The new Bauman reader

Thinking sociologically in liquid modern times

Tony Blackshaw

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781784998066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Diritti umani

Zygmunt Bauman has written more than seventy books over five decades, most taking a single subject and finding doors to open it in all directions. His work is an essential reference point in sociology, but it is time that everyone caught up with him. In this book Tony Blackshaw doesn't just tell us that Bauman is a massive star in sociology, he demonstrates why his light shines brighter than that of almost any other intellectual figure in the world today by offering his readers deep insights into the 'Bauman Effect'. The new Bauman reader is two books in one. On the one hand, it is a critical introduction to a vital and inspiring sociologist who stands against the predictable in 'majority' sociology to draw out daring and new insights from which we can all learn. On the other, it is an anthology of his work chosen with the specific aim of guiding readers, whether undergraduates, postgraduates, academics or general readers to Bauman's original way of 'thinking sociologically', which is as irresistible as the 'liquid' metaphor that guides it.

I

Thinking sociologically

Introduction

Tony Blackshaw

Bauman’s ability as a writer is closely associated with his genius as a sociologist. He is a superbly gifted essayist with great powers of imagination; in his writings, one springs from the other. In recent years he has stopped writing long discursive books and become a sage. This doesn’t mean that he has stopped writing; and sagacity was there from the start. These days much of what he publishes is in the format of interview books and articles. But he prefers the ‘silent interview’,¹ which recognizes that, if the interviewer really wants to know what the interviewee thinks about certain matters, written responses are more efficient than verbal exchanges. These interviews also suit his speed and give him an opportunity to exercise his unstoppable curiosity – which is the source of his freedom and is what, in turn, feeds his sociological imagination. And just like the more conventional books and journal articles that preceded them, they always bear their maker’s unmistakable brand which – to borrow an aphorism from Kafka – operates like an ‘axe for the frozen sea’ inside us. Bauman’s starting point is this: if sociology doesn’t stir our imaginations with a blow to the head, what use is it?

As I explained in the Preface, the chapters in Part I bring readers face-to-face with Bauman’s words so that they can see how he mines the enormous power of language to encourage us to think the world into a different type of reality. These readings offer one other thing, too – perhaps the most important. By bringing readers close to the words Bauman uses they also show them how to use those words themselves.

This is important since (and as I pointed out in the main introduction) Bauman is a practising sociologist who lacks the scholarly patience and the enthusiasm to say much about the art and techniques of his Schöpferkraft. However, in pursuing his calling he has stopped from time to time to say something about what he means by sociology and how we should do it. He has also on occasion commented on sociology’s inadequacies, hopeful that he can impart something useful about this academic discipline – by which I mean the discursive formation that constitutes and reconstitutes itself through the major sociology departments, the key associations, journals and conferences – that too often seems to generate more opinions and fewer instructive critical statements about it than any other.

There is a sentence of Nietzsche which seems to hang over sociology: ‘I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar.’ What I mean by belief in grammar is the widespread conviction in sociology that its tried and tested concepts, theories and methods somehow presuppose an order of things that mirrors its conviction to a ready-made way of conceptualizing ‘reality’, which it perceives is more adequate than any other.

Though many sociologists continue both to sing the praises of and to pursue such concepts, theories and methods, they are meeting with increasing challenge for at least three reasons. First, there has been a decline in confidence in objectivity across all academic disciplines. Second, within sociology itself, while confidence appears the norm, this has declined as apparently self-assured assertions about the value of sociology often come under attack. The most obvious upshot of this trend would have to be the decline of taught sociology degrees in universities. Third, and most relevant to our concerns here, the discursive formation has done little to advance sociology conceptually in the light of the challenges posed by the new century. As Bauman pointed out over twenty-five years ago, the primary reason for this is that the ‘conceptual system of sociology still very much in operation and hardly ever seriously questioned’ is one that was ‘designed to cope with the past century’s experiences and anticipations’.² Plus ça change.

Bauman manages to buck this trend by developing his own way of thinking sociology. But what do we mean by this term? As the philosopher Martin Heidegger once said, one of the marks of being human is that we can think in the sense that we possess the ability to do so. However, this possibility is no guarantee that we are capable of thinking. According to Bauman, the main reason why thinking can’t be guaranteed – especially critical, discursive and reflective thinking – is that we tend to get bogged down in our daily routines, to the extent that ‘we hardly ever pause to think about the meaning of what we have gone through: even less often have we the opportunity to compare our private experience with the fate of others, to the social in the individual, the general in the particular’.³

This is precisely what thinking sociologically can do for us. It is that distinctive sensibility which enables us to locate our own experiences within a broader socio-historical context. For Bauman, as for Charles Wright Mills, the sociologist who coined the term the ‘sociological imagination’, thinking sociologically enables us to distinguish between our own ‘personal troubles’ and ‘public issues’⁴ or, more pointedly, to begin to conceptualize the relationship between our own individual experiences and broader processes of social continuity and change.

What Bauman also adds to Mills’s putative insights is this: sociology is a kind of intellectual life with the spark of imagination’s power shot through it, like the letters that run through a stick of seaside rock. On top of that, and to recall John Berger’s key insight once again, ‘imagination is not, as is sometimes thought, the ability to invent; it is the ability to disclose that which exists’. What Berger is suggesting here is that it is only when it is in ‘agreement’ with what exists in the real world that the imagination has vitality. This means not that thinking sociologically has some privileged access to reality but that what we get through our sociological imaginations are ideas about ‘reality’ that we do not get in any other way.

Yet to be sociologists good at our job, especially in a modern world as socially and culturally diverse as ours, we not only need to understand what is going on in our own lives, but we must also have a keen interest in what is going on in the lives of other people. What this aspect of thinking sociologically entails is trying to put ourselves in the shoes of others (which inevitably will also lead us to shed some part of our existing identity). This tells us that sociology is not only insistent on our feelings, our empathy, our solidarity, our kindness for others – as Bauman would put it, ‘loving others as you love yourself’ – but also our acceptance that for all our social and cultural differences as human beings we have a responsibility for each other, because we are after all one of a kind. In insisting on our human kindness Bauman is suggesting that our preparedness to look the other in the face comes before everything else: in looking into the face of the other we are reminded that we are engaged in a human encounter, person to person, that comes with the face.⁵

This emphasis on our ethical responsibility for the Other is not, of course, an outlook distinctive to thinking sociologically with Bauman. What is distinctive about thinking sociologically with him, however, is that he encourages us to challenge the Platonian admonition in majority sociology that artists should be banned from citizenship in its ideal republic. The assumption behind all sociological thinking is that life has meaning. It is designed for people with common sense who recognize what it ‘means to understand a little more fully the people around us in terms of their hopes and desires and their worries and concerns’;⁶ it is a way of thinking which widens our awareness of connection – the threads to the past and the future which lie concealed in daily life.

As we saw in the main introduction, the way that Bauman practises this Schöpferkraft is through sociological hermeneutics rather than hermeneutic sociology. He has never been interested in identifying and analysing the way empirical reality is experienced as such. The fact that things appear to look a certain way on the surface does not mean that is the way they really are. What the best sociology does is offer a different way of seeing. One of the ways in which Bauman does this is by ironizing perception – in other words, boundedness and selfsameness – in order to challenge commonsense doxa (the language we think with but not about) so that the modern world, which is always in flux, impelled as it is by contingency, might flash up before us, as only language can, in alternative ways. To this end, his commitment is to the poetic, to the confluence of language in surprising ways: metaphor, analogy, juxtaposition, all sorts. But in his determination to disclose that which lies concealed in daily life the style of the exposition never obscures human reality. This is because Bauman is concerned to make his poetic intuitions as weighty and living as any ‘facts’ emerging from other kinds of sociology.

To borrow one of the great American philosopher Richard Rorty’s favourite aphorisms: the difference between Bauman and most other sociologists writing today is the difference between a man who can remember and use a range of different vocabularies at the same time and those who can remember and use only one. He is, as Hegel would have said, one of those thinkers who are always looking for new ways to capture his own time in thought. To this extent what Bauman offers sociology is an orientation rather than a perspective; he is the sociologist as poet who is keen to use words in ways they have never been used. His mission is to shape the old language of sociology into new liquid modern ways that he imagines will extend the possibilities of civic engagement. As we have seen already, to this extent, Bauman’s work is metaphorical, its objective being to sweep you into a world you think you already know and make you see it all with a startled second sight. Its ethos is hermeneutical: metaphor trips a switch and a connection is made.

Notes

1 S. R. Delaney, Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994).

2 Z. Bauman, ‘Hermeneutics and Modern Social Theory’, in D. Held and J. B. Thompson (eds) Social Theory and Modern Societies: Anthony Giddens and His Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 55.

3 Z. Bauman, Thinking Sociologically (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).

4 C. W. Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959).

5 Z. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).

6 Z. Bauman and T. May, Thinking Sociologically, Second Edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 11.

1 The motive for metaphor

(2013)

Michael Hviid Jacobsen

Part I begins with Michael Hviid Jacobsen’s insightful discussion of the way in which Bauman has done a fine job of re-establishing the ontological significance of metaphor for sociology. In this regard the chapter captures the moment when sociology met postmodernism in the 1980s; when the possibility of a new kind of social theory emerged that developed its own ‘new’ rules of method, which turned out to be radical – because they were not rules of method at all. Following in the footsteps of the ‘linguistic turn’ instigated by the great twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, postmodernism placed emphasis on ‘seeing things differently’ and the notion of pictorial thinking through ‘language games’ and the process of making ‘family resemblances’. This involves using tropes drawn from literature and poetry to understand social life, rather than depending on the ‘facts’, theory, or being fixated with establishing grand narratives.

Bauman was not merely an observer of these radical changes. Jacobsen’s portrait is an example of this innovative kind of thinking which Bauman emerged as a leading exponent, and through the idea of ‘metaphormosis’ his chapter discusses many of the virtues of the Bauman Effect – a strength of sociological exposition that rather than trying to conceptualize the social world through rules of method, instead literalizes it through the confluence of language.

As Jacobsen draws to our attention at the start of the chapter, Bauman’s point is to alert us that the strength of a metaphor lies not in any kind of ‘methodology’ but in our use of it. As the Wittgenstein scholar Peter Hacker has argued, questions about ‘what is it like to be something?’ require contrasts in order to make sense. What is it like for a person born into one generation to be of that generation? This is not a good question. For Hacker, critical inquiry is dialogical in spirit. Fundamentally, and despite any appearances to the contrary, questions about ‘what it is like to be’ require ‘contrast classes’.¹ In other words, and as Jacobsen demonstrates in this chapter, we should turn our attention to what two things – in the case of the two of the most common metaphors used by Bauman, for example, the certain solid modernity and the unpredictable liquid modernity – might say about each other. What is it like for a person born into a solid, seemingly permanent, immutable modernity to find themselves in a liquid modern world? This is a perfectly good question. In other words, there is a requirement that there be some kind of confluence, and, once there is, all sorts of stories are likely to follow. From this shuttling between ‘solid’ and ‘liquid’, ‘anthropoemic’ and ‘anthropophagic’, ‘gamekeeping’ and ‘gardening’ and so on – metaphors as magic wands in and of themselves which illuminate our way of thinking by maximizing contrast – this chapter demonstrates how Bauman is able to weave for social theory a new kind of fabric, a sustained deliberation on some key themes, or to be more precise, a compelling picture of the always unrestful modernity.

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

Robert Frost

Introduction: against ‘methodology’

Towards the end of his seminal book Liquid Modernity, published at the threshold of the new millennium thus marking an entry-point into the twenty first century – and a book whose argument unfolds around a gigantic metaphor of liquidity – Zygmunt Bauman draws an interesting and thought-provoking parallel between the similarities of the work of poets and sociologists in the way they approach their shared subject matter, the human world, by stating the following on the so-called ‘art of writing sociology’:

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 that prevailing ideological fashion of the day whose commonality is taken for the proof of its sense. Demolishing such walls is as much the sociologist’s as th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: Setting up the encounter
• Part I: Thinking sociologically
• Part II: Rethinking the unit-ideas of sociology
• Part III: Modernity from a ‘liquid’ perspective
• Epilogue: The continuing task
• Index