Bauman between the Modern and the Postmodern

Zygmunt Bauman can be viewed as an exemplary public intellectual engaging key theoretical, ethical, and political issues of the epoch. In particular, in a series of articles and books that sketch out a postmodern turn in society, theory, culture, ethics, and politics, he delineates major transformations in culture, politics, and society. Changes in contemporary society and culture, Bauman argues, require new modes of thought, morality, and politics to respond appropriately to the new sociocultural and political conditions. This requires a reconfiguration of critical social theory and cultural politics, a project in which Bauman was deeply involved up to his passing. Bauman thus poses fundamental challenges to contemporary social theory and cultural politics, providing original and provocative interventions of the sociological imagination between the modern and the postmodern and developing sketches of fundamental social and cultural changes of our time and the ways that theory and politics must be transformed to creatively map and democratically respond to these challenges.

After some early works on culture (Bauman 1973), Bauman undertook studies that would eventually produce his trilogy on modernity (1987, 1989, 1991) and his formulations of the postmodern turn. His Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) displays how as a public intellectual Bauman engaged a key political issue of his lifetime, combining his political engagement against the evils of the Holocaust with political reflections on modernity.

The concept of postmodernity appears in the subtitle of his 1987 book Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Postmodernity, and Intellectuals. Bauman’s optic in this book is to theorize shifts over the past three hundred years from intellectuals as legislators (of universal truth, values, and rationality) to intellectuals as interpreters (of cultural meanings, political and historical events, social change, and the like). The shift in the fate of intellectuals is correlated to an alteration between two historical eras and two regimes of knowledge, the modern and the postmodern. Thus, Bauman writes:

In the sense they are used in this book, the concepts of modernity and post-modernity stand for two sharply different contexts in which the “intellectual role” is performed; and two distinct strategies which develop in response to them. The opposition between modernity and post-modernity has been employed here in the service of theorizing the last three centuries of Western European history (or West European dominated history) from the perspective of intellectual praxis. It is this practice that can be modern or post-modern; the dominance of one or other of the two modes (not necessarily without exceptions) distinguishes modernity and post-modernity as periods in intellectual history.

(1987: 3)

This shift in historical epochs and the praxis of intellectuals involves two competing types of knowledge and two different world views. The modern world view for Bauman “is one of an essentially orderly totality,” and knowledge constitutes insight into preexisting order and serves as an instrument of control and mastery (3–5). Effective control involves accurate knowledge of the world and is deemed attainable. The world is therefore assumed to be rational and orderly, and reason must simply discover its order and structure. On the basis of this knowledge, domination of nature can be assured, and intellectuals are to discover this knowledge, legislate its norms and practices, and legitimate the dominant mode of order and control.

Whereas modern knowledge was an order of universality, the typically post-modern view of the world, from Bauman’s perspective, postulates unlimited numbers of models of order, “each one generated by a relatively autonomous set of practices” (1987: 3), and thus perceives knowledge as local and contextual. Bauman’s views here of what might be called the postmodern condition of knowledge are similar to those of Jean-François Lyotard and Richard Rorty and ascribe the role of the intellectual as the interpreter of knowledge and value within distinct communities and local situations. The postmodern conception of knowledge is thus more modest, provisional, contextual, and qualified than the modern conception, and the postmodern intellectual is more localized in contrast to the “extraterritorial” modern intellectual (1987: 4–5).

Bauman’s work as a postmodern engaged intellectual continued for the last productive decades of his life to explore...