BAUMAN
We’ll put Zygmunt Bauman (born 1925, Poznań, Poland – died 2017, Leeds, England) in conversation with Weber. Please be sure to read Bauman’s obituary published in the Associated Press.
LIQUID MODERNITY
Bauman. 2000. Liquid Modernity. (pp. 1-15, 22-41, 53-90, 113-23, 140-60)
Bauman argues that modernity isn’t dead, it’s just been transformed. We don’t really live in a postmodern society, but rather in a “society of fluid modernity.” As such, Bauman distinguishes between three basic periods: premodernity, solid modernity, and liquid modernity. Solid modernity was formed by melting down the already weakened bonds and practices of traditionalism. The point was to form a new solidity of social life, one made stable by rationalization and the increasing salience of the market. Modern society was a somewhat settled world of production, heavy capitalism, Politics with a capital P, leaders, conformity, and citizens. Its solidity could be detected in Ford factories, unionized labor, the welfare state, the nation, marriage, and the relative certainty of social life. That society, however, is largely gone. Solid modernity has been melted into liquid modernity. The latter is a relatively unsettled world of consumption, light capitalism, life-politics, counselors, adequacy, and individuals. Its fluidity can be detected in Microsoft office buildings, flexible labor, low taxes, international mobility, cohabitated households, and the relative uncertainty of social life. While Bauman argues that this liquification process has been massive, he is clear that it has also been uneven. The world today is more liquid at the top. A nomadic elite rules a settled majority.
BAUMAN AND WEBER
Read the "Weber Excerpts for Bauman" in the Excerpt Packet.
It’s perhaps not surprising that Bauman engages so frequently with Weber. Both reference instrumental rationality and the iron cage (or “steely casing”) in an effort to make sense of modernity in its early formation. In many ways, Bauman frames liquid modernity as an opposition, if not an inversion, of Weber’s descriptions. Among other things, we may want to spend some time thinking about Bauman’s critique of “value rationality” and his reimagining of procrastination and asceticism. Then there’s the question of authority. Of course, we may also want to consider what Bauman says, or might say, about panopticism (Foucault), civil society (Gramsci), global capitalism (Fanon), and more.