Zygmunt Bauman

Legislators and interpreters : on modernity, post-modernity, and intellectuals

Introduction - intellectuals, from modern legislators to post-modern interpreters Paul Radin, or the aetiology of intellectuals les philosophes - the archetype and the utopia sociogenesis of the power/knowledge syndrome gamekeepers turned gardeners educating people discovery of culture ideology, or building the world of ideas the fall of the legislator the rise of the interpreter two nations mark two - the seduced, the repressed conclusions - one too many.

On Glocalization: or Globalization for some, Localization for some Others

Globalization cuts both ways. Not only does it valorize the local in a cultural sense, it constructs the local as the tribal. Processes of geopolitical fragmentation give those in power even more room to manoeuvre. Glocalization involves the reallocation of poverty and stigma from above without even the residual responsibility of noblesse oblige. Geographical and social mobility are dichotomized; populations are refigured as tourists and vagabonds. Globalization thus reinforces already existing patterns of domination, while globalization indicates trends to dispersal and conflict on neo-traditional grounds. The privileged walk, or fly away; the others take revenge upon each other.

State of emergency

THE QUESTION concerning the condition and application of the contemporary State of Emergency is now at the centre of theoretical exploration across a range of specialities within the humanities and the critical social sciences, from sociology and political theory to literature, cultural, philosophical and international studies. The 14 articles written by highly distinguished contributors for this Special Section of Theory, Culture & Society on the State of Emergency are varied in their theoretical viewpoints, the cultural intentions behind their texts and in their social emphasis. The contributions are engaged with investigating questions such as the critical social significance of state and military institutions, with law and political order, the implications of terror and violence, and for whose political objectives the State of Emergency is planned. The orthodox modern State of Emergency was a situation, declared by the state, in which the strategies and tactics of the military were employed legally, typically because of a number of occurrences of civil disorder such as terrorism, the methodical use of carnage and coercion to attain political aims. Nazi Germany’s Decrees of 1933 are, for instance, a first-rate illustration of the modern State of Emergency. The 28 February Decree, for example, was one of the most oppressive acts of the new Nazi administration. It authorized the suspension of civil liberties in the wake of the fictitious crisis produced by the Nazis as a consequence of the fire that wrecked the Reichstag parliament building on the preceding day. Now, George W. Bush, the President of the United States, and Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, have not, of course, formally affirmed a contemporary State of Emergency in their governments. Yet, in this Introduction, I shall argue that the Bush and Blair regimes are certainly beginning to lay the foundations for the state and purposes of a ‘hypermodern’ State of Emergency (Armitage,

Collateral Casualties of Consumerism

Collateral victims of consumerism are the ‘flawed consumers’ - lacking resources that socially approved consumer activity requires. Collateral damages refer to the new frailty of inter-human bonds resulting from the transfer of consumerist patterns upon relations between humans. Collateral casualties of consumerism are all men and women affected by either of these and thereby confronted by a series of unfamiliar challenges difficult or impossible to cope with.

On Postmodern Uses of Sex

Of sex, eroticism and love, the first is natural and limited in its forms, while the other two are cultural products infinite in their expressions and applications. The history of eroticism is, essentially, a history of changing border conflicts and shifting alliances between the three members of the triad. The postmodern novelty is emancipation of eroticism from both sexual reproduction and love - and setting it free to perform a variety of new tasks. A crucial one among these is the renegotiation of social relations inside the family and in public space, as well as new forms of identity building.

Culture and Management

The idea of ‘culture’ was coined and named in the third quarter of the 18th Century, as a shorthand term for the management of human thought and behaviour. ‘Culture’ was not born as a descriptive term, a summary name for the already achieved, observed and recorded regularities of the population-wide conduct (that use of the word ‘culture’ arrived about a century later, when the culture managers looked back on what they already came to view as their creation and following the world-creating God’s example declared it to be good. ‘Culture’ came to mean the way one type of ‘normatively regulated’, regular human conduct differed from another type, under different management) – but as a declaration of intent.

The Great War of Recognition

With the removal of the ‘final state’ vision from the perception of historical process recasts the coexistence of (proliferating) differences as a perpetual condition of modernity. Given that ‘difference’ masks all too often inequality, perpetuity of the ‘wars of recognition’ is therefore a likely prospect, since the instability of all extant and emerging power settings triggers reconnaissance-through-battle. The politics of recognition, though, tends to be viewed and practiced, wrongly, as an alternative rather than complement of distributive justice, thereby inflaming rather than mollifying the intensity of ‘recognition wars’.

The Bauman reader

Preface. 1. Introduction: Peter Beilharz: Reading Zygmunt Bauman. 2. The Telos Interview. 3. Socialism. 3.1 The Historical Location of Socalism. 3.2 Modern Times, Modern Marxism. 3.3 Communism: A Postmortem. 4. Class and Power. 4.1 Class: Before and After. 4.2 Gamekeepers Turned Gardeners. 4.3 The Rise of the Interpreter. 5. Hermeneutics and Critical Theory. 5.1 The Challenge of Hermeneutics. 5.2 Critical Theory. 5.3 Modernity. 6. Sociology and the Postmodern. 6.1 A Sociological Theory of Postmodernity. 6.2 The Re--Enchantment of the World, or, How Can One Narrate Postmodernity?. 7. Figures of Modernity. 7.1 Making and Unmaking of Strangers. 7.2 Parvenu and Pariah: The Heroes and Victims of Modernity. 8. The Century of Camps. 8.1 Sociology After the Holocaust. 8.2 Dictatorship Over Needs. 8.3 A Century of Camps?. 9. Ambivalence and Ethics. 9.1 The Quest for Order. 9.2 The Social Construction of Ambivalence. 10. Globalization and the New Poor. 10.1 On Glocalization: Or Globalization for Some, Localization for Some Others. 10.2 From the Work Ethic to the Aesthetic of Consumption. 11. The Journey Never Ends, Zygmunt Bauman Talks With Peter Beilharz. Index.

Education in Liquid Modernity.

Let me start by discussing a few seminal and interconnected departures from the old social order which are currently happening (at least in the ‘developed’ part of the planet) and which are creating a new and indeed unprecedented setting for the educational process, thereby raising a series of never-before-encountered challenges for the educators. First of all, society is being transformed by the passage from the ‘solid’ to ‘liquid’ phase of modernity, in which all social forms melt faster than new ones can be cast. They are not given enough time to solidify, and cannot serve as the frame of reference for human actions and long-term life-strategies because their allegedly short life-expectation undermines efforts to develop a strategy that would require the consistent fulfilment of a ‘life-project.’ The second departure from the past involves the divorce between power and politics, until recently a married couple cohabiting ‘till death do us part’ the shared household of the nation-state. Power now circulates within the politically uncontrolled global (and in many ways extraterritorial) space. By contrast, politics, that historically-shaped way of linking individual and public interests and of engendering purposeful collective action, remains as before local; as such, it is unable to effectively operate at the planetary level. The absence of political control makes power into a source of profound and in principle untameable uncertainty; while the dearth of power makes the extant political institutions, their intitiatives and undertakings, increasingly irrelevant to citizens’ most haunting life-problems and, for that reason, less likely to draw citizens’ attention. This situation also prods the state organs to drop, transfer away, or ‘subsidiarize’ an increasing number of previously performed functions. Having been abandoned by the state and left to the private initiative and care of individuals, those unregulated

Sociology and Postmodernity

Most current concepts of postmodernity refer solely to intellectual phenomena. In some cases, they focus narrowly on arts. In some others, they spill over to include a wider sp^ectnim of cultural forms and precepts. In a few cases they reach deeper, into the fundamental preconceptions of contemporary consciousness Rarely, if at all, they step beyond the boundary of the spiritual, into the changing social figuration which the artistic, cultural and cognitive developments, bracketed as postmodern, may reflect Such a self-limitation of the postmodernity discourse, and its legitimacy, is of crucial importance for the future of sociology. Indeed, if postmodernity means what the current concepts impK a reform of culture, of world-perception, of the intellectual stance then sociology faces the task of an essentially strategical adjustment. It must make itself resonant with new, postmodern culture, and break its links with the ontological and epistemologica! premises of modernity. It must transform itself into a postmodern sociology. In particular, it must follow other elements of postmodern culture by accepting (in theory as much as in practice) the self-containment and the self-grounding of the production and reproduction of meanings. It must abandon its traditional identity of a discourse characterised by an attempt to decode such meanings as products, reflections, aspects or rationalisations of social figurations and their dynamics. If, on the other hand, the self-containment of contemporary culture, and the associated implosion of vision, signal processes which reach beyond the realm of culture proper, (if they accompany transformations in. say, principles of systematic organisation or power arrangements) then it is not the traditional strategy of sociology which calls for revision, but a new focus of inquiry is needed, and a new set of categories geared to the changed social reality. In this case -