Zymunt Bauman Essay Research Paper A Distinguished

Zymunt Bauman Essay, Research Paper

A Distinguished Man

Zygmunt Bauman was born in Poznan, Poland in 1925. He moved to Britain with his wife Janina in the 1950’s, and took up a position as Lecturer at both the University of Warsaw and the University of Tel Aviv. He held several visiting professorships before he became Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds in Yorkshire from 1972 until his retirement in 1990. Bauman is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at both the University of Leeds and University of Warsaw (www.sociologyonline.com). “He has been described by the British sociologist, Anthony Giddens as: ‘the theorist of postmodernity he has developed a position with which everyone has to reckon’” (www.sociologyonline.com).

While heading the Department of Sociology at Leeds, Bauman brought great qualities of intellectual leadership. “From the start he saw his task as one of inspiring students, and among his academic colleagues promoting a collegial atmosphere in which new academic projects were welcomed and free and open discussion encouraged in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance and understanding” (www.leeds.ac.uk). Since his retirement, Bauman and his reputation has continued to benefit sociology at Leeds.

Zygmunt Bauman is a prolific writer known for such works as Legislators and Interpreters (1987), Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), and Postmodern Ethics (1993). He is the author of about 21 books, two more projected for the early 2000s, and of numerous articles and reviews (www.leeds.ac.uk). In 1990, Bauman was awarded the Amalfi European Prize, followed by the Adorno Prize in 1998. “Today he is described variously as one of the twentieth century’s great social theorists and the world’s foremost sociologist of postmodernity” (www.leeds.ac.uk).

Influences to Bauman’s Work

Bauman’s logic can be traced back to his upbringing in the Polish Humanist tradition, where society was culture. His most immediate teachers, Julian Hochfeld and Stanislaw Ossowski, viewed sociology as primarily a service to the common man, seen simultaneously as a product and the producer of culture (www.ub.es). Bauman eventually learned to think of culture as the activity of structuring, rather than structure as a matrix of permutations, which he adopted from Claude Levi-Strauss’ theory. “He came to think of culture as existing solely in its permutations, in making and unmaking distinctions, tying and untying connections” (www.ub.es).

In an interview with Zygmunt Bauman published on October 25, 1999, Marian Kempny asked what the most important influences on his intellectual development were. Bauman responded “If some ‘moment of revelation’ must be located, I guess the encounter with Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks comes closest to the idea of such an event” (www.ub.es). Bauman goes on to explain that his background was mostly in the Marxist theory, with all of its historical determination and solid structures. Gramsci’s writings made him realize that this rigid framework “was actually a fluid, liquid flow of cultural transmutations and such a viewpoint has opened up a completely new approach to understanding and analyzing social reality” (www.ub.es). Bauman suggests, “Gramsci immunized me once and for all against the na ve hope that cultural phenomena might be construed in terms of systems, structures, and functions” (www.ub.es).

There are two very different theories regarding social and cultural analysis- modernity and postmodernity. Zygmunt Bauman falls under the postmodernity category, so in light of this, it can be assumed that he writes in reaction to the modernist train of thought, thus inadvertently influencing him. The modernist argument is that “personal and cultural experience in the contemporary world involves various tensions and ambiguities, the distinctive characteristics of which involve contradiction, fluidity, and fragmentation” (Elliott 1996,pp6-7). They believe that our world is experienced by people as both an exciting opportunity and a threatening risk. Modernists want to reach some sort of balance between security and risk (Elliott 1996,p7). Postmodernism, on the other hand, “reacts against the tiredness of the modernist negotiation of risk and uncertainty by attempting to dissolve the problem all together’ (Elliott 1996,p7). They believe that cultural ambivalence cannot be overcome, and that social and cultural organization cannot be rationally ordered and controlled (Elliott 1996,p7). In the words of Bauman:

Postmodernity does not necessarily mean the end, the discreditation of the rejection of modernity. Postmodernity is no more (but no less either) that the modern mind taking a long, attentive and sober look at itself, at its condition and its past works, not fully liking what it sees and sensing the urge to change (Modernity and Ambivalence 1990,p272).

Bauman believes that contemporary culture exercises both postmodern and modern orders simultaneously, which leads to Bauman’s central thesis: “postmodernity as modernity without illusions” (Elliot 1996,p22).

Bauman’s Theory

Like stated above, Bauman believes that there exists a union between the modernist and postmodernist train of thought. He suggests that “postmodernity is modernity coming to age it is coming to terms with its own impossibility (Elliot 1996,p5). He believes that postmodernism as a theory is not only