After Bauman

The coincidence of the passing of the great European sociologist Zygmunt Bauman with the British decision on Brexit, the American election to president of Donald Trump, the rise of fake news, and the normalization of what would have previously been extremist political views raises profound ethical questions and political challenges for not only Bauman's home discipline, sociology, but also the wider humanities and social sciences.Although Bauman was a sociologist, he was not a social scientist in the Durkheimian mold of those who want to prove causal relationships between variables in the name of establishing social facts. Against the antihumanism of so much contemporary sociology, which has been able to uncritically serve the interests of the state because it considers ethical norms distortions of its value-free methodological mission, Bauman wrote through what C. Wright Mills ([1959] 2000) called the sociological imagination. In Thinking Sociologically (Bauman and May 2001), what I consider his greatest book, simply because it seems to capture the essence of his sociological project, Bauman insists upon the primacy of the social relation in the name of the critique of the kind of brutal individualism that has taken over capitalist society, certainly since the 1970s when the postwar consensus between business and labor broke down. Reading Bauman's work, one cannot escape the conclusion that his project is deeply political, profoundly human, and unashamedly critical of what he called the individualized society (2000) and the related apolitical turn in the social sciences where facts trump values and ethics every time. It is for this reason that Bauman was more than simply a sociologist and should be instead understood in the broader sense of European intellectual history, where the writer or thinker was never confined to a particular professional discipline that defined what could and could not be said. Against this limiting profane professionalism, the intellectual had a kind of ethical, political, and historical mission to teach, humanize, and critically engage in the world in the name of the good or the utopian possibility rooted in the human ability to make the world better. It is also for this reason that Bauman's passing represents a serious ethical and political challenge to sociology, and to the wider humanities and social sciences, because he was one of the final representatives of this tradition steeped in European history and the horror of utopian projects gone awry. These projects based in naive idealism, the belief in objective truths, and the fantasy of the transparency and self-identity of facts that are somehow beyond critique are perversions of our capacity to make our world better brought about by a kind of antihumanist hubris and failure to understand history and the tradition of those who came before.Bauman's very human opposition to this strain of brutal utopianism based in violent othering and the uncritical belief in objectivity and fact emerged from his experience of the Holocaust, which he later theorized in his book on the subject, where he drew upon the works of Max Weber and the Frankfurt School writers. But there was always more than history at stake in his work. In the current situation, the importance of Bauman's history and place within a tradition of thought sensitive to the madness of inhuman utopia is founded upon the extremism of the present. In Modernity and the Holocaust (1991) Bauman outlines this madness, and it is possible to identify comparable tendencies in the populist politics of the Brexiteers, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, and Trump, who have had enough of globalization and want to return to a fantastical version of the nation by violently attacking others who have somehow corrupted their perfect worlds. In this sense the profound irony of the current political situation, and the reason Bauman's passing is so important, is that the violent extremism of the present is the result of the ending of his modern history and the rise of a posthistorical society that has come to regard ethics, values, and human politics as passé and unnecessary simply because these seem self-evident. This is precisely how the postideological, posthistorical society emerged from the period running from the 1970s onward. The story here was that there is no need for politics and endless debate about ethics and the good, because we have realized the good in a truly human, liberal society-there is nothing left now but the working out of technical detail. However, what Bauman understood because of his roots in European history is that the value of humanity is never self-evident and that we must take care of even the strangest other on the basis that neglect of the embodied truth of our shared humanity in a kind of profane objective culture will quickly strip us of our ability to think ethically, politically, and critically. When we lose sight of our shared humanity and no longer care for the weak, the miserable, and the homeless, because we have vanished into the kind of bureaucratic calculus Weber associated with instrumental rationality, our social, political, critical, and ethical intelligence is impoverished, diminished, and destroyed, and there are no limits to our potential inhumanity. The idiocy of facts, figures, and uncritical, unethical, objective truths, therefore, opens up a space for violent attacks on strange others who are so much waste, trash, and useless (post)human material to be processed away.If the normalization of violent extremism, which we struggle to name because we have neglected our social, political, critical, and ethical responsibility in the period since the rise of neoliberalism where numbers dominate, is the contemporary problem for those who believe in a shared human future, it is clear that Bauman saw this coming in the good times when violence was deferred by economic growth and the mirage of universal prosperity. Consider Bauman's own working context. In the Britain of the late 1990s, Bauman remained skeptical of the Blairite advance on Thatcherism because he thought that the ideology of the Third Way was unsustainable. While the other great sociologist of the period, Anthony Giddens (1998), advanced the theory of Third Way politics and became a kind of spokesman for the Blairite project by arguing that his theory of structuration was realized in the policy idea of public-private partnership that meant it was possible to have both social protections and rampant individualism at the same time, Bauman recognized the problem of the violent disembedding of the social self produced by this move. Against Giddens (1993), who celebrated the transformation of intimacy and a situation where human relationships were provisional and rooted in the vicissitudes of fleeting desire, Bauman (2003) wrote of the horror of liquid love founded upon the empty objective form of asociality Georg Simmel criticized in the early twentieth century and the Frankfurt School would later associate with the consumer society. For Bauman, what was lost in the advance of Western capitalist freedom celebrated by Giddens was deep human connection, respect, and a determination to care for others when times are hard and it would be easier to walk away.This is, I think, how Bauman's project focused on the transformation of solid into liquid modernity emerged from his earlier books, including Postmodern Ethics (1993). While these earlier books are often considered superior to Bauman's later works, primarily because of their deep theoretical engagement with the destruction of social relations in postmodern society, it is possible to find the same ethical, humanist critique of the individualized society at the heart of this range of books exploring different aspects of the liquid society. Read from this perspective, the problem of the liquid society is not simply that it is fluid and difficult to understand but also that it is provisional, fleeting, lonely, loveless, stupid, uncritical, and unethical, simply because there are no durable social relations able to survive the good times or, more important, the bad times, when we need to support and care for one another. In the thoughtless, liquid society there are no long-term social relations founded upon understanding, intelligence, empathy, compassion, and trust because these take time to evolve; instead, there is a high-speed, short-termist, provisional, alienated mode of objective asociality that, on the one hand, seems to globalize freedom on the basis that it is easy to extend such thin interactions across all borders but, on the other hand, creates immense levels of anxiety, loneliness, fear, and mistrust and a desire for some kind of thick communal engagement. What Bauman understood most keenly, in my view, is what happens when this primal desire for thick engagement develops in the context of an anxious, disembedded asocial situation devoid of ethical, human intelligence long since sacrificed to the computational logic of market principles. The result is the kind of sadistic violent attacks against objective, dehumanized others carried out by the Nazis in the name of a utopian ideology organized around hygiene and a better, cleaner society. However, in much the same way that the Frankfurters moved from Nazism to the critique of the consumer society, Bauman extended his critique of the modernity of the Holocaust to the horror of the liquid society and its discontents in the present.In the 1990s the neoliberals sanctioned objective violence on the grounds of the truth of market principles, and today we see the same tendencies developing in the thinking of the most extreme of the Brexiteers, who want to abandon Bauman's great humanitarian project Europe to the rubbish heap of history, and Trump, who wants to take America out of the world and into a utopia of isolationism. The problem in each case is the fate of the other who is dehumanized, objectified, cast out, and destroyed in the name of the emergence of the new that rises up on the far side of critical intelligence, any sense of ethics, or human understanding of our inherent fragility, weakness, or vulnerability. Although Bauman was never naive and understood the real violence of both the neoliberal European Union and processes of globalization, he also recognized the destructive power of cynicism, despair, and hopelessness. As a result, he held onto the utopian possibility of humanity, human sociability, human intelligence, and our capacity to behave ethically, because he knew what happens when we lose sight of our capacity to recognize the ultimate value of life. This is, I think, Bauman's legacy to sociologists, those working within the humanities and social sciences, and the people he tried to reach through his books that were written to be read by everybody: we cannot abandon human value for objective facts and some transcendental vision of the truth because this opens up a posthuman abyss for colonization by violent, extremist politics that thrives upon the idiocy of the anxious and fearful who have forgotten how to think. After Bauman, we have to save and take care of our social, critical, ethical, and, most important, human intelligence in the name of opposition to the brutal materialism of facts; the need to critique the apolitical, antihumanist space that fact-based thinking opens up; and finally, the possibility of resistance to the violent extremism that knows no truth and that grows up through the cracks in this deserted landscape

Epistemology · Individualism · Normalization (sociology · Political science · Political sociology · Politics · Relation (database · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science · Value (mathematics · Wright · Law · Philosophy · Zygmunt Bauman's Sociology

• The Third Way

  Anthony Giddens

  Incluir item

• The Individualized Society

  Open Access•Simon Tormey•Contemporary Political Theory•2003

  Incluir item