Abstract
Deceased in January this year, the Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has left an extremely rich scholarly legacy. In one of his last academic interviews, he refers to the key issues which had been the subject of his in-depth analysis for many years. Bauman starts with reflections on the gap between political authority and power. Next, given his long-standing research into ‘liquid modernity’, he focuses on the vitality of capitalism, which has now adopted a lighter, consumer form. Another thread of the interview is Bauman’s own research attitude, which he refers to as ‘sociological hermeneutics’. It is characterized by his reluctance to use any ‘-isms’ and a profound mistrust of all particular schools of research (including postmodernism) which could limit creative freedom. In the final part of the interview, Bauman highlights the problem of the social entanglement of intellectuals.
Slawomir Czapnik: Let’s start with the fundamental matter. For over a decade, you have been describing the growing gap between power and politics (Bauman, 2007: 1–2) and calling for the creation of a universal, worldwide political unit because ‘nowadays it is no longer possible to effectively defend democracy, security, human rights in any single country, no matter how powerful it may be’ (Bauman, 2006: 27). Are we dealing with something which could be called telescopic thinking, that is, the perception of a slowly developing tendency which will dominate in the future? One way or another, even the most powerful corporation is not capable of replacing a central bank for issuing currency, while the crisis that started in 2007 has shown convincingly that the key countries support such corporations willingly with huge injections of cash – the same cash which, apparently, is not available for the poor. What is also significant is the protection of patent rights. Another thing that makes one think is the campaign of targeted killings, which the United States can conduct in Somalia or Afghanistan, but not in Russia or China. The threat that the rich and wealthy elites would potentially escape to more accommodating countries is hardly convincing: this is attested by the situation in the UK, where the implementation of a 50 per cent income tax rate for the rich was to have allegedly resulted in their flight to other countries – this never happened. In fact, just the opposite occurred: taxes at the new highest rate were paid by more taxpayers than expected – these were mainly British managers returning to Britain after periods of employment abroad.
Zygmunt Bauman: It seems that you have concluded that ‘for over a decade … I have been calling for the creation of a universal, worldwide political unit’. … If there is anything that I have been doing for over a decade or for a few decades it is repeating, under the influence of Karl Jaspers, that a global or worldwide state (were it ever to be established) would be a nightmare, probably more terrible than all dark cells or prisons known from history, and also all already practically experienced or imaginary totalitarian systems thought out by the most insightful authors of dystopias (because there would be nowhere to escape to: it is possible to manage to pass through a border checkpoint – you can dull a guard’s vigilance; you can kill, corrupt or con a guard; but what can you do if there are no borders or checkpoints?!). However, I regard the multidimensional diversity of the human kind as not only its inherent hallmark, which could perish only together with humanity, but also one of the most important virtues – perhaps a meta-virtue from which all other virtues originate and without which they could not emerge and – hopefully – take root.
Therefore, I don’t know what thesis is illustrated by the observations you have collected. If they have been collected in opposition to my claim about the mutual separation or even divorce between power and politics, they miss the target. Because if it is true that ‘even the most powerful corporation is not capable of replacing a central bank in the issue of currency’, it does not imply that it cannot replace national politics in the selection of objectives such politics is to pursue. Quite recently the collective (but extraterritorial, meticulously extracted from under control of ‘territorially sovereign states’) power of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, stock exchanges around the world and unleashed finances freely moving around the ‘space of flows’, imposing for everything that got stuck in the ‘space of places’ (see Manuel Castells), without much effort, have managed to turn the decisions of Greek voters, the Greek parliament and the will of the Greek nation inside out. Politicians (and not only locally bound, glebae adscripti politicians who focus on transforming the will of their community needs into action) make their decisions on Friday and then, with trembling hearts, they await the opening of stock exchanges on Monday to find out if there is any chance for implementation. The opponent of power released from under the control of politics amounts to a politics suffering from a chronic deficit of strength; it is no wonder that the result of their confrontation is a foregone conclusion.
You also write that ‘countries support such corporations willingly with huge injections of cash’; willingly or gnashing their teeth (depending on the shade of party), but certainly because states obey the will of banks, and not vice versa – and woe betide them should they want to reverse this relationship of control. The sanctions remaining at the disposal of the global powers – withdrawing their capital to countries with more compliant (or corrupt) governments and a less demanding ‘workforce’ are, in fact, not, as you suggest, hardly but sufficiently enough ‘convincing’ (of course, with the exception of service providers which, similarly to those who are being ‘served’, are tethered to a particular place; but these, in turn, compensate for their lack of mobility by bringing a docile ‘workforce’ from the territories to which they aren’t able to move, which openly or secretly thwarts restrictions planned by local governments under the pressure of their voters who are in their majority xenophobic and also suspicious of anything smelling of globalization). The United States sends their murderous drones wherever they want, with the exception of those countries whose power includes paying attackers back in their own coin; why should this risk calculation contradict the thesis that power increases in proportion to the incapacitation of politics? And so on, and so forth …
SC: Nowadays it’s easier to imagine the end of the world resulting from human intervention than the end of capitalism. However, there are thinkers who prophesy the inevitable end, which is nothing new; after all, already half a century ago the Polish singer Stanisław Staszewski (otherwise an ideological communist) would sing about ‘how the West is getting tangled in the fetters of capitalism/and how it is gradually approaching its demise’. Some of them, for example Immanuel Wallerstein, are conscious enough to foretell the end of capitalism, and nobody will be able to demand that they account for their forecasts. But isn’t it true – and Wallerstein himself doesn’t rule this out – that capitalism may be replaced by a much worse system deprived of capitalism’s strengths (generally speaking, those embodied in liberal democracy) but practically possessing all its weaknesses? Maybe the grim visions of Philip K. Dick, whose idée fixe was the Nazification of the United States, constitute a prophesy that is made with the hope that it will not be fulfilled. After all, hope is given to those who are deprived of hope itself.
ZB: Since the times of Saint-Simon and Fourier, prophets and clairvoyants have been scattering around tales of the collapse and end of capitalism as if from the horn of plenty, and they are continuing to do so (some of them, similarly to contemporary scientists, craving for a confirmation of their fortune-telling ambitions; others, similar to biblical prophets, wishing that their gloomy visions functioned as self-negating prophecies). Nevertheless, after each subsequent set of prophecies or forecasts, capitalism has undergone revivals and, in the manner of the legendary Phoenix, arisen again from the factual or imaginary ashes, although always in a rather different or renewed form.
Anatole Kaletsky (2016) put forward a new version of this particular point of view. Dividing the history of capitalism into four phases, he described the first one as the time of the independent co-existence of the economy and politics, without much eagerness to interfere with the neighbour’s affairs, let alone to impose one’s will on the neighbour. The second phase, lasting from the catastrophic world war of 1914–18 to the revolution of Friedman/Thatcher/Reagan, was a period of the state’s active intervention in the functioning of the economy and, to a certain extent, the saving of capitalism from the disastrous consequences of its wilfulness. Lasting until the breakdown of the credit system in 2008, the third phase was the period of the free rein of the economy, the state’s withdrawal from attempts to regulate the economy, and the transfer of hope from the state controlling the economy to the markets released from the state’s intervention restricting their inherent logic. Nowadays, for a change, we no longer pin our hopes on the command of either of them, or on their mutual separation and independence. Just to quote Kaletsky (2016): The fourth phase may come to be defined by the recognition that governments and markets can both be catastrophically wrong. [ …] If the world is too complex and unpredictable for either markets or governments to achieve social objectives, then new systems of checks and balances must be designed so that political decision-making can constrain economic incentives and vice versa.
One – exceptionally topical – reason for embarrassment is that seen in the New York Times, the two keen observers Andrew Brooks and Gail Collins (2016) having declared that the crisis continuing in America ‘has created effectively zero percent economic growth for the bottom four-fifths of the population’ – noting immediately that the same phenomenon gave birth to both ‘Trumpism’ and ‘Sandersism’ … and they are certainly right.
SC: You are both a socialist and a liberal. But attempting to grasp your thought, from the Marxist times to the present, I wonder if it weren’t possible to refer to you, using the term coined by your friend Leszek Kołakowski, as a conservative socialist and liberal: for the sake of clarity, a post-Enlightenment conservative believing in the possibility of progress, although fearing regress. Simultaneously it is significant that among the admirers of your thought there is no shortage of anarchists radically interpreting your restraint with respect to state institutions. At present you regard the state as a part of the problem, and not its solution. This is, to a certain extent, justified because – analogically to pantheism or atheism – the vision of a universal political community isn’t so much distant from anarchism if such a community is to have no political competitors. In your vision of socialism as a utopia in action (Bauman, 1976), would there be any space for conservatives and anarchists?
ZB: Once bitten, twice shy. Instead of running from one ‘-ism’ to another ‘-ism’ in search of an ointment for the bite caused by the former, relatively early in my unbearably long life I decided to avoid any ‘-ism’, like the devil shuns holy water; I hope I have managed to keep this promise. By the way, the proposal of a conservative-liberal-socialist international put forward by Leszek Kołakowski, who was not only a great sage but also an excellent joker, was, in its intention and performance, a manifesto for the elimination of ‘-isms’ and against the enslavement of minds, which each of these ‘-isms’ propagates in its original way, but with similar and unpleasant results, preventing liberation from such enslavement.
‘-Isms’ are one of the manifestations of perceiving the world by means of the categories of ‘we’ and ‘they’ or, more precisely, ‘us’ against ‘them’. Every ‘-ism’ adds irreconcilable differences to previously marked borders, creates enclaves with tightly barricaded doors and frequently deprived of any windows, calls on people to dig trenches, and prevents them from leaving such trenches. But the view of the world from the perspective of any ‘-ism’ is an illusion. The world shaped and inhabited by people diverges from such an illusion. Attempts to impose coherence and neatness on the world, which the followers of ‘-isms’ pursue and take pride in, cannot succeed (which, unfortunately, does not mean that they will not be continually renewed).
In other words, all ‘-isms’ are ideal types born at the poles of an axis, while any thought attempting to capture the incurable multiformity and ambiguity of reality (human reality, in particular) in a conceptual network volens nolens (willingly or unwillingly) has to look for a place for itself somewhere between the poles. Just to remind you: Leszek was also the author of ‘In Praise of Inconsistency’ (Kołakowski, 1964) – a pamphlet on the stiffening of commandments and the consequent paralysis of thought. But in order to protect my position against your classifying it as an ‘anti-ism’, I declare that, for the continuous ‘genre mixing’ aversion to extremism or irrevocability in the propagation of the truth, and allergy to ‘the sole truth’, I assume personal responsibility, completely and without reservations. To make a long story short: I do not belong to any ‘school’. With respect to schools, I could only repeat the phrase attributed to Aristotle: Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas (I love Plato, but I love truth more). So to answer your question: yes, there would be some space for them in the book – just like there is space for them in life …
SC: If, in the times of Aristotle, a few dozen of the richest people in a given Greek polis owned more wealth than more than a half of its poorest citizens, he surely wouldn’t have called it a democracy but an oligarchy. Oxfam has disclosed that the 62 richest people in the world own as much as the poorest half of humanity, while 1 per cent of the richest people own more than the remaining 99 per cent (Elliot, 2016). These are all signs that capitalism functions precisely as Karl Marx foresaw – the concentration of riches at one pole is accompanied by the concentration of poverty at the other. Neoliberalism, to repeat David Harvey (2007), has two basic objectives: a) the revival of capitalism, and b) the restoration of class power. The former, measured by means of economic growth, hasn’t been achieved, while the latter is already a harsh fact. Could you explain how you understand the dynamics of quickly growing economic inequalities followed by the absence of egalitarianism in the social, cultural or political spheres – the deprivation of billions of people of their dignity?
ZB: I have written a lot about it, so let me just summarize the main ideas. Almost until the very fall of the Berlin wall, the capitalist part of the world was able to feel on its neck the panting of a live and lively alternative to capitalism, more kindly for the ordinary people, and it was impossible to ignore its existence (I write ‘almost’ because the gradual breakdown of the Soviet system under the weight of people’s ambitions revived by it, which, as it turned out, it wasn’t able to fulfil, combined with the downfall of its authority as a model to imitate, had started some time before the wall came down). Marx’s prophecy turned out to be self-negating – instead of overthrowing capitalism, it saved it from the destructive consequences of its logic. For the sake of saving the system from the fulfilment of Marx’s prophecy, it was necessary to impose restrictions on capitalist inclinations towards accumulation of profits and devaluation of labour. It was necessary to declare full employment as a goal of governmental politics and to comply with such a declaration in a visible manner. It was also necessary to mobilize the state’s resources in order to supplement the income of the working classes in the conditions of refusal or inability of capitalist buyers to pay the full value of labour. The combined result was to locate the project of a ‘welfare state’ or ‘social state’ outside the division into the right and the left: both the seller and the buyer of labour recognized its necessity, or at least consented to its existence. The ‘glorious 30 years’ after the war became a rare period in history when inequalities in income and ownership were being reduced. It appeared for some time that social inequalities had been brought under control and the factors contributing to their growth had been given a tight leash.
These hopes, frankly speaking, appeared to be vain. What happened was the disappearance of the tangible alternative for capitalism, and, together with it, the disappearance of the need for capitalism's self-restraint with respect to its inherent greed for profit. Social inequality based on following the principle of ‘catch-as-catch-can’ or ‘every man for himself, and devil take the hindmost’ started to grow (and continues to grow) without restraint. The rich have their taxes reduced, the poor – their benefits. But the details of this mechanism you can find in my short book entitled Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All? (Bauman, 2013).
SC: Still, in the 1990s you were referred to as the ‘prophet of postmodernity’ (Smith, 1999), while – simultaneously with the crystallization of the concept of liquid modernity (Bauman, 2000) – you started to be clearly distinguishable from postmodernist researchers. But it seems that you’ve never been a postmodernist in the sense of not believing in the existence of the truth, invariably putting reality in quotation marks or focusing on puns, not to mention about recognizing the end of so-called large narrations. After the years, is it not possible to suggest, paraphrasing Samuel Johnson’s opinion on patriotism, a diagnosis that postmodernism has become the last refuge for blackguards? Nowadays Deleuze and Guattari are a ‘subject of interest’ to the Israeli army, which wants to be even more efficient in suppressing the national independence aspirations of the Palestinians (Weizman, 2007: 199–201). Also in Europe there have been judges who considerably reduce sentences for murderers of women, specifically Muslims who have carried out so-called honour killings, in view of ‘irreconcilable cultural differences’ (Rose, 2009).
ZB: On this, I agree with you completely; one, but not the only, reason for my hectic search for a replacement for the notion of ‘postmodernism’ (whose result was the selection of the notion of ‘liquid modernity’) was that, no matter how hard I tried to specify the dividing line and emphasize the difference between postmodern sociology and the sociology of postmodernism, I was generally classified as a ‘postmodernist’. Thus, against my will, I found myself in the club whose membership I had never applied for and whose members’ ideas (as well as their cavalier style of thinking and writing) I had disagreed with; because of such classification, I was ascribed ideas and approaches effective in the club, although I didn’t share either the former or the latter.
But probably I wouldn’t go so far as to accept the opinion that ‘postmodernism was the last refuge of blackguards’ (for instance, because of the fact that blackguards are masters of finding refuges and, without any scruple, they will make themselves comfortable in any available one), but I accuse postmodernists of a not much more pardonable sin of playing the role of avant-garde in the still continuing process of separation between intellectuals and their historic mission.
This process may be recorded in history as the separation of intellectuals and the people; the mass of the poor in the rich world, the humiliated in the world of the swaggering, self-confident and self-righteous; those deprived of access to knowledge among the lights of the Enlightenment; the masses which they have sworn to serve in the name of getting them out of misery and backwardness. This separation took place without any goodbyes or notices of termination; simply, another repetition of Pilate’s gesture: you there, do whatever comes to your mind; at best, do nothing and be quiet because there is very little chance you’ll come up with anything sensible; and we intellectuals are washing our hands of your matters to take care of our own ones. For example, actors will fight for subsidies for theatres, academics for better equipment (but not necessarily for scholarships for their students, let alone free education) and better employment conditions.
Apart from giving up activities which since their appearance in the public arena they have identified as their vocation and, using them, have woven their social positions and roles (such as making the unaware masses aware of the difference between good and evil, truth and superstition, beauty and ugliness as well as following such differences in their everyday personal and communal lives) – activities which become the spiritual leaders of society and the guardians of its values – now the enlightened classes started to deal with the promotion and defence of their own interests and caste privileges, and instead of caring for the survival of values worthy of survival, they promote and practice cultural omnivorousness, using it to measure the sense and value and, to a certain extent, essence of humanity. Emancipation, liberation from tyranny, freedom (in a sense other than the individual one), equality and brotherhood of the human kind have disappeared from their vocabulary and catechism.
SC: When years ago you stopped being a Marxist, thanks to Gramsci, whom you value highly (Tester, 2004: 47), you did not become anti-Marxist. Agreeing that Lenin’s variety of Marxism is compromised both theoretically and in the practice of the Soviet states, one should state that scholars who admit being inspired by Marx still have a lot to say. This is worth noticing with respect to not only the economy or politics but also culture; let us mention, for instance, the following three names: Fredric Jameson, Perry Anderson and (last but not least) Terry Eagleton. No matter what one thinks about them, it is impossible to accuse them of reductionism and omnipotent economic determinism. In your thought, not only the one related to ‘liquid modernity’, one can see – let us risk it – a significant Marxist element at the methodological level. You can be regarded as an excellent dialectic (remembering that there is a long tradition of non-Marxist dialectics) who is not afraid of paradoxes and who perceives reality from the angle of the dynamic interaction among contradictory tendencies. Was Engels right in saying that ‘For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed’ (Engels, 1890)?
ZB: Expressing this thought, Engels was right, but it can be proud of its very old origin (similarly, it does not look like it might retire or stimulate people to a revision of their communal life, which would render its repetition unnecessary – in other words, it does not look like it might soon stop being a voice calling in the wilderness).
And just to repeat: I do not consider myself an ‘-ist’ of any kind, which includes a ‘Marxist’ as well. I admit that I take from ‘schools’ what helps me to understand the world and its psycho-social mechanisms, not paying much attention to group loyalties and also, as far as possible, without the so-called ‘benefit of inventory’. In my opinion, ideas do not fall under the criteria of private property (if you give me one dollar and I give you one dollar, each of us will have one dollar; but if I give you a thought and you give me a thought, each of us will have two thoughts …). Thoughts multiply in consequence of their donation, and this is what in principle distinguishes them from goods, which become depleted when given away.
However, I also admit that the method which I have developed over the years and diligently try, although with variable success, to practise – which I call ‘sociological hermeneutics’ – is, to a certain extent, of Marxist provenance. It is connected by some ambiguous and disputable relationship to the Marxist dialectics of the base and the superstructure, and without my previous training in inferring consciousness from being, it wouldn’t have had a chance to appear. But it also owes a lot to inspiration from Antonio Gramsci, and in particular his idea of ‘hegemonic philosophy’.
SC: The Israeli journalist Amira Hass, who has lived in the West Bank for many years, claims that journalists’ superior objective should be to monitor the centres of political, economic or ideological power, especially when, lying, those in power push for war at which some will be killing and others will be killed. Don’t you think this could be a good description of the mission of scholars representing social sciences and humanities? Remembering, of course, that in the period of the so-called war on terror the difference between war and peace, the normal state and the state of emergency becomes blurred.
ZB: Sociology, which, in my opinion, in the conditions of the individualization of society, should become ‘freedomology’, is naturally entitled and even obliged to ‘watch the hands of the state' (and all other entities restricting freedom). But according to this vocation, it should also investigate the actions of ‘internalized power’: its impact on the shape of the dominant type of characters whose function is to make choices from among a set of options provided/made possible/limited by ‘fate’ (that is, a set of realities which the individual, the builder and the owner of the character has not selected – and which are, in principle, unselectable because they are positioned outside the scope of their control). Fate determines options, selects a character from among such options – but the ‘internalized power’ of fate manipulates the probability of the appearance, adoption and absorption of various types of characters. I have written more about it in Art of Life (Bauman, 2008).
SC: When a few years ago, in one of your interviews, you compared the wall being built by the Israelis in order to separate themselves from the Palestinians to the wall in the Warsaw ghetto, it was met with a chorus of critical opinions. What was significant was that the most virulent of them were authored by people obsessed with Jews and accusing you of antisemitism. On the one hand, this could be waved aside as a typical example of ignorance. It is not a secret that the Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion referred to the future prime minister of the Jewish state as a ‘racist’ and ‘Hitlerite’, and in the last decade a certain Israeli officer would emphasize that, in subjugating the Palestinians, the Israelis should follow the example of the German army suppressing the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto (Goldberg, 2009: 118). On the other hand, however, it cannot be ruled out that – at least for a part of the world – Israel establishes a certain standard, being a model of giving priority to physical safety before social security. It can be assumed that what originally was supposed to bring colonized peoples under control will be used in time to curb dangerous classes in metropolises. The basic modern surveillance tools (fingerprints, records, maps, profiling), including the predecessors of contemporary biometrics, were created by colonizers – the Dutch in South-East Asia, the French in Africa, and the British in India and North America (Zureik, 2016: 98).
ZB: The State of Israel (deliberately and systematically or by the force of the logic of the many years’ occupation and the multidimensional ethnic discrimination) has turned the state of permanent war into the axis of the aforementioned ‘hegemonic philosophy’. For this reason, among contemporary states, it is a special (although not completely exceptional) case. Therefore, it would not be advisable to extrapolate in particular the Israeli reasons for ‘the monitoring of the state power’ to all other entities of a state character and to accord them the status of universal principles.
In order to try to capture and disclose tendencies in the structure and widely-spread and long-term tools of contemporary domination (so far hidden under the cover of ‘zombie notions’, as they were correctly called by Ulrich Beck; or notions which should be used sous rature (under erasure) but are not – as Jacques Derrida pointed this out to those using such notions, that is, basically to all of us thrashing around in the nets of philosophy hegemonic on an ongoing basis), it is necessary to broaden horizons and look for what is common and not to focus one’s attention on idiosyncrasies. In my opinion, it is too early for any final synthesis of those underlying trends or any conclusion concerning their direction, let alone their social and political consequences. For now it is necessary to be content with what Robert Merton referred to as middle-range theories (in a rather free translation, a theoretical counterpart of roadside inns). And there are lots of them, and their number is growing. For example, let us have a close look at James Nye’s suggestion concerning transition from ‘hard’ power to ‘soft’ power, or the earlier proposition put forward by Pierre Bourdieu concerning the evolution of techniques of control from constraint to temptation and seduction, from normative regulations to the generation of new needs, and from police surveillance to advertising. Together with Monika Kostera, Jerzy Kociatkiewicz and Irena Bauman, I’ve also tried to add something of mine to the swelling cluster of middle-range theories, working on equally drastic and common transformations in philosophy and the practice of management. And in the background of this flood of new observations and attempts to condense them, an extensive panorama of the varieties and aspects of the ‘vertical process’ – the ‘subsidiarization’ of the functions and responsibilities of state authorities to the sphere of ‘life politics’ in which an individual is to be a personal union of the parliament, the executive power and the supreme court – and the accompanying ‘horizontal’ process: submitting these functions under the management of the market elements.
But I repeat: we should still wait before any synthesis of the transformation we are currently participating in is undertaken.
SC: Something bad is happening to social sciences and humanities; not only in Poland (Czapnik, 2012) but generally, around the world. In the past, more or less consciously, scholars perceived themselves as donkeys which, step by step, try insistently to reach a carrot, that is, the truth, hanging from a stick in front of them. It is known that they will never know the taste of the carrot, but the way to it is, as it were, a goal in itself. Nowadays scholars are more like pigs, first of all employees of the research and education industries, pushing and shoving their way to a trough full of grants, jobs in public or private institutions, as well as publications in prestigious academic journals. Thinking about ends and means has disappeared – methods and tools are turned into something valuable in themselves. C. Wright Mills, famous for quoting from his memory, the lack of footnotes or very sloppy footnotes, would probably find it difficult to defend his doctoral dissertation at many universities were he to submit his Sociological Imagination (1959). What is your opinion about this phenomenon, especially within the context of the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, which you have been faithful to for many decades, after all – let us repeat after Tony Blackshaw (2005: ix) – you have become a sociologist to change the world?
ZB: I absolutely agree with what you’ve just said. Unfortunately, this is all right; nothing needs to be added, although additions could be made endlessly. For example, the fact that, having turned their backs on ordinary people, people of knowledge released their hands in the (fulfilled, fulfilled!) expectation of bribes from those who, unlike ordinary people, could afford to offer bribes. Elegantly (or politely correctly), this is called ‘coopting’. Or another example: Michel Foucault observed already a few decades ago that ‘general’ intellectuals had been displaced by a newly born type of ‘specific intellectuals’ (I consider this notion as unfortunate, internally contradictory: someone entering the lists only to promote or defend their own interests and those of their fellow professionals is not an intellectual by definition). Or the fact that nowadays the majority of educated people are eager to obtain lucrative positions of ‘experts’, and according to old folk wisdom, those who pay the expert write the tune which the expert sings. For every opinion it is possible to find experts who will gladly confirm it, and for every business claim there will be experts ready to support and defend it (of course, if a particular business entity can afford to buy its own experts).
SC: When one talks with you, one usually has a previously shaped opinion about you, which is understandable in the context of the extent of your interests and the large number of publications. For some, you are a sensitive liberal, concerned to understand the Other; for others – a man who describes the world metaphorically, sometimes even poetically. I wonder if there is a question which you have always wanted to answer, but which has not been asked yet. Maybe such a question would pave the way for new deliberations which would not be as obvious as it may seem to your interviewers and/or readers. I am positive that you are still able to surprise the readers of your works.
ZB: The question which I have always wanted to answer, and would like to answer before I die (unfortunately, most probably this will not happen), is the question which is not new, has been asked since time immemorial and which I am asked after almost every public lecture: ‘How to turn the word into flesh?’ I am filled with bitter sorrow when every time this question is asked the only thing I can do is to spread my arms as a sign of my helplessness. What I can do is only to repeat after my favourite novelist and philosopher, José Saramago (2010: 16): I’m tired of listening to myself. What might seem new to other people has, with the passing of time, turned into reheated soup for me. Or, worse still, I’m left with a bitter taste in my mouth due to the certainty that the handful of sensible things I’ve said in my life [are] after all to be of absolutely no consequence.
SC: Thank you for the interview.
Translated into English by Krzysztof Brzozowski
Note
This is a translation of an interview that was originally published in Polish in the journal Studia Krytyczne – Critical Studies (2016, Issue 2). The interview was conducted via email in April 2016. Additional editing was carried out by Theory, Culture & Society editors to clarify the English. Requests for permission to reproduce the interview in the original language should be directed to the Studia Krytyczne – Critical Studies Editorial Office (studiakrytyczne@gmail.com).