90-letni Zygmunt Bauman: Schopferkraft i jego dwoistości
Tony Blackshaw
Abstract
Zygmunt Bauman turned 90 years of age in November 2015, as vital, productive, and intelligently alive as ever. After more than seventy books written over five decades, each one taking a single subject and finding doors to open in all directions, his work remains an essential reference point in sociology. Bauman continues to be one of most electrifying writers in sociology, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of his generation. This explains why some commentators have described him as the most important living sociologist. Yet his work has also come in for some severe critique. After outlining what his detractors have had to say, the view developed in this article is that generally speaking this criticism says more about present culture in sociology than it does about the quality of the work as such. The way in which Bauman practices his craft may have the appearance of idiosyncrasy, yet nothing about it is unusual; it has had a previous life in sociology. Other important sociologists have played the same nonconformist game that Bauman plays – Marx, Simmel, Weber – but none in the contemporary period. It is explained that in common with other important nonconformists Bauman is a product of his own unusual biography. And like some of them he has also been able to take the advantage of an émigré’s double vision which has sharpened his personal awareness of the ambivalence of modernity. It is subsequently demonstrated that in Bauman’s hands sociology is compelled into a different cognitive mapping of what we ordinarily understand as reality, the one we all experience and take for granted. What we find in his work is the demand that sociology begin with a hermeneutic understanding of the contingency and ambivalence of life’s flux. It is argued thereafter that the metaphors Bauman uses to describe this modernity are messianic and ecological: they are saving a certain kind of sociology, an endangered species. The final part of the article challenges the tendency of Bauman’s critics to assume that the ultimate defence of sociology as an academic discipline lies in an authority beyond that of society – the authority of the objective is. It is argued that Bauman leaves no room for such an authority since his sociology is established between two ‘realities’ – hermeneutic sociology and sociological hermeneutics. As a result of a continuous reciprocal process between the two, he is able to ‘disclose that which exists’. And it is the sense of freedom emanating from this dialectic that he communicates in his work.
Keywords:
ambivalence, Bauman Effect, cultural politics, hermeneutic sociology and sociological, hermeneutics, imagination, knowledge, liquid modernity, metaphor, SchöpfungReferences
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