ABSTRACT
Zygmunt Bauman rightly has a large number of admirers, some of whom (see, e.g., Smith 1999; Beilharz 2000; Tester 2004; Blackshaw 2005) have written favourable exegeses of his voluminous output. He is not, of course, without his critics, and some of the best critical essays have been published in two edited collections (Elliott 2007; Jacobsen and Poder 2008). Even the current director of the Bauman Institute at the University of Leeds, Mark Davis, has written a thoughtful, appreciative critique of Bauman’s work (Davis 2008). There have also been many objections to Bauman’s pioneering and influential thesis set out in Modernity and the Holocaust (see, for example, Mann 2005) and his views on consumerism have not gone unchallenged either (see, for instance, Warde 1994a, 1994b). However, none of the critics has conducted an interrogation of the myriad
ways in which the limited attention Zygmunt Bauman pays to issues of racism, imperialism and gender have led to a damaging selectivity in his interpretations of the Enlightenment, modernity, the Holocaust and consumerism. It is the effect of these partial absences in Bauman’s work that I focus on here. Another way of expressing this would be to argue that what I am attempting to accomplish here is a critique of Bauman’s work in the light of the extensive interventions by postcolonialist and feminist researchers which have had the effect of exposing the limitations of the ‘imperialist gaze’ and the ‘male gaze’ in many mainstream disciplines, including sociology. A more extensive and detailed critique of these and other themes in Bauman’s work form part of my larger project, to be published soon in book form (Rattansi in press). It should go without saying – but to avoid misunderstanding is worth
pointing out – that my critique is not meant to detract from the great many achievements that Bauman’s admirers have highlighted, and indeed my book will add to an appreciation of his many profound contributions. But that is not the purpose of this chapter. Here I am only concerned to turn the spotlight on a number of absences in his work which in my view significantly weaken Bauman’s analyses of some of the themes that are central to his work and
reputation. I am well aware that Bauman’s weaknesses with regard to these issues are not his alone. Similar criticisms can be made of most major Western, white, male sociologists, including Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck (see Connell 2007; Bhambra 2014), with whom Bauman is often bracketed as one of the greats of modern sociology (Bauman and Donskis 2012: 1). Inevitably, then, broader questions of Eurocentrism and a masculinist bias in sociology are at stake here; Raewyn Connell (2007), for example, also presents a postcolonialist critique of the work of Pierre Bourdieu. And of course, there have been a number of feminist critiques of contemporary sociology (for one useful contribution see Marshall and Witz 2004). Unfortunately, I will not be able to do justice to these sets of issues within the confines of this brief chapter except for a few brief remarks in the conclusion. Nevertheless, they should be borne in mind as forming the essential backdrop against which my critique of Bauman’s later works should be viewed. Other caveats need to be entered here, too. First, I shall only be concerned with Bauman’s ‘Postmodern’ and ‘Liquid Modern’ phases. Second, I will have to scrupulously restrict myself to issues of racism, imperialism and gender, setting aside broader issues that arise from Bauman’s interpretation of the Enlightenment, modernity, the Holocaust, consumerism and so forth, which will form part of my book-length discussion.
It was in Legislators and Interpreters (1987) that Bauman first announced his adoption of a distinctly postmodern standpoint, and it was in this text that some of his key theses on modernity were first explicated, which were subsequently developed in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), Modernity and Ambivalence (1991), Intimations of Postmodernity (1992), Postmodern Ethics (1993), Life in Fragments (1995), Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (1998) and In Search of Politics (1999). The European Enlightenment of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
has long been regarded as a key moment in the development of Western modernity (Cassirer 1951; Gay 1973; Geras and Wokler 2000), and it is thus not surprising that Bauman, in developing a genealogy of modernity, also focuses his attention on the key intellectual and political transformations that are usually associatedwith the Enlightenment. In particular, the Enlightenment of course has come to be called the ‘Age of Reason’, signalling the attempt at establishing rationality and scientific method as against superstition and religion, a belief in progress as a consequence of the application of instrumental rationality, and the beginnings of liberalism and pluralism in politics. With the immense influence of the seminal writings of Michel Foucault, the Enlightenment has also come to be seen as part of the development of a disciplinary social formation for the government of national populations, with an emphasis on Panopticon-like institutions such as schools, the army, prisons, mental asylums and so forth. It is important to bear in mind Foucault’s reinterpretation of the Enlightenment and modernity, for it had a profound
influence on how Bauman thought of the Enlightenment in Legislators and Interpreters (see, for instance, Bauman 1987: 45), a text deeply indebted to Foucault’s analysis of what Bauman refers to as ‘the self-perpetuating mechanism of power/knowledge’ (Bauman 1987: 11). The originality of Bauman’s interpretation of the Enlightenment lies in the
way he connects the emergence of intellectuals as a separate group with the emergence of the modern state, seeing in this alliance a powerful bloc that helped usher in the ‘Age of Reason’. In seeing the Enlightenment as the Age of Reason – he refers to it as being an age characterised by the ‘Kingdom of Reason’ (Bauman 1987: 111) – Bauman remains within the bounds of a conventional interpretation that I question in my forthcoming book. For the time being, note that Bauman primarily focuses on the French version of the Enlightenment but mentions very few actual French Enlightenment intellectuals and their writings – Marquis de Condorcet and Denis Diderot get brief mention; Destutt de Tracy is given more attention. Roy Porter (2000), a major Enlightenment scholar, has remarked that those who see the Enlightenment only as the Age of Reason, thus overemphasising the hold of scientific, mathematical and instrumental rationalism on the era, have a tendency to cite only a few French thinkers, overlooking a host of intellectuals, of French or other nationality, who held a variety of differing views. Be that as it may, I want to highlight other issues: gender, and Europe’s
imperial expansion, amongst them. A number of arguments are worth making here in relation to the account of the Enlightenment that Bauman provides, which then affects his broader interpretation of Western modernity. First, despite devoting an entire chapter to what he regards as the emergence of the concept of culture in the eighteenth century (Bauman 1987: 81-95), he fails to notice that this was also the era in which the concept of culture enabled women to be positioned as part of nature, with important consequences. Being part of nature rather than culture meant that women were regarded as unable to properly self-cultivate, self-actualise, and exercise freedom and rationality. Women were thus legitimately to be confined to the private sphere of domesticity and child rearing, for they were largely seen as emotional, credulous and incapable of objective reasoning (Outram 2005: 83; Ortner 1982). This, though, was not just an Enlightenment or eighteenth-century phenomenon. Women’s place in Western modernity more generally was circumscribed by these notions, for they long continued to be seen as overemotional and child-like, thus needing the patriarchal tutelage of men; in the nineteenth century attempts were made to bolster this view with spurious measurements purporting to show that women had smaller brains and less intelligence. Note, moreover, that similar arguments were made regarding Western modernity’s other Others, the racialised inferior peoples ‘discovered’ by the West as overseas exploration and imperial domination took off in the wake of Columbus’s fateful journey. Thus, by the middle of the nineteenth century an analogy was being made between the natural inferiority of both women and blacks and ‘Orientals’ (Stepan 1990; Rattansi 2007: 33-8). There is only passing reference to this in Legislators and
Interpreters (Bauman 1987: 17, 18); historically, class was also incorporated into such conceptualisations, thus women, blacks and the ‘lower orders’ were all classified together as child-like, overly subject to the ‘passions’, incapable of rationality and thus requiring strict government by the white upper classes (Rattansi 2007: 38). It is important to acknowledge that the concept of ‘culture’ itself has origins that are not internal to Western Europe as Bauman’s discussion assumes; it owed much to the West’s encounters with non-Western others in the form of blacks, Orientals and ‘primitives’, and thus to the emergent discipline of anthropology, on which more in the conclusion of this chapter. One of the oddities of Bauman’s discussion is that despite his reliance on
Foucault, and the latter’s influence on Edward Said’s widely read and hugely influential Orientalism (Said 1979), Bauman makes no mention of Said in Legislators and Interpreters, and has never mentioned Said’s work as far as I know, which suggests that Bauman might not have read Said. While Said’s work has been subjected to important criticisms, this is not the point, for a neglect of his work highlights Bauman’s provincialism, or more appropriately put, his Eurocentrism. It may be that an over-reliance on Foucault is, paradoxically, to blame, for Foucault himself failed to understand the significance of the concept of race and of racism and imperialism to the formation of Western modernity until late in his career (Stoler 1995). One serious consequence of Bauman’s neglect of issues of gender and race
in the Enlightenment is that in subsequent works, especially Modernity and Ambivalence (1991), he fails to grasp the extent to which in Western modernity in general, woman, the black and the Oriental have been figures of profound ambivalence. Bauman recognised that the Jew was an ambivalent figure, but neglects the similar positioning of woman, the black and the Oriental as being of at least equal importance, and perhaps of even greater significance as sources of deep ambivalence. Not surprisingly, then, Legislators and Interpreters also makes no mention of the ambivalence of the figure of the ‘Noble Savage’, reflecting an attempt by many Enlightenment intellectuals to appreciate the attractive simplicity – however misconceived some of these notions were – of the lives of non-Westerners such as Tahitians. Indeed, the perceived simplicity of primitive cultures was often used to criticise contemporary manners as excessively artificial and materialistic (Meek 1976; Vogel 2000; Whelan 2009: 48-77). Nor should we forget the great veneration during the Enlightenment of Chinese civilisation, the elevation of Confucius to a sort of cult figure and the impact of Chinese art and porcelain manufacture, leading to the emergence in France of what has been called Chinoiserie, with Voltaire being a leading light in this wave of Sinophilia (Clarke 1997: 37-53). Changing attitudes to China exemplify the Enlightenment’s (and arguably, the West’s more general) ambivalence to non-Western cultures, with the same thinkers sometimes praising the Chinese system of rule and at other times denouncing what they took to be an unacceptable form of ‘Oriental Despotism’, one of the regimes of governance included in Montesquieu’s influential typology of forms of rule.
