ABSTRACT
Introductions to, presentations and appreciations of, reflections on and critical dissections and interpretations of Bauman’s work abound (for some notable pieces of work but a far from complete list of titles see, e.g., Beilharz 2000, 2001; Best 2013; Blackshaw 2005; Davis 2008, 2014; Davis and Tester 2010; Jacobsen 2004a, 2006; Jacobsen and Poder 2008; Junge and Kron 2014; Rattansi in press; Smith 1999; Tester 2004). Each of these books focuses on different aspects of Bauman’s work and deciphers and evaluates it differently, thereby showing how interpretation and appreciation of intellectual ideas is always in the eye of the beholder. Despite such interpretative differences, there is, I sense, a general agreement that Bauman’s work can best be seen as a critical and humanistic contribution to sociology – something I suspect Bauman himself would hardly object to despite his strong reservations about any kind of intellectual or paradigmatic pigeonholing and despite insisting that he himself is a poor judge of such matters (see, e.g., Kilminster and Varcoe 1992: 205). First and foremost, Bauman’s sociology is a relentlessly critical and icono-
clastic confrontation with everything that we – as sociologists as well as human beings in general – take for granted and uncritically accept as the only possible or only available version of reality. In Bauman’s view, such a position – by him characterised as the ‘TINA Syndrome’, spelling out loud and clear that ‘There Is No Alternative’ – is not only factually wrong, but it is also normatively deceitful and downright dangerous. In his view, every historical moment is an open-ended situation that is not entirely determined by
its previous path and from which more than merely one trajectory of action and events may follow (Bauman 1976a: 10). By way of critiquing that which currently is or which parades as inevitable, natural, normal or unchangeable, we may come to discover that the world can always be made differently – even when it seems futile or even impossible – and that it is always possible for humans to remake it again, should they wish to do so. In Bauman’s dramatic words, the death knell to the ‘TINA Syndrome’, and to everything associated with it, sounds when we come to realise that we can do it (Bauman 1976b: 93). Second, and in close connection to this important insight, is Bauman’s humanistic perspective that places the human experience of the world at the centre of analytical attention as opposed to those strands of sociology that look at inanimate systems or solidified structures that relentlessly force themselves onto people’s lives, thereby making people puppets who are controlled by some omnipotent societal master. Although Bauman certainly admits that structures and systems indeed are at work in society, and that they in many different respects shape and interfere with the lives of humans, they are neither indestructible nor immortal. In the end, they are made up by people who may decide to challenge and demolish them again. It is evident that Bauman has an indomitable and unquenchable belief in humanity – one that is indeed shaped by his own dramatic life-biographical experiences as someone who had to flee persecution and to remake his own life in exile. In his inaugural lecture as the newly appointed professor of sociology at the University of Leeds in 1972, he stated the following, here quoted at length, related to his own personal experiences in Poland but also something with a much more principled meaning and extensive scope – namely that humans, time after time, seem capable of overcoming the many obstacles and setbacks that life is destined to hold in store for them:
I have seen morally inspired, noble and lofty ideals smashed to pieces by the merciless logic of the reality their bearers failed to assess. I was with those who took … upon themselves to re-define the world they lived in, to fill the world with a new, better, more human meaning, to deny its repulsive reality in the name of the untrammelled human potential. I was with them still when they saw their ambition shattered against the wall of the same stubborn reality they refused to admit, and the same moral squalor sprouting again from below the thin film of ideals. And then, fortunately, I saw the same, always young and vigorous, indomitable spirit of exploration and perfection rising again to challenge the ungratifying reality. There seemed, indeed, to be no end to the drama in which the meaning and the reality, the subjective and the objective, the free and the determined, merge continuously to mould our present into our future. Such – contradictory and mischievously elusive to all clear-cut unilateral descriptions – is the shape of the human world (so I learned), my metier – sociology – is about. And the lesson I learned was, I think, congenial to the collective experience from which sociology in its modern form
emerged. It was born of the painful realization of the vexing discrepancy between the ends people read into their actions and the consequences these actions bring about; between anticipations and results; ideals and reality; the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’.
