The Social Thought of Zygmunt Bauman

The Social Thought of Zygmunt Bauman Keith Tester

The Social Thought of Zygmunt Bauman

Also by Keith Tester ANIMALS AND SOCIETY: The Humanity of Animal Rights CIVIL SOCIETY COMPASSION, MORALITY AND THE MEDIA CONVERSATIONS WITH ZYGMUNT BAUMAN (with Zygmunt Bauman) MEDIA, CULTURE AND MORALITY MORAL CULTURE THE FLANEUR (ed.) THE INHUMAN CONDITION THE LIFE AND TIMES OF POST-MODERNITY THE TWO SOVEREIGNS: Social Contradictions of European Modernity

The Social Thought of Zygmunt Bauman Keith Tester Professor of Cultural Sociology, University of Portsmouth, UK

© Keith Tester 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–1271–8 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tester, Keith, 1960– The social thought of Zygmunt Bauman / Keith Tester. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–1271–8 (cloth) 1. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2. Sociology. 3. Socialism. 4. Postmodernism. I. Title. HM479.B39T46 2004 301—dc22 2003070725 10 9 8 7 6 13 12 11 10 09

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Dedicated to Madeleine Tester

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Contents viii

Acknowledgements Introduction

1

1

Critical Thinking and Human Possibility

12

2

The Emergence of an Imagination

34

3

Socialism: Utopian and Cultural

58

4

Communism and Modernity

82

5

The Holocaust

107

6

Postmodernity: Ethical Incentive, Indifferent World

131

7

Sociology and the Challenge of Globalisation

157

References

183

Index

193

vii

Acknowledgements The greatest debt I have incurred has been to Zygmunt Bauman. Without his personal and intellectual inspiration I would not have written this book, and neither would I ever have been in a position that would have made it possible for me to spend time on a project like this. Neither can anyone who has worked closely with Zygmunt Bauman fail to be deeply grateful to Janina Bauman. I hope that this book is a moderately adequate ‘thank you’ to them both. I have benefited from the advice and support of Peter Beilharz, Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Linda Rutherford, Chris Shilling and Sophia Wood. I am also grateful to Heather Gibson and Jen Nelson at Palgrave Macmillan for their confidence in both this project and me. The Faculty of Humanities and Social Studies of the University of Portsmouth generously granted a period of sabbatical leave so that I could work on this book, and I would like to express my thanks for this.

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comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. – Milan Kundera The price of silence is paid in the hard currency of human suffering. – Zygmunt Bauman The likes of Zygmunt Bauman will never be found in the world of academia again. He is one of that generation of Central and Eastern European intellectuals who literally lived through the disasters of the twentieth century. He experienced what others only write about. Zygmunt Bauman is of Jewish descent and he was born in Poznan, Poland in 1925. With his parental family he escaped the Nazi Holocaust by moving to the Soviet Union. His formal schooling was completed in Stalin’s Russia, where he thought of becoming a physicist. But that ambition was overtaken by events. Instead of entering into the ranks of the physicists, Bauman entered the ranks of the military. He joined the Polish Army in the USSR and fought with it as it expelled the Nazis from the Soviet Union and then Poland. (For these details and further information about the biography of Zygmunt Bauman, see the first chapter in Bauman and Tester 2001. See also Bunting 2003; Smith 1999.) By the time he was twenty, Bauman had confronted anti-Semitism, Stalinism, Nazism and warfare. After the war Bauman started to build a military career in Communist Poland, and he rose to the rank of Captain. It remains possible to glimpse some of the reasons why Bauman stayed in the army. There was a passion: ‘With the army, I fought my way back to a country 1

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devastated by a war which only aggravated its prewar misery and backwardness. To lift it from penury and centuries-long retardation was an exciting task.’ The concern to liberate Poland from the horrors of Nazi occupation overlapped with a fundamentally socialist aspiration for a common humanity not torn apart by surface differences. Bauman wanted to play a part in the construction of a Poland that did not consign its citizens to live according to little or nothing more than the demands of inescapable want and evidently natural inequalities. As Bauman has put it: ‘the new powers promised more, much more than that: the end to discrimination, petty enmities and the day-to-day cruelty of people suffocating in a country which did not have enough work for them to make sense of their lives and not enough bread to keep them alive. It promised an equality of dignified life’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 17–18). This was a dream of human commonality that was entirely contrary to the thread of anti-Semitism that runs through Polish history, and which the Communist authorities exploited at times of political instability and crisis. (The Communist state’s exploitation of antiSemitism in post-war Poland is explored in Checinski 1982.) Referring to this thread of anti-Semitism, Stefan Morawski has mentioned, ‘Bauman’s . . . Jewish descent, which shaped him as a not quite normal kind of Pole because open or tacit anti-Semitism formed an obvious part of the socio-cultural fabric of his fatherland’ (Morawski 1998: 30). Bauman was expelled from the army in 1953 during an antiSemitic purge which was carried out in the name of a policy of the ‘de-Judaising of the army’. Bauman’s expulsion was typical of this policy and unsurprising since he was born Jewish and had managed to become a political officer in the army. The latter achievement put Bauman high on the list of expulsion because alongside the policy of ‘de-Judaising’, the authorities were also keen, as they put it, to ‘nationalise the cadres’ (less euphemistically, that meant getting rid of anyone who could be labelled as Jewish). In Poland then, anti-Semitism often went hand in hand with expressions of a kind of nationalism. As the Polish film director Krzysztof Kieslowski put it in 1991–92: ‘Anti-Semitism and Polish nationalism are a stain on my country which has remained to this day and I don’t think we’ll ever be able to get rid of it’ (Kieslowski 1993: 38. For subtle insights into Polish anti-Semitism, albeit from the perspective of recollections of Eastern Poland, see Milosz 1968: 91–107).

Introduction

3

Like a handful of the other expelled cadres Bauman entered into the world of education, albeit during a period (1952–56) that one commentator has dubbed, ‘the dark years of Polish sociology’ (Smolicz 1974: 21). Bauman took an MA in social sciences at Warsaw University and in 1954 became a lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences. From 1964 to 1968 Bauman held the Chair of General Sociology at Warsaw, only to be expelled from this post on 25 March 1968, during another wave of anti-Semitism whipped up by the state authorities (a wave in which Kieslowski admitted that he played a very small part. Kieslowski put his participation down to political naiveté and, in essence, stupidity; Kieslowski 1993: 38). This time Bauman was singled out as one of the intellectual leaders of the student protests that were taking place. After three years, struggling to settle in universities in Israel (for a short while he was Professor of Sociology at the Universities of Tel Aviv and Haifa) and Australia, Zygmunt Bauman finally found a new home in 1971 at the University of Leeds, where he was Professor of Sociology until his retirement in 1990. The onset of retirement was the moment when Bauman’s mind went into overdrive, and he produced the flood of books and articles which have caused his name to become known to a public considerably larger than a few of his fellow sociologists. It would be easy to romanticise such a biography, so long as one does not have to endure it oneself. Similarly, it is just as easy to reduce all of Bauman’s ground-breaking work – on questions of ethics, postmodernity, the Holocaust, socialism, violence, on that little thing of how we do and are to live today – to his own life story. However, there is need for caution here. The crux of the matter is that Zygmunt Bauman’s biography is most certainly unique in the particular, but terrifyingly it is not unique in the general. For example, in 1967 Bauman said that there was only one period in the history of socialist Poland when youth engaged in pure politics. This was the period immediately after the war, when the country had to be rebuilt. When he spoke about ‘pure’ politics, Bauman was thinking about a kind of political action that was concerned solely with the pursuit of ideals and aspirations that went beyond simple self-interest and utility. In 1967, in a passage that the wonders of hindsight can make it possible to identify as an anticipation of his later comment about why he participated in the liberation and

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reconstruction of Poland, Bauman pointed to a political commitment and passion that was felt by a generation rather than by one or two individuals. He said that: ‘Threatened in the very basis of its existence by the German occupation, cut off from literally all life opportunities, frustrated in all its normative and comparative life expectancies, the Polish youth grown up during the war or immediately before it could achieve its life goals . . . by no means but political struggle.’ This was a political struggle that required commitment even after the expulsion of the Nazis: ‘The German troops were not the only enemy to be fought against. The prolonged German occupation itself was to a great extent the result of the weakness, helplessness and unreliability of the pre-war Polish political system’ (Bauman 1967a: 73). In other words, Bauman’s political passion was definitely unique in the particular (he felt like this), but it was not at all unique in general (he was not the only one to feel like this). Indeed, the generality of this political awareness is reflected in a significant amount of post-war Polish literature and especially in Jerzy Andrzejewski’s novel Ashes and Diamonds (Andrzejewski 1997. For an outline of general themes in post-war Polish literature, see Milosz 1983: 453–458) as well as Andrzej Wajda’s great trilogy of movies: A Generation in 1954, Kanal in 1956 and Ashes and Diamonds in 1958 (the latter is based on the book by Andrzejewski. Milosz castigated Andrzejewski in The Captive Mind, where the latter appears as the character ‘Alpha’; Milosz 1953: 82–110. For discussions of Wajda’s trilogy, see Lewis and Britch 1986, Morris 1970. Lewis and Britch rather idiosyncratically read the trilogy as an attack on the Soviet domination of Poland, whereas Morris writes with all of the confidence of the orthodox Western Marxist and essentially criticises Wajda for being insufficiently in thrall to Party ideology). Or to put it simply, in Poland after the war: ‘The political destiny of the country and personal lot of the young generation were lucidly interrelated’ (Bauman 1967a: 74). The interrelationship to which Bauman refers is thrown into extremely sharp relief by Jaff Schatz’s book, The Generation, which tells the story of the mid-twentieth-century Jewish Communists of Poland (Schatz 1991. It seems likely that the title of Schatz’s book deliberately recalls the film of Wajda). Even though Schatz’s book is primarily concerned with a generation that was born around 1911 (that is, a decade or so before Zygmunt Bauman was born, and therefore a decade or so before the generation of youth about which Bauman

Introduction

5

was thinking with his 1967 comments), the details of The Generation relate to Bauman’s pre-exile biography with extraordinary accuracy. Broadly speaking, Schatz’s story is one about how a generation of Polish Jewish Communists emerged as political actors from their immediate and personal experiences of poverty and oppression. The ‘generation’ was motivated by the promise that Communism could bring about a future in which anti-Semitism would be replaced with justice, equality and an emancipation from overwhelming want and oppression. The ‘generation’ coalesced and moved through a process of pre-1939 participation in various Communist groups; the experience of exile in Stalin’s Soviet Union; the reconstruction of Poland; and a final defeat in the face of state-sponsored anti-Semitism in the 1960s. Bauman’s biography becomes part of this story during the last years of the Soviet exile, and continues through to the crushing of Jewish Communist hopes in the 1960s. The counterpoint to the tale of idealism is provided in Schatz’s book by a detailed and subtle examination of the choices and contingencies that determined the life-courses of the generation: the Nazi Holocaust or escape to the Soviet Union; the pressures for assimilation or the acceptance of the promise that one could remain onself because ethnicity would no longer be important; and Polish nation-building and anti-Semitism as a deliberately manipulated safety valve to ensure the stability of the state. As Bauman himself put it, in a passage that resonates loudly with his own biography, Schatz’s ‘generation’ were, ‘people who, not by their own choice, were cast in a context in which all the ambivalence of the human condition spawned by the self-contradictory and often self-defeating processes of modernity was at its most acute and most creative at the same time’ (Bauman 1990a: 175). In that passage Bauman is carrying out a number of moves that typify his sociological ambition. First, Bauman’s work is concerned with the world as it is experienced by living human beings like me, you or the generation of Jewish Communists in Poland. Bauman is not concerned with some abstraction called ‘Man’ or ‘Humanity’. Rather he is always concerned with what the world does, and has done, to ordinary but real men and women. This concern is reflected in Bauman’s credo that sociology ought to, ‘help an ordinary person like you and me to see through our experience, and to show how the apparently familiar aspects of life can be interpreted in a novel way

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The Social Thought of Zygmunt Bauman

and seen in a different light’ (Bauman 1990b: 18). Sociology shows that things could be different than this; that where we perceive only necessity there is the chance of possibility. The aim is to dissolve the world that would otherwise be seen as natural and inevitable. This is Bauman’s sociological mission. Second, Bauman is concerned to explore how personal life-stories and biographies are shaped by structural societal forces, and in particular how men and women are brought face to face with contradictions in their own lives that are utterly beyond personal and biographical resolution. For example, the Communist state in Poland made it nigh-on impossible for one to be Jewish and a builder of the purported new world. This is Bauman’s analytical problem. Third, Bauman is concerned to show that despite the pretence of power that the world is clear to the understanding (or can be made clear as soon as the ‘correct’ method is discovered or as soon as the obstacles to clarity are got out of the way), the human condition is instead marked by all of the possibilities and problems of ambivalence. He seeks to rescue the possibilities of this ambivalence from power and the powerful. This is Bauman’s political action. Fourth, and barely below the surface of that quotation from Bauman about Schatz’s ‘generation’, there is a concern to attend to those who are made to suffer most sharply from the ambivalence of the human condition (and in particular a concern for those who are made to suffer by the fallacious and disastrous attempts of power and the powerful to pretend that ambivalence is a temporary problem rather than an inevitable condition). This is Bauman’s ethical commitment. To this extent, important dimensions of Zygmunt Bauman’s work can be seen to be intelligible in terms of the peculiarities of Polish ambivalence. These dimensions continue to shape his work. But of course, the sociological resonance of Bauman’s own life-course does not stop in March 1968 and with his expulsion from Poland. After all, it has been since his arrival in England that Bauman has produced the texts that have secured widespread, global, attention. These texts build upon the sociological lessons of ambivalence learnt in Poland, but refract them through the lens of the sociological condition of exile. Indeed, it is in the context of his own encounter with exile that Bauman has been so productive. A circumstance that might have encouraged others to keep their heads down and out of the way of history has, instead, caused Zygmunt Bauman to become an incredibly prolific writer. It is through the sociological condition of exile that

Introduction

7

Bauman has written works which, first, reflect the costs of being thrown into ambivalence and, second, express the possibilities of that condition which is rarely chosen in the first instance but can nevertheless be turned into distinctively and distinctly human aspirations. It is on account of his own exile, building on the experiences of the problems and the possibilities of ambivalence, that Bauman’s work is so provocative and able to speak to anyone who is prepared to spend time with it. The nub of the matter is that just as Bauman’s own Polish biography is unique in the particular but not in the general, so according to his own understanding the same is true of his exile. Leszek Kolakowski who was also exiled from Poland in 1968 (although not for antiSemitic reasons; Kolakowski is not Jewish) has written that the ‘intellectual in exile’ is one of the familiar figures of the twentieth century (Kolakowski 1990: 55). Zygmunt Bauman goes a stage further to suggest that exile is not the preserve of certain specially picked-out intellectuals but is, instead, a common experience for all men and women who are forced to confront the ambivalence of the contemporary human condition. Bauman distinguishes between what he calls the ‘pre-taste’ and the ‘fully fledged experience’ of exile. He believes that all of the men and women who live in the present experience the pre-taste and, on that basis, can – but not necessarily will – go on to experience exile in its fully fledged form. Bauman identifies exile with displacement and he explains that we are all displaced: ‘All of us, in every situation or context, in any surroundings or neighbourhood. To each group or role network we lend but part of ourselves . . . leaving the rest outside.’ He goes on to explain that this situation in which we are never entirely present in whatever situations we may find ourselves, ‘does not happen due to our duplicity, lofty self-distanciation or disgust of engagement. Whatever attitude we might have taken, we have little chance of being and doing otherwise’. There follows the sociological understanding of the roots of this predicament: ‘. . . cast, as we all are, in the world sliced into fragments and episodes, the tangled network of criss-crossing connection, looped or blind tracks and an absent centre’ (Bauman 1997a: 159). In short, the common experience of the present is one in which all men and women are to some degree exiles from themselves, from their significant others and from their situations.

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The Social Thought of Zygmunt Bauman

Consequently, all men and women are able to have ‘a pre-taste of exile’ in so far as we are all confronted with the problems and yet also the possibilities (that is, the ambivalence) of our being displaced. But if that is all there is to the matter of exile, it leaves a question dangling. If we are all capable of having the pre-taste of exile because we are all partly displaced, then why is it that fully fledged exile remains less common? Why is it that not all of the exiles are sociologists? Zygmunt Bauman offers a persuasive answer to that riddle but it is an answer that, characteristically, refuses to elevate his life-course over that of others. What makes the difference between the pre-taste and the fully fledged exile is the making of a choice on the part of the exile; a choice that can be made by any and every exile. As Bauman writes: ‘The difference between that pre-taste and a fully fledged experience of exile is one between fate and vocation: the first is, as they say, blind; the second can be only lived with the eyes fully opened.’ He continues: ‘Fate is blind because indiscriminate and unchoosing. Vocation can only be chosen. The problem . . . is how to reforge fate (which we can do little or nothing about) into destiny (which is our choice and our responsibility)’ (Bauman 1997a: 159). This is a passage that captures the full ambivalence of exile, the ambivalence that Kolakowski summarises as that in which, ‘exile can be seen either as a misfortune or a challenge’ (Kolakowski 1990: 58). What Zygmunt Bauman is advocating is precisely the making of a choice to accept the challenge of exile. Bauman’s work since his arrival in England is testimony of the extent to which this precept is not merely an abstract injunction but, for him, a principle by which to be a human being in the world. Bauman is saying that this unchosen situation of the displacement of exile should not be suffered as natural and inevitable nor as a misfortune alone. Rather, Bauman is saying that exile should be confronted actively as an opportunity for the practice of a distinctly human being in the world. There are and can be no guarantees that this transformation of exile into a vocation will lead to ease or comfort. Yet Bauman is quite sure that if the displaced do not chose the vocation, then they are allowing themselves to be whatever it is that power and the powerful have ordained, and therefore they are allowing themselves to be reduced to a status of being something other than human; they are allowing themselves to be the objects rather than the subjects of relationships.

Introduction

9

When Bauman argues that those who choose actively to transform their situation from a fate into a destiny feel the fully fledged experience of exile, he is implying a certain understanding of what it means to be human in the world. Bauman is saying that to be human is to transcend the limitations that are created by the actuality of social structures, institutions and arrangements. Sociology is the study of those limitations; exile, their subjective experience (annihilation or silencing is invariably their objective experience) and the vocation, a refusal to accept their inevitability. Or, to put the matter differently, Bauman’s work looks at how the world has become a place of an exile that seems natural, and it edges towards a future in which that exile will be transformed into something human. To this extent, Bauman’s work sits well with a comment that Kierkegaard made in his Journals: ‘It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards’ (Kierkegaard 1958: 89). This ‘living forwards’ takes a number of forms in Bauman’s work. First, it is fundamental to his understanding of culture as a ‘knife pressed against the future’ (see Bauman 1973a). For Bauman, culture is fundamentally ethical: ‘it is my conviction that morality and culture are cancellations of necessity’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 50). Culture is a way in which we can become human, despite the limitations of the world. Second, it explains why Bauman has paid so much attention to the question of the changing social and cultural significance of the intellectuals. Bauman has argued that those who have chosen the vocation of exile are an avant-garde. They are ‘the advanced troops of the marching army’, who are concerned to, ‘survey, chart, signpost and so to domesticate the yet unexplored territory, to pave the way for those moving behind, but bound to arrive where they have already been’ and, ‘It processes the experience which for many others stays unprocessed. It experiments with a language fit to grasp and express and communicate, what most of us find irritatingly ineffable’ (Bauman 1997a: 159. Compare with the discussion of sociology in Bauman 1978 and the discussion of intellectuals in Bauman 1987a. The avant-garde is given a crucial social, cultural and ethical role by Bauman in one of his presently lesser-known essays: Bauman 1966a. But for questions about the contemporary avant-garde, see Bauman 1987d). Third, it is crystallised in his vision of an ethically responsible human being in the world. This third aspect of ‘living

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forwards’ is developed by Bauman very clearly in his Society Under Siege (Bauman 2002a). Bauman declares that: ‘Human being-in-theworld means being ahead-of-the-world. The “human” in “human being” is what “sticks out”, runs ahead of the rest of being’. By this argument, the world in which human being is situated, ‘is that rest which has been left behind. “The world” stands for limits – the limits that exist, though, in (and through) the process of being broken and transcended’ (Bauman 2002a: 222. Compare with the discussion of second nature at the very beginning of Bauman 1976a). Here then, the limitations of the world are only known to the extent that humans rub up against them and try to transcend them; and it is precisely in that rubbing against and attempt to transcend that we become fully human. As such, the vocation of exile is a humanisation of an otherwise imposed fate because it is a refusal to be completely displaced. Through the vocation the exile finds a home, a home that is constituted by ‘living forwards’ rather than through a relentless focusing on the past. It is a home that is always known in and through the acts of its building, never by a resting within its walls. This concern to ‘live forwards’ has an effect on the texts that Bauman has produced during the period of his vocation of exile. It also has an impact on how those texts might be received; and therefore an impact on the status and content of this book. First, to the extent that Bauman writes in terms of a commitment to a human being in the world which is oriented towards the ‘other than this’, then his texts are required to be such that they never themselves foreclose on the future nor, indeed on the possibility of their own transcendence. Consequently, Bauman’s texts, unlike other kinds of sociological work, are not concerned to offer the ‘last word’. So do not think that this book is the ‘last word’ about Bauman’s work. It is not and cannot be. Bauman does not write in order to find answers. To the contrary, his writing is concerned to develop better ways of asking questions. According to Bauman the avant-garde experiments with language in order to achieve communication that fits with – and can accommodate – the ambivalence of contemporary experience. To this extent, his own sociological work, with its concern to find a resonant description of the present (modern, postmodern, liquid modern) is avant-gardist (and so there is a return to Bauman’s interest in intellectuals). As with an earlier avantgardist who remorselessly dissected his present, Karl Kraus, so with

Introduction

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Bauman: ‘language . . . is a means not so much of communicating what he knows, but of finding out what he does not yet know’ (Heller 1961: 209). The language is itself a principle of the opening-up of paths for ‘living forwards’. Second, in order for the texts to be able to play a part in ‘living forwards’, they have to be left by Bauman to find their own place in the world. In practical terms this means that Bauman refuses to believe that he and he alone knows what his work ‘really means’. After all, were he to imply that there is an inscrutable authorial authority behind and beyond the language and words in the book or article, he would be saying that their definite and final meaning was located in the past (in the moment of their production which, by definition, precedes the moment of their reading). Consequently, whenever this book attributes intentionality to Zygmunt Bauman, that attribution is entirely due to my limitations with prose rather than to anything that Zygmunt Bauman himself might ever have said, written or done. Since Bauman’s texts are the product of a vocation that is about the transcendence of limits, then he cannot logically seek to tie down their meanings to a reified or mythical past of their production nor to an authorial authority. Indeed, Bauman consciously and systematically upholds these refusals: ‘The text the author has produced acquires its own life’ (Bauman 1978: 229). It is engaged in a ‘living forwards’. Third, this book is a conversation with and about Bauman’s work as opposed to a survey of the debates in which it has come to be situated. There is very little here on the critiques and criticisms that surround his work since my concern is to open up an interpretation of it as opposed to sit in presumptive judgement of a debate. (Criticisms up to 2001 are collected in Beilharz 2002a.) This book is a study of Zygmunt Bauman’s work, the work which dissects the present, which seeks understanding from the past, and which is carried out in the vocational hope that in the future human being in the world might be just that – human.

1 Critical Thinking and Human Possibility

Zygmunt Bauman is one of the most deliberate of sociological stylists. For him language and prose are not simply functional tools. Certainly, a sentence, paragraph, essay or book is a means of communication and therefore of conversation between the reader and the writer. It is a means of the translation of interpretations into practices. But the conventions of academic language can be an obstacle to this end. Bauman has said that: ‘the problem with writing is the linear nature of the writing . . . you have to express your ideas in a linear form’ (Welzer 2002: 109). Perhaps it is a deepening appreciation of this limitation that explains why Bauman has moved from the long book to the short, from the chapter to the essay and thence to the fragment (Beilharz 2001: 1). It is this question of writing, and of the relationship between the linear text and the fragmentary contemporary human condition, that explains why there always seems to be something that is difficult to capture about Bauman’s work. There is something about Bauman’s work that seems always to escape clear and concise encapsulation. Even Peter Beilharz, who understands Bauman’s work better than anyone, has been moved to comment that it is, ‘extensive, awesome, different . . . Bauman’s work is notoriously difficult’ (Beilharz 2000: vii). In a passage that approves of what others might condemn, Pieter Nijhoff has written about the ‘irregular features’ of Bauman’s work: ‘He often combines the criteria of what is just, pleasing or true – he intertwines scientific and moral considerations and lavishes literary means on questions that are usually treated analytically’ (Nijhoff 1998: 87). Meanwhile, Dennis Smith unintentionally demonstrates 12

Critical Thinking and Human Possibility

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the difficulty when he attempts to situate Bauman’s work in terms of pre-existing categories but ultimately fails to find any single heading which can accommodate it. First, Smith applies to Bauman the label of ‘sociologist’. He finds that the label fits, but only partially: ‘Bauman is more than “just” a sociologist’. And so that label has to be put with others, such as social philosopher and socialist: ‘Bauman is not only a sociologist, a social philosopher and (in some sense, at least) a socialist. He is also an accomplished storyteller, a maker of historical narratives’ (Smith 1999: 5). But even those labels do not work too well and something seems to escape. As Smith himself realises, Bauman is a kind of socialist. Moreover if it is agreed that Bauman is a storyteller, then it is necessary to recall his suspicion of linear narrative. There is more than a chance that Dennis Smith has discovered one of the tendencies of modernity which Zygmunt Bauman so remorselessly uncovers; the tendency of power to try to cope with what it identifies as the problem of ambivalence by the imposition of ever tighter and firmer classifications which, instead, just create more ambivalence (Bauman 1991a). Bauman’s work seems to be partly this, partly that and not entirely either. Consequently it is no surprise to find attempts to avoid the problem of the difficulty of capturing Bauman’s work through the use of what are intended to be last word classifications. Here, the strategy is one of making Bauman’s work entirely explicable through its subordination to a classification that is imposed from outside and with which the audience can be presumed to be familiar, so that the work can be explained – or at least explained away – without it having to be read. Bauman’s work typically is made safe by its being labelled as ‘postmodern’ in either its concerns or content. For example, Anthony Giddens once said that for him Bauman is the theorist of the postmodern, an unfortunately (and certainly unintentionally) backhanded compliment in view of Giddens’ well-known scepticism about all things postmodern. After all, what does it mean to be lauded as the theorist of something that the applauder thinks is misplaced? (Giddens 1992). But there has been a crass tendency in critical reflections on the postmodern to confuse the message with the messenger, and Bauman has gone out of his way to refuse this identification as well. He has commented that: ‘The very talk of postmodernity has been taken as a sign of joining the “postmodernist” camp. I found myself in the company of bedfellows with whom I would rather not share

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a bed, while all too often ideas were read into my texts which were not mine, but belonged to those I was associated with on the strength of semantic confusion’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 97). Every time someone tries to capture Bauman’s work, it manages to slip away again. Why is this? That is the question that this chapter seeks to explore. It is the thesis of this chapter that the ability of Bauman’s work to escape classification is not due to any intrinsic difficulty that the texts might contain. To be sure, Bauman’s work is not at all one-dimensional and, indeed, there is a frequent complexity of argument. It is the thesis of this chapter that the confusion and undecidability about the work is due to the fact that although Bauman is a sociologist by identification and temperament (a point that is rightly insisted upon in Kilminster and Varcoe 1996), he is a sociologist of a very specific sort. In particular, Bauman’s is a sociology that is also possessed of a literary edge. Bauman’s sociology draws for inspiration and stimulation on literature as much as it draws on what is conventionally identified as sociology. This is a significant aspect of what it is that makes Bauman’s work so unique and special. Consequently, Dennis Smith is right when he identifies Bauman as a storyteller. But he is only partly right. The point is also that the storytelling of others has had an impact upon Bauman’s work, an impact that is so important that, without it, Bauman’s work would not be as interesting and elusive as it is. The importance of certain literary texts to Bauman cannot be doubted. When asked what book he would take with him to a desert island, he chose a story by Borges from out of a list of possibilities that also included work by Robert Musil, Georges Perec and Italo Calvino. Bauman is quite clear about what he admires in these writers; and what he admires is the mix in their texts of a literary style with a critical concern. As Bauman put it, the books for his desert island all, ‘exemplify everything I learned to desire and struggled, in vain, to attain: the breadth of vistas, the at-homeness in all compartments of the treasury of experience and sensitivity to its as-yet-undiscovered possibilities’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 24). As this chapter will go on to show, what these writers achieve shapes in very definite ways Zygmunt Bauman’s sociology. (For a clear introductory illustration of Bauman’s debt to Musil, see Bauman 2003a.) What all of these writers share is a concern to construct a previously unimagined universe of meanings and possibilities from out of

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a reinterpretation of a world that otherwise seems to be beyond human interference. Musil, Perec, Calvino and Borges similarly draw the reader into a distinctive universe that is at once like this world and yet totally unlike it. Musil and Perec achieve that end through what amounts to a reaurization of the banalities of the everyday, while Calvino and Borges do it by turning the seemingly banal to fabulous ends and openings. All of this is work that is, in the words of Kurt H. Wolff, capable of ‘opening up . .. a world’. It is work in which, ‘readers [are introduced] into worlds they had not known before’ (Wolff 1991: 6) even though the fragments of that world might well be very familiar indeed. However, it is important to stress that the universes that are opened up by these writers are all of a very specific sort. They are all universes of ambivalence. Musil, Perec and the others open up worlds where value is found in possibility rather than probability. The situation is more than ably symbolised by the jigsaw puzzle, which is one of the main motifs in Perec’s magnum opus, Life: A User’s Manual. Towards the end of the novel the last piece of the jigsaw is about to be put into place, but it turns out to be the wrong shape for the last remaining space. And so the puzzle must be started once again, only to founder once again on the problem of the wrong-shaped piece. By different routes, Bauman’s sociology achieves something comparable. He encourages his readers to enter into worlds that they had not known before (for example, the worlds of ambivalence, ethics, globalisation and so forth) and thus to begin to think – and act – differently. Bauman’s is a sociology that points to the possible. The linkage of sociological and literary concerns was spotted in Lucien Goldmann’s work on the novel. He implied that sociology and literature confront the identical problem of the ossification, or what Goldmann drawing on Lukacs, preferred to call the reification, of the human world. A certain linkage was suggested when Goldmann argued that Marx and the literary novel deal with the same question: ‘the principal transformations introduced into the structure of social life by the appearance and development of the economy’ and that Marx and the novel alike ‘situated’ these transformations, ‘on the level of the inert-individual–object relationship and emphasized the gradual transference of the coefficient of reality, autonomy, and activity from the first to the second’ (Goldmann 1975: 135). Goldmann understood the kind of literature that Bauman draws upon as exploring

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the ‘dissolution of the character’ in the context of the emergence of an objective world (Goldmann 1975: 138). However, that seems to be a rather one-dimensional way of reading the likes of Musil. What they explore is not just the dissolution of the human (a dissolution that is also examined in Milan Kundera’s novel Identity; Kundera 1998). They also seek to show how structured actuality puts limits on human possibility. It is in this way that Bauman’s work connects with tendencies in European literature. (For a history of the relationship of sociology with literature, see Lepenies 1988.) However, there is a methodological point that needs to be got out of the way before the discussion moves on. It could be argued that this chapter falls into the very trap that it seeks to uncover. It has been suggested that there is something about Bauman’s work that means that it seems to escape all classification. And yet, it could be argued, what the rest of the chapter is going to do is nothing other than offer a classification of Bauman’s work. On this basis it might be argued that the chapter refutes itself. In defence it is proposed that attention needs to be paid to the intent of classification. It is proposed that the common attempts to classify Bauman’s work, of the kind which are characterised by its designation as ‘postmodernist’, seek to make it safe, make it fit for preconceived agendas and, thus, have the effect of closing it down, reducing its possibilities and ambivalences. But what this chapter seeks to do is emphasise the extent to which Bauman’s work escapes easy sociological classification and thus is all the more important. This chapter does not seek to put Bauman’s work into a box. It seeks to identify the critical and world-opening potentialities of the work. In the first section of this chapter the thesis that Bauman’s work connects with certain literature will be substantiated and then, in the second section, the discussion will move on to show how the link is part of a wider issue about the roots of Bauman’s distinctive sociology. It is argued that Bauman’s sociology is a unique synthesis of literature filtered through a critical theory that is indebted to the early Marx.

Hermeneutics In Hermeneutics and Social Science (1978) Bauman argues that hermeneutics should be understood as a practice, rather than a narrower strategy for the examination of texts, through which it is possible to

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translate meanings across social or cultural distances and, thus, to intimate some conversation about what it means to be human in the world. By this method, the task of sociology is to interpret the social and the cultural in order to uncover the specific forms of being in the world so that translation between them might then become possible on a commensurable basis. Through that translation there can be dialogue and, thereby, a revelation of the contingency of what might otherwise be taken to be inevitable and natural. What is interesting is that when Bauman moves on to illustrate and explore some of the problems of this hermeneutic enterprise he does not turn to the kinds of sources that might immediately come to mind. Given Bauman’s concerns, it might be expected that he would turn to anthropology or ethnomethodology in order to examine the possibilities and problems of a project of translation. Indeed, he is well able to turn to such sources given his familiarity with them (for example, an awareness of anthropology runs all the way through Culture as Praxis while ethnomethodology was confronted in an article in the Sociological Review; Bauman 1973a,b). What he does instead is start discussing issues raised in a couple of stories by Borges. This is because, contrary to the optimism about easy translation that is implied by self-referential sociological theories, Borges shows that it can be difficult: ‘This is Borges’s message: there is no understanding without experience to which the object can be referred . . . the meaning is accessible only together with experience’ (Bauman 1978: 226). Consequently, it is not enough for the sociologist to have a wonderful system. It is the lesson of Borges that the sociologist must also have – seek, express – experience of the world. However, the sympathy of Bauman’s work with literature goes much deeper than the use of a fictionalist to illustrate and make a substantive point. Bauman does not wheel on the likes of Borges simply for the sake of illustration. Rather, there is a much deeper connection, as becomes clear in the ‘Afterthought’ to Liquid Modernity (Bauman 2000a). There, Bauman argues that even though most sociologists do not publicly write poetry, nevertheless sociologists and poets share a common aim. Writing – as ever – from the vantage point of the practising sociologist, Bauman says that: ‘we ought to come as close as the true poets do to the yet hidden human possibilities; and for that reason we need to pierce the walls of the obvious and self-evident, of

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that prevailing ideological fashion of the day whose commonality is taken for the proof of its sense’. According to Bauman: ‘Demolishing such walls is as much the sociologist’s as the poet’s calling, and for the same reason: the walling-up of possibilities belies human potential while obstructing the disclosure of its bluff’ (Bauman 2000a: 203. This argument reflects what may be identified as one of the profound continuities in Bauman’s thought; compare with Bauman 1972a). That quotation emphasises the importance of possibility as a category in Bauman’s work. The obvious source with which Bauman’s argument connects is Kundera’s essay on the European tradition of the novel, ‘The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes’ (Kundera 1986). It is a debt that Bauman tacitly acknowledges and it is indeed noticeable that Kundera is a recurrent presence in Bauman’s work (Bauman 2000a). There is little room for doubt that Bauman has a deep and keen appreciation of Kundera’s literature. For example, Bauman has eulogised Kundera as a writer who upholds, ‘the vocation of artistic freedom’: ‘to serve as the ironic, irreverent counter-culture to the technological-scientific culture of modernity, that culture of ordering passion, neat divisions and taut discipline’ (Bauman 1997b: 119). This is Bauman’s vocation too. It is then no surprise to find that Bauman has said that Kundera is a writer who has taught him more about society than have many sociologists (Blackshaw 2002: 2). Kundera highlights a dialectic that resonates with one that runs through Bauman’s work. Recalling Husserl’s announcement of the crisis of European humanity, Kundera says that it is possible to identify in European history a dual process. On the one hand there is what Heidegger called a ‘forgetting of being’ which is associated with the increasing dominance of technology, organisations and History. This is a forgetting which was woven into the corpus of sociological knowledge by Max Weber with his drama of the implications of the Protestant Ethic (Kundera, perhaps unsurprisingly given his specific concerns, does not himself mention Weber). Meanwhile, and on the other hand, Kundera points to the European tradition of the novel, a tradition that has been going on more or less in parallel with the increasing dominance of the forces of the forgetting of being. For Kundera, the European novel is concerned to do nothing less than ‘scrutinize man’s concrete life and protect it against “the forgetting of being”; to hold “the world of life” under a permanent light’. The

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novel seeks to recover what is otherwise lost, and specifically it seeks to recover possibility from necessity. The tradition of the novel tries to achieve that aim by opening up new worlds, new universes. And so Kundera says that: ‘A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral’ (Kundera 1986: 5–6). Bauman would undoubtedly agree with Kundera’s dictum, albeit with a modification of the kind of knowing that is put at the centre of attention. Bauman would say that a sociology that does not discover possibilities is unethical. And so the novel and sociology are aligned in their incompatibility with any totalitarianism. Kundera says that: ‘The world of one single Truth and the relative, ambiguous world of the novel are moulded of entirely different substances. Totalitarian Truth excludes relativity, doubt, questioning; it can never accommodate what I would call the spirit of the novel’ (Kundera 1986: 14). Substitute the word ‘sociology’ for Kundera’s ‘novel’ and it is not at all far-fetched imaginatively to hear Zygmunt Bauman making exactly the same proclamation. Reflecting a connection with this understanding of the novel, it can be seen that Bauman’s work looks two ways. It looks to recovery and to creation. First his concern with the interpretation and translation of variations on the theme of the human condition is predicated on the experience of those variations of form. To this extent Bauman’s work is engaged in a project of the recovery of the possible from the actual. In this way Bauman is interested in how the actual has come to be so self-evident. But it is important to be clear about the stakes of that recovery. Bauman does not recover the past so that hidden voices might be permitted to speak. Instead his recovery is concerned to examine what in the past might hamper – or help – the pursuit of possibility in the future. Bauman is concerned to recover what Ernst Bloch called, ‘the still undischarged future in the past’ (Bloch 1986: 200). As Bauman has said, in a sentence that says as much about his own position as that of Bloch: ‘Bloch describes both humans and their world as existing in the state of “explosive possibility” ’ (Bauman 1992b: 162). Second, Bauman’s emphasis on possibility (an emphasis which, as argued above, lines up his sociology alongside Kundera’s ‘spirit of the novel’) means that sociology is not simply, if at all, retrospective. It is also concerned to carry out a measure of the work of creation. Bauman’s sociology is engaged in a project of the creation of possibility. As Bauman has put it: ‘What is opened up is the realm

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of the possible, the territory explored by critical sociology’ (Bauman 1989b: 50). But what is possibility? In Socialism: The Active Utopia Bauman stated that the word ‘possibility’ ought to be understood as a category that ‘signifies an event which has not yet happened, and whose future occurrence cannot in principle be established on the basis of data about facta’. The possible, then, consists in going beyond the limits of the actual, and in that transcendence the actual is subjected to humanisation: ‘Possibility in this sense is a category which applies solely to the human world, namely the world of events on which informed human volition may exercise a determining influence’ (Bauman 1976b: 34). Possibility is a refusal to be constrained within the limits of the ‘is’. Substantively, Bauman is concerned with the creation of an ethically responsible humanity from out of its recovery from what humanity is permitted to mean. Bauman manages to synthesise the concerns of recovery and creation by a refusal to accept any polarisation of the contrast between them. This is a synthesis that once again gestures back to the project outlined in Hermeneutics and Social Science. In Liquid Modernity Bauman wrote: ‘the history of human condition discovery equals creation . . . in thinking about the human condition explanation and understanding are one’ (Bauman 2000a: 215). Sociology – just like the novel as understood by Kundera and, it might be added just like poetry – means recovering the world and, from out of what is recovered, creating something that did not and could not exist before; an ethically responsible humanity. And, to paraphrase Kundera, any sociology that does not do this, any sociology that contends that what is recovered is natural and beyond human intervention (that is, beyond human responsibility to be accomplished through action) is immoral. For Bauman, ethics and human freedom are linked, and it is the job of sociology to emancipate humanity into freedom from out of erstwhile inevitability. It is only through a recovery of the social origin of what seems to be so natural and necessary that it is possible to go about the possibility of human emancipation (Bauman 2001a). When Bauman outlined what the phrase ‘critical theory’ meant to him, this was all thrown into especially sharp relief. After making it plain that he understands critical theory to be an activity rather than a badge of allegiance or school membership, Bauman clarified one of

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the basic assumptions of this critical theory and, by implication, of his own work. He said that critical theory ‘culturalizes’ the ‘interpretation of the human world’ and continued: ‘Cultural theory accepts as its constant working hypothesis that even most obstinate necessities may well be artifacts of historically made cultural choices that can be challenged.’ By this argument, it is vitally important that the human world is ‘culturalised’ since to accept it as being natural and simply the way that it must be would be an attack on possibility and on the chance of emancipation into ethical responsibility: ‘the natural mode may be itself a crucial factor in concealing and suppressing possibilities of a better society’ (Bauman 2001a: 143–144). A little later this mission of critical theory is stated even more boldly: ‘It questions the grounds of habitual recognition of necessities and impossibilities and, by transforming usually tacit and uncontrolled assumptions into the topic of discourse, it opens new, previously unconsidered, alternatives’ (Bauman 2001a: 149). Critical theory, which in Bauman’s understanding clearly links with literature, is then critical of this world in that it attends to the processes through which this world closes down on human possibilities, and it opens up other worlds in that it shows that things do not have to be like this since what seems to be so natural is, in fact, entirely cultural. Consequently, out of the recovery of the processes of this world, there is a glimpse of the chance of an alternative. There is, in fact, a dialectic of the analysis of unfreedom going hand in hand with a creation of an emancipated and responsible humanity. The concerns of recovery and creation in Zygmunt Bauman’s work are also very clearly reflected in his discussions of postmodernity. This work demonstrates quite clearly that it is possible to write about postmodernity without, however, becoming what others would classify as a ‘postmodernist’ (whatever that classification would mean, beyond an intended insult). Bauman does not enter into celebration of what he finds. After all, to do that would be to naturalise the actual and thus foreclose on the possibility of any critical thought. Neither does Bauman contemptuously dismiss what he finds, since that would be to turn sociological attention away from actual men and women. Instead, it would be a turn to some ideal or abstraction. Critical theorising requires, and presumes, a remorseless and unstinting focus on, as Kundera would have it, the trap that the world has become (Kundera 1986). What Bauman is doing instead is recovering the social roots of

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the contemporary circumstances of necessity in the world and, on that basis, he is seeking to explore whether or not it is possible to create new ways of thinking and, therefore, being. The concern is made abundantly clear in the essays of the late 1980s and early 1990s in which Bauman sought to establish a sociological concern with postmodernity. In essays such as ‘A Sociological Theory of Postmodernity’, it is possible to find a characteristic narrative structure. First, Bauman provides a hermeneutic of what it is about the contemporary human condition that is new and unique. He argues that it is indeed possible to think about a new condition of postmodernity, which is experienced in terms of an individualisation that is organised around, ‘insufficient determination, inconclusiveness, motility and rootlessness’. Second, this means that new tools of the interpretation are needed. In other words, postmodernity requires a fundamental reconfiguration of sociology. As such Bauman suggests the introduction of what amount to new ‘unit ideas’ (for the use of unit ideas in sociology, see Nisbet 1967, Shilling and Mellor 2001): ‘sociality, habitat, self-constitution and self-as-assembly should occupy in the sociological theory of postmodernity the central place that the orthodoxy of modern social theory had reserved for categories of society, normative group . . . socialization and control’. Third, and through an interpretation of the contemporary human condition, Bauman contends that the job of translation that sociologists perform can only be one of interpretation rather than of legislation. For Bauman the experience and interpretation of postmodernity means that the role of sociology is participation in the dialogues between humans rather than, as in the modern situation, one of top-down legislation (the quotations from Bauman in this paragraph are from Bauman 1992a: 193 and 191 respectively). Consequently, this is a sociology that is oriented towards playing a part in the free accomplishment of a possibility of humanity rather than in the imposition of a definition of what humanity finally means. This explains the fundamental ambivalence that runs through Bauman’s work on postmodernity, and it also explains why it is simply wrong to classify him as a ‘postmodernist’. To be sure, in his earlier essays on the matter Bauman can be found to be embracing – or at least looking with some hope – towards what his new sociological armoury enables him to translate and thus enter into dialogue. He seems to be attracted to the intimations of postmodernity because

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they force new strategies of interpretation (both in terms of unit ideas and the social role of sociology itself), and therefore they contain a potential to open up new worlds and new possibilities. But as the interpretation of postmodernity proceeded, Bauman’s temper was necessarily required somewhat to change, as his sociological method required him to focus on the circumstances of the contemporary human condition and, therefore, on all of the erstwhile necessities that replace possibility with compunction.

Sociology against alienation From all of this it should be clear that Bauman’s sociology takes aim at all claims that the present order of things is necessary, inevitable and natural. He wants to show that there is always an alternative because he always wants to recover human responsibility from the trap of the actual. Even more than that (as if an attempt to recover human responsibility – and by intimation therefore human commonality – were not enough), Bauman’s work seeks to expand the human meaningfulness of the world. Consequently Bauman’s work is required to take a distance from any approach that seeks to reduce everything human to the rational and the scientific. Bauman does not think that science can capture the intrinsically human. At the beginning of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, there is a scientific and rational attempt to depict the moment when the book’s ‘events’ commence. Musil tells his readers that there was a depression over the Atlantic but that the atmospheric temperature was average for the season and that all the planetary movements were occurring as predicted in the almanacs. However Musil implies that all of this scientific and rational information cannot come anywhere close to grasping the simple human meanings and resonance of even as banal a phrase as, ‘it was a fine August day in the year 1913’ (Musil 1954: 3). Musil reveals the dominance of science over the contemporary human condition and interprets it as utterly closing down on human possibilities; the very possibilities that his novel seeks to recover thanks to its deep and fundamental ambivalences that are thoroughly – and perhaps even quite deliberately – incompatible with the pretence of scientific clarity. Musil shows that the human, if it is to remain human, ought never to be approached as if it were identical with nature. The human is different and, his novel is

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saying, long may it remain so (but whether or not it will so remain is precisely the problem that the contemporary condition forces interpretation to confront). Musil’s novel is an attempt to recover human being from its forgetting. As with Musil’s novel, Bauman’s sociology is deeply and irrevocably non-naturalistic. Bauman agrees that it is necessary to insist upon the uniqueness of the human. For Bauman it is always necessary to remember that humans are freely and autonomously responsible (and therefore always faced with ethical choices) in a way that the natural never can be, and in a way that the tendencies towards naturalisation seek to deny and destroy. Bauman has directly challenged what he calls ‘the natural mode of cognition’ in which it is assumed that there is a world of ‘facts out there’ that exists independently of its theoretical interpretation and which, therefore, is natural. He argues that this way of thinking – which can of course be found in the scientific rationalism that Robert Musil mocks as well as in the current tendency to turn biology and genetics into a kind of metaphysics – only holds good all the time that the peculiarly human is denied or dismissed: ‘Application of the natural mode is painless and uncontroversial as long as its object’s conduct manifests repetitiveness and regularity. In the case of human objects [Bauman’s talk of “human objects” is mocking in the mode of Musil], such regularity can be only achieved by an effective repression of a great number of alternatives. This, in turn, more often than not includes the application of coercion – physical or mental.’ As Bauman puts it: ‘It takes a lot of pain to smother the intrinsically refractory propensity of human activity . .. Routine monotony of behaviour is always enforced’ (Bauman 2001a: 144. The history of the pain is explored by Bauman in his studies of the fate of the project of actually existing socialism and the Holocaust; Bauman 1976b, 1989a). In the narrow terms of sociology, this comment clearly and obviously puts Bauman’s work in a camp that is wholly opposed to what might be called ‘systemic sociology’ as well as to that work which is carried out either for, or in the hope of being of use to, power. Rather Bauman’s contrarian position means that the doing of sociology is itself of deep and profound human relevance. By this argument, it is not just that sociology is a recovery of human possibility from out of the trap that the world has become. More than that, sociology is also a practice of possibility. Sociology is a form of praxis.

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Praxis is at the very centre of Bauman’s way of doing sociology and it underpins his appreciation of the relationship between interpretation and translation in sociological work. For Bauman, sociology is a kind of praxis because it is a combination of theory and practice: ‘Theory and practice meet in the act of cognition, when theory strives to explain and to interpret practice, to make sense of it.’ However, he continues: ‘but they meet as well in the process of labor, when the practice as it comes later within the sight of cognizing subject is brought into being and made into a potential object of cognition. Theory both produces and (intellectually) reproduces practices’ (Bauman 2001a: 142–143). This is the reason why it is appropriate to talk about Bauman’s work rather than, in more intellectualist terms, about his oeuvre or authorship. Bauman is engaged in a labour in which the human condition is interpreted, and that interpretation is then translated into one of the practices of the world that needs subsequently to be interpreted itself. He is engaged in a work of adding to the world and, in so doing, of opening up any conceits of necessity or inevitability. This is a project that once again connects directly with the ‘art of the novel’ as presented by Milan Kundera, and with the concerns of Musil, Perec, Borges and Calvino. Here, it is worth following up the roots of the concept of praxis in the early Marx. If the line back to Marx is followed it becomes possible to uncover what is, perhaps, the major stake of Zygmunt Bauman’s sociology. He is trying to develop a sociology that is at once a revelation, and therefore a condemnation, of human alienation from the world that humans have made. In this light, it is unsurprising that Bauman wrote a book called Culture as Praxis. The title of the book makes the point that culture is a free-human creation and that it is a non-necessary opening up of possibilities rather than a straightforward natural property of the naturalised human condition. Running through Marx’s analysis of alienation is a grasp of the extent to which human possibility has been closed down by relationships of production that trap the worker within a world that is experienced as external, beyond interference and as natural. What Bauman suggests is to expand the orbit of alienation so that it becomes a quality of the human condition in toto rather than a preserve of the restricted group of the workers (an expansion that is required due to the emergence of a human condition that is organised around a privileging of consumption over production). Marx begins his discussion

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of alienation by explaining that in capitalism the worker is alienated from the product of labour which is thus confronted as, ‘an alien object exercising power over him. This relation is at the same time the relation to the sensuous external world, to the objects of nature, as an alien world inimically opposed to him’ (Marx 1977: 63). This aspect of alienation is reflected in Bauman’s disdain for naturalistic thinking in sociology. The implication of Bauman’s position is that if the world is naturalised and treated as an ‘alien object’ or as a transcendental object exercising power over humans without itself being influenced by them, then that sociology is at once an agency and a sign of alienation. In these terms it is no surprise that Bauman castigates positivistic and, implicitly, systematic, sociology: ‘A strong case may be made for the supposition that positivism is the self-awareness of the alienated society’ (Bauman 1973a: 163). Bauman advocates something quite different. He looks towards a critical theory which, rather like Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts, ‘will insist on asking, “How has this world come about?”. It will demand that its history be studied, and that in the course of this historical study the forgotten hopes and lost chances of the past be retrieved’ (Bauman 2001a: 143. This is a passage that sounds remarkably ‘Kunderan’ in that it is an attack on the forgetting of being. It also explains why one of Bauman’s books is called Memories of Class; Bauman 1982). Second, Marx thought that the worker is also alienated from the labour process in a manner that leads to a self-estrangement in which work ceases to be experienced as an activity that belongs to the worker and is instead confronted as something restricting and hampering: ‘activity as suffering, strength as weakness, begetting as emasculating’ (Marx 1977: 66). A similar sensibility can be found in Bauman’s inquiries into, for example, happiness and sexuality, where there is a keen sense of the processes whereby these activities lead to self-estrangement rather than any semblance of completeness or satisfaction (Bauman 2001a, 2002a). Marx continued to identify two further aspects of alienation: alienation from species-being and the alienation of man from man (here, with the use of the masculine noun the discussion is keeping with the translation of Marx purely for the sake of narrative clarity). In the first of these regards, Marx begins with the contention that Man is a species-being, ‘because he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being’ (Marx 1977: 67). Whereas humanity should,

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according to its species-being, be living off of inorganic nature, ‘and the more universal man . . . is, the more universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on which he lives’, in alienated labour the estrangement of the worker from the product of labour means that there is always a piling up of the external and evidently natural. The natural grows and so the universality of humanity is always more and more restricted. In the conditions of alienation, human labour actively undermines human species-being. Consequently, the trap that the world has become is not a natural event; it is a social event and therefore requiring critical interpretation rather than systemic acceptance. Traces of Marx’s thesis about alienation from species-being undoubtedly can be found in Bauman’s definition of nature: ‘nature is inhuman, in so far as “being human” includes setting goals and ideal standards; nature is meaningless, in so far as bestowing meanings is an act of will and the constitution of freedom; nature is determined, in so far as freedom consists in leaving determination behind’ (Bauman 1976a: 1. In these terms, the ‘risk society’ that Bauman develops from Beck is one in which the unfreedom of nature is presented in new and unforeseen ways. This theme also runs through Bauman’s work on globalisation). Finally, Marx identified the alienation of man from man. So far it has been shown how Marx explored the way in which the worker is alienated from the product of labour, from himself and from the species-being. Now Marx pulls together all of these dimensions of alienation: ‘Every self-estrangement of man, from himself and from nature, appears in the relation in which he places himself and nature to men other than and differentiated from himself’ (Marx 1977: 71). Alienation means that each man confronts himself as an individual who is separate and distinct from all others and who has an interest in keeping a distance from them. Alienation means that the other human being is confronted as an actual or potential problem rather than as an Other with whom it might be possible to enter into a relationship. Any semblance of inter-human togetherness is crushed. In Bauman’s work the critique of this aspect of alienation is readily evident in three ways. First, it appears in his analysis of the different modes of individualisation through which men and women come to understand relationships between themselves and others (see Bauman 2001b). Second, it takes the form of an emphasis upon the significance of the stranger in social and cultural relationships (where the

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stranger is the other with whom the individual has no necessary or prior relationship; see Bauman 1991a). Third, and most notably, the critique of this dimension of alienation appears in Bauman’s insistence upon the possibility, despite all of the naturalised social and cultural claims to the contrary, of ethical relationships between men and women. Bauman’s development of an ethical argument is not merely an attempt to make men and women responsible for their own actions. It is also a refusal to accept that the alienation of men and women from one another is natural and that there is nothing to be done about it. Interestingly, this identification of ethical responsibility as a transcendence of alienation means that Bauman understands the ethical relationship to be one that is without mediation. For Bauman the ethical command to attend to the needs of the other is realised and taken up despite social and cultural mediation. There is an assumption that ethical practice via the social or cultural would be alienated and alienating of person from person (hence Bauman’s analysis of adiaphorization; Bauman 1991b). Bauman advocates a being for the other which is nothing less than a critical opening up of a world of possibilities in the face of the restraints and restriction that the naturalisation of the present implies (for the ethical argument, see most notably Bauman 1993a, 1995). Consequently, and to take the argument back to a point near where it began, it can be seen that Bauman’s sociology against alienation, just like the art of the novel according to Kundera’s presentation, is also against any forgetting of being. In short, Zygmunt Bauman’s sociological praxis stands against alienation in order to consciously change the way that men and women think about the world. To this extent there is a direct and for that matter fairly straightforward connection with literature. But Bauman adds a crucial dimension to the argument. He goes beyond the confines of literature and enters into a world of praxis. Bauman does all of this so that men and women might freely seek to establish ethical relationships with one another.

Back to sociology It is curious that despite the originality of his work, ultimately Zygmunt Bauman takes the argument right back to the founding tempers of sociology. If knowledge of the sociological tradition were rather more

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subtle and sophisticated than it presently appears to be, Bauman’s location firmly within that tradition would be appreciated rather more. Simply put, Bauman is not just a sociologist by subjective identification. He is also a sociologist because his work can be clearly situated within what has become an objective tradition. Yet perhaps this is also what makes Bauman’s work seem so difficult for sociologists to capture. It is familiar and strange at one and the same time. It is familiar to the extent that Zygmunt Bauman’s work can be identified as one manifestation of the humanist current in sociology. As Donald Levine has pointed out, according to the humanistic current, sociology is a mode of enquiry that is quite different to the natural sciences and therefore, according to it, any attempt to establish a positive or rational science of human life is either misplaced thinking in the naturalistic mode or, quite simply, unethical. By contrast, this current identifies sociology as a primarily aesthetic activity that is a response to the contemporary human condition. Sociological modes and styles are not to be understood as direct and unproblematic reflections of external facts and neither are they at their most valuable if they are little more than narrow insights amenable to technical verification. According to the humanistic current, if attention is paid to the history of sociology it becomes abundantly clear that sociological ‘ideas came into being through processes like style, vision, and intuition – processes that have greater relation to the thoughtways of the artist than to those of the scientific data processor or technician’ (Levine 1995: 65). A strong version of this argument can be found in Nisbet’s contention that in the case of Simmel (and by extension, the other founding sociologists like Marx, Durkheim, Weber and the rest), if the vision of the artist is removed then there is an amputation of everything that gives the work life and significance (Nisbet 1967: 19–20). Bauman’s work sits easily with this humanistic current in three ways. First, Bauman contrasts sociology as critical theory to science; he claims that the latter is concerned with the development and dominance of instrumental reason whereas the former is about emancipatory reason (Bauman 2001a: 156–157). Second, Bauman’s central unit ideas such as postmodernity and liquid modernity owe everything to what amounts to an artistic sensibility. Bauman does not develop these ideas from ‘the facts’; rather they are the product of a subtle and nuanced experience and interpretation of the

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contemporary human condition. Third, and most broadly, Bauman’s commitment to a sociology that opens up possibilities means that he would perforce agree with the strong case of humanistic sociology that is made by Nisbet when he declares that: ‘anything that shrinks the field of experience and style, that in any way diminishes the sources of inspiration, that routinizes the workings of the intelligent mind, is to be regarded with suspicion’ (Nisbet 1963: 155). So far it has been shown that Bauman’s work, and indeed his way of doing sociology, fits in rather well with the tradition. But it is necessary to be cautious about making this claim too confidently, because Bauman’s is a humanistic sensibility of a particular sort. This might be a further cause of the difficulty of capturing Bauman’s work. On the one hand, perhaps Bauman is too well read in the tradition of the European novel for most sociologists to be able to untangle the references and allusions of his work. But, no less significantly, it is important to stress the point that Bauman’s knowledge of the tradition of the novel, just like his humanistic debts more broadly, are refracted in a very particular way. The current of humanistic sociology is largely built on the philosophical and anthropological premise that there is, ‘a core humanity or common essential features in terms of which human beings can be defined and understood’. It seeks to offer, ‘concepts . . . designating, and intended to explain, the perversion or “loss” of this common being. Humanism takes history to be a product of human thought and action’ (Soper 1986: 11–12). These themes can be identified in Bauman’s work with relative ease. They are explicit in his understanding of culture, implicit to his case for critical theory and intrinsic to his propositions about ethics. But Bauman would not rest easily with this foundation of a humanistic position because the understanding of humanity that it expresses is an abstraction. Bauman’s work, in so far as it is always sociological, is a refusal of abstraction. Bauman’s work points to the very firm and unflinching conclusion that any abstraction of Humanity is nothing other than a reflection of the alienation of human being from itself. It entails the subordination of human being in the world to a transcendental object of Humanity and, moreover, it actually serves to gut human being in the world of any ethical and moral dimension. The transcendental object justifies pretensions to undistorted and universally truthful scientific knowledge but as Bauman’s critical imagination establishes,

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that kind of understanding is entirely contrary to what human being demands. In particular, the transcendental object of any human science ultimately requires that: ‘Nothing may stop the enquiring subject from resigning himself, obediently and willingly, to the unquestionable reality of the transcendental object’ (Bauman 1973a: 162). In effect there would be dissolution of the subject into the transcendental object. And that dissolution leads in a worrying direction: ‘It makes a virtue of dissolving the cognizing subject in the transcendentality of the cognized object. It re-creates, in the idealized universe of Mind, what has been already accomplished in the reality of the human condition.’ What it recreates is nothing other than, ‘the expedient of turning the better part of the subject in to the object of authoritarian control and rendering the rest of it meaningless and irrelevant’ (Bauman 1973a: 164). In the end there is a simplification of what it means to be human and, therefore, a misrepresentation of human being in the world. The subject is able to reflect only on her or his alienation from praxis and, therefore, from self, others and in the final instance from human being itself. Bauman’s humanism is not conducted on behalf of some abstraction called Humanity. Rather it is carried out on behalf of those actual humans who experience alienation and the restriction of their possibilities most powerfully. It is possible to deduce Bauman’s conception of human being from an important paper that was published in 1967 (Bauman 1967c). In the paper he rejects common sociological understandings of what it means to be human and, through that rejection, points towards his own understanding of humanity and to what he calls his ‘image of man’. First, Bauman rejects what he called the ‘mechanistic’ image of man that is postulated by positivistic sociology. Within this image it is assumed that human being is in itself nothing and that humans are not actors so much as reactors to external stimuli. This mechanistic image of man feeds into managerial concerns because it suggests that if the stimuli can be applied with precision and accuracy it will be possible scientifically to predict human responses. Bauman pins his colours to the opposing mast, to, ‘the less managerial, even anti-managerial, more traditional, humanistic variation of sociology’ that, ‘aims at making human behaviour less predictable by activating inner, motivational sources of decision – supplying the human beings with ampler knowledge of their situation and so enlarging the sphere of their freedom of choice’ (Bauman

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1967c: 15). Second, Bauman rejects the image of humans as conformist and conforming, as beings that are inclined to act in a way that is ‘normal’, where ‘ “Normal” is a human being well adjusted, submissive, obedient’. Within this image the role of sociology is to assist in the ‘adjustment’ of humans through the restriction of any unpredictability in their actions. For Bauman what this kind of sociology calls ‘normal’ is, in fact, deeply abnormal: ‘human personality . . . becomes “abnormal” when distorted, twisted, trampled down by external necessities unfit to human conditions, by pressures stemming from unfairly organized set of social relations’ (Bauman 1967c: 16). Third, Bauman rejected the image that stresses general laws of human action. Bauman identifies these general laws with the arguments of social psychologists that humans are reward-oriented rational utilitarians. He argues that these erstwhile laws represent an illicit universalisation of the peculiarities of market-dominated relationships, ‘in which problem of choices is practically, not only abstractly, involved in each individual socializing process and in which human values become already merchandized and so quantified and exchangeable to the extent that no criteria – ethical, for example – of choice were left but counting prospective rewards and losses’ (Bauman 1967c: 19. This passage contains gestures towards Simmel’s sociology of the money system; see Simmel 1990).

Conclusion In all, Bauman’s work postulates an image of man in which humans are active and creative, unpredictable and non-rational. As such, all the time that men and women are passive and consuming, predictable and calculating what benefits they will derive from action, some violence must have been done to them because, most certainly, their humanity has been limited. They have been oppressed and suffer a reduction of their human possibility. Bauman’s is humanism on behalf of the oppressed and suffering (for an illustration of this point, see Bauman 1998a). Or, put another way, Bauman’s work is shaped to no small degree by a humanistic socialism (Bauman 1992a: 205–206). Perhaps it is the socialist variation on the theme of humanism that multiplies some of the problems about the reception of Bauman’s work. It is noticeable that Bauman’s work has become increasingly prominent since the socialist project

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has entered an evident decline with the emergence of purportedly new and fitting-to-the-times strategies of persuasion and technique that consciously occupy some naturalised ‘centre ground’. Ironically, Bauman’s work is part of a humanistic socialism that has been consigned by the dominant to the waste bin of history, and yet it is precisely on account of its relentless commitment to human possibility (that is, it is precisely because of his humanism and socialism) that Bauman’s work contains such a provocative charge. Bauman’s work adopts positions and draws on inspirations that are entirely contrary to the dominant temper of the time. His work has been taken up ‘too late’ – or should that be ‘too soon’? From this paradox follow two conclusions. First, it is possible to conclude that the increasing attention that is paid to Bauman’s work is actually incapable of understanding it adequately. This can explain why there are so many desperate attempts to classify that work as ‘postmodernist’ or whatever, attempts that always fail because the classifications are drawn up without adequate attention to the current of thought to which Bauman’s work contributes. Second, there is a rather more hopeful conclusion; a conclusion that indeed opens up possibility. Perhaps the widespread concern with Bauman’s work and the seriousness with which it is frequently treated (by those who do not wish to classify it away) means that the humanistic socialist case of a refusal to naturalise the forgetting of being and for an emancipation of the oppressed and alienated from their social and cultural restriction and delimitation retains validity and attraction. The only problem is how to translate the continued charge of this sociology into a wider human praxis.

2 The Emergence of an Imagination

A sociological imagination never appears on the stage of history ready-formed and from nowhere. It is the product and expression of a frequently complex – although sometimes perhaps rather obvious – relationship between a number of factors. In particular, the sociological imagination in question emerges out of the circumstances of the relationships, and of the time and place within which the practitioner of the imagination started to think sociologically. A sociological imagination is itself a sociological phenomenon. It is not ahistorical, and neither is it natural or inevitable. There is no extra-social reason why a sociological imagination is practised or, more immediately, why it is practised in any given way. A sociological imagination has to be inspired. This chapter will outline and discuss the inspirations that lay behind the emergence of Zygmunt Bauman’s sociology, and therefore the factors that helped influence the character of his sociological imagination. However, this discussion is not carried out for only historical reasons. The point is that the work for which Bauman is best known takes on deeper resonance and richness if it is traced back to its very earliest roots.

Two teachers The most obvious mode of inspiration is personal example. There can be no doubt that the work of Zygmunt Bauman was inspired in this immediate way. When given the opportunity he always acknowledges the debt that he owes to his two main teachers, Julian Hochfeld and Stanislaw Ossowski. They put in some of the foundations upon 34

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which Bauman consistently built, consistently builds: ‘I am so grateful to Ossowski and Hochfeld for having vaccinated me, at the very beginning of my sociological life and once and for all, against the idea that sociology is (or should become) a kind of physics which leaves its own history behind and never looks back.’ His two teachers taught Bauman that, ‘sociology has no other – and cannot have any other – sense . . . than of an ongoing commentary on human “lived experience”, as transient and obsessively self-updating as that experience itself’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 20. See also Beilharz 2001: 336–337). In his Inaugural Lecture at the University of Leeds, Bauman made it plain that he believes that he became the kind of sociologist that he is only because of the impact of Hochfeld and Ossowski. According to Bauman’s understanding of the matter, both Hochfeld and Ossowski believed albeit in different ways that: ‘either sociology will make sense of the human world, thereby giving power to the powerless, or it must admit its own powerlessness to make sense of its own existence’ (Bauman 1972a: 186). This is inspiration in the broadest of broad brushstrokes. However, it is possible to go a little further and to fill in some of the detail about precisely what Zygmunt Bauman took from Julian Hochfeld and Stanislaw Ossowski. Hochfeld (1911–66) was a member of the Polish Socialist Party, one of the first members of a circle of philosophers set up by the Communist Party after the war to help develop Marxist ideas, and a representative in the Sejm, the Polish parliament, during the 1950s. In 1951 he was appointed as Director of the Department of Historical Materialism at Warsaw and in 1957 he was responsible for setting up the Department of the Sociology of Political Relations at the same university. From 1962 until his death, Hochfeld was Deputy-Director of the Department of Social Sciences at UNESCO (an appointment that is reflected in two rather managerial publications: Hochfeld 1964, 1966. For biographical details on Julian Hochfeld and an introduction to his thought, see Adamek 1984). The trace of Hochfeld that seems to have been carried through in Bauman’s work is a certain spirit of honesty, sobriety and a refusal to be fooled by illusions. Hochfeld’s commitments were clearly reflected in a short yet excellent obituary that he wrote for C. Wright Mills. It is noticeable that what Hochfeld applauds in Mills is exactly what Bauman applauds in Hochfeld. So, Hochfeld commends Mills’ view

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that, ‘the scientist . . . should be intrepid and uncompromising in demasking social evil, in seeking the truth about society’ (Hochfeld 1962: 5. For Mills see, of course, The Sociological Imagination; Mills 1959). Of course, Bauman would not talk about ‘scientists’, but he would certainly agree that this demasking is precisely what sociology ought to be about. Similarly, the whole corpus of Bauman’s work might be identified as a prime illustration of the position that Hochfeld associates with Mills that, ‘it is the duty of the intellectual to preserve the indispensable connection between scientific truth, cultural sensibility and the social-political goal’ (Hochfeld 1962: 6). The possibility that in the obituary of Mills Hochfeld was identifying his own commitments as much as those of Mills, is made even stronger by an essay that Hochfeld wrote around Marx’s theory of alienation, ‘Two Models of Humanization of Labour’. Just like Mills, and just like Bauman later on, Hochfeld knew that men and women can suffer. It is the duty of the sociologist to reveal the social causes of that suffering and to refuse to be bought off by the promises of the actual. As such, sociology needs to be honest and resolute in its dealings with the world, lest it get distracted or distorted in such a way that the social causes of suffering get hidden away. (This stress on the social causes of suffering means that Hochfeld, like Mills and then like Bauman, sees suffering as a moral evil, which is socially perpetrated and humanly suffered rather than a natural evil about which men and women can do nothing.) That point was made in the Mills obituary, and it appears in the essay on labour: ‘With no successful attempts of ensuring adequate amount, quality and universal accessibility of the means of man’s “animal subsistence”, any programme of overcoming this “animal existence”, of delivering man from its exclusive domination and crossing the boundaries of the “kingdom of necessity” – is so much empty talk’ (Hochfeld 1961: 13. For Hochfeld on class, see Hochfeld 1967). Hochfeld saw sociology as a means by and through which it might be shown that men and women can be more than the prisoners of ‘animal existence’, that they might go beyond necessity, and instead engage in the praxis of possibilities. As such, anything which prevents the transcendence of the animalistic (that is, the natural, object-like dimensions of human being) demands morally to be repudiated. By extension, sociology becomes a critique of the actual (which is itself seen as being power-assisted) in the name of what might be. Such a spirit of the refusal of the inevitability of social

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suffering, such a spirit of a refusal to accept that men and women are nothing more than natural, animal-like objects, is fundamental to Zygmunt Bauman’s sociological imagination and work. The inspiration that Stanislaw Ossowski gave to Zygmunt Bauman is of a different order than that provided by Julian Hochfeld. Ossowski (1897–1963) is one of the giants of Polish sociology. He was a volunteer soldier in the Polish army during the war against the Soviet Union in 1920, and by 1926 he was a member of the Union of Socialist Intellectuals. He became a major figure in Polish intellectual life and a Professor at Warsaw. At the beginning of the Second World War he was an officer in the Polish army and during the years of the Nazi occupation a lecturer for the underground University of Warsaw. After the war, Ossowski refused to join any political party and was increasingly attacked by Marxist intellectuals on account of his critical writings on Marxism–Leninism (one of the most aggressive attackers allegedly was Hochfeld; Smolicz 1974: 21). In 1951, Ossowski was forbidden to publish and he was refused the right to teach in 1952. He was permitted to return in full to his role of a professor at Warsaw in 1956. (For useful biographical details on Stanislaw Ossowski and for introductions to his astonishing work, see Kurczewski 1998; Mucha 1984, 1987.) There is a definite continuity between the sociology of Ossowski and that of Zygmunt Bauman. Not least, in intellectual terms Ossowski was firmly placed within the broad tradition of Polish humanism, and he refused to accept that sociology can be like a natural science or, indeed, that the objects of sociological inquiry are themselves natural. Indeed, for Ossowski there is a strong need to refuse any naturalisation of self-evidently cultural phenomena. To cite just one example from Ossowski’s work: ‘A banknote can enter the scope of sociological problems only when we take care of it with references to the interpretation of the inscriptions printed on it’ (Ossowski quoted in Mokrzycki 1974: 27). Similarly, it is quite noticeable that when Zygmunt Bauman explores questions that might conventionally be analysed in economic terms alone, he extremely quickly shifts the focus of attention towards the human interpretations and meanings that surround these matters (a text in which this shift takes place rather clearly is Bauman’s Work, Consumerism and the New Poor; Bauman 1998a. But see also the content of Bauman 1972b). It is very rare to find statistics in Bauman’s work and on the few occasions when he

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does use them they are wheeled on simply to illustrate an argument that has already been developed through a more hermeneutic and interpretative strategy of enquiry. But Ossowski gave to Bauman much more than a way of thinking. Ossowski gave to Zygmunt Bauman an ethic; an ethic in terms of which one has an obligation to carry on being a sociologist utterly irrespective of fashion or exigency (an ethic that Ossowski practised with determination in the early years of the Polish Communist state). In Ossowski’s terms, the practice of a sociological imagination is not just theoretical or intellectual. It is also a principle for a determined and unflinching ethical being in the world. Towards the end of his Inaugural Lecture at Leeds, Bauman stated that, ‘we must beware of falling into the traps of fashions which may well prove much more detrimental than the malaise they claim to cure’. He said that, ‘our vocation, after all these unromantic years, may become again a testfield of courage, consistency, and loyalty to human values’ (Bauman 1972a: 203). In that passage it is worth noting that Bauman is carrying out the kind of strategy that was identified in the last chapter; he is engaging in an exercise of recovery (‘may become again’) so that the possibility of new creation might be embraced. (Bauman’s self-identification as a sociologist is also being highlighted in this passage.) Yet there is more to the argument than this. There is a categorically ethical dimension. What Bauman is saying is that sociologists must engage in the praxis that human values demand, and the sociologist’s commitment to those values will be the basis of the courage and strength that is needed to endure the abuse and attacks which will doubtless come from the direction of those who are happy with fashion or power. All the time that the sociologists are supporting power, accepting the inescapability of the actual (and cutting their cloth to its measure) or playing along with the agendas as defined by ‘those who know best’, they are being disloyal to human values even though they might well be immensely loyal to their status in the world and their bank accounts. Power and fashion are false gods; loyalty to human values the only true and definite guide. These are positions that Bauman undoubtedly derived from Ossowski. Ossowski once argued that men and women ought to stand firm against the demands of external power (be those demands psychological or directly coercive), since if they do not then it is impossible to maintain any semblance of self-respect. He argued that

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any kind of accommodation with the demands of power is likely to lead to the individual lying to herself or himself and, therefore, destroying her or his own sense of worth. For Ossowski, it does not matter if that accommodation is actual (consisting in an acceptance of the external power) or symbolic (appearing as if one is accepting the external power), it all means the same thing; a loss of self-respect. And that, in turn, means a reduction of the meaning and the possibilities of being human. Ossowski was sure that such an accommodation leads to the embrace of an utterly utilitarian attitude towards life (and therefore a denial of its ethical and creative potentialities), ‘and a growing dislike for the aesthetic attitude: performing, under pressure, certain symbolic actions, I go a long way from the impressive personality patterns which I once admired . . . so I’d better adopt, and encourage others to adopt, a “businesslike” approach, which appreciates only the results of the action’ (Ossowski 1974: 9). Yet if we adopt such an attitude, we are not just letting ourselves down. We are also playing a crucial part in the devastation of humanity tout court. The person who upholds a utilitarian attitude alone deprives others of an example that might encourage them to break the shackles of external power and of the actual: ‘We do not, or do not want to, remember that by acting out of disinterested motives, or by proceeding in our behaviour from aesthetic reasons, personal honour or concern for the dignity of our group, we enhance its attractiveness, enrich its culture and heighten its vitality’ (Ossowski 1974: 9). By pandering to external powers (in Ossowski’s life those powers would be totalitarianism, in ours they would be fashion and the market), we demean humanity itself and ourselves. The argument directly recalls an incredibly brave piece that Ossowski published in 1956, almost as soon as possible after the lifting of the ban that the state had placed on him in 1951. He made it perfectly plain that he was not going to be quiet or ‘grateful’. Ossowski announced that the social researcher – that is to say, the sociologist – has a duty to be disobedient towards those who are in power. It is only through disobedience that it is possible to retain an unflinching and tight grasp on human values. Indeed, the substance of Ossowski’s argument anticipated Bauman’s thesis that we be loyal to human values. These human values are distilled in the human possibility of the transcendence of necessity; a transcendence that is denied all the time when men and women accept that external powers have a right

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or ability to tell them what to do. Furthermore, Bauman made a clear statement in favour of the disobedience of sociologists in his book Community, when he wrote with a hint of resignation that: ‘To stand up against the status quo always takes courage, considering the awesome forces gathered behind it – and courage is a quality which intellectuals once famous for their obstreperous radicalism have lost on the way to their new roles and “niches” as experts, academic boffins or media celebrities’ (Bauman 2001c: 125). The essence of the argument can be traced right back to Ossowski. Ossowski embraces the human value of the human possibility of the practice of a distinctively human being in the world that is wholly free from dictates that are encountered as – or as if – natural. Humanity and the merely utilitarian are quite different, and the power-assisted actual is a challenge to the human, not the only alternative available to us. Ossowski said that if the social researcher alters his views in line with the commands of an external authority, if he writes and speaks in a way that is contrary to her or his thoughts (a concern which resonates with Milosz’s account of the captive mind; Milosz 1953), then he is shirking his duty. Ossowski condemns such an obedient researcher for being nothing more than a mere clerk, whereas: ‘Disobedient thinking is one of the duties of the research worker. The research worker works towards the social cause and that means that he must not think obediently when doing his job’. Ossowski put himself on the side of those, ‘whose activities are turned towards values which do not die as soon as the political tactics have changed. These . . . people owe their authority to the opinion that respect for truth, not mutable tactics or obedience, controls their words’ (Ossowski 1998: 93). These comments by Ossowski reflect an important distinction in his thought between what he called ‘empirical’ and ‘humanistic’ sociologists. For Ossowski, the empirical sociologist draws on a battery of methods in order to influence social conditions and possibly provides technical guidance to those who wield power. The empirical sociologist is a problem solver in the sphere of the actual and the questions of who identifies the problems and what the implications of their resolution might be for men and women are seen as matters of little or no sociological relevance. Empirical sociology is a neo-positivism that can only be contrary to any position, like that upheld by Ossowski (and indeed Bauman), that the human and the natural worlds are utterly distinct and ought to always remain so. However, Ossowski did not dismiss

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the importance of this empirical sociology (although it is obviously the case that serving the powerful is incompatible with the duty to be disobedient). He thought that it needed to be gone beyond. Sociology demands to be humanised, just like the world in which it is practised. Sociology is humanised in this way as soon as the limitations of the empirical are transcended, and as soon as the inescapability of the trap of the actual is denied. How that transcendence might occur was hinted at in an example that Ossowski gave: ‘Discussions of the social consequences of planning in turn lead to problems of more general nature, problems which go beyond the concrete ground in the existing system of planning, and inspire to search for new possibilities in social relations.’ These ‘new possibilities’ consist in what Bauman would subsequently identify as human values. Ossowski said that the productions of empirical sociology could be used to help inspire new possibilities such as the defence of the individual or voluntary associations from the effects of the concentration of power, the encouragement of individual initiative and the promotion of ‘human relations based on mutual confidence’. In other words, empirical sociology constitutes the actuality that humanistic sociology transcends. For Ossowski, humanistic sociology goes beyond the empirical, beyond the limitations of the actual, and seeks, ‘new phenomena and new possibilities, when a typical behaviour and exceptional circumstances provide material of special interest’ (Ossowski 1962: 15). Ossowski said that the possession and the practice of a humanistic sociological imagination demands that the sociologist have a wealth of experience and imagination. The sociologist does not look down or out at the world with a secular version of the God’s eye view; the sociologist has to experience the carrying out of praxis in the world. It is only on account of that experience that the sociologist is able to interpret the world, translate interpretations from one situation to another, and empathise with the human others who are studied. Indeed, the ability to empathise is especially important. It is only on account of empathy that there can be, ‘the verification of general theses by referring openly or not to inner experience when the material collected through observation is insufficient for scientific verification’ (Ossowski 1964: 20). As such, Ossowski did not just provide Zygmunt Bauman with an ethic of the why of sociology. Ossowski also provided an ethic of the how.

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Zygmunt Bauman’s sociological imagination emerged out of an intellectual soil that was fertilised by Julian Hochfeld and Stanislaw Ossowski, and therefore it is no surprise that Bauman’s work can be seen as being in many ways typical of Polish sociology. According to Piotr Sztompka (in a paper that it must be said does tend to be more than a little self-serving), Polish sociology is characterised by three qualities. (The three points that follow draw on the argument in Sztompka 1984.) First, Polish sociology is committed. There is a rejection of valueneutrality and of the conceit of the ‘ivory tower’ scholar. The commitment in different ways runs through Hochfeld and Ossowski (Hochfeld was committed to socialism, Ossowski to humanity), and Bauman has gone out of his way to dismiss value-neutrality: ‘Wertfreiheit is – as human silences are concerned – not just a pipe-dream, but also an utterly inhuman delusion . . . sociologizing makes sense only in as far as it helps humanity in life, that in the ultimate account it is the human choices that make all the difference between lives human and inhuman’ (Bauman in Beilharz 2001: 335). Indeed, Bauman’s work presumes that value-freedom is nothing other than a sign of human alienation, and thus it must be repudiated and rejected. In Culture as Praxis, Bauman condemned positivistic and systemic sociology on the grounds that within it, ‘It is the subject who must be wertfrei . . . Nothing may stop the enquiring subject from resigning himself, obediently and willingly, to the unquestionable reality of the transcendental object’. Actuality stands over, above and apart from its knower; it is an objective presence towards which only accommodation is possible; there is, ‘the acknowledgement of the unconditional supremacy of the Object in the process of cognition and verification, and the postulate of complete indifference, neutrality and dispassionateness on the part of the cognizing subject’ (Bauman 1973a: 162). Second, Polish sociology has what Sztompka calls a ‘macrosociological focus’. This takes the form of a concentration on the ‘big questions’ such as those about state, culture and responsibility. One variation of this characteristic appears in Ossowski’s humanistic sociology. It is certainly the case that ‘macro’ concerns are what interest Zygmunt Bauman. He identified an immensely ‘macrosociological’ enterprise when he said that: ‘For many decades humanistically motivated sociologists defined their mission as debunking necessity

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disguised as freedom; they fought to lay bare the insidious deceits with which slaves are misled into believing that they are free’ (Bauman 1972a: 194. That phrase points back to Hochfeld. See also Bauman 1968c). This debunking of necessity is not at all the concern of the ‘empirical sociologist’ (the empirical sociologist is confined within the limits of the actual and is therefore incapable of identifying the unnecessary or the contingent), although it has always been the concern of Zygmunt Bauman. Third, Sztompka says that Polish sociology is typified by a theoretical pluralism. Sztompka rather mythologises the reasons for this pluralism but his observation is correct. Even the quickest reading of Ossowski, as of Bauman, reveals an enthusiasm to range across disciplinary boundaries and to use what is useful irrespective of its ‘scientific status’ or disciplinary origin (an enthusiasm that is represented by Bauman’s debt to literature). It is the mark of the humanity of the work of Zygmunt Bauman that it has outgrown the distinctively Polish soil and become universal. But as Hochfeld and Ossowski would have been the first to argue, inspiration, and most certainly sociological inspiration, does not just come from meetings with great men and women. It also comes from the wealth of experience that is provided by social and historical circumstances, and the imaginations that they open up. To this extent it is important to appreciate the significance of the historical fact that Zygmunt Bauman emerged as a sociologist in the wake of the Polish October of 1956.

The Polish October, stabilisation and Antonio Gramsci The Polish October represented a simultaneous ideological, political, social and economic crisis for the relatively recently established Communist state. Ideologically, the certainties according to which the socialist system was imposed throughout Central and Eastern Europe were collapsing with the critique of Stalinism. Politically, the collapse of Stalinism meant that the disputes between the ‘centralisers’ and ‘democratisers’ in the Polish Party could be no longer hidden away or dissolved through purges. The disputes moved outside of the confines of the Party and became part of a wider struggle for democratisation. Socially, the Communist state was associated with the Soviet Union and, therefore, as one more instance of an external and

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even totalitarian occupation of Poland. Economically, the promises of rapid industrialisation were not being achieved. For example, in the mid-1950s, eighty per cent of all those in employment were living below the official subsistence level (Checinski 1982: 104). The crisis that led to the Polish October has entered into Polish folklore through the prism of the Poznan events of June 1956. On 28 June, workers from around the area marched to the centre of Poznan carrying banners with the slogan ‘Bread and Freedom’. The march was held on the day before the end of an international trade fair, and was consequently noticed by people from outside of Poland. After the failure of attempts at placation by local Party leaders, the crowd became violent; prisoners were released, shops were looted and firearms were taken from the local police station. The authorities responded by bringing in the army. The crowd was dispersed with the aid of machine guns and, after two days of shooting, official figures recorded that 53 people had been killed, 300 wounded and 323 arrested. Poznan was the spark which lit the fuse of the more general ideological, political, social and economic bomb. The situation came to a head in October 1956 when it looked as if the Soviet Union would use its tanks to re-establish a satellite state on its Western border. It was at this moment that a formerly purged Party leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka, was identified for different reasons by the different factions in the Polish Party as the answer to their problems. One of the first acts of Gomulka after his return to power was unexpectedly to meet with Khruschev. The story runs that at this meeting Gomulka stood up to Khruschev and did a deal which established the principle that Poland would be allowed to pursue its own road to socialism all the time that it did not represent any kind of threat to the Soviet Union. (Obviously, these paragraphs on the events of 1956 are an incredibly focused distillation of a complex historical moment; for greater detail, see Davies 1986, Ekiert 1997, Leslie 1980. Although this virtually ‘just so’ version of the events provides sufficient context for these purposes, it must be noted that some writers are sceptical about the ‘myth’ of the Polish October. For example, Jadwiga Staniszkis has argued that the ‘Polish October’ became a ritual drama which was invoked in order to assist in the maintenance of state power; the state was able to refer to these events to imply that it was capable of responding to public opinion. See Staniszkis 1984. Staniszkis’s position is critiqued in Taras 1992. Nevertheless it cannot be doubted that the

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October events were read by those who were critical of the state as opening up new possibilities.) The sense of possibilities that October 1956 inspired amongst Polish sociologists can be found in some sentences written by Ossowski. In his book Class Structure in the Social Consciousness, which destalinisation and Gomulka’s democratisation meant that he was able to publish because the ban on his work had been lifted, Stanislaw Ossowski wrote about, ‘the post-October period of enthusiasm and hope’. The hope consisted in, ‘the destruction of the official myths which concealed our reality . . . the grim myth with which those who were reconciled to the existing state of affairs salved their consciences: the myth of historical necessity as revealed to those who wield power’ (Ossowski 1963: vii, 193). October 1956 gave the responsibility for the human world back to men and women. The events hinted at a moment of the transcendence of necessity and, therefore, at the realisation of distinctly human values. But the years after 1956 seemed to show that these were possibilities that men and women did not want to accept, nor which the Party actually wished to allow them to practice. Contrary to initial promise, Gomulka did not bring about a democratisation of Polish life. Rather his years in power became those of what is known as the ‘little stabilisation’: ‘The six years from the beginning of 1957 to the end of 1963 were a period of comparative stability. The upheaval caused by the twin processes of destalinization and desatellization subsided rapidly after 1957, and the country settled down to life under Gomulka’ (Leslie 1980: 367). It has been argued that Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds is a product and reflection of the post-October disillusion (Morris 1970: 11). Gomulka managed to divert the idealistic (and in Ossowski’s understanding humanistic) hopes of October into a dully pragmatic Polish road to socialism where Party aims and national aspirations were allowed to rub along together, so long as neither tried to undermine the other, and so long as the interests of the Soviet Union were not challenged. The period between 1957 and the end of 1963 was one of a kind of social and political torpor in Poland, which was only ended by economic collapse, and, in 1968, by student revolt and state-managed antiSemitism. (For historical details on the period of the so-called ‘little stabilisation’, see Leslie 1980.) It is exactly this sober post-October period of the ‘little stabilisation’ that is the historical condition of the emergence of the sociological

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work of Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman’s sociological imagination was inspired by Gomulka’s, ‘retreat from the ideal of a free and pluralist society which the nation had hoped he would fulfil . . . I knew our hopes had been dashed, and was eager to find out what went wrong and where our mistake lay’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 24). This was a retreat in which even some intellectuals were complicit. Bauman once mentioned the situation after October 1956 in which it was possible to find, ‘Polish intellectuals then fresh from the battlefields of the revolution they first spurred and later helped to contain’ (Bauman 1987b: 162). And here the third source of the inspiration of Bauman’s sociological imagination comes into play. Apart from the inspiration of Hochfeld and Ossowski, apart from the context of the Polish October and the ‘little stabilisation’, Zygmunt Bauman’s work was deeply inspired by texts. Bauman invariably stresses the vital importance of Antonio Gramsci for the development of his thought, but he read Gramsci in the context provided by other writers, in particular Albert Camus. Bauman has said that although he has never re-read it, Camus’ book The Rebel cut deep into his imagination when it was encountered in the late 1950s (for Bauman on his debt to Camus, see Bauman 2004. For a longer discussion of the relationship of Bauman and Camus, a discussion upon which the next couple of paragraphs draws, see Tester 2002). He was not alone with this particular piece of reading. Camus was widely read in the circles in which Bauman was situated (Kolakowski 1978: 463). At the very beginning of The Rebel, Camus asks the question, what is a rebel? He answers that the rebel is, ‘A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes as soon as he begins to think for himself’ (Camus 1953: 19). Camus gives the example of a slave who says ‘no’ to some new command. He argues that in that negation of the order the slave is confirming the existence of a borderline, which might not be prominent cognitively but is known as soon as it is transgressed, beyond which the crushing of human dignity cannot be accepted. The slave says no but, in so doing, affirms something: ‘Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified. It is in this way that the rebel slave says yes and no at the same time. He affirms that there are limits and also that he suspects – and wishes to preserve – the existence of certain things beyond those limits’ (Camus 1953: 19).

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According to Camus, as soon as the slave intuits these things beyond the limit, as soon as the rebel feels motivated and justified to rebel, the rebel steps beyond the sphere of her or his own peculiar insults and injuries (the phrase is derived from Dostoevsky) and moves instead towards an affirmation of a common humanity. In saying ‘no’ the rebel negates the common sense of the world that teaches that this is simply the way that things are and must be, and thus makes the everyday seem strange. It is opened up to a critique. The rebel comes to feel a distance between herself or himself and the everyday common sense. But, for Camus: ‘the first step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that the entire human race suffers from the division between itself and the rest of the world. The unhappiness experienced by a single man becomes collective unhappiness’. Camus goes on to make one of his most powerful statements: ‘Rebellion is the common ground on which every man bases his first values. I rebel – therefore we exist’ (Camus 1953: 28). It was through the prism of Camus that Bauman came to Gramsci. Camus raised a philosophical and historical question that Gramsci translated into politics and sociology. Bauman makes great claims about the influence and impact of Antonio Gramsci on his intellectual development. Perhaps a little hyperbolically, Bauman has said that reading Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, ‘was the major influence of my life’. For Bauman what Gramsci showed was that it is possible to analyse and understand, ‘reality as something flexible and fluid’, as a sphere of action (that is, of praxis) and not just inescapable actuality (Bauman 1992a: 206). In terms of the moment of the encounter with Gramsci, Bauman has said that the discovery of the Prison Notebooks happened in the early 1960s and that it resulted in a ‘break’ in his work, between sociological and political orthodoxy, and something else (Bauman and Tester forthcoming. The break with any orthodoxy is represented in an essay on Gramsci: Bauman 1963). Indeed it would also be inappropriate to ignore the political circumstances in which this encounter with the Prison Notebooks first occurred. In the context of the Polish October and the ‘little stabilisation’, Gramsci was dynamite. Gramsci’s Notebooks appeared in Italian editions in the late 1940s and early 1950s and they were quickly known in intellectual circles in Poland. The texts were read as making it possible to launch an

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impeccably Marxist critique of the ‘actually existing’ socialism of the Soviet bloc. In particular, they were read as a critique of the Leninist model of the Party which was upheld in official Communist circles (and which Gomulka never doubted) and, moreover, as a way of avoiding any tendency towards historical determinism. Gramsci gave the making of history back to humans and, in so doing, gestured towards a need to reject theses about history being made by the relationships of production, the Revolutionary Party or, quite simply, Progress. To this extent the words in Gramsci’s texts coincided with the hopes and enthusiasms of sociologists like Ossowski. Leszek Kolakowski summed up the implications of the Gramscian insight very neatly when he wrote that: ‘history is a human product. Although no individual is responsible for the results of the historical process, still each is responsible for his personal involvement in it’ (Kolakowski 1969: 88). The role that Gramsci played in this realisation was that he showed that it was possible, if not indeed necessary, to reject ‘the idea of knowledge as a copy or “reflection” of some reality independent of man’. Gramsci showed that: ‘All reality that can be meaningfully spoken of is a component of human history . . . [H]uman praxis determines the meaning of all components of knowledge, and . . . there is no fundamental distinction between scientific and humanistic knowledge, for all knowledge is in fact humanistic’ (Kolakowski 1978: 249–250). In this way, knowledge of the world is action on and in the world; it is praxis and not just speculation. Knowledge can therefore help change the world. It is not consigned merely to interpret the world. Bauman has said that Gramsci enabled him to make the connection between two concerns: ‘To understand how the visibility, tangibility of power, of reality – and the conviction concerning, the belief in, reality – are being constructed: that was why I got interested in culture’ (Bauman 1992a: 206). So, Gramsci showed Bauman that the claim that the actual is inevitable, and that the Party stands at the forefront of a definite and determining process, are not contentions to be believed in because they are more or less accurate grasps of independent truth and of a distinctive actuality. Rather, such contentions are to be understood as the product and the producer of relationships of power. The question that Gramsci forced was not: Is this true? but: What are the conditions and circumstances that ensure that this is believed to be true? Gramsci points to questions of power and culture,

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not science or nature, of politics, not economy. Gramsci thus fitted in well with the Polish sociological tradition and, perhaps more importantly, with a humanistic agenda. But what role exactly did Gramsci play in Bauman’s turn to an understanding of the world as the product of human action (of praxis) rather than of historical necessity? The key was the ability of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks to demonstrate that the world ‘does not have to be like this’, that ‘there is an alternative’, and that it is only because of structures of power which shape structures of cognition that men and women are unable to realise that the world is a thing of their own making, a thing of their own responsibility. It is only because of a kind of terminal paradox (in Kundera’s phrase; Kundera 1986) which says that humanity can only be free all the time that men and women accept the dictates of the actual and of history as known by the Party, that the world as it is seems to be incontrovertible. (It is not unreasonable to propose that in Bauman’s work since about 1995, the theme of the dictatorship of the Party has reappeared in a mutated variant as its opposite, as the theme of the dictatorship of the market.) Gramsci helped turn Bauman’s attention to an analysis of the structures and the conditions of the conviction in the necessity of the actual. The stake of that realisation was nothing less than the chances of human values in the circumstances of the present. The handle on these issues that can be found in the Prison Notebooks is Gramsci’s discussion of common sense. Gramsci defined common sense as the ‘philosophy of non-philosophers’, and went on to explain that he meant that common sense is, ‘the conception of the world which is uncritically absorbed by the various social and cultural environments in which the moral individuality of the average man is developed. Common sense is not a single unique conception, identical in time and space’ (Gramsci 1971: 419. This Gramscian focus on the forms of individuality is undoubtedly one of the roots of Bauman’s concern to explore forms of individualisation; see Bauman 2001b). There are two obvious threads to pull out of this definition. First, Gramsci is making the point that common sense consists in the modes of cognition and understanding into which individuals are socialised by virtue of their social and cultural situation. Common sense is a ‘conception of the world’ that is taken on board uncritically. As such, it is the basis of apprehensions of the ‘way things must be’; it is evidently natural and naturalising. It is the basis of the

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development of ‘moral individuality’ and it is, therefore, a principle and means by which men and women are shaped by the actual rather than possessed of the intimation that their action (and therefore the practice of their dignity as human beings) might intimate possibilities of the transcendence of the actual. Common sense is conservative. Second, Gramsci says that common sense is mutable; it is not unitary and neither is it ‘identical in time and place’. That comment serves to relativise common sense and make it an object of interpretative interest. This is because common sense thus becomes fundamentally paradoxical. On the one hand, common sense is conservative and yet, on the other hand, it is itself historically changeable. The critical questions that emerge in the wake of this relativisation of common sense are: What are the ‘social and cultural environments’ that presently shape ‘the moral individuality of the average man’? And: What are the power relationships through which the secret of the relativity of these claims about the natural and the inevitable are hidden? Gramsci says that common sense is, ‘the traditional popular conception of the world’ (Gramsci 1971: 199), but it is a tradition of recent provenance and therefore it can only be popular thanks to strategies and relationships of popularisation. It is easy to see how this conception of common sense could quickly slip in the direction of a critique of actual social and cultural relationships. In the specific circumstances of the ‘little stabilisation’, this meant that the Party and its claims to be the possessor of the truth of actuality (the truth of historical necessity) could rightly be interrogated in the name of human action. The Party could be subjected to questions about exactly how it achieves the ‘uncritical absorption’ of its truths and thereby shapes ‘moral individuality’ in such a way that men and women are prepared to refute their own praxis and, instead, accept the claim that only the Party truly knows what ought to be done. The critique of common sense is also an investigation of the destruction of human action, praxis and dignity. All of this would be interesting as an incident in the history of ideas if not for the fact that these kinds of themes continue to be absolutely central to Bauman’s social thought. The critique of Communist common sense might have been rendered unnecessary and obsolete by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, but the critique of prevailing common sense continues to be a pursuit of fundamental significance. Indeed, this critique is one of the guiding principles of Bauman’s

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conception of the value and purpose of sociology. In Towards a Critical Sociology, he contended that, ‘commonsense is the ultimate object of sociological exploration in the same inescapable way as nature is the ultimate object of natural science’. Common sense is, then, the object of sociological critique but, symbiotically, it is the precondition of that critique. Without common sense assumptions about the way that the world ‘must be’ there could be no sociology that seeks to show that ‘things could be different than this’. For Bauman this meant that, ‘commonsensical experience will always remain the locus in which sociological queries and concepts are gestated – and the umbilical cord binding the knowledge of human affairs to commonsense will never be cut’ (Bauman 1976a: 28). Much the same argument was being made some fourteen years later when, in Thinking Sociologically, Bauman wrote that: ‘Perhaps more than other branches of scholarship, sociology finds its relation with common sense (that rich yet disorganized, non-systematic, often inarticulate and ineffable knowledge we use to conduct our daily business of life) fraught with problems decisive for its standing and practice’ (Bauman 1990b: 8). He went on to explain that it is precisely because of this closeness of common sense and sociology that it is important to be quite clear about what distinguishes the latter from the former. Bauman identifies four ways in which common sense and sociology are different, four ways in which sociology is identifiable and cohesive. First, sociology ought to be responsible; it ought only to make claims that can be corroborated and ought to refuse to accept anything that is said to be true because ‘I know it is true’. Sociology is analytical not assertive. Second, sociology draws its material from a wider field than common sense. Common sense draws on the everyday, the close at hand and the self-evident, while sociology draws upon a broader field of material; it widens horizons. Third, common sense makes sense of the world through the prism of the sovereign individual acting in almost glorious isolation in terms of her or his own will. Meanwhile, sociology is the analysis of the social and cultural determinants and situation of that action. (Bauman uses the Eliasian word ‘figurations’ in this context; sociology is the analysis of figurations.) Finally, common sense is a knowledge that confirms the world and its arrangements (Bauman says that common sense is immune to questioning), whereas it is the business of sociology to ‘defamiliarise the familiar’. Sociology is not about confirmation at

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all. It is in the business of critique. (This list of the differences between common sense and sociology is drawn from Bauman 1990b: 12–15. This programme means that sociology is not just critical. It is also hermeneutic; Bauman 1978.) By this token, to think sociologically is to recover human action and, therefore, human dignity. That stake is stated with great clarity at the end of Liquid Modernity: ‘Sociologists may deny or forget the . . . effects of their work, and the impact . . . on human singular or joint actions, only at the expense of forfeiting that responsibility of choice which every other human being faces daily.’ He wrote that: ‘The job of sociology is to see to it that the choices are genuinely free, and that they remain so, increasingly so, for the duration of humanity’ (Bauman 2000a: 216). This means that the concern of sociology is with the world that makes sure that human choices are not free, or which stunts the human will to choose in the first place. The concern of sociology is with the destruction of human values. During the period of the ‘little stabilisation’, Zygmunt Bauman produced sociological work that addressed precisely that issue.

The question of youth During the period of the ‘little stabilisation’, Party ideology was concerned to use education to inculcate amongst youth a largely utilitarian attitude towards life. Utilitarianism was common sense and the basis of the Party-led forms of moral individuality. In his study of Party ideology in Poland, Ray Taras has contended that: ‘Destalinisation in operative ideology took the form . . . of a replacement of political rules governing action by strict economic utility ones’ (Taras 1984: 69). That concern with utility continued to be paramount. Taras notes that throughout the 1960s, the Party always upheld an operative ideology in which: ‘Industry, discipline, responsibility and collectivism were the qualities most strongly emphasised . . . the work ethic was stressed . . . The leadership opted for a value system . . . directly related to the immediate functional imperatives of the country’ (Taras 1984: 104). Obviously, these attempts on the part of the Party to establish the absolute authority of strictly utilitarian values were open to direct condemnation from the point of view of any perspective indebted to Ossowski. After all, from this point of view, what the Party was

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attempting to do was to establish responsibility towards external power (and therefore to a form of coercion) over and above the responsibility of the individual man or woman to human values of possibility. And indeed, just such a condemnation can be found in some essays that Zygmunt Bauman published in the early 1960s. Implicitly rather than explicitly, Bauman identified contemporary Poland as a ‘multi-dimensional society’ by which he meant that it was typified by the existence of a number of different relationships of differentiation (age, ethnicity, religion and, it might be added, gender and perhaps even class), none of which are pulled together by a coherent and consensually agreed value hierarchy. Moreover, and in a more materialistic temper, Bauman argued that multi-dimensional societies are ones in which different goods are produced and distributed according to the demands of different structures. There is more than a flavour of Durkheim’s account of organic solidarity about this (and Ossowski was influenced by Durkheim). Now, for Bauman, given its internal differentiations the multi-dimensional society is one in which, ‘the human behaviour . . . instead of being a culturally determined chain of systematically arranged acts, becomes a sequence of choices’. Then comes an Ossowskian moment: ‘Predominance of some solutions over others is now being obtained not by a unified and meaningful system of prescriptions and prohibitions but by diffuse aggregate or expected rewards and punishments administered by many autonomous social forces’ (Bauman 1965: 57). In other words, some solutions to the choices that men and women need to make come to be accepted as common sense only because they are tied to external power and perhaps even coercion. It is not so much that some choices are better than others; rather it is the case that some choices come to seem to be better than others because of the power with which they are able to punch. By this analysis Bauman identifies a typical personality structure (in Gramsci’s terms, a typical moral individuality) that is indivisibly associated with multi-dimensional societies. He argues that these societies generate and contain men and women who are characterised by an ‘innovational personality’. They are innovational because they are always confronting situations in which they have to make choices without knowing in advance what choice is needed. As Bauman (1965) put it: ‘Neither sequential consistency, nor cumulation, prefiguring, consolidation, growing automaticity are attributes of the

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socialization process in its socio-cultural context.’ For this reason, men and women are ‘compelled to be creative’ and so: ‘Not only the social world is now perceived as something manipulable and changeable by human action; manipulating and changing the world is the only plausible and visible way to live in it.’ He went on: ‘Human being is creative and innovative by the sheer necessity of moving through an internally inconsistent and atomized world full of intercrossing multi-original and multi-directional pressures and forces’ (Bauman 1965: 59). These innovational personalities, and the distinctly human potentials and possibilities linked to them, could only be crushed by external authority and power: ‘The only limitations of maximization of goals and efforts . . . are superimposed by the external action of the higher levels of social organization . . . but they are not built into the individual motivational structure’ (Bauman 1965: 58). Innovational personalities are only absent from multi-dimensional societies if external authorities stop them in the process of their development. On the one hand, the realisation of the human ability to manipulate and therefore change the world is contradicted by the success of common sense in making the actual seem to be natural and inevitable. On the other hand, the ‘superimposition’ of the ‘higher levels of social organisation’ was the project of an ideology-led educational system. In short, men and women are not utilitarians by social circumstance; they have to be made to be so restricted in their horizons and ambitions. The operative common sense and ideology of the Party was one that attempted to engineer utilitarians who would be happy and keen to work according to the dictates of external powers and within the bounds of the actual. But when Bauman turned to an examination of the kinds of utilitarians that the common sense had made, he found only apathy, resignation and confusion. By Bauman’s analysis the alternative to innovational personality was not happy robots. Rather more hopefully (given that robots never rebel against their oppression), he found alienation. For Bauman the problem was that the values that were imposed by the educational system were very quickly and directly contradicted by the exigencies of the actual. For example: ‘As soon as he takes a job the young man who was brought up by his school to admire new ideas and to be courageous, at once encounters those bureaucratic barriers to new ideas which the school . . . neglected to tell him

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about, and he soon learns from his own experiences how little courage pays.’ Similarly, ‘The young man, who in school was brought up to follow the traditions of the romantic heroes, suddenly awakes to find himself in extremely prosaic situations where romanticism is of little use.’ The result is that even the ideologically convinced become apathetic: ‘Being determined to keep strictly to the rules of equality and justice, the young man goes into retreat, helpless in the face of unexpected signs of indifference to human injustice and in face of other people’s strict observance of differences between people as regards rights and duties’ (Bauman 1966b: 85. This article also appears as Bauman 1967b). The more successfully schools pursued the Party-led ideology of utilitarian education, the more they undermined the chance that men and women would be content with their utilitarianism. Bauman observed precisely this contradiction in the youth of Warsaw during the years of the ‘little stabilisation’. He noted that the youth that remained at school was quite convinced that the world could be made a better place through hard work; they were committed and extremely inclined towards practical action. But the youth who had left school upheld completely different values and, consequently, were typified by a different kind of personality: ‘They were much more minimalistic, egocentric, defensive . . . these young people were anxious above all to make for themselves out of the uncertain, incomprehensible and, what is most important, uncontrolled world outside, a small private world for themselves.’ This would be a private world, ‘consisting of matters and things that were certain and that they themselves could control’ (Bauman 1966b: 83. This passage seems remarkably to anticipate the nub of Christopher Lasch’s narcissistic personality and minimal-self theses: Lasch 1979, 1984. Bauman had examined the horizons of this turn to a purportedly manageable private world in Bauman 1962a, a paper which seems to have been a small part of a massive Franco-Polish cross-cultural study; Jollivet 1959). Bauman found that youth were completely depoliticised: ‘Its life itinerary being rather smooth and devoid of insurmountable impediments, with maximum effort the heights achievable not surpassing very drastically the present position, youth is not likely to experience much tension and thus to originate sufficient stamina for political radicalism’ (Bauman 1967a: 75). Consequently, a grudging utilitarianism and an

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embrace of the promise of a meaningful private sphere shaped their horizons. All youth hoped for was a level of consumption which would allow them to have, ‘a decent, nicely furnished flat, motorcycle or a small car, and pleasant holidays once a year in a sea or mountain resort’ and ‘an interesting job’ which would provide the financial basis for a ‘decent family life’, consisting in: ‘a nice, not quarrelsome wife, a couple of well-brought up, compliant and rather gifted children, likeable and unobtrusive neighbors, and a small circle of cordial friends one may count on if needed’ (Bauman 1967a: 75. In that quotation it is possible to see some of the very first traces in English of the sense of humour and awareness of the human comedy that is so often present in Bauman’s later English-language writing). Yet it was exactly because of this retreat into a private world that Bauman was able to hope. The retreat ironically bolstered the chance of the social production of innovational personalities who would embrace human values and be disobedient towards external authority. This was because the retreat required men and women to make choices on their own behalf, without accepting any guidance from (the discredited) external powers. Even as men and women tried to separate the realm of private troubles from that of public issues, they were forced to rely on their own ability innovatively to create that private milieu. Men and women would be forced to become responsible for their own being in the world. They would be forced by the logic of their self-chosen situation to begin to uphold human values of autonomy and of the manipulation of the world. And so, even as the retreat publicly appeared in the guise of apathy and resignation, it also opened up the possibility that something other might emerge.

Conclusion In a reflection on the lessons that he learnt from Julian Hochfeld and Stanislaw Ossowski, Bauman said that neither of them believed that this is the best of all worlds, but neither did they believe that it is the worst: ‘Ossowski and Hochfeld were neither in the optimist nor in the pessimist camp; just where the sociologist worth her salt should be’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 21). That is exactly where it is also possible to find the work of Zygmunt Bauman. Although his sociological imagination emerged in the specific circumstances of the post-October 1956 ‘little stabilisation’, and although that historical

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moment could be interpreted as a denial of the possibilities of praxis that the October events were taken to represent, he does not fall into any trap of self-indulgent pessimism. In no small part this is due to the influence of Gramsci. The lesson of Gramsci’s texts was that pessimism is entirely misplaced since the problem the sociologist must confront is not of the order of ‘How is this necessary?’ but the far more analytical ‘What are the causes of the belief that this is necessary?’. That latter question points to optimism in that if the social causes of the common sense of the inevitable dominance of the actual can be revealed, then so it is also possible to uncover and present its utter contingency. However, and as Bauman knew from Hochfeld and Ossowski, the place to be is neither pessimist nor optimist, but in the ambivalent middle. This is because, in the ambivalent middle, the problem of having to confront the actual is tempered with a hope that it might be transcended and that things could be made different (and as the analysis of Warsaw youth showed, Bauman found traces of hope where others might only have found the pits of despair), while the possibilities of hope are pulled down to earth such that it is always appreciated that possibilities emerge out of the actual and not thin air. Or, as Bauman once said in a slightly different but consonant register, and in a conscious adoption of an adage of Enzensberger: ‘short-term hopes are futile and long-term resignation is suicidal’ (Bauman 1986: 93). In short, the conditions of the emergence of a sociological imagination are also the conditions of the emergence of a possibility of human being in the world, despite all of the limitations that the belief in the inevitability and inescapability of the actual might suggest. Where it is possible to engage in the praxis of humanistic sociology there too it is possible to engage in the praxis of humanity.

3 Socialism: Utopian and Cultural

Zygmunt Bauman has identified as a continuous interest of his work: ‘the working class, standing for the downtrodden or the underdog, for suffering in general. For a long time there was the sign of an identity between the two: the working class as the embodiment of suffering’ (Bauman 1992a: 206). The interest can be traced back to the passion that led Bauman to fall into line with the Communists in their stated desire after the war to rebuild Poland as a nation of human dignity and without social suffering (that is, as a place where moral evil had been overcome). It also points forwards to Bauman’s discussions of such themes as ambivalence, globalisation and community, where there is a realisation that while the working class historically might be the pre-eminent signifier of social suffering, the contemporary human condition is one in which the working class has been replaced by other signifiers of the perpetration of evil great and small; Jews, refugees, the excluded (see also Bauman 1986). The meaning of being downtrodden has also changed. The old model working class experienced the oppression of grinding material want, but while poverty remains an inescapable issue, it is not the only form of suffering that needs to be taken into account. Indeed it is an important principle within Bauman’s work that poverty is about much more than the objective condition of being without the means of subsistence. Bauman upholds a relative definition of poverty, which means that his work can never, ever, imagine an actuality where social suffering has been overcome once and for all. The best that can happen is that the threshold of suffering is pushed lower and lower. Of course, and as Bauman has said, some people are in 58

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poverty because they struggle to meet subsistence needs: ‘But there are many others who are “poor”, and bound to remain such, because what they possess is pitiful by comparison with what is on offer, and because all limits have been removed from their desires’ (Bauman 1988a: 96). The conceit on the part of the powerful that the problem of poverty has been overcome thanks to policy initiatives is one more common sense that needs to be unmasked by critical sociology. But even if the content of poverty is relative and can change, the offence to human being that it represents is invariant. The offence of poverty can never be dismissed, and it demands special attention, special condemnation: ‘Poverty is not one humiliation among many socially caused humiliations . . . It is a “meta-humiliation” of sorts, a soil on which all-round indignity thrives, a trampoline from which “multiple humiliation” is launched’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 154). To accept that such poverty is inevitable or necessary is to naturalise it and, thereby, also to confirm the common sense contention that this is simply the way that things are (or, more insidiously, that this is simply the way that things are for some people, but rarely for ‘us’). Bauman’s work unavoidably leads to the contrary position that the social suffering of poverty must not be accepted in this way, that its humanly produced causes must be uncovered and turned into something that is spoken about, transformed and politicised. For example, Bauman has argued that in the present the poor and impoverished are kept firmly out of sight (and therefore out of the minds of the affluent). They are ‘Exempt from human community, exempt from public mind’ (Bauman 1998a: 93). What Bauman’s work seeks to do is nothing less than put the sufferers of poverty back into the public mind. It is precisely this position that Bauman pursues in a number of his books (most notably in the little book on globalisation, Bauman 1998b. See also Bauman 2002b). It is also a position that has always been defining of the seriousness of moral purpose that typifies Bauman’s work. This ethical position points to a political affiliation. Bauman is quite clear that he is a socialist. ‘I am indeed a socialist’, he has said (Bauman and Tester 2001: 153). It is the concern of this chapter to explore precisely what this socialist identification means and entails for Bauman’s work. The point is that Bauman is not simply pinning onto his work a badge of party membership. His definition of socialism mitigates

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against that, just as any position that owes a debt to Stanislaw Ossowski’s principle of disobedience and dissent is utterly incapable of accommodating itself to claims of necessity. Instead of participation in party politics, Bauman identifies socialism as an ethical commitment which emphasises the problem of social suffering and, typically critically, opens up the possibility of something different through the humanisation of the world. Bauman’s is a socialism that operates ultimately on a field that is much larger than that within which party politics tends to be happy to be confined (and to confine itself): ‘Socialism, to me at least, is not an alternative model of society bound to replace the currently operating system. Socialism is a sharp knife pressed against the blatant injustices of society as it is.’ Bauman makes the critical dimension of this quite clear when he says that socialism ‘is a challenge to the society as it is never to stop questioning its wisdom, to think again about alternatives to its present state’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 154). Such a position logically means that socialism as Bauman defines it, can never be identical with any party platform, government procedures or policy initiatives that are based on a presumption of the inevitability of the actual. Bauman’s socialism is intrinsically critical. It is always living forwards in relation to the actual. There is a massive paradox about all of this. What Bauman is saying is that whenever socialism is proclaimed to be achieved, it cannot possibly be socialism. Those who most loudly and confidently proclaim the identity of the actual with socialist ideals are no less than some of the biggest obstacles that socialism needs to overcome. (Perhaps they are not the biggest obstacles only on account of the existence of those who argue that socialism is no longer relevant to the times.) The core of this paradox, and its roots in Bauman’s work, can be seen in the studies of Polish youth. What that work showed was that the purported socialism that had been achieved in Poland (and more broadly throughout Central and Eastern Europe in the 1950s and 1960s), had fallen drastically short of its ideals. Groups such as Polish youth demonstrated quite clearly that alienation continued to exist in actually existing socialist society and, even more strongly, that actually existing socialism was productive of alienation. Unlike the heroic Polish youth who featured in films like Andrzej Wajda’s A Generation or Kanal, the youth of Gomulka’s Poland were living in

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a, ‘relatively stable and well-balanced society, free from serious crises, from inflaming conflicts and internal contradictions, from sharp class differentiations’ (Bauman 1967a: 75). But that stability had not led to a dignified life. First, the emergence of embryonic consumerism had taken the lid off of material desires and played a part in the creation of what amounted to a class structure (see Bauman 1971a: 48, 1974. For Bauman, material desires are also stimulated by the semiotics of consumer goods: (Bauman 1972d) and for the theoretical background to Bauman’s use of semiotics, see Bauman 1968b). Second, even though they lived in conditions that seemed to make the dignified life possible, Polish youth were stuck with nothing other than the gluing of the shards of dignity to the most modest and narrow of private spheres. They were in a situation that taught them the lesson that dignity lies in staying at home watching the television rather than in any engagement with the world outside. That world was one that was confronted through a utilitarian managerialism in which the problem was either accommodation or exit. Moreover, it was a world without hope because it denied the horizon of the future. The deliberate stasis of actually existing socialism meant that its subjects could not live forwards since the periods in which humans live with the greatest focus on the future are, ‘times of the most rapid change and most profound upheavals and upturns in their form of life’ (Bauman 2002c: 17). And those were occurrences that actually existing socialism sought to manage away. From the point of view of the economic utilitarianism advocated by the Party, such grudging participation in non-personal spheres represented a lack of adjustment to actuality. But from Bauman’s perspective the situation was exactly the reverse. It was not the fault of the youth themselves. In a phrase that echoes C. Wright Mills’ distillation of the sociological imagination, Bauman once wrote: ‘If numerous people experience “maladjustment” as their personal problem, what is really maladjusted is the society’ (Bauman 1969a: 6; Mills 1959). The attempt to make a world fit for humans to live in had at best led to a replication of old problems and, at worse, to the addition of new ones (after all, in what might it be possible to hope if even socialism could now be seen to be something less than the promised ideal?). Bauman’s socialism is one which is placed firmly within this paradox. He tries to keep the ethical commitment while retaining

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a critical analysis of the actual. He maintains the necessity of socialism despite, in spite, because, of what socialism actually entails. The more attenuated this paradox in theory and practice, then the stronger the commitment to socialism could be. Bauman’s work is characterised by a very keen and subtle appreciation of paradox. This sharpness is due to the impact of the work of Georg Simmel on his sociological imagination. In a discussion with Peter Beilharz, Bauman agreed when it was suggested that the work of Georg Simmel was ‘special’ to him: ‘Simmel took away . . . the youthful hope/check that once the “surface” incongruities and contradictions are out of the way, I’ll find “down there” the clockwork running exactly to the second’. Simmel, ‘also taught . . . that for the pencil of every tendency there is an eraser of another’ (Bauman in Beilharz 2001: 334–335). Simmel showed that the world does not necessarily turn out as planned, that the actual might not fit with the ideals according to which it lives, that ambivalence and not certainty is the nub of human being in the world. Simmel’s sociology achieved something comparable to the emphasis on praxis in Gramsci’s brand of Marxism. Gramsci showed Bauman, ‘reality as something flexible and fluid’ (Bauman 1992a: 206), while: ‘Reality dissipated, so to speak, in Simmel’s hands; it refused to be patched together again by the unifying impact of the church, the state or the Volksgeist’ (Bauman 1991a: 185). Socialism, for Bauman, is thus a commitment to the theory and the practice of a fluid human world. Socialism nowhere more desperately stands in need of recovery than in those times and places where the achievement of socialism is announced. Bauman’s work contains recovery attempts, and this chapter will discuss what they are. The chapter has two substantive parts. First, attention will be paid to Bauman’s recovery of socialism from the paradox of alienation in actually existing socialism through his emphasis upon the fluid (and intrinsically human) quality of praxis. Second, the chapter will discuss the utopian dimension of Bauman’s socialism. By way of conclusion, these theoretical themes will be related to sociological issues raised by Bauman’s own biography. The point is that this recovery of the humanity of socialism did not take place in a vacuum. It was carried out in the face of attacks by the forces of actually existing socialism, and in 1968 those forces managed to secure Bauman’s exile from Poland.

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From paradox to praxis Simmel’s work encourages its readers to attend to one paradox in particular. This is the paradox that the world is a human production that is, however, ossified. According to Simmel, humanity is unique amongst all things because, ‘unlike animals, humanity does not integrate itself unquestioningly into the natural facticity of the world but tears loose from it, confronts it, demanding, struggling, violating and being violated by it’. It is the mark of human being to refuse to accept that the world is inevitable or that the place of humans within it has been established once and forever, at some time in the past. Simmel is writing in terms of the thesis that what makes humans human is precisely the ability to change the world through conscious and deliberate action. To accept the constraints of the actual in some measure is to deny one’s own humanity. But there is a problem. Simmel is clear that although human being therefore involves the making of the human world, the creations of human action come to take on an almost natural inevitability and permanence. They become fixed. Consequently, it is possible to see in human history a paradoxical conflict, ‘between subjective life, that is restless but infinite in time, and its contents which, once created, are immovable but timelessly valid’ (Simmel 1997: 55). The world made by humans – the world that allows for the human action of human being – becomes a restriction upon what humanity might be able to mean and involve. It is precisely recognition of this sort of paradox that ran through the Marxist revisionism with which Bauman was associated in Poland during the 1960s (the identification of Bauman with revisionism is discussed in Satterwhite 1983, see also Kolakowski 1978: 464). Marxist revisionism was harnessed to a commitment to a brand of socialism that argued that actually existing socialism was an ossification of the initial promise of human dignity, and that humanity could only be achieved if that ossification were overcome. In other words the aim of Marxist humanism was not to overthrow socialism but, in tune with the appreciation of paradox, to rehumanise it and, therefore, to make it more socialist. This is why it was Marxist revisionism and not anti-Marxism. The point was to free the possibilities contained within Marxism from the shackles of the state and Party. This is also why Marxist revisionism is much more interesting than

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straightforward anti-Marxism (and it is noticeable that despite his caution and reservations, Bauman has never been anti-Marxist, although he has most certainly been enthusiastic about its revision. See, for example, Bauman 1987c). Marxist humanism was a politics of paradox: ‘The peculiarity of the situation was that both Marxism and Leninism spoke a language full of humane and democratic slogans which, while they were empty rhetoric as far as the system of power was concerned, could be and were invoked against that system’ (Kolakowski 1978: 460). Leszek Kolakowski has identified the extent to which revisionism was an attempt to revitalise Marxism. Although Kolakowski does not use themes and concepts from Simmel, it might also be said that he shows the extent to which critical thinkers in the 1960s were approaching Marxism as an ossification, as a block on human possibility. What revisionism sought was an injection of life back into Marxism, something that was necessary thanks to the smothering of Marxism by its connection to the actual: ‘The revisionists began by requiring that Marxism should subject itself to the normal rules of scientific rationality, instead of relying on the monopolistic power of censorship, police, and privilege.’ After all, studies of groups like Warsaw youth showed the paradox of alienation in actually existing socialism, a paradox that power sought to deny through a strict utilitarianism which allocated youth to the role of workers alone, their existential horizons beyond concern except where and when they implied ‘maladjustment’. It was only because of repression by the institutions of power that the question was barely raised as to whether the persistence of alienation implied that something was wrong with actually existing socialism rather than with groups such as youth. The revisionists, ‘argued that such privilege inevitably led to the degeneration of Marxism and deprived it of vitality . . . and that Marxist studies were withering away because Marxism had been institutionalized into a state ideology immune from criticism’. The revisionists argued that Marxism, ‘could only be regenerated by free discussion’ (Kolakowski 1978: 461). Bauman played a small yet notable role in the encouragement of free discussion about Marxism and the state in Poland. One of the main texts in the history of revisionism in Poland is the 1964 An Open Letter to the Party, written by Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, who were both students at Warsaw University. In the Letter they argued that

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Poland continued to be riddled with relationships of exploitation, even though actually existing socialism proclaimed that exploitation was a thing of the past. Kuron and Modzelewski argued that the capitalist relationship of exploitation between the owners of the means of production and the proletariat had been replaced in Poland with a situation in which the worker was forced to sell labour to the central political apparatus, which used profit to establish the institutions of repression. They saw the answer to this state of affairs in the establishment of worker’s councils and in work-place democracy (Kuron and Modzelewski n.d. For another revisionist argument for workers’ councils, see M. Hirszowicz 1966). For their efforts, in 1965 Kuron and Modzelewski were imprisoned, but before that the state authorities put pressure on the Rector of Warsaw University to prevent students from reading the Letter. A University committee was set up to address this matter of whether the Letter should be read. It included Leszek Kolakowski, the economist Wlodzimierz Brus and Zygmunt Bauman. Instead of giving the answer that the authorities presumably wanted (the Letter must not be read), the committee concluded that since Kuron and Modzelewski had addressed the text to the University Party organisation and the Union of Socialist Youth, the members of those organisations indeed should be permitted to read it. (For this incident, see, Raina 1978: 88.) But Bauman was much more than just a facilitator of the revisionism of others. He was also an active participant in the debates surrounding revisionism and its development as a free political position. One sign of this was his interest in Gramsci (Bauman 1963), and it is perhaps noteworthy that Bauman’s studies of British socialism focus on the 1950s, that is precisely on a period in which the Labour Party was undergoing its own period of Wilsonian revisionism (Bauman 1972b; this book draws on another book and a range of articles published by Bauman in Poland in the 1950s and 1960s. Bauman’s first published article was a discussion of the Labour Party’s theory and practice of nationalisation; Bauman 1956). Bauman’s own revisionism can be glimpsed in an article that was first published in English in 1967, ‘Modern Times, Modern Marxism’ (Bauman 1969a). In the article, Bauman refuses to privilege Marxism as a theory and, instead, critically examines its contemporary meanings and implications. Having subjected Marxism to rational scrutiny, he then moves on to offer a revised and revitalised commitment to Marxism. In this way,

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Bauman’s essay is typical of the strategies and concerns of revisionism as they are summarised by Kolakowski. In a statement that is entirely incompatible with any claims of the sort that Marxism is an objective science which tells of one single truth, and that there is only one single bearer of that truth, Bauman wrote that: ‘The body of knowledge claiming the Marxist designation is far from homogeneous. It is differentiated in its content as well as in the functions that it fulfils’ (Bauman 1969a: 7). Bauman identifies two ‘functions’ of Marxism. Implicitly, he identifies a managerialist function and explicitly he identifies a humanistic one. The discussion of managerial Marxism points back to Ossowski and highlights the extent to which Bauman’s imagination could not (and to this day cannot) provide succour to those who exercise power. He contends that, ‘our epoch is one of large-scale organizations’ and goes on to suggest that this defining characteristic of the present gives rise to managerial knowledge which will show how humanity can be forced to limit its aspirations to the utilitarian demands of institutions. Whether they manage humans or steel production: ‘The main instrumental values these organizations cherish are the set of manageable stimuli assuring the highest probability of achieving the expected response’ (Bauman 1969a: 3). And when it comes to humans this means that they must be made to be predictable and prepared to confine all aspirations and actions within the confines of what the large-scale organisations can allow. If the essence of human being is the unpredictability of human creative praxis, and if the good society is one which permits and encourages that freedom, then organisations stand in the way of the achievement of humanity. Or, put another way, those social relationships which depend upon organisations for their stability, coherence and legitimacy, can only be identified as instances of the bad society: ‘Organization itself is an attempt at limitation of the unbounded multiplicity of opportunities; an attempt at structuration of an amorphic, homogeneous universum. Organization is concerned with what is restricted, “realistic”, relatively stable’ (Bauman 1969a: 4. The reference to a ‘universum’ in this sentence anticipates Bauman’s much later Levinas-inspired ethics, and it is not far-fetched to see here the seeds of Bauman’s later analysis of adiaphorization; Bauman 1991b). This kind of managerialism requires that men and women are fitted into social and economic roles that exist independently of them. The human is reduced to the

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utilitarian. Yet Bauman believes that human being is far richer than that: ‘The problem any man as a pure and simple human being is confronted with is different from the kind of problems faced by men in their managerial function’ (Bauman 1969a: 5). In the context in which those sentences were written, they represent a conscious and deliberate critique of the ossification into bureaucracy of actually existing socialism. Admittedly, Bauman only makes this connection between the lines of his argument. It is implicit rather than explicit. (However, Bauman was elsewhere fully aware of the emergence of a managerial – and managerialist – elite in Poland: Bauman 1964.) But one thing that is made clear very explicitly is the fact that, for Bauman in the 1960s, Marxism is part of the answer to this problem of ossification. It does not have to be part of the problem alone. According to Bauman the way out of the managerial reduction of human being to dull utilitarianism is an acceptance, embrace and nurturance of the defining anthropological quality of humanity. This is the promise of a humanistic Marxism. Remember that Simmel saw the difference of humanity in the ability to tear itself apart from nature, its ability to do the unpredictable. Something very similar is upheld by Bauman, and he identified Marxism as a knowledge that could build on this humanistic claim in order to make, ‘human behavior less, not more, predictable. It functions in a manner exactly opposite to the knowledge created to suit the managerial world’. According to Bauman, Marxism ought not to be what it has become (an erstwhile justification for alienating and exploitative, ossified, utilitarian managerialism) but, rather, it ought to provide knowledge about, ‘how to adjust society to individual needs, not the reverse; how to extend the range of freedom of individual choice; how to provide room enough for individual initiative and non-conformity’ (Bauman 1969a: 6–7). As such Bauman wants Marxism to be torn away from the bureaucracies of actually existing socialism and turned into the kind of living incitement to be human that it might be. Bauman wants Marxism to be revised and not jettisoned. In this way sociology and Marxism come together to revitalise the world and undermine its ossification and common-sense acceptance. Sociology then was a part of the antidote to the fixing into orthodoxy of previously critical thought. However, the royal road out of the paradox of the ossification of Marxism was provided by the revisionist emphasis on praxis. Satterwhite has identified the importance of

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praxis to Marxist revisionism. He says that the concept, ‘referred to human creative activity as constituting human reality, as opposed to the Stalinist stress on human reality as determined by “objective laws” external to human activity’ (Satterwhite 1983: 238). Of course, praxis is a concept that sits well with a humanistic sociology and for at least one commentator looking at Bauman’s pre-exile work it was long ago clear that, ‘in his emphasis on ethical humanism, praxis, and the rejection of determinism . . . Bauman’s sociology is infused with “humanist” values’ (Bryant 1972: 115). Indeed, there is an assumption within the concept of praxis that resonates exactly with Bauman’s humanism and, for that matter, with the claim of Simmel that humanity consists in the deliberate establishment of a difference from nature. All of them are committed to the principle that the good society is the one that permits and encourages ‘human creative activity’ and that social relationships and arrangements can be condemned as bad to the extent that they restrict or hamper such activity. From this it follows that the actually existing socialism of Poland could be condemned precisely because it produced alienation and destroyed human creativity on the altar of utilitarianism. Praxis is emphasised by Bauman in the ‘Modern Times, Modern Marxism’ paper. Indeed he identifies it as the expression of what it means to be human. If to be human is to be different from nature, to rebel and to aspire towards the possible rather than the just necessary, then it is through praxis that this aspiration is played out: ‘The only genuine reality . . . is man as such, pursuing the process of living through and by his social and cultural environment.’ (Bauman 1969a: 1). Although that comment once again sounds rather Simmelian, its direct genealogy goes back to Gramsci. Bauman identifies Gramsci’s thought as opening up the possibility of a Marxism that connects with the humanistic interpretation of human being because it rejects any tendency towards naturalisation. Unlike orthodox ossified, dead, Marxism, the debt to Gramsci frees humanity from outside determination and into praxis: ‘With human historical action as its basic category, this current puts to the forefront the active, motivating role of mental structuralization of the human world’ (Bauman 1969a: 16). By this argument, the world is what humanity makes of it, not some inescapable necessity that requires the managerial adaptation of human being to external constraints or the reduction of ambition to economic utilitarianism. Through praxis, the world

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is a production of the human practice of possibility. Consequently, ideas about the world are not reflections of an external and independent reality (they are not ‘mirrors of nature’, in the phrase of Rorty), instead they are constitutive of the world. Through ideas humanity can change the world and not just learn how better to reside within its determinations. Beyond Gramsci, Bauman’s emphasis on praxis also stretches back to the young Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’. Once again then it becomes clear that the point was not to replace Marxism but, instead, to revitalise it. The use of Marx against actually existing Marxism was another move typical of revisionism. Kolakowski says that the revisionists, ‘appealed for a “return to the sources”, i.e. they based their criticism of the system on Marxist tradition’ (Kolakowski 1978: 460). The strategy can be glimpsed in a comment that Bauman made in 1968: ‘the centre of gravity in Marxian doctrine is in the category of “praxis” and not in “economic determinism”, as is falsely assumed by some interpreters of this theory’ (Bauman 1968a: 29). Marx implied praxis in the First Thesis when he repudiated the argument that ‘reality’ is an external object that can only be contemplated. By contrast, Marx wanted ‘the object, reality, sensuousness’ to be appreciated as ‘human sensuous activity, practice’. Or as the Eighth Thesis put it: ‘Social life is essentially practical’ (Marx 1942: 471, 473. Original emphasis). That Bauman took these ideas on board cannot be doubted. It is the lesson of Marx and Gramsci alike that: ‘All aspects of the human world, the social structure and cultural systems included, exist only through human praxis’ (Bauman 1972c: 317). Bauman’s most sustained discussion of praxis is to be found in his book Culture as Praxis. Although this book was published in 1973, after his arrival in England, today it reads much more like a pre-exile production. The mode of argumentation and the range of references are much more consonant with the essays that Bauman published in the 1960s than they are with the better-known post-exile work. The book can be read as a summation and, thereby, as the opening up of new possibilities, as an incitement to start thinking forwards from out of an understanding that looks backwards. When Bauman talks about culture it is clear that he is sharing assumptions about humanity with Simmel and, moreover, building on the Marx–Gramsci thesis that the distinctively human world is made not through contemplation and accommodation with the actual

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but through praxis. Bauman says that: ‘Culture is unique to man in the sense that only man of all living things is able to challenge his reality and to ask for a deeper meaning, justice, freedom, and good.’ Certainly Bauman was in no doubt whatsoever that culture is identical with human possibility and, therefore, with a critique of all that seeks to restrict the pursuit of the possible. Culture concerns the, ‘possible, the potential, the desirable, the hankered after, even if as yet improbable worlds’ (Bauman 1973a: 177). Consequently, culture is praxis, and therefore compatible with the essence of what it means to be human, all the time that it permits and incites free human action. By this understanding culture has nothing to do with the mere consumption of mass-produced objects (see the critique of mass culture in Bauman 1966a). That is just another sign of alienation. Culture is something that humans do rather than simply have. In short: ‘Culture is . . . the natural enemy of alienation. It constantly questions the self-appointed wisdom, serenity and authority of the Real’ (Bauman 1973a: 176). Any work that takes up this argument that culture is an overcoming of alienation and not simply an objective actuality ‘out there’ is going to have certain characteristics. Not least, it is going to be possessed of a deeply critical perspective on any contention that culture can be analysed and confronted as if it were an external thing or a ‘transcendental object’ of knowledge that humanity neither creates nor controls but which, instead, creates and controls humanity and human being in the world (Bauman 1973a: 163). Bauman condemns the ‘concept of culture as appropriated and employed by social science’ on the grounds that it has been, ‘unduly tapered to cover only the predictable, routine, institutional aspect of human behaviour’. Put another way, it might be said that the orthodox concept of culture is cut to the measure of utilitarian managerial concerns. Within this orthodox approach, ‘Culture is an adaptation to the tough, inflexible reality which can be made usable only if adapted to . . . Creativity boils down to sheer expediency, cleverness and dexterity which guileful humans display to turn an inhospitable environment to their advantage’ (Bauman 1973a: 170). Yet for Bauman culture truly is about that human praxis which is beyond management, beyond narrow questions of mere utilitarian adaptation. For Bauman, culture is about what cannot be predicted, what cannot be contained within the confines of the actual. Bauman

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understands culture to be much more than a concern with mere survival in the face of the actual and, consequently, any understanding of culture must be one that rejects the ‘transcendental object’ that demands nothing more than human adaptation. But this can only be achieved if an emphasis is placed on praxis, on human action in the world, and if the understanding of that action always builds on two postulates. Bauman says that culture as praxis is about more than survival. This is because, first, ‘the survival value of a project on which humans embark is ordinarily pushed well down the list of the criteria they apply to the project’s desirability’ and, second, human action is oriented towards, ‘an ideal state which ought to be achieved . . . rather than the cognizance of what can be achieved’ (Bauman 1973a: 171). Culture is about the possible, not just the probable. In sum, as with socialism, culture for Bauman is: ‘to paraphrase Santayana – a knife with its sharp edge pressed continuously against the future’ (Bauman 1973a: 172).

Praxis and living forwards Given that Bauman is sure that, ‘Humanity is the only known project of rising above the level of mere existence, transcending the realm of determinism, subordinating the is to the ought’ (Bauman 1973a: 172) and given that culture is the praxis of this human capacity, it follows that it is only possible if questions of poverty and social suffering have been overcome. Humans can only be dignified if they can first of all survive. This is why the thesis of culture as praxis implies that there is an identity of culture with socialism (an identity that is highlighted when Bauman defines culture and socialism alike as ‘knives pressed against the future’). Culture can only be living forwards all the time that men and women are able to live today. This identification of an identity of culture and socialism means that Bauman’s work tends to contain a specific understanding of socialism. It is one that has its roots in his Marxist revisionism. First, there is the materialistic aspect of socialism; it must offer the resources for human life. These resources cannot be of a merely subsistence kind since that would mean that humanity is always being thrown back onto the natural terrain of the satisfaction of material needs. Rather, the satisfaction of needs must be accomplished at such a level

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and according to such a distribution that all and any men and women have an equal chance to rise above the actuality of necessity and, instead, begin to engage in the possibility of praxis. Second, socialism can only be socialism all the time that it permits men and women to aspire towards the future, all the time that it facilitates the emergence of a consciousness that is not confined within the actual. Socialism requires a perpetual critique and even condemnation of any institutions or arrangements that uphold the common sense of a timeless present and which promote ossification. Bauman’s socialism is one that is fully open to the limitless horizon of the possible. As Bauman once put, socialism has, ‘the unpleasant quality of retaining its fertility only in so far as it resides in the realm of the possible. The moment it is proclaimed as accomplished, as empirical reality, it loses its creative power’ (Bauman 1976b: 36). Consequently, logically, it has a somewhat paradoxical attitude towards the future. The nub of the matter is that for Bauman socialism is the praxis of possibility (it is an expression of the human), but for that praxis to remain focused on the possible, its productions must always be overcome. The future into which socialism – exactly like culture – is pushing must be undetermined else the possibilities of praxis are restricted. Bauman’s conceptualisation of the future (and therefore of the humanity that is produced by socialism and culture), can never be stated for, if it were, it would hamper the pursuit of possibility in that future and, furthermore, represent an ossification of human practice. Bauman’s socialism is one that, ‘puts on the agenda . . . an acute demand for a new horizon, distant enough to transcend and relativise its own limitations’ (Bauman 1976b: 36). This understanding of socialism as self-transcending praxis can be interpreted as being fully in accord with Marx’s claim in the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ that truth is not transcendent: ‘The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. In practice man must prove the truth i.e. the reality and power, the “this-sidedness” of his thinking’ (Marx 1942: 471). This is exactly what Bauman is saying about culture and socialism. Neither are standards to be approached, and they are certainly not overwhelming actualities which establish standards of the management of humanity. The truth of socialism, as with the truth of culture, is something that is proved in practice. They are true to the extent that they permit humanity to engage in the praxis of

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possibility. To the extent that actually existing arrangements restrict possibility, they are a lie. The implications of this position are not restricted to culture and socialism, however. The position that the future must be undetermined if it is to be filled by and with human praxis has major implications for the practice of a sociological imagination. Bauman believes that sociology can say nothing about the future: ‘The competence of sociology ends where the future begins.’ This silence does not reflect a failing of the imagination but, instead, one of its strengths. All the time that sociology remains silent, all the time that it is accepted that sociologists do not know what will happen next, they are engaged in a critical opening up of possibility. Sociology can look to the past and the present but: ‘Human history is not predetermined by its past stages. The fact that something has been the case . . . is not a proof that it will continue to be so. Each moment of history is a junction of tracks leading towards a number of futures’ (Bauman 1988a: 89). Sociology, and the sociologist, should be bound by a statute of limitations, which decrees that no one of these many possible futures will be closed down in advance. Most certainly, sociology should avoid any pretence that it can be a science of the future. Once again recalling the rejection of the positivistic ‘transcendental object’, Bauman says that the future ‘does not exist – while all the refined models of truth-seeking designed by scientific reason have been made to the measure of things that do’ (Bauman 2002c: 17). All the time that it leaves the future as a realm of possibility, all the time the future is accepted as ‘a complete enigma, impenetrable mystery’ (Bauman 2002c: 17) sociology is in accord with the essence of humanity. The critique of common sense plays its crucial role here since it manages to relativise and dissolves naturalisations of the order that ‘there is no alternative’. In this way, sociology itself becomes praxis of possibility and it too is at once human, cultural and socialist. For Bauman then the future is undetermined by the present, and the concern of human praxis in the present is to pursue the possible without knowing in what this possibility consists, without knowing where it may lead. In this way the future becomes a utopia and to the extent that socialism is the precondition of the praxis of possibility, so socialism itself is also utopian. This explains the far from innocent title of one of Bauman’s books, Socialism: The Active Utopia (Bauman 1976b).

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The connection of socialism to utopia by someone who is as knowledgeable about Marx’s work as Bauman might seem to be very curious. After all, Marx and Engels often went out of their way to castigate utopian socialism. In both The Communist Manifesto and Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, there are attacks on reformers like Fourier and Robert Owen who thought that a complete social transformation was possible without class struggle and recognition of the revolutionary role of the proletariat. But when Bauman talks about utopia he means something very different to what Marx and Engels condemned. (For Marx’s utopias, see Beilharz 1992: 7–14.) Utopia was a significant concept in free Polish thought, from the debates around October 1956 and through the years of Marxist revisionism. It is unsurprising to discover that in that context utopianism did not refer to the blueprint of a perfect society. To the contrary, it pointed towards the human practice of a living forwards. Kolakowski has called utopia an ‘imaginative incentive’ (Kolakowski 1981: 12). It is an incentive to aim for the undetermined possible: ‘Utopia is the striving for changes which “realistically” cannot be brought about by immediate action, which lie beyond the foreseeable future and defy planning.’ Utopianism was a transcendence of the actual and a refusal to accept its constraints, all in the name of the possible. It was praxis guided by the maxim that, ‘It may well be that the impossible at a given moment can become possible only by being stated at a time when it is impossible’ (Kolakowski 1969: 91, 92. Kolakowski’s commitment to this paradox was sadly undermined by the actual; see the essay on utopia in Kolakowski 1990). This is a maxim that highlights a paradox in order to achieve nothing other than its complete overcoming. Bauman has stressed the importance of utopia as, in Kolakowski’s words, an ‘imaginative incentive’. Bauman also shows where his understanding of utopia comes from; not the likes of Fourier and Owen who were criticised by Marx and Engels, but from the idiosyncratic Marxism of Ernst Bloch. Bauman has said that he believes that utopia is an intrinsic aspect of human being in the world and that: ‘I owe that view to Ernst Bloch. I remember being deeply impressed by his definition of human being as “intention pointing ahead”, and of “human nature” as “something which still must be found” ’. From this it follows that utopia emphasises, ‘The “human essence” lying forever in the future, the pool of human possibilities remaining

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forever unexhausted, and the future itself being unknown and unknowable, impossible to adumbrate’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 49. For Bloch on utopia, see Bloch 2000, and for a brief yet resonant comment by Bauman on Bloch’s notion of utopia, see Bauman 1994c: 108). How then is socialism such a utopian incentive to human praxis? That is the question that Bauman addresses in Socialism: The Active Utopia. There he sees socialism as, ‘a horizon, constantly on the move, perpetually receding, but guiding the travel; or like a spike prodding the conscience, a nagging rebuke that casts complacency and self-adoration out of bounds and out of question’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 49). Of course, in view of Bauman’s concern to recover socialism from the ossification of actually existing socialism, and given Bauman’s identification of socialism as a utopia, he cannot possibly offer a detailed account of what this future will be like. After all, were Bauman to have done that he would have fallen into the trap of denying the human praxis of possibility and he would also be guilty of turning the future into a transcendental object rather than leaving it as something that is to be made through social action. No, Bauman’s socialism is entirely utopian in that it concentrates on the recovery of possibility from ossification, and in that it emphasises that the world can only be human if it permits praxis. From all of this it follows that socialism is an active utopia, it is an ‘imaginative incentive’ because it highlights the possibility of the overcoming of alienation. This overcoming is intrinsic to the ‘functions which have been played by utopias in general, and by modern socialism in particular’ (Bauman 1976b: 12). Bauman identifies four aspects of utopia, all of which seek to give the creation and control of the human world back to humans through a process of the dissolution and making fluid of an actuality that otherwise seems to be merely natural. First, Bauman identifies the intrinsic critical dimension. The powers of the actual (such as the authorities of orthodox Marxism) try to establish one single set of meanings but, ‘By exposing the partiality of current reality, by scanning the field of the possible in which the real occupies merely a tiny plot, utopias pave the way for a critical attitude and a critical activity which alone can transform the present predicament of man.’ Utopia shows that the actual is nothing other than a fixed and ossified human production; it can be dissolved and, in the recognition of that dissolution there is an ‘unleashing’ of

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‘human imagination’ (Bauman 1976b: 13). Second, ‘Utopias are those aspects of culture . . . in which the possible extrapolations of the present are explored.’ Here Bauman is making the point that utopias are not pie in the sky inventions. They draw their inspiration and their appeal from the extent to which they ‘provide answers to issues people experience as poignant’. Utopia is an expression of the hope of an epoch that its problems can be solved (Bauman 1976b: 14). Third, utopia is necessarily engaged: ‘In so far as the society consists of groups differentiated by an unequal share of available goods as well as by unequal access to the means of social action – including the ability to act critically – all criticism of the present is inevitably committed.’ Through utopia critical thought moves beyond the confines of the critical thinkers and connects to broader issues and groups. Bauman said that utopias, ‘scan the options open to society at the current stage of its history; but by exposing their link to the predicament of various groups, utopias reveal also their classcommitted nature’ (Bauman 1976b: 15). Finally, Bauman emphasises the practical influence on action of utopia: ‘Utopias do exert enormous influence on the actual course of historical events.’ This influence is part of their nature. Even if the once desired ideals supposedly have become actual, still the charge of utopias remain: ‘they just linger in the public mind as guides for social action, as criteria marking off the good from the evil, and as obstinate reminders of the never-plugged gap between the promise and the reality’ (Bauman 1976b: 16). This utopianism implies a very specific, and inevitably nonsystematic, understanding of socialism. For Bauman, socialism is a utopia only when: the ideal is unfulfilled and still requires extra action to be brought about; it is identified as desirable, as a condition that ought to come but will not if the course of affairs is left to itself; it is critical; and its coming about requires deliberate and committed action. In other words, the only aspect of the socialist utopia about which it is possible to be confident is that it will not look anything whatsoever like actually existing socialism. After all, ‘a system of ideas remains utopian and thus able to boost human activity only in so far as it is perceived as representing a system essentially different from, if not antithetical to, the existing one’ (Bauman 1976b: 17). To be a socialist demands that one always leaves socialism behind. And through these utopian imaginings, humanity can become something more than a natural presence in the world. It can become,

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instead, a project; the fate of the fact of being human can be transformed into the destiny of the possibility of becoming human. Humanity can be socialised: ‘In short: it is not so much the anatomy of man that is at stake, as Man’s future – imagined, wished or expected at the time of writing’ (Bauman 2002c: 17).

Conclusion: too far forwards So far a vitally important aspect of this debate has been entirely ignored, although it is something that Bauman recognises when he mentions the class commitment of utopia. Quite simply, if the human praxis of possibility is to be imagined, there has to be a social group that shows through its own example that the boundaries of the actual can be broken. The cultural and socialist humanisation of the world cannot possibly be the product of an objective law of history (that would be a major contradiction). It only happens if social groups make it happen. Or, put another way, if the point is to live forwards, then there must always be a social group that is the exemplar of that principle. This is something that Bauman’s work knows very well. It is the basis of his recurrent concern with intellectuals (see most notably Bauman 1987a). The main issue can be identified as being about the intellectuals as an avant-garde. They are the ‘advanced guards’ who are pushing the blades of the knives of culture and socialism into the future. This raises important sociological questions of, first, precisely where it is that the intellectuals as avant-garde are pushing (towards utopia as possibility or towards the future as the perfect order in which all ambivalences have been resolved) and, second, the strength of the connection of the avant-garde to other social groups. The first of these sociological issues is best explored in the context of a discussion of Bauman’s contributions to the understanding of the collapse of actually existing socialism and of Nazism. Meanwhile an examination of the second issue makes it possible to go some way towards the development of a sociological explanation of Bauman’s exile from Poland in 1968. Without the intellectuals as an avant-garde, utopia would be nothing more than wishful thinking. It would have no social dimension whatever. This point is made clear by negation in the concluding chapter to Society Under Siege where Bauman argues that

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the present (the present of liquid modernity) is without the imaginative incentive of utopia precisely because the intellectuals have cut any ties that might connect them to other social groups. The intellectuals have stopped offering any kind of utopian imagination and, instead, they seek simply to naturalise their own disconnection from the victims of social suffering (Bauman 2002a). It might be speculated that this situation is somewhat proven by the vapidity of so much of what presently passes as significant critical and social thought. In the present the intellectuals have stopped being an avant-garde for the simple reason that they are not concerned to lead anyone anywhere. The situation was drastically different in Poland during the times of Marxist revisionism. Then the socialist utopia was indeed made to push into the future by a group of intellectuals who were also committed to the connection of their concerns with other social groups. Kolakowski has identified Polish revisionism as, ‘the work of a numerous group of party intellectuals – philosophers, sociologists, journalists, men of letters, historians, and economists’ (Kolakowski 1978: 463). This was a group that enjoyed an especially high prestige in Poland. From the nineteenth century onwards, the intellectuals tended to be identified as the repository and conscience of a Poland that could express its identity in no other ways than the cultural and the ethical thanks to oppression by external powers: ‘Having been swept from the map of Europe as a political unit, Poland could survive as a distinct nationality only in a cultural sense. The role of classes whose function was to protect the cultural identity of the nation thus became crucial’ (Kolakowski 1983: 55). In a finding that can be interpreted as a modest rebellion against economic utilitarianism and instead in favour of the pursuit of disinterested cultural values, a 1961 survey found that the most highly regarded occupation in Poland was that of university professor, with government minister coming in at a lowly eight place (Gomori 1973: 154). Stanislaw Starski has written about the emergence of a generation of Romantic intellectuals in the years around 1968, involving, ‘a definite reinforcing of the Romantic tradition . . . which viewed independent artists and writers as the nation’s conscience and as the only legitimate representatives of public opinion’ (Starski 1982: 35). Consequently, this avant-garde was not forged in the image of the Leninist Party, rather it was a critical elite.

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The sociological problem was that although this group of intellectuals were the knife bearers of socialism as utopia rather than of actuality, although they engaged in the praxis of the imaginative incentive of the transcendence of alienation, they were made to live too far ahead of other social groups. This is the lesson of Poland’s March Events of 1968. The revisionists were a thorn in the side of the Party and the powers of actuality, and they were extracted through the relatively simple expedient of being cut off from the larger growths of Polish society. One piece of evidence to support this contention is provided by a throwaway comment of Krzystof Kieslowski, who once said that, ‘Back in 1968 there was a small revolution in Poland led by intellectuals whom nobody supported’ (Kieslowski 1993: 38). Yet it was not a revolution at all. By 1967 the Party in Poland was being torn apart by the contradictions of Gomulka’s ‘little stabilisation’. (For Bauman’s own analysis of the contradictions in Poland, see Bauman 1972d.) An opportunity to let steam out of the pressure cooker was provided in 1967 by the Soviet attitude towards the Arab–Israeli war. Miecyslaw Moczar emerged as a powerful anti-Gomulka figure within the Party, using anti-Semitism to blame Jews for Poland’s problems. As Bauman put it: ‘The anti-Jewish struggle is not an end in itself but only a means to an end’ (Bauman 1969b: 4). Gomulka responded to the threat that Moczar posed to his power by stealing some of his anti-Semitic clothing. Revisionism was identified as a Jewish attack on Poland and the continuation of the Polish road to socialism. An anti-Semitic press campaign was started in 1967, and in the same year Jewish cadres were purged from the army and the state machinery. All that remained was the excuse that the Party needed to move against the intellectuals. The moment came in March 1968 when a nationalist play being staged at Warsaw University was closed down because it was ‘anti-Russian’. Student demonstrations ensued which were met with police violence and on 25 March a group of the most important revisionist intellectuals were expelled from their posts at the University: Bronislaw Baczko, Leszek Kolakowski, Stefan Morawski, Wlodzimierz Brus, Maria Hirszowicz and Zygmunt Bauman. These were the intellectuals who, Kieslowski said, nobody supported. (For a summary of the March Events, see Krajewski 1982. The Events are discussed from a Jewish perspective in L. Hirszowicz 1986. An exhaustive and passionate account of the Events is offered in Raina 1978.) The removal

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of these intellectuals from public life was so effective that as quickly as 1971 an essay was published on the history of Polish sociology that failed to mention Bauman and a number of those who were purged with him (Markiewicz 1971). The question is why did nobody support them? Obviously, to some degree Kieslowski’s remark is wrong. The March Events were a moment of praxis by more than just a handful of revisionist intellectuals. But the germ of the point remains well made. It has been commented that the workers, ‘had virtually no connection with the 1968 campaign’ of opposition (L. Hirszowicz 1980: 3). The answer seems to be that the revisionists could be cut off so easily by the Party because they were an avant-garde that was beginning to live too far forwards of other social groups. Bauman has suggested that the problem might have been that the struggle between the intellectuals and the Party was a domestic affair of the elite, which said little to other social groups. It was a debate carried out with commitment but, ‘without much affecting the structure of domination as such. For this reason, the conflict at most times leaves other classes of the society indifferent. The struggle does not effect them’. Bauman says of Poland in the 1960s that: ‘There are numerous accounts of the blank incomprehension, if not chilly suspicion, with which the workers greeted intellectuals’ forays into factories and their attempts to stir commotion and discontent among “the people” ’ (Bauman 1987b: 182). Yet this is not at all the whole picture. The intellectuals did not go too far forwards only on account of the indifference of ‘the people’. The point is that ‘the people’ were also encouraged to be indifferent about the fate of these particular intellectuals. ‘The Polish rebels and those purged from the establishment were said to be acting on behalf of Israel, international Zionism, world Jewry and imperialism’ (L. Hirszowicz 1986: 204). Bauman believed that the campaign of 1967–68 represented the end of Polish Jewry. It was the end in two ways. First, Jewish emigration from Poland increased exponentially thanks to the state making it extremely easy for Jews to get exist visas, so long as they only wanted to go to Israel. Bauman thought that these exiles, ‘will leave the country bearing in their hearts attachment to Polish culture, Polish landscape, and a sense of resentment against the rulers of Poland for denying the Jews – as Jews – the right to be recognised as fully

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fledged citizens of their country’. Second, Bauman was sure that those Jews who remained would withdraw from participation in Polish life: ‘Others might go on living out their lives in Poland, embittered, suspicious and suspect, within their ghettoes this time free of walls and barbed wire, but full of similarly tired people’ (Bauman 1969b: 8). Polish Jewry had come to an end since no one was permitted to be Polish and Jewish at the same time. Polish Jewry foundered on the rock of ambivalence.

4 Communism and Modernity

The sociological problem thrown up by the March Events of 1968 was that the public issues emphasised by the intellectuals evidently did not connect with the personal troubles experienced by wider social groups. Zygmunt Bauman’s post-exile sociological work commenced with an attempt to make sense of exactly this conundrum. It was an attempt that he pursued through the 1970s and 1980s and it eventually played a crucial part in the emergence and development of his interrogation of modernity. It is the aim of this chapter to discuss Bauman’s reflections on the nature and the fate of actually existing socialism and then to use that material as a way of beginning to open up a consideration of aspects of his understanding of modernity. In this way the chapter covers debates that are of crucial importance in the development of Bauman’s sociology. His discussion of actually existing socialism can be identified as the chronological and thematic hinge between his particular Polish studies and the more general sociological inquiries for which he became known in the late 1980s and 1990s. In short, in order to understand Bauman’s work on the Holocaust, postmodernity and liquid modernity, it is first of all necessary to spend some time with his essays on Eastern European Communism. That is what this chapter seeks to do, first of all by paying attention to the work on actually existing socialism and then by showing how the emergence of the Solidarity trades union in Poland was a point at which Bauman’s language and thought started to change into a more widely recognisable shape, although emphatically building on longer-standing foundations. (To some extent this chapter runs parallel to themes raised in Beilharz 2002b. The title of 82

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this chapter was suggested by a comment in Beilharz’s essay which itself refers back to an essay by Bauman; see Bauman 1992a: 179.)

The lessons of March If the March Events signified a revolution that failed because the intellectuals as an avant-garde were living too far ahead of other social groups, then the roots of the failure were not tactical. They were sociological. In an essay that had among its aims an attempt to reflect on March and learn lessons from it, Bauman was able to explain why it was that a group of intellectuals took a distance from Party orthodoxy. It was because the Party had trespassed onto ground that the intellectuals claimed as their own and which the forces of actually existing socialism were required to occupy if the promotion of the operative ideology of managerialism and utilitarianism were to be possible: ‘The party had assumed the sole right of initiative in the very same areas of social life that were originally the exclusive, well-nigh definitional, domain of the intelligentsia.’ From the point of view of the intellectuals, the Party was attacking freedom all the time that it sought to influence: ‘The selection and dissemination of cultural values, the formation of opinions and evaluation of social change, the critique of ideology, the articulation of the criteria of moral and aesthetic judgment, and decisions on the content of public education and the “civilizing process” ’ (Bauman 1987b: 178). This battle over a common ground meant that conflict between the intellectuals and the forces of actually existing socialism was completely inevitable. The tactics of the conflict revolved around attempts to limit the room to manoeuvre that was available to the other side. For example, the intellectuals sought to exclude the forces of the actual from any discussion of values on account of their tendency towards ossification and therefore the misrepresentation of what it means to be human. Meanwhile, the Party tried to make sure that the intellectuals were stuck in a box labelled ‘enemies of Poland’. To this extent the conflict between the intellectuals and the Party as the representation and symbolisation of the forces of actually existing socialism was a power struggle, where power consists in, ‘the differentiation of opportunities of action, of influencing events, and of access to appropriate resources’ (Bauman 1974: 129). But what the intellectuals discovered in March was that notwithstanding claims to

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cultural power, the forces of actually existing socialism had far better claims to the resources of political and social power. Cultural values were attacked by the dread combination of common sense and coercion. The Party severely limited the power of the intellectuals through a combination of brute force and anti-Semitism. The latter was particularly effective. Anti-Semitism pre-defined anything that many of the intellectuals might have done as being an attack on Poland and socialism. In this way it restricted the ability of the intellectuals to control events (neither could they control their own socially defined identity nor, therefore, the social definition of their motives) as well as denied them the chance of securing ‘access to appropriate resources’ in the form of connection to and with wider social groups. Indeed, the intellectuals were stuck in a double bind. On the one hand, they could uphold the values of critique and thus come into conflict with the forces of actually existing socialism. Or, on the other hand, they could accept the occupation by the Party of the ground of cultural values and thus fall into irrelevance and compromise. In short, the Party was able to control the ‘opportunities of action’ of the intellectuals to such an extent that whatever the intellectuals did they were behaving in a way that could be dealt with. If the intellectuals dissented, then that was predictable, and if they assented then that was manageable. In either case the answer to the problem that the intellectuals posed was much the same; a kind of exile. The nub of the matter was that actually existing socialism had been structuralised, and therefore the intellectuals’ room to manoeuvre was limited: ‘The degree of “structuralization” of a pattern can be measured by ascertaining the probability of some events and the improbability of some others’ (Bauman 1968b: 70). It might have been possible to overcome these difficulties had the intellectuals been in possession of power in relation to wider social groups, and therefore been able to manoeuvre around the structures put up by the Party. But they were not. First, the dissent that the intellectuals represented and carried out had been made at least partially safe through the success of the state in, ‘reducing the probability of some events, and thereby substantially increasing the predictability of the human environment’ (Bauman 1968b: 71). The state had made sure that the ‘human environment’ (that is to say, society), was structured in such a way that there could be a reasonably high level of confidence that things would carry on much as they

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were, in the predictable and predicted way. Some things became highly improbable, as the ‘human environment’ became more and more like a common sense to which there was no alternative. Substantively, this meant that it was not self-evident that the ideas of dissent would be translated into the practice of revolt. Second, Bauman identified ‘the web of dependencies, which both unites and opposes groups within a society’ as a dimension of power (Bauman 1974: 129). One group has power over another group all the time that the latter is dependent on the former. The problem highlighted by the March Events was that the wider social groups whom the intellectuals needed were dependent only on the Party. The wider social groups were dependent on the certainties that actually existing socialism provided and not at all on the struggles for freedom to which the intellectuals were committed. (The point about actually existing socialism lending the security of certainty is made strongly in Bauman 2003b.) The only currency that the intellectuals possessed was one that wider social groups did not want to accept. The intellectuals preached the message of freedom, and wider social groups sought only security. This contrast can be understood if the image of man that runs through Bauman’s sociological work is recalled. Briefly, Bauman identifies human being with the praxis of possibility. Logically this means that men and women are called constantly to challenge and overcome everything that they are inclined to accept as natural and inevitable. Common sense and identities alike demand to be dissolved so that the past and the present put no obstacles in the way of the praxis of the unalienated, human and intrinsically free future. This image of man thereby underpins a critical sociology of the actual. The concern of sociological work is the analysis of how it is that the actual becomes natural and inevitable, how it is that the actual is able to turn human being away from praxis and towards the routine, the manageable and the predictable. The critical work that Bauman pursues is committed to the emancipation of human possibility, but in March 1968 the lesson was taught that perhaps the forces of the actual are so powerful that men and women would prefer not to be free in the way that critical intellectuals propose. Actually existing socialism offered a more alluring kind of being. Bauman has mentioned, ‘life under totalitarian regimes, which was all about liberating people from the trauma of contingency and offering tempting escape from freedom into the safe havens of historical necessity and

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nomenklatura’ (Bauman 1990c: 230. The nomenklatura to which Bauman refers to was made up of those who were appointed to state posts, and who enjoyed a number of privileges, because they were deemed by the Party to be ‘suitable candidates’. According to Bauman one of the biggest problems that confronted the nomenklatura was making sure that its privileges were passed down to its children: Bauman 1971a, 1972d. For detailed discussions of the nomenklatura in Poland, see Podgorecki 1994, Smolar 1983). Actually existing socialism offered the chance of an escape from the responsibility of being human.

The conservatism of actually existing socialism Bauman’s own reflections on the social context of actually existing socialism makes it quite clear that the refusal of other groups to mobilise for freedom if this meant an increase of insecurity was not terribly surprising. In 1971 he was developing the argument that in both the Soviet Union and Poland the birth of Communism had also involved the massive and rapid industrialisation of what were largely peasant-based societies. For Bauman this had major social implications. First, the industrialised and urbanised peasantry had to be inculcated with an ‘employee spirit’, and in the early stages of industrialisation this was achieved through brutality. Brutality was used in Western capitalism as much as East European socialism, but with a crucial difference of timescale: in the East the attempt was made to achieve in a few years what had in the West taken decades. Consequently, ‘abundance of compulsion and forcible mobilization methods were unavoidable’ (Bauman 1971b: 37. For a study of the question of the peasantry in the Soviet Union, see Bauman 1985a). The industrialised peasants were ripped out of the secure worlds of their old communities and put in a world that made little or no sense other than that which came from the Party. Second, ‘The bulk of industrial workers came to the socialist factories, which . . . did not allow for much personal freedom of expression and self-organization, direct from a mostly pre-industrial village’ (Bauman 1971b: 37). The industrialised peasantry lacked – and were denied – the social resources of self-management and so they were totally dependent on the state’s provision of access to goods and services. Third, Bauman argues that however brutal it might have been, life in the industrial-urban areas was much better than life in the countryside. Standards of living were higher and

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more comfortable: ‘all this transformed the new “working class” of the socialist countries not only into loyal supporters of the new order of things, but also into a group with important vested interests in its continuation and stability’ (Bauman 1971b: 38–39). Fourth, the children of the peasantry received a standard of education which made it possible for them to enter into the ranks of the state bureaucracy (the ranks of the nomenklatura were swollen with this group); for them a white-collar job was something to be aspired towards, and so they too had a vested interest in the stability of actually existing socialism. The final strand of the security-mindedness of the workers was particularly disastrous for the attempt of the intellectuals to make common cause with them. Bauman put the matter very succinctly: ‘Freedom of political expression never was a demand which people with thousands of years of political exclusion behind them considered the proper solution to their troubles.’ He went on: ‘Neither was freedom of print the dream of the illiterates. Nor the freedom of (functional) organization the war-cry of these used to the cosy security of the closed integrated communities.’ Consequently: ‘[T]hat is why they are spontaneously suspicious of intellectuals’ (Bauman 1971b: 39, 40). Social groups were offered security by the state, a security to replace that which had been taken away from the ‘old ways’ by the very processes with which actually existing socialism was associated. Consequently, actually existing socialism ‘worked’ all the time that social groups had an investment in what Bauman later called the ‘patronage state’. ‘The patronage state strives to be a monopolistic source of needs-satisfaction, social status and self-esteem.’ In this way, ‘it transforms its subjects into clients and asks them to be grateful for what they have received today and will receive tomorrow’ (Bauman 1994c: 139). All of this had two different implications, one for the forces of rapid industrialisation and the other for the intellectuals. Bauman glimpsed the first implication as early as 1962. In what first impressions imply to be a rather unpromising piece on ‘Social Structure of the Party Organization in Industrial Works’, Bauman showed that the industrial workforce was so conservative that its active participation in political and economic life could not be taken for granted. They wanted security rather than excitement. For example, Bauman argued that unskilled ‘Party militants’ tended to be characterised by

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an ‘introverted’ subjectivity, which meant that they would rarely, if ever, take any initiative. They were happy to settle for what they had and, ‘the person with an introverted attitude must be set to perform the functions of a militant by external stimuli of an organizational nature’ (Bauman 1962b: 64). Their concern was to be loyal to Party ideology and disciplined towards the demands of the Party, but in that concern they made great demands on the ability of the Party to provide the security of saying what had to be done. Meanwhile, those who were possessed of an ‘extroverted’ subjectivity were to be found most strongly among engineers, technicians and office workers (that is, precisely among those children of the peasantry who had managed to achieve white-collar jobs). Extroverted, that is to say active, participation in organisational and political life, correlated directly to educational achievement, but declined significantly once people reached the age of forty (Bauman 1962b: 64). Even the actively committed were fated to become seekers after passive security. The workers were prepared to accept that things were as they must be (or, at least, that it was not their concern to change things). The allegiance of the workers (whether introverted or extroverted) to actually existing socialism was not active, and even where it was active it would soon become passive thanks to age breeding conservatism. But from that it did not at all therefore follow that they would lend any support to demands for change. Life might have been dull, but it was secure. The second implication of the realisation of the conservatism of Polish workers was especially significant for intellectuals. Most locally there were no reasons to expect anything other than a continuation of the situation of, ‘the (at best) apathetic response which the intellectuals’ manifestos win in the other strata of the nation, as well as among the majority of intellectual professions themselves’ (Bauman 1971b: 40). But more significantly, it was impossible to hold out any reasonable hope in a revolution. Bauman identified, ‘the immunity of this society to revolutionary challenges’ (Bauman 1971b: 49). For coming to this last conclusion Bauman was criticised by Leszek Kolakowski. As Kolakowski observed, Bauman was not saying that actually existing socialism was without conflict. After all in the light of October 1956 and March 1968 that would have been absurd; an absurdity that would have been even greater in the light of the bloody protests in Gdansk and the other Baltic ports between December 1970 and February 1971 that were stimulated by state-managed price rises. But,

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as Kolakowski observed, Bauman was saying that actually existing socialism was capable of absorbing conflict. Kolakowski’s objection was that Bauman’s sociological pessimism is misplaced. For Kolakowski there might well be no good sociological reason to imagine the possibility of a revolution but, ‘many unexpected events have occurred . . . and they occur every week’. He went on to say that, ‘sociologists are better equipped than other people in explaining and classifying social phenomena, but they are not any luckier in predicting the outcome of big conflicts on a global scale. They guess right or wrong, as do other people’ (Kolakowski 1971: 60). But some guesses seem at the time to be more plausible than others, and Bauman made his guess that actually existing socialism would not experience a revolution on the basis of the thesis that what existed in Poland, and throughout Eastern Europe, was a distinctive system, quite different from what existed in the West. The system was a kind of meta-level manager and utilitarian, and therefore when Bauman dissected its operation he was not seeking merely to describe, or even worse applaud, its designs. Given that Bauman’s sociological work is motivated by an image of man that is radically critical of any management of the human, he analysed the system in order to open it up for interrogation. What Bauman wanted to do was reveal the workings of the system and, in so doing, understand exactly how it was that social groups could possibly believe that it offered them an incontrovertible security. It was because actually existing socialism was a system that some eventualities were more likely than others, some events like revolutions quite unlikely.

The system Drawing at least in part on cybernetic theory but more heavily on Michel Crozier’s work on bureaucracy (Crozier 1964), Bauman argued that within any identifiable system, ‘certain events are more probable than others, whereas certain other events are almost unthinkable or can occur only in rare circumstances’ (Bauman 1971c). In these terms actually existing socialism could be identified as a system because it had managed to make some events more probable than others (the however passive allegiance of the workers who would not choose anything other than security) and had thereby made any other event, such as a revolution led by any particular social group,

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largely unthinkable. This meant that, just like any other system, the actually existing socialist system had an insatiable need for information. As Bauman put it: ‘from the system’s point of view, the availability of information is unequivocally beneficial; the more information available, the better’ (Bauman 1971c: 22). Greater information increased the probability that the outcomes that the Party sought would be achieved or, put another way, greater information decreased the possibility that unexpected and unwanted events would take place. But what kind of information did the socialist system require? At one level, the information that was necessary was that which would enable the system better to control its environment. That meant information that could help control men and women, which could play a part in the manipulation of the praxis of others. The most important group about whom the system needed information was that of the experts who could, precisely because of their own access to information, constitute a parallel power structure if not kept under control. Hence Bauman contended that the rulers of the system were interested in one kind of information above all others: ‘the type usually kept in secret dossiers, and concerned with facts which – in due circumstances – can influence heavily the destiny of other people, usually experts’ (Bauman 1971c: 28). The rulers needed this ability to influence the experts (that is, the rulers sought power over the experts), because the system contained within itself a contradiction. Both the rulers and the experts were in a position to claim a special relationship to the system. On the one hand, the experts staked a claim for the minimum of the regulation of their activities. The greater the importance of the particular expertise to the operation of the system the stronger that claim was made. The experts provided the information that the system needed. On the other hand, the rulers were ‘interested in a maximum of regulation imposed on the others’ behavior and in leaving to themselves the right to make exceptions and to decide when the rule is to be applied and when it can be suspended’ (Bauman 1971c: 26). One way in which the rulers of the system dealt with the threat that was potentially posed by the experts was through what Maria Hirszowicz called ‘bureaucratic integration’ (Hirszowicz 1980: 186), while Bauman was aware of the uses of secret files and nomenklatura. This conflict between the need for information and secret files could never be dissolved entirely: ‘the deepest functional contradiction of this state

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[i.e. the Polish state as a system-ruler] is that as the executive board of a gigantic economic enterprise, it creates conditions which as a totalitarian state it increasingly attempts to eradicate’. Those conditions consisted in the relative independence and security of the experts, yet: ‘By playing freely with the “political criteria” of promotion, the state must make the self-confident “specialist” constantly aware that he cannot rely on his skill alone’ (Bauman 1972d: 237). But other big guns were on the side of the system-rulers. The experts might well have been able to stake a claim to a measure of control over the environment in the here and now, but that claim was always subordinate to a primary claim for power that the Party rulers were keen to make. The experts might have been managers of the system, but the rulers were in possession of the truth of History. The experts might have known what was efficient, but the rulers knew what had to be done in the name of Humanity. This was because of the mode of futuristic legitimation that was practised by the system of actually existing socialism. ‘Whatever may be said about the practice of socialist government, its sole and indispensable legitimation is in the future; the rulers of any socialist state justify their rule and demand obedience in the name of an ideal society they are set on building.’ The fundamental tenet of futuristic legitimation is that the future is the time of the achievement of the perfect society; the outlines of this perfection are given in advance, and because it is perfect it cannot be altered without damage. Consequently, the future with its perfect society is ‘an ideal form and is called to play the role of the sole and ultimate judge of whatever decisions may be made at present’ (Bauman 1974: 136–137). Indeed any opposition to the Party line becomes a sign of ‘maladjustment’, ‘backwardness’ and of a need for ‘re-education’ for the simple reason that if the Party knows the perfect future, and if the rule of the Party is justified because it is taking humanity to that perfect future, then any protests against what it does can be brushed aside and the protesters silenced. Ideology and coercion go hand in hand. Bauman pointed out that within this futuristic legitimation; ‘Dissatisfaction of the population is significant only insofar as it may slow down or indeed temporarily thwart the introduction of a better society; but certainly not as an ultimate and unchallengeable test of good and evil and, as it were, withdrawal of legitimacy’ (Bauman 1973c: 16–17).

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There are two points of sociological relevance to pull out of this model of futuristic legitimation. First, and specific to Bauman, it is clear that the kind of future that was stressed by actually existing socialism was diametrically opposed to the utopian future that is so important to Bauman’s brand of socialism. Bauman identifies the future as an ‘imaginative incentive’ that will be proven in the process of the praxis of its achievement, and which will therefore represent an overcoming of alienation. Bauman’s is a socialism of the worldopening future. By contrast, actually existing socialism based its legitimacy on the vision of a future that was already clear to those ‘in the know’. They knew what had to be done and, on the basis of that knowledge, needed to pay absolutely no positive attention to protest and dissent. Indeed, one of the main concerns of this legitimation on the basis of the future that is known in advance was to make sure that this special knowledge was not diluted or distorted by those who did not know best: ‘The inevitable conclusion is that some people, not necessarily a majority of the population, must be bearers of the ought and hence qualified to overbalance the beliefs of the sheer multitude’, and they do this, ‘in virtue of their knowledge of the truth of which the unarmed eye can take only a dim view’ (Bauman 1973c: 17). Bauman upholds a socialism that gives the world back to praxis (and which is therefore critical of everything and anything that hampers praxis), whereas the system of actually existing socialism led to a situation in which the praxis of men and women became a problem to be overcome all the time that it was not totally subordinate to the demands of the Party. Second, the futuristic legitimation that was upheld and practised by the system implied a certain attitude to the present. It made the present – and the men and women who lived within it – a sphere of managerial intervention, indeed of utilitarianism towards the ultimate value of the perfect future as envisaged by the Party. Writing about actually existing socialism rather than socialism as such, Bauman said that: ‘the socialist philosophy of society sees the ideal future fixed and the reality of the present flexible’ (Bauman 1973c: 18). But of course the present is only flexible for those who know what the passage to the future demands, it is only flexible for those who have the power to control their environment. And to the extent that their aspirations and horizons were shaped by the common sense of the utilitarian operative ideology, other social groups could, and for that

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matter ought, to do nothing other than what they were told. As Stalin put it in a passage that has blood behind its banality, the Party must base its activity on a guiding principle, ‘as correctly reflects the needs of the development of the material life of society, and which is therefore capable of setting into motion broad masses of the people and of mobilizing them and organizing them into a great army of the proletarian party’. All the time it was guided by the truth of the future, this Party would and ought to be, ‘prepared to smash the reactionary forces and to clear the way for the advanced forces of society’ (Stalin 1973: 315. Of course, these forces were ‘advanced’ precisely because they knew where they were going and where everyone else ought to follow). Futuristic legitimation involved a denial of the validity of human praxis. After all, from the point of view of this mode of legitimation, human praxis was both unnecessary and a diversion from what the objective future established had to be done. Futuristic legitimation illustrates the common sense of the Stalinist version of dialectical materialism, which was exported through Eastern Europe after the Second World War as a justification for the Party and for rapid industrialisation under the aegis of the plan. Stalin argued that there are scientific laws of social development just as there are scientific laws of natural development, and that these laws revealed ‘the history of society’ and, moreover, established principles for ‘the practical activities of the proletariat’. As soon as these laws, which Stalin said had been uncovered by Marx, were known: ‘social life, the history of society, ceases to be an agglomeration of “accidents”, and becomes the history of the development of society’ (Stalin 1973: 311–312). Stalin made it plain that his version of dialectical materialism meant that the Party always had to keep its eye on what the objective future demanded: ‘the party of the proletariat should not guide itself in its practical activity by casual motives, but by the laws of development of society, and by practical deductions from these laws’. And so: ‘Hence Socialism is converted from a dream of a better future for humanity into a science’ (Stalin 1973: 312). It is hard to imagine statements about socialism and the future with which Bauman would disagree more. Inevitably, futuristic legitimation also implied a very narrowly focused view of what action was permissible in the present. Bauman argued that it logically leads to an emphasis being placed on what Weber called wertrationalitat, action guided by and oriented towards

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absolute values (Bauman 1974: 134). In the case of the system, that absolute value was the construction of socialism and it required the ‘teleological determinism’ of the plan (Bauman 1974: 138). The plan was the dominant and defining feature of economic activity in the system of actually existing socialism. A vast centralised bureaucracy that made decisions about production in the economy managed it. The guiding principle behind the decisions of the plan was the perceived need to expand some sectors of the economy more rapidly than others at certain times. In actually existing socialism this traditionally meant a focus on the expansion of heavy industry and heavy industrial production at the expense of consumer production. Within the plan, each unit of production (be it a factory, farm or even in principle an individual worker) had a production target to meet. The plan was intended to be the means by which the end of socialist society could be achieved. In the specific circumstances of Eastern Europe, the plan was a means by which largely rural and peasant-based economies could be subjected to the rigours of rapid industrialisation (hence the problem of the industrialisation of the peasantry that Bauman noted).

Contradictions of the plan Bauman saw the plan and planning as wertrational because it was guided by the absolute value of the future that ought to be constructed, and practised a utilitarian managerialism in the present. Planning was a teleology in which, ‘the action is prefigured by the goal’ (Bauman 1966c: 145). The present thus became a time that was on the road to somewhere else. According to these principles, the present needed to be managed and manipulated according to what the road required and, politically most importantly, the journey might only be criticised once the future had been achieved, although by definition the future never could arrive. (For a sustained critique of socialist planning, see Feher et al. 1983. Bauman’s approach is in sympathy with theirs; Bauman 1984.) According to Bauman, writing as early as 1966 (in an article that was a revision of a 1964 conference paper, published as Bauman 1967d), actually existing socialism upheld the principle of ‘perfect planning’ and, in so doing, the system made a number of assumptions about the environment in which it was operating. Planning was

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‘perfect’ all the time it was guided by a single agent that operated according to one – and only one – ‘factor determining the totality of social action’ (Bauman 1966c: 146). First, for planning to be perfect the system had to be self-sufficient in resources, and these resources had to be manageable according to the ultimate value of the construction of socialism. An attempt to meet this need of perfect planning was the establishment in 1949 of Comecon (the Council for Mutual Economic Aid) as an agency which was intended to manage cross-national planning to enable the Soviet Union and its satellites to achieve economic self-sufficiency (one intended result of this strategy was a turning away from economic activity with the West and, unintentionally, an exacerbation of the attractiveness of Western commodities for Eastern consumers). Second, perfect planning demanded ‘perfect information’. The managers of the plan needed to have complete information about the availability of resources and the extent to which they could be freely manipulated. Third, the plan required that, ‘the planning agent be capable of making decisions which are not only realistic but also most effective in terms of the overall systemic goals’ (Bauman 1966c: 147). Here then, the planners had to ignore personal interests and uphold only the ‘interests of the system’; they had to be possessed of the executive power to choose between competing interests in relation to the needs of the system. Thus, these competing interests had to be made comparable: ‘the alternative among which selection is to be made must be reducible to a common denominator, commensurable, exhaustible by a simple and universal quantifying and quantifiable measure’ (Bauman 1966c: 147). Fourth, perfect planning was predicated on an assumption of social homogeneity, ‘in the sense that there are no events which are at the same time beneficial for one part of the system and harmful for another; in other terms, that the system does not consist of parts which have mutually competing interests’ (Bauman 1966c: 147). Finally, perfect planning required ‘perfect hierarchic control’. Perfect planning required that the commands of the planners were translated in an immediate and undistorted way into the action of men and women and that, ‘there ought to be no place for any autonomous sources of power of influence’ (Bauman 1966c: 147). Perfect planning, with its futuristic legitimation, sanctioned the closing-down of any

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practices and networks of praxis that might hinder the free management of resources. Equally, the need for perfect information gave a permit for the surveillance of all of the activities of men and women. The problem with perfect planning was that none of these assumptions were empirically valid. Perfect planning was not implemented in a perfect environment. Consequently, the absolute value of the construction of socialism through perfect planning meant that the latter (the plan and the attempt to overcome all of its problems) started to take precedence over the former (the future). In this way, the system started to ossify. As Bauman put it: ‘the “futuristic” fuel – the most important moving force of the “primary accumulation of authority” period – loses much of its power potential and instrumentality the further the society advances into the system-management phase’ (Bauman 1976c: 87). This led to three major problems. The first problem was ontological: ‘The genetically determined action now takes precedence over the teleologically determined one; correspondingly a legitimation in terms of rationality and efficiency in solving problems raised by the current stage of development supersedes the older one, which belittled the significance of today’s experiences when measured by future expectations’ (Bauman 1967c: 89). Futuristic legitimation stopped being any sort of teleology, and instead it became nothing more than a ritual incantation in which few believed. Second, the impossibility of perfect planning did not lead to the collapse of the planning enterprise. To the contrary, the more that the environment revealed itself to be rather less than what the system planners required, the more the power of the planners increased. They became more and more necessary as the environment became more and more resistant to manipulation. This was the basis of a conflict between the Party and the experts. The experts could not do what they want and go where they pleased, neither could they gather the information that perfect resource allocation required. Third, perfect planning created its own imperfect environment. Perfect planning required that men and women be nothing other than manageable utilitarians, and yet it also required that consumer desires be stimulated so that these men and women would carry on being open to manipulation in the future. The problem for the plan was not simply to secure labour resources today but, also, to reproduce labour tomorrow and in the future. Perfect planning had to stimulate

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desires in the present that could only be satisfied in some ever-receding future. In this way the present and future action of the workers could be predicted (they would become rationally oriented towards the instrumentality of the satisfaction of desires). But: ‘A severely restricted market can, however, hardly generate enough rationality to render individual behaviour sufficiently predictable to be taken as a stable factor in the process of planning’ (Bauman 1974: 139). And so perfect planning produced not heroic Stakhanovites, but sullen and alienated frustrated consumers. Bauman’s analysis of actually existing socialism, then, was one that was fully aware of the contradictions of the system. But, just like virtually every other discussion from the 1970s, his analysis identified few, if any, reasons to justify the thesis that ultimately the system would crack along the fault lines of its own contradictions. Bauman’s work said that the power of the Party was so great that it could at once limit the manoeuvrability (and therefore the power) of the dissent that the system generated. Furthermore, the intellectuals, as the protagonists of dissent, could be cut off from wider social groups all the time they were made to offer precisely the currency of freedom from which those wider groups, with their primary concern for security, would recoil with absolute horror. However . . .

Solidarity and systemic revolution In 1974, Zygmunt Bauman could only speculate about the kind of opposition that would ultimately come to confront the system. He might have hoped that the contradictions of actually existing socialism were so serious that the Party could not keep a cap on them for ever, yet he also knew that a unified opposition was difficult to imagine because of the split between the intellectuals (and more broadly the experts) who sought freedom and the workers who wanted security. These were the predictable slogans with which these groups expressed dissent or dissatisfaction and so the task was to, ‘disrupt the routine structure of society and to expose its other structure of interests normally kept in the shadow by everyday necessities and usages’. But Bauman could not possibly say whether that kind of disruption was ever going to occur. After all, his commitment to a critical sociology that stresses praxis and which stands firmly against any

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declarations of necessity or inevitability made sure that he was writing without guarantees: ‘This event, called a revolutionary situation, is not . . . sufficiently determined by the everyday power structure.’ He went on to make a claim that expresses hope in the open-ended future and a commitment to human possibility: ‘the role of catalyst may be played only by a creative and refractory historical praxis, which alone is able to weld together diffuse and manifold deprivations and to forge them into revolutionary praxis’ (Bauman 1974: 147). As the contradictions of the Polish system multiplied in the 1970s, and as Gierek’s regime ineptly exacerbated the problems bequeathed to it by Gomulka (Edward Gierek replaced Wladyslaw Gomulka as Party leader in February 1971 in the wake of the protests and violence in the Baltic ports), the revolutionary praxis that Bauman hoped for as a possibility started to emerge. (For a sociological discussion of the problems created by Gierek’s regime, and in particular the economic problems, see M. Hirszowicz 1986.) The praxis broke out with full force in August 1980 in the form of Solidarity. Although Solidarity had its immediate causes in essentially trades union concerns as they emerged in the Baltic shipyards, what was unique about it was the speed with which it became a national social movement. On the one hand, industrial workers were able to make common cause with the peasantry while, on the other, there were strong and well-maintained connections between the workers and the intellectuals. To this extent Solidarity represented a political moment that was quite different from that of March 1968 when the intellectuals and the workers were unable to forge a unity. Solidarity was a movement in which the otherwise different and socially distinct causes of security and freedom were harnessed together. (For the most dramatic and readable account of Solidarity, see Garton Ash 1991. The sociological literature on Solidarity is immense, but for one of the more interesting studies, see Touraine 1983. However, Bauman’s essays on the Polish situation strongly emphasise the thesis that the unity signified by Solidarity fell apart under the weight of its own contradictions, as more and more political ambition was invested in the movement; Bauman 1989c, 1993c, 1994b. Bauman’s own relationship with Solidarity caused him and his wife to be subjected to surveillance and burglary by the East German secret police; Conradi et al. 1999.) Bauman was in no doubt about the massive significance of Solidarity. In 1981 he was arguing that the events surrounding the emergence

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of Solidarity, ‘admitted of no comparison with past events, however dramatic. Rare materializations of the Blochian novum, they left the experts with past wisdom largely unfit for making this particular oddity familiar’ (Bauman 1981: 48). There are a number of points that it is important to pull out of this interpretation of Solidarity. First, it fits in with Bauman’s understanding of sociology as a retrospective wisdom. He is saying that none of the experts could have possibly predicted what happened in Poland and, consequently, the past offers no guarantees about the present (see Bauman 1993b). Second, Bauman’s identification of Solidarity with a novum meant that he was able to overcome the empirical problem that his analysis of the structure of actually existing socialism tended firmly to the conclusion that any unified assault on the system was improbable. It was exactly the improbability of Solidarity that made it so effective (it was beyond the environment of systemic competence) and important. Third, it fits with Bauman’s commitment to the open-ended future. His interpretation of Solidarity is one that uses a device from Bloch to make it clear that the movement was a moment when, ‘praxis takes over from structure as the main determinant of events’ (Bauman 1981: 48). Solidarity meant that in Poland at least men and women were actively taking back from the system the human ability to create and make the future; Solidarity was a humanisation of the ossified world. Indeed it is not at all far-fetched to suggest that Solidarity was a praxis of socialism as a utopia. With the benefits of retrospective wisdom it is now plain that the emergence of Solidarity was one of the first cracks in the edifice of actually existing socialism, a system that finally came crashing down in 1989. For Bauman 1989 went beyond the Solidarity novum. It was nothing less than a systemic revolution that totally destroyed the old common sense and concerns. Bauman made a distinction between political and systemic revolutions. Whereas political revolutions are deliberate attempts to change the character (and members) of the political leadership while keeping everything else much as it is, systemic revolutions go much further: ‘they face the task of dismantling the extant system and constructing one to replace it’ (Bauman 1993b: 4. See also Bauman 1994c). Systemic revolutions occur when a system is overloaded with demands. For Bauman then the primary cause of the collapse of actually existing socialism was that it stopped being able to control its own environment, because it buckled in the face

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of too many demands: ‘The disaffection which the old system could not but generate tended to exceed the system’s capacity for accommodation and thus pushed the crisis to breaking point’ (Bauman 1993b: 4). Bauman went on to make it clear that this meant that 1989 was different to the Solidarity novum. In 1981 he was arguing that Solidarity was successful in part because it refused to speak the language of the system (Bauman 1981), but in the wake of the 1989 systemic revolutions he was contending that the collapse came about as a ‘result of couching the demands in the language of the extant system . . . and thus facing the system with the output postulates the system was unable to meet’ (Bauman 1993b: 5–6). Besides their political importance, the systemic revolutions in Eastern Europe were also of major theoretical significance for the shape and concerns of Bauman’s sociological work. In 1981 Bauman was speculating that perhaps the Solidarity novum would reinvigorate certain socialist principles that Leninism and Stalinism had distorted. For example, he considered whether, ‘The Polish events opened up a possibility of the revival of the idea of proletarian domination in a form so thoroughly repressed by the long decades of the Leninist practice and hence so completely forgotten’ (Bauman 1981: 53). Yet as the novum continued to open up the possibility of praxis, the return of this particular repressed was abandoned. Bauman moved away from privileging any particular social group or class as the agent of the systemic revolution and, instead, implied that the actors and the script to be performed on the revolutionary stage would only be written at the moment of its performance: ‘the social forces that led to the downfall of the communist power . . . are not those that will eventually benefit from the construction of the new system. Forces whose interest will gain from the working of the new system will need to be brought into existence in the process of system-construction’ (Bauman 1993b: 5). Or more concisely: ‘Systemic revolutions must yet create the social forces in the name of which they embark on the thorough systemic transformation’ (Bauman 1992a: 160). But exactly what system was being subjected to a revolutionary overthrow? To this simple question there are two answers, one straightforward and the other opening up a whole new field of inquiry. The straightforward answer, of course, is that the systemic revolution of 1989 overthrew the system of actually existing socialism. But the other answer to this question that can be found in Bauman’s

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work is that the systemic revolution represented also the overthrow of modernity.

Modernity One of the consequences for Bauman’s thought of the changing character of Eastern Europe was what amounted to his abandonment of class analysis. Bauman has said that: ‘Memories of Class . . . was my farewell to reading history as class history . . . Perhaps a little earlier than most western sociologists, I was thus in a situation comparable to the present situation in Europe because the disappearance of the conflict between the communist and the western world has left an empty space’ (Bauman in Bielefeld 2002: 116). Perhaps the most significant part of that quotation from Bauman is the part that is less obvious; Bauman is making a connection between ‘the communist and the western world’. Whereas Bauman’s work up to the mid-1980s had assumed that there was a fundamental and decisive difference between the West and actually existing socialism, by the late 1980s, and through to the early 1990s (when he stopped explicitly addressing the question of the Communist system), he was much more likely to connect them. The means of that connection was the concept of modernity. As Bauman put it in 1990: ‘Since its inception, modern socialism was and remained the counter-culture of modernity.’ This phrase recalls Bauman’s argument, in his book Socialism, that socialism is the counter-culture of capitalism; but in 1990 he is arguing that both capitalism and socialism are similar in that they are both modern. What made socialism a counter-culture as opposed to just a culture was its critical edge, but there was a general agreement with capitalism as to what could and should be aspired towards: ‘modern socialism belonged to one historical formation with the society it opposed: that is, it shared its crucial values and it believed in the means trusted to bring those values about’. Bauman went on to say that: ‘Socialism’s own programme was a version of the modernity project . . . The worthiness and desirability of the modern project as such, socialism was not obliged to prove. They had already been amply demonstrated by the practice of modernity’ (Bauman 1990d: 20). In this way the critical edge of actual socialism was the specific argument that capitalism was not as efficient as it could be. Socialism did

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not disagree with industrialisation, urbanisation or the movement towards centralised states. Rather the protagonists of socialism argued that the West had not done these things sufficiently well. Modernity had not been taken to its full expression: ‘What socialism did was to reconfirm the ends as worthy of pursuing, and the means as worthy of applying’ and it did this by putting, ‘the blame for the “poor showing thus far” at the door of the current, capitalist managers of modernity’ (Bauman 1990d: 21). Socialism was to be a better kind of management, the socialist a manager who knew better than the capitalist the true meanings of modernity. Bauman argued that the project that socialism promised to achieve more efficiently than capitalism was the separation of the human world from the natural and the subordination of nature to ends imposed upon it by free humanity. From the point of view of socialism as the counter-culture of modernity, the problem with capitalism was that it was a fetter on modernity: ‘Under capitalist management, modernity forfeited its chance to remake the world from top to bottom, to make nature pliant, malleable, obedient to human will’ (Bauman 1990d: 21). The nature that had to be made pliant and malleable included, ‘human nature, human needs, cravings, dreams’ (Bauman 1995: 200). Again, speaking as a ventriloquist for the dummy of the counter-culture, Bauman wrote of the socialist belief that: ‘There was nothing wrong with the project of modernity. All that was wrong was the outcome of capitalist distortion. One needs to rescue the courage and the tools of modernity from the capitalist fetters, so that they may show their true potential and so that everybody may enjoy the fruits’ (Bauman 1990d: 21). Consequently Lenin and Stalin did not disdain industry as such; what they wanted was bigger and more productive industry than that which capitalism had provided. The socialists who managed to get their hands onto the levers of modernity did not avoid the subordination of nature to human ends; instead they wanted more and bigger technologies and humans than capitalism had brought into being. ‘It so happened that under the socialist, not capitalist, auspices the project was pushed to its radical limits: grand designs, unlimited social engineering, huge and bulky technology, total transformation of nature’ (Bauman 1990d: 21). It was in this way, with its ambitious desire to reconstruct the world according to a definite plan that established criteria for the rationality of social engineering, that actually existing socialism was

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linked to the defining characteristics of modernity. Bauman’s analysis is based on the thesis that what typifies and defines modernity is a belief that, ‘human order is vulnerable, contingent and devoid of reliable foundations’. In terms of historical periodisation, this means that the roots of modernity can be traced back to the European Renaissance with its celebration of the marginalisation of the supernatural in the explanation of the material world and, instead, its commitment to, ‘a triumphant entry of Man’ (Bauman 1994a: 101). In other words, the Renaissance released from the bottle the genie of the idea that, first, the material world was – or rather ought to be – subordinate to human ambitions and, second, that since humanity was free it could – or at least ought to – be motivated by the achievement of its own perfection. As Bauman puts it: ‘Human freedom of creation and self-creation meant that no imperfection, ugliness or suffering could now claim the right to exist, let alone legitimacy. It was the contingency of the imperfect that spurred the anxiety about reaching perfection’ (Bauman 1994a: 102). But Bauman argued that the emancipatory promise of the Renaissance proved to be relatively short lived; human freedom was reinterpreted less as possibility and, instead, as something to be regulated so that the erstwhile perfect state might be moved towards. Bauman has said that Renaissance possibility became subordinated to the probable: ‘the vision of visionaries joined hands with the practice of practitioners: the intellectual model of an orderly universe blended with the ordering bustle of the politicians’ (Bauman 1994a: 103). Modernity is an ossification of Renaissance humanisation. And instead of all men and women being equally legitimate agents of this praxis, legitimate action was made the preserve of only those who could make claims to the possession of the knowledge of perfection; the intellectuals. In Legislators and Interpreters, Bauman contends that intellectuals played a legislative role in modernity: ‘It consists of making authoritative statements which arbitrate in controversies of opinions and which select those opinions which, having been selected, become correct and binding.’ The intellectuals’ legislative power was based on their ability to claim exclusive access to, ‘superior (objective) knowledge . . . Access to such knowledge is better thanks to procedural rules which assure the attainment of truth, the arrival at valid moral judgement, and the selection of proper artistic taste’ (Bauman 1987a: 4–5). The futuristic legitimation that, in the 1970s, Bauman

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was identifying as a crucial aspect of the power structure of actually existing socialism clearly and directly fits in with this later account of the role of legislative power in modernity. Futuristic legitimation was based on the argument that the Party was possessed of superior and objective knowledge about the perfect state of human being in the world. The Party could see beyond the particular horizons of common sense, was able to see what is truly universal and, all the time it remained able to see clearly, could implement wertrational rules for the attainment of that truth. Against all of this individual men and women could not rightly object, and their dissent from the Party line demonstrated only their need to be subjected to even more forceful and effective encouragement to work towards what perfection demanded. It was in terms of this perspective of the perfect future that, ‘communism was thoroughly modern in its passionate conviction that a good society can only be a carefully designed, rationally managed and thoroughly industrialized society’ (Bauman 1992a: 166). The need for careful designing was based on the objective truth, rational management took the form of the central planning which subordinated all decisions in the present to the demands and requirements of the already-written future, and industrialisation was the means of the propulsion of the present into that future. The problem was that actually existing socialism took all of these modern promises too seriously, too much at face value. What the legislators of Communism could not really take into account was the failure of designing, management and industrialisation to come anywhere close to the perfect state. Of course, in orthodox theory that failure could be overcome through the simple expedient of declaring that ‘we are still on the road’ and thus remaking the case for an evermore vigilant policing of those who might encourage men and women to wander down byways and blind alleys. But ultimately the failures of the system caught up with actually existing socialism. And with that, modernity itself was defeated. This is the sociological significance of the collapse of Communism in 1989: ‘The fall of communism was a resounding defeat for the project of a total order – an artificially designed, all-embracing arrangement of human actions and their setting, one that follows the rules of reason instead of emerging from diffuse and uncoordinated activities of human agents.’ Additionally, the collapse was a moment of the, ‘ultimate frustration of the ambitions of global

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management, of replacing spontaneity with planning, of a transparent, monitored, supervised and deliberately shaped order in which nothing is left to chance’ (Bauman 1992a: 178).

Conclusion The collapse of Communism in 1989 was at once the end of a system and an end to the innocent phase of modernity. From then on it became clear that the trade-off between human security and freedom is an inevitable ambivalence of human-being-in-the-world. The system of actually existing socialism offered the security of not having to be responsible for one’s own actions because everything would be all right in the end, so long as power was left alone to get on with the business of perfecting the presently less-than-perfect humanity. This was an existential security that was underpinned by a material security all the time the industrialised peasantry in Eastern Europe accepted that any return to the old ways would reduce them to a state of poverty much worse than anything existing in the towns and cities. Meanwhile, the intellectuals were offered the security of planning and managing the march to the perfect future; and if they dissented rather than agreed, then, all they proved was that they had no rightful place in that particular parade. Consequently, as Communism collapsed these securities disappeared. Instead men and women were confronted with the responsibility for freedoms that they neither sought nor knew how to handle; the freedom of the brutal and rapid dismantling of the ‘patronage state’ and its replacement with a form of capitalism harsh even by the standards of the West of the 1980s (a brutality that is only hinted at by Kieslowski’s film, Three Colours: White, with its picture of a Poland where everything can be bought and sold). Now, while Bauman was obviously and clearly welcoming of the events of 1989, it is typical of the whole temper of his work that he refused to allow himself any too great an optimism. Typically, Bauman located his analysis somewhere between the alternatives of optimism and pessimism. This was a middle ground that his analysis was especially well able to occupy, since Bauman’s interpretation of actually existing socialism was always aware of both the contradictions of the system and of the opposition towards it. Indeed, the contrast that Bauman consistently drew between the interest in freedom of the intellectuals and the interest in security of the workers reappeared,

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the more Bauman considered the implications of the systemic revolutions. In particular, Bauman knew that the removal of the security that the system offered would lead to the reappearance in Eastern Europe of dangerous ghosts. The system had offered men and women an escape from responsibility for their own actions (and more sharply from responsibility for their own failings and failures). But with the end of the system men and women were thrown back onto themselves. As Bauman once put it: ‘The nice, old-style, bureaucratically ruled unions have offered one precious freedom that glasnost threatens to take away: freedom from worry, from the need to come face to face with the truth of one’s ability (or lack of it), from anguish and uncertainty’ (Bauman 1988b: 10). Yet, instead of accepting selfresponsibility, those who had been given the freedom they did not want went on the search for scapegoats. They found the perennial standby: the Jews (Bauman 1988b). Of course it was not the first time that the Jews had been put in the firing line of history.

5 The Holocaust

If it is reasonable to suggest that two of Bauman’s books of the 1970s (Culture as Praxis and Socialism: The Active Utopia) have at least one foot in Poland, then it can be contended that Bauman’s post-exile sociological questions took some time to emerge. The process of the emergence can be traced through the essays on actually existing socialism. In terms of books, the first stage of emergence can be seen in Towards a Critical Sociology and Hermeneutics and Social Science (Bauman 1976a, 1978). Both of these books are best approached as exercises in social theory in which Bauman is restating the significance of sociology in facilitating the translation of experiences and therefore the conversations of human being. To this extent there is no deep discontinuity that separates the pre- and the post-exile work. Throughout, Bauman has been engaged in the work of a critical sociology which builds on, to use his phrase, an ‘image of man’ (Bauman 1967c), that itself can be traced back to the influence on his sociological imagination of Julian Hochfeld and, in particular, Stanislaw Ossowski. As such, it follows that many of the dimensions of the post-exile work fully come to light only if they are read in the context of an awareness of pre-exile themes. That is one reason why this book has paid so much attention to the essays from the 1960s. If they are not understood, then neither is Bauman’s betterknown work. Bauman’s post-exile sociological (as opposed to social theoretical) books began to emerge with Memories of Class (Bauman 1982). Now, if there is a continuity of commitment and of the ‘image of man’ that runs through Bauman’s pre- and post-exile work, Memories 107

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of Class is a book which shows that, important though it is, the recognition of the continuity should not lead to blindness about a crucial discontinuity. Indeed, it is precisely this discontinuity that Bauman has addressed since the late 1980s. Bauman has said that Memories of Class was, ‘a farewell, not to the working class, but to the identity between the working class and the problem of injustice, and inequality’. As Bauman put it: ‘The problem of inequality survived. But it is not related to the working class especially’ (Bauman 1992a: 206). What all of this meant was that the social symbolisation of suffering had to be rethought. The working class no longer fulfilled that role for the simple reason that it had been destroyed both quantitatively and qualitatively: ‘Industrial workers are now the most rapidly shrinking part of the population . . . Organized labor’s militancy is now defensive in nature and particularistic in vision. Far from being a “dangerous class,” organized labor has become the staunchest defender of law and order.’ This does not mean that social suffering has been thereby overcome: ‘If anything, poverty and suffering are still increasing. But poverty is no longer associated with organized labor’ (Bauman 1986: 83). These comments reflect lessons learnt in Poland as well as Thatcher’s Britain in the 1980s. The 1980s was a moment when it became quite clear that the old intellectual certainties and secure ways of thinking and acting had become quite redundant. The dismantling of the post-1945 social democratic consensus forced open minds to rethink the relationship of labour to politics. The working class ceased to be a dominant political actor thanks to the combination of state power and the economic collapse of manufacturing. In the 1980s Bauman identified three strands to this transformation of the working class, from actor to memory. First, he pointed out that the working class of large-scale industrial production was contracting on an annual basis. Second, the working class had been morally and spatially fractured, its old concentrations dissipated: ‘Gone or almost gone is that working class moral density, which came together with physical density. New workers are sprinkled amidst faceless residential estates whose inhabitants are united by the way they spend their money, not the way they earn it’ (Bauman 1988f: 36). Third, the nature of work had changed: ‘most of the new generation of workers are occasional, temporary and part-time. They neither can nor wish to think of their jobs as a life-long occupation . . . They come and go, much as those people whom they

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meet on the way’ (Bauman 1988f: 36. This theme reappears in Bauman’s diagnosis of ‘liquid modernity’; compare Bauman 2000a). The goodbye to any privileging of the working class in Bauman’s work is itself a sociological phenomenon. He was not responding to exile from actually existing socialism by moving over to the camp of the supporters of capitalism. Bauman’s critical imagination did not at all diminish when he left Poland. It took a different focus, and it had to do that if it were to have any relevance to the men and women with whom he was now living. The analysis of class formation showed that the forms of social suffering that were experienced by the working class were not peculiar to it. Discipline in factories, for example, was extensive with discipline in schools, asylums and barracks (Bauman 1983). Here then it is clear that Foucault’s Discipline and Punish resonated with Bauman’s image of man in that the book can be read as a study of the management of humanity, even though Foucault’s own approach is far removed from that of Bauman. After all, Foucault was quite sanguine about the end of man (Foucault 1977). Bauman reads and uses Foucault for his own ends, in terms of his own image of man (a similar strategy informs Bauman’s reading and use of Elias; see, for example, Bauman 1979, 1985b). But there is a second matter that emerges out of Bauman’s claim that Memories of Class is a text where social suffering is uncoupled from the working class. The bidding farewell to the working class could have paralysed Bauman’s sociological imagination since hitherto he had tended to assume an identity between it and suffering. But if the working class was no longer to be privileged, how could suffering continue to be condemned sociologically? Where was social suffering to be found? For whom was critical sociology to be carried out? Bauman’s answers to those questions turned back to the image of man that runs through his work. This is an image of humanity which strives towards the possible, which seeks to engage in free creative praxis but is trapped within a world which through utilitarianism and ossification confines men and women within the dull routines of the probable. This image of man led Bauman to try to find the symbolisation of a social suffering that could not be blamed on capitalism alone. After all, capitalism itself was not an ossification that could be presumed to be the same in all times and in all places (British capitalism in the 1980s was quite different to that of the 1950s, when Bauman studied the British Labour Party), and the work on

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Poland showed that problems that theoretical orthodoxy said ought to be peculiar to capitalism were also evident within actually existing socialism. As such, neither capitalism nor socialism could explain the roots of social suffering, and therefore neither could industrial workers nor alienated youth be given any privileged status. Their troubles might well have been of universal significance, but they were not thereby amenable to universalisation. Some other conceptual apparatus was needed, some other symbolisation of social suffering. The answers were provided for Bauman’s work when Jewry moved into his line of vision. As soon as Bauman’s sociological imagination starts to focus on Jewry as a symbolisation of social suffering, his post-exile work starts to emerge both quickly and clearly. Bauman is not saying that Jews are historically privileged because of their suffering, and neither is he saying that they are the only group to be subjected to social suffering (although their suffering has been of a unique and dreadful sort). Rather, Bauman’s point is that a sociological analysis of the fate of European Jewry opens up a way of looking critically at the world, a way that cannot be glimpsed if attention focuses on capitalism and socialism alone. The post-exile work addresses the questions that are inspired by this different focus on modernity. Bauman’s way into the social suffering of Jews was the Holocaust: ‘the Holocaust was a window. Looking through that window, one can catch a rare glimpse of many things otherwise invisible. And the things one can see are of the utmost importance not just for the perpetrators, victims and witnesses of the crime, but for all those who are alive today and hope to be alive tomorrow’ (Bauman 1989a: viii). This chapter discusses what Bauman saw when he looked through the window of the Holocaust. There was nothing necessary about Zygmunt Bauman beginning to see this particular window, even less looking through it. After all, Jewry and Jewishness were not obvious themes in the pre-exile work and even when Bauman wrote about the ‘end of Polish Jewry’ he tended to mention the Holocaust as little more than a historical event. Typically, the Holocaust appeared as a backdrop in an essay on the 1967–68 anti-Semitic campaign in Poland: the campaign was happening in, ‘a country which became the mass grave of European Jewry, and in a nation which only a quarter of a century ago was an impotent witness of the extermination of three-and-a-half million of its Jewish compatriots’ (Bauman 1969b: 3). Additionally, there was

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no sense of personal trouble about the Holocaust or for that matter Jewishness: ‘I was Jewish but nobody took any notice . . . I only recognized my Jewishness in 1967’ (Bauman in Welzer 2002: 114). Or again: ‘On the whole, for most of my life and the greater part of it, Jewishness played a very small role, if at all. The first time it was brought to my awareness, was in . . . this eruption of anti-semitism’ (Bauman 1992a: 226). But in the post-exile work the temper is radically different. Why? The answer is that Bauman became able to connect the personal troubles of being Jewish to public issues about European Jewry. From the point of view of his sociological work, Bauman’s biographical Jewishness is not terribly important; it only becomes important as soon as it can be connected to public issues about how and why it is that Jewry has become a symbol of suffering. And Bauman was given a chance to make just that connection. Zygmunt Bauman has continually pointed to the influence on his work of his wife, Janina. For example, he told Peter Beilharz that, ‘from Janina I learned . . . that sociologizing makes sense only in as far as it helps humanity in life, that in the ultimate account it is the human choices that make all the difference between lives human and inhuman, and that society is an ingenuous contraption to narrow down, perhaps eliminate altogether, those choices’ (Bauman in Beilharz 2001: 335). The question is, of course: How were those lessons taught? In 1986 Janina Bauman published a book, Winter in the Morning, which tells the story of her experiences as a Jewish girl in Nazi-occupied Poland. Janina Bauman’s wealthy childhood was demolished when the Nazis forced her, her sister and mother into the Warsaw ghetto. The three of them managed to escape deportation to Auschwitz or Treblinka and spent over two years on the run, hiding from the Nazis in the houses of ordinary people who decided that Jews should be sheltered and not given over to their would-be murderers. They were helped by, ‘all sorts of people who for this or that reason risked their own lives and the lives of their relatives to help us’ ( J. Bauman 2002: 30). These rescuers provided help and shelter even though they knew that if their activities were discovered they would be killed. Winter in the Morning is a remarkable book indeed, not only because of its obvious content, but on account of its absolute humanity. So far as anyone who was not there might possibly guess, it can be presumed that it

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would have been very easy for Janina Bauman to have written a book that emphasised the absolute horrors and deprivations of the ghetto and permanent risk. But this is not at all what she did. The book is much more subtle than that. It tells how Janina Bauman, her sister and mother, ‘met utter cruelty and corruption but also people of great courage and integrity’ (J. Bauman 2002: 30). The book lives up to Janina Bauman’s maxim that, ‘the hardest of struggles is to remain human in inhuman conditions’ (J. Bauman 1986: x). Janina Bauman’s book led to a transformation in the way that Zygmunt Bauman approached Jewishness. It stopped being a fate that was delivered upon the unsuspecting by the anti-Semites and instead it became an identity that could be chosen (a destiny), in terms of which it is possible to engage in creative human praxis in the world. Jewishness stopped being a prison alone, becoming instead a kind of freedom, although bearing with it all of the dangers that freedom is made to have by the powers of the actual. This change is reflected in the tone and content of some of Bauman’s essays. For example, in terms of tone, the sense of unavoidable fate that runs through the 1969 essay on ‘The End of Polish Jewry’, is replaced almost twenty years later with a subtle appreciation of the difficulties of Jewishness as a destiny and as a mode of praxis that can be found in an essay on ‘The Jew as a Polish Writer’ (Bauman 1969b, 1998c). Meanwhile, and in terms of content, Jewish writers begin to move from the margins and into the centre of Bauman’s texts. For example, Bauman writes understandingly about Benjamin (Bauman 1993d), while Simmel was reinterpreted; no longer just a sociologist now he became a Jewish sociologist who could see things that others could not. Anti-Semitism meant that Simmel was forced to the margins of social life, but from the margins he developed a fragmentary sociology (that is completely resistant to managerial utilisation) that has become more valid than the work of some of his contemporaries: ‘Today we see that the “bittiness” of Simmel’s analysis was made to measure the human condition which Simmel, unlike his colleagues, sensed behind the facade of the totalizing ambitions of powers that be’ (Bauman 1991a: 185). Jewish thinkers became valuable, insightful and relevant, because in them one can find, ‘some sort of . . . elective affinity between the enforced condition of social suspension . . . and the kind of penetrating, perceptive, insightful modern culture which saw through the modernity deception’. For Bauman there was an opening up of the possibility of

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critique: ‘the Jewish experience could be helpful in the understanding of some general issues, through the conditions in which the essential categories of modern culture were conceived of’ (Bauman 1992a: 226).

Modernity and order With the final emergence of Bauman’s post-exile problematic words like ‘class’, ‘alienation’ and ‘praxis’ tended to disappear from his sociological vocabulary and what emerged instead was a new language, which stressed the concept of modernity. The stake of the emergent sociological language was an attempt to find a new way of asking the questions that would open up the world to critique and facilitate the possibilities of human conversations. The analysis of the modernity of actually existing socialism brought firmly into view some hitherto unnoticed lines of enquiry. Most obviously, the new approach resulted in a turn away from the theme of the 1970s essays that actually existing socialism represented a distinctive social system. From the point of view of a stress on modernity the differences between the East and the West became considerably less significant than the similarities. What Bauman stressed instead was what they shared and had in common; a presumption of the malleability of human being in the world. They shared the presumption that the social and the human were absolutely free of any outside (natural or supernatural) determination and, consequently, that without the conscious and deliberate guarding of what human being might become, things would turn out to be an offence to human freedom and dignity. Actually existing socialism became an exemplary story in the possibilities and the problems of modernity, rather than an ossified attempt to construct an alternative to capitalism. In this way Bauman’s work on modernity could have placed much greater emphasis on the theme of futuristic legitimation. Actually existing socialism’s mode of futuristic legitimation fits in exactly with the analytic of modernity that Bauman developed in the very late 1980s. They are two ways of making the same point, namely that the world today can be turned into a means to an end that will only be achieved in some ever-receding future. It was because of this commitment to the achievement of an ultimate end that actually existing socialism involved the pursuit of

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wertrationalitat. But as Bauman knew, wertrationalitat is not the end of the story of rationality. It is also possible to identify the pursuit of zweckrationalitat. Whereas actually existing socialism was fundamentally wertrational in that it stressed, ‘the teleological, not the genetic, determination of macro-social processes’ (Bauman 1974: 138), zweckrationalitat emphasises the suitability of action which is carried out according to rational demands in the here and now. It is a distinction that is derived from Max Weber. Wertrationalitat is Weber’s valuerational action, which is, ‘determined by a conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious, or other form of behavior, independently of its prospects of success’. Meanwhile, zweckrationalitat is Weber’s instrumental-rational action, ‘that is, determined by expectations as to the behavior of objects in the environment and of other human beings’ (Weber 1968: 24–25). Bauman’s sociological imagination is finely tuned to an appreciation of Weber’s zweckrationalitat in that its instrumentality is identical with – indeed is the same as – the managerialism and utilitarianism that was the dominant object of his critical scrutiny throughout the pre-exile work. Once again then, it is possible to see a surface discontinuity but deeper continuity. This zweckrationalitat, instrumentality, managerialism and utilitarianism, is made by Bauman to be central to the sociological understanding of the Nazi Holocaust. Indeed, although Bauman has on occasion tended to pull together the Gulag Archipelago, where actually existing socialism deposited those who were deemed unfit to reach the future, with the Nazi death camps (see most notably the chapter ‘A Century of Camps?’ in Bauman 1995), the logic of his argument is that they need to be kept firmly apart. This is not a backhanded way of reinstating the abandoned conception of West and East as distinct social systems. Rather, if the camps of actually existing socialism and the camps of Nazism are not pulled together, it becomes possible to develop a far more nuanced appreciation of the varieties of modernity. In a nutshell, the Gulag Archipelago was death in the name of values, whereas the Nazi camps were mass murder in the name of instrumentality. But that claim raises the question of in relation to what was the action of the Holocaust instrumental? Actually existing socialism offered the security of the perfect future, and the Holocaust was an attempt to offer the security of the perfect order. The Holocaust was instrumental in the attempt to construct

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that order out of the flux, messiness and unruliness of human being in the world. In Modernity and Ambivalence, Bauman focused on the modern problem of order (Bauman 1991a). He made it plain that order is a specifically modern problem precisely because modernity emerged out of a praxis of human possibility that challenged, and indeed undermined, any claims that the human world was arranged and determined by some supernatural authority. Modernity consisted in the recognition that the human world is a human production. On the one hand this is an awareness of freedom; since there is no absolute determination then there is nothing to prevent men and women making the world and themselves according to their own plans and designs. But on the other hand this is also an awareness that fatally undermines any semblance of security; if there is nothing without human action, in what might humans be able to trust? (This question is a sociological variation on the theme of metaphysical horror, as discussed in Kolakowski 2001. The theme is also present in Bauman 1992b,c and 1994d.) This means that the order of the world, and of human affairs, is something that has to be made and maintained. It cannot be left to take care of itself: ‘We think of modernity as of a time when order – of the world, of the human habitat, of the human self, and of the connection between all three – is reflected upon.’ Bauman continued to say that modernity is ‘a time’ in which order is, ‘conscious of being a conscious practice and wary of the void it would leave were it to halt or merely relent’ (Bauman 1991a: 5. This understanding of modernity as the careful and continued separation of the human from the natural was emphasised by Bauman in the content of, and catalogue to, a photographic exhibition; Bauman 1988e). The modern imagination is one in which human freedom from external determination is turned to the task of establishing a secure and trustworthy order of things. This requires intervention to ensure the establishment and relentless practice of a firm divide between the social and human on the one hand and the natural on the other. Since modern humanity is free, then the natural (just like the supernatural for that matter) requires separation and subordination; it must be made to be something apart, and then kept there: ‘The raw existence, the existence free of intervention, the unordered existence, or the fringe of ordered existence, becomes now nature: something singularly unfit for human habitat.’ Nature is, ‘something not to be

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trusted and not to be left to its own devices, something to be mastered, subordinated, remade so as to be readjusted to human needs’ (Bauman 1991a: 7). By definition then, modern order is not, and cannot be, one that is left to itself. Modern order is one that is predicated upon the pursuit of a project of ordering. Modern order is not a once and for all achievement; it is an ongoing project of the ordering. This is a project that itself requires, first, the vision of in what order consists and, second, an agency to practice the project and work towards its achievement. Consequently, Bauman contends that: ‘we can say that existence is modern in as far as it is effected and sustained by design, manipulation, management, engineering’. He went on: ‘The existence is modern in as far as it is administered by resourceful . . . sovereign agencies’ (Bauman 1991a: 7). Hence, in modernity, human freedom logically leads to the strong state. Order and power fit together. Engagement in the project of ordering presupposes, requires and establishes relationships of power over that which is ordered and subjected to design, manipulation, management and engineering. A good way of clarifying this modern version of order as a social project is to use the metaphor of gardening that Bauman first offered in Legislators and Interpreters. There he wrote that: ‘The power presiding over modernity . . . is modelled on the role of the gardener’ (Bauman 1987a: 52). The state and power in modernity play a role that is similar to that played by the gardener over the garden. Just like the gardener, it is the role of the state and power to manipulate the things in the plot (in the garden, in the nation or in the culture), so that they grow according to the order that is imposed upon them rather than according to their own unruliness (but of course their self-growth and self-development can only be considered to be ‘unruly’ from the point of view of a design of order that is imposed upon them from outside, by those who ‘know best’). In relation to the garden, the gardener is an instrumental and utilitarian manager of order. Bauman explained that the gardener presumes of gardens that: ‘To reproduce, they need design and supervision . . . However well established, the garden design can never be relied upon to reproduce itself by its own resources.’ Indeed: ‘The weeds – the uninvited, unplanned, selfcontrolled plants – . . . underline the fragility of the imposed order; they alert the gardener to the never-ending demand for supervision and surveillance’ (Bauman 1987a: 51).

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This metaphor underlines the status of modernity as a project. The ordering project can never be relaxed or assumed to be completed because the things of the world will never stop tending towards the unplanned and the uncontrolled. It is the job of the modern gardener, it is the job of the state, to ensure that the things of the world are allowed to grow, develop and act only within the constraints of the design. Only in this way can the security of the order be defended. This metaphor of the gardening power of the modern state reappeared in Modernity and the Holocaust in a way that makes it obvious that it was not a mere abstraction. Bauman made it plain that quite literally gardening is a matter of life and death. Bauman contended that, ‘Modern genocide, like modern culture in general, is a gardener’s job. It is just one of the many chores that people who treat society as a garden need to undertake.’ Here the main role of the gardener – be he the gardener of plants or of humans – is the extermination of weeds. And so, ‘Weeding out is a creative, not a destructive activity. It does not differ in kind from other activities which combine in the construction and sustenance of the perfect garden’ (Bauman 1989a: 92). But it remains necessary to consider exactly what order consists in. Since it involves the manipulation of the things of the world in the name of a project of the separation of the natural from the free social, and therefore since it involves the identification of the natural and the social as distinct entities, ordering is the power to impose and instrumentally manage classifications. This is what the gardener does in the garden. Some plants are classified as weeds and are uprooted, while others grow in such a way that they fit in with the design and are managed and guarded so that their development is not hampered by the unruly growths (which thus become not just offensive in themselves but also a threat to the health of the plants that grow according to the design). Bauman established the significance of the project of classification at the very beginning of Modernity and Ambivalence: ‘To classify means to set apart, to segregate.’ This segregation is imposed upon the things of the world, and Bauman explains that it has three stages. First, segregation presumes that things are discrete and different. Second, it means that these discrete things nevertheless possess ‘family qualities’ that mean that they should be classified as being like some others but unlike other others. Third, classification seeks to make these likenesses and differences actual, ‘by linking differential patterns

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of action to different classes of entities (the evocation of a specific behavioural pattern becoming the operative definition of the class)’. In a sentence: ‘To classify . . . is to give the world a structure: to manipulate its probabilities; to make some events more likely than some others; to behave as if events were not random, or to limit or eliminate randomness of events’ (Bauman 1991a: 1). For Bauman, modernity needed to give the world a structure since, without that imposition, the world had no structure of its own. If modernity was freedom from external determination, it was also the struggle for security in the face of what was otherwise out of control. At one level that is a formal definition of classification and therefore of the project of ordering (to the extent that ordering means classification and the allocation of things to one class as opposed to any other). But at another level, in the context of the guiding assumptions of Bauman’s sociological work, this definition of classification contains a critique of modernity. For Bauman, of course, human being in the world is about the possible rather than the probable, the unpredictable rather than the predictable, the rebellious as opposed to the managed. Consequently, to the extent that modernity consists in the practices of projects of classification, and to the extent that classification establishes probabilities and criteria for management, these modern projects are an assault on what it means to be human. This explains the passion that runs through so much of Bauman’s work on modernity. He is not just asking questions about an objective condition. Rather the foundations of his sociological work, and their influence on his analysis, mean that when he questions modernity he is interrogating what is, to him, something that is almost necessarily inhuman. Indeed, the problem that classification presents for human being in the world is emphasised by Bauman in his discussion of ambivalence. Quite simply, the problem is that some (but not all) of the things of the world, which are subjected to the classifications that are imposed upon them, do not necessarily fit into those categories. Either they fit into more than one class (they are both this and that), or they do not fit into any single class too well (they are neither this nor that). This mismatch is the essence of ambivalence. The ambivalent is that which does not unambiguously fit the classifications that are imposed upon it. It is precisely the presence of ambivalence that makes the ordering effort necessary, and it is exactly the persistence of ambivalence that

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makes the ordering a project that can never end. But ambivalence persists because a perfect order is possible only on paper, never on the ground. As Bauman stresses, the practice of ordering produces ambivalence in the name of seeking to overcome it: ‘Ostensibly, the naming/classifying function . . . has the prevention of ambivalence as its purpose . . . And yet the application of such criteria . . . are the ultimate sources of ambivalence and the reasons why ambivalence is unlikely ever to become truly extinct’ (Bauman 1991a: 2). Therefore: ‘Ambivalence is a side-product of the labour of classification; and it calls for yet more classifying effort. Though born of the naming/classifying urge, ambivalence may be fought only with a naming that is yet more exact, and classes that are yet more precisely defined’ (Bauman 1991a: 3). Although this argument came to the fore in Bauman’s work in the 1990s, it has long-standing roots. For example, in his discussion of perfect planning in actually existing socialism, Bauman noted how the indices of production and consumption in the Polish plan multiplied incredibly quickly (from eight in 1956 to thirty-five in 1963): ‘The introduction of each new index was in all cases somehow imposed by discovering certain undesired by-products of the heretofore existing incentive system’ (Bauman 1966c: 156). Put another way; the tighter the management, the greater the need for tighter management. Bauman’s inquiry into classification and its unforeseen consequences (ambivalence as a production of ordering; the evermore determined urge to classify leading to more and more things not fitting the increasingly refined classifications), can be traced back to the influence on his work of Mary Douglas. Bauman has said that Mary Douglas is one of the writers from whom he has derived his ‘essential cognitive frames’. Specifically: ‘To Douglas I owe my understanding of the social production and the effects of ambivalence’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 35). In Purity and Danger, Douglas offers an anthropological study of how societies seek to order their environment (both physical and cosmic), through the imposition of classifications upon the things of the world. These classifications are the basis of social attitudes and, importantly, practices of clean and unclean, safe and dangerous, healthy and unhealthy. Douglas shows that this imposed order works well all the time that the things that are subjected to it can be matched with one classification alone (so that they can be apprehended

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as this and not that), but special practices are needed towards those things that do not so fit and which are ambivalent. These ambivalent things, which fit more than one classification or no classification at all, are identified as dangerous and are therefore surrounded with rites and rituals of purification. In this way, the order of classifications is maintained despite ambivalence, but the ambivalent thing is pushed out of everyday social life. It becomes something apart, something to be treated with caution (Douglas 1966). Bauman shows that in the case of the Holocaust the group that did not fit the classifications of peoples, the groups that were ambivalent (European Jewry and other groups such as gays and gypsies) were pushed out of everyday social life in the last instance by means of their annihilation. Bauman sociologises the themes from Mary Douglas, and relates them to the historical form of the human condition that is modernity. In the conditions of modernity there was one category of the things of the social world that was irredeemably ambivalent: the stranger. As early as Culture as Praxis Bauman was arguing that the presence of the stranger means that: ‘The orderliness of the human world, far from being automatically assured, now became a matter of continuous and active concern’ (Bauman 1973a: 134–135). It was a concern that took the form of an attempt to manage the proximity of people who were defined as strangers and, therefore, as belonging to a different classification than the ‘proper’ inhabitants of any given social space. The strangers became a problem precisely because, in the famous adage of Georg Simmel, whereas in pre-modernity they came today and left tomorrow, now they came today and stayed tomorrow. Their proximity became unavoidable: ‘The physical proximity of others now acquired menacing qualities when combined with cultural osmosis and the new, uneasy consciousness of the mutability and transmutational potency of forms’ (Bauman 1973a: 135). This was a theme to which Bauman returned some fifteen years or so after the publication of Culture as Praxis, when he stated that: ‘The stranger disturbs the resonance between physical and psychical distance. He is physically near while remaining spiritually remote. He brings into the inner circle the kind of difference and otherness anticipated and tolerated only at a distance.’ In a sentence, the appearance of the stranger ‘is a challenge to the reliability of orthodox orientation points and the universal tools of order-making’ (Bauman 1988c: 9). The stranger undermines security.

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But the classification of the stranger as a danger took on its greatest substance when it was applied to Jewry. As Bauman put it: ‘Jews have been Europe’s prototypical strangers. In the continent of nations and nationalism, they were the only reminder of the relativity of nationhood and of the outer limits of nationalism. They were the very danger against which nations had to constitute themselves’ (Bauman 1988c: 26–27). In European modernity they were identified as the group of strangers and, therefore, as the materialisation of the danger borne of ambivalence. Europe is understood by Bauman to be the home of attempts to classify the people of the world through national identity. But Jews were classified as a group that did not fit. They were classified as being external to any secure sense of nationhood, and therefore as a problem to be overcome. According to Bauman, it is because Jews were created as ambivalent by the ordering project of modernity that they became identified as a threat to order. In other words, one of the destinations of the ossification of human freedom that modernity represents was the gate to Auschwitz. Bauman’s connection of modernity and ordering projects meant that when he turned to the specific question of the hostility to Jews that ran through twentieth-century European history, he followed a less than obvious line of analysis. The obvious line, of course, is that the Holocaust version of hostility to Jews is simply the relatively recent expression of a long-standing tradition of anti-Semitism. Jews have been subjected to oppression and outrage because they are Jewish. Bauman rejects this line of argument, and develops an alternative that reflects the emphasis that he places on order and ordering. First, Bauman has argued that, ‘the notion of “anti-Semitism” . . . is too narrow to account fully for the phenomenon the notion intends to grasp’ (Bauman 1998d: 143). Here, Bauman is making the point that before Jews can be hated (the attitude that anti-Semitism stresses), they must first of all be classified as being different (indeed, as a they who are not us). Consequently, Bauman argues that before antiSemitism there must be allosemitism, a word that, ‘refers to the practice of setting the Jews apart as people radically different from all the others, needing separate concepts to describe and comprehend them and special treatment in all or most social intercourse’ (Bauman 1998d: 143). In itself, allosemitism does not lead to hatred. It merely leads to the conclusion that Jews are different. Second, Bauman rejects the argument that hatred towards Jews is a result of a resentment of their

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difference. Rather, he says that it is a product of protoephobia: ‘the apprehension and vexation related . . . to something or someone that does not fit the structure of the orderly world, does not fall easily into any of the established categories’. Jews did not fit and so their presence undermined, ‘the borderlines which ought to be kept watertight and undermine[d] the reassuringly monotonous, repetitive and predictable nature of the life-world’ (Bauman 1998d: 144). Third, Bauman pointed out that to collapse all hostility towards Jews into a category of ‘anti-Semitism’ is to oversimplify what are, in fact, historically different and perhaps even disconnected forms of antipathy. Certainly, Jews might long have been treated with contempt, but it has been a different contempt according to different social and cultural situations (Bauman 1998d: 144–145). The Holocaust was an attempt by the Nazis, operating in the specific social and historical context of post-Weimar Germany, to settle the distinctly and peculiarly modern issues of allosemitism and the protoephobia towards Jews. It might be said that the Holocaust was an attempt to tidy up what the imposition of nationally specific ordering projects constructed as an untidy and therefore dangerous world. The Nazis were trying to establish a kind of security through the annihilation of the other. In a sentence, Auschwitz was an instrumental rational, zweckrational, solution to the problems of ambivalence that modern ordering projects could not but generate. Auschwitz was a particularly stark instance of the end point of managerial utilitarianism.

The Holocaust and the inhumanity of organisation Bauman’s analysis of the Holocaust is represented most fully in Modernity and the Holocaust (Bauman 1989a). The book opens with a discussion of the startlingly simple observation that, hitherto, sociology has had little or nothing to say about the Holocaust, even though the discipline is practised according to the principle that it is focused on the contemporary world. Bauman observes that when the Holocaust is discussed it is marginalised in two ways: ‘There are two ways to belittle, misjudge, or shrug off the significance of the Holocaust for sociology as the theory of civilization, of modernity, of modern civilization’ (Bauman 1989a: 1). The first way is to approach the Holocaust as an incident in Jewish history that is, therefore, only

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relevant for Jews. The second way is to treat it as an aberration from the stately progress of modernity; to treat it as the terrible release of a barbarism and of not-yet-controlled natural passions that will, however, be managed and disciplined – civilised – in due course (in the sociological tradition this latter tendency is represented undoubtedly by the work of Norbert Elias). Sociology has done little to challenge either of these explanations, indeed it has done quite a lot to lend them substance, precisely because they justify the managerial argument that what needs to happen is that human action be controlled and made more and more predictable. There is an assumption that is shared by modernity and by a lot of sociology that the Holocaust is exactly what happens when the control and management is not good enough. As Bauman put it: ‘The nature and style of sociology has been attuned to the selfsame modern society it theorized and investigated; sociology has been engaged since its birth in a mimetic relationship with its object’ (Bauman 1989a: 29). As a result, any sociology of the Holocaust has to be critical and world opening even in relationship to sociology itself. The mimetic bond needs to be broken apart. The argument traces right back to Stanislaw Ossowski’s announcement of the obligation to think disobediently, and it means that any sociology of the Holocaust that Bauman might develop will also have to construct its own language, its own questions, its own way of going on. But of course that sociology would not be constructed out of nothing. Bauman might have doubted the insights that could be offered by conventional sociology, but he did not doubt that sociology could offer insights. He has always remained loyal to sociology because it offers a tradition, which ‘defines the fashion in which one seeks knowledge and understanding; respect for reality, self-control and self-criticism’ (Bauman 1987c: 1). Without loyalty to the tradition of sociology it is impossible to maintain the prospect of a sociological understanding and, by extension, it is also impossible to humanise the world. Sociology might have failed abysmally in the task of approaching the Holocaust; but that failure proves how much sociology needs to be rescued from its own ossification. When Bauman developed his sociology of the Holocaust, the aspect of the tradition of the discipline that came most sharply into focus was Weber’s analysis of rationality. He has said that Weber, ‘more than any other thinker set the agenda for our discussion of

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modern experience’ (Bauman 1993a: 5). Weber’s work enabled Bauman to achieve three objectives. First, it enabled him to develop a distinctively and consciously sociological understanding of a theme that had been previously ignored. Second, it enabled that analysis to stay rooted in a tradition without, however, ossifying it. Perhaps this is why references to Weber are pretty scarce in the Holocaust book; Bauman was wanting to use Weberian themes as part of a conversation and not simply restate the continued importance of classical texts; third, it offered a way of exploring the Holocaust that was entirely and fairly easily resonant with the presumptions of Bauman’s sociological work. The fundamental presumption which Weber and Bauman share is their commitment to a humanistic vision of human being in the world as restrained and restricted. This is not to say that Bauman’s work can be therefore classified as ‘Weberian’. It is simply to highlight a resonance with the sociological tradition. Perhaps Bauman’s relationship to Weber has been most ably summarised by Peter Beilharz: ‘much of Bauman’s work reads something like a dialogue with the ghost of Weber’ (Beilharz 2000: 172–173). By extension, it can also be proposed that much of Bauman’s work is also a dialogue with sociology itself. The substance of this particular dialogue is that whereas Weber’s analysis of the entrapment of human being leads to what has been called a ‘heroic sociology’ in which the aim is to try to maintain the semblance of humanity despite and in spite of the world (Shilling and Mellor 2001), Bauman’s sociology focuses on what amounts to the ossification of the human world in relation to humanity and it seeks to uncover from out of the darkness the chances for a revitalisation. For Bauman the Holocaust was possible precisely because of the ability of modernity ‘getting out of control and running wild’ (Bauman 1989a: 93), to uncouple human being from humanity. The controlling, designing and rationalising dreams that characterise modernity, ‘gave birth to institutions which serve the sole purpose of instrumentalizing human behaviour to such an extent that any aim may be pursued with efficiency and vigour, with or without ideological dedication or moral approval on the part of the pursuers’ (Bauman 1989a: 93). There is a tendency in studies of the Holocaust to attribute the perpetration of evil to personality traits in such a way that in the end the only explanation that can be reached is a tautology; evil people carry out evil acts. Bauman rejects this approach and instead takes up

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the discovery of Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience that, ‘inhumanity is a matter of social relationships. As the latter are rationalized and technically perfected, so is the capacity and the efficiency of the social production of inhumanity’ (Bauman 1989a: 154). Bauman goes on to argue that modernity is characterised by a bureaucratic system of authority in which the, ‘language of morality acquires a new vocabulary. It is filled with concepts like loyalty, duty, discipline – all pointing to superiors as the supreme object of moral concern and, simultaneously, the top moral authority’ (Bauman 1989a: 160). In these terms, bureaucracy leads to inhuman social relationships since it allows men and women to offload onto another the responsibility for their actions. Instead of attending to the possibility of an authority of moral conscience, men and women instead attend to the higher authority of the superior. This is the nub of what Milgram called the agentic state, and which Bauman defines as: ‘a condition in which he [that is, the actor] sees himself as carrying out another person’s wishes. Agentic state is the opposite of the state of autonomy’ (Bauman 1989a: 162). In the agentic state it does not matter if social actors agree or disagree, so long as they obey orders. Consequently, it is not just that men and women in the agentic state are prepared to play a part in inhuman deeds; the agentic state is itself inhuman because it denies humans the autonomy and freedom that they warrant. ‘The conscience of the actor tells him to perform well and prompts him to measure his own righteousness by the precision with which he obeys the organizational rules and his dedication to the task as defined by the superiors’ (Bauman 1989a: 160). In this bureaucratic system of authority there is no freedom, and therefore no humanity. But there is a high level of security. The actors in the system are emancipated from the humanity of responsibility and of having to decide for themselves what has to be done: ‘almost no actor ever has a chance to develop the “authorship” attitude towards the final outcome of the operation, since each actor is but an executor of a command and giver of another’. Bauman continued to say that the agentic state means that: ‘Between the idea which triggers the operation and its ultimate effect there is a long chain of performers, none of whom may be unambiguously pinpointed as a sufficient, decisive link between the design and its product’ (Bauman 1995: 196). Any semblance of moral responsibility for the ultimate end (for the wertrational outcome) was suspended in the utilitarianism

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and managerialism of the instrumental. It did not matter whether the actors agreed or disagreed. All that mattered was that they did their job to the best of their abilities, according to the commands of their superiors. They were enjoined simply to be efficient managers of instrumental rationality. (This was precisely the line of reasoning that allowed Adolf Eichmann to claim that actually he was a good man: Arendt 1977.) Moreover, the instrumental and utilitarian managers rarely had to face up to the human consequences of their actions. This was because of two qualities of bureaucratic systems. First, and as Weber and later Bauman powerfully point out, in a bureaucratic system no single individual has responsibility for the entire system, and neither does any individual role within the system constitute a perspective from which the totality can be seen. In itself, each individual act is morally neutral, just a shifting of the files (and the more efficiently and quickly the files are moved, the better). The Holocaust was a bureaucratic instrumental rational system in which, ‘most functionaries of the bureaucratic hierarchy may give commands without full knowledge of their effects . . . Usually, they only have an abstract, detached awareness of them; the kind of knowledge which is best expressed in statistics, which measure the results without passing any judgement’ (Bauman 1989a: 99). Or again: ‘each actor has but a specific, self-contained job to perform and produces an object with no written-in destination, no information on its future uses’ (Bauman 1995: 196). Second, and following on from this point, the bureaucratic system (and the Holocaust as a bureaucratic system), meant that the actors of the system never had to come to terms with the human consequences of what they were doing because: ‘no contribution seems to “determine” the final outcome of the operation, and most retain but a tenuous logical link with the ultimate effect – a link which the participants may in good conscience claim to be visible only in retrospect’ (Bauman 1995: 196). All of this points to an effacement of humanity that Bauman has called adiaphorization. Bauman defines adiaphorization as social action that is morally indifferent. He argues that organisations, such as instrumentally rational bureaucracies, make action morally indifferent (that is, neither good nor bad and actually beyond the meaningfulness of those terms), in three ways. First, there is a stretching of the distance between the action and its consequences for men and women. This stretching can

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be spatial (the bureaucrat in Berlin plays a part in causing the death of people in Poland), and it can also be temporal (such that an action performed today might only have an effect weeks or months further down the line). Adiaphorization means, ‘creating what may be called a social and psychological, rather than a merely physical and optical, distance between actors and the targets of their actions’ (Bauman 1995: 195). Second adiaphorization means the removal of certain classified groups from the spheres of moral concern and competence. For example, a trite observation that is sometimes made about the Nazis is that they were kind to dogs. In Bauman’s terms, this is easy to explain since dogs were classified as things of the world in relation to whom humans have certain moral responsibilities, whereas Jews were classified as a threat to order (and therefore to security) that consequently needed to be resolved. Jews were classified into ambivalence and dogs were not. By this argument, Jews simply were not morally relevant except in so far as their presence was classified as problematic. Third, instrumental rational, utilitarian, action is morally indifferent all the time that the objects of that action (and in the case of the Holocaust those objects of action were the victims), are treated not as complete human beings but, instead, as ‘aggregates of functionally specific traits, held separate so that . . . the task set for each action can be free from moral evaluation’. Bauman pulls these aspects of adiaphorization together in order to reach the conclusion that: ‘organization does not promote immoral behaviour; it does not sponsor evil, as some detractors would hasten to charge, yet it does not promote good either, despite its own self-promotion’ (Bauman 1991b: 144). More dully, and yet much more inhumanly, organisation promotes no moral response whatsoever; it promotes a moral vacuum, in which the overriding concern is to do the job well. In a sentence then, the Holocaust could be prosecuted by completely ordinary men and women (and not just by the psychotic), because it was an instrumental system of managerial utilitarianism in which each individual was cast into an agentic state and in which every action was morally neutral except in so far as it was measured by superior orders, and was certainly without any consequences for complete human beings. ‘Men and women have been given the opportunity to commit inhuman deeds without feeling in the least inhuman themselves’ (Bauman 1995: 197). Rationality and utilitarianism offered a refuge from humanity. However, Bauman’s analysis

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points to the conclusion that perhaps the greatest tragedy of the Holocaust was that it was exactly the victim’s own reliance on the structures of predictability that are implied by instrumental rationality that led them straight into the gas chambers. The victims died in such massive numbers because they too took modernity at its word. The victims too were utilitarian, and that was part of the reason why they went to their deaths. Bauman believes that the actions of the victims in the face of Nazi persecution were guided by ‘the rationally interpreted purpose of survival’ (Bauman 1989a: 122). The problem was that the rules of the game of survival were stacked against them, and had already been thought through by the persecutors. In 1971 Bauman had written that: ‘the instrumentality of power is embodied in the phenomenon of the “bargaining position”, which every member of an organization, were he acting “rationally”, would try to achieve or to defend’. In practical terms: ‘If my response cannot change substantially the intended after-effects of the others’ action, my bargaining position is weak. I enjoy a strong bargaining position if my responses cannot be predicted in full by the others’ (Bauman 1971c: 25). The victims of the Holocaust were cast into a situation in which their bargaining position was completely non-existent. The Holocaust was effective because it forced its victims to make rational choices and it made sure that their actions could be predicted in advance by powers that needed never to change their own plans. The Holocaust enabled the victims to co-operate in their own murder, even as it seemed to offer rational choices that pointed to a way out: ‘Incorporated in the overall power structure, given an extended set of tasks and functions within it, the doomed population had apparently a range of options to choose from’ (Bauman 1989a: 122). Jews were given responsibility for getting themselves to the ghetto, they were given the responsibility to organise relief operations in the ghetto and to ensure that the population was registered and policed. All the time the victims were encouraged to make instrumentally utilitarian choices in order to make their lives slightly less insecure in the context of the threats that otherwise faced them. ‘At all stages of the Holocaust . . . the victims were confronted with a choice . . . They could not choose between good and bad situations, but they could at least choose between greater and lesser evil’ (Bauman 1989a: 130). The victims were forced to play a particularly awful game of rationality,

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but a game in which the Nazis held all the best cards. According to Bauman: ‘The game in which the Jews were forced by the Nazis to participate was one of death and survival, and thus rational action in their case could be only aimed at, and measured by, the increase in the chances of escaping destruction, or of limiting the scale of destruction.’ This was a game in which all human possibilities were closed down and in which the sole aim became an attempt to increase the predictability of survival: ‘The world of values was reduced to one – remaining alive’ (Bauman 1989a: 129). As a result, the individual victims were forced by their own rationality into a situation in which their own death could only be deferred all the time they could make sure that someone else was more vulnerable: ‘they could divert some blows from themselves by stressing, and manifesting, their entitlement to an exemption or to a special treatment’ (Bauman 1989a: 130). The victims were forced to make a rational choice for their own survival potentially at the expense of any and every other. For Bauman then, the conclusion to be reached from opening this window of the Holocaust is extraordinarily stark: ‘Rational defence of one’s survival called for non-resistance to the other’s destruction. This rationality pitched the sufferers against each other and obliterated their joint humanity . . . Having reduced human life to the calculus of survival, this rationality robbed human life of its humanity’ (Bauman 1988d: 296). Rationality is lethal to moral and material humanity alike. And so, the argument returns to the thesis that is explicit in Bauman’s image of man: to be human is to be irrational, to attend to the non-utilitarian and the unmanageable and unpredictable.

Conclusion Yet according to Bauman it is exactly this ‘calculus of survival’ that is stressed in the cultural ossification of the Holocaust. Cultural productions like Spielberg’s now canonical film Schindler’s List at once represent and attenuate a situation in which there has been an, ‘elevation of survival to the rank of the supreme, perhaps the only value’ (Bauman 2000b: 8). But Bauman objects that this drastically instrumental and utilitarian reduction of the Holocaust itself plays no small part in the evacuation of humanity from the event, and from the hesitant understanding of it. Bauman objects to this cultural

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ossification which contends that, ‘the sole stake of that most inhuman among human tragedies was to remain alive – while the humanity of life, and particularly its dignity and ethical value, was at best of secondary importance and above all of no consequence and was never allowed to interfere with the principal goal’ (Bauman 2000b: 8). For Bauman survival is not the highest value; humanity is. The cultural ossification of the Holocaust as a question of survival thus mirrors the very instrumental rationality that made the Holocaust possible. Bauman’s discussion of the Holocaust manages to find a way of prising apart, opening up, that mirror reflection. His is a distinctly humanistic critique of the Holocaust that understands it as a crystallisation of what the modern project of the attempt to construct a secure and ordered world can lead to when it can be carried out without let or hindrance. His conclusion is clear; if this is what the rational world of instrumentality, utilitarianism and management can lead to, then it is clear that ‘the humanity of life, and particularly its dignity and ethical value’ consists in something quite different. To be human is to stand against what is rationally predictable and perhaps even sensible. And because the annals of the Holocaust contain stories about men and women who did not put the utilitarianism of their own survival above all other considerations, people like those who sheltered the young Janina Bauman, it is possible, even here, to find some resources for hope. From out of the Holocaust it is possible to glimpse an ethic of humanity and of human being in the world. But that ethic would turn out to be postmodern.

6 Postmodernity: Ethical Incentive, Indifferent World

In the end, Modernity and the Holocaust is a very cautiously hopeful book. The bulk of the text is an analysis of the relative ease with which modern rationality was able to turn men and women into perpetrators of evil who could nevertheless claim with some truthfulness that they were innocent. But the either/or characters of victims and perpetrators are not the only figures in the story of the Holocaust. Neither is the story complete if the figure of the bystander is allowed to walk onto the stage. No, the story contains another set of characters, whose story is rather less often told: the human beings who refused complicity or predictability and who, instead, struggled to uphold a measure of dignity by making choices that were precisely opposite to those which the powers desired and sought to predetermine. They show that: ‘The value, the most precious of human values, the sine qua non attribute of humanity, is a life of dignity; not survival at all costs’ (Bauman 2003a: 84). It was because they were unpredictable and unmanageable, because they refused to play the game of rational calculation, that they were human beings, and retained their humanity even in the midst of hell, although invariably at the price of their own lives. They were human because they realised that they were free, and through freedom they discovered that they were human: ‘freedom . . . is given to us along with our humanity, and is the foundation of that humanity; it gives uniqueness to our very existence’ (Kolakowski 1999: 98). Modernity and the Holocaust is hopeful because it recalls that, ‘Some ordinary people, normally law-abiding, unassuming, non-rebellious 131

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and unadventurous, stood up to those in power and, oblivious to the consequences, gave priority to their own conscience’ (Bauman 1989a: 168). Their consciences told them that the victims were not to be loathed and repudiated because of their supposedly irredeemable ambivalence, but were, instead, to be cared for because of the suffering that they were being caused to experience. Conscience told them that their own preservation was not the only factor to consider, and that some things are more important than living. They moved from survival to morality: ‘This is a passage that renders morality a part, perhaps a conditio sine qua non, of survival. With that ingredient, survival of a human becomes the survival of humanity in the human’ (Bauman 2003a: 78). It is this figure of the human being that allows Bauman to recover hope for humanity from out of the Holocaust. These men and women who struggled to engage in the praxis of human being show that what seems to be the moral fate of modernity is in fact a choice. Admittedly, the terms of the choice can be stacked entirely in the favour of one outcome, but it is still a choice and not something that has to be done. The Holocaust system worked because it demanded that everyone who was sucked into its orbit consider his or her actions in terms of the extent to which they would assist in the achievement of the utilitarian goal of self-preservation. That became the over-riding consideration. But some people showed that, ‘putting self-preservation above moral duty is in no way predetermined, inevitable and inescapable. One can be pressed to do it, but one cannot be forced to do it . . . it can be resisted’ (Bauman 1989a: 207). Through the recovery of the example of those who did not put their self-preservation over and above each and any other consideration, it is possible to turn the tables on modernity. In the lecture that Bauman gave when the Holocaust book was awarded the 1990 Amalfi European Prize for Sociology and Social Science, he said that there had been a separation of ‘morality and utility’ that ‘lies at the foundation of our civilization’s most spectacular successes and most terrifying crimes’. Bauman said that only the reunification of morality and utility might enable the world, ‘to come to terms with its own awesome powers’ (Bauman 1991b: 138). But actually Modernity and the Holocaust is saying something much more radical than that. The book is not calling for any kind of reunification of that which has become separated. It is, instead, a celebration of the victory of morality over utility. Even as the book is an analysis of modernity taken to its

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terminal extreme, it calls the bluff of the dominance of utility and deals the trump card of morality. And the way that the book ends on the note of hesitant celebration rather implies that, for Bauman, this is the lesson to be learnt from the Holocaust; utility is not inevitable and the morality of distinctly and dignified human being can be chosen instead. (The Amalfi Prize was not the only award given to Modernity and the Holocaust; in 1998 Bauman was awarded the Adorno Prize for Sociology by the City of Frankfurt in recognition of the book.) What Bauman achieves in Modernity and the Holocaust is a recovery of undischarged possibility. But this raises the question of why the possibility of human being, why the possibility of the choice of morality over self-preservation, has indeed remained undischarged. One reason is implicit to the possibility. To put the matter at its most brutal, people who put morality above the utility of self-preservation tend not to live to tell their tales. Bauman mentions the other reason. He remarks that the Holocaust is no longer ‘a private property (if it ever was one)’ (Bauman 1989a: 206). Going beyond Bauman’s own argument, it is clear that the Holocaust has floated free of its historical and personal moorings and become a cultural property that is commemorated in a variety of ways such as museums, state-sponsored memorial days, personal experiences become cultural artefacts and, most ambiguously of all, cinema. The problem is that the more that these commemorations are rooted in representations rather than experience, the more they are testaments to self-preservation. Put another way, and at the risk of sounding immensely crass, it might be said that the culturalisation of the Holocaust extends the logic of the Holocaust itself. Self-preservation becomes the dominant message and once again utility wins out over morality. The possibility of human being remains to be discharged because of the dominant message that: ‘Life is about survival . . . Surviving – staying alive – is a value apparently unscathed and untarnished by the inhumanity of a life dedicated to survival. It is worth pursuing for its own sake, however high are the costs paid by the defeated and however deeply and beyond repair this may deprave and degrade the victors’ (Bauman 2003a: 85). It is because of the dominance of this message that the stories of those who put morality above utility are forgotten or turned into somewhat sentimental tales of idiosyncrasy. After all, what could be more peculiar than freely to give one’s life regardless

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of the usefulness of that giving? It is precisely the utilitarian common sense behind that question that Bauman resists. What Bauman seeks to recover is the undischarged possibility that it might well be more important to be a human than merely to survive come what may. The problem is that when Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust recovered this undischarged possibility of the victory of morality over utility, it did so in a context that was remarkably different to that of what might be called the ‘terminal modernity’ of the Holocaust. The changing context is reflected in the fact that possibilities that were realised in the Holocaust study were not discharged in a book of historical sociology nor, for that matter, in an expansion of the analysis of modern processes. Instead, and as Peter Beilharz has noted, ‘the Holocaust book leads directly into ethics; Postmodern Ethics . . . is the conclusion to Modernity and the Holocaust ’ (Beilharz 2000: 122). As a result, recovery of resistance to modern actuality discharged into Bauman’s sociology of postmodernity. Those who struggled to embrace human being were gesturing beyond modernity. This is the basis of the extraordinary tension that runs through Bauman’s work on postmodernity. Indeed, it is likely that it was precisely the irreconcilability of the tension that caused him to write so much and so quickly about it. One series of questions led to another, and then to another again. In a nutshell, the tension is that postmodernity is aporetic. An aporia is, ‘a contradiction that cannot be overcome, one that results in a conflict that cannot be resolved’ (Bauman 1993a: 8). The postmodern ethics towards which the Holocaust book gestures implies the possibility of living forwards, from anathematisation of the Other on the basis of ambivalence, through toleration to solidarity. Postmodern ethics is an incentive. Yet the postmodern condition is dominated by tendencies towards the avoidance and hiding away of that very possibility. This chapter uses that aporia to provide the narrative structure of a discussion of Bauman’s work on postmodernity. However, it is important to be aware that even more than the other chapters in this book, this chapter offers one way of discussing Bauman’s work. Given the quantity of his writing on postmodernity, other and very different discussions are possible (see, for example, Smith 1999). In the first section of the chapter, attention will be paid to the reasons why Bauman developed a concern with postmodernity. Second, the chapter

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examines Bauman’s attempt to discharge the possibility of a utopian ethics. Third, it is important to remember that Bauman’s work is sociological and, therefore, it deals with the actuality in which men and women engage in praxis rather than with abstractions. Here then the focus of attention is on Bauman’s analysis of the impact of postmodern actuality on the possibility that the postmodern ethics discharges. In conclusion, the chapter emphasises Bauman’s continued commitment to sociology.

The emergence of postmodernity Bauman has explained that he took up discussion about ‘postmodernity’ because the word made it possible for him both to interpret the changing world and address the place of sociology in it. ‘Since it engaged both the changing world and its reflection in human experience, it allowed a focus on . . . the nature of strategies which could usefully be pursued in sociological thought’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 71). By the mid-1980s at least two things had become clear, and both had an impact upon the pursuit of sociology. First, the ossification of actually existing socialism into a social system approaching virtually the diametric opposite of its proclaimed ideals, confirmed the lesson of the Holocaust that the modern confidence in perfectibility was either wrong or utterly inhuman in its day-to-day consequences. Second, the distinctly modern principle that the intellectuals could legislate over the rest of humanity on account of their privileged relationship to culture had become completely anachronistic in Western social systems where culture had been commodified and where value had been reduced to money (Bauman 1987d. See also Bauman 2002d). Bauman started to talk about postmodernity because it appeared to offer a way in which sociology could engage in a conversation with men and women without, however, falling into the trap of its own ossification. Something else was happening in the 1980s that required a rethinking of the pursuit and purpose of sociology. Bauman has suggested that it was becoming clear that the project of modernity was deliberately being abandoned. Admittedly, the cases of actually existing socialism and the Holocaust are extraordinarily stark expressions of modernity (it might be said that they are ideal typical), but they do make it clear that modernity required and exploited the

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power of the state. The intellectuals in the legislative mode, validated by their erstwhile possession of the secrets of human perfectibility, knew what had to be done, and it was the state that possessed the ability to do it. However in the 1980s, the dominance of free-market neo-liberalism led to, ‘the state shedding, one after another, its ambitions of introducing the “perfect society by design”; of the state ceding its function to the admittedly chaotic, un- or underregulated “blind” forces of competition’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 73). The project of human perfectibility was replaced with a laissez-faire faith in the market to which it was announced that ‘there is no alternative’. In this situation, it became incumbent upon the critical sociologist to develop the means by which new personal troubles could be connected to the new public issues that were emerging. That is precisely why Bauman started to talk about postmodernity. He took the word from architecture and specifically from Charles Jencks’ work (Bauman and Tester forthcoming). According to Bauman it was in architecture that it was first possible to see the emergence of a conscious attempt to move away from modern practice. Whereas modern architecture upheld a principle of fitness for purpose (with the purpose being rationally known and founded in reason), postmodernism signified a, ‘rebellion against functionalist, scientifically grounded, rational architecture’ (Bauman 1987a: 118). This was a sensibility that resonated with attitudes that were emerging elsewhere. Architecture perhaps got there first because it, ‘was the very epitome of, simultaneously, the modern pilgrimage to finitude and the war of attrition which modernity waged against contingency’ (Bauman and Tester forthcoming). For example, as soon as the concept of postmodernity was taken up in art, it clarified a sensibility of, ‘the end of the exploration of the truth of the human world or human experience, the end of the political or missionary ambitions of art’ (Bauman 1987a: 118). Bauman says that postmodernism moved beyond these disciplinary fields once it was realised that it opened up avenues of analysis and understanding that orthodoxy could not even glimpse. ‘It has opened the eyes of intellectual observers to those features shared by the transformations in contemporary arts and the fascinating shifts of attention, anti-traditionalist rebellion, and strikingly heretical new paradigms competing for domination in philosophy and the philosophically informed social sciences’ (Bauman 1987a: 118). What they all shared was a suspicion of the modern confidence

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that there was a reason of perfectibility that could and ought to be the standard of the utilitarian management of human affairs. Or, as Bauman put it, postmodernity was a way of beginning to understand, ‘that despite modern ambitions the war against human waywardness and historical contingency is unwinnable, that the resistance of human modality to logic and rule is here to stay, and that the modern crusade against ambivalence and the “messiness” of human reality only multiplies the targets it aims to destroy’ (Bauman and Tester forthcoming). When Bauman took up discussion about the postmodern, inevitably he shifted the context of the word. He took the aesthetics of postmodernism and turned it, instead, into an inspiration and component 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’ (Bauman 1987a: 119). The main point of distinction and difference between this ‘new meta-cultural stance’ and the modern one is that the former does not share, ‘modernity’s self-confidence; its conviction of its own superiority over alternative forms of life . . . and its belief that its pragmatic advantage over pre-modern societies and cultures . . . can be shown to have objective, absolute foundations and universal validity’. According to Bauman: ‘From the post-modern perspective the episode of modernity appears to have been, more than anything else, the era of certainty’ (Bauman 1987a: 119). The certainty was absolutely central to both actually existing socialism and the prosecution of the Holocaust. These rational systems were quite confident that what they were doing was right and that the pursuit of the right both legitimatised and made necessary the destruction of anyone and anything that got in the way. Actually existing socialism and the Holocaust consequently constitute an empirical validation of Bauman’s argument that: ‘At the totalitarian extreme, the present and its residents were offered all the importance of the manure . . . which, as is the way of all manure, had to decompose so that new life might be born’ (Bauman 1992b: 163). The roots of the confidence were located in the modern assumptions of universality and foundation. It was upon their basis that the legislators of modernity were able to identify the ‘manure’ and thereafter manage it according to either wert- or zweck-rational utilitarianism.

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Bauman argues that modernity ‘seems never to have entertained . . . doubts as to the universal grounding of its status’ (Bauman 1987a: 120). There were two sides to this modern universality. First, it involved the unchallenged rule of one set of laws over a given territory. Initially this meant the rule of a single system of law over a local territory but with the onset of Empire in the nineteenth century, along with its associated ideology of the civilising mission, it meant that all social and cultural life could be in principle judged according to a common standard. Second, universality was defined as, ‘that feature of ethical prescriptions which compelled every human creature, just for the fact of being a human creature, to recognize it as right and thus to accept it as obligatory’ (Bauman 1993a: 8). Universality consequently implied the delegitimation of any practices or modes of life that were not compatible with the principles of human being that were imposed by the intellectuals in legislative mode and exported from Europe and its satellites. The universal was universal precisely because space was denied to anything else. According to Bauman, the denial was effective because of the foundations that underpinned modernity: ‘foundations stood for the coercive powers of the state that rendered obedience to the rules a sensible expectation; the rule was “well founded” in as far as it enjoyed the support of such powers, and the foundation was strengthened with the effectiveness of the support’ (Bauman 1993a: 8–9). Just behind modernity’s confident face lurked the threat of violence and the dominance of survival. Indeed, modernity was confident because it had at its disposal the most effective ways of getting rid of those who could not be presumed to be obedient. It could rely on the pincer of armed force and common-sense utilitarianism. But this actuality was hidden by the promise that what would be achieved would be nothing less than, ‘a just society, the reason-guided society, a setting for secure and happy humanity’. This would be, ‘a “perfect” society, in the sense that no further change would be possible or required to improve it’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 73). Postmodernity is disbelief in the modern confidence or, as Bauman put it: ‘Postmodernity . . . is modernity without illusions’, where the ‘illusions’ all revolve around the ideal and the practice that a perfect human world is possible and that the evident lack of perfection of the found world is a temporary affair that can be remedied (Bauman 1993a: 32). Postmodernity, then, is the awareness that the modern

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confidence was either ill-founded or had unforeseen consequences that completely undermined the project. The, ‘ “project of modernity is not “unfinished”, but unfinishable, and . . . this “unfinishability” is the essence of the modern era’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 75). As soon as it is appreciated that the condition of the perfect society populated by perfect humans can never be achieved, all confidence in modern claims to universality and foundation collapses. Bauman outlines some of the illusions that underpinned confidence: ‘It was evident to everybody except the blind and ignorant, that the West was superior to the East, white to black, civilized to crude, cultured to uneducated, sane to insane’ and so on (Bauman 1987a: 120). But all of this was only ‘self-evident’ all the time that the assumptions upon which it relied were tacit, all the time the denigrated part of each of those binary oppositions was deprived of the power to speak, either by force of arms or by the confidence that whatever they said could be taken to be a sign of their lack of perfection, possibly their inability to be perfected and, therefore, a sign that the project needed to go on. However: ‘All of these “evidencies” are now gone. Not a single one remains unchallenged’ (Bauman 1987a: 120). Consequently, postmodernity means living with the awareness of contingency. Where modernity ‘problematized contingency as an enemy and order as a task’ (Bauman 1992a: xi) postmodernity implies, ‘a life in the presence of an unlimited quantity of competing forms of life, unable to prove their claims to be grounded in anything more solid and binding than their own historically shaped conventions’ (Bauman 1987a: 120). Postmodernity means living in the full knowledge that the human world is only orderly and predictable to the extent that human being in the world has been crushed and forgotten, and that no form of life has any greater universalising or foundational legitimacy than any other. Postmodernity is the world without unchallenged ‘evidencies’. According to Bauman, this leads to the, ‘most conspicuous features of the postmodern condition: institutionalized pluralism, variety, contingency and ambivalence’ (Bauman 1992a: 187). Postmodernity signifies the recovery of ambivalence from the dustbin into which modern practice had tried to consign it. Bauman has said that postmodernity, ‘is first and foremost an acceptance of ineradicable plurality of the world; plurality which is not a temporary station on the road to the not-yet-attained perfection . . . a station sooner or

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later to be left behind – but the constitutive quality of existence’ (Bauman 1991a: 98). Clearly, Bauman had never accepted the modern condemnation of ambivalence. It is not too far-fetched to suggest that the ‘image of man’ that runs through his sociological work is more or less ambivalence incarnate. Meanwhile the substantive focus on the impact for men and women of the project of the annihilation of ambivalence revealed the emptiness and evil at the heart of modernity. Bauman’s work seeks to recover ambivalence from the conceit of modernity that it is only a terrible fate from which there is no chance of escape. Bauman seeks to turn this condemnation of ambivalence back on itself in order to show that it can be transformed through an act of existential commitment, and with that transformation men and women might begin to see through the mystifications of power and the dull naturalisations of common sense. That ‘might’ is much more than wishful thinking. For Bauman, its possibility is expressed in the example of Jewish writers like Simmel and Kafka who turned their expulsion to the margins of social life into the opportunity to see what the orderly insiders could not (Bauman 1991a). The recovery of ambivalence leads to the realisation that human being and humanity consist in much more than utilitarianism and asking questions motivated by self-interest. Once again, the Holocaust rescuers come into focus, since they point to the way out of modernity. Ambivalence can be transformed into a destiny and, with that transformation, there emerges the possibility that the lives of men and women will approximate much more closely with the messiness – and yet also the world opening potential – of human being. The recovery of ambivalence is the victory of morality over utility.

Utopian ethics ‘What is it that binds us when all that is solid has melted into air?’ (Beilharz 2000: 127). That question cuts to the heart of the ethical situation that typifies postmodernity. But Bauman would undoubtedly propose that traces of modernity can be found in the question, and that if they are not revealed and rejected then it can never be answered in anything other than a negative way. If the traces of modernity are not jettisoned then postmodernity will be seen as a condition of ethical crisis, as a diseased and corrupted modernity,

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rather than as a distinctive social system in its own right (Bauman 1992a: 188; Bauman 1999a: 140–153). What the question tends to assume, or at least the impression that it creates for the reader, is that ‘what it is that binds’ is external to the ‘us’ who are bound. This reflects a very modern view of the potential of men and women since it implies that humanity is only bound together by what is imposed upon it, from outside. The bonds are not at all identified as being immanent within human being in the world. This modern sensibility is clearly expressed in, ‘Durkheim’s identification of asocial behaviour with the weakening of collective consensus’ (Bauman 1991a: 251), as well as in the modern conflation of ethics with the Law, and the Law with power-assisted universality. These assumptions express a confidence in what is imposed upon human being in order to make it obedient, routinised, predictable, and they suggest absolutely no confidence in human being itself. However, the recovery of ambivalence from its modern denigration and anathematisation means that these assumptions about human being cannot be taken for granted. And in the context of the possibilities that open up as soon as the modern common sense is critically undermined, Bauman seizes upon an alternative conception of what it is that binds us all together. For Bauman, what binds us is immanent within human being and ambivalence. Without externally imposed universalities and foundations we are left alone with our consciences to make choices in the context of the presence of the Other. This is the possibility that Bauman recovers from out of the wreckage of modernity. And it is a recovery rather than an invention. Bauman argues that Western culture contains two aetiological myths about the foundations of ethics. One of the myths runs through modernity. It reflects the Biblical story of Moses coming down from the mount with God’s Laws inscribed on the tablets of stone. Within the modern variation of this myth it is presumed that: ‘to be moral is to follow strictly the command – to obey unconditionally and never to deviate from the straight path, in deed or in thought’ (Bauman 1998e: 13). The second myth was forgotten during the march of modernity and, with the halt of that march, once again it has come to light. It proposes something quite contrary to the dominant temper of modernity. According to this second myth, which draws on the story of the dilemmas of Adam and Eve after their expulsion from Eden, morality consists in ambivalence

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and uncertainty rather than obedience to an externally imposed Law: ‘Humans cast in that predicament were moral because they lived through situations without obvious and unambiguously good choice . . . and because they could not or dared not hope that the goodness of what they had done would ever be proved or approved beyond reasonable doubt, so that certainty could take over where rampant uncertainty now runs the show’ (Bauman 1998e: 14–15). Modernity with its confidence in the ethical Law allowed for certainty and the knowledge that what ought to have been done had been done, whereas postmodernity means living without that confidence. It means having to make choices with no guide other than the incomplete knowledge that the chooser possesses in the present. Postmodernity means having to decide what to do without ever being able to know whether or not the good decision had been made. Consequently, postmodernity implies an ethical situation in which men and women can never be confident and can never be sure that they have done enough: ‘The moral self moves, feels and acts in the context of ambivalence and is shot through with uncertainty . . . Seldom may moral acts bring complete satisfaction’ (Bauman 1993a: 11–12). Bauman’s distinction between modern ethics as Law and confidence, and postmodern ethics as choice between good and evil and uncertainty, can be clarified through the prism of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s film, Three Colours: Red. Putting it extremely simply, this complex film is about the relationship between a young woman, Valentine Dussaut, and a retired judge, Joseph Kern. The two come together when Valentine’s car hits the judge’s dog, which has run into the street. Joseph Kern discharges a duty when he reimburses Valentine for the cost she incurred taking the dog to a vet. Meanwhile Valentine Dussaut practises relationships of care towards the dog that are based upon the demand that is made by the dog that she redeems its suffering. The demand can never be satisfied, in so far as the demand to care becomes translated into love and companionship. Their different attitudes towards the dog illustrate the differences between modern and postmodern ethics. The retired judge can be interpreted as an expression of the ethical legislation of modernity (judges impose a Law that commands obedience), but he is given a postmodern twist. Kern has retired from the judiciary because he has come to believe that the judgement of others is vanity. He has lost confidence in the

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Law, but can imagine no alternative other than to withdraw from social life because all that can now be seen is the veniality of human life. Kern is a modern legislator having a postmodern crisis of confidence. Meanwhile, Valentine is presented as an expression of love and compassion that breathes freshness and life into stultified lives and relationships. (In the film the phrase ‘the freshness of life’ has a considerable number of meanings, all of which point to a disturbance of routine and predictability; Andrew 1998: 89.) Valentine seeks to engage with others on the basis of what her conscience tells her is ‘good’, but she is choosing without external guidance and can never feel that she has done enough, and neither can she allow herself a moment’s rest. Since no Law guides Valentine, she can never stop trying to do ‘good’. In short, Valentine is struggling to practice what Bauman has called ‘morality without ethics’ (Bauman 1995). This phrase is a key to unlocking Bauman’s case for postmodern ethics. And it is a key that is worth using because of a confusion that sometimes creeps into Bauman’s discussion. The cause of the confusion is his tendency to use the word ‘ethics’ in two quite different ways, dependent upon whether he is talking about modern or postmodern ethics. Modernity stresses ethics as the systematic code of Law that is imposed upon men and women from outside. Modern ethics are understood by Bauman to be about the project of perfectibility and, therefore, they also involve a forgetting, if not in fact destruction, of the ambivalences of human being in the world. But when Bauman talks about postmodern ethics, the meaning of the word completely shifts. In the context of postmodernity, ethics reflect the dimension of responsibility that is intrinsic to human being. Postmodern ethics are a recovery. They are like the character of Valentine Dussaut revitalising what modern pretension has stifled. Modernity then is ethics without morality (the zealots of actually existing socialism and the Holocaust were ethical according to the Laws which they were compelled to obey, but most certainly they were not at all moral), while postmodernity is morality without ethics (the Law in which it was once possible to have confidence because of its universality and foundation has been revealed to be a principle of the oppression of humanity that is based on nothing more than arrogance and violence). As Bauman put it when talking in the terms of his discussion of postmodernity: ‘Morality does not need codes or rules, reason or knowledge, argument or conviction’ (Bauman 2001b: 175).

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Bauman speculated that the emergence of this situation is nothing to bewail since: ‘it may well be that the power-assisted ethical law, far from being the solid frame which protected . . . moral standards from falling apart, was the stiff cage that prevented those standards from stretching to their true size’. The ‘true size’ is, ‘that of guiding and sustaining inter-human togetherness’ (Bauman 1995: 36–37). ‘Inter-human togetherness’ is precisely the context of ambivalence that modernity tried to subordinate to utilitarian managerial calculations of efficiency. But since postmodernity means the collapse of confidence, the true meaning of ‘inter-human togetherness’ can be recovered. For Bauman, ‘inter-human togetherness’ is sustained by the freedom of ethical responsibility. And it is this togetherness without externally imposed ethical Law that ‘binds us’ when all the solids of modernity have melted into air. This was the possibility discharged by Modernity and the Holocaust. Since modernity was a condition that was ethical (in the sense of ethics being identical with Law) but most certainly not moral, Bauman concludes that: ‘Moral behaviour is conceivable only in the context of coexistence, of “being with others”, that is, a social context.’ This is a position that sits well with Bauman’s ‘image of man’ because he is arguing that ‘being with others’ is not the product of external imposition and management. Rather, Bauman is saying that this ‘inter-human togetherness’ is something in which humans freely participate by virtue of their sociability. As a result, morality ‘does not owe its appearance to the presence of supra-individual agencies of training and enforcement, that is, of a societal context’ (Bauman 1989a: 179). In other words, morality is social but pre-societal. The subtlety of this distinction can easily get lost. Bauman is saying that morality has its roots in the social, in ‘inter-human togetherness’, but he denies that it has anything to do with the ‘societal’, where the societal is identified with external agencies and institutions that seek to manage and routinise togetherness. Modernity was a project of the establishment of the dominance of the societal over the social, whereas postmodernity is the possibility of the recovery of the social from out of the wreckage of the societal. As such, when Bauman says – as he sometimes does – that morality is ‘pre-social’, two things are happening. First, Bauman is being guilty of a terminological slippage. Despite the impression that his terminology might sometimes create, Bauman does not believe that morality is pre-social; he believes that

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it is pre-societal. Second, he is not referring to some state of nature that has been lost and to which humanity ought to return (Bauman and Tester 2001: 43). Instead, his point is that moral conscience and moral praxis are rooted in relationships of togetherness that ontologically and epistemologically precede societal intervention and manipulation. Morality is not rooted in compulsion; it is a sign of freedom and, therefore, it is a mark of humanity and a responsibility as opposed to a duty. Bauman bolstered his position through the use of the work of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. According to Levinas, responsibility is the essence of human togetherness. As Bauman puts it: ‘to Levinas, “being with others”, that most primary and irremovable attribute of human existence, means first and foremost responsibility . . . My responsibility is the one and only form in which the other exists for me’ (Bauman 1989a: 182). If human existence is impossible without human togetherness, then I have a responsibility towards the Other; I have a responsibility to care for her since, without that care there can be no togetherness and without togetherness there can be no humanity. Moreover, this responsibility implies an opening up of infinite possibility in relation to societal utilitarianism: ‘most emphatically, my responsibility is unconditional. It does not depend on prior knowledge of the qualities of its object; it precedes such knowledge’. Bauman continues: ‘It does not depend on an interested intention stretched towards the object; it precedes such intention. Neither knowledge nor intention make for the proximity of the other, for the specifically human mode of togetherness’ (Bauman 1989a: 182). For Bauman it is precisely this possibility of the togetherness of proximity, a proximity that is established through responsibility, and that can only be distorted or destroyed by external impositions, that is discharged by postmodern ethics: ‘Responsibility, this building block of all moral behaviour, arises out of the proximity of the other. Proximity means responsibility, and responsibility is proximity’ (Bauman 1989a: 184). Proximity is represented in the recognition of the Other as a face. As Alain Finkielkraut has put the matter: ‘When I encounter the other man face to face . . . his face lays claim to me. When mediation ceases to temper our relation, when his role, status, or the particular traits that delimit him no longer protect me from his presence, when he reveals himself to me point blank, the Other controls me with his

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weakness, immediately turning me into his debtor’ (Finkielkraut 1997: 115). The kinds of identities that modernity sought to establish through classification are rejected and instead infinity opens up; the Other is no longer ‘delimited’ and neither is our togetherness, and because the Other is not ‘delimited’, then neither can she be taken to be identical with me (since to say that the Other is identical to me is, precisely, to delimit her). It is only with the acceptance and nurturing of the Other as a face that is always and necessarily distinct from myself that possibility might be opened in relationships: ‘When the Other is incorporated, thought repeats its own certainties ad nauseam and becomes . . . a threat to life’ (Finkielkraut 1997: 59). Where the Other is not incorporated into the classifications that have become common sense, praxis opens up possibility. Praxis becomes oriented towards the novum. For Bauman, being for the Other is always disinterested. Being for the Other is, ‘Not the interested concern, zestful or reluctant readiness to serve for the sake of future rewards or gains in self-respect, but a concern with the Other for the Other’s benefit’ (Bauman 1992b: 40). The primacy of being for the Other is deduced from an exercise in bracketing: ‘Given the ambiguous impact of the societal efforts at ethical legislation, one must assume that moral responsibility – being for the Other before one can be with the Other – is the first reality of the self, a starting point rather than a product of society’ (Bauman 1993a: 13). It is, however, a methodological and critical starting point rather than a nostalgic point of departure. What Bauman is advocating is a recovery of free and autonomous humanity from the legislative attempts to create it through external imposition. The sense of recovery is made quite clear when he says that humanity is surrendered, ‘on the road leading from the moral to the social self, from being-for to being “merely” with. It took centuries of powerassisted legal drill and philosophical indoctrination to make the opposite seem evidently true’ (Bauman 1993a: 14). Stefan Morawski has made the sharp observation that the ethical position that Bauman develops is utopian. He has asked: ‘Can there be a more utopian blueprint of humankind than “being-for” taking priority over “being-beside” or “being-with”?’ (Morawski 1998: 35). When Morawski asks that question he is not using the word ‘utopia’ in a straightforward sense. He knows fully well that when it is used in the context of a discussion of Bauman’s work the word ‘utopia’

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has a technical meaning. And, in that light, it becomes clear that Bauman’s postmodern ethics is indeed utopian. Bauman is not saying that being for the Other is a state of innocence that has been lost, and neither is he saying that it is a description of actual ethical relationships. The condition of being for is at once an ethical-humanistic deduction, a motivating principle for critical praxis and a possibility that can – but not necessarily will – rupture everyday common sense. As Morawski notes, Bauman offers a ‘counter-power’ to ‘this world of ours’ (Morawski 1998: 35). Bauman’s postmodern ethics is developed and offered as an imaginative incentive (to recall Leszek Kolakowski’s definition of utopia). It is a principle of living forwards. Of course, for Bauman utopia signifies the praxis of possibility that seeks critically to open up the world against the ossification of actuality by common sense, alienation and brute power. In the 1970s, Bauman identified utopia with culture and socialism. They were both taken to be, ‘knives pressed against the future’. In the 1990s much the same sensibility reappears in the guise of being for the Other. Indeed, Bauman just about signposted the shift of utopia from culture to ethics when he wrote: ‘Art and the Other of moral relationship – the Other of being-for, the Other as the face – share the same status: when they are, they are in the future; when they are not in the future, they are no more. They are what they are only as a challenge to what already is and has been’ (Bauman 1995: 67). By way of driving the point home, Bauman went on to say that: ‘Art, the Other, the future: what unites them, what makes them into three words vainly trying to grasp the same mystery, is the modality of possibility’ (Bauman 1995: 68). As such, just like art, the relationship of being for the Other is something that has to be made and achieved. It is the product of praxis and not at all a given (like a Law or a mountain). Moreover, since the relationship is rooted in praxis and nothing else, it is something from which human being can never be alienated. Postmodern ethics are human and humanising. Postmodern ethics are an opening up of a future of possibility: ‘Morality, like the future itself, is forever not-yet’ (Bauman 1995: 71). Bauman implies that since the imaginative incentive of the postmodern ethics is the utopia of free human praxis rooted in a togetherness that is not distorted by external mediations, so it is a utopia of human solidarity as a counterpoint to the societal solidarity of the modern imagination. Bauman’s point is that to the extent that

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postmodernity means living in and with ambivalence, and therefore to the extent that postmodernity liberates the possibility of the praxis of being for the Other from the factum of being with or the trap of being apart from the Other, so postmodernity implies tolerance. ‘After a few centuries spent by human diversity in the hiding enforced by the threat of exile, and in learning to be embarrassed by its stigma of iniquity, the post-modern eye . . . now views that diversity, that difference, with zest and glee: difference is beautiful and no less good for that’ (Bauman 1991c: 5). All men and women are at once the beneficiaries and potential victims of that tolerance, since the modern projects of perfection have fallen into disrepute and because it is now ambivalence rather than identity that is taken to be defining of human being. But Bauman goes on to argue that this tolerance of difference offers no defence for the weak against power. ‘By itself, tolerance remains a sitting target – an easy prey for the unscrupulous’ (Bauman 1991c: 6). The point is that tolerance implies letting the Other be, leaving them alone; and that benign attitude can easily shift into indifference (this point is engagingly discussed by Leszek Kolakowski; see Kolakowski 1999: 33–40). Tolerance is a version of being with the Other. It only becomes an ethics of being for the Other, when it is transformed into solidarity. ‘Tolerance . . . can survive only in the form of solidarity . . . survival in the world of contingency and diversity is possible only if each difference recognizes another difference as the necessary condition of the preservation of its own’. Whereas tolerance is a fate (since it is a reflection of the endemic ambivalence of postmodernity), solidarity is a destiny because it has to be chosen responsibly: ‘solidarity . . . means readiness to fight; and joining the battle for the sake of another’s difference, not one’s own . . . [S]olidarity is socially oriented and militant’ (Bauman 1991c: 6. Note that solidarity is socially and not societally oriented).

From incentive to indifference However, the actuality of the condition of postmodernity flies in the face of the possibilities of postmodern ethics. It is in this way that postmodernity is aporetic. The nub of the problem is that the possibilities of postmodern ethics all reflect the uncertainty and insecurity that confront men and women in the condition of postmodernity. Postmodernity deprives men and women of any of the modern

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certainties to which they have grown accustomed. They have to make choices and they are responsible, although they are absolutely without any guidance as to whether they have chosen the ‘right’ course of action (the word ‘right’ needs to be in quotation marks because postmodernity also means the absence of any criteria that might allow something to be judged as ‘right’), and they can never know if their responsibility has been discharged satisfactorily (quite the contrary; to the extent that men and women are always and necessarily with others, they are always and necessarily face to face with a demand to do more). Bauman’s postmodern ethics emphasises the possibility that this demand to always do more will be transformed into a destiny, but the paradox is that, in so doing, the man or woman who thereby embraces being for the Other would be following a path that is quite contrary to that which is dominant in the condition of postmodernity. Within Bauman’s postmodern ethics there is a barely hidden argument that being for the Other becomes the basis of an ethical life-project on the part of the self. Indeed, this is confirmed by the utopian possibility of solidarity. In both cases there is an advocacy of free commitment over time and circumstance, and the self is identified as being and becoming human in so far as she or he engages with the Other on that basis. Postmodern ethics might well be rooted in ambivalence, but the demand that it makes is neither temporary nor transient. But Bauman argues that this practice of self as project is incompatible with the condition of postmodernity. He says that the condition subordinates the life-project to the ‘process of self-constitution’ (Bauman 1992a: 194). This process: ‘has no visible end; not even a stable direction. It is conducted inside a shifting . . . constellation of mutually autonomous points of reference, and thus purposes guiding the self-constitution at one stage may soon lose their current authoritatively confirmed validity’ (Bauman 1992a: 192). The dominance of self-constitution over life-project means that the praxis that postmodern ethics require is almost diametrically incommensurable with the kind of praxis in which the postmodern self engages. Furthermore, the existence of a ‘shifting constellation’ of reference points suggests that the self is likely to flit from the demands of one Other to the demands of another, with the shift of attention being determined by the needs of self-constitution as opposed to the needs of the Other. The face of the Other is liable

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to be ignored or forgotten all the time it is not engaging or entertaining (Bauman 1993a: 177–179). Postmodern ethics require long-term engagement with the Other and an ability to attend to and recollect her hurts, and yet the condition of postmodernity generates an agent of action that is only focused on the here and now: ‘the self-assembly of the agency is not a cumulative process; self-constitution entails disassembling alongside the assembling, adoption of new elements as much as shedding of others, learning together with forgetting’ (Bauman 1992a: 194). The condition of postmodernity implies that ethical demands are unlikely to ‘stick’. It is in the context of these processes that it becomes most pertinent to ask the question about what it is that binds us together, to raise it as a sociological rather than philosophical point. Bauman says that: ‘The identity of the agent is neither given nor authoritatively confirmed. It has to be construed, yet no design for the construction can be taken as prescribed or foolproof. The construction of identity consists of successive trials and errors’ (Bauman 1992a: 193). This lack of certainty leads to a flight towards any haven in which it might be possible to have some confidence. Consequently, Bauman argues that postmodernity leads to the emergence of ambitions and styles that seem to offer a refuge from choice (and therefore a refuge from human being itself). The postmodern agents are desperately looking for a home. And postmodern actuality seems to offer exactly what they are looking for. In the face of ambivalence and in the context of the recovery of the possibility of utopian praxis, postmodernity points instead to the certainties of common sense and naturalisation. In the sphere of personal troubles with ambivalence, there is a turn to the cultivation of the body since only the human body appears, ‘as the sole constant factor among the protean and fickle identities: the material, tangible substratum, container, carrier and executor of all past, present and future identities’ (Bauman 1992a: 194). But since it is impossible to be sure that one is making the ‘right’ choices about one’s body, there is also a turn to external experts in body management and use (management and use that is invariably reduced to the completely utilitarian). They validate choices and, not at all insignificantly, constitute an externality that can be blamed if the body-cultivation does not lead to the body that is desired (Bauman 1991a; see also Bauman 1992b). A different kind of certainty is provided by the practice of following the crowd

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(Bauman 1992a: 195). Bauman developed this point to contend that in this way the ‘consumer mass’ offers to the individual a resolution of problems with insecurity, doubt and loneliness. He has argued that the ‘consumer mass’, ‘with the authority drawn from the endorsement by the many . . . translates . . . vague anxieties and unanchored fears into . . . tasks which can be confronted and dealt with individually’ (Bauman 2001e: 111). In these ways the freedom of ambivalence leads to attempts to deny human autonomy: ‘Thus freedom of choice and dependence on external agents reinforce each other, and arise and grow together as products of the same process of self-assembly and of the constant demand for reliable orientation points which it cannot but generate’ (Bauman 1992a: 195). Orientation points are also offered by distinctively postmodern political concerns. Bauman identifies the emergence of tribal politics in postmodernity. The tribal politics are aimed at the ‘collectivization (supra-agentic confirmation) of the agents’ self-constructing efforts’ (Bauman 1992a: 198). These tribes coalesce around the participation of their members. They have little or no permanence but, for that very reason, greater emotional and existential investment is placed in them. They are marked by, ‘a tendency to render the rituals [of belonging] as spectacular as possible – mainly through inflating their power to shock’ (Bauman 1992a: 199). This is the root of the postmodern focus on community that Bauman has repeatedly explored; communities are attempts to provide a seemingly natural basis for postmodern tribal certainties that are otherwise without foundation (Bauman 2001c). This argument also explains the emergence of forms of nationalism that are expressed through virulently exclusivist rituals and incredible violence (Bauman 2001d). Apart from tribal politics, Bauman also identifies in postmodernity tendencies towards: a politics of desire which, ‘entails actions aimed at establishing the relevance of certain types of conduct . . . for the self-constitution of the agents’ and in which relevance is derived from attractiveness; a politics of fear, in which attempts are made to draw boundaries between what can be relied upon and the outside, Bauman speculates that this explains the food scares that often arise in conditions of postmodernity; and a politics of certainty: ‘This entails the vehement search for social confirmation of choice, in the face of the irredeemable pluralism of the patterns on offer and acute awareness that each formula of selfconstitution . . . is ultimately one of many.’ According to Bauman this

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politics of certainty takes the form of an emphasis on trust; that is why political figures in postmodernity so often make the plea, ‘trust me’ (this question of trust is discussed in Bauman 2002a: 164). (For these different politics, see Bauman 1992a: 199–200.) These politics are different responses to the fear of uncertainty and therefore they are also different ways in which men and women seek to avoid having to come to terms with ambivalence. But these politics also have massive implications for ‘inter-human togetherness’. They deny it. First, there is a denial through identification, in which the Other is taken to be identical to the self through shared tribal membership or desires. Those Others who are not identical are rendered indifferent. Second, there is a denial through separation; the Other is either a source of external poison or a source of trust that the self is incapable of generating on its own. In this case, the Other is still rendered indifferent since what is important about them is the qualities that they are presumed to possess and that can be turned into material of self-constitution. They are not significant in and as themselves. They are denied a face. It is a denial that feeds into the social suffering of postmodernity. Since Bauman identifies postmodernity as, ‘a self-reproducing, pragmatically self-sustainable and logically self-contained social condition defined by distinctive features of its own’ (Bauman 1992a: 188; original emphasis), he is required to conceptualise the site and principle of that self-reproduction. Part of the answer to that question is provided by the practices of self-constitution; to some degree selfconstitution implies the common-sense reproduction of the condition of postmodernity since the practices of men and women are all largely reflective of a world that is found rather than made. But something else is needed. If men and women are going to engage in self-constitution through politics of tribalism, desire, fear and certainty then, quite simply, the resources of tribalism, desire, fear and certainty must be available for use. They must be ready and at hand for consumption. An appreciation of this point leads Bauman to propose that postmodernity is self-reproducing as a system on the basis of consumerism (Bauman 1987a: 166). Bauman contends that, ‘the same central role which was played by work, by job, occupation, profession in modern society, is now performed . . . by consumer choice’. And this consumer choice is not simply about the business of need-satisfaction: ‘Consumption is not just a matter of satisfying

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material greed, of filling your stomach. It is a question of manipulating symbols for all sorts of purposes’ (Bauman 1992a: 223). For example, this manipulation enables self-constitution, while on the societal level consumerism sustains, ‘the continuing existence of institutions, of groups, structures and things like that’. Finally, consumerism ensures, ‘the reproduction of the conditions in which all of this is possible’ (Bauman 1992a: 223. See also Bauman 1997b, 1998a). The social suffering that is defining of postmodernity therefore reflects relationships of consumption and consumerism. Whereas modern social suffering was defined by relationships of production, postmodern social suffering is defined by the ability of men and women to be self-constituting in the market place. This leads Bauman to replace the modern division between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat with the postmodern division between the seduced and the repressed. The seduced are those who have the resources to participate in consumerism with all of the speed and lack of care for durability that endless self-constitution requires and implies. The seduced are those who have bought – and who are able to buy – into the argument that consumerism, ‘offers freedom to people who in other areas of their life find only constraints, often experienced as oppression. What makes the freedom offered by the market more alluring still is that it comes without the blemish which tainted most of its other forms: the same market which offers freedom offers also certainty’ (Bauman 1998a: 61). The seduced are doubly in thrall to the market: ‘they depend on it for their individual freedom; and they depend on it for enjoying their freedom without paying the price of insecurity’ (Bauman 1998a: 62). It is the consumption of the seduced, and their search for new resources for self-constitution that facilitates the reproduction of capital in conditions of postmodernity. Meanwhile the repressed, ‘are not consumers; or, rather, their consumption does not matter much for the successful reproduction of the capital . . . they are not, therefore, members of the consumer society. They have to be disciplined by the combined action of repression, policing, authority and normative regulation’ (Bauman 1987a: 180–181). The repressed are irrelevant to the reproduction of consumerism (except to the extent that they take on low-paid labour), and so the main concern of the system is to keep them out, lest their presence devalues the goods and practices through which the seduced engage in self-constitution. The lives of the repressed are

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reduced to the level of precariousness. Consumerism, then, represents a return of the dominance of utility; everything and everyone is appreciated in terms of symbolic- and use-value alone. However, where the modern proletariat was able to turn poverty into a cause for praxis, the same chance is not available to the postmodern repressed. Bauman says that, ‘being flawed as producers or as consumers has a different impact on human dignity’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 116). After all, the repressed also seek certainty and security, and so the market seduces them too, but would that they be in possession of the ability to be seduced. Where modern politics organised around production led to class conflict and sometimes hatred of the personifications of class, the consumer society is quite different. The repressed do not want to get rid of the paragons of seduction. Rather, they want to imitate them. According to Bauman, in consumerism: ‘The rich are not enemies, but examples. Not hate figures, but idols’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 118). They are idols because they seem to be able confidently to chart a course of selfconstitution through the shifting tides of postmodern actuality. The idols are idols on account of their evident success. The repressed poor experience themselves as flawed and inadequate because they cannot imitate the exemplars of consumerism. Experientially their failings become their own fault. This is a message that is rammed home by education systems that tell their subjects that success in the job market is determined by the possession of skills as opposed to structural economic factors. (Contemporary education is discussed in Bauman 2001b, 2002e. The discussions of education in that book and article link back to Bauman’s interest in education in Poland: Bauman 1966b, 1967b.) The repressed do not see that their personal troubles are linked with much larger public issues, and the common sense of consumerism prevents them from making the link: ‘Individuals in the consumer mass, like the components of any other mass, are all alike . . . but they are alike in being, all of them and each one of them, individuals who individually face up to individual problems’ (Bauman 2001e: 111). The point is, though, that some of these erstwhile individuals are more able than others to secure access to the resources that will, for a time at least, lessen the charge of these problems. For those who are without the resources that will make problems go away, for those who blame themselves as individuals for being individuals who cannot face up to individual problems because of

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flaws that can only be interpreted as individual, sociology can step in to show that their personal problems are public issues. But sociology can only do that if it remains critical and does not fall into the trap of merely reflecting postmodernity.

Conclusion The aporia between the utopian possibility of postmodern ethics and the escape from freedom of the actuality of the condition of postmodernity is taken by Bauman to call for the intervention of sociology. Sociology can show to men and women that their personal troubles with uncertainty, contingency and ambivalence are not the fault of their own failures (or more dangerously the fault of the Other), but are, instead, linked to public issues. In this way, sociology plays a part in an honest and human politicisation of postmodernity (Bauman 1999a). What Bauman is saying is that postmodernity has shown that ‘inter-human togetherness’ is possible, and it is the job of sociology to make sure that this possibility is not wrecked against the rock of the forms of escape that postmodernity generates. For Bauman it is the job of sociology, as it is always the job of sociology, to enable the conversations of humanity to take place through the interpretation and translation of experiences. It is the job of sociology to promote the togetherness that the actuality of postmodernity at once reveals and hides away (Bauman 1999b: lii). Postmodernity needs sociology. But it needs sociology of a particular sort, a critical sociology. This means that postmodernity does not need a postmodern sociology that gives up on utopian incentives and on the possibility that there is a dignity of freedom about human being that demands to be recovered from the forgetting that is prompted by the flight from ambivalence and into consumer certainty. Such a postmodern sociology would be identical with the condition of postmodernity, a reflection of it and, therefore, a capitulation of the possibility that the world might be opened up to the novum (Bauman critiqued what he identified as one such capitulation in Bauman 1993e). As Bauman put it: ‘postmodern sociology does not have the concept of postmodernity . . . It is precisely because it is so well adapted to the postmodern cultural setting – that postmodern sociology . . . cannot conceive of itself as an event in history’ (Bauman 1992a: 41). Rather, what the actuality of postmodernity

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needs, and more importantly what the men and women who experience that confusing condition need, is a sociology of postmodernity that, ‘conceive[s] of itself as a participant . . . of this never ending, self-reflexive process of reinterpretation’. Bauman went on to speculate that the pursuit of a sociology of postmodernity, ‘In practice . . . will mean . . . replacing the ambitions of the judge of “common beliefs”, healer of prejudices and umpire of truth with those of a clarifier of interpretative rules and facilitator of communication’ (Bauman 1992a: 204). The aporia of postmodernity is nothing less than the context of the coming of the time of hermeneutic, interpretative, sociology of the kind that Bauman has always practised. ‘The new situation . . . calls for a sociology . . . as a flexible and self-reflective activity of interpretation and reinterpretation, as an on-going commentary on the many-centred process of the inter-play between relatively autonomous yet partially dependent agents.’ For Bauman this self-reflective commentary plays a part in the shift from tolerance to solidarity and offers an alternative to the flight into ersatz certainty, ‘as it demonstrates in practice (even if not in theory) the non-exclusiveness of any of the competing interpretations, the absence of any single authoritative standpoint from which unambiguous and universally binding pronouncements can be made’ (Bauman 1992a: 90). The world changes, but the conversation of sociology with the world goes on.

7 Sociology and the Challenge of Globalisation

The aporia of postmodernity confirmed the continued significance of critical sociology as a partner in a conversation that would connect personal troubles to public issues. But as the conversation proceeded and was joined by more and more participants, a question arose about whether the focus on postmodernity was a help or hindrance. It is clear that Bauman started to wonder. As the debate about postmodernity became more widespread, gradually he stopped talking in its terms. Undoubtedly, there was a degree of subjective choice about this. Some of Bauman’s comments show that he stopped using the word postmodernity because he was keen that his books be read for what was inside them rather than because of how they had been classified. Bauman has reflected that on account of his work on postmodernity he was, ‘filed away’ and meanings were imposed upon his work from outside and according to preconceptions (Bauman and Tester, forthcoming. Even the most careful and sophisticated commentators tend to put Bauman’s work in the file labelled ‘postmodernity’; see for example Shilling and Mellor 2001). In the context of Bauman’s sociological commitments, this is no trifling complaint. His objection to being ‘filed away’ is cut of the same cloth as his belief that to be human is to be unpredictable, and that human action is only predictable because it has been managed into preconceived channels by power and the powerful. What this subjective movement away from postmodernity highlights is the fact that power relationships exist within academic institutions just as much as any other. More importantly, Bauman has identified objective reasons for his movement away from using the word postmodernity. Here, the 157

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implication is that the language of postmodernity stopped being a way in which he could ask what he took to be the most pressing questions. Postmodernity stopped being a way of finding out what he did not know (to recall the phrase about Karl Kraus that was quoted in the Introduction) precisely because the word, and the language around it, had become ossified and so common sense. Yet for Bauman, postmodernity was only common sense on account of two errors that were fed into the debate, and rarely questioned. First, Bauman has argued that postmodernity was a problem because the whole debate came to be based on semantic confusion. He has commented that: ‘when I resorted to the concept of postmodernity . . . I took a distance form the then widely deployed concept of “postmodernism” ’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 96). For Bauman postmodernity was about the social and societal, and postmodernism was about art and aesthetics. This distinction is reflected in Bauman’s separation of sociology of postmodernity from postmodern sociology (Bauman 1992a). But not all the participants in the debate were so careful, and as the conversation went on there was a failure to maintain this strict distinction between postmodernity and postmodernism. Bauman wanted the two terms to be kept apart, yet: ‘It looks now that my hopes were unwarranted. “Postmodernity” and “postmodernism” have been hopelessly confused, used in many cases synonymically.’ Bauman has concluded that the ‘semantic confusion’ means that ‘sensible discussion of contemporary trends under the rubric of “postmodernity” would be well-nigh impossible’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 97). Second, even had there been agreement about what the word postmodernity actually meant, it was still faulty. It misrepresented what the debate was intended to examine, namely the relationship between postmodernity and modernity. Bauman has pointed out that the word postmodernity necessarily creates the impression that what it designates is after modernity. He has said that: ‘You may lean over backwards to deny it, to pile up reservations, but nothing doing: the word “postmodernity” implies the end of modernity, leaving modernity behind, being on the other shore.’ But Bauman believes that modernity has not been left behind: ‘We are as modern as ever, obsessively “modernizing” everything we can lay our hands on’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 97). Or again: ‘The society which enters the twenty-first century is no less “modern” than the society which

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entered the twentieth; the most one can say is that it is modern in a different way.’ What makes either end of the twentieth century modern is a shared, ‘compulsive and obsessive, continuous, unstoppable, forever incomplete modernization; the overwhelming and ineradicable, unquenchable thirst for creative destruction’ (Bauman 2000a: 28). Consequently, the word postmodernity carried with it a baggage of meanings that were sociologically invalid, and so Bauman abandoned it. (Bauman also deals with this problem in Yakimova 2002. The last flourish of postmodernity is in In Search of Politics, but the chapters in which the word is used have the air of being earlier pieces, and when they are mentioned in the Introduction of that book, Bauman does not contextualise them in terms of postmodernity; Bauman 1999a: 7.)

From postmodernity . . . It would be quite wrong to think that because Bauman stopped using the word postmodernity he also gave up on the insights that he had derived from it. This is clear from the style and concerns of Bauman’s post-postmodernity work. Now, if the collections of essays are put aside for a moment (2001b, 2002a), then it is noticeable that Bauman’s style of writing and his mode of the construction of an argument became quite different to what they were before. Books like Modernity and the Holocaust and Postmodern Ethics follow the conventions of linear narrative. They are texts that establish a problem, discuss the literature and then, through a sequential analysis, reach conclusions (although with Bauman, of course, those conclusions are more by way of questions than a tying up of loose ends). Post-postmodernity books like Community, Globalisation, Liquid Love and Wasted Lives are completely different. They are shorter, much more discursive, rather less rooted in narrowly academic literature (Bauman has become much more likely to quote the opinion pages of newspapers) and considerably less linear. These later texts consciously avoid academic conventions. Peter Beilharz points to a reason for this shift. He suggests that Bauman deliberately seeks to address, ‘the urgency of social and political affairs’ (Beilharz 2000: 152) and therefore the books are concerned to appeal to an audience somewhat greater than that of the usual readers of European social thought. In order to do that, the books have to be able to communicate with the life experiences and

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concerns of that readership; communicate, that is, not through mimesis (a trap into which so much work falls, only to be rewarded with the glittering prizes of fashion) but through the posing of critical questions. The movement away from a linear narrative to something much more fragmentary and fractured is intended to help achieve just that. It is one of the main principles of Bauman’s sociology of postmodernity that life experiences are no longer organised around life-projects. Rather, in postmodernity the cultural and existential dominant is self-constitution (Bauman 1992a: 193–194). Since the self-constitution has no end, but instead forces men and women into a struggle perpetually to make them what they will to be from out of the symbols that are provided by consumer capitalism, then any text that seeks to capture that experience must also eschew any definite conclusion. It too must offer the possibility of a journey through pieces. In this way the fragmented text highlights contemporary lifeexperiences. The reader and the text are engaged in a mutual process of, ‘the incessant (and non-linear) activity of self-constitution that makes the identity of the agent’ (Bauman 1992a: 193). In other words, the agent constitutes the text and the text constitutes the agent in a reciprocal process of hermeneutic translation that is open to change and never static (there are extremely heavy shadows of Calvino here). Reading the text is praxis. The first text in which Bauman deliberately tries out this strategy is the not-coincidentally titled Life in Fragments. That is a text that seeks to talk to, ‘the fragmentariness of the social context and the episodicity of life pursuits’ (Bauman 1995: 9). But the strategy of a style that speaks to the times (without of course becoming a mere reflection of them) is most clearly found in Liquid Love (Bauman 2003a). That is quite explicitly a book of fragments, which begins with the announcement that the text will be successful if it can be read through the prism of any given fragment taken either on its own or in juxtaposition with any other. There, Bauman is trying to get away from any last vestiges of linearity and to open up the possibilities of the text. He attempts this so that the conventions of narrative do not create the false impression that the issues with which the text deals can be contained within a set of covers. The fragments, and the multiplicity of readings that Bauman wants to encourage, are an invitation to realise that, ‘however big the thoughts may seem, they will never be big enough to embrace, let alone keep hold of, the bountiful prodigality

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of human experience’ (Bauman 2003a: 2). The only book that could embrace all human life would be a book as big as the world and yet without any words (words are signs of the probable, whereas life for Bauman is the pursuit of the possible), and since such a book can never be written (except in the form of Borges’ Book of Sand), the best remaining option is to highlight the extent to which the text is inadequate, a question to be constituted as opposed to an answer to be pondered (and this is exactly the strategy adopted by novelists like Musil and Perec). In all, what Bauman is trying to do is disrupt the authorship of the post-postmodernity texts that bear his name and, in so doing, he is hoping to emphasise to men and women the extent to which they are also engaged, every day and all the time, in processes of self-constitution. However, Bauman kept more from his sociology of postmodernity than narrative issues alone. His post-postmodernity work can be read as an exercise in the more or less quick discharge of the full appreciation of a point that was realised towards the end of Postmodern Ethics. There, Bauman explores the context in which his postmodern ethics of being for the Other is to be practised. He argues that the modern ways of keeping responsibility at bay (through the establishment of distances) have collapsed. Instead of the modern template in which the people of the world were kept apart through national identity, tribal belonging and territory, postmodernity is a condition of global space. What flows through that global space is capital, ever in the search of new markets and cheaper costs of production, and heralding the end of the modern style state, exercising sovereign power (and the monopoly of the legitimate use of the means of violence) over a given territory. With these comments in Postmodern Ethics, Bauman was anticipating the ground of his post-postmodernity work on globalisation (see Bauman 1993a: 231). Indeed, the deepening of the understanding and interpretation of this global space – of this globalisation – represents a dominant strand in Bauman’s postpostmodernity sociological work. Something else happens as well. When Bauman developed his analysis of postmodernity he tended to use the word in a somewhat all-encompassing way to try to capture transformations in a wide range of areas, such as knowledge, state activity, self-constitution and so forth. In the post-postmodernity work that way of talking, which perhaps contains the last dying embers of a general theoretical ambition, disappears.

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The point is that although globalisation refers to processes that are significant at the meta-level of human being in the world, something else is needed to capture transformation at the level of life-politics (Bauman 2002g: 89). Life-politics is about the immediate spheres of being in the world: ‘Life politics is self-centred and self-referential’ (Bauman 2002a: 171). Life-politics can also be taken to be synonymous with Mills’ identification of ‘personal troubles’ that, ‘occur within the character of the individual and within the range of his immediate relations with others’ (Mills 1959: 14–15). The term that Bauman introduces for the purpose of capturing changes at the level of lifepolitics is liquid modernity. He coined the phrase liquid modernity so that he could avoid throwing out the baby of postmodernity with the bathwater. In these terms, liquid modernity is proposed by Bauman as a way of understanding the present without falling into the traps of semantic confusion or misrepresentation. Whereas the word postmodernity implies that it is after modernity, his coinage of liquid modernity, ‘points to what is continuous (melting, disembedding) and discontinuous (no solidification of the melted, no re-embedding) alike’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 97–98). Liquid modernity is a phrase that overcomes another problem. A lot of the postmodernity debate was structured in terms of what it was not: ‘The postmodernity idea was introduced as a pure collection of absences’ (Bauman 1992a: 218). As early as 1992, Bauman was saying that it was necessary to move away from the ‘grip of historical memory’ that lurks in that definition by negation, and with his term liquid modernity he was eventually able to achieve just that. From postmodernity then, Bauman developed a sociology that was organised around two different principles, dependent upon whether he was concerned to study the meta- or the life-political levels of human being in the world. For the former he analyses globalisation, and for the latter liquid modernity. The presence of the two different principles is reflected in the considerable number of books that Bauman has published in the wake of his participation in the postmodernity conversation. Some tend to deal more with the meta-level (Bauman 1998b, 1999a, 2003d) and others with the life-political (Bauman 2000a, 2001b,c), while there are also works of synthesis (Bauman 2002a, 2003a). It is the concern of this chapter to discuss this stage in Bauman’s sociological work, and through that discussion it will hopefully be shown that despite the complexity that often ensues from these two

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different principles of the organisation of his sociological imagination, Bauman’s work nevertheless continues to be marked by coherence and consistency.

. . . To globalisation According to Bauman: ‘By far the most prominent and seminal feature of our times is the emergence of “global figuration”: of a network of dependencies which covers the entirety of the planet’ (Bauman 2001d: 11). As this ‘network of dependencies’ spreads to include everything it becomes increasingly obvious that: ‘In this globalized world of ours, we all live closer to each other than ever before. We share more aspects of our daily life than ever before’ (Bauman 2002a: 15). We also share more of the risks since local events can be the causal agents of global effects. Bauman mentions environmental degradation and mass population migration as events with, ‘thoroughly local causes but potentially global effects’ (Bauman 2001d: 11), and he also focuses upon the proliferation of nuclear weaponry. Bauman cautions against: ‘The spread of nuclear weaponry which at any moment may be deployed in any of the numerous local conflicts with blatantly non-localizable consequences’ (Bauman 2001d: 11). This is a recurrent theme in the tradition of critical thought in which Bauman works and with which he identifies. Nuclear weaponry has tended to be discussed in a rather paradoxical manner, and this is a sensibility that Bauman shares. For example, the paradox has been expressed neatly by Kundera who points out that the modern dream of unified humanity (the logical end result of the dreams of perfect future and perfect order) has been achieved: ‘but it is war, ambulant and everlasting war, that embodies and guarantees this long-desired unity of mankind. Unity of mankind means: No escape for anyone anywhere’ (Kundera 1986: 11. This sensibility can also be found in the work of Hannah Arendt; Arendt 1958, 1970). A nuclear explosion anywhere has effects everywhere. However, even this threat of global destruction is ‘but a tip of the iceberg’. Beneath the surface, Bauman identifies globalisation with, ‘the interdependency of all ostensibly or allegedly self-balancing, but in fact not self-sustained, let alone self-sufficient economies’ (Bauman 2001d: 11). This is the nub of the matter of globalisation. It consists in the emergence of a global figuration in which all activity is tied

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together by an economy that is absolutely beyond any local control. Here, local events are but the effects of global causes. Moreover, the time lag separating causes from effects is getting shorter and shorter, and so there is no chance to take control (even assuming that potentially controlling agencies exist). Bauman has identified ‘time/space compression’ as a term that, ‘encapsulates the ongoing multi-faceted transformation of the parameters of the human condition’ (Bauman 1998b: 2) in which thanks to the needs of economic flow, ‘capital, which means money and other resources needed to get things done, to make more money and more things yet – moves fast; enough to keep permanently a step ahead of any . . . polity which may try to contain and redirect its travels’. Bauman says that this almost instantaneous speed of movement leads to, ‘a total annihilation of spatial constraints . . . Whatever moves with the speed approaching the velocity of the electronic signal, is practically free from constraints related to the territory inside which it originated’ (Bauman 1998b: 55). The implication of these processes is the emergence of what Bauman has called a ‘post-Trinitarian world’ (Bauman 2002f). There are mischievous theological connotations to that phrase, but Bauman means it to be taken in a purely sociological and secular manner. Looking back on modernity, Bauman has argued that: ‘For two hundred years the world was occupied with making the control of human movements the sole prerogative of state powers, with erecting barriers to all the other, uncontrolled human movements, and manning the barriers with vigilant and heavily armed guards’ (Bauman 2002f: 284). During these two centuries the state took on the job of managing the spatial distribution of human beings. This was achieved through classifications of order that established which peoples had a right to occupy a certain territory and those who did not have such a right (and so Jews were particularly focused upon in modern Germany because of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century influx of the Ost-Juden who were trying to escape the tsarist pogroms; Bauman 1998c). The state imposed a design of order that was lent a degree of natural common sense and inevitability by its connection with nationality and possibly even ethnicity. In this way, to be a person in ‘the right place’ was to be accepted without qualification as a citizen, and citizenship was linked with nationality. All of this is signified by the modern invention of the passport, which is a document of citizenship and nationality at one and the same time: ‘Passports, entry

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and exit visas, custom and immigration controls were among the major inventions of the art of modern government’ (Bauman 2002f: 284). These are all inventions that place people. Developing these arguments, Bauman identifies in modernity, ‘the territory/nation/state trinity’ (Bauman 2002f: 289). Each of these aspects needed the other two. The identification and occupation of a definite territory gave a foundation to the nation and boundaries within which the state could claim a monopoly of the use of the means of violence. The nation justified the limitations of territory and lent the state the legitimacy of the ‘national interest’. Finally, the state policed the boundaries of the territory and defended the nation from the threat of either incursion or false claims-makers. By way of confirming the linkage between these three aspects of the modern trinity, Bauman points out what happened to the other two if any one was absent. He says that a territory without a nation-state was ‘a no-man’s land’, a nation without a state was, ‘an alien body given the choice of surrender or annihilation’ (this is a claim that immediately recalls Bauman’s sociology of ambivalence), and, ‘a state without a nation or with more than one nation had turned into a residue of time past faced with a dilemma to modernize or perish’ (Bauman 2002f: 288. Here it is worth thinking about the frequently rediscovered debate about the theoretical problems of the British state. According to many commentators it is confronted with the choice of modernisation or death because it is a state with more than one nation). Globalisation has undone the connection between the three aspects of the modern trinity. Bauman has contended that: ‘The way in which the world economy operates today . . . as well as the exterritorial economic elites who operate it, favour state organisms that cannot effectively impose conditions under which the economy is run, let alone impose restraints on the way in which those who run the economy would like it to be run’ (Bauman 1993a: 231). Weak and uncoordinated states are favoured by global capital because only they are incapable of imposing the kinds of restraints that can prevent transnational global capital transfers from happening overnight. States with firm labour laws, for example, restrict capital’s room to manoeuvre. In terms of territory, capital also smiles upon those states that operate within very narrow limits and in the context of extreme conflict with a multiplicity of local neighbours: ‘The more fragmented are the sovereign units, the weaker and narrower in

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scope is their grip over respective territories, the freer still is the global flow of capital and merchandise’ (Bauman 1993a: 232). Territory has been made porous by the ability of externally caused processes to move inside (nuclear radiation does not respect boundaries). Meanwhile, the nation has been challenged by the ability of capital to float free of any local moorings and the state has withdrawn from policing functions, through privatisation or opened up borders so that barriers between ‘here’ and ‘there’ have become blurred (for the elites of global capitalism, anyway). In this temporally and spatially compressed global figuration it is possible to identify the emergence of a defining conflict. The point is that the global figuration occupies a global space that is unmapped and for the most part without institutions (the actually existing global institutions patently are extensions of the old modern powers that the developing nations are either desperate or foolish enough to take on their word rather than according to the record of their deeds). And so the global figuration is uncoordinated (except by the agencies of global economic markets) and it destroys the ability of local powers to have control over their now-porous territories: ‘It is in the virgin space between the increasingly coordinated global capital and market forces and the sorely under-coordinated political, mostly localized forces, that the major contest of the present stage of globalization is being conducted’ (Bauman 2001d: 14). The contest leads to the emergence of two different kinds of war, and each kind represents a different response to the conflicts that are associated with the global figuration. First, Bauman identifies what he calls ‘globalising wars’. They are ‘conducted as a rule in the name of the not yet existent but postulated “international community”, represented in practice by ad hoc, mostly regional, coalitions of interested partners’ (Bauman 2001d: 14). The ‘international community’ then, is less an actuality and more a legitimating principle that drives on the promoters and practitioners of this kind of war. They are able to claim that they are speaking on behalf of the global good as opposed to their own self-interest, purely because they have the power to ensure that they are not contradicted. The purportedly moral ‘international community’ is nothing more than a legitimation for the exercise of power: ‘There is hardly another way of bringing the “international community” closer to reality than flexing muscles in its name’ (Bauman 2001d: 15). Examples of these

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‘globalising wars’ are to be found in the military operations that were launched by America and Britain against Iraq in the early 1990s and 2003, as well as in the emergence of so-called ‘humanitarian wars’ of the kind that led to the NATO bombing of Serbia in the late 1990s. According to Bauman these wars are globalising because they are prosecuted with the intention of removing any local obstacles that might stand in the way of the global movement of capital: ‘The intention behind the decision to go to war is to throw the heretofore closed territory wide open to the global circulation of capital, money and commodities’ (Bauman 2001d: 16). This is achieved through the weakening of any local trinities of state, nation and territory and by the imposition of puppet authorities that will ensure that local obstacles may never be re-erected. Second, he talks about ‘globalisation-induced wars’. According to Bauman even as global capital destroys the economic significance of territory and place, the significance of place in the minds of men and women increases. Bauman argues that, ‘the more vulnerable place becomes, the more radically it is devalued of its “cosiness” ’, then the more it, ‘becomes a focus of intense emotions, hopes and fears which merge into hysteria’ (Bauman 2001d: 19). Trust becomes ‘unanchored’ but the search for the security and certainty that trust provides never ceases: ‘Unanchored trust desperately seeking shelter is a source of permanent anxiety. It prompts rising demands for certainty, security, safety.’ Bauman continues: ‘The body, home, street, neighbourhood, near or distant, all become targets of acute attention and protective concerns’ (Bauman 2001d: 20). Globalisation-induced wars are, then, the product of attempts to find havens of security in the face of processes that destroy everything in which it might be possible to have some confidence and a measure of certainty. These wars represent attempts, ‘to fight back the unprepossessing consequences of global processes by local means and with local resources’ (Bauman 2001d: 20). Moreover, it is precisely the increasing anxiety that globalisation induces that explains why these kinds of wars are often so extraordinarily violent. According to Bauman the violence is an attempt to found the newly identified community in a moment of ‘original sin’ that can never be challenged: ‘It matters a lot that the murder is committed openly, in the daylight and in full vision, that there are witnesses to the crime who know the perpetrators by name, so that no retreat and no hiding from retribution remain a viable option and

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thus the community born of the initiatory crime remains the only refuge for the perpetrators’ (Bauman 2001d: 25). This explains the visible violence of the war of the Yugoslav succession in the 1990s, as well as the decision of Al-Qaeda to attack the World Trade Center. In Bauman’s own sociology these insights underpin his analysis of the contemporary allure of community (Bauman 2001c. For his views on September 11, see Bauman 2002g. Shortly after September 11, Bauman wrote an opinion piece for a Polish newspaper. The piece attempted to understand rather than merely condemn the attack, and it became caught up in a fairly vitriolic debate: Gross 2002). The emergence of globalising and globalisation-induced wars shows that there has been precisely the achievement of a universal humanity in the way that Kundera identifies. The modern philosophers thought that universal humanity would be the work of reason, but globalisation has instead achieved it through the temporally and spatially compressed moment of death. Humanity has become universal because we can all die at one and the same time, either through the global effects of the local use of weapons that do not respect territory, or through the effort of the anxious and uncertain to shore up the few sources of a sense of security that remain available to them. And the compression of time and space means that there is no place left to hide from these terrors: ‘Places no longer protect, however strongly they are armed and fortified, nor do they give foolproof advantage to their occupiers. Strength and weakness, threat and security have now become, essentially, exterritorial issues that evade territorial solutions’ (Bauman 2002g: 82). In a way that is reminiscent of Kundera, Bauman says that, ‘there is nowhere to hide’ (Bauman 2002f: 285). Time and space compression means that the world no longer contains any secret places. With these kinds of conclusions Bauman owes an acknowledged debt to Hannah Arendt. In an article that was originally published in 1957, Arendt asserted that: ‘Mankind owes its existence not to the dreams of the humanists nor to the reasoning of the philosophers and not even . . . to political events, but almost exclusively to the technical development of the Western world.’ Arendt goes on to make the point that the spread of the products of the West has multiplied insecurity throughout the world by the destruction of anything local in which it might have been possible to trust: ‘No less manifest than the fact that technology united the world is the other fact that

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Europe exported to the four corners of the earth its processes of disintegration.’ The West did not just export capitalism. In Bauman’s terms, Europe also exported the processes of the dismantling of local security through its replacement with the modern trinity of state, nation and territory, only to let global movement destroy that trinity too. Arendt says that the forces that changed Europe over the course of centuries, ‘took only a few decades to break down, by working from without, beliefs and ways of life in all other parts of the world’ (Arendt 1970: 85. Bauman acknowledges Arendt in Bauman 2002f. Perhaps, Communist Poland was Europe’s own representations of this process). Bauman’s work on liquid modernity examines what life is like when globalisation has made the old certainties vulnerable.

Life-politics: liquid modernity Any remark that pulls together Europe and, to use Arendt’s word, ‘disintegration’ immediately calls to mind the famous announcement that is made in The Communist Manifesto that with the rise of capitalism: ‘All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air’ (Marx 1942: 208–209). As part of his ‘love–hate’ relationship with Marx, Bauman has pointed to the continued importance of this concept of the melting of solids for an understanding of the present (Bauman 2000a: 3). Obviously, the insight of the Manifesto is lurking in Bauman’s analysis of globalisation and, especially, his emphasis on the needs and implications of the free global movement of capital. When Bauman refers to the old comment, in Liquid Modernity, he also makes it plain that the metaphor of the melting of solids can be used to understand the contemporary processes of life-politics. However, the linkage of Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity to Marx and Engels creates a difficulty. Bauman started to talk about liquid modernity because he thought that it offered a way of examining what connects and distinguishes the present from modernity. Now, the continuities since Marx and Engels wrote their sentences in the mid-nineteenth century are fairly easy to spot. As Bauman has said we are still obsessively modern. Indeed through consumerism a concern with the modern, with the up-to-date, is one of the motive powers of global capitalism. But for that very reason the discontinuities are

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rather less obvious. Quite simply, what is so special about liquid modernity if the process of ‘melting’, that is its essence, has been going on for the best part of two hundred years? In the time of Marx and Engels, and indeed until the appreciation of the possibilities that were discharged in the postmodernity conversation, it was common sense that solids were melted so that ostensibly new and better ones might be put in their place. It was one of the dominant and guiding illusions of modern practice that this improvement could and would take place so long as the old was not allowed to stand in the way. This is why Polish peasants were urbanised and industrialised in the 1950s. Bauman has said that this version of melting was informed by the principle that: ‘Solids may be melted, but they are melted in order to mould new solids better shaped and better fitted for human happiness than the old ones – but also more solid and so more “certain” than the old solids managed to be’ (Bauman 2001b: 143). This version of the melting of solids is represented in both actually existing socialism and Nazism. What each of those expressions of modernity sought to do was take apart everything that had been given to the present by the past in order to clear the ground for the march into the perfect future or the imposition of the design of the perfect order. In both cases, institutions and ways of life that were rooted in tradition and habit were melted so that more modern and therefore allegedly better solids could be put in their place. The illusion was that: ‘One order needed to be dismantled so that it could be replaced with another, purpose-built and up to the standards of reason and logic’ (Bauman 2001b: 143). These would be solids in which it would be possible to feel secure and have confidence. According to Bauman, the ‘melting powers’ of modernity have been ‘redistributed’ so that they now focus on life-politics. Of course, the melting of solids always had that direct and immediate impact on the lives and life-strategies of men and women. Had it not, it would scarcely have been of any sociological relevance. But orthodox, ‘solid’, modernity concentrated its melting efforts on the meta-levels of the nation/state/territory trinity. That kind of modern practice sought to take men and women out of one domain of solidity and certainty and put them into another (again, think of Polish peasants moving from fields to steel mills). In solid modernity, it was the fate of men and women to be prodded out of the old and into the new, and in neither situation were they accorded any ability to take control of

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what those solids determined. Bauman has said that, ‘people were let out from their old cages only to be admonished and censured in case they failed to relocate themselves . . . in the ready-made niches of the new order’ (Bauman 2000a: 7). The cages changed but men and women remained as prisoners. Life-politics was about making sure that the cell was as comfortable as possible, since the more comfortable they made themselves the more men and women would be able to have confidence that they would not be disturbed: ‘The task confronting free individuals was to use their new freedom to find the appropriate niche and to settle there through conformity: by faithfully following the rules and modes of conduct identified as right and proper for the location’ (Bauman 2000a: 7. Here, the Polish youth of the period of the ‘little stabilisation’ come back to mind). In the condition of liquid modernity the balance has changed. The discussion of postmodernity had shown that the foundations and conceits that underpinned the new solids ought to be treated with caution. They cause no optimism, only disillusionment. The march to perfection had turned out to be the road to hell, and perfect order always foundered on the rock of the ambivalence that it could not help generating (to say nothing of the absolute inhumanity of the measures that perfectibility sanctioned). Equally, global capitalism and globalisation has destroyed the solidity of the modern trinity and thereby put a question mark against notions of sovereignty (oldstyle gardening power is impossible because all of the boundaries between the gardens have been torn down). This is the context of the life-politics of liquid modernity. Bauman says that: ‘codes and rules to which one could conform, which one could select as stable orientation points and by which one could subsequently let oneself be guided . . . are nowadays in short supply’ (Bauman 2000a: 7). This is a contention that recalls Bauman’s argument that in postmodernity life-politics is organised around problems of self-constitution rather than the life-project. For Bauman liquid modernity is a condition in which, ‘we are presently moving from the era of pre-allocated “reference groups” into the epoch of “universal comparison” ’. In this ‘new epoch’, ‘the destination of individual self-constructing labours is endemically and incurably underdetermined, is not given in advance, and tends to undergo numerous and profound changes’ (Bauman 2000a: 7). With postmodern disillusion and globalising movement having destroyed the conceits of solid

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modernity: ‘It is the patterns of dependency and interaction whose turn to be liquefied has now come’ (Bauman 2000a: 8). These patterns, these figurations, no longer have anything to give them shape, and so they become like ice cubes in hot water. In the book Liquid Modernity, Bauman runs through a number of the dimensions of this liquefaction of the life-political ‘patterns of dependency and interaction’. An area that he stresses is the transformation of the securities of work, and with this discussion there is a degree of overlap between Bauman’s sociology of globalisation and his analysis of liquid modernity. It is here, with the dimension of work, that it is possible for the exercise of a sociological imagination to show how the meta-level processes of globalisation link directly to personal troubles. The increasing freedom of global capital means that work is no longer an area of being in the world in which men and women can feel secure and certain. Of course, Bauman does not want to say that all work under whatever circumstances is to be embraced. Rather, for Bauman the significance of work is to be found in the opportunity it provides for human beings to engage in the distinctly human praxis of creation. As a result, if work (of whatever kind, however far the actuality might be removed from the incentive) has been denuded of durability then the, ‘consequences of all this are in many respects disastrous’ (Bauman 1989a: 97). Bauman says that in solid modernity, men and women were trained and taught to occupy ‘niches’ in a labour market that possessed a high measure of certainty, and which therefore allowed for a high measure of security. In solid modernity, work might well have been immensely alienating, but it did not occasion too much anxiety about its stability. In this context (think about Poland during the years of the little stabilisation by way of an example), it was the role of the education system to make sure that the new generations of workers were trained for economic utilitarianism so that they would fit in with the economic ‘patterns of interdependency and interaction’ that were ready and waiting for them. Work was structured in such a solid way that people fitted in with it, rather than vice versa. In this way, men and women had little freedom but they were able to place themselves and be secure in the durability of their world. Equally, if a group of workers was made redundant it was likely in most cases to be taken to be a sign of an economic issue as opposed to a mark of individual failings. These assumptions are reflected in C. Wright Mills’ claim

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that, ‘When, in a city of 100,000, only one man is unemployed, that is his personal trouble . . .but when in a nation of 50 million employees, 15 million men are unemployed, that is an issue.’ In the first case the answer lies in the man himself, in the latter ‘the very structure of opportunities has collapsed’ (Mills 1959: 15). But Bauman argues that what Mills would have identified as an immense issue (the collapse of local industry thanks to it being opened up to global markets and the movement of employment in the search for ever-lower costs and greater employee ‘flexibility’) has become the norm: ‘Secure jobs in secure companies seem to be the yarn of grandfathers’ nostalgia; nor are there many skills and experiences which, once acquired, would guarantee that the job will be offered, and once offered, will prove lasting’ (Bauman 2000a: 161). Everyone feels the anxiety of uncertainty because thanks to the quick and easy movement of capital: ‘No one can . . . feel truly irreplaceable – neither those already outcast nor those relishing the job of casting others out. Even the most privileged position may prove to be temporary and “until further notice” ’ (Bauman 2000a: 162). Whereas the subjects of solid modernity felt the boredom and lack of control that comes from knowing precisely what is going to happen next, the men and women of liquid modernity feel the apathy and lack of control that comes from knowing that everything can change in a moment, for reasons over which they have absolutely no control. This transformation of work is typical of the anxieties of the lifepolitics of liquid modernity, and combined with the globalisationinduced lack of confidence that men and women are able to place in institutions such as companies there emerges a situation in which, ‘in the absence of long-term security, “instant gratification” looks like a reasonable strategy. Whatever life may offer, let it be offered . . . right away’ (Bauman 2000a: 162). After all: ‘any chance not taken here and now is a chance missed; not taking it is thus unforgivable and cannot be easily excused, let alone vindicated’ (Bauman 2000a: 163). Liquidity means that it is no longer possible to have any confidence that what happens today will happen tomorrow, or that people met once will be met again, and so there emerges a life-political concern to get what is available now. In liquid modernity it is a reasonable strategy to make sure that one can enjoy as much as possible as quickly as possible. Deferred gratification is replaced with an emphasis on instant gratification to such an extent that the things of the

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world are only engaged with in so far as they are instantly available and can be used and then disposed-of so that they do not get in the way of any future moments of the use of things: ‘Precarious economic and social conditions train men and women (or make them learn the hard way) to perceive the world as a container full of disposable objects, objects for one-off use; the whole world – including other human beings’ (Bauman 2000a: 162). As a result, liquid modernity heralds testing times for inter-human togetherness: ‘Since the present-day commitments stand in the way of the next-day opportunities, the lighter and more superficial they are, the less is the likely damage’ (Bauman 2000a: 163). Love too has been liquefied. Given the ethical commitments that were clarified in Bauman’s work when he was discussing postmodernity, the transformation of love is of enormous importance. Bauman’s ethical position leads him to understand love as an encounter with the absolute Other. Love is: ‘the unconditional acceptance of the otherness of the other and of the other’s right to its otherness’. He goes on: ‘love means signing a blank cheque: in as far as the other’s right to otherness has been fully and truly agreed to, there is no knowing what that otherness might consist of now, let alone later’ (Bauman 2001b: 168). From this understanding of love it follows that the otherness of the Other establishes the ethical responsibility of being for since the self can never be identically with. In short, love is embracing the Other as value for themselves, not as an object to be used. Yet it is exactly that version of love that liquid modernity undermines, or at least replaces with a life-political dominant that runs in a quite contrary direction. The problem is that for Bauman love means embracing precariousness: ‘Making an other into the definite someone means rendering the future indefinite. It means consent to the future’s indefiniteness’ (Bauman 2003a: 20). But just like globalisation-induced wars, liquid modern life-politics involve turning away from precariousness and towards something in which it is possible to invest hopes for certainty. At the life-political level the only thing that can be trusted in this way is instant gratification. Consequently, ethical love relationships have been replaced with ‘top pocket relationships’ that are ‘instantaneity and disposability incarnate’ (Bauman 2003a: 21). The very phrase distils what top pocket relationships entail. They are relationships in which the partners engage all the time that they are found to deliver use values. As soon as the other in the relationship ceases

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to be useful, then like a dirty handkerchief they are simply thrown away. Inter-human togetherness is liquefied, and the human Other becomes like everything else that is found in a pocket; waste to be discarded. In this context Bauman has alluded to Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities. Bauman says that the melting of the bonds of inter-human togetherness has led to the appearance of ‘Der Mann ohne Verwandtschaften – the man with no bonds’. This figure is ‘the denizen of our liquid modern society’ (Bauman 2003a: vii). One of the ways in which this liquefaction is immediately experienced by men and women is through their desires. For Bauman, love is expressed physically through the caress, and the caress can take the form of the mutual giving that is sexual activity. The commitment that is implied by this activity is reflected in heterosexuality by its connection to procreation. All of this implies a security of relationships, a confidence in the Other, a commitment of being for the Other over time, and the durability of roles to which the partners can be assigned both subjectively and socially. But liquid modernity means that these roles and solidities have melted: ‘Solidity is anathema, as is all permanence – now a sign of dangerous maladjustment to the rapidly and unpredictably changing world, to the surprise opportunities it holds and the speed with which it transforms yesterday’s assets into today’s liabilities’ (Bauman 2001b: 231). As such, sex as caress has been replaced by a life-political emphasis on eroticism. Yet Bauman believes that eroticism is, ‘Sex free from reproductive consequences and stubborn, lingering love attachments’ and that it, ‘can be securely enclosed within the frame of an episode; it will engrave no deep grooves on the constantly regroomed face which is thus insured against limitations on the freedom to experiment further’ (Bauman 2001b: 231. For Bauman on sex and eroticism, see Bauman 1997b: 141–151, 2001b: 220–237). Since liquid modernity stresses a life-politics of the transient rather than the durable, the instant as opposed to the long term, and usefulness as the paramount value, it melts the bonds between us and leads to men and women becoming individuals, each in pursuit of their own measure of security. From this it follows that liquid modernity is the condition of the emergence of an individualised society. ‘What the idea of “individualization” carries is the emancipation of the individual from the ascribed, inherited and inborn determination of his or her social character . . . To put it in a nutshell, “individualization” consists

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in transforming human “identity” from a “given” into a “task” ’ (Bauman 2001b: 144). That task is performed by the individual herself or himself, without any confidence that is given by secure roles or relationships that can be assumed to be durable over time. Selfconstitution then has also been subjected to a kind of time and space compression. The men and women who constitute themselves through the life-politics of liquid modernity are individuals – and individualised – because they have to constitute themselves and their lives, their certainties, hopes and ambitions, as they go along and without any outside support that can be relied upon to be available tomorrow. This self-constitution never stops and the individuals can never find a niche in which to rest because there are no more niches. There is then a massive contradiction between globalisation and the liquid modern life-politics. The former destroys all of the solids of the modern trinity, creates the sensibility of a world from which there is no escape and in which there is a perpetual and relentless need to think about the distant effects of which immediate action might be the cause. Globalisation requires great foresight, vision and attention to the far-off. Meanwhile, liquid modern life-politics also dissolves solids and creates a society of individuals who are confronted with the problem of trying to make sense of a life from which all certainty and confidence has been sapped. These are individuals who consequently attend to little more than the immediate, the close at hand, the transient, who are concerned to make sure that ‘options, as many as possible, are kept open’ (Bauman 2001b: 148) and that actions performed today can be forgotten tomorrow. Globalisation and liquid modernity create individuals who are incredibly anxious, incredibly desperate to find a source of certainty, and yet who are quite incapable of achieving either (or, as September 11 showed, if they do find a kind of certainty it lends them the confidence to try to destroy symbols of the global production of anxiety). Consequently, there emerges the, ‘curious paradox of our times, in which the growing awareness of the dangers ahead goes hand in hand with a growing impotence to prevent them or alleviate the gravity of their impact’ (Bauman 2001b: 186. Original emphasis).

Conclusion The problem is not just that globalisation raises questions that liquid modernity makes it difficult to answer. The problem also is that liquid

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modernity makes it difficult to ask questions of globalisation. Drawing on a claim by Cornelius Castoriadis, Bauman observes that, ‘the trouble with the contemporary condition of our modern civilization is that it stopped questioning itself’ (Bauman 1998b: 5). This signifies nothing less than an assault on the possibility of human being in the world. Bauman’s sociological work has always been motivated by a refusal to accept the common sense that the way things are is the way that things must be. Ever since he started work in Poland during the little stabilisation, Bauman has sought to show that despite everything things could be different than they are; there is an alternative. For Bauman human being is precisely that, precisely human, to the extent that men and women engage in the praxis of questioning so that possibility opens up, and the probable is shown to be nothing more than an effect of power. Consequently, if the present is a condition that has stopped questioning itself, then it is also a condition that challenges the possibility of human being. But Bauman’s comment itself raises a question: why has the present stopped questioning itself? One reason is that the life-politics of liquid modernity mean that world beyond the self ceases to be a problem about which men and women feel that they ought to devote attention. In liquid modernity, the connection of personal troubles to public issues is undone. Men and women are individuals who seek to maximise their opportunities in the world through the development of their own skills and aptitudes. In this context there is no compulsion to enter into binding ties of inter-human togetherness for the simple reason that the human Other is merely a use-value to be consumed and then discarded. For Bauman, this means that men and women stop questioning the world because experientially it poses few problems: ‘Told repeatedly that he or she is the master of his or her own fate, the individual has little reason to accord “topical relevance” . . . to anything which resists being engulfed by the self and dealt with by the self’s facilities’ (Bauman 2000a: 39). Only the self and Others become troubling. This is why liquid modern life-politics leads to the growing sense of threats and the inability to do anything about them. Since the individual is ‘the master of his or her own fate’, the external world only becomes meaningful in so far as it can be reduced to the scale of personal troubles: ‘For the individual, public space is not much more than a giant screen on which private worries are projected without ceasing

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to be private or acquiring new collective qualities in the course of magnification’ (Bauman 2000a: 39–40). The reduction of public issues to personal troubles is also due to the impact of globalisation. It has destroyed the modern trinity and made confrontation with the local state largely irrelevant. Yet there has been no emergence of a global public sphere that would enable men and women to deal with the issues that are thrown up by globalisation. Of course from the point of view of global capital this is no bad thing, since the absence of any space for the emergence of issues means that there are unlikely to be any unpredicted or unpredictable obstacles put in the way of free movement. But from the point of view of human possibility, it implies bad times indeed. For Bauman, the problem is that globalisation has not brought about the imagination of a global inter-human togetherness. The absence of any imagined global togetherness is reflected in the extent to which the word globalisation is so often taken to refer, ‘primarily to the global effects, notoriously unintended and unanticipated, rather than to global initiatives and undertakings’ (Bauman 1998b: 60). Only with the imagination of a global togetherness will those initiatives and undertakings, will that praxis, be at all possible. Yet such an imagination requires ‘socially sustained institutions of collective selfidentification and self-government’ and: ‘As far as the imagined global community is concerned, such an institutional network . . . is largely absent’ (Bauman 2002f: 297). Perhaps it is for this reason that Bauman is prepared hesitantly to embrace a utopian notion of Europe that is far removed from the Europe of the utilitarian managers of economic union. First, Europe can be identified as the imaginative incentive – and not at all as the realisation hitherto in actuality – of the first glimmering of the possibility of a global togetherness, in that it is an identity beyond the national, and which signifies universality as opposed to irredeemable difference. Second, Europe can do this because Bauman identifies it as a utopia built on respect for the Other and on ambivalence: ‘we may say that Europe could be seen as a greenhouse of universal humanity because of its own amazing aptitude for communicating across the cultural . . . divides’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 31. See also Bauman 2003c, Tester 2004. It is worth stressing that even if this utopia of Europe was ever achieved, Bauman would not refrain from criticising it since Europe would

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then constitute an ossified actuality that critical thought would be required to open up). Global togetherness points towards the praxis of an ethic of distant consequences that might deal with ‘the globalization of responsibility’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 145). This globalisation is the result of the emergence of a situation in which any local occurrence in principle can be the cause of effects very far away. These effects are not just unintended, they are completely unforeseen precisely because the horizons of men and women tend to be relatively circumscribed: ‘This new challenge stretches the endurability of the “moral impulse” to its limit . . . considering that for long centuries that impulse used to operate . . . only in the proximity of the Other’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 145). What Bauman advocates is an ethic of being for the Other that has expanded to cover the entire globe and which enjoins an appreciation of the implications of the realisation that: ‘We all bear responsibility for whatever happens to any of us, and the postulate of taking responsibility for our responsibility now involves the need to alleviate sufferings in whatever spot of the globe they may happen, the most distant sufferings included’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 145). When Bauman stresses that this ethic of distant consequences is one in which men and women take ‘responsibility for our responsibility’, he is gesturing back to the revelation of the work on postmodernity that ethics do not need Law, back to his humanistic-Marxist critique of alienation, and back to the principle that to be human is to engage in praxis, and to his repudiation of any naturalisation of human being in the world. All of this backwards gesturing is aimed towards living forwards, towards free human responsibility. Through an ethic that calls for care for the Other however distant she or he may be, men and women might be able to start asking questions and, thereby, once again discharge possibility into the world. Yet it is up to men and women to do this for themselves, since many of the intellectuals – and most certainly the best-known and most celebrated intellectuals – are unlikely to offer much help (Bauman 1998b). Of course, for Bauman this is no great problem. He has a confidence in his fellow men and women that goes back to Ossowski and Hochfeld and which recalls Gramsci’s precept that ‘everyone is a philosopher’ (Gramsci 1971: 322). Even if many men and women are only philosophers of common sense, nevertheless, they can become philosophers of praxis as soon as they start treating

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the world as a question as opposed to naturalised self-evidence (although they will only start doing that through participation in the autonomy of the constitution-through-praxis of an ethic of global togetherness). For Bauman, the problem is that too many intellectuals have become mere reflections of globalisation and liquidity. They too move freely from place to place and identify local ties as obstacles that are in the way and need to be overcome. In this way, Bauman argues, the intellectuals (or at least the global celebrities) are forging common cause with the partisans of global capitalism in celebrating a life of movement, shallow-ties and lack of solidity. They are turning cosmopolitanism into a mimesis, by taking for granted their own movement throughout the world and turning it into an ideology of what is purportedly required to live adequately in the present (Bauman 1998b: 99). They engage with the world with all of the attention, care and concern of a tourist. And tourists do not ask questions, so long as the plane departs on time, the hotel is clean and tidy, the food does not poison and the locals appear to be happy. But if the world is not treated as a question, a price is paid. Admittedly, this is not a price that is likely to be paid by those who permit their lives to reflect globalisation and liquid modernity, but there is a price none the less. Bauman’s point is that not everyone imitates the movement of capital and the liquefaction of bonds through choice. Some people have that fate forced upon them. Tourists travel because they choose to, but: ‘Not all wanderers . . . are on the move because they prefer being on the move to staying put and because they want to go where they are going.’ Some people, ‘are on the move because they have been pushed from behind – having first been spiritually uprooted from the place that holds no promise, by a force of seduction or propulsion too powerful, and often too mysterious, to resist’ (Bauman 1998b: 92). Bauman calls these the vagabonds of globalisation. They are represented in the figure of the refugee, and they are the human waste of globalisation. They are people in the way of free movement, and so they are pushed away from where they were and kept somewhere no one would ever wish to go, the refugee camps (Bauman 2003d). Where solid modernity produced the social suffering of the proletariat, ordering modernity that of the ambivalent and consumer capitalism the suffering of the repressed, globalisation and liquid

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modernity produce the social suffering of the refugee who is treated as human waste. But there are differences separating the proletariat and the ambivalent from the repressed and the refugees. The concern that was shown for the former rather demonstrated that there was an assumption of an intrinsic relevance to all human being in the world. On that basis political movements emerged which imagined an alternative condition that would enable actual men and women to begin to engage in praxis towards the incentive of humanity freed from suffering and released into unlimited possibility. There was the constitution of a politics in which men and women could engage in praxis because their experiences could be translated into some shared currency of the struggle to overcome humiliation and to discharge possibility. But the latter representations of social suffering – the refugees and the repressed – are not identified in this way. The tourists do not forge common cause with the suffering of globalisation and liquid modernity for the simple reason that they rarely encounter them. The suffering are kept away from the tourists by being confined to refugee camps or sink estates. The only time that the tourists do come across the suffering is when they are obstacles, add ‘local colour’, or when their presence is thoroughly mediated, aestheticised and, therefore, fundamentally misrepresented (Bauman 1993a). The refugees and the repressed on the one hand and the tourists on the other have no opportunity to engage in a conversation, translate experiences into shared meanings and engage in any kind of praxis. The tourists fly around the world, increasingly happily but talking with increasing irrelevance to anyone beyond an ever-decreasing circle, while the refugees and repressed are not given any chance to make their voices heard. The way out of this situation, the way of humanising the world, is to be found in an invigoration of the sociological imagination and the commitment of sociologists to the praxis of politics. Bauman enjoins the practitioners of the sociological imagination to play their part in the human praxis that is going in search of politics (Bauman 1999a). This is because it is only through the inter-human togetherness that is politics, and through the coming together into a mutually respectful conversation that politics implies, that it is at all possible for the bridge to be spanned between the issues of globalisation and the troubles of liquid modernity. The bridge that politics represents is a way of filling the empty spaces of the global flows with the

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voices of men and women, voices that require interpretation and translation. That in turn requires that all men and women are possessed of the resources that will enable them to participate in the conversation. They must be free from common sense and emancipated from the social suffering of humiliation. Consequently, politics is the incentive of justice (Bauman and Tester 2001: 131). Bauman says that, ‘the art of translation needs to be re-learned and the agora made once more available for practising it. It is in this awesomely difficult yet imperative task that sociology is called to play . . . the crucial role’ (Bauman 2002h: 193). Sociology, of course, is the ‘art of translation’. Perhaps then Bauman does point towards an answer to all of the questions that he raises. Perhaps the answer is to take up the sociological vocation and to ask all of the questions that power, common sense and ossification rule out of court and deny. And as soon as power says that some questions are stupid, as soon as common sense says that there is no point asking them because this is just the way things are, and as soon as ossification says that nothing will change, it is possible to have some confidence that one is indeed beginning to press a knife against the future.

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Index

actually existing socialism 82 and absorption of conflict 88–9 as a system 89–94 as structuralised 84 collapse of 99–100, 105–6 conflict with/implications for intellectuals 83–6, 88–9 connection with the West 101 conservatism of 86–9 contradictions of the plan 94–7 and desire to reconstruct the world 102 ethics of 143 and experts 90–1 and futuristic legitimation 91–4, 103–4, 113 and modernity 101–5, 113 and need for information/secret files 90–1 ossification of 135 peasant support for 86–7 power structure of 104 and process of melting 170 pursuit of wertrationalitat 113–14 solidarity/systemic revolution 97–101 and state security 87–8, 105–6 and the perfect future 114 totalitarian extreme 137 adiaphorization 126–7 agentic state 125–6 alienation 25–8, 36, 85, 172 individualisation 27 and intellectuals 79 male/female ethical relationships 28 man from man 26, 27 paradox of 62, 63–7 persistence of 64

and socialism 60–1, 63–7 species-being 26–7 the stranger in social/cultural relationships 27–8 worker/process 26 worker/product 26 youth 54–6 allosemitism 121–2 ambivalence 6, 58, 81 annihilation of 139–40 coming to terms with 152 freedom of 151 and human being 148 and inter-human togetherness 144 modern crusade against 137 and morality 141–2 and perfect order 171 persistence of 118–20 postmodern 137, 139, 155 and power 13 transformation of 140 An Open Letter to the Party (Kuron and Modzelewski) 64–5 anthropology 17 anti-Marxism 63, 64 anti-semitism 2, 5, 45, 79, 80–1, 106, 111, 112, 121 aporia 134–5, 155–6, 157 architecture 136 Arendt, Hannah 163, 168–9 Ash, G. 98 avant-garde 9–11, 83 as critical elite 78–9 and pushing toward the future 77–81 relationship with other groups 77, 78 193

194

Index

Baczko, Bronislaw 79 Bauman, Janina 130 Winter in the Morning 111–12 Bauman, Zygmunt, and alienation 25–8 analytical problem 6 as avant-gardist 10–11 as socialist 59–60 as sociologist 13, 14 as storyteller 13, 14 avoidance of academic conventions 159–61 books 107–8 classification of work by 16 and culture 9 difficulty of work by 12–14 early life 1 ethical commitment 6 and exile 6–9 and hermeneutics 16–23 and human meaningfulness of the world 23–4 humanism of 29–33 image of man 107, 109, 144 importance of literary texts to 14–16 influence of wife on 111–12 inspirations for 34–57 Jewish ancestry 1, 2, 111 and lived experience 5 and living forwards 9–11 loyalty to sociology 1223 military career 1–2 move away from postmodernity 157–9 Polish ambivalence of 6 and political action 6 political commitment/ passion 3–4 and praxis 24–5 pre-/post-exile works 107–8 and present order of things 23 removal from public life 79–80 sociological ambition 5–6

sociology mission 5–6 university career 3 Beilharz, Peter 12, 62, 111, 159 Benjamin, Walter 112 biography 6 Borges, Jorge Luis 15, 17, 161 Brus, Wlodzimierz 65, 79 bureaucratic systems 89, 125–6 Calvino, Italo 14, 15, 160 Camus, Albert, The Rebel 46–7 capitalism 101, 102, 109–10 Castoriadis, Cornelius 177 class 101 class structure 61, 78 classification 127, 146 definition of 117–18 problem of 118–19 common sense 59, 67, 138, 140, 182 as conservative 50 as paradoxical 50 as philosophy of non-philosophers 49 critique of Communist 50 critique of prevailing 50–1 and making choices 53–4 and moral individuality 49–50 sociological differences 51–2 and truth of actuality 50 Communism 5, 44–5, 50, 86 and belief in perfect future 104 failures of system 104–5 link with the West 101 community 58, 168 Community (2001) 159 Consumerism and the New Poor (1998) 37 consumption 152–4, 155, 180 critical sociology 155 critical theory 20–1, 26, 29, 67, 78 Crozier, Michael 89 culture 9 identity of 71 and intellectual legislation 135 myth of ambivalence/ uncertainty 141–2

Index

myth of unconditional obedience/ no deviation in deed/ thought 141 and praxis 17, 42, 69–71 theory 21 values 83 Culture as Praxis (1973) 17, 42, 69–71, 107, 120 cybernetic theory 89 dialectical materialism 93 disobedience 39–40, 60 Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger 119–20 Durkheim, Emile 29, 53, 141 economics 37, 94 Edenic myth 141–2 education 154, 172 Elias, Norbert 123 employment 172–3 Engels, Friedrich 169–70 ethic of distant consequences 179 ethical Law 142–4, 146 ethics 6, 9–10, 20, 38, 59, 130, 134 as choice between good, evil, uncertainty 142 as Law/confidence 142 crisis of 140–1 foundations of 141–2 and love 174 male/female alienation 28 modern/postmodern distinction 142–3 postmodern 147–9 and solidarity 148, 156 and tolerance 148 use of term 143 utopian 135, 146–8 ethnomethodology 17 exile, active confrontation of 8 ambivalence of 7 as common experience 7 fate/vocation difference 8–9, 10 and making choices 8–9

pre-taste/fully-fledged experience 7–8 sociological condition of

195

6–7

Finkelkraut, Alain 145 Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punishment 109 futuristic legitimation, and absolute values 94 actually existing socialism 113 and attitude to the present 92–3 and denial of validity of human praxis 93 diametrically opposed visions of 92 fundamental tenet 91 and perfect planning 96 and power structure of actually existing socialism 103–4 Giddens, Anthony 13 Gierek, Edward 98 globalisation 58, 161–2 and destruction of modern trinity 171, 178 emergence of post-Trinitarian world 164–6 and environmental degradation 163 and foresight, vision, attention to the far-off 176 and global figuration 163–4, 166 and globalisation-induced wars 167–8 and globalising wars 166–7 and imagined global community 178–9 and inter-human togetherness 178–80 and lack of confidence 173 and liquid modernity 169–76, 177 and mass population migration 163 meta-level processes 172 and network of dependencies 163

196

Index

globalisation (Continued) and no place to hide 168 and nuclear weapons 163 and political movements 181 of responsibility 179 and security 168–9 and tourists 180, 181 and universal humanity 168 vagabonds of 180–1 Globalisation (1998) 159 Goldman, Lucien 15 Gomulka, Wladyslaw 44, 45, 60, 79, 98 Gramsci, Antonio 53, 57, 62, 68, 179 Prison Notebooks 46–52 Gulag Archipelago 114 Heideggar, Martin 18 Hermeneutics and Social Science (1978) 16–17, 20, 107 hermeneutics, and forgetting of being 18 as a practice 16–17 possibilities 18–20 and postmodernism 22–3 and recovery/creation 19–22, 38, 133 and spirit of the novel 18–19 Hirszowicz, Maria 79 Hochfeld, Julian 34–7, 43, 56, 57, 107, 179 Holocaust 82, 110–11, 135, 140 and allosemitism 122 as aberration from modernity 123 as bureaucratic instrumental rational system 126–9 as cultural property 133 as incident in Jewish history 122–3 attributed to evil 124–5, 131 and classification/hostility of Jews 121–2 and cultural ossification 129–30 due to modernity getting out of control/running wild 124

ethics of 143 humanist critique of 130 and inhumanity of organisation 122–9 and perfect order 114–15 and pursuit of the right 137 and self-preservation 132, 133–4 sociological discussion on 122–4 survivors of 131–2 use of Weberian themes 123–4 victim co-operation 128–9 and victory of morality over utility 132–3 human beings, bonds of 140–2, 150, 175, 180 as free/autonomous 24, 106, 115–16, 131 conformist 32 entrapment of 124 and escape from responsibility 85–6, 106 laws of action 32 making choices 53, 180 paradox of 63 positivist 31 and praxis 68–9, 132 in the world 31, 113 uniqueness of 63, 131 what it means 23, 68 human togetherness 144–7, 152, 155, 174–5, 178–80, 181–2 human values 39–40, 49, 52, 56 humanism 29–33, 49, 68 and empiricism 40–1 Marxist 67 and the Holocaust 124 identity 150, 176 imagination/inspiration 107 actual/ideal ambivalence 62 and alienation 54–6 and common sense 49–52 and disobedience of thinking 39–40 emergence of 34 empirical/humanist distinction 40–1

Index

ethical dimension 38–41 and external power 38–40 history as human product 48–9 human interpretations/ meanings 37 and human values 49, 52 influences on 34–57 and innovational personalities 53–5 and little stabilisation 45–6, 50, 52 loyalty to human values 38, 40, 41 and male/female as natural/ animal-like objects 37 and moral individuality 53 and necessity of the actual 49–50 optimism/pessimism 57 and Polish October 43–6 and Polish sociology 42–3 and power/culture 48–9 and question of youth 54–6 rebel/slave allusion 46–7 scientific truth, cultural sensibility, socio-political goal 36 sociology as ongoing commentary on human ‘lived experience’ 35 spirit of honesty, sobriety, illusion 35, 36 and suffering 36–7 texts 46–52 individualised society 175–6 individuals/individualisation 27, 154–5, 177–8 industrialisation see peasant industrialisation innovational personalities 53–5, 56 instrumentalism 126, 126–9, 130 intellectuals 9, 10, 82, 83 as knife-bearers of socialism 77–81 and asking questions 179–80 conflict with actually existing socialism 83–6

197

and legislation 135, 136 and peasant industrialisation 86–7 power of 84 support for 80 international community 166 Jencks, Charles 136 Jews see anti-Semitism; Holocaust Kafka, Franz 140 Khruschev, Nikita 44 Kieslowski, Krzysztof 79, 80 Three Colours: Red (film) 142–3 Kolakowski, Leszek 7, 64, 65, 66, 78, 79, 88–9 Kraus, Karl 10 Kundera, Milan 16, 18–19, 21, 49, 163 Kuron, Jacek 64–5 language 11, 12 Lasch, Christopher 55 Legislators and Interpreters (1987) 103–4, 116 Levinas, Emmanuel 145 Levine, Donald 29 life-course decisions 5 Life in Fragments (1995) 160 life-politics 162, 169–76, 177–8 life-stories see biography Liquid Love (2003) 159 liquid modernity 29, 78, 82, 109, 162 in actually existing socialism/ Nazism 170 and codes/rules 171 and individualization 175–6 and instant gratification 173–4 and inter-human togetherness 174–5 and lack of control 173 and life beyond the self 177 link with Marx and Engels 169–70 and love 174–5

198

Index

liquid modernity (Continued) and move from pre-allocated reference groups to universal comparison 171–2 and process of melting 170–1 and sex/eroticism 175 and transience 175, 176 and work security 172–3 Liquid Modernity (2000) 20, 169, 172 literature 14–16, 17, 21 ‘little stabilisation’ 45–6, 50, 52, 79, 171, 172 lived experience 5–6 living forwards, and ethically responsible human beings 9–10 influence on texts 10–11 and necessity of active social group 77–81 and postmodernity 147 and praxis 71–7 and the intellectual 9, 10 and understanding of culture 9 love 174–5 managerialism 66–7, 114, 125–6, 130 March Events (1968, Poland) 79–80, 82, 83–6 Marx, Karl 15, 25–7, 29, 36, 69, 93, 169–70 ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ 69 Marxism 62 as objective science 66 debates surrounding 65 and free discussion 64–5 Gramscian 62 humanist 67 importance of praxis to revisionism 68–71 managerial 66–7 open letter on 64–5 ossification of 64, 67–8 paradoxes 63–4

revisionist 63–8, 78 revitalisation of 69 strategies/concerns 65–6 Memories of Class (1982) 107–10 Milgram, Stanley 125 Mills, C. Wright 35–6, 61, 172–3 Moczar, Miecyslaw 79 ‘Modern Times, Modern Marxism’ (1969) 65, 68 modernity 82, 112 abandonment of 135 as unfinishable 139 and certainty 137 characterised by bureaucratic system of authority 125 and confidence in ethical law 142, 144 confidence of 137, 138, 139 and dominance of societal over the social 144 foundations of 137, 138 gardening metaphor 116–17, 171 and human freedom 115–16 and human/natural separation 115 and intellectuals’ role in legislative power 103–4 melting powers of 170–1 modern socialism as counter-culture of 101–3 and order 115–22 and power of the state 136 roots in European Renaissance 103 terminal 134 territory, nation, state trinity 165 and the Holocaust 123 and the stranger 120–1 universality of 137–8 Modernity and Ambivalence (1991) 115, 117 Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) 117, 122–9, 131–4, 144, 159 Modzelewski, Karol 64–5

Index

morality 49–50, 53, 108, 125, 132, 140 as pre-societal 144–5 as responsibility not duty 145 as sign of freedom/mark of humanity 145 and ethics 143 and self-preservation 133 victory over utility 132–4 Morawski, Stefan 79, 146, 147 multi-dimensional societies 53–4 Musil, Robert 14, 15, 16, 23–4, 161 The Man Without Qualities 175 Nazism 77, 170 neo-liberalism 136 Nijhoff, Pieter 12 Nisbet, Robert 29 nomenklatura 86, 87 obedience 125 order, and ambivalence 118–20 as modern problem 115 as social project 116–21 and classification 117–19 gardening metaphor 116–17 imposed 119–20 made/maintained 115–16 perfect 171 and power 116 secure/trustworthy 115 world/human affairs 115 organizations 66–7 Ossowski, Stanislaw 34, 37–41, 43, 45, 53, 56, 57, 60, 123, 179 Class Structure in the Social Consciousness 45 Other 145–6, 147–8, 149–50, 161, 174–5, 177, 179 pain 24 peasant industrialisation, conservatism of 87–9 and education 87 and employee spirit 86 and introverted/extroverted subjectivities 88

199

lack of personal freedom/ self-organization 86 lack of support for intellectuals 87 and melting process 170–1 security of 87 and standards of living 86–7 and use of brutality 86 Perec, Georges 14, 15, 161 plan/planning, contradictions of 94–7 as dominant/defining feature of economic activity 94 as wertrational 94 and futuristic legitimation 96 and imperfect environment 96–7 and Party/expert conflict 96 and perfect hierarchical control 95–6 and perfect information 95 and principle of perfect planning 94–6 problems concerning 96 and realistic/effective decision-making 95 and self-sufficient resources 95 and social homogeneity 95 Polish October 43–6 Polish sociology 37 commitment of 42 macrosociological focus 42–3 theoretical pluralism of 43 political action 6 politics 181 of certainty 151–2, 154 of desire 151 of fear 151 post-Trinitarian world 164–6 Postmodern Ethics (1993) 159, 161 postmodernism 13–14, 137, 158 postmodernity 22–3, 29, 33, 82, 130, 134–5, 170 actuality of needs 155–6 as aporetic 148, 155–6, 157 as institutionalized pluralism/ variety 139

200

Index

postmodernity (Continued) as modernity without illusion 138–9 as recovery of social from wreckage of the societal 144–6 and awareness of contingency 139 and bonds of humanity 140–2 and certainties of common sense/ naturalisation 150, 156 and consumer mass 150–1 and consumption/ consumerism 152–4 and cultivation of the body 150 cultural/existential dominance 160 definition of 137 emergence of 135–40 and engagement with other 145–6, 147–8, 149–50 focus on community 151 foundations/conceits 171 and global space 161–2 and inter-human togetherness 144–7, 152, 155 and life-political issues 162 meaning of 158–9 and meta-political issues 162 move away from 157–9 and need for sociology 155–6 political concerns 151–2 and practice of self as project 149–51 reasons for considering 135–6 and recovery of ambivalence 139–40 and self-constitution 152–4, 160, 161, 171 semantic confusion over 158 and the individual 154–5 and uncertainty 142, 148–9 utopian ethics 147–8 poverty 58–9, 71, 108, 154 power 6, 48–9, 66, 140, 177, 182 and ambivalence 13 cultural 82–3

external 38–40, 53 intellectual limitations 84 legislative 103–4 political/social 84 sovereign 161 state 136, 138 praxis 24–5, 62, 92, 135, 154 and culture 17, 42, 69–71 ethic of distant consequences 179 and it what means to be human 68–9 and Marxist revisionism 68–71 possibilities of 72–7, 85 public/private issues 55–6, 177–8 rationality 123–4, 127–9, 130, 137 refugees 180–1 repression 154 responsibility 9–10, 85–6, 106, 145, 161, 179 revolution see systemic revolution Santayana, George 71 Satterthwaite, 67–8 Schatz, Jaff 4–5 science 23, 29, 36 In Search of Politics (1999) 159 security, and employment 172–3 and globalisation 168–9 state 87–8, 105–6 and the stranger 120–1 sex/eroticism 175 Simmel, Georg 29, 62, 63, 64, 67, 69, 112, 140 Smith, Dennis 12–13, 14 social groups, and acceptance of actually existing socialism 87–9 avant-garde relationships 77, 78 intellectual/expert/worker split 97 necessity of active 77–81 power of 84 regard for 78 and state patronage 87

Index

support/connections between 77, 79, 80–1, 84, 85–6 and the human environment 84–5 and web of dependencies 85 ‘Social Structure of the Party Organization in Industrial Works’ (1962) 87–8 socialism 44, 48 and a dignified life 61 and alienation 60–1, 62 as counter-culture of capitalism 101–2 as praxis of possibility 72–7 as self-transcending praxis 72 and creation of class structure 61 critical dimension of 60 definition of 59–60 ethical commitment 60, 62 and future aspirations 72 knife-bearers of 77–81 and living forwards 61, 71–7 and Marxist revisionism 63–8 materialistic aspect 71–2 necessity of 62 ossification of 67 paradox of 60–2 and praxis 68–71 and pursuit of the right 137 and recovery of humanity 62 recovery of humanity of 62, 63–71 Stalinist view 93 stasis of 61 and theory/practice of fluid human world 62 utopian dimension 62, 73–7 see also actually existing socialism Socialism: the Active Utopia (1976) 73–7, 107 Society Under Siege (2002) 10, 77–8 sociology 6 as critique 52 as flexible/self-reflective 156 as non-naturalistic 24, 26 as praxis 24–5

201

common sense differences 51–2 and creation of possibility 19–20, 69 and destruction of human values 52 and discussion of the Holocaust 122–3 focus on ossification of human world 124 heroic 124 historical condition of 45–6 and human togetherness 155 and job of translation 22 literary concerns 14–16 and the possible 15 solid modernity 172, 173, 180–1 solidarity 82, 98–101 as humanisation of ossified world 99 identification with novum 99, 100 prediction of 99 significance of 98–9 Stalin, Joseph 93 Stalinism 44, 93, 100 Staniszkis, Jadwiga 44 Starski, Stanislaw 78 stranger 120–1 suffering 58, 78, 180–1, 182 and Jewry 110 rethinking of 108 roots of 109–10 symbolisation of social 108–10 and the Holocaust 110–11 systemic revolution 99–100, 106 Sztompka, Piotr 42 Taras, Ray 52 texts, inadequacies of 161 influence of literary 14–16, 17 jigsaw puzzle motif 15 linear narrative 159–60 and living forwards 10–11

202

Index

texts, inadequacies of (Continued) reading as praxis 160 relationship of writing to 12 ‘The End of Polish Jewry’ (1969) 112 ‘The Jew as a Polish Writer’ (1969) 112 Thinking Sociologically (1999) 51 Touraine, Alain 98 Towards a Critical Sociology (1976) 51, 107 tribal politics 151–2 utilitarianism 39, 52–4, 55–6, 67, 68, 78, 96, 109, 114, 125–6, 137, 138, 140, 172 utopia 78 as engaged 76 as expression of hope 76 as imaginative incentive 74–5 as significant concept 74 critical dimension 75–6 of Europe 178–9 and future as imaginative incentive 92 identified with culture/ socialism 147 influence on action 76 and possibility of overcoming alienation 75 and postmodern ethics 147–8 and socialism 73–7 technical meaning 146–7

Wajda, Andrzej 60 Ashes and Diamonds 45 wars, globalisation-induced 167–8 globalising 166–7 humanitarian 167 Wasted Lives 159 Weber, Max 18, 29, 93, 114, 123–4 wertrationalitat (value-rational action) 113–14, 125–6, 137 Wolff, Kurt H. 15 working class 58 as defenders of law and order 108 change in nature of work done by 108–9 contraction of 108 forms of social suffering 109 and injustice/inequality 108 militancy as defensive 108 moral/spatial fracturing of 108 transformation of 108 writing, linear nature of 12 poetic link 17–18, 20 youth 60–1, 64, 171 as depoliticised 55–6 and creation of private world 55–6 effect of education on ideology 54–5 and hard work 55 zweckrationalitat (instrumentalrational action) 114, 137