ABSTRACT
Zygmunt Bauman’s postmodern ethics as unfolded in books such as Postmodern Ethics (1993) and Life in Fragments (1995) signals an important new direction in contrast to the orthodoxy of Émile Durkheim’s ‘normative’morality. Bauman’s (1993, 1995) postmodern ethics develops out of his sociological excavation of the sources of the Holocaust (Bauman 1989). In response to the manifest failure of modern forms of normative rationality and bureaucratic organisation, Bauman turns to the relational moral theory of Emmanuel Lévinas (1979). Morality does not arise out of the ‘rational order’. Rather morality is ontologically prior to social organisation, integral to our relational engagements. While others have taken up and extended this Lévinasian approach to morality (Irigaray 1991; Ahmed 2004a; Butler 2004), Bauman’s later work turns away from Lévinas. The Lévinasian inspired relational morality of Bauman’s ‘postmodern
phase’ contrasts with his later analyses of liquidity. His analyses of liquidity focus on exposing the failures of the highly individualised consumer age marked by speed, disposability and ‘until-further-notice’ relations, and created by ‘negative globalisation’ (Bauman 2006), citing the critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno and Karl Marx. It would be an oversimplification to describe the relational morality of Bauman’s postmodern phase as ‘optimistic’ and his liquid analyses as ‘pessimistic’, but there is certainly a change in the tone of his utopianism (Jacobsen 2007), that echoes a longer-term intellectual shift in modern thought from the ‘self-confidence and audacity of young Icarus to the scepticism and circumspection of the elderly Daedalus’ (Bauman 2006: 161). In contrast to Bauman’s turn to critical theory in his later analyses of liquidity, in this chapter we suggest that the Lévinasian relational morality of his ‘postmodern phase’ can be developed to address some of its shortcomings. Following a brief overview of Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘moral sociology’ and
how it fits with his recent liquid analysis, the first part of the chapter makes a case for the importance of Bauman’s postmodern ethics for grasping moral life outside decline accounts. The second part of the chapter argues that Bauman’s ethics of ‘infinite responsibility’ needs to be groundedwithin particular, emotional and embodied encounter. Taking a cue from Jeffrey C. Alexander’s (2010)
conceptualisation of ‘iconic consciousness’, the chapter suggests that Bauman’s relational theory can be extended to include aesthetics and symbols as integral to ethical practice and needs to provide space for the self to establish itself as a self. The approach also draws on Sara Ahmed’s sociology of emotions, Luce Irigaray’s analysis of embodiment, and Judith Butler’s Lévinasian-inspired analysis of relations with the ‘other’. Bauman, Ahmed and Alexander are all concerned with human responses to systemic cruelty, suffering and trauma. We conclude that the Lévinasian/Baumanesque ‘infinite responsibility’ to the Other can be reconceptualised through a celebration of the uncertainty in the moment of human response to suffering. The otherness of the Other is found through embracing the uncertainty associated with the possibility of trauma in the presence of the suffering Other. Butler’s (2004) analysis of the US response to 9/11 carries this argument.
