Abstract
Zygmunt Bauman has always approached sociology as an imagination, as an ongoing conversation with experience rather than a discipline within tight boundaries. This has enabled his work to move outside of the academy, and over the past decade or so he has become a leading public sociologist. But what does this status mean for the practice and possibilities of sociology? In this conversation Bauman reflects on the role, status and opportunities of sociology, who it is for, and what this means for the sociologist.
Introduction
At its 2011 annual conference the British Sociological Association gave a Lifetime Achievement Award to Zygmunt Bauman. This was recognition by his disciplinary peers of the impact Bauman has had on making sure that a distinctive sociological voice remains loud and clear both within academia and outside. Unfortunately, Bauman was unable to attend the award ceremony, but in this interview, which was held a few weeks after the 2011 BSA conference, Bauman makes a call for the continuation of a sociological project. In this discussion Bauman shows what sociology means to him and why it matters to us all.
The Interview
Each of the three ‘founding fathers’ of academic sociology entertained different ambitions for the emergent discipline and sketched a different itinerary for fulfilling them. All were after the same objective: they wished to add sociology to the list of legitimate residents of the House of Solomon (as Francis Bacon chose to baptise the modern sanctuaries/repositories of learning, aspiring to collective management of human affairs). They differed, however, in justifying the claim to residence. Durkheim averred that the realities sociologists are set to investigate meet the standards of realities explored by the ‘established’ academic disciplines boasting the most impeccable scientific credentials – there being therefore no reasons to doubt sociology’s potential of turning out knowledge of equally unquestionable quality. Weber acknowledged the peculiarity of realities scrutinized by sociology, but set to prove that their particularity does not diminish the chance of investigating them with the same degree of precision as allowed by non-human (dubbed ‘objective’) realities. Simmel avoids being filed unambiguously with the advocates of either of these two stances. He just went on engaging, so to speak, in the dialogue with ‘common sense’ – in a kind of ‘secondary hermeneutics’ or ‘second degree hermeneutics’: reinterpreting what has been already interpreted, interpretation being the universal and only way of constructing the objects filling human Lebenswelt. Interpretation (both primary and the secondary) being perpetually in statu nascendi, and its finding being therefore barred from claiming a status more solid than that of interim settlements, a ‘perpetual state of crisis’ cannot but be sociology’s natural habitat: which, instead of giving reason to an ‘inferiority complex’, testifies however to the adequacy of sociological practice to the task it set itself …
Rightly or wrongly, I count myself among loyal Simmelians … And so I believe that our job is not cognitively or pragmatically inferior to other jobs performed, intended to be performed or claimed to be performed inside academia. Like all such jobs, ours may be well or badly done – but in both cases needs to be measured by its own specific task-oriented criteria …
In our increasingly individualized society, however, in which resolution of socially created problems is relentlessly shifted from social powers onto the shoulders of individual men and women, sociology faces the chance (though, admittedly, no more than that!) of turning instead into a science/technology of freedom: knowledge of the ways and means through which the individuals-by-decree and de jure of the liquid-modern times may be lifted to the rank of individuals-by-choice and de facto. This is, I repeat, a chance – though I believe that this is also, and even in the first place, a moral obligation: the task which sociology owes to men and women of our times. But to acquit itself honourably of this moral duty, sociology needs nowadays to engage in a continuous dialogue with the daily experience of those men and women.
I’d say that the twin roles which we, sociologists, are called to perform in that dialogue are those of de-familiarizing the familiar (debunking its alleged self-evidence) and familiarizing (taming, domesticating, making manageable) the unfamiliar. Both roles demand skills in uncovering and clarifying the influences and dependencies with which humans need to cope whenever confronting the tasks which they are forced and expected (in all too many cases counterfactually) to perform individually, with individual resources and at individual risk.
The kind of dialogue I have in mind is a difficult art. It involves committing the partners-in-conversation to an intention to jointly clarify the issues, rather than to win the argument and carry one’s own point; to multiply voices, rather than reducing their amount; to widen the set of possible sequels, rather than denigrate and exclude all alternatives; thereby to jointly pursue understanding, instead of aiming at defeating alternative views – and all in all being animated by the wish to keep the conversation going, rather than by a desire to grind it to a halt. Mastering that art is terribly time-consuming, though far less time-intensive than practising it. It also calls for humility, surrendering the privileges of an unerring expertise, exposing oneself to the risk of being proven wrong …
Once humans become also our partners of dialogue, and of a dialogue calculated to service their needs and respond to their quandaries, sociologists lose the luxury enjoyed by the sciences of the non-human: the privilege of ignoring opinions held by the objects of their study, and exercising full, indivisible and inalienable, ‘professional’ sovereignty over the meaning-creation and over the separation of truth from untruth … The quality of this dialogue is measured by the progress of mutual comprehension and by relevance to the interests and the tasks of the objects of research, rather than to the researchers themselves. It is that loss (or rather voluntary surrender) of the monopoly on interpretive rights, and our agreement to share them with our ‘objects’, that is mistaken by some for the ‘loss of technical quality’.
The ultimate purpose of education in which sociologists would then engage (as the line separating communication in general, and a dialogue in particular, from reciprocal education, is anything but clear and non-negotiable) is, however, preparation of our partners-in-conversation for life, and sociology of the kind I’ve described here is bent on preparing them to live in the kind of society in which our pupils or students are bound to live and which they will be making while being made by it … Having been already sentenced to individuality, our students will need yet to lift themselves from being individuals merely by the decree of fate to being individuals de facto: able to self-assert, to choose the kind of life they wish to lead, and to follow that choice. Sociology may help to make them aware of what this endeavour is likely or bound to involve, and so to expand their options and by the same token serve the cause of their freedom.
I am inclined to think that the question of liquid-modern life, incessantly and hopelessly interpretation-hungry, is not ‘do we need critical social theory?’ – that life, being nothing else but continuous critique of extant realities, gestates it incessantly, spontaneously and on a massive scale … No reflection on that life can possibly begin, let alone be seen through, without it. The second eventuality you consider looks more intriguing; it shuns resolute answers. Though the true bone of contention, I think, and a genuinely relevant query, is not do we need a ‘new theology’ – but are we capable of composing it, credibly? And how would it relate to the experience of liquid-modern life, were we, against all odds, to compose it?
Having unpacked that message and spelled out the reasoning underpinning it, Voltaire put the thereby unravelled essence of theodicy in the mouth of a certain Pangloss, ‘professor of metaphysico-theologico-cosmolonigology’ and ‘the oracle’ at the certain Baron of Thunder-ten-Trockh’s court – as well as, let me add, the precursor and progenitor, as well as the inspiration from-behind-the-grave, of Margaret Thatcher’s TINA (There Is No Alternative) creed. Pangloss, wrote Voltaire, ‘proved admirably that there is no effect without a cause, and that, in this best of all possible worlds, the Baron’s castle was the most magnificent of castles, and the lady the best of all possible Baronesses’.
‘It is demonstrable’, said he, ‘that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for all being created for an end, all is necessarily for the best end. Observe, that the nose has been formed to bear spectacles – thus we have spectacles. Legs are visibly designed for stockings – and we have stockings. Stones were made to be hewn, and to construct castles – therefore my lord has a magnificent castle; for the greatest baron in the province ought to be the best lodged’.
Jokes and witticisms aside, sociology stands, stubbornly and emphatically, in a rugged opposition to theodicy; you may say ‘it is constantly re-constituted through the secular opposition to theodicy’. The sole significant exceptions to that rule that come to mind are the Soviet rendition of ‘historical materialism’ (or as Herbert Marcuse disdainfully called it, ‘Soviet Marxism’), and the monster-grand-theory of Talcott Parsons; both, not accidentally, short-lived and long resting in the dustbin of history.
Sociology (I go on repeating: willy-nilly, by design or by default) cannot but sap the foundations on which the popular beliefs in ‘necessity’ and ‘naturalness’ of things, actions, trends and processes rest; it unmas the irrationalities that have contributed to their composition and go on contributing; it reveals the contingencies behind the ostensible rules and norms, and alternatives crowded around the allegedly sole (that is, chosen at the expense of all other) possibilities; all in all, its métier is, to borrow Milan Kundera’s allegory, ‘tearing up the curtains’ that hide the realities from view by covering them up with their fraudulent representations.
There is of course always a danger, as Theodor Adorno kept warning, that in pursuit of the parsimony and elegance of its accounts (one of the guiding criteria of scientific perfection) sociological theorizing may ascribe to social realities much more ‘rationality’ than they in fact possess; and ‘rationality of the world’, let’s note and remember, is the modern (and secular) version of theodicy. The danger, no doubt, is there, the bait is difficult to resist, while the temptation to swallow it is built into the logic of scholarly endeavour – so that the un-conditionality of the anti-theodicean stance is by no means a foregone conclusion (there is hardly any power-that-be that would not find/produce/buy some practitioners of sociological trade all-too-eager to prove its entitlement to the ‘no-alternative’ status); the threat needs to be reminded of and the seduction needs to be resisted – but in the liquid-modern, endemically multi-centred and dynamic setting the chances of temptation to divert/corrupt the character (and so the social effects) of sociological inquiry are probably less than in the ‘solid-modern’ past.
So yes, like other market goods, sociology needs to ‘create clients’ for the services it offers; in the society of consumers, it is the offer that is as a rule expected and obliged to create demand – not vice versa. Some products have a better chance to acquit themselves from such an obligation, whereas some others have little or no chance to do so. This much for the ‘conditions not of our choice’. The rest, however (and this is quite a large ‘rest’), consists fully of, and fully depends on, our choices. To find a quite extensive and grateful audience, that ‘rest’ need to be guided, again in my view, by one of the principles engraved in gilded letters under the cupola of Leeds town hall, among other canons of morality which its funders and builders, the pioneers of the industrial revolution, believed to guide their labours to change the world to the better: ‘Honesty is the best policy’. In our case, ‘honesty’ translates, first and foremost, and the promise to stay honest to our sociological vocation and to deliver on that promise.
The promise in question is to sound the alarm whenever it is necessary to sound it. When, as the great Polish thinker and poet, Czesław Miłosz, noted a few decades ago: ‘The world strikes us as the un-reason incarnate, a product of some demented mind’. Was that observation a product unfit for mass consumption? An unsellable failure? It might have seemed like that, especially at the time Miłosz shared it with his readers, though only to people who would accept the ‘official’ TINA version of our shared existential condition, or at least accept it as the safe-conduct certificate through the mire and the maze in which they were, as they came to believe on the political leaders’ and mass media’s authority, doomed to vegetate.
But then the little booklet under the clarion-like title Indignez-vous!, scripted but a few months ago by the veteran French fighter turned statesman, the 96-year-old Stéphane Hessel, has sold already millions of copies in 27 languages, and brought to the streets millions of young and not-so-young Spaniards in protest against the political system that failed to note the passing of its use-by date and defends itself tooth and nail, by hook and by crook, against the already disastrously overdue demotion. And the message which that little book contains is as radical (and thus allegedly un-sellable) as messages but very few sociologists would dare to compose when crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s in their research reports. In Hessel’s own summary: What happens currently in the world cannot be accepted. It needs to be changed. As never before, we know today the true volume of the man-made devastation of our planet. That destruction goes on for centuries. When will it end? We have no right to consent either to the monstrous misery cohabiting in close neighbourhood of unimaginable wealth. And if we allow terrorism to develop further in the fashion in which it grew in recent years, we are bound to find ourselves stood against the wall.
We must find a solution, but this little book does not offer it. This book needs to be viewed as an alert, a clarion call, an appeal to conscience, and a call to lift ourselves out of passivity and embrace responsibility for the fate of the world.
When more than half a century ago I entered the fields of sociology and philosophy, I found them neatly segmented into plots bearing the name of ‘schools’. There was historical materialism, structural functionalism, ethnomethodology, structuralism, analytical philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism and what not – the number changing from one survey of the field to another, but the principle of its mapping remaining intact and unquestionable. The chapters of textbooks of the discipline’s history also bore names of schools. Individual names differed by sometimes sharply distinct biographical and bibliographic data of their bearers, but only by minor and well short of iconoclastic variations in their bearers’ approaches and scholarly practices. I suspect that the field of a scholarly discipline appears to a present-day newcomer in a completely different light: a vast expanse with a lot of criss-crossing tracts, paths and gorges trodden in all directions by clearly distinguishable figures of more and less distinguished personalities, each eager to blaze a new trail rather than keep to one already blazed. Histories tend to be similarly re-written: no longer the stories of successive paradigms, essentially school accomplishments, but of paradigm-breaking, principally an individual feat; not of ‘schools’, but of ‘key sociologists’ or ‘key philosophers’. And what I am talking about now applies to all branches of science – and yet more generally to all areas of culture and arts … As a matter of fact, even more generally than that: its traces are spattered all around our daily lives. No nook or cranny of our mode of being-in-the-world, however minute and isolate, is genuinely free of them.
I wonder about the phenomenon of Mark Zuckerberg, presuming that all human concerns ultimately focus on the challenge of self-identification and all roads of the identity-searchers-and-builders rebound on the body and mind of the seeker, and therefore initiating the ‘FaceBook revolution’ that raised him in a matter of a few years to the status of a multi-billionaire … I am asking: Would that phenomenon have been at all conceivable at the time of my youth (it is not the then absence of computers that prompts me to ask)? Had Mark Zuckerberg been born 30/40 years earlier, had he been trained by his teachers to unctuously regurgitate and reincantate Jean-Paul Sartre’s homilies or to reiterate after Michel Foucault as if quoting from the Holy Scripture that ‘the author is dead’, and had he learned from the apostles of the ‘New Criticism’ church that it is downright silly, and disqualifying for a student, to connect artistic texts with any personal details of the author’s life – would it occur to him that it is precisely the ‘personal details’ that make the author, and that therefore his young colleagues are bound to be itching to match the celebrated authors’ glory through making public their own ‘personal details’? And in the utterly unlikely case that it would have occurred to that earlier-born Zuckerberg, would millions of active users leap indeed to his invention (or spoils of a robbery, according to some) and would the billions of dollars follow them? It was only in the course of the last 20 years that, as for instance Sebastian Faulks points out in Faulks on Fiction, ‘far from being banned from comment, the author’s life and its bearing on the work became the major field of discussion’. And, he adds, this watershed change ‘opened the door to speculation and gossip. By assuming that all works of art are an expression of their authors’ personality, the biographical critics reduced the act of creation to a sideshow’. I suspect (or rather I am sure) that only in the last 20 years could Zuckerberg have his revelation and decide to carry his good tidings to his fellow students, whereas his fellow students could have been prepared to follow the Master along the road he pointed …
That ‘world as we know it’ is a caddish/boorish world. Bushes are no longer for beating about. If Victorians crammed piano legs into stockings, we put pianos on legs previously to be savoured only on the pages of pornographic magazines. We use daily, publicly and ostentatiously, a kind of language once confined to the gutters and dens of vice. We no longer respect rights to privacy and intimacy. Maybe the Englishman’s home is still his castle, but a castle open 24/7 to visitors, and inhabited by people fearing the absence or dearth of snooping onlookers as the most awesome of Egyptian plagues. We revel at the sight of the also-run apprentices having been shown the door, and of residents of Big Brother’s house voted out after a week-long string of routine humiliations and ridicule. We respect neither dignity of others nor our own. When we hear the word ‘honour’, we reach for a dictionary (that is, in case we swot for ‘Who wants to be a millionaire’ or the ‘Weakest link’ quiz). And gratuitous (no longer punishable nor, indeed, censured and condemned) mud-slinging has reached unprecedented heights of facility – courtesy (sic!) of protection offered by the anonymity of internet calumny, slander and libel. It is as if the ‘right to slander’ has become the one human right most likely to be universally respected and tooth-and-nail defended by law-guarding agencies …
Respect and (what follows!) trust are the two attributes of what used to be called ‘civilized society’ that are conspicuously missing from human interactions – whether conducted in private or put on public display. In fact, stripping individuals of respect and of the grounds to trust each other is in my view the paramount (and thus far astoundingly successful) stratagem in casting the ‘core concerns in society’ (as you put it) off limits of society’s attention, care, action – and, indeed, concern …
I believe that it is the respect for humanity of an-other, and the right to be respected, which ‘critique’ needs to locate at the top or near the top of its agenda – if we wish it to stand a chance to reach the (here I repeat after you once more) ‘core concerns of society’. Without resurrection of respect, no chance for solidarity. Without solidarity, no chance of awaking ‘core concerns in society’ from their present somnolence, and forcing them into the open out of the secure shelter of human inattention.
Anecdotes aside, however, please do not confuse being seen with being listened to; ‘being a celebrity’ (i.e. being known for being known), without having an influence on the thoughts and deeds of those by whom one is known … The forte of Régis Debray’s ‘mediocracy’ (a uniquely felicitous blend of the ‘rule of media’ with that of mediocrity …) is to promote the first eventuality of the pair while stifling the second …
One of the most formidable obstacles lies in institutional inertia. Well established inside the academic world, sociology developed a self-reproducing capacity that makes it immune to the criterion of relevance (insured against the consequences its social irrelevance). Once you’ve learned the research methods, you can always get your degrees if only you stick to them and don’t dare to deviate from the paths selected by examining masters (as Abraham Maslow caustically observed, science is a contraption that allows non-creative people to join into creative work). Sociology departments around the world may go on indefinitely awarding learned degrees and teaching jobs, self-reproducing and self-replenishing, just by going through routine motions of self-replication. The harder option – the courage required to put the loyalty to human values above other, less risky loyalties – can be thereby, at least for a foreseeable future, side-stepped and avoided … Or at least marginalized.
Two of sociology’s great fathers with ears particularly sharpened to the courage-demanding requirements of their mission, Karl Marx and Georg Simmel, lived their lives outside the walls of academia. The third, Max Weber, spent most of his academic life on leaves of absence … Were these mere coincidences?