Three of Zygmunt Bauman’s recent books are assessed to present insights into the recent development of his thought and the challenges it poses to the social sciences, humanities and the wider public. By reading Bauman’s recent work through the influence he takes from Georg Simmel, the former’s disparate recent work is understood as an attempt at the cultivation of critical and ethical engagement through the externalization and objectification of his own subjective culture. The more radical elements of Bauman’s work are (...) emphasized in his attempts to stimulate a counter-culture through encouraging critical analysis of society. It is proposed that he achieves this through ‘polylogic’ discourse and engagement with the public. Sociology is presented as a tool of freedom through ‘defamiliarizing the familiar’ and Bauman’s most powerful tool in this is the demonstration of his particular critical view of the world. The broad-ranging engagement with diverse topics in his recent books enables him to place this critical perspective, rather than a particular topic or issue, at the centre of his work. The metaphorical and other literary devices used by Bauman to stimulate critique and in particular to spur on the radical potential of youth are highlighted as some of his most powerful contributions. (shrink)

Three of Zygmunt Bauman’s recent books are assessed to present insights into the recent development of his thought and the challenges it poses to the social sciences, humanities and the wider public. By reading Bauman’s recent work through the influence he takes from Georg Simmel, the former’s disparate recent work is understood as an attempt at the cultivation of critical and ethical engagement through the externalization and objectification of his own subjective culture. The more radical elements of Bauman’s work are (...) emphasized in his attempts to stimulate a counter-culture through encouraging critical analysis of society. It is proposed that he achieves this through ‘polylogic’ discourse and engagement with the public. Sociology is presented as a tool of freedom through ‘defamiliarizing the familiar’ and Bauman’s most powerful tool in this is the demonstration of his particular critical view of the world. The broad-ranging engagement with diverse topics in his recent books enables him to place this critical perspective, rather than a particular topic or issue, at the centre of his work. The metaphorical and other literary devices used by Bauman to stimulate critique and in particular to spur on the radical potential of youth are highlighted as some of his most powerful contributions. (shrink)

Drawing on critical analyses of the internet inspired by Gilles Deleuze and the Marxist autonomia movement, this paper suggests a way of understanding the impact of the internet and digital culture on identity and social forms through a consideration of the relationship between controls exercised through the internet, new subjectivities constituted through its use and new labour practices enabled by it. Following Castells, we can see that the distinction between user, consumer and producer is becoming blurred and free labour is (...) being provided by users to corporations. The relationship between digital technologies and sense of community, through their relationship to the future, is considered for its dangers and potentials. It is proposed that the internet may be a useful tool for highlighting and enabling social connections if certain dangers can be traversed. Notably, current remedies for the lack of trust on the internet are questioned with an alternative, drawing on Zygmunt Bauman and Georg Simmel, proposed which is built on community through a vision of a ‘shared network’. (shrink)

Drawing on critical analyses of the internet inspired by Gilles Deleuze and the Marxist autonomia movement, this paper suggests a way of understanding the impact of the internet and digital culture on identity and social forms through a consideration of the relationship between controls exercised through the internet, new subjectivities constituted through its use and new labour practices enabled by it. Following Castells, we can see that the distinction between user, consumer and producer is becoming blurred and free labour is (...) being provided by users to corporations. The relationship between digital technologies and sense of community, through their relationship to the future, is considered for its dangers and potentials. It is proposed that the internet may be a useful tool for highlighting and enabling social connections if certain dangers can be traversed. Notably, current remedies for the lack of trust on the internet are questioned with an alternative, drawing on Zygmunt Bauman and Georg Simmel, proposed which is built on community through a vision of a ‘shared network’. (shrink)

Desde hace unas décadas se ha manifestado un movimiento en la literatura relevante que busca la superación de la tolerancia, especialmente en casos como el de la diversidad sexual y otras diferencias atributivas. La idea subyacente es que la tolerancia es incompatible con el respeto que nos debemos como iguales en una democracia. En este artículo argumentamos que la noción de respeto que motiva tal movimiento es inadecuada políticamente, dados los profundos desacuerdos de nuestras sociedades. En su lugar proponemos una (...) alternativa que denominamos “respeto institucional”, que privilegia las posibilidades efectivas de participación política. (shrink)

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of critique in Habermasian thought. Given that the concept of critique is a central theoretical category in the work of the Frankfurt School, it comes as a surprise that little in the way of a systematic account which sheds light on the multifaceted meanings of the concept of critique in Habermas's oeuvre can be found in the literature. This paper aims to fill this gap by exploring the various meanings (...) that Habermas attributes to the concept of critique in 10 key thematic areas of his writings: (1) the public sphere, (2) knowledge, (3) language, (4) morality, (5) ethics, (6) evolution, (7) legitimation, (8) democracy, (9) religion, and (10) modernity. On the basis of a detailed analysis of Habermas's multifaceted concerns with the nature and function of critique, the study seeks to demonstrate that the concept of critique can be considered not only as a constitutive element but also as a normative cornerstone of Habermasian thought. The paper draws to a close by reflecting on some of the limitations of Habermas's conception of critique, arguing that in order to be truly critical in the Habermasian sense we need to turn the subject of critique into an object of critique. (shrink)

The main purpose of this article is to provide an in-depth review of Andrew Feenberg’s Technosystem: The Social Life of Reason. To this end, the anal...

In this paper, we argue that nurses need to be aware of how the production of space in specific contexts – including health care systems and research institutions – perpetuates marginalized populations' state of social otherness. Lefebvre's idea regarding spatial triad is mobilized in this paper, as it pertains to two‐spirited, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer populations (2SLGBTQ*). We believe that nurses can create counter‐spaces within health care systems and research institutions that challenge normative discourses. Lefebvre's work provides us (...) the necessary tools to understand how various places or environments produce identities. In understanding Lefebvre's principles, we believe that nurses can play an essential role in creating counter‐spaces, thereby instigating counter‐institutional practices, for those who experience otherness. (shrink)

The history of a European identity is the history of a concept and a discourse. A European identity is an abstraction and a fiction without essential proportions. Identity as a fiction does not undermine but rather helps to explain the power that the concept exercises. The concept since its introduction on the political agenda in 1973 has been highly ideologically loaded and in that capacity has been contested. There has been a high degree of agreement on the concept as such, (...) but deep disagreement on its more precise content and meaning. The concept of a European identity is an idea expressing contrived notions of unity rather than an identity in the proper sense of the word and even takes on the proportion of an ideology. In this sense the concept is inscribed in a long history of philosophical and political reflection on the concept of Europe. On these grounds the analytical use of `identity' in social sciences can be questioned. (shrink)

This paper addresses racism from a phenomenological viewpoint. Its main task is, ultimately, to show that racism as a process of “negative socialization” does not amount to a contingent deficiency that simply disappears under the conditions of a fully integrated society. In other words, I suspect that racism does not only indicate a lack of integration, solidarity, responsibility, recognition, etc.; rather, that it is, in its extraordinary negativity, a socially constitutive phenomenon per se . After suggesting phenomenology’s potential to tackle (...) the question of racism, I will focus on the experiential oppressiveness of racism, i.e., the ways in which it affects its victims’ lived experiences, in transforming their habitual ways of life and, finally, their subjectivities. My major thesis is that racism works via both inter-kinaesthetically as well as symbolically inflicted distortions of the victim’s body schema. As such a process of “negative socialization,” racism, however, influences the embodied self-conception of the oppressor, who finds himself compelled to adhere to some kind of invisible norm such as, e.g., “whiteness.”. (shrink)

This introductory essay discusses how the trope of “religious violence” is operative in contemporary discussions concerning the so-called “return of religion” and the “post-secular constellation.” The author argues that the development of a genuine phenomenology of “religious violence” calls on us to critically reconsider the modern discourses that all too unambiguously tie religion and violence together. In a first part, the paper fleshes out the fault lines of a secularist modernity spinning out of control. In a second part, it demonstrates (...) how the “liberal imaginary” revolves around individualist conceptions of freedom and sovereignty that, on their part, become parasitic upon imaginations of disorder, otherness and violence. In a third part, the author demonstrates how these insights call for developing a transformed phenomenological framework in order to give a more sensible account of “religious violence.” Finally, in presenting the articles gathered in this “special issue” of Continental Philosophy Review, some pathways into such a sensibilized phenomenology of “religious violence” are outlined. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that we need to analyze ‘religious violence’ in the ‘post-secular context’ in a twofold way: rather than simply viewing it in terms of mere irrationality, senselessness, atavism, or monstrosity – terms which, as we witness today on an immense scale, are strongly endorsed by the contemporary theater of cruelty committed in the name of religion – we also need to understand it in terms of an ‘originary supplement’ of ‘disengaged reason’. In order to confront its (...) specificity beyond traditional explanations of violence, I propose an integrated phenomenological account of religion that traces the phenomenality of religion in terms of a correlation between the originary givenness of transcendence and capable man’s creative capacities to respond to it. Following Ricœur, I discuss ‘religious violence’ in terms of a monopolizing appropriation of the originary source of givenness that conflates man’s freedom to poetically respond to the appeal of the foundational with the surreptitiously claimed sovereignty to make it happen in a practical transfiguration of the everyday. (shrink)

Zygmunt Bauman has used his `outsider' position to explore the defining boundaries of our world and help shape a discourse which allows communication across these boundaries. In this spirit he has investigated: sociology and culture; capitalism, socialism and class; and modernity and postmodernity. Bauman has argued for an emancipatory sociology which takes full account of what ought and ought not to be, what human beings hope for and fear, and the need to give people intellectual tools to make use of (...) their freedom. Applying the strategy of the `hermeneutic circle', he has examined capitalist and socialist regimes from a range of vantage points. He has also identified the challenges we all now face as inhabitants of the half-ruined structures created by modernity's failed ambitions. Bauman has confronted these challenges in the last decade by focusing on the evils of modern bureaucracy as epitomized by the Holocaust, the inescapability of each individual's responsibility for his or her own moral choices, and the potential for an open and self-critical dialogue between sociologists and their fellow citizens. (shrink)

This article offers a political reading of Franz Kafka's posthumous work The Trial. In this novel, the main protagonist (Joseph K.) is subject to an arrest and trial conducted by the ambiguous authority of a shadowy court and its officials. This article explores Joseph K.'s experience of being subject to the Law, and relates this to our own understanding and experience of political subjectivity in modern times. K.'s doomed search for order through a ‘permanent resolution’ of his case is related (...) to the modern desire for order: Specifically, the desire for both philosophical and political frameworks that provide narratives or certainty. Here modernity is understood to be characterized by an anxiety brought about by a crisis in authorship and authority. The article then considers K.'s desire for justice and the Law, and his entanglement with the power of the court, as analogous to the modern experience of the triad of justice–law–power, which is subsumed under the banner of ‘sovereignty’. In particular, the article explores K.'s inability to locate, read, or fix the Law; a problem that is also reflected in the aporia of sovereignty as justice–law–power. K.'s experience alerts us to the contradictions in the triad justice–law–power; contradictions that occur as although each member of the triad is dependent upon the other two, each member of the triad also seeks to exclude or deny this dependency. Thus, read politically, K.'s struggle in The Trial can be seen as a reflection of the modern struggle with sovereignty as the triad justice–law–power, and the impasse that K. reaches is also the impasse that modernity has reached. (shrink)

This article offers a political reading of Franz Kafka's posthumous work The Trial. In this novel, the main protagonist is subject to an arrest and trial conducted by the ambiguous authority of a shadowy court and its officials. This article explores Joseph K.'s experience of being subject to the Law, and relates this to our own understanding and experience of political subjectivity in modern times. K.'s doomed search for order through a ‘permanent resolution’ of his case is related to the (...) modern desire for order: Specifically, the desire for both philosophical and political frameworks that provide narratives or certainty. Here modernity is understood to be characterized by an anxiety brought about by a crisis in authorship and authority. The article then considers K.'s desire for justice and the Law, and his entanglement with the power of the court, as analogous to the modern experience of the triad of justice–law–power, which is subsumed under the banner of ‘sovereignty’. In particular, the article explores K.'s inability to locate, read, or fix the Law; a problem that is also reflected in the aporia of sovereignty as justice–law–power. K.'s experience alerts us to the contradictions in the triad justice–law–power; contradictions that occur as although each member of the triad is dependent upon the other two, each member of the triad also seeks to exclude or deny this dependency. Thus, read politically, K.'s struggle in The Trial can be seen as a reflection of the modern struggle with sovereignty as the triad justice–law–power, and the impasse that K. reaches is also the impasse that modernity has reached. (shrink)

Despite his own observations that autonomy is never complete, never once-and-for-all — in short, that autonomy is always relatively more-or-less; or rather, human subjects, institutions and societies can only ever be more-or-less autonomous, and thus more-or-less heteronomous — Castoriadis nevertheless polarizes autonomy and heteronomy. From the polarized perspective, then, he maintains that religion is intrinsically heteronomous, and thus intrinsically antithetical to the project of autonomy. By exploring Taylor's more nuanced understanding of the varieties of religious experience, I argue in this (...) article that there must be room for religious belief within an autonomous society, and that religiosity per se is not incompatible with the project of creating an autonomous society. (shrink)

Alexander’s invitation to a sociology of evil begins from the premise that the social sciences have long neglected direct analyses of evil. They have focused instead on questions of the good and treated its other as an absence or residual category. His most direct foray into this field must be read against his strong program in cultural sociology and his more concrete analysis of the development of narratives of the Holocaust as a moral ‘trauma drama’. I argue that the analytic (...) frame Alexander constructs in ‘Towards a Sociology of Evil’ is too narrow to achieve the ambitions declared in ‘The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology’. A multi-dimensional social theoretical approach to evil must recognize that while its significations are clearly culturally variable, they also refer to something beyond the limits of discourse. (shrink)

How are masculinity and nationalism intertwined? This question has received scant theoretical attention, and existing theories tend to focus on their shared ideals and are embedded in a heteronormative, homophobic, and patriarchal framework. Such views imply a static relationship between the two phenomena and are incompatible with the recent phenomenon of homonationalism and the incorporation of some homosexual bodies within the nation. Addressing this theoretical gap, this article develops a more holistic framework of the relationship between nationalism and masculinity. Drawing (...) on relational sociology, it conceptualises nationalism as competing masculinities. It argues that the link between masculinities and nationalism is not found in their overlapping substantive ideals, but rather that the two phenomena are co-constructed through their overlapping Othering processes. The proposed theoretical framework does not only provide a more dynamic understanding of the link between masculinity and nationalism, but it also helps to overcome the apparent duality between homonationalism and heteronationalism. It is shown that both phenomena are in fact two sides of the same coin, with the main difference between them being the location of homophobia as a technology of Othering within different types of Self/Other relations. Overall, the article provides an analytical tool that allows for the contextualisation and understanding of seemingly contradictory features of nationalism and its relationship to masculinity. (shrink)

This article is designed to explore ideas in the recent sociology of morality about the conjunction of ethics and embodiment in everyday life. While it draws on an interpretation of the ethical encounter as a relation of moral proximity, it extends this conception of ethics beyond the dyad to include a discussion of gift giving and generosity in the present context. This is done in order to analyse a concrete empirical event in terms of the web of moral and social (...) codes that inform it. The event in question is a well-known New Zealand breastfeeding case in which a woman breastfed another woman's baby `without her consent'. As well as drawing attention to the ethical risks in encounters between strangers and others in contemporary social life, this particular breastfeeding case also brings to the fore the invisibility of breastfeeding as an embodied ethical practice. (shrink)

This article examines adult online education by investigating the complex relationship between technology and community. The aim was to explore online teaching in relation to the handbook dilemma teachers meet in their teacher profession by focusing on participation and sharing opportunities. This study analysed several handbooks that aim to help teachers design and implement online education. The advice in the handbooks was contrasted against two empirical cases. Specifically, the study examined how two cases – online adult education courses and special (...) needs teacher training courses – implemented online education with respect to participation and sharing. The analysis suggests that pedagogy is the crucial point and a planned pedagogy is absolutely necessary for designing and implementing effective online education, education that encourages participation and sharing. The findings showed that some handbooks offer meaningful guidance regarding the development of online education, but other publications were not helpful which creates a dilemma for teachers. (shrink)

The article explores the relationship between visual culture and the fight for visibility and attention in contemporary society. It draws on a concept of visual culture which not only sees the rising significance of the visual and the proliferation of images as its defining traits, but also the fact that, today, people are—to a much higher degree—both consumers as well as producers of images. Based on this definition, it is argued that in visually oriented communication and media societies, the anthropologically (...) fundamental need for attention manifests itself as a fight for visibility which takes on the form of ever more extreme forms of public self-display. Furthermore, a portrait of two social figures—the star and the voyeur—will serve as further analysis and description of the social trends which can be tied to the emergence of today's visual culture. The article will close by discussing attention and visibility in terms of inclusion and exclusion and by proposing an analytical model for differentiating four modes of existence in a visual culture. (shrink)

In 2015 students in South Africa mobilized to decolonize universities and to struggle for free higher education. This article discusses these developments in the context of contemporary theories of remembrance, repression and denial and current debates around decolonization and “talking race” in post-apartheid South Africa. The current South African student movement challenge apartheid legacies and white colonial culture, contending that campuses are still dominated by racist symbolic and economic orders. They argue, “As we learn we need to unlearn and develop (...) new epistemologies.” This article analyses this process as it unfolds and looks at the unfolding intergenerational tensions and discusses how a lack of affirmative labor of remembrance on the side of the white South African population complicates notions of decolonization in relation to a gendered black nationalism. A point of conceptual reference is the 1968 student protest movement in West Germany, which forcefully broke the silence surrounding fascist continuities within the newly democratized institutions that was “unable to mourn” and remember. (shrink)

This paper examines the relation or, more precisely, tension between postmodern deconstruction and ethics by elaborating upon the ethico-political dimensions of deconstructionism. It embarks on a critical assessment of postmodern discourse on ethics in view of its political implications by analyzing Jacques Derrida''s and Richard Rorty''s arguments with an assumption that their positions represent a certain logic in the postmodern discourse on ethics. Postmodern ethics is based on incredulity with regard to traditional metanarratives, and it defines ethics in terms of (...) sensitivity or responsibility to otherness and difference. Its proponents believe that the negation of modern metanarratives opens a way to the Other which has been marginalized and suppressed both in thought and in social practice. Derrida and Rorty represent this position with their emphasis on the ethical nature of deconstruction and the need to elaborate new languages for ethics. Despite postmodern appeal to ethics of this sort, however, postmodern thinking shows its limits in dealing with most ethical-political matters in the contemporary world. The postmodern approach to ethics, being restricted within the perspective of the individual, does not provide any determinate framework for deciding how to adjudicate conflicting ethical claims or how to link the unconditional affirmation of emancipatory ideals, enlightened social criticism, and democratic accountability in determinate political terms. In the main, this paper contends that philosophical deconstruction and responsibility to otherness undermine each other in the public sphere. (shrink)

In this brief response to Herbert De Vriese’s The Charm of Disenchantment, his attempt to link secularism and modernity is questioned. Criticism is leveled at De Vriese’s use of the correspondence between Voltaire and Frederick the Great without reference to the historical context, notably the confessional states that existed between roughly 1650 and 1800 in Europe. De Vriese’s apology for disenchantment and modernity is also questioned in the light of both modern religious and secular responses to modernity as exemplified by (...) the Dalai Lama and Bernard Stiegler. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Relational leadership invokes an ethics involving a leader’s affective engagement and genuine concern with the interests of others. This ethics faces practical difficulties given it implies a seemingly limitless responsibility to a set of incommensurable ethical demands. This article contributes to addressing the impasse this creates in three ways. First, it clarifies the nature of the tensions involved by theorising relational leadership as caught in an irreconcilable bind between an infinitely demanding ethics and the finite possibilities of a response to (...) those demands. Second, it examines this ethical challenge in acknowledgement of the hierarchical discourses and power dynamics in which leadership relationships are constrained and enacted. Third, it proposes “ethical irony” as a way leaders can respond to the demand for ethics without resulting in either an escape from ethics, or being crushed by its burden. Three dimensions of ethical irony are examined: ironic perspective, ironic performance, and ironic predilection. (shrink)

In 2018, the Bauman Institute and the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory & History, both based at the University of Leeds, initiated a transdisciplinary programme to assess the legacies of Zygmunt Bauman, whose prolific writings we felt to be profoundly relevant to the multiple challenges of the 21st century. In this special issue of Thesis Eleven, we are marking just over three years since the death of Zygmunt Bauman by bringing together some of the contributions to that programme in order (...) to revisit, elaborate, and crucially to extend his intellectual archive. Taking Bauman’s revision of contemporary social realities as a point of departure, each of the participants in this special issue re-examine – critically but also generously – the many questions Bauman asked, tried to answer, and imbued on the way with new and sometimes shocking insights. This paper surveys those contributions by way of introducing the special issue. (shrink)

The sociology of emotions is a fast-growing disciplinary field. Research on emotions has enabled major advances in medical science, political science, anthropology, psychosociology etc. Turner and Smets have shown that social relations feature a kernel of phenomena with an emotional substrate ranging from face-to-face encounters to the emergence of social movements. The social arena is shaped by emotions, which are powerful agents of change. In this paper, we focus on the links between emotions, happiness and well-being apprehended as a polymorphic (...) state culturally determined by an emotional substrate. Finally, through the lenses of emotions, we sketch out the features of the structural crisis of neoliberalism and the lessons for a renewed understanding of the underlying socio-economic phenomena. (shrink)

John Beck's fine study of the representation of the postwar American West, analyzes the cultural impact of the secret state's establishment of its arsenals, proving grounds and waste disposal sites after the Manhattan Project. The giant Southwest Defense Complex is registered, with acute and telling political energy, in texts by Cormac MacCarthy, Leslie Marmon Silko, Bradford Morrow and Don DeLillo, as a brute invisible energy field at the edges of national experience. This is one of the best studies of the (...) military-industrial complex on record, typified by sharp close reading, blistering and theoretically wise readings, and a sure-footed grasp of difficult and evasive histories and strategies of deception. Beck sketches relations between toxic waste disposal, repressive anti-marginal politics, Cold War megadeath and atomic culture with an eloquence and passion controlled by a cool theoretical head. The review article argues that Beck's study is a major contribution to the analysis of the artificial state of emergency instituted by the AEC and Pentagon deep within the United States. (shrink)

This paper argues that the Marxist theory of the proletariat in many ways projects a romanticized self-description or 'false shadow' of its revolutionary spokesmen, and hence more proximately describes the missionary complex and Bohemian life-style of marginalized political intellectuals than a 'really existing' working class. This 'mistaken iden tity play' between spokespersons and their favourite sociological con stituency, which is already alluded to in various historical left-wing and right-wing 'farewells to the proletariat', is more systematically criti cized in recent reassessments (...) by, for example, Bahro, Gouldner, Gorz, or Bauman. Next to its psychological and sociological infrastructure, classical proletarian standpoint theory has also attracted critical atten tion because of its suggestive epistemological linkage between the con dition of estrangement and claims for scientific objectivity. This connection is reasserted by recent feminist and postcolonial standpoint epistemologies - which, however, also tend to repeat the logic of classi cal Marxism's metonymic 'identity play'. The paper concludes with a defence\of the idea of 'situated knowledges', which wishes to preserve the classical liaison between objectivity, distanciation and marginality, while simultaneously rendering it more reflexive in critical confron tation with the ubiquitous 'spokesperson problem'. (shrink)

This article explores some aspects of the long-standing metaphoric conjunction between the images of the intellectual and that of the stranger in the history of social thought. Recently, this conjunction has re-emerged in the self-complimentary image of the `exilic' or `nomadic' intellectual, who is torn between identities and transgresses cultural and linguistic traditions. The article offers a critical appraisal of the intellectualist presumption lurking behind such self-identifications, and raises the issue of intellectual spokespersonship in the novel conditions of a postmodern (...) `society of strangers'. (shrink)

The modern research university is an unsustainable institution. It normalizes academic activity along the lines of a scientist engaged in normal science and seeks to measure the success or failure of academics based largely on the quantity of their contributions to a particular discipline, often measured in terms of papers published and conference presentations. The ensuing race to produce academic studies is creating unprecedented mountains of academic studies, but often in haphazard, unstructured, and unsustainable ways, especially in the humanities and (...) the social sciences, which do not discover nomothetic laws or accumulate knowledge in a fashion similar to science. This not only undermines the quality of work being done and the character of academics doing this work but also results in the thoughtless, endless, largely unstructured mountains of new studies that no one can keep up with. (shrink)

Postmodernist thinkers have often claimed that there is something like a `modernist' model of theory and metatheory in the social sciences which is objectivistic, dogmatic, and generally over-ambitious, aiming to dominate the theoretical landscape like a modernist skyscraper. This paper suggests that there is little to support such a view, and that most sociologists and social anthropologists, and many other social scientists, have been much more cautious and tentative in their claims than postmodernists have claimed. The alleged distinctiveness of postmodern (...) social science is therefore itself open to question. The paper includes a discussion of reflection and reflexivity in realist philosophy of science and in the social theory of Habermas and Bourdieu. (shrink)

To Bauman the incongruities of life are best reflected in an analytical effort that moves between perspectives without forcing them into a synthesis. He seems to arrogate the right to inconsistency when operating from points of view. This violates a curious requirement of scholarly discourse: an author is free to select his conceptual framework and method — but once they are selected, he must stick to them. This practically inviolable rule of consistency might come (as Bauman himself suggests) from the (...) juridical pretensions sociology had from its birth. Consistency gives an aura to academicians who feel called to legislate, judge and legitimize. To Bauman, however, truth in judgement, reality in empirical studies and responsibility in practical affairs are approached by a constant movement between incongruous points of view.These ambitions make heavy demands on the composition of his writing. In many stretches of linear argument, imagery is interjected, showing lateral connections and complications — conversely, in many pieces of interpretation causal explanations intrude. A discourse with all these boundary violations is rather suspect in modern eyes. When Bauman contaminates the purity of analytical lines with terminology from other branches, he is demonstrating in a stylistic way that our reality is multitudinous — be it premodern enchantment, ambivalence in modernity or liberated postmodern polyvalence. (shrink)

The wide range of semiotic possibility, through networks of motor communications, reveal processes for decision-making with playful meaning. We describe a physical education experience according to a sequence based on five motor games, corresponding to five networks of motor communications, with the purpose of revealing the signs to interpret a fully comprehension of playful communication. A total of 180 high school students were part of this pedagogic experience. Events were obtained through the systematic observation of three game conducts, to be (...) compared through the five games and thus offer indicators of motor complexity regarding decoding. Through the game sequencing studied, three blocks with different networks of motor communications were shown: their exclusivity and stability, their instability, and ambivalence, in addition to signs based on relationships of opposition, reidentification, and relativization. We propose that these signs should be transferred to a significant pedagogy with curricular interest for the physical education class. (shrink)

The most important structural feature of the music of the New World is its often-time polyrhythmic and polymetrical character. This is also a key to unlocking the nature of social form and democratic persona in the diasporic and settler metropolises of the New World. In such settings, composers and musicians working with simultaneous temporalities, lines, groups, textures and characters offer intimations of a just totality for culturally fragmented societies.

Starting from the often-used metaphor of the “horizon of experience” this article discusses three different types of intercultural hermeneutics, which respectively conceive hermeneutic interpretation as a widening of horizons, a fusion of horizons, and a dissemination of horizons. It is argued that these subsequent stages in the history of hermeneutics have their origin in—but are not fully restricted to—respectively premodern, modern and postmodern stages of globalization. Taking some striking moments of the encounter between Western and Chinese language and philosophy as (...) example, the particular merits and flaws of these three types of hermeneutics are being discussed. The claim defended is that although these different types of hermeneutics are mutually exclusive from a theoretical point of view, as interpreting beings in the current era we depend on each of these distinct hermeneutic practices and cannot avoid living them simultaneously. (shrink)

Drawing on Richard Kilminster and Ian Varcoe's article concerning the main themes of Bauman's sociology, this article emphasizes what was left aside. Another characteristic quality is focusing on the Polish issues, that is, the native tradition in humanities, the specific vicissitudes of sociology after 1945, Bauman's personal background, his gradual change of philosophic views through the phase of his dissident activity till the 1970s, when he transgressed the Marxist worldview. The way in which way Bauman combines many talents is also (...) pointed out and analysed and his latest creative period, opened by the publication of Legislators and Interpreters, is brought to light. Bauman's diagnosis and weighted appreciation of the present-day cultural breakthrough, named postmodernity, were enriched and deepened with each subsequent book. There is a touch of genius in the scope and mode of dealing with this problematic. Bauman's international fame seems to be well deserved and firmly grounded. (shrink)

This article explores how our understanding of ambivalence would shift if we saw it as an inherent and essential part of the ordinary work of education. Following Bauman's sociology of the stranger and Derrida's deconstructions of hospitality, the article unfolds in three parts. In the first part we discuss the preconditions of modern education which since the Enlightenment has been guided by the postulate that there is and ought to be a rational order in the social world. In the second (...) part we consider the intolerance of strangers the modern will-to-order has caused. Since the stranger appears as a liminal category that falls between the boundaries of already established social categories, she can only be viewed as an antithesis of a well-ordered society. In the third part we ask how educational spaces hospitable to strangers can be opened up, and argue that we would do better not to construe living with ambivalence as a problem, but as a quest for humanity and justice. (shrink)

This paper argues that ambivalence can serve as a proxy for consensus-based debates in public discourse as it allows for individuals to maintain flexible and analytic perspectives on matters that otherwise appear contradictory. In particular, an affirmative understanding of ambivalence will be presented to supplement the highly influential Habermasian approach by drawing from sociological theories of ambivalence found in the work of Simmel, Bauman and Kołakowski. While the theme of ambivalence is not completely absent from Habermas’s work on the public (...) sphere, it is typically described as a structural consequence of contradiction rather than a form of action that is capable of working with and around inconsistencies in ethics, knowledge and social values. This allows for participation to be sustained through contradiction, rather than being withdrawn in frustration, while also encouraging open-minded judgements capable of avoiding forms of fanaticism. (shrink)

Violence is a spectacle. Not because it is simply something that we observe but, more fundamentally, because it is a mechanism through which we observe and define other things. Violence has the capacity to shape the ways that we see, and thereby come to know, these things. In other words, violence is more than a practice that acts upon the bodies of individual subjects to inflict harm and injury. It is, metaphorically speaking, also a way of looking at these subjects.

: This response seeks to pick up on the key questions and concerns raised by Nancy C. M. Hartsock and Karen Houle in their critiques of The Spectacle of Violence. I mold my response around two emotions that are never far from the question of violence: fear and hope. Is it fear of ambiguity that stops us from delicately blending the experiential with the discursive, the nodal with the circular, the corporeal with the epistemic, or the oppressive with the constitutive? (...) If so, we can only hope that the power of such ambivalence lies in its ability to unsettle these treasured lines of force. (shrink)

In the final decades of the 20th century, issues such as identity, Otherness and the role of social and cultural boundaries have been prominent in social theory, sociology and cultural studies. In this context, an analysis of Bauman's work is important because it raises pertinent questions pertaining to the nature of social and cultural boundaries and the nature of boundary construction under modernity. The metaphors of inside and outside and the idea of the boundary are significant in Bauman's critique of (...) modernity's search for a meta-order and in his examination of strangerhood. The article illustrates how this ordering process manifests itself at the individual and societal levels of modernity. Bauman's contention is that modernity's search for a meta-order leads to the construction of boundaries and to exclusionary practices. It is the presence of the Third, for Bauman, which threatens the certainty of order. Different images of the stranger in Bauman's work are identified and the ways in which Bauman's conception of freedom and `community' is intrinsically linked to his work on the ambivalent stranger are demonstrated. (shrink)