I shall concentrate here on his remarks on freedom. A distnction is made between subjective and objective freedom. Subjective freedom has to do with how one perceives the limits to one’s freedom, while objective freedom pertains, when all’s said and done, to one’s actual capacity to act. Thus people can feel (subjectively) either free or constrained in contradiction with their (objective) circumstances. Bauman suggests that people can and do dislike the idea of freedom because it seems a ‘mixed blessing’. He is not unsympathetic, citing Durkheim’s judgement that by putting oneself under the wings of society one might gain a ‘liberating dependence’. To be totally free is to exist in a constant agony of uncertainty and indecision, not least in relation to the will of others. Norms provide well-trod paths and settled routines. Contemporary societies remain open to critique, but the context and targets have changed. Critiques have shifted from positing and promoting societal change to a focus on ourselves and our life-politics. Our reflexivity has become shallow and no longer extends meaningfully to the systemness of society or the system’s colonisation of the lifeworld.
In liquid modernity the options to disavow one’s individualism and to decline to participate have been removed. How one lives adds up to a biographical solution to systemic contradictions. The contradictions and their associated risks remain, but the duty to confront and deal with them has become individualised and a matter of personal responsibility. Bauman argues too that a gap is opening up between individuality as fate and the capacity for self-assertion. This ‘capacity’, he suggests, now falls well short of what is required for genuine, ‘authentic’ self-assertion. It is the task of a ‘critical theory of society’, Bauman avers, to devise the means to so empower individuals that they have a degree of control over the resources required for authentic self-assertion.
The postmodern represents a break from the modern. ‘Postmodernity, Bauman writes, ‘is modernity reconciled to its own impossibility – and determined, for better or worse, to live with it. Modern practice continues – now, however, devoid of the objective that once triggered it off.’
Bauman is such a prolific writer that these few paragraphs cannot be anything other than a purposeful extraction. What is important from my vantage point is that: (a) when push comes to shove, he opts for a commitment to continuity as opposed to discontinuity by retaining the concept of ‘modernity’; and (b) he catches much of the cultural change that has accompanied, and is functional for, our present era of post-1970s financial capitalism. Both (a) and (b) warrant elaboration. I too am unconvinced by arguments for the end of modernity (let alone of history). I have avoided the prejudicial term ‘late modernity’ and used the more neutral ‘high modernity’ in my own writings. Bauman also distanced himself (eventually) from conjectures around a new era of postmodernity. Capitalism persists, if in innovative clothing, as do so many of its social structures/relations/mechanisms. However, Bauman perspicuously analyses the cultural transumutation that has walked in tandem with financial capitalism. This novel (‘rejoice, you’re on your own’) postmodern relativism, which ‘feels emancipatory’, but which Habermas wisely casts as the latest form of neo-conservatism, delivers significant obstacles to the solidarity that Bauman calls for. The key question for sociology in my view is this: how in this most unsympathetic and inauspicious phase of financial capitalism can the objective reality of class relations and struggle or ‘warfare’ be translated into a potentially belligerent and transformative subjective sense of, and impulse to, ‘class consciousness’? Bauman’s contribution is to lay bare the cultural ‘obstacles’.