Zygmunt Bauman's sociology of aesthetic knowledge

Aesthetics is one of the fundamental dimensions in Eastern European critical theory. Although Zygmunt Bauman as a well-known neo-Marxist is mostly a critical sociologist. He integrates diverse aesthetic experiences into aesthetic discourses, without which, his theory would be less interesting and penetrating. As a matter of fact, some of his important sociological concepts originate from aesthetics. According to editors of Bauman's writings in Culture and Art, “Bauman's reflections on culture and art were the inspiration – sometimes the foundation – for his analyses of morality and ethics, social and economic challenges and the condition of social theory” (Brzeziński et al., 2021: xiii). Dennis Smith rightly pictures Bauman's aesthetic image: “He is also an accomplished storyteller, a maker of historical narratives. A significant part of the power of Bauman's work comes from the stories he relates” (Smith and Bauman, 1999: 5). In Keith Tester's eye, Bauman's being in exile shows that he is “an avant-garde” (Tester, 2004: 9), giving it a positive meaning. Most of Bauman's writings can be effectively interpreted as aesthetics and thus are responsible for the understanding of aesthetic issues in a strict sense. Bauman focuses on the concept of “aesthetic knowledge” (wiedza estetyczna), as he repeats the following idea: “It is possible to have aesthetic knowledge as distinct—expressing information about what is beautiful and what is ugly. And this knowledge is a product of social upbringing” (Bauman, 1965: 27). This paper is intended to analyze Bauman's sociology of aesthetic knowledge from the 1960s to the new century in his memory.

Framework of aesthetic knowledge

Bauman's aesthetics emerges from his consideration of sociology of knowledge, which has interested him since the early 1960s. Thus it is necessary and essential to trace back to his early writings in Poland. I agree with Darius Brzezinski that, “many of the texts that are only available in Polish have significant meaning for understanding Bauman's later work. This pertains especially to his theory of culture” (Brzezinski, 2022: 5–6). Sociology of knowledge is different from the traditional one in that it is characteristic of critique and humanism, which means human beings are closely involved. Bauman emphasizes the role of human existence in his construction of sociology. Words such as “thinking,” “idea,” “ideal,” “vision,” “imagination,” “everyday,” “ideology,” “attitude,” and “common sense” are central elements in his theory, thereby endowing these with sociological, philosophical, and aesthetic significance. Knowledge, in Bauman's view, is embedded within these terms. He argues that the most prominent feature of knowledge is that it consists of concepts widespread in the world beyond the individual and private ideas. It is defined and accepted by “human community” (Bauman, 1964: 92). It is the ordering of human experiences and communication of culture: “knowledge organizes and orders human experience, systemizes it, ‘institutionalizes' — cultural heredity that transmits the active components” (Bauman, 1964: 494).

In 1963, Bauman published the book Idea, Ideal, Ideology (Idee, Ideały, Ideologie). In my view, this book lays an important foundation for sociology and especially for sociology of aesthetic knowledge, though Bauman's two other works “have acquired the status of modern classics: Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) and Liquid Modernity (2000)” (Davis et al., 2024: ix). In this book, Bauman discusses the nature of human beings on the basis of sociology from the thinking person to the social one, then to the ideological one, lastly to the ideal life. Obviously these discussions respond to the classic questions from the French Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?”. According to Peter Beilharz (2020: 4), “these matters would remain to dog Bauman's later career.” Bauman points out that a person, group, community, and society need a certain direction, that is, we need knowledge about practical goals and effective instruments, otherwise we will not know what to do and how to behave, so “knowledge provides us with orientation of life” (Bauman, 1963a: 6) and promotes the realization of freedom. This notion of knowledge comes from the creator of modern science, the English philosopher Francis Bacon who wrote the book Novum Organum. Bacon (2000: 33) struggles for the association between knowledge and power: “Human knowledge and human power come to the same thing.” Bauman's definition of knowledge is located in the context of modernity. For Bauman (1963a: 7), “Life is art and — as every art — it is necessary to learn.” Children and adults learn how to live from the world's chaotic experience to bring order to their lives. Learning is a process of schematization, that is, the accumulation of knowledge. Bauman (1963a: 8) points out that, “The basic elements of this schema appear in every process of learning in children and adults.” Based on the theory of reflection of condition by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov and the theory of learning and cybernetics from America, Bauman (1963a: 12) characterizes human as different from animals by means of knowledge and language: “Through language, the learning process of a person is not so simple and unambiguous as in an animal, which directly related to the satisfaction of primary need and drive, but is inclined to the recognition and assimilation of indirect need with the help of language information, which supports the ‘practical learning’.” It means that a person can go out of the satisfaction of desire. Learning and knowledge are complicatedly associated with the society. Knowledge is one important part of human culture as a whole and plays a significant role in the society.

Bauman divides knowledge into four types and discusses their principles: a) knowledge of utilization, which orders and accumulates human experience according to the principle of effectiveness–ineffectiveness or usefulness–harmfulness; b) moral knowledge in terms of the principle of goodness–badness; c) aesthetic knowledge, which is associated with the principle of beautiful–ugliness; and d) scientific knowledge on the principle of truth–falsehood, which plays a very important part in modern society so that Bauman discusses it respectively. These variations of knowledge are identification of subject and object. They are rooted not only in the pure thoughts, but also from human practical activities. They gradually accumulate into the culture, that is, they become the human culture. Here Bauman (1963a: 51) rediscovers the common foundation for the human beings: “We talked about culture, about utilitarian, moral, aesthetic, scientific knowledge — these were common ones for all persons, and human beings were not separated from each other, and they had a common experience for all that is identical, ‘adjustable’ to different perspectives in order to justify their correctness and perform their own choices among them.” Therefore, aesthetic knowledge is one of the four dimensions of the knowledge system.

Bauman analyzes the concept of “aesthetic knowledge” in detail and points out the distinction of principle. For him, aesthetic knowledge orders human imagination of the world through the categories of “beautiful” and “ugly.” This is a special way for human beings to appropriate the world. Bauman compares it with utilitarian knowledge by using an interesting metaphor: if the latter permits human beings to see the world through a lens (soczewki), then the former is engaged with the world through a prism (pryzmat). The lens is to magnify the image of the world and to make it more visible, thereby standing out its utility; the prism is to make a ray of light into a beautiful spectrum, thus becoming art. According to Bauman (1963a: 34), “By justifying art, human beings seizes a new glance at the world, a new criterion of its value, and then classifies the different observatory phenomena.” Here, Bauman (1963a: 51) appreciates the poem by the Indian great poet Tagore: “‘You are the big drop of dew under the lotus leaf, I am the smaller one on its upper side,’ said the dew drop to the lake.” Bauman's taking up and understanding of photography in 1983–1985 was encouraged by this idea of aesthetic knowledge. By learning and mastering the technique fully, especially developing and printing, we can use photography to cleanse the experience from the decomposing solvent of time and make up for our daily neglect: “It may sharpen our eyesight, bring into focus things previously unnoticed, transform our experiences into our knowledge” (Bauman, 2021: 106). Aesthetic knowledge is an integration of aesthetic reflection, aesthetic criterion, and aesthetic action. This knowledge is historical. In his 1963 book, Bauman argues that aesthetic knowledge is closely bound up with utilitarian one in the traditional and primitive society by reading Necessity of Art in a Polish version in 1962 by Ernst Fischer, the Austrian Marxist aesthetician or art theorist. Bauman cited Fischer's book twice to defend the necessity of aesthetic knowledge and its gradual differentiation from the primary existence of society. He uses the book A Research for the Style of Epoch (Wposzukiwaniu stylu epoki) in 1961 by the prominent Polish aesthetician Jerzy Kossak to explain the association of the aesthetic knowledge with the utilitarian one by indicating that “in the times every craftsman was an artist—every artist was a craftsman … style of work, method of science, space of society—related to painter … Beautiful was related to utility” (Bauman, 1963a: 35). In addition, Bauman makes a good use of the cultural anthropologist Frazer's The Golden Bough and Lévy-Bruhl's book on morality in order to justify his concepts of knowledge.

According to Bauman, aesthetic knowledge is ideological. He dealt with aesthetic ideology earlier than Terry Eagleton, who did it in his 1990 book The Ideology of the Aesthetic: “the category of the aesthetic assumes the importance it does in modern Europe because in speaking of art it speaks of these other matters too, which are at the heart of the middle class's struggle for political hegemony” (Eagleton, 1990: 3). For Bauman, human beings are political animals. He (Bauman, 1963a: 64) points out that, “Every knowledge ‘organize’ the human experience around a certain value.” In history, every class has its own system of value and interest along with its system of knowledge. Thus, knowledge about the society or the world has the position of the class. It is a kind of ideology. For Bauman (1963a: 69), “system of knowledge is the ideology of the class.” Ideology encompasses three meanings—genetic, structural, and functional—which are bound up with the experience, everyday life, worldview, and interest from the given class. In his view, “an ideology in a certain sense creates a class” (Bauman, 1963a: 71). In the modern society, there were three higher ideologies of knowledge: liberal ideology in capitalist society with an emphasis on economicism, individualism, and egotism; national ideology such as Hilter's German fascism based on the ethnicity and nationhood; and communist ideology. These ideologies contain aesthetic knowledge in a different sense. Bauman (1963a: 149) explored this concept in depth within communist ideology, which presents a worldview that reconciles theory and practice, embodying the principle that “the highest value for a person is the person itself.” This kind of person is the vision of proletariat from class in itself to class for itself. The class for itself combines theory and practice. This is an application of theory to the mass. The result is the identity of intellectual action and class experience and integration of reason and sensibility. In this sense, this idea of Bauman is with Kar Marxs's ideal in philosophical writings from 1844 to 1846. By so doing, modern society's alienation will be liquidated, and making a good life possible. With this ideology there exists a new kind of knowledge about world and nature. Of course, aesthetic knowledge is significant. According to Bauman (1963a: 174), “it is possible to create a new artistic value, if it possesses talent and will power,” and as a result it produces “a new personality, a beautiful and material form.” That means, the ideal life does not fall off from the heaven, but comes true by means of human activities with aesthetic knowledge: it is pushed by environment, prompted by colleagues, and advocated in books and films.

In a word, Bauman offers a new understanding of aesthetic sphere or art in general. That means that art is a special kind of knowledge which orders and organizes the human experiences. Further, Bauman lays a significant foundation for the sociology of aesthetic knowledge by revealing the origin, formation, and vision of ideal life in the society. It shows that aesthetic knowledge is not simply reflective and ideological, but also provides a possibility for a good life.

Evolution of aesthetic autonomy

In Bauman's sociology of aesthetic knowledge, he establishes the intimacy between knowledge and aesthetic autonomy, advancing the understanding of aesthetic modernity.

Considering the variations of knowledge in 1963, Bauman identified the issue of autonomy, noting that each of the four forms of knowledge has distinct practices, institutions, and principles. They distinguish themselves from each other and reach varying levels of specialization. Thus, the distinctiveness of each type of knowledge is manifested, reinforced, and accumulated through the practices and learning processes within the social division of labor. This distinctiveness is presented by the distinct category of persons, with aesthetic knowledge specifically performed by artists. According to Bauman (1963a: 37), “Social division of work was the fundamental of autonomization of individual field of human knowledge.”

From this, Bauman goes into the cultural mechanism of anthropology and sociology to understand aesthetic autonomy. His book Culture and Society in 1966 delves deeply into this issue. Here, Bauman explores the concept of autonomy from the perspective of both subject and object. A person's life is shaped by two forces: one is from his desiring inner world which consists of the subjective sphere of “I”; the other is from the external world with necessity and objectivity. Thus, human life is involved in the complicated conflict between ideal and reality, spirit and existence, superstructure and base, culture and society. Bauman is intended to focus on the relative independence of culture and society, “two autonomous spheres” (Bauman, 2021: 28–32), so the autonomy becomes a key point which is regarded as “mechanism of cultural autonomization” (Bauman, 1966: 91). He attempts to find out one cultural logic and mechanism of cultural phenomena. Many scholars, such as Adorno, Lukács, Agnes Heller, Győrgy Markus, regard this mechanism as a historical emergence of modernity or philosophy of art. In contrast, Bauman's bases his interpretation on the scientific mechanism of human evolution from a semiotic perspective: “in the community, some connections were specialized as an information, but the other connection — were preserved mainly as an energetic role” (Bauman, 1966: 91). Communication of information is opposite to communication of energy in that the former uses sign, signal, and symbol, while the latter uses energy. With the biological–social evolution, communication of information is separated from communication of energy in the community. With it, culture compresses the logic of communication of information. Bauman maintains that during the human evolution, human beings develops its infinite possibility and potential with ever increasing freedom of selection that gradually goes beyond its instinctive existence. Bauman (1966: 92) explains that, “Process of selection favors ‘indefinition’ of biological species, enlargement of arrange of freedom in the choice of manner of behavior, in selection of natural environment, and in method of its exploitation.” Although human beings cannot go beyond its biological genetic basis, he or she can use signals to exchange information by means of education, learning and understanding. Thereby communication of information particularly is exclusive human being's character and becomes a foundation of cultural form. Indeed, animals can learn and develop their skills, but it is mainly based on signals which are related to energetic communication. During the process of autonomization of culture, language plays an important part because it serves as a memory of information and communication. It is responsible for the formation of cultural norm and principles. Thus, the function and meaning of symbols are different from the energetic communication. According to Bauman (1966: 95), “Meanings isolating from the reality, which signify, become cultural materials. Process of symbolization, which is a condition of cultural birth, reflects the road of stability of meaning through their connection with the primary acoustic signs, consisting of spoken language and then with naming, which at last develops into written language.” A community becomes a system of symbol available to every member. Language as an important symbol becomes a mediation determined by this community. Thus, Bauman argues that the activity of symbolization and of communication of symbol is a special method of human beings closely associated with the power from the ancient period of magic to the present. Communication of information is the potential condition of “relatively cultural autonomy” (Bauman, 1966: 97). If we compare Bauman's analysis with Fischer's discussion about the origin of arts, we will find the same or similar ideas which emphasize the function and power of abstract signs as a mediation that differs man from animal. Fischer (1963: 30) writes: “Such signs were of immense importance to early man; they had organizing functions within the working group or collective, because they meant the same thing to all its members.”

With the evolution of society, cultural autonomy becomes more and more outstanding with new and different characters. Bauman discusses the complicated historical process in detail and constructs a genealogy of cultural autonomy that merits further scholarly attention. Bauman divides human culture and society into four types in terms of homogeneity (homogeniczność) or heterogeneity (heterogeniczność): Hmhm (homogeneous society and homogeneous culture, mainly primitive society and culture); Hmht (homogeneous society and heterogeneous culture, transitional society and culture); Hthm (heterogeneous society and homogeneous culture, European feudal society and culture); and Htht (heterogeneous society and heterogeneous culture, Western capitalist society and culture). In his eyes, the evolution of heterogeneity contains the development of cultural autonomy gradually separating from homogeneous society and homogeneous culture. In the Htht, cultural autonomy appears with a peculiarity. In the traditional society and culture called Hthm, there exists the nondivision between natural order and moral order, with the emphasis on magic role, and function of knowledge, which orders the chaos experience. However, in Htht, industrialization and market play very important parts. Particularly, the functional specialization for the social structure is very penetrating. This character is the most important feature which makes Htht different from Hthm. With the specialization, every structure individually has the definitive circulatory system: “The privilege of position in one system does not mean now the automatic privilege in other systems” (Bauman, 1966: 426). It is obvious that Bauman goes into the understanding of aesthetic autonomy in modernity. This idea does not change in his thoughts. According to him, postmodern art establishes a new relation to autonomy: “The postmodern arts have reached a degree of independence from the non-artistic reality of which their modernist predecessors could only dream. … Independence does not necessarily mean autonomy, while the slogan ‘art for the art's sake’ demanded precisely autonomy: the right to self-government and self-assertion, not cutting the ties with social life and surrendering the right to influence its course” (Bauman, 1997: 102).

However, Bauman refutes the notion of absolute autonomy, advocating instead for relative autonomy. He highlights numerous connections between aesthetic autonomy and other domains, suggesting a complex interrelationship. His sociology draws much from aesthetic knowledge. In the book Liquid Modernity in 2020, he clearly establishes the close relation between poet, history, and sociology by discussing Milan Kundera's nature of poet in the book The Art of Novel: “To write, means for the poet to crush the wall behind which something that ‘was always there’ hides.” Even if neglecting the difference between poem and history in Aristotle's Poetics, Bauman thinks that the task of the poet is not different from the work of historian, which is also to discover rather than invent: historians, like poets, uncover, in ever new situations, human possibilities previously hidden. By following Niklas Luhmann's understanding of autopoesis–self-creation linking between history and poetry as the two parallel currents, Bauman (2012: 204) opens up a new possibility for sociology: “Sociology, one is tempted to say, is a third current, running in parallel with those two.” It should “crush the wall” like a poet and penetrate the creation of human being. As a result, sociology transgresses the line that traditional orthodox one defines. Literature becomes part of Bauman's sociology, which is consciously called “writing sociology.” As Peter Beilharz (2020: 202) rightly explains, Bauman keeps conversations with literary interlocutors “in Calvino and Perec, Orwell and Huxley, Borges, Kafka, Kundera, and also East European, as in Mickiewicz.” By arguing that literature is a necessary companion to sociology, he is ambivalently tied to professional sociology as an academic discipline. Relative autonomy can be explained through the relation between language and external language in literature. Bauman (2012: 205) positively supports Alfred de Musset's words “great artists have no country”: “Now as then, they aim at the heart of the writers’ mission and challenge their consciences with the question decisive for any writer's raison d’étre.” The great Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo insists on it. According to Bauman's wonderful interpretation, if one lives only in the present, one risks disappearing together with the present. “It was the ‘outside’, detached look at his native language which allowed Goytisolo to step beyond the constantly vanishing present and so enrich his Spanish in a way otherwise unlikely, perhaps altogether inconceivable. He brought back into his prose and poetry ancient terms, long fallen into disuse, and by doing so blew away the store-room dust which had covered them, wiped out the patina of time and offered the words new and previously unsuspected (or long forgotten) vitality” (Bauman, 2012: 206). Bauman agrees with George Steiner that Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, and Vladimir Nabokov are the greatest among contemporary writers because the greatness lies in “at home” in not one but several linguistic universes. In the book of 2016, In Praise of Literature, this intimacy between sociology and literature is regarded as a metaphor of “two sisters”: “Human experience arrives at the workbenches of writers and sociologists alike in an already pre-interpreted form. Both literature and sociology are exercises in the “'secondary hermeneutic’ – reinterpretation of the already interpreted. Both therefore need to engage in tracing the hidden seams along which the curtains of interpretation can be torn, and none can avoid revealing more curtains hidden behind those that they currently take apart. We are indeed, as you suggest, two ‘sisters’” (Bauman and Mazzeo, 2016: 9). In a traditional Chinese way, it is very significant for a successful person to be capable of going into and beyond the world.

Indeed, as to writing sociology, early in the 1960s, works of the well-known Russian novelist Dostoevsky encouraged Bauman to analyze the sociological behavior. For example, he analyzes the dysfunctional structure and authority of the group as a category from Marxist sociology by specifying Dostoevsky's novella The Christmas Tree and the Wedding. In this novella, Dostoevsky narrates a boy's alienation from the adults and other children's play at the family ball. Bauman cited the punctual point as follows: “All the while I was quite lost in admiration of the shrewdness our host displayed in the dispensing of the gifts. The little maid of the many-rubied dowry received the handsomest doll, and the rest of the gifts were graded in value according to the diminishing scale of the parents’ stations in life. The last child, a tiny chap of ten, thin, red-haired, freckled, came into possession of a small book of nature stories without illustrations or even head and tail piece. He was the governess's child. She was a poor widow, and her litter boy, clad in a sorry-looking little nankeen jacket, looked thoroughly crushed and intimidated. He took the book of nature stories and circled slowly about the children's toys. He would have given anything to play with them. But he did not dare to. You could tell he already knew his place” (Bauman, 1964: 351). This narrative responds to the novella The New Year's Sacrifice by the Chinese modern writer Lu Xun in which the heroine Hsiang Lin's wife lived in a hierarchical social group. They both seriously reveal the tragedy of ordinary persons in the unjust society. Bauman uses the boy to expose the mechanic character of the group in the society of class. The family ball is a global salon where inequality and lack of freedom exist among group members. In fact, the analysis is critical and excellent with the introduction to the literary experience and knowledge. In Bauman's view, aesthetic knowledge should be integrated into general aspects of sociology, including the construction of personality. This perspective relates to Adorno and Sanford's book The Authoritarian Personality (1950). There are different criteria between idealistic personality and a practical one because the former does not neglect the aesthetic knowledge or aesthetic ideal: “if he has enough time and money, he prefers collecting stamps, books or reproducing paintings to packing up money in an enterprise … In the best means he pays attention to reading ‘deep’ books, listening to music or watching a good film ‘with his spare time out of work” (Bauman, 1964: 480).

Aesthetics as hermeneutics

In Bauman's view, aesthetic knowledge continues to change in the evolution and development of society, for every system of knowledge is changeable in different situations and histories. It depends on the changes of function and strategy of knowledge. Bauman traced these transformations from the classical aesthetics to modern and postmodern one. His aesthetics as hermeneutics is engaged in the Western tradition of hermeneutics from the early nineteenth century to the postmodern society. Bauman explores the rise of hermeneutics and goes into the discussions of hermeneutic topics from Marx, Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, Edmund Husserl, Talcott Parsons, Martin Heidegger, Schutz, Habermas, and so forth, which are mainly concerned with the understanding of the work of history, reason, and life. He explores the transformation from the legislators in modernity to interpreters in postmodernity, ultimately developing his own interpretive aesthetics based on the sociology of knowledge.

First, comes the shift from the intention of text to the meaning of text. With the rise of hermeneutics as a new paradigm of knowledge, the center of aesthetics is transferred. Bauman locates the shift in the romantic aesthetics, which changes the classical aesthetics. In his book Hermeneutics and Social Science in 1978, he maintains: “Artists were still regarded as craftsmen guided by the anonymous rules of the guild rather than by thoroughly individual and ‘private’ feelings and visions. The middle of the eighteenth century saw a genuine revival of classical aesthetics — with its emphasis on the work of art itself, its form and structure, its harmony, its inherent logic — and utter lack of interest in author's intentions. … This aesthetics had no room for the personality of the author; it considered bad any art which bore too visible an imprint of its author's individuality” (Bauman, 1978: 8–9). But hermeneutics of art emerges to respond to the new change of modern aesthetics emphasizing the author's intentions and private feeling. That means modern aesthetics is transformed into hermeneutics with the cognitive predisposition of the era: “The perception of the author as the legitimate ‘owner’ of his ideas was only beginning to capture the imagination” (Bauman, 1978: 8). The new aesthetics is justified by thinkers such as Kant, Wackenroder, Nowalis, and Shelley: “With personal freedom fast becoming the inviolable canon of the new aesthetics (as, indeed, of the dominant worldview of the new era), there was little point in searching for meaning in the text while neglecting the author. With author repossessing their texts, readers were denied the authority of their judgement” (Bauman, 1978: 9). According to Bauman, this romantic aesthetics maintains work of art as a purposive system, so the text, the painting, the sculpture regarded as visible embodiment of ideas which, though represented in the result, were not exhausted by it. Only within the artist's experience can these ideas achieve full realization, provided they can be discovered and interpreted. This is the task of hermeneutics, which is suitable for a new aesthetic experience. For him, “To remain true to its task, hermeneutics had now to extend its concerns beyond the faithful description and structural analysis of the text. I had to interpret, to advance hypotheses regarding the hidden meaning of the text” (Bauman, 1978: 10). In the context of aesthetics as hermeneutics, the focus lies on interpreting the meaning of a text. Interestingly, Bauman analyzes the mechanism of shift in modern aesthetics. According to him, the true meaning of a text cannot be discerned through internal analysis alone. To understand it, one must look beyond the text itself. The work of art acquires its value from the individuality, uniqueness, irregularity of the experience. It requires that an interpreter as a reader is capable of similar experience, “To grasp the meaning, the reader had to employ his imagination, and be sure that his imagination is rich and flexible enough to be truly commensurate with that of the artist” (Bauman, 1978: 10). This is an imaginative sympathy. In fact, an interpreter is not able to locate himself in the author's authentic experience, nor available to the true intention of the author, as the two experiences are inherently different: “what we take as ‘putting myself into his mind’ can only remain forever an interpretation of overt conduct, referring to our own introspective experience” (Bauman, 1978: 217). It implies that any reading is not to rediscover the author's intention but to interpret the meaning of text. It is a re-creation of the text. An interpreter works around a text and puts it in a complicated system of knowledge and historical society so that he can explore more clearly and deeply the authentic meaning than the creator. Bauman (1978: 229) argues that during the process of meaning-exploring, “the author's intentions are just a factor among many others.” Therefore, in interpretative aesthetics, meaning rather than intention is emphasized. Inspired by Baudrillard's idea of simulation, Bauman (1997: 106) sees the sufficient spreading of meaning in postmodern art: “Thus art and non-artistic reality operate on the same footing, as meaning-creators and meaning-holders, in a world notorious for being blessed/plagued simultaneously by the paucity and excess of meanings.” It is no doubt that the theory of representation and reference is abandoned and new aesthetics characterized by “overabundance of meanings” (Bauman, 1992: 31) emerges.

Second, Bauman discusses complexity and fluidity of aesthetic interpretation. He touches this in terms of consensus and truth of interpretation by reading two stories “Averroes's search” and “Pierre Menard, author of Quixote” by the great Latin American writer Jorge Luis Borges. In the former story, the hero Averroes did not have these paths of all sorts for would-be heroes which are forever closed to humans but confronted with the paradox of human being: a man who sets himself a goal which is not forbidden to others, but is to him. However hard Averroes tried to understand the meaning of Aristotle's two words “tragedy” and “comedy,” his understanding is constrained by the confines of Islam and could never know the meaning of the terms, and then he could not imagine the nature of a drama. Bauman (1978: 226) thinks from this story that “there is no understanding without experience to which the object can be referred.” If there is no understanding, reaching consensus and truth in the aesthetic field becomes more challenging. In the latter story, Borges narrated the hero Pierre Menard with the literary experience of symbolism and a new worldview that tried to write a new and produce the text of Cervantes's novel Quixote word by word and line by line. Both writers had the same text but implied different meaning. It means that they understood the same text with different experiences. In my view, Bauman's analysis brings out the specificity of literary understanding. There exists the paradox of understanding and interpretation in the aesthetic knowledge. While aesthetic communication appears straightforward due to its resemblance to everyday life, it is sensual and figurative with images and actions. However, true understanding is complex, as it relies on and transcends arbitrary symbols of language. Although Bauman does not solve the paradox or tension, he really touches the key aspect of aesthetic interpretation.

Next appears the fluidity of meaning and then liquid modernity. Bauman draws from Borges's literary understanding and gets the concept of “fluidity” to develop it into a sociological term of originality and popularity. With the first story, Bauman maintains that the meaning of text is accessible only together with experience: “Hence with varying experience, the meaning varies. Is not the meaning, therefore, subject to a ‘double bind’, constrained simultaneously by the text and by the reader? And if this is so, can the meaning ever be conclusive, final, ultimately borne out once and for all?” (Bauman, 1978: 226). From the story, Bauman grasps consciously the concept of “fluidity.” Benard helps Borges to hit the problem of pure understanding and interpretation, “What it exposes, above all, is the endemic fluidity of meaning. Far from being once and for all fastened to the text by the author's intention, meaning keeps changing together with the readers’ world. Of this latter world it is a part, and only inside can it be meaningful. The text the author has produced acquires its own life” (Bauman, 1978: 229). The liquidity of meaning implies meaning is not solid but becoming. He concludes that “This fluidity of meaning, so unlike the alleged solidity of its textual ‘container’, has been brought into prominence thanks to the artful transparency of Menard's case” (Bauman, 1978: 229). Liquidity is based on different interpretations of text by a reader, signifying “difference” as an aesthetic concept. More than 20 years later, in the book Liquid Modernity it mainly becomes a sociological term with modernity. According to Bauman (2012: 8), “Modernity means many things, and its arrival and progress can be traced using many and different markers. One feature of modern life and its modern setting stands out, however, as perhaps that difference which make[s] the difference; as the crucial attribute from which all other characteristics follow.” It becomes a metaphor with diverse meanings, such as “travel easily,” “lightness,” and “melting the solids.” It is concerned with politics, economics, everyday life, and culture, penetrating into the global space and time. He (2012: 1) physically says: “Fluidity is the quality of liquids and gases.” Here “difference which makes the difference” is without doubt from his hermeneutics. His idea of liquid modernity concludes that aesthetic modernity is discovered especially by Baudelaire: “Baudelaire praised his favourite ‘modern painter’, Constantin Guys, for spying eternity inside a fleeting moment” (Bauman, 2012: xi). So liquidity in interpretative aesthetics leads to the solid concept, institution, principle, and criteria. It follows from this that the deconstruction of traditional and solid aesthetic knowledge stands out. In fact, this is the postmodern tendency with novel and different features. Bauman (2012: 22) clearly expresses, “What has been cut apart cannot be glued back together. Abandon all hope of totality, future as well as past, you who enter the world of fluid modernity.” With it comes new aesthetics of consumption ¹ focusing on desire and body, which is related to life–politics. Bauman (2012: 78) originally regards it as the discourse “fitness” which is anything but solid: “‘Fitness’ means being ready to take in the unusual, the non-routine, the extraordinary—and above all the novel and the surprising.” It has a different sense of space and time with lightness and speed. Kundera portrayed “the unbearable lightness of being” as the hub of modern life's tragedy, but Bauman offers lightness and speed as the “fullest, ultimate incarnations of the eternal emancipatory function of literary art,” like Italo Calvino. It is the aesthetics of spectacle, found later in Douglas Keller's sense in the Spectacle of Media, that Bauman (2012: 200) defines as: “Spectacles have come to replace the ‘common cause’ of the heavy/solid/hardware modernity era—which makes a lot of difference to the nature of new-style identities and goes a long way towards making sense of the emotional tensions and aggression-generating traumas which from time to time accompany their pursuit.” Thus he draws a surprising conclusion that aesthetics stands out in the liquid modernity: “It is aesthetics, not ethics, that is deployed to integrate the society of consumers, keep it on course, and time and again salvage it from crises. If ethics accord supreme value to duty well done, aesthetics put a premium on sublime experience” (Bauman, 1998: 321).

Third, Bauman explores the transformation from aesthetic legislators to interpreters as intellectuals. He observes that many intellectuals engage with the field of aesthetics or aesthetic knowledge, referring to this issue as “the ‘aesthetic’ branch of the intellectuals” (Bauman, 1987: 140). The word “intellectuals” is associated with the production and dissemination of knowledge and with “a motley collection of novelists, poets, artists, journalists, scientists and other public figures who felt it their moral responsibility, and their collective right, to interfere directly with the political process through influencing the minds of the nation and molding the actions of its political leaders. … The word was hence a rallying call, sounded over the closely guarded frontiers of professions and artistic genres; a call to resuscitate the tradition (or materialize the collective memory) of ‘men of knowledge ‘embodying and practising the unity of truth, moral values and aesthetic judgement” (Bauman, 1987: 1). According to his definition of difference of context in which knowledge plays a part, legislators are intellectuals of strategy of modernity while interpreters are of postmodernity.

In solid or heavy modernity, the focus is on the authority of the intellectual. If legislators represent the syndrome of power/knowledge with a particular worldview and strategy in modernity, we can follow that aesthetic legislators are these who combine the power and aesthetic knowledge. They attach importance to the orderly totality, universal validity, control/knowledge syndrome and hierarchy criteria of values between high art and nonart. It is a kind of Grand Narrative on knowledge in Lyotard's sense. It is cultivated or garden culture: “The emergence of modernity was such a process of transformation of wild cultures into garden cultures” (Bauman, 1987: 51). This culture, which in a sense resulted in the holocaust in modernity, ² destroys the traditional aesthetic knowledge and cultivates the mind and body by a new order “with a vision of harmonious colors and of the difference between pleasing harmony and revolting cacophony” (Bauman, 1989: 57). For Bauman, the judgment of taste that Kant had already described as “disinterested” occupied the “very centre of the intellectual world once organized around the metaphor of the legislator” (Bauman, 1987: 140). He specifies that intellectuals have inevitably applied their own standards of beauty or ugliness. Criteria of beauty have remained strikingly the same throughout the modern era. It is an intimate affinity with progress, understood as the widening of the scope for Reason at the expense of whatever opposed it; an appreciation of the value of rationality and a strongly pronounced need for enlightenment; a cult of truth, and respect for those who know it and can separate it from error; and the willingness to give Reason the ultimate authority in shaping and administering the society and the life of its members (Bauman, 1987: 172). For Bauman, in modernity, legislators powerfully invade into the modernist sphere and are full of ambivalence. On touching the assimilation of Jews’ identity as strangeness, he deeply analyzes the ideal in Erza Pound's of writings which pursue the metaphor of order: “Pound hated the Jews (and he hated them with all his heart and all his mind, with that genuine, wholesome hatred which cannot any more distinguish between physical disgust and intellectual horror) because he strove for the perfect grid of words in which all things have their own rightful places, everything has one place only, and no place is occupied by two things at a time. Such a perfect grid is a most potent metaphor of order—that order for which earthly powers strove since the very dawn of modernity” (Bauman, 1993: 152). From this, the Jews is pictured as the opposite to this order and the holocaust lies in this possibility of legislators.

On the contrary, interpreters as intellectuals represent the new worldview with “an unlimited number of models of order, each one generated by a relatively autonomous set of practices” (Bauman, 1987: 4). Order can not serve as criteria of validity, because validity is from each practice: “In each case, validation brings in criteria which are developed within a particular tradition; they are upheld by the habits and beliefs of a ‘community of meanings’ and admit of no other tests of legitimacy” (Bauman, 1987: 4). It works as a metaphor of interpreter and prompts the communication between autonomous participants. Bauman discusses the interpreters in the aesthetic sphere. He disagrees with Habermas's comments on recent pluralism as an aberration that needs to be cured by a more and argues for the idea that “all further search for supra-communal grounds of truth, judgement or taste is futile” (Bauman, 1987: 129). There appears a turn in the structure of the world or in the intellectuals’ perception of the world especially from the state of arts at the age of postmodernity. Bauman cites Matei Calinescu's description: “modernity has presided over the formation of an ‘aesthetics of surprise’, this seems to be the moment of its total failure. Today the most diverse artistic products (covering the whole range from the esoterically sophisticated to sheer kitsch), wait side by side in the ‘cultural supermarket’ … for their respective consumers. Mutually exclusive aesthetics coexist in a sort of stalemate, no one being able to perform an actually leading role” (Bauman, 1987: 130). Postmodern art is conspicuous for its absence of style as a category of artwork. It uses strategies such as collage “and” pastiche and defies the very idea of style, school, rule, and purity of genre from modernist art. It deconstructs the possibility of positing aesthetic norms as valid ones, even if the iconoclastic gesture of Marcel Duchamp with Fountain goes beyond Western aesthetics and presents a new definition of art, a new theory of artwork, and a new method of artistic work. Bauman points out that, “In recent times, Duchamp's gestures came to be repeated and duplicated on an ever increasing scale and ostensible radicalism” (Bauman, 1987: 131). He compares the modernist art with the postmodernist one. On the basis of Kim Lewin's famous essay of 1979, he maintains that modernism is autonomous with scientific characteristic: “Obsessive about its autonomy and concentrating self-consciously on its own media and its own techniques as the crucial (or the only) subject-matter of its work and area of its responsibility, modern art seldom broke with the Zeitgeist of the modern era; it shared fully and whole-heartedly in this era's search for truth, its scientific methods of analysis, its conviction that reality can be – and should be – subjected to the control of Reason” (Bauman, 1987: 133–134).

Throughout the modern era, including the modernist period, aestheticians remained firmly in control of the area of taste and artistic judgment. It meant exercising power over the field of art. For Bauman (1987: 134), “In the case of aesthetics the power of intellectuals seemed particularly unchallenged, virtually monopolistic.” Thus, aesthetic intellectuals also occupy roles among legislators. Postmodern art is indeed radically different from modernism. From Howard S. Becker, Bauman sees that in the perception of artistic experts, the evident incapacity of aesthetic judgments articulated in the traditional way to function as self-authenticating descriptions rebounds as a state of chaos, a state of anarchy with the ensuing impossibility of separating art from nonart, or good art from bad art and with inherent impurity. The philosophy of art is replaced by an institutional theory of art, “which gives their due to the other, impure, non-philosophical, non-aesthetic sites of authority: art galleries, art collectors, the opinion-making media, the consumers themselves” (Bauman, 1987: 138–139). It destroys the dream of consensus and control envisioned by art philosophers. Through Gadamer's hermeneutic book Truth and Method, Bauman extends to postphilosophy and social science from the understanding of postmodern art, and considers this new paradigm of intellectuals as one of the interpreters. In the postmodern era, among communities, intellectuals are called upon to perform the function of interpreters, so these communities are established by meaning of interpretation with the emergence of Habermas's “legitimation crisis,” as consumer culture has left little space for intellectuals as legislators. Bauman (1987: 197) points out that, “The idea of interpretation assumes the meaning-constituting authority to reside elsewhere – in the author, or in the text; the role of the interpreter boils down to reading out the meaning.”

In a word, Bauman's aesthetic hermeneutics is not simply subject to the knowledge of aesthetics, but also is involved in the social structure of modernity and postmodernity. His aesthetics is of hermeneutics and at the same time of sociology of knowledge, successfully merging these two discourses of knowledge.

Characteristics of Bauman's aesthetics

An exploration of Bauman's aesthetic thought from the 1960s to the new century reveals both continuity and discontinuity in his theory. In my view, from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, particularly aesthetic knowledge, this continuity is evident, as it reflects the development of Marxism or critical theory. Thus, I strongly disagree with some scholars who divide Bauman's theory into the discontinuity between the Polish stage of Marxism and the English stage of non-Marxism. In the early 1960, Bauman had already constructed his fundamental framework of sociology of knowledge, which he subsequently deepened, expanded, and sharpened. This continuity in aesthetics without doubt is more obvious than one in other disciplines such as scientific, moral, or political knowledge. In my view, Bauman's sociology of aesthetic knowledge is critical, analytic, and cultural.

First, his sociology of aesthetic knowledge is a new kind of critical theory or critical sociology. It is for the most part influenced by Marxist sociology of knowledge, mainly by that of the Italian prominent Marxist Gramsci. In Bauman's discourse of theory, there is a shadow of Gramsci's theory of knowledge. Gramsci attaches importance to the function of knowledge and culture with the key category “cultural hegemony.” This category implies the power and ideology of knowledge. In modern capitalist society, there exists two extremes between elite intellectuals and mass as people: “The popular element ‘feels’ but does not always know or understand; the intellectual element ‘knows’ but does not always understand and in particular does not always feel” (Gramsci, 1971: 767). Focused on the Italian cultural–political situation, Gramsci chooses to integrate an organic relationship between them, that is, to construct a “passage from Knowing to understanding and to feeling and vice versa from feeling to understanding and to Knowing” (Gramsci, 1971: 767). Thus revolution of culture or aesthetic knowledge is a constituent of total revolution. Bauman's aesthetics can always be found explicitly or implicitly in this framework of theory. In one of his early books, The Vision of Human World (Wizje ludzkiego świata), which consisted of essays in 1960–1962, he discussed in detail changes of sociology of knowledge. Its second part, “Vision of sociological knowledge,” contains four theorists: Talcott Parsons, George Lundberg, C. Wright Mills, and Antonio Gramsci. In my view, Bauman highly agrees with Gramsci's sociology of practice, which emphasizes the historicity, class, power, practice, and ideology around knowledge and intellectuals who produce and disseminate knowledge. Different from Parsons and Lundberg, who neglect the historicity of knowledge, Bauman said in the second version of 1965 that “social function of all kinds of knowledge are always determined through the process of history” (Bauman, 1965: 9). Although Bauman learns from his teacher Julian Hodgfield who claimed for “open Marxism,” he gains more from Gramsci. Bauman regards Gramsci as a profound intellectual and political activist, focusing on four major themes in Gramsci's work: persons in history, practical philosophy, social function of knowledge, and conception of sociology as an attempt of interpretation. He concentrates on the originality of Gramscian's sociology of knowledge, which is bound up with the ideal of Marxian unity of theory and practice. For him, the Gramscian program becomes the material power once occupying the mass of people, thus “drawing on the words of Marx” (Bauman, 1965: 336, 1963b: 14). This program establishes the organic relationship between intellectuals and the mass and overcomes the alienation of the elite intellectual from the mass. It goes beyond the vulgar materialist and idealist attitudes toward knowledge and intellectuals. His standing point is based on the people as mass: “for Gramsci, the human history is the practical activities of human mass” (Bauman, 1965: 351). The mission of intellectuals is to speak for the people by filling in the individuality with the elements of the mass and directly getting in touch with it. Bauman agrees with Gramsci that sociology is the elements of historical process with the combination of thinking and acting.

Bauman explores the culture or aesthetic issue, examining their ideological and political power. His aesthetics of knowledge is from Gramscian conception of “cultural hegemony.” With it Bauman probes into the identity of the Jew as a polish writer: “A crucial part of the Kulturkampf of the rising nation was the achievement of Polish cultural hegemony over the territory of the future nation-state, and thus the cultural conversion of ethnic minorities: this, first and foremost, meant the assimilation of Jews” (Bauman, 1996: 133). Some important concepts such as “education,” “common sense,” “ideology,” and “legislator” in Bauman's writings have their origins in Gramsci. ³ If we reread the later writings of Bauman via the Gramscian topics, we will be surprised to find that sociology of aesthetic knowledge becomes an important thread which is bound up with his whole theory. Some scholars, who are concerned with Bauman, have already noticed it: “Throughout his career, there are important interventions dealing with individual thinkers” such as Antonio Gramsci and Norbert Elias (Campbell et al., 2024: xv). These scholars argue that the “Camus–Gramsci–Mills axis orientated Bauman's work in a humanist direction over the coming decades, with this thread remaining clearly detectable across the many forking paths his writing followed” (Campbell et al., 2024: xviii). Dariusz Brzezinski (2022: 53) says, Bauman “was inspired, inter alia, by the philosophy of Antonio Gramsci.” According to Peter Beilharz (2020: 85), “In 1996 Bauman told me he had read Gramsci in 1960/1961, written about him in 1962 and published on him in 1964 (actually, 1963). With the culture of Polish communism, and elsewhere, in the Anglo world Gramsci was a radical thinker. Here the Poles were ahead of the Anglos.” In the book of 1976, Socialism: An Active Utopia, Bauman highly recognized the importance of Gramsci's model of cultural hegemony on thinking of mechanism of socialism which is “by far the most perspicacious” (Bauman, 1976: 39). He maintains that, in the conditions of a mature capitalist society, socialism can establish itself only as a new cultural idiom which remolds commonsense, hence: “In Gramsci's model intellectuals occupy the strategically central place, for the simple reason that the struggle for socialism is above all the struggle for a new culture” (Bauman, 1976: 41). In my view, the most important figure to inspire Bauman is Gramsci, for Marxist sociology of knowledge and understanding of intellectual is mainly from the theory of cultural hegemony.

In addition, Bauman's aesthetics is strongly inspired by critical theorists in Eastern Europe and in the West. From the 1960s onward, he paid attention to Polish neo-Marxists Leszek Kolakowski and Adam Schaff. After arriving in Leeds, he kept in touch with Agnes Heller and thought that her attention to “postmodern mentality” is what “I most admire” (Bauman, 1994: 116). Thus, his aesthetics is innovative in terms of Marxism. Like Gramsci, he consistently struggles against the vulgar Marxism or materialism, deepening his understanding of contemporary realities and emerging aesthetic activities. He disagrees with the classic critical theory of the Frankfurt School because the historical situation changes very much from solid modernity to liquid modernity: “At the time when classic critical theory, gestated by the experience of another, order-obsessed modernity and thus informed by and targeted on the telos of emancipation, was put in shape by Adorno and Horkheimer, it was a very different model, that of a shared household with its institutionalized norms and habitualized rules, assignment of duties and supervised performance, in which, with good empirical reason, the idea of critique was inscribed” (Bauman, 2012: 24). This critical theory is pregnant with the tendency toward totalitarianism, even if Bauman learns something from it. Like the early Hollywood melodramas with a blissful life ever after, early critical theory saw the wrenching of individual liberty from the iron grip of routine. The task of critical theory used to be the defense of private autonomy from the advancing troops of the “public sphere.” However, in liquid modernity, the task is reversed. Bauman sharply points out that: “The task is now to defend the vanishing public realm, or rather to refurnish and repopulate the public space fast emptying owing to the desertion on both sides: the exit of the ‘interested citizen’, and the escape of real power into the territory which, for all that the extant democratic institutions are able to accomplish, can only be described as an ‘outer space’” (Bauman, 2012: 39). There is no doubt that this is a new kind of critical theory which is adequate to confront the new situation of consumer society on which Bauman agrees with Habermas and Baudrillard. Ultimately, Bauman's aesthetics does not transcend critical theory: “It is argued that Bauman's sociology is a unique synthesis of literature filtered through a critical theory that is indebted to the early Marx” (Tester, 2004: 16).

Second, Bauman's aesthetics on the basis of sociology of knowledge inherits the methodology of semantic analysis in Poland. Some scholars have noticed Bauman's structural analysis in the 1960s learning from French structuralism, especially from the linguistics of Saussure’s and Claude Levi-Strauss's structural anthropology. Peter Beilharz sees the effect of Marxist structuralism and semiotics on Bauman's theory: “Structuralism was to remain a constant, if subordinate, theme in the work of Zygmunt Bauman” (Beilharz, 2020: 125). However, it needs to go further. It goes without saying that semantic semiotics was a great current in the first part of the twentieth century in Poland. Stefan Ossowski and Adam Schaff, who are deeply involved in this currently, directly stimulate Bauman's aesthetics. Bauman wrote down his “many deep thanks to Professor Adam Schaff” (Bauman, 1965: 16). When coming to the communicative function of language, he discusses in detail Schaff's original book Introduction to Semantics (Wstęp do semantyki) in 1960 (Bauman, 1964: 23). Ossowski is a well-known aesthetician and semiotician in Poland. He studied philosophy with Tadeusz Kotarbinski who is one of the central figures of the Lwów-Warsaw logical school. In 1933, his book The Foundations of Aesthetics (U Podstaw Estetyki) established a semiotic paradigm of aesthetic meaning and interpretation. Ossowski concentrates on the interpretation of aesthetic experience, which is divided into two types: semantic interpretation (interpretacja semantyczna) and asemantic interpretation (interpretacja asemantyczna). Semantic interpretation means, “We interpret objects semantically if we take towards them the attitude—so difficult to characterize but so common—when the perceived object is not the object of our observation but a representative of a certain different object or certain situation which we, through the intermediary of the interpreted object but without any thought about it, present to ourselves. The semantic interpretation is possible only in relation to certain objects, e.g., ones which mean something, represent something or visualize something for us” (Ossowski, 1933: 6, 1978: 9). Semantic interpretation is closely associated with the understanding of artworks. Later, his aesthetics was developed into sociology. Stefan Nowak reviewed, “The Foundation of Aesthetics is the first major work by Stanislaw Ossowski. Ossowski is well known to the English reader for his sociological works, and especially for his book Class Structure in Social Consciousness and the majority of his works deal with various theoretical and methodological problems of sociology. It should be stressed here, that the book in the field of aesthetics constitutes a turning point in his biography in the process of changing his focus of interest from logic to sociology” (Nowak, 1978: xi). From Polish semantic semiotics, Bauman's aesthetics emphasizes the key concepts and keeps their precise definitions. The categories of “culture,” “autonomy,” “knowledge,” “intellectual,” “ideology,” “society,” “power,” “praxis,” and “interpretation” are the key terms in his theory and aesthetics that are repeatedly discussed and analyzed. They coherently construct a system of discourse and knowledge. It is interesting to see the appearance of these categories in Bauman's writings from the 1960s to the 2010s. Thus, it is reasonable to argue that his late book, Liquid Modernity, is from his framework of early writing. With the semantic analysis, Bauman's categories in the 1960s have a significant validity of theoretical discourse. These categories are influenced not only by classical Marxist writings but also by contemporary avant-garde thinkers such as Parsons, Gadamer, Foucault, and Habermas, to name a few. It is because of his consciousness of categorical analysis that Bauman is adept at inventing the original categories which are full of rich aesthetic meanings. “Liquid modernity” is less a sociological term than an aesthetic one. It is for the most part from Baudelaire's perception of the modernity of new paintings in the 1840s or so, yet with the famous sentence “All that is solid melts into air” of the Communist Manifesto in 1848 (Marx and Engels, 2010: 487). It is with the semiotic methodology that Bauman's aesthetic discourse is very original, extremely different from vulgar Marxism and its aesthetics.

Third, Bauman's aesthetics is characteristic of cultural anthropology and cultural sociology, making his aesthetics richly cultural. It is different from the classic modernity which focuses on the harmony as it is unlike the modern aesthetics which emphasizes subjective experience. Instead, it attaches importance to cultural interpretation. Bauman locates the aesthetic knowledge in the whole human culture and its evolution associated with economy, politics, science, and technology. His aesthetics is an expression of collective accumulation of feelings. To some degree, it is a cultural theory. Thus Bauman is deeply concerned with the modern cultural anthropology, such as Frazer's The Golden Bough, Claude Levi-Strauss's Structural Anthropology, Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture, Robert Redfield's The Peasant Society and Culture, and Franz Boas's The Mind of Primitive Man. According to Peter Beilharz, “Culture in the larger anthropological sense refers to whole ways of life, all their rituals, habits, institutions and artefacts; in the closer, traditional sense, it refers to high culture, culture as innovation or preservation” (Beilharz, 2000: 34). He borrows ideas from cultural sociologists such as Margaret Mead. Bauman relies on the profession of sociology so that his aesthetics is fundamentally sociological. He considers aesthetic issues from the perspective of strictly cultural sociology or sociology. So his aesthetics is characteristic of common sense, normativity, institution, and function with no interest in private and individual experiences. It is a kind of normative aesthetics. For example, his concern about aesthetic autonomy is different from that of Győrgy Lukács. Lukács concentrates on the issue of aesthetic validity from young age to old by questioning “The works of art exist, how are they possible?” (Lukács, 1974a: 9, 1974b: 9). He argues for it mainly in the aesthetic sphere or philosophy of art. In the 1950s, he found the category of Besonderheit (peculiarity) as the central one of aesthetic reflection or validity. On the contrary, Bauman locates aesthetic autonomy in the evolution of culture and society. In the long run, he attributes this idea to the field of cultural sociology, especially to cultural modes or patterns. Thus, while Lukács established reflective validity for aesthetic autonomy, Bauman provides an institutional validity for it.

Conclusion

Bauman's aesthetics is complicated, original, and poetical, like his writing style. It is difficult to put all of his aesthetic ideas into a coherent system. It is more difficult to do it in an era of liquid modernity. Even so, through reading his writings and pondering them, it is found that aesthetics frequently inspires Bauman's thinking. He keeps thinking and thinks that a person is a thoughtful existence. The human thinking is creative, original, individual with reason and sensibility. He is not always separated from the aesthetic dimension in his life. As a prominent sociologist, he is interested in the aesthetic issues and integrates them into his critical sociology, which pursues the possibility of a good life in the contingent condition. Obviously, there are some shortcomings and inadequacies such as oversimplification of aesthetic knowledge, unclear analysis between knowledge and experience, and a mixture of modernity and postmodernity. However, we can find it interesting to locate aesthetics in sociology of knowledge, because he provides a new paradigm for contemporary aesthetics which is a new version of critical theory in postmodernity.