Abstract
What does a new book mean to Zygmunt Bauman, undoubtedly one of the most prominent social theorists, who published dozens of books and hundreds of articles? The first volume of his selected writings, Culture and Art, was recently edited by sociologists from the Polish Academy of Sciences and the University of Leeds, Dariusz Brzeziński, Mark Davis, Jack Palmer, Tom Campbell, and virtuoso translator Katarzyna Bartoszyńska. It contains 15 of Bauman’s lesser-known pieces from 1966 to 2015. As Peter Beilharz puts it, this project brings us many surprises, especially the underwater part of Bauman’s iceberg. This review would like to give some comments from a Chinese reader’s perspective.
Reading Bauman in China has a different context from the West. Since the 1980s, China has experienced a rapid and comprehensive modernization. What is modernity? Furthermore, its future in China has become an essential agenda in humanities and social sciences. Bauman was introduced as a sociologist with deep insight into these topics. In contrast to the West, his books never became a bestseller, and he is not a household name intellectual. Chinese scholars imagine him as an esoteric social thinker who makes good use of fashionable terminology. In 2006, Zheng Li published the first Chinese book on Bauman (Understanding Bauman). It argues modernity and postmodernity is the central theme in his writings. From this, Bauman arouses the concerns of experts from different disciplines. Moreover, we need to mention that Chinese scholars have also regarded Bauman as an ‘Eastern European neo-Marxist thinker’. The label refers to the Marxist dissident that emerged within the Eastern European communist countries after 1956, just like Adam Schaff, Leszek Kołakowski, Karel Kosík, Ivan Sviták, Ágnes Heller, Ferenc Fecher, Gajo Petrović, Mihailo Marković, Predrag Vranickić, Milan Kangrag, and Svetozar Stojanović. In A Spiritual History of Eastern European Neo-Marxism, a remarkable book over seven hundred pages, Yi Jun Qing involves Bauman in that genealogy. Yi suggests there is an affinity between the neo-Marxists and Central East European cultural heritage. The experience of suffering makes East European thinkers cherish individual freedom and moral responsibility more than the Western left. Yi’s arguments set a new orientation for Chinese Bauman Studies. Anchoring Bauman in the East European context can help us to find more exciting things. In this regard, Culture and Art provide a series of resources.
From 1957 to 1968, Bauman was a member of the Warsaw School of Marxism. It is a crucial stage in shaping Bauman’s sociological imagination. In Culture and Art, we can make this point more clear. Let us start with his 1972 inaugural lecture at the University of Leeds, ‘Culture Values and Science of Society’. Bauman regarded the suffering, depression, and hope witnessed in his Polish years as sociological lessons. It not only makes the teaching of Julian Hochfeld and Stanisław Ossowski intelligible but also helps him to realize sociology’s contradictory status. ‘Sociology was conceived as a desperate effort to bridge the gap between the planning, ordering, goal-oriented reason, and apparently chaotic, obstreperous, unruly and intractable human reality. Were there not this gap, there probably would be no sociology’ (p. 69). Bauman then illuminates his sociological approach through a discussion on ethnomethodology and structuralism. He believes sociologists need to accept inherent dilemmas of social life and focus on the creative potential of human beings. Only in this way can sociologists grasp factual reality (pp. 79–80). This motivation recurs in Bauman’s writings on culture, socialism, utopias, ethics, and morality. The creative potential of human beings can be embodied as the moral agent or be cultural praxis to change the status quo. We can find such tendencies in Bauman’s other three early texts.
Culture and Society and Marx and the Contemporary Theory of Culture can be taken, in a sense, as primary texts of Culture as Praxis. Bauman explored different dimensions of culture in 1966, namely culture ‘in an attributive’ and ‘in a distributive’ (p. 3). It later developed into a trichotomy: culture as a hierarchical, differential, and generic concept. Furthermore, Marx’s praxis had already inspired Bauman to integrate the different cultural concepts before he arrived in Leeds. ‘The centre of gravity in Marxian doctrine is in the category of “praxis” and not in “economic determinism”, as is falsely assumed by some interpreters of this theory. The human praxis is essentially natural world’ (p. 61) (We translated Marx and the Contemporary Theory of Culture in 2017 to mourn Bauman’s passing. It has gotten interesting from scholars in Marxism philosophy, aesthetic, and cultural studies). Bauman’s discourse on Culture was undoubtedly anti-dogmatic claims in the late 1960s. We should relate it to Kołakowski’s views on historical relativity. Their targets are not precisely the same. Kołakowski criticizes the historical necessity in orthodox Marxism, while Bauman rejects ‘technical sociology’. Even so, both Kołakowski and Bauman are committed to recovering the meaning of moral choice. In Bauman’s opinion, affirming moral agent means sociology must accept that its ‘observation objects’, men and women, are unpredictable. As he stated in Notes Beyond Time, ‘Unless we use an SS whip to tear from them all the successive layers of their human existence-and even then, there may be surprises . . . ’ (p. 35).
Bauman reconciles with the human behavior’s uncertainty by Hermeneutics. In Jorge Luis Borges, or Why Understanding Is Not What It Seems to Be, an essay written in the same year as Hermeneutics and the Social Sciences, Bauman demonstrates the intertwined between his sociology and literature in more detail. The social world is imagined as Borges’s labyrinths, in which there are always infinitely alternative possibilities. Then understanding is an essential human need to create order, logic, thinking, and acting in the labyrinths. Since every social member weaves a web of meanings from their respective position, ‘the problem of understanding boils down to the question how to understand others, and the problem of knowledge becomes that of communications’ (p. 99). In this way, we suggest that Bauman’s sociology, especially his later writings, is public sociology to promote communication and dialogue. He is very concerned with disrespect toward human dignity in totalitarianism and neo-liberalism. In order to reveal the potential possibilities that are closed by power, Bauman hopes to encourage audiences to be mutual acceptance and recognize the forgotten suffers. Such an agenda is also inseparable from the East European historical experience. In this respect, we can learn some different stories from The Spectre of Barbarism and Assimilation to Exile. Polish Jews, colonialism, genocide . . . Such themes are related to Bauman’s trilogy of modernity, but not only the same. We have not been able to cover all of the exciting parts of Culture and Art in turn. In any case, it is a great start. Polity Press will subsequently publish two volumes of Bauman’s selected writings: History and Politics; Theory and Society. They are undoubtedly worthy gifts to Chinese Bauman Studies.