Zygmunt Bauman and the West: A Sociology of Intellectual Exile 9780228018193

Table of contents :
Cover
Zygmunt Bauman and the West
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Bibliographical Note
Introduction: Zygmunt Bauman and the West
1 The Exilic Position
2 Writing the Multiplicity of Modernity
3 Decolonizing Zygmunt Bauman?
4 Postmodernity as Jewish Experience and Interpretation
5 From Solid Communism to Liquid Post-Communism
Conclusion: Melancholic Hope
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Zygmunt Bauman and the West

Zygmunt Bauman and the West A Sociology of Intellectual Exile

Jack Palmer

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2023 ISBN 978-0-2280-1768-4 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-2280-1769-1 (paper) ISBN 978-0-2280-1819-3 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-2280-1820-9 (ePUB) Legal deposit third quarter 2023 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Zygmunt Bauman and the West : a sociology of intellectual exile / Jack Palmer. Names: Palmer, Jack Dominic, author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230154549 | Canadiana (ebook) 2023015462X | ISBN 9780228017691 (paper) | ISBN 9780228017684 (cloth) | ISBN 9780228018209 (ePUB) | ISBN 9780228018193 (PDF) Subjects: LCSH: Bauman, Zygmunt, 1925-2017. | LCSH: Sociology. | LCSH: Civilization, Western – 20th century. Classification: LCC HM479.B39 P35 2023 | DDC 301.092 – dc23

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Contents

Acknowledgments Bibliographical Note

vii xi

Introduction: Zygmunt Bauman and the West 1 The Exilic Position

3

28

2 Writing the Multiplicity of Modernity 3 Decolonizing Zygmunt Bauman?

60

82

4 Postmodernity as Jewish Experience and Interpretation 5 From Solid Communism to Liquid Post-Communism Conclusion: Melancholic Hope Notes

189

Index 253

166

110 139

Acknowledgments

Research for this book was funded by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship. I am grateful to the Trust for providing the space and time for the sort of scholarship that it represents, and I am particularly thankful to Andreas Heiner for his administrative support. I would also like to thank Richard Baggaley of McGill-Queen’s University Press for his considerable help and interest in the project from an early stage. I am especially grateful to Paula Sarson for her patient and thorough editorial work, which has improved the manuscript significantly. Mark Davis continues to be a brilliant mentor, and Adrian Favell has been a strong supporter of my legacy work at the Bauman Institute. I also thank other Bauman Institute members Tom Campbell, Austin Harrington, Ben Hirst, Robert Thornton-Lee, Rodanthi Tzanelli, and Katy Wright for their interest in my work over the years. Eric Ferris, Michael Hviid Jacobsen, William Outhwaite, Max Silverman, and Janet Wolff read and commented on versions of the manuscript, as did Peter Beilharz who is a model of intellectual friendship. I also learned a great deal about Zygmunt and Janina Bauman (and much more) from Bryan Cheyette, Aleksandra Kania, Richard Kilminster, Griselda Pollock, and Arne Johan Vetlesen, and I thank them for their generosity. Izabela Wagner has become a good friend, and I had the good fortune that her monumental biographical work was in its final stages when we met. Similarly, Dariusz Brzeziński’s work on Bauman’s sociology of culture and his Polish-period works has been invaluable. I thank Roxana Barbulescu, Matt Dawson, Helen Finch, Alfia Leiva, and Joe Ruffell for thoughtful discussions, and my dissertation supervisees during the period of my work on the project – Teighan Currie, Mailies Fleming, and Juliette Saetre – were also a source of inspiration.

viii

Acknowledgments

Some of the contents of this book have been developed and honed in dialogues established at events both in-person and online. In September 2019, I organized a symposium on Modernity and the Holocaust, thirty years on, and thank all the participants for their stimulating contributions. I would particularly like to thank Larry J. Ray, and Jon Catlin, who has been a great transatlantic conversant. I also played a part in organizing a series of online lectures on “Postcolonial Bauman” and took a great deal of influence from Manuela Boatcă, who was very generous in responding to the numerous questions that her reflections provoked in me. I am also grateful to Lisa McCormick for the invitation to take part in an event organized by the British Sociological Association’s Theory Network on Bauman’s life and work. I presented a version of chapter 1 at a hybrid event on intellectual emigration hosted by the Richard Pipes Lab at the Polish Academy of Sciences. An early version of chapter 2 was delivered at an event on sociology and literature at the University of Warwick, and I would like to thank Christine Emmett, Dominika Partyga, and Charles Turner for their comments. I was able to present a paper on Bauman and the West at the very beginning of my fellowship at the University of Leeds and am appreciative to the organizers of the “Decolonial Dialogues” seminar series for the opportunity. The Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences generously hosted my visit in November 2022, and I am grateful that I was able to preview the book in its entirety in a presentation I delivered there. I would like to thank the entire special collections staff at the Brotherton Library in Leeds for their support of my work in the Papers of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman Archive, especially in the context of enforced remote working, when they ensured access to key documents. I am particularly grateful to Tim Procter, Caroline Bolton, Christopher Grygiel, and Claire Morton, as well as to a number of student interns who made contributions to the project: Karolina Glasek, Robert Irnazarow, Andrew O’Neill, and Lorna Sweeney. Two of these internships were supported by funding from the Q-Step program, and I thank Andrea Denny for her help in facilitating these. Maya Johnston translated an important piece from Hebrew into English for me, and Katarzyna Bartoszyńska translated a number of Polish documents and was also generous in commenting on aspects of my project. Most importantly, I thank the Bauman family for making the archive available to the

Acknowledgments

ix

public, including scholars. The encouragement and enthusiasm of Irena Bauman, Lydia Bauman, and Anna Sfard for my work continues to be deeply appreciated. My interest in Bauman, and in sociology, was sparked by Sophia Wood, who I was lucky to have as my undergraduate dissertation supervisor at the University of Portsmouth. I am indebted to her for arranging a consequential meeting with Keith Tester, without which this book may never have been written. Keith’s death in early 2019 was devastating: he was exemplary of a humane, writerly sociology, and his influence on this book extends well beyond his appearance in the notes. Finally, forever, endless gratitude to my family. To Mum and Dad, for everything. To Yoshiko, for remaining my closest companion, and for being the best proofreader I know. And to our two daughters, Naima and Serin, who were born over the course of working on this book. In their short lives, they have given me a melancholic hope that we may construct and inhabit a better world.

Bibliographical Note

References to sole-authored books of Zygmunt Bauman appear in the notes to this book with the following abbreviations: ZCDP SB CSS KRE

ZWSA SNCD SKZ ZS

(1957) Zagadnienia centralizmu demokratycznego w pracach Lenina [On Democratic Centralism in the Works of Lenin]. Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza. (1959) Socjalizm brytyjski: Źródła, filozofia, doktryna polityczna [British Socialism: Origins, Philosophy, Political Doctrine]. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe. (1960) Cztery szkice socjologiczne [Career: Four Sociological Sketches]. Warszawa: Iskry. (1960) Klasa – ruch – elita. Studium socjologiczne dziejów angielskiego ruchu robotniczego [Class – Movement – Elite: A Sociological Study of the History of the English Labour Movement]. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe. English translation was published in 1972; see below. (1961) Z zagadnień współczesnej socjologii amerykańskiej [On Contemporary American Sociology]. Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza. (1962) Socjologia na co dzień [Everyday Sociology]. Warszawa: Iskry. (1962) Społeczeństwo, w którym żyjemy [The Society We Live In]. Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza. (1962) Zarys socjologii. Zagadnienia i pojęcia [Outline of Sociology: Issues and Concepts]. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe.

xii

III WLS

ZMTS KS BCE CP SAU TCS HSS MoC LI Fr MH TS MA IP MIOLS

Bibliographical Note

(1963) Idee, ideały, ideologie [Ideas, Ideals, Ideologies]. Warszawa: Iskry. (1964) Wizje ludzkiego świata. Studia nad społeczną genezą i funkcją socjologii [Visions of the Human World: Studies on the Social Genesis and Function of Sociology]. Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza. (1964) Zarys marksistowskiej teorii społeczeństwa [Outline of the Marxist Theory of Society]. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe. (1966) Kultura i Społeczeństwo. Preliminaria [Culture and Society: Preliminaries]. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe. (1972) Between Class and Elite: The Evolution of the British Labour Movement – A Sociological Study. Manchester: Manchester University Press. (1973) Culture as Praxis. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (My references are to the 1999 edition published by SAGE.) (1976) Socialism: The Active Utopia. London: George Allen and Unwin. (1976) Towards a Critical Sociology: An Essay on Commonsense and Emancipation. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (1978). Hermeneutics and Social Science: Approaches to Understanding. London: Hutchinson. (1982) Memories of Class: The Pre-history and After-life of Class. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (1987) Legislators and Interpreters: Modernity, Postmodernity and Intellectuals. Cambridge: Polity. (1988) Freedom. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity (My references are to the 2000 edition, also published by Polity.) (1990) Thinking Sociologically. Oxford: Blackwell. (1991) Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity. (1992) Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge. (1992) Mortality, Immortality and other Life Strategies. Cambridge: Polity.

Bibliographical Note

PE AA LF

xiii

(1993) Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell. (1994) Alone Again: Ethics after Certainty. London: Demos. (1995) Life in Fragments: Essays on Postmodern Morality. Oxford: Blackwell. PD (1997) Postmodernity and its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity. GHC (1998) Globalization: The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity. WCNP (1998) Work, Consumerism and the New Poor. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. ISP (1999) In Search of Politics. Cambridge: Polity. Com (2000) Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World. Cambridge: Polity. LM (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity (My references are to the 2012 edition, also published by Polity.) IS (2001) The Individualized Society. Cambridge: Polity. SUS (2002) Society Under Siege. Cambridge: Polity. LLa (2003) Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds. Cambridge: Polity. Eu (2004) Europe. Cambridge: Polity. WL (2004) Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity. LLb (2005) Liquid Life. Cambridge: Polity. LF (2006) Liquid Fear. Cambridge: Polity. CL (2007) Consuming Life. Cambridge: Polity. LT (2007) Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity. AL (2008) The Art of Life. Cambridge: Polity. DEHCWC (2008) Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 44L (2010) 44 Letters from the Liquid Modern World. Cambridge: Polity. CD (2011) Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age. Cambridge: Polity. CLMW (2011) Culture in a Liquid Modern World. Cambridge: Polity. TnD (2012) This Is not a Diary. Cambridge: Polity.

xiv

DRFBA SD Re CC STC CA HP

Bibliographical Note

(2013) Does the Richness of a Few Benefit Us All? Cambridge: Polity. (2016) Strangers at Our Door. Cambridge: Polity. (2017) Retrotopia. Cambridge: Polity. (2017) A Chronicle of Crisis. London: Social Europe Editions. (2018 / 1968) Sketches in the Theory of Culture. Cambridge: Polity. (2021) Culture and Art: Selected Writings, Volume 1. Cambridge: Polity. (2023) History and Politics: Selected Writings, Volume 2. Cambridge: Polity.

Stand-alone essays written by Zygmunt Bauman, co-authored or “dialogue” books, and interviews are referenced fully in the notes. For a more or less exhaustive record of Bauman’s publications spanning 1953–2018, I refer the reader to the “living bibliography”1 that I have I have collated with colleagues, available at https://baumaninstitute.leeds. ac.uk/bauman-archive/living-bibliography/. A great many works on Zygmunt Bauman have been consulted in the writing of this book and are referenced throughout. Among the first commentaries on Bauman’s works were the Festschrift for Bauman edited by his former Leeds colleagues Richard Kilminster and Ian Varcoe (1998), followed by Dennis Smith’s Zygmunt Bauman: Prophet of Postmodernity (1999); Peter Beilharz’s Zygmunt Bauman: Dialectic of Modernity (2000); another collection of essays edited by Kilminster and Varcoe, Culture, Modernity and Revolution (2002); and Keith Tester’s The Social Thought of Zygmunt Bauman (2004). Other English-language interpretations (by no means all) include books by Tony Blackshaw (Zygmunt Bauman, 2005); Anthony Elliott (The Contemporary Bauman, 2007); Mark Davis (Freedom and Consumerism, 2008; Bauman’s Challenge, 2010 [with Tester]; Liquid Sociology, 2013); Michael Hviid Jacobsen (The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman 2008 [with Poder]; Beyond Bauman, 2016); Shaun Best (Zygmunt Bauman: Why Good People Do Bad Things, 2013; Zygmunt Bauman on Education in Liquid Modernity, 2019; The Emerald Introduction to Zygmunt Bauman, 2020); and Ali Rattansi (Bauman and Contemporary Sociology, 2017).

Bibliographical Note

xv

Beyond English, and reflective of Bauman’s status as a European intellectual and the eminent translatability of his thought, his works have been interpreted in other languages. For obvious reasons, there is a substantial literature of commentary on Bauman in Polish. For a small recent sample, see Roman Kubicki and Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska’s Życie w kontekstach (2009); Dariusz Brzeziński’s Myślenie utopijne w teorii społecznej Zygmunta Baumana (2015) and the same author’s Twórczość Zygmunta Baumana w kontekście współczesnych teorii kultury (2017, English translation published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2022). Volumes on Bauman’s work have been published in Germany (see Matthias Junge and Thomas Kron’s Zygmunt Bauman: Soziologie zwischen Postmoderne, Ethik und Gegenwartsdiagnose, 2014), where he has been widely read and known since the publication of his Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), and also in France, where he has been much less acknowledged after an initial period of resonance in the late 1960s, as I detail in chapter one of this book (see Simon Tabet, Le projet sociologique de Zygmunt Bauman, 2014). Beyond Europe, to take two examples, there are substantial interpretations of Bauman’s moral sociology and his Marxist revisionism in China, and a recently published specialized dictionary attesting to a burgeoning popularity of his works in Brazil.2 My book also follows in the wake of three biographies on Zygmunt Bauman: in English, and in a scholarly idiom, Izabela Wagner’s Bauman: A Biography (2020), and in Polish, in a more journalistic vein, Dariusz Rosiak’s Bauman (2020) and Artur Domosławski, Wygnaniec: 21 scen z życia Zygmunta Baumana (2021). Bauman’s own work has been translated into, inter alia, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croat, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Ukrainian. There is a large collection of Bauman texts in Italian, including translations of lectures that have not been published in any other language. The Papers of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman in the Special Collections of the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds holds many of these translations. It also holds a great many documentary materials – letters, unpublished typescripts, notebooks, and so on – which have hitherto not been accessed and incorporated into scholarly studies of Bauman’s

xvi

Bibliographical Note

works. This book is the first to do so. Where sources from the Papers of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman (JZB) are referenced, their location in the archive is provided in the notes. Other archival collections consulted for this book are fully referenced in the notes. I have drawn on translations of non-English and/or unpublished writings of Zygmunt Bauman, by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska (Polish) and Maya Johnston (Hebrew). Accreditation is provided in the notes where this is the case to KB and MJ respectively. All remaining translations are my own.

Zygmunt Bauman and the West

Introduction

Zygmunt Bauman and the West

This book centres on the ambivalence of Zygmunt Bauman’s social position and intellectual work vis-à-vis the West, situating him as a thinker who at various times and in various places has been cast as a stranger ante portas, in, but not of, the West. The argument developed over the book’s duration is that there are several entangled paths in Bauman’s thinking – not at all well-trodden hitherto, but unmistakable and more or less continuous from the later years of his pre-exile period in Warsaw – that amount to a sustained and sophisticated problematization of the West and critique of Eurocentrism. These paths are inextricably connected to his social situation, as a Jew who experienced and interpreted the extremes of twentieth-century modernity in East-Central Europe before exile in the West. Moreover, Bauman’s thought developed in the shifting web of relations in which his fragmented life trajectory was entangled, gestating in a network of similarly entangled intellectuals, scattered and reconstituted in an exilic republic of letters.1 It follows, I claim, that Bauman’s thought can have a unique bearing on the interpretation of non-Western historical experiences of economic unrest, cultural ferment, political conflict, and violence, experiences which may well be absent in his own writings. Furthermore, Bauman’s work contains numerous contiguous points from which a productive and fruitful dialogue might be initiated with post-colonial and decolonial theorists, and thinkers of “alternative” or “multiple” modernities beyond the Western experience.

4

Zygmunt Bauman and the West

Three Vignettes: Bauman in the West In 1972, the historian and literary scholar E.P. Thompson, doyen of the New Left in Britain and inaugurator of cultural studies, reviewed Zygmunt Bauman’s first English-language book. Titled Between Class and Elite (1972), it is a study of the British labour movement, its historical adaptability and creativity, and its internal contradictions. Thompson, it is fair to say, was not impressed. The work, he said, was dense and dull, and though its empirical conclusions were dressed up in sophisticated sociological terminology, it possessed a fatal shortcoming: “the trouble is that none of it is true.” Not even the physical properties of the book survived Thompson’s ire: “Manchester University Press accentuates the message by printing the book on a glinting, light-reflective paper, so that one’s head aches on two accounts.”2 Between Class and Elite had a curious genesis. It developed the interest evinced in the author’s PhD thesis, “The Political Doctrine of the British Labour Party,” defended in 1956.3 Between Class and Elite was in fact a translation of Bauman’s second published book on British political traditions, Klasa – ruch – elita. Studium socjologiczne dziejów angielskiego ruchu robotniczego (1960), the first being Socjalizm brytyjski: Źródła, filozofia, doktryna polityczna (1959). Both books were influenced significantly by Bauman’s ten-month visit to the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1958 as part of a Ford Foundation program, which enabled young scholars in Soviet-type societies to travel across the iron curtain for the purposes of intellectual exchange.4 At the LSE, Bauman had been supervised by Robert McKenzie, the Canadian professor of politics and sociology, at the time a familiar face on BBC election night broadcasts as a psephologist. The program was a great success, its benefits mutual. Bauman recalled that the visit allowed him to “inquire into the Fabian tradition, as the sole genuine alternative to the Marxist variety of socialism,” to ask therefore “a British-born phenomenon a set of Polish-born questions,” and enabled him to tell “a story of a working-class movement running out of steam.”5 For his part, McKenzie said that working with the young scholar from Poland had been one of his “most rewarding academic experiences … despite his rigid Marxist background.”6 Later, McKenzie would become the “exchange student,” staying with Bauman in Warsaw in 1967. Thanking Bauman for his kind hospitality, McKenzie noted that he was particularly impressed by the health of political sociology in the Soviet Union.7

Introduction

5

Expelled as a student-agitating revisionist Marxist – along with other intellectuals like Leszek Kołakowski, Maria Hirszowicz, Bronisław Baczko, and Stefan Morawski – and persecuted as a Jew in the anti-Semitic campaign of 1968, Zygmunt Bauman had arrived in Leeds in 1971 as a professor of sociology after a brief, though consequential, stay in Tel Aviv. Between Class and Elite appeared in translation shortly after, over a decade after it had appeared in Polish. Thompson was known for his occasional belligerence, and belligerent reviews of rival interpretations are not infrequent. However, beneath the scholarly objections to Bauman’s book, something else is at work in Thompson’s review. It betrays an undertone of disappointment. Thompson writes: An intelligentsia which has experienced Stalinism and, more recently, the nationalism and anti-intellectualism (with authentic working-class support) which have surged through Poland and Czechoslovakia, are liable to view the creative potential of working people with a wary eye and with undiminished expectations. Coming to the West they are liable to see as their allies not any section of socialist intellectuals but … Bob McKenzie and the LSE … And a new, preposterous, pedagogic, pretentious, counterempirical and plain boring “sociological methodology” comes to birth. The British labour movement will probably survive this, but one pities the students.8 Bauman suspected that the true target of Thompson’s review was the better-known Leszek Kołakowski, newly installed as a research fellow in philosophy at All Souls College, Oxford, and to whom Thompson wrote an open letter, in excess of one hundred pages, heavily criticizing his abandonment of Marxist thought and politics.9 Unlike Bauman, who remained resolutely socialist, if anti-communist, his entire life, Kołakowski moved to the right upon his arrival in Britain. Both, however, “together with the other exiled ‘dissidents,’” were charged with “betraying the Western Left’s expectations.”10 As Keith Tester noted with characteristic perceptiveness, Thompson’s review of Between Class and Elite positions Bauman “as an outsider, as someone who is without (in both senses of that word) the English Idiom and, therefore, as someone who is not a legitimate contributor to these debates.”11 And thus, Bauman reflected, in Britain “my personal bond with the ‘New Left’ had been broken before it had an opportunity to be tried,” despite his connections

6

Zygmunt Bauman and the West

during the 1950s with figures like C.W. Mills and Ralph Miliband.12 Bauman’s arguments about the exhaustion of the UK labour movement appeared some years prior to the widespread sense among socialist intellectuals and politicians in Britain that, by the 1980s, the “forward march of labour” had been halted and that the industrial working class had been bidden farewell.13 The dissident from the East came with a message that was lost in translation. Some years later, on a cold November morning in Warsaw in 1988, Zygmunt and Janina Bauman – life-companions until Janina’s death at the end of 2009 – stood at the gates of a Jewish cemetery. Here lay buried Zygmunt’s mother, Zofia, and many members of Janina’s family. They had returned to Poland for the first time since the events of their exile twenty years earlier. Among other luminaries of Polish intellectual life, they were there to raise money for the Committee for the Conservation of the Cemeteries and the Monuments of Jewish Culture in Poland. Janina through her powerful works of testimony and Zygmunt through the sociological studies inspired by them, they were together engaged in a “war against forgetfulness” that was “aimed at the rescuing of Jewish history and culture from oblivion.”14 They received, in more than one way, a frosty reception. Indeed, there is something undeniably autobiographical in the title of an essay of Zygmunt’s written around that time called “The Homecoming of Unwelcome Strangers.”15 The unwelcome strangers in that essay are the Ostjuden, who Bauman claims had been written out of Jewish history except, in a quasi-modernization discourse, as the low-point of traditional backwardness from which post-Holocaust Jewry lifted itself. Bauman also writes of the intra-communal tensions within European Jewry during the era of assimilation: “To Western Jews, it seemed that the final success of their own assimilation, just around the corner, was systematically thwarted if not prevented altogether by the influx of backward and uncivilized Jewish masses virtually untouched by the process of Enlightenment.”16 But there is another layer to read into the essay: the unwelcome strangers are also the Baumans themselves. For Zygmunt, the events of March 1968 – which triggered the emigration of at least thirteen thousand Jews up to 1972 – were a watershed moment in the conjunction of history and biography, standing for, as he reflected in exile in Tel Aviv, “the end of Polish Jewry.”17

Introduction

7

It was some time before this traumatic experience began to be interpreted. What has recently been called Zygmunt Bauman’s “Jewish turn” began in the middle of the 1980s, influenced greatly by Janina’s delving into that “world that was not his” that was her own past.18 As Bryan Cheyette notes, before Janina turned to autobiography in the 1980s, she maintained a “dignified silence,” even to family members. Lydia Bauman notes in her review of Winter in the Morning in the Jewish Quarterly that the appearance of her mother’s memoir was a surprise even to her children.19 Zygmunt was also silent. When he arrived in Leeds, he was uninterested in discussing his Polishness and his Jewishness, and eager to distance himself from the studies of Soviet-type societies that had marked his reception outside Poland.20 Even in his “Jewish writings,” the reader gets a sense of an engaged, morally committed spectator of the social and political forces he depicted, but not so much of someone who experienced them directly.21 This is disrupted, however, by the existence of The Poles, the Jews, and I, an unpublished memoir detailing Bauman’s childhood experiences in Poznan, his first experience of being a refugee in the Soviet Union, and his march back to Poland with the 4th division of the Polish First Army in 1944. Intended only for the eyes of his immediate family, he wrote: Yes, I am a Pole. Polishness is my spiritual home, Polish language is my world. This is my decision. You do not like it? I am sorry, but this is your decision. I am a Polish Jew. I’ll never shed my Jewishness, membership of a tradition which gave the world its moral sense, its conscience, its thrust for perfection, its millennial dream. I do not see why my Jewishness should be difficult to square with my Polishness. This is my problem. You think it cannot be squared? I am sorry, but this is your problem.22 And it proved difficult indeed, in Bauman’s latter years especially, to square his Polishness and Jewishness, as well as his prior communist affiliations, as Poland’s political mainstream drifted rightward in the twenty-first century. The lustration process in post-communist Poland, as well as the opening of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) archives, led to the revelation that Bauman had served as an officer of the Internal Security Corps (Korpus Bezpieczeństwa Wewnętrznego, KBW) between 1945 and 1953.

8

Zygmunt Bauman and the West

Too often, the exile is cast simply as a victim or witness of the events that led to their expulsion, stripping them of a factor of their humanity as historical agents who make their own choices. In Bauman’s case there has emerged in some quarters a tendency to push back against such approaches to such a degree as to argue that the celebrity and acclaim he has received in the West – as both a witness to twentieth-century barbarism and a harbinger of its recurrence in the twenty-first – has led to a failure to pierce the silences in his own biography. Bauman’s sociological project, they even argue, amounts to post-hoc rationalization of his role in the postwar communist administration of Poland. Under the guise of reinstating “motivation” in the sociogenesis of his ideas, critics claim that Bauman was effectively able to shift responsibility from himself to social structure.23 “Man proceeds in the fog,” wrote Milan Kundera. However, Kundera continues, “when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their faraway future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way. Looking back, he sees the path, he sees the people proceeding, he sees their mistakes, but not the fog.”24 Izabela Wagner’s excellent, long-overdue biography – one of three recently published, and which includes the most rigorously sociological account of Bauman’s postwar activities – illuminates the fog in which Bauman acted.25 But the very existence of the biographical contestation over Bauman, especially in Poland, is symbolic of the fog cast over the past by the “memory wars” of the present. Shrouded in fog, those who read and write intellectual history as subterfuge are not generally reflexive about how their accounts align with the avowedly xenophobic, anti-intellectual, and more or less “official” reception of Bauman as Żydokomuna (Jewish communist – itself an evocation of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth) among Poland’s dominant nationalist elites.26 Neither is it recognized that the revelations about Bauman occurred after the Law and Justice (PiS) party’s electoral victory in 2005, whereupon the lustration process was reinvigorated and the role of the IPN came to resemble more and more, in the words of Polish historian Dariusz Stola, an Orwellian “ministry of memory.”27 As Václav Havel and Adam Michnik proffered, there are blurred lines in memorialization processes between justice and revenge, between working through the past, political expedience in the present, and power over the future.28

Introduction

9

Moreover, these accounts tend not to acknowledge that Bauman’s IPN records reveal he was surveilled by the secret service and persecuted as a revisionist for many more years than he served them. They also ignore the fact that pictures of Bauman were burned on streets outside when he gave public lectures in Polish cities. The lectures themselves were sometimes interrupted by far-right hooligans erupting into nationalist chanting, as was the case in 2013 when he was awarded, and subsequently turned down, an honorary doctorate at the University of Wrocław.29 Such events are continuous with a xenophobic and often anti-Semitic nationalism that has been on the rise across Central and Eastern Europe (though by no means confined there), where Judaism and communism have congealed in historical memory.30 The reception of the late Agnes Heller – a friend and correspondent of Bauman’s – in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is another case in point.31 Both were dissident, “othered” intellectuals, thorns in the sides of regimes that today position themselves as beleaguered defenders of the Christian heritage of Western civilization, the last bulwark against the onslaught of Black and Brown, largely Muslim, so-called barbarians from the east and south, their passage enabled and encouraged by “globalist” benefactors. Almost thirty years after that gathering in Warsaw in 1988, on 9 January 2017, Zygmunt Bauman died at his home in Leeds. Shortly after, there appeared numerous obituaries and tributes posing the question, however implicitly, about how we should remember him and assess his contribution to social and political thought.32 These interpretations and positionings, though prompted now by his absence, were in some senses continuations of what had begun in earnest at the turn of the twenty-first century, when the first in a slew of publications dedicated to the interpretation of his work began to appear.33 Zygmunt Bauman had long been “a witness to his own historicisation.”34 Framing many of these obituaries was something akin to what the anthropologist Daniel Fabre termed the “paradigm of the last witness.”35 Bauman’s death was a symbolic reminder of the passing of a specific generation of European intellectuals who had lived and acted within the tumults and barbarisms of the “short twentieth century,” and were witnesses to its terminus.36 They thought and wrote the century with

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an undeniably autobiographical orientation.37 Its representatives were exiles, propelled by the forces of totalitarianism, war, and revolutionary upheaval away from the centre and east of Europe. They were products of what Hannah Arendt, herself a defining example of this generation, identified as the unprecedented phenomenon of mass statelessness born of European civil war.38 This generation was and is praised for its insight. There is widespread agreement that the condition of twentieth-century intellectual exile and immigration – one that I try to elucidate in sociological terms in this book – produced a highly creative and productive vantage point of estrangement that had an indelible impact on the global social sciences and humanities. Zygmunt Bauman was a foremost representative of this impact, especially in British sociology, which has been fundamentally shaped by the contributions of exiles.39 At the same time, one detects today a certain impatience with his work and its purportedly disproportionate impact on the public perception of sociology. His post-2000 books exploring the novel global-social condition that he metaphorized as “liquid modernity” are well read and widely known in the West, including beyond academic circles. In spite or perhaps because of this public resonance, for some in those circles Bauman’s “liquid” writings were overly impressionistic and sweeping. “Liquidity” figures as a panchreston, a seductive metaphor, but too general as an explanatory schema. If all is liquid (fear, love, surveillance, education, management, to take a selection of affixes from his books), then nothing is. For some contemporary sociologists working in an already marginal discipline, in universities undergoing marketization and in which scholars are compelled to compete for ever scarcer resources by aligning their work to often instrumentalized aspirations of “impact,” Bauman’s approach itself provokes ire. Unencumbered by departmental administration and indifferent to disciplinary conventions (it is often forgotten that Bauman’s rise to renown coincided almost exactly with his retirement from academic sociology), he could pick and choose what he engaged in, writing the world as read in newspapers, as seen on TV, and as experienced on international visits for public lectures. As the sociologist of intellectuals Neil Gross put it in his New York Times obituary, Bauman could do “sociology without data.”40 The late work of Bauman’s career has often thus been reduced to a form of “para-

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sociology” or intuitionist “cultural diagnosis.”41 As Göran Therborn put it: Bauman’s “prolific output of social commentary … travel[s] light, burdened neither by research nor by theoretical analytics, but borne up by an unusual life wisdom, a trained observer’s eye and a fluent pen.”42 This problem of generalization was compounded by the increasingly sepulchral character of Bauman’s analyses. In a world hungry for alternatives and for a discipline attentive to the “agency” of modern subjects, he seemed to dwell, like the first-generation figures of the Frankfurt School before him, in the “Grand Hotel Abyss,” as György Lukács infamously termed it.43 Fittingly, Ali Rattansi raised the question of whether Zygmunt Bauman ought to be remembered as “an Adorno for liquid modern times,” noting that a particular mood of jaded and detached intellectual pessimism was characteristic of both their writings.44 Rattansi’s essay was a precursor to a book, published shortly after the death of his subject, which purports to lay bare some serious weaknesses across Bauman’s writings, namely in his interpretation of the Holocaust, his diagnosis of consumerism, his sociological metaphorology of globalization, and his conception of the very nature of sociology itself.45 Excoriating the “white male gaze” of Bauman’s sociology, Rattansi claims that Bauman’s optic is seriously limited by Eurocentrism, gender blindness, and a lack of awareness of the racism faced by Europe’s non-white ethnic minorities. These are serious charges indeed, and I engage with some of them throughout the present work. Rattansi is not the first to make such claims, and neither is Bauman the only canonical sociologist subject to them. For now, though, Rattansi’s argument stands as an example of Bauman’s uneasy positioning in sociology’s reckoning with its coloniality, an ambiguous presence in the dubious pantheon of European sociology’s dead white men.

Sociology, Intellectuals, and Exile Expressing his frustration with Bauman’s refusal to extend the scope of his analysis of racial terror in modernity beyond the Holocaust to the barbarisms of transatlantic slavery and the litany of colonial atrocities that were themselves formative of the modern age, Paul Gilroy said that Bauman made no secret of his “Europe-centeredness.”46 Turning down an invitation to speak in New York on the concept of social space

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developed in his Postmodern Ethics (1993) as extended “outside of the framework of western culture,” Bauman seemed to confirm Gilroy’s point, admitting that: I do not think I am in position to say anything responsibly about anything “outside the framework of Western Culture.” I am hopelessly west-centric, and given my age, I guess the sorting out of the ambivalences of being west-centric will be just about enough for my life-programme.47 Consequently, mine is admittedly an “inspired reading” of Bauman. In a review of Gillian Rose’s The Broken Middle, Bauman himself uses this term to distinguish his approach from “methodical” readings, which aim at the correct or definitive interpretation, the knowledge of “what the book they put on the grill was really about.” The inspired reader, by contrast, searches for “illumination,” aware that their “reading will differ from that of any other reader, much as her or his interests and commitments and biographically shaped relevances [sic] differ from mine.”48 Bauman’s view was that all reading is situated within spatiotemporally bound cognitive horizons that are fused with those of the author in the reading of the text.49 Despite how loud its claims to definitiveness may be, all reading is conditioned by the conditions in which one reads, and thus the meaning of the text is perpetually being established. He wrote: The author is the last person to whom I would ask for a “real” interpretation of the text (if I were convinced – and I am not – that something like true interpretation, i.e. an interpretation that makes other interpretations incorrect, exists or can exist). I agree with Blanchot’s sad conclusion that when the text is ready, the author is no more. We are in the same situation – I, the author of the texts, and their readers and critics. Each reading of the text is a creative act and an unprecedented event; whoever reads the text is the author of the reading – what they read is written by them.50 He surely overlooks the authorial agency expressed in the text, and in correcting interpretative errors in commentaries on his own work he would somewhat contradict this position. It is an open invitation to commit what Quentin Skinner termed the twin sins of anachronism and

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prolepsis: the projection of linguistic and conceptual frameworks of the present into a past where they were absent and unavailable to authors; and the tendency to find anticipatory threads of arguments and ideas of the present that could not possibly have existed in the texts or entered the heads of the writers.51 Nevertheless, Bauman’s inspired approach to reading prompts us to look beyond his self-referential statements on his closedness to non-Western forms, structures, and processes of societal modernity. It involves reading Bauman’s biography, and the unique setting of his intellectual and spiritual struggles in the borderlands of East and West, against the grain, so as to elucidate the multiplicitous subterranean currents at work in his social thought. It is precisely the reworking of the context of Bauman’s thought that enables such a reading. Texts are answers to questions, as Skinner argues, and the source of the questions is the context of social and political life, which is fundamentally mutable. It follows, therefore, that the questions posed by social and political thinkers and the operative concepts with which they are articulated change.52 Categories such as the West or Europe, or disciplinary boundaries between sociology and anthropology, are not what they were when Bauman wrote theoretical works on culture in the 1960s, amid the relativization of European empires on the world stage as their former colonial territories became nominally independent nation-states. Nor are notions of colonialism or Empire the same today as when, Bauman, as a professor in sociology in Poland, conducted research into the political sociology of Soviet-type societies, and later, in exile, reflected on their dissolution. Contemporary understandings of race or whiteness, central to the contemporary reckoning with Eurocentrism in accounts of Western history, are not configured in relation to the Jewish experience and interpretation of European modernity in the same way as when Bauman addressed them at length in his work of the 1980s and ’90s. In part, then, this book is concerned with the history of sociology. Alvin Gouldner labelled the study of the history of sociology “intellectually undistinguished,” barely of any use or interest to anyone “except to graduate students preparing for their doctoral examinations.”53 This dismissal haunts this study rather acutely, inasmuch as is develops a detailed, heavily contextualized frame for interpreting the work of a sociologist who was adamant that sociology should extend itself and speak beyond its organizational confines before it could raise questions

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of its own validity, relevance, plausibility, or social function. Part of Bauman’s diagnosis of the malaise of postmodern intellectuals was the so-called “self-referentiality” of the knowledge class and its “acute preoccupation with the conditions of its own professional activity.”54 Bauman wrote extensively on intellectuals, a rubric under which he grouped “a motley collection of novelists, poets, artists, journalists, scientists and other public figures.”55 They formed an essential part of his cultural sociology from an early stage.56 His concern with intellectuals is most evident in the first iteration of his “modern trilogy” in which he narrated the transformation of the social role of intellectuals from “legislators” to “interpreters,” a transition accompanying the movement from the modern to the postmodern situation. There is a strong temptation to use Bauman’s framework in order to narrate his own intellectual trajectory, to read Legislators and Interpreters as autobiography. Indeed, he himself framed Legislators, along with the oft-neglected Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies, “the most ‘personal’ of my books, the products of protracted and often painful soul-searching. The first solved to me the puzzle of vocation, the second the mystery of that short visit to earth called ‘human life’ and of the consequences of that mystery.”57 This is a significant methodological challenge of a project that seeks to work in the middle between the exegetical and the figurational as I do, to understand ideas in relation to the constellations of peoples, networks, institutions, and events in which they are located. In elucidating Bauman’s ideas, one runs the risk of a tautological description of those ideas’ development. An additional challenge is posed by Bauman’s reluctance to draw connections between his work and his life experience. He admitted as much in an illuminating interview: You probably heard about how Franz Kafka asked Max Brod to destroy his manuscripts after his death. Not believing that he will do it, of course. Henri Bergson was much more determined, that he actually burnt not just his unpublished manuscripts but every personal document, with the purpose that his ideas should not be interpreted in the light of his biography, because he disliked this approach. Ideas have their own logic and life goes anyway its natural development. And that was his view. I think I share his

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sentiments. I find it very difficult to connect events in life with events in whatever happens when I am sitting in front of my word processor, think and write.58 There is a paradox here: on the one hand, Bauman was an elusive and reticent figure, but on the other he was perhaps the most interviewed of all sociologists, frequently invited to discuss his work, his choices, his motivations, and the relationship of his sociology to his life experience.59 In the very room in which Bauman wrote was amassed a large cache of personal papers, correspondence, autobiographical material, unpublished typescripts and lecture transcripts, photographs, awards and other personal objects, and much more, belonging to Zygmunt and Janina Bauman. These documents span across Zygmunt Bauman’s long career in sociology, some reaching further into the recesses of his military service and beyond. As such, their range of formats – from browned typescripts, through AMSTRAD discs, to USB sticks – reflect the technological transformations wrought by the shift from analogue to digital electronics. These documents have been passed, with the permission and enthusiasm of their owners and estate, to the University of Leeds where they are now archived. This study is the first to make extensive use of this archive. The archive poses a number of questions in relation to the problems outlined above. If Bauman was inclined to agree with Kafka and Bergson, why were the documents kept? Did Janina’s turn to autobiography in the 1980s inspire Zygmunt, when both their lives became a source of political debate in Poland? When did he become concerned with the image that posterity would shape of him? Did “liquid modernity,” with its presentism of constant change, generate a personal concern with preserving a past under threat? What relationship do these documents, some of them strikingly intimate, have with the published work?60 Bauman was – as I am concerned with showing in this study – among the most writerly of sociologists, his substantive framings inextricably tied to the forms in which they are expressed. It is tempting, therefore, to treat the Bauman archive as a literary archive, which enables us to trace and understand the creative processes involved in the genesis of the particular cultural forms he produced. I suggest the papers of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman are better seen as an exemplary form of what might be

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termed the sociological archive. The sociological archive is an imperfect and partial storehouse of the “documents of life” of the sociologist, to use the humanist term of Ken Plummer.61 But the archive of an intellectual is more than a repository of unseen information that can be used for studies in the history of sociology in order to provide a glimpse of the biographical depth below the surface of the writer’s published works. In the Bauman archive one sees, in fractal form, the development of the sociological tradition through one of its most representative figures. The archive, nowhere more so than in its voluminous correspondence, is moreover networked into manifold social and political currents: the histories of the Eastern and Western Left, particularly Poland and Britain; the memorial transmission of the Holocaust; the vagaries of the Cold War and its terminus; and the trajectories of East-Central European exiles from Soviet states.62 In his Extraterritorial, the late critic George Steiner claimed that the “civilisation of quasi-barbarism which … made so many homeless” during the twentieth-century “age of the refugee” had generated a standalone literary genre. Among the genre’s principal figures were exiles, émigrés, expatriates, all of them “poets unhoused and wanderers across language.”63 Steiner’s focus was literature, but “poets unhoused” imprinted an indelible stamp on intellectual cultural production in general, including in sociology. And thus, the papers of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman take on another significance. They are redolent of how the twentieth-century archive became, in the words of the German cultural historian Ulrich Raulff, “the emblematic location of a cataclysmic century,” which has “conferred a new, existential and political, value on memory.”64 As is typical of such collections, alongside that which was preserved in their collection are the silences caused by war, displacement, and associated personal tumult. Janina’s personal diaries from the Warsaw ghetto, miraculously preserved during the war itself, were seized when the family was exiled in 1968, and she reconstructed her testimony from memory.65 These diaries remain in the archives of the IPN. What is absent is also especially pertinent in Zygmunt’s case; the sources of controversy in Poland about his past are based on fragmentary materials also found in the IPN archives, for example. But many gaps have more mundane causes: fax paper being very prone to disintegration, for instance, or the fact that physical archives must exist in space and

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therefore often require periodic culling of materials. Also challenging are the technological developments that run through the archive. Zygmunt Bauman had his most productive period and wrote much of his most acclaimed work (c. 1987–96) on an Amstrad machine, and the resources and expertise for converting these files into a contemporarily readable format are scarce. In a different context, the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote that any narration of history always gathers together “a particular bundle of silences,” and it is through the critical work of reconstruction that silences can be made to speak.66 As with Bauman’s texts, my approach to the archive has taken the form of inspired reading, an imaginative as well as documentary exercise that is attentive to the world that opens up in front of archive materials as well as to what they reveal about the currents behind the available published texts. Throughout this book are deployed a number of examples from the archive of Bauman articulating ideas and engaging themes that are silenced in his published work. This is a risky strategy, granted. It can easily lead to the invention or embellishment of voices, or the imputation of ideas to thinkers who did not possess them. One must also guard against a hyper-focus on epistolary curios, or a proclivity to revel in the “unseen” notes scrawled in exercise books and marginalia, interpreted as the secret key in the depths below published works. The documents in the Bauman archive offer an extremely rich repository for the study of the relationship between the life and work of the sociologist. They also present, alongside its productive silences, a great impetus for thinking about Bauman’s sociology in novel ways and extending it in unexpected directions. Of interest to me throughout this book is not simply how a body of thought came into being in the course of Bauman’s life. Nor am I preoccupied solely with the internal dimensions of Bauman’s work. In short, it is not my main intention to contribute to the contemporary biographical turn in studies of Bauman, or to add to the considerable elucidative literature on Bauman’s ideas, although I hope that my book will have something to add to each of these endeavours.67 What especially concerns my engagement with Bauman’s work in this book is the question of how it can be put to use, including ways which it was not originally intended for and may not have been apparent to its creator.

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Zygmunt Bauman and the West

The foundations of such a rethinking of Bauman’s sociology are established in my first two chapters. In “The Exilic Position,” I show that Bauman’s experience and interpretation of exile is productive of a hermeneutics of estrangement that is generalized into a framework for critical sociology. Any attempt to pin down Bauman’s positionality into centred forms – “whiteness,” Jewishness, Polishness, and so on – fails on account of the essentially centreless positionality of exile, with consequences for any easy association between Bauman’s work and the charge of Eurocentrism. In “Writing the Multiplicity of Modernity,” I explore the formal dimensions of Bauman’s writing, arguing for an elective affinity between the exilic position and the essayistic orientation. The position of exile – its centrelessness, contingency, groundlessness, and disjunction – corresponds to an essayism attuned to the open-endedness of all attempts at capturing a social and political world in mutation, to the heightened awareness of multiple possibilities of social organization, and to the futility and dangers of all attempts at totalization. Bauman’s essayistic sociology – in a manner akin to the Jorge Luis Borges short story, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” which Bauman selected as his personal favourite – is constituted by diverse themes which “proliferate and fork,” at various points converging and diverging.68 The remaining chapters of this book are attempts at disentangling some of these paths, each of which have a distinct bearing on the question of Bauman and the West. Below I introduce them and outline what is at stake in this work of disentanglement.

Decolonization, Eurocentrism, and Modernity: Bauman on the West Stuart Hall once wrote that “archives are not inert historical collections. They always stand in an active, dialogic, relation to the questions which the present puts to the past; and the present always puts its questions differently from one generation to another.”69 The questions the present puts to the past, which frame my encounter with Bauman’s work and his archive, have arisen in the context of proclamations that the social sciences and humanities must be decolonized. The institutional and epistemological centres of knowledge formation, it is said, formed part of the intellectual arsenal of European colonial-imperialism. Sociology is no exception. Indeed, as the reflexive study of modern (read: Western)

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societies, sociology is uniquely saturated with coloniality. Yet, in its canonization it has erased the traces of this aspect of its own historical development. Sociology developed in the colonial episteme, but unlike sociologists’ counterparts in the disciplines of history and anthropology, erstwhile accomplices in the colonial project who for a long time have had to work through the problem of their complicity, they are only now beginning to face up to their own “entanglements” in colonial empires.70 Decolonizing sociology entails seeing its institutional formation as a power-saturated process with ongoing historical effects that continue to frame the way the world is seen from the centres of Western power, and which has consigned non-Western ways of being and knowing the world to the piles of debris left in the wake of Western-led “progress.” This shines a spotlight on concepts, and in particular on the master concept of modernity. No other discipline, even among other social sciences, is so centrifugally configured around the concept of modernity than sociology. Often implicit in sociological analysis is the idea that modernity denotes an era in which there emerged a particular constellation of institutions and processes, crystallized in the nineteenth century: industrialism and the class system; nation-state formation and nationalism; and revolutions in knowledge and the establishment of scientific institutions. Sociology itself developed within this constellation, its practitioners self-conscious of their role as its foremost interpreters. Sociology is thus both a product of and mirror to modernity, a privileged space for societal self-interpretation that itself constitutes an effective force in the shaping of society. Until its delayed “decolonial turn,” there was a widespread assumption that the sociological identification of modernity as a temporal concept denoting an emergent era and set of institutions was spatially located in Europe. Anthony Giddens, for example, summarized that “modernity refers to modes of social life or organisation which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence.”71 What had been internal to Europe came to possess universal significance through processes of diffusion to other world regions, in the first instance the settler formations of the Americas, Australasia, and Southern Africa, which Louis Hartz referred to as “fragment” societies to describe their “broken off ” character from Europe.72 Together these came to constitute “the West,” clearly not so much a geographical category as a historical one.

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“All philosophical terms,” wrote Arendt, “are metaphors, frozen analogies, as it were, whose true meaning discloses itself when we dissolve the term into the original context, which must have been vividly in the mind of the first philosopher to use it.”73 This applies equally to sociological terms. The West – the definition and meaning of which is often taken to be self-evident, even in critical and denunciatory arguments – is comprised by a shifting constellation of metaphors, analogies, symbols, and synecdoche, which function as “social imaginary significations.” These do not simply represent or conceal social reality (as in an ideology, in the Marxist sense) but are rather what enables it, through making sense of it and investing it with meaning.74 In orienting human beings in the world – humans who are thrown into the world as beings who understand and interpret – the concept of the West itself gives shape to the world, becoming an imaginary coordinate of what Manfred Steger has termed “the global imaginary.”75 Max Weber famously argued that “material and ideal interests, directly govern men’s conduct,” and “yet very frequently the ‘world images’ that have been created by ‘ideas’ have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamics of interest.”76 Weber sought, of course, in his famous study to show how Protestant asceticism had been an effective force in the historical development of Western rational capitalism. Weber – whose argument in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism both conformed to and looked askance at the self-definition of the superiority of the West prevalent before the First World War77 – did not address how, in turn, the “world image” of the West was itself an effective force in the development of a globalizing capitalist economy, the primitive accumulation and proletarianization of the peripheries from the industrial centres of Europe. As is increasingly recognized, Europe’s connectedness with world regions external to its ambiguous territorial borders is constitutive of Western modernity, its genesis located in the fifteenth-century Portuguese exploration of the African coast and the voyage of Christopher Columbus to the new world of the Americas.78 The age of discovery, with its conquest, settlement, and colonization, thus marks the beginning of the rise of the West as the centre of global power. Its apex occurred in the nineteenth century with the scramble for colonies, markets, and raw materials in Africa in particular, legitimated by the notion that being Western was synonymous with being law-

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governed and socially and technologically advanced.79 Gradually, despite internal differences, countries of Western Europe and their colonial outposts began to see themselves as part of a single civilization, unified by Christianity.80 To the East, as shown in the canonical work of Edward Said, it was both threatened and enthralled by the Islamic civilizations expressed in the institutional form of the Ottoman Empire.81 The West also had its internal “Others,” most notably Jews, whose image as an “oriental” presence within Europe can be traced back to the historical distinction between western and eastern churches.82 This schism came to be symbolized by the cities of Athens and Jerusalem, themselves standing for two inimical world orientations: Athens for the life of the freely inquiring mind, Jerusalem for obedience to religious law. This self-image took on particular significance in nineteenth-century imaginaries of the West, especially in the form of what Hans-Georg Gadamer termed the “romantic revaluations,” which gave rise to the discipline of history as we recognize it today.83 As argued in works like Martin Bernal’s Black Athena and Cheikh Anta Diop’s The African Origin of Civilization, it was here in particular that the Semitic and Afroasiatic influences on classical Athenian civilization were erased in the pursuit of the clear cultural boundaries of white European Christendom.84 The imaginary coordinates of the global imaginary are nevertheless configured differently, depending on the location of the centre from which they emanate. Often neglected in the critical histories of discourses of the West and its “Others” are the forms in which the West was defined by the outside, in the sense of what has been termed “Occidentalism.”85 The West and its traditions as a concept beyond a simple geographical destination is traceable to ancient China, where it became a regular part of dynastic historical writing from the fifth century CE as the land of the setting sun and a symbol of death.86 Much more recently, from the middle of the twentieth century, the West was defined as an oppositional category in the territories of the Soviet Union in the era of Cold War antagonism. It was during this period that the West came to be synonymous with liberalism and capitalism, and its centre migrated from the ruins of Europe to North America. The postwar discourse of modernization, the central theoretical paradigm of postwar social sciences in the USA, was fundamental in the self-presentation of the West as the Other of right and left totalitarianisms. It is often forgotten, however, that modernization theory was

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a sociology of decolonization. Supported by proliferating “area studies” departments and Ford Foundation grants, it was oriented toward the new nation-states of the formerly colonized parts of the world, concerned not simply with representing them but with influencing them in all areas of social and economic policy. Western societies, spearheaded by the USA, possessed high levels of functional differentiation, universal value-generalization, and achievement-related roles. The new nations of the so-called Third World remained “traditional” societies, lagging behind those that had achieved the state of modern society, but with the right guidance they could be placed on the path trail-blazed by the West.87 This was succinctly expressed by W.W. Rostow, who served as national security adviser to Lyndon B. Johnson: “We must demonstrate that the underdeveloped nations – now the main focus of Communist hopes – can move successfully through the preconditions into a wellestablished take-off within the orbit of the democratic world, resisting the blandishments and temptations of Communism.”88 The fall of communism inaugurated another shift in the coordinates of the global imaginary. After 1989, liberal democratic Western societies came to be defined as the inevitable institutional form of human association without an alternative, infamously captured in Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of the “end of history.”89 It soon transpired that history had not exhausted itself, and the concept of the West was both challenged and reinforced in various military events of the 1990s and 2000s. Here, it became significantly imbricated in the discourse of humanitarianism, as a response to what Robert Kaplan termed “the coming anarchy” resultant from global overpopulation, deregulation, scarcity, crime, tribalism, and disease.90 Most conspicuously, the concept of the West was revitalized as a symbolic accompaniment to the NATO-led bombing of Serbia and, especially after 9/11, the War on Terror.91 Today, in the wake of a pandemic, the entrenchment of authoritarian populist nationalism across the world, and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, liberal democracies as the vanguard of the West do not seem so sacrosanct and self-confident. In contemporary popular (and populist) rhetoric on the West, there resurface cyclical conceptions of historical time, themselves deeply embedded in Western imperial discourse.92 Now, it is arguable that the most ardent defenders of the West are no longer liberals claiming to march at the vanguard of historical progress but are self-consciously “illiberals” who position themselves as the last bulwark against both external threats to Christian civilization

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from east and south, and their “decadent” internal collaborators: urban “cosmopolitans,” LGBTQ+ movements, advocates of migrant hospitality, Black activists, and so on. Resurgent narrative devices of decline and fall are not empirical categories of civilizational analysis but are rather highly affective sensitizing ideas that postulate that Western civilization is in a state of terminal crisis. The name given to the malady that forms the epistemological horizon of the discourse of the West in social thought is Eurocentrism. Though the intellectual myopia it denotes had long been identified, Eurocentrism (and its close cognates Europocentrism and Western-centricity) seems to have entered the conceptual vocabularies of social science and humanities disciplines in earnest during the 1960s, in the context of the high period of decolonization. The Egyptian pan-Arabist Marxist, Anouar Abdel-Malek, diagnosing the crisis of Orientalist studies, spoke of a widespread “europocentrism in the area of human and social sciences.”93 In turn, it figured centrally in the canonical works of postcolonial studies. Said drew on Abdel-Malek’s diagnosis to identify Eurocentrism as the foundation of Orientalism, in which “the West is the spectator, the judge and jury, of every facet of Oriental behaviour.”94 Eurocentrism was the title of the popular book by the Marxist and “Third Worldist” theorist, Samir Amin, where it figured as the ideological-cultural dimension of globalizing capitalism. European scholars, Amin held, excavated antiquarian civilizations and framed them as embryonic stages of their advanced technical civilization, inventing “an eternal West, unique since its moment of origin.”95 The fate of Eurocentrism is today illustrative of the problems that arise when concepts become detached from the conditions of their emergence, when they live on as an effect of historical memory in the absence of the context that generated them. Charges of Eurocentrism are often made without any awareness of the need to define it. Shorn of its rootedness in the decolonization movements and the attempt to interpret them, Eurocentrism has come to work as if it and the problem that it designates were always already there. In short, Eurocentrism often appears, as Charles Turner comments, as “a term of abuse that now comes as readily to the lips of students as ‘functionalism’ or ‘positivism’ once did.”96 It is useful to disentangle several modalities of Eurocentric claimmaking, which often appear in conjunction with one another. The most obvious among them is the universalizing mode. What holds in Europe, or the West more broadly (the West taken to refer to Europe plus its

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“civilizational offshoots” in the settler colonies), possesses universal significance. Eurocentrism in this sense stands for a false universalization of a set of circumstances that are relative to a particular location in global space. Although it refers predominantly to purportedly objective statements, universalizing Eurocentric claims are always imbricated in normative and teleological claims. The West, located in space – the northwestern tip of Europe and its settler outposts – is framed as the vanguard of human civilization due to the unique, internal material and cultural factors of its socio-economic life. As the most developed world civilization, what the West first endures is the fate of all other world regions. This is also closely allied with the notion that what is said in the West is synonymous with reason and rationality themselves. Its anointed intellectuals purport to speak in terms of the universal from a supposedly positionless, unsituated location. Most often, this appears in a triumphalist, proselytizing form, as typified in the ideological legitimation of the expansion of European colonial-imperial states, or the foreign policy of postwar political administrations of the USA. There is, nevertheless, in a more complex sense, a pessimistic variant of universalizing Eurocentrism. This is at play whenever the “dark sides” of modernity – in particular, the Holocaust and the world wars – are discussed as the product of forces, ideas, relations, and structures internal to the European continent, which via processes of diffusion, will become the fate of the world. The twenty-first-century conflicts and refugee crises of postcolonial societies in the Great Lakes region of Africa, or in the contemporary Middle East, are in this sense echoes of the abyssal conflicts of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.97 Another modality of Eurocentrism might be termed immanent. The immanent mode identifies the key logics, cultural orientations, and institutional arrangements of Western societies as innate properties that developed internally.98 The immanent mode of Eurocentrism, whether implicitly or explicitly, also adopts an internalist view with respect to cultures and world regions outside the West. Cultures are self-contained, impermeable entities that have been thrust together in our so-called global age. At its least destructive, these cultures can tolerate each other as in happy ideas of multiculturalism. At its most destructive, this immanent mode feeds into notions of the “clash of civilizations,” where the world is divided into self-contained international and transnational culture-power blocs condemned to a hostile existence of conflict and competition.

Introduction

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A third, totalizing modality of Eurocentric claim-making skirts the internal plurality and specificities of the European (more broadly, Western) experience itself. It manifests in a tendency to treat Europe as a homogeneous, imperial political agent that itself colonizes, without due consideration of the internal peripheries and provinces of Europe or the quasi-Orientalist discursive framework that has made the “northwest peninsula” of the European continent stand as a synecdoche for Europe itself. This tendency surfaces, paradoxically, in the critique of Eurocentrism intrinsic to anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial theorizing. Despite its critical interrogation of the grand narratives and universals of European/Western overseas colonialism, the critique of Eurocentrism can often seem to portray this as the only colonialism of universal significance.99 While the critique of Europe has an undeniably significant rhetorical power – as evidenced in the decolonizing movements of the postwar period – this totalization is ultimately an impediment to developing analytically useful understandings of colonial imperialism in its proliferation of forms, gradations, and situations, both inside and outside Europe. The totalization of Europe as an agentic colonial-imperial power in itself sometimes results in a troubling presentist tendency to ignore the ambiguity and historicity of racial and ethnic identity. This is particularly apparent in the treatment of Europe’s minority populations, including Jews. There is a sharp irony in the notion that Bauman, who wrote so penetratingly of the “trap of assimilation” experienced by Jews in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European Christendom, is so readily assimilated to “whiteness” today.100 Another uneasy and historically suspect assimilation occurs in the absorption of Central and Eastern Europe into a homogeneous, colonialimperial, universalizing “Europe.” This elides the fact that Europe has long had its own internal others against which the dominant powers in its northwestern tip have asserted their superiority and dominance. Europe’s internal peripheries are themselves significantly shaped by what Laura Doyle termed “inter-imperiality,” the interactions of the Ottoman, Napoleonic, Habsburg, and Russian land empires during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.101 The inventions of the Orient, Africa, and Latin America were accompanied by the inventions of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, peripheralized regions subjected to a specific form of the general tendency of Western Europe to cast its others as inferior forms of itself.102 Forever “catching up” with the West, its peoples were

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placed alongside “Indians, Africans, and other ‘rude’ nations” in the “waiting room of history” while they searched for the “gateway to the present.”103 This region of Europe has been indelibly stamped by the deadly interaction of the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian land empires during the twentieth century. Born in Poland in 1925, less than a decade after its independence, Bauman was a child of the “shatterzone of empires” and a teenager in the barbarous conflicts of the European “bloodlands” when Poland was once again wiped off the map in successive occupations.104 His habitus was formed in a state of permanent liminality, which moved through the social types of refugee, soldier, apparatchik, exile. A sense of these connected histories and the nuanced reflections of those who tried to elucidate them are often lost amid all the welcome talk of dismantling the Eurocentric cognitive frames of the social sciences and humanities. The criticism of the Eurocentric and white constitution of sociological writing foundational to the imperative to decolonize is itself based upon a recognition of the “situatedness” of knowledge claims, to use Donna Haraway’s neat conceptualization of the complex of social, political, ideational, and epistemological determinants that generate specific “standpoints” in the world.105 Beyond important questions of redress and relativization, the critique of Eurocentrism emphasizes the unique advantages of the hermeneutic vantage point of marginality. And yet, it is seldom explored how the evaluation of Eurocentrism figures as immanent critique in European intellectual history, including in sociology, often as a product of the systemic marginalization of the peripheries within Europe itself.106 The experiences of Jewish thinkers from East-Central Europe and the interpretations generated in exile are too often underestimated or misread, hastily assimilated to a Eurocentric canon. Their critical theories referred to the fascist and to the Soviet occupations to which they were witnesses and agents and were developed at a specific vantage point of detachment within the Western, liberal-capitalist, post-colonial societies to which they were exiled. These thinkers – with a standpoint generated by the “exilic position” – experienced and interpreted the multiplicity of modernity, its constitutively pluralistic yet entangled historical trajectories and cultural orientations. Their interpretations allow for the redeeming of the multi-faceted European critique of the West and Eurocentrism as an interlocutor of the decolonial critique, and not a competitor.

Introduction

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I develop this argument vis-à-vis Bauman over the course of chapters 3, 4, and 5. First, turning to Bauman’s works of cultural sociology from the late 1960s and 1970s, I claim the event and process of decolonization constituted the horizon of his thought, and subsequent developments in the conceptualization of culture, which became the fulcrum of Bauman’s work were fundamentally propelled by what he saw as a decentring and provincialization of Europe on the world stage. I then turn to a consideration of Bauman’s “Jewish writings,” situating them in the context of recent attention to both the relationship between Jewish history and culture and the sociology of Western modernity, as well as dialogues between Jewish and post- and decolonial writing. Finally, I consider the “Eastern” dimensions of Bauman’s thought, apparent in the writings on communism and post-communism which prefigure his well-known metaphorical framing of “liquid modernity.” I also consider Bauman’s political sociology of Soviet imperialism, situating him in the context of the “New Imperial History,” which translates themes and analytics of postcolonialism into the Soviet and post-Soviet space.107 In a concluding chapter, I evaluate Bauman’s writings on what he termed the “crisis of humanity,” and his turn to the theme of the “decline of the West”’ and his preoccupation with European heritage in the years before his death in 2017. I situate his “late style,” to which many ascribe an overwhelming mood of gloomy pessimism, in the context of what Enzo Traverso has recently called “left-wing melancholia,” resultant from the disentangling of three memorialization processes: of the Holocaust, of communism, and of colonialism. I argue that worth defending in Bauman’s work today is its attentiveness to the multiplicity of modernity and the space it creates for a “multidirectional memory” that recognizes the specificity of Jewish modernity, colonial modernity, and communist modernity without unduly separating them from one another or without conflating them. Finally, a note on form. I have written this book and structured its arguments in a particular way, one which adheres to the essayistic style, which I discuss in some depth – both in broad terms and more specifically vis-à-vis Bauman’s work –in the second chapter. Likewise, the chapters were written as essays – each one self-contained, isolatable if the reader so wishes, but which also forms part of a whole.

1

The Exilic Position

That the widespread condition of exile dramatically influenced twentiethcentury cultural and intellectual history is now axiomatic. But exile and exiles were not novel phenomena of the twentieth century. A conceptual history takes us to the Roman-Latin exsilium, encapsulating both banishment and voluntary departure from the city. The related Greek concept of ostracism (ὀστρακισμός, ostrakismos) was a mechanism of Athenian democracy, which ordered that a citizen be expelled from the city for ten years. In Old French, essilier meant “to ravage,” “to devastate,” or “to drive beyond the boundaries,” whereupon it acquired a semantic proximity to the word extermination. This need not, however, be a purely occidental conceptual history. Liu (流) denoted the practice of banishment to remote borderlands that was common in Imperial China. Exile formed one of the “five punishments” meted out by the Western Han dynasty, and was carried forward into the Qing dynasty in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when delinquents, political opponents, and dissidents were cast into the wildernesses of Xinjiang, today a scene of exile and erasure of the Uyghur people. Many oral traditions around the world are founded on narratives of exile. The Baoulé of present-day Côte d’Ivoire, for example, were said to have been banished along with Queen Pokou when she broke from the Ashanti Confederacy in the seventeenth century, shortly before the Ashanti kingdom was established in what is now Ghana.1 Exile is an active verb in these origins, a doing, denoting an expulsion from the scene of politics. As Mary McCarthy recognized, it is “decreed from above, like the original sentence of banishment on Adam and Eve which initiated human history.”2 In the theology of exile, however, lies

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another meaning. Here, exile is an abstract noun, denoting a condition. It is a being, lived through, endured, navigated, and negotiated. For Leszek Kołakowski, exile is the fundamental theme of all religious worship, its “fundamental message … our home is elsewhere.”3 This sense of homelessness is particularly pronounced in the Hebrew word galut – the diasporic condition that Martin Buber, in his 1901 essay on “Jewish Rennaisance,” termed a “torture screw” – which symbolizes the inextricable connection between the traumatic events of twentiethcentury history and the condition of Jewish intellectuals in exile.4 The exsul – the “banished person,” in Latin – is derived from the verb ex-sulure, “to take out to the root.” “Sul” also evokes solum (soil), and thus exile denotes a severance from the earth. The cutting of roots and wrenching from soil is materialized in a traumatic event of deterritorialization and temporal rupture, experienced as a profound loss and dislocation.5 In his searching assessment of the discrepancy between the lived experience of forced migration and the transmutation of exile into a figurative trope of literary modernism, Edward Said wrote that “exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience.” He termed the “pathos of exile” the experience of a “loss of contact with the solidity and satisfaction of earth” in the knowledge that “homecoming is out of the question.” He called the “temptation” of exile the attempt to attain solid ground through subsumption into a collective identity, the “assertion of belonging in and to a place, a people, a heritage.”6 It is also said, however, that the condition of exile can generate a unique interpretive advantage. Thrust onto the margins, thinkers in exile are thinkers of the marginal. Banished from the centre, they de-provincialize the world views of their places of banishment and refuge alike.7 This meaning of exile as interpretive freedom is also implied in its etymology. It is thought that the second element (ex-ile) comes from the Proto-Indo-European root “al,” also the source of the Greek word alaomai, meaning “to wander, stray, or roam about.”8 Driven beyond the border, the exile transgresses, trespasses, and transcends all borders. The condition of exile stands for a certain mode of thought, an advantageous cognitive standpoint born of a pained proximity to the real. This too is recognized in antiquarian images of thought. The thinker, no longer at home in the polis, must withdraw into a selfimposed form of exile in order to subject it to thought.9

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Many twentieth-century social and political thinkers extended their traumatic lived experience of the exilic condition in similar ways. Siegfried Kracauer, for instance, wrote that the “state of self-effacement or homelessness” forced upon the exile is the ideal disposition for the historian who confronts the past as “a stranger to the world.”10 For Said, the obverse of the temptation to enclose oneself within the nostalgic comfort of a totalizing entity – a nation, an ideology, or a discipline or vocation – was the possibility for a particular kind of wisdom that he terms “worldliness,” consisting in the revelation of the groundlessness and contingency of what appears essential and fixed. Manifesting in “a knowing and unafraid attitude to exploring the world we live in,” this derives from the exile’s “contrapuntal position” between two or more cultural worlds.11 Zygmunt Bauman, as I detail herein, also metaphorized exile in order to describe the position of critical sociology. The reflection necessary for societal self-understanding demands a cognitive stance analogous to the vantage point of the exile, in but not of the social figuration in which they find themselves entangled. Exile is, then, a doing and a being, but it is also something else. It is a subject, invoked when we speak of the exile. This social type is closely related to a number of other cognate categories of international mobility: expatriates, asylum seekers, migrants, refugees. In the crude Newtonian terminology of current popular discourse on migration, the exile – alongside refugees and asylum seekers – is pushed by social and political turmoil, while expatriates and migrants are pulled by economic and occupational opportunity. The reality, of course, is far more complex. Contemporary global economic forces expel as brutally and as effectively as do tyrannical governments, and those most frequently memorialized as intellectuals in exile during the twentieth century were most often not banished into exile by decree so much as they escaped into it, away from deprivation, political censorship, and in many cases persecution, imprisonment, and execution.12 As Hannah Arendt recognized, the unprecedented phenomenon of statelessness fundamentally altered the meaning of exile in the twentieth century. No longer ordered by a despotic ruler against the dissident, entire populations were evicted as the state deprived the minorities in its territory of “the right to have rights.” Once containing “an undertone of almost sacred awe,” the word exile now provoked “the idea of something simultaneously suspicious and unfortunate.”13

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The cognate categories of exile tend to stand as synecdoche for a collective. The figure of the asylum seeker, stripped of agency, signifies a legal-bureaucratic entity of the humanitarian sphere. The refugee, more often than not, is swallowed up in a mass or crowd in motion, hence the evocations of swarms, tides, and floods borrowed from framings of natural disaster and deployed to depressingly powerful effect by antiimmigrant populists. The refugee and asylum seeker share the condition of exile but the exile, crucially, is memorialized as a particular person, renowned for who they are and what they have done, standing out amid the stateless collective in which they may have moved. The exile, in other words, has a name. Indeed, it is often precisely the fact of having a name that ensures their passage, however traumatic, into a space of refuge and asylum.14 Intellectuals in exile become, in the words of Dubravka Ugrešić, “those rare migrants who leave their footprints on the cultural map of the world.”15 The exile is thus a strangely privileged category of forced migrant. “To be an exile,” as David Kettler sardonically notes, “is to be interesting, in the way that a refugee or victim or traveller or immigrant cannot be.”16 It is in this sense that evocations of exile can tend toward overstylization, or the metaphorization of exile in claims of self-conscious estrangement.17 Just as the exile crosses the territorial border, the critical thinker – who need not be in exile in any spatial sense – traverses the borders of disciplinarity and historical time. It can also be a romanticized category. Twentieth-century intellectuals in exile were of course well represented in what Randall Collins termed “the inner circles of the intellectual world … surrounded by peripheries and peripheries, where most of us live.”18 But for every “successful outsider” there were many more who struggled to learn new languages, to re-establish links to professional organizations from which they were severed, to find secure work, and to become reconciled to the exilic condition.19 All intellectual exiles may well, as Theodor Adorno postulated, be “damaged” or “mutilated,” but the degree of mutilation differs dramatically according to the sociological determinants of race and class, as well as career stage and status at the point of expulsion.20 On the significantly gendered aspect of exile trajectories, it is instructive to compare Zygmunt Bauman’s with that of Janina Bauman who, prior to expulsion, had worked in a high-profile position in the Polish film industry. She wrote:

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When I left Poland I knew that my professional life was at an end … I was left on my own with no place to go and no clear aim to fight for. Bound only to the house, I automatically became a housewife. I have been a career-woman since my early adult life, and this change came as a bitter blow. My only work now was cooking, cleaning and washing so as to keep my hard-working husband and children satisfied … I soon discovered that my status as a housewife not only seemed natural but was also fully acceptable to our new acquaintances … Nobody ever asked me what my profession was or what I had done in Poland. I was a wife, a professor’s wife and my visitors seemed fully satisfied with that. The only questions they ever asked me were: “How do you like it here?” or “How old are your daughters?” Nobody ever asked me what my personal plans were or what I intended to do in this country.21 For some intellectuals ruptured from their intellectual networks, the relational webs severed were never spun again. If modern intellectuals came to constitute a class in themselves, exile raised the spectre of the déclassé intellectual “hurled down the social ladder, to a situation that few had previously known.”22 In some cases, the result was suicide.23 As Lyndsey Stonebridge puts it, “In efforts to redeem the experience of exile, to make it good for humanism, for morality and aesthetics, all too often literature about exile ends up performing the perverse trick of making those forced to disappear, disappear once more.”24 Jean-Michel Palmier wrote in his monumental study of Weimar exiles, “Only those who have known exile can describe its heartbreak, others can only imagine it.”25 My aim in what follows, then, is to attempt to imagine exile sociologically, as a particular conjunction of biography and history. Rather than separating out the multiple meanings of exile (as a doing, a being, and a subject), I shall instead refer to what I term an exilic position, which is attentive to their interrelations. It is precisely the interaction between the positioning of the intellectual by  the social-historical circumstance and political forces which exile them, the navigation and interpretation of the condition of displacement and unbelonging, and the self-positioning of intellectuals in exile as their lives continue to intersect with macro-historical transformation after the event of their expulsion that account for the creativity of exile. The

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“standpoint” of the exile is refigured over and again as the flux of history washes away the footholds of their position within the social figuration, generating a “hermeneutics of estrangement.” The intellectual in exile, therefore, has no single centre from which to gaze upon the world.

Sociological Perspectives on the Positioning of Intellectuals Intellectuals have been a mainstay of sociological study. They have been thought of as a secular form of those figures historically concerned with the production, evaluation, and sanctification of culture, such as the clerics, priests, and shamans of Weber’s historical sociology of world religions or Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt’s studies of axial age civilizations.26 Nevertheless, “the intellectual” is well known to have originated as a social type in the context of the Dreyfus affair. Here, it denoted those concerned with the production, evaluation, and distribution of reflection on culture, politics, and society, over and above their specialist interests and expertise. From these beginnings, it also served as a denigrative term to specify a conceited and elitist high-mindedness. Some contemporary sociologists designate as intellectuals anybody whose occupational role is bound up in the formulation of knowledge claims.27 Nevertheless, intellectuals have been synonymous with intervention and engagement from the time of the emergence of their “self-consciousness.”28 Intellectuals mobilize their expertise in addressing public issues of societal or political significance that are not necessarily delimited by that expertise.29 Interest in intellectuals curiously seems to peak in periods in which the position of the intellectual has itself been called into question.30 It particularly gestated in the interwar climate of rampant nationalism, socio-economic turmoil, and anti-intellectualism. From his prison cell in Mussolini’s Italy, Antonio Gramsci identified the organic, proletarian intellectual arising in the context of class struggle to engage the traditional intellectual on the battleground of culture in the pursuit of hegemony and consent.31 Julien Benda’s influential polemic La trahison des clercs argued that intellectuals were corrupted by their “intellectual organisation of political hatreds.”32 Underlying each of these diverse works appears the animating question of the allegiance, loyalty, and social situation of intellectuals amid a pervasive sense of the decoupling of thought from Enlightenment universalism.33

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A different form of retreat from the universalist ambitions of les philosophes was detected by the 1970s in Western Europe. Michel Foucault argued that the universal intellectual had been displaced by the specific intellectual, the latter foremostly a professional positioned “at the precise points where their own conditions of life or work situate them (housing, the hospital, the asylum, the laboratory, the university, family and sexual relations).” Their habitat is the think tank, the policy unit, the technical journal, and they intervene in specific issues under the auspices of expertise to advocate for their chosen cause. This professionalized proximity has “undoubtedly given them a much more immediate and concrete awareness of struggles,” but there is nevertheless loss here too, specifically of “the threshold of writing, as the sacred mark of the intellectual,” the feature that distinguished the universal intellectual from mere “competent instances in the service of the state or capital – technicians, magistrates, teachers.”34 Indeed, as I discuss in the next chapter, a distinguishing feature of intellectual exile embodied by Bauman was the retention of writing as a vocation, and essayism as an orientation to the universal. This tension between the universalistic ambitions of the intellectual and the targeted, particularistic interventions of the expert is one of the factors that gave rise to the sense that Bauman represented a dying sort of public figure. The expert could dismiss the intervention of the universal intellectual as dilettantism, uninformed, specious, generalizing, and so on – charges that have consistently been made against Bauman, in particular the writings of his post-2000 “liquid modern” period. The sociology of intellectuals was taken up significantly in the work of another French intellectual, Pierre Bourdieu, who inaugurated a turn to the sociological analysis of institutional settings of intellectual life, reflecting the societal development of the expansion of European universities and a concomitant decline in the role of the engaged public intellectual.35 In Homo Academicus, the “intellectual” is supplanted by the “academic,” whose workplaces – the French university system in particular – prove an exceptionally fertile social field for the accumulation of cultural and symbolic capital. Through Bourdieu, we come to see the academic as positioned in a social field by the sociological determinants of class and status, which sediment in the habitus. The academic also engages in a self-conscious mobilization of dispositions, a jostling for prestige and recognition which unfolds “from the viewpoint

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of the preservation and augmentation of the power associated with [their] position.”36 “Academic capital,” Bourdieu argues, consists in obtaining and maintaining “a position enabling domination of other positions and their holders,”37 and its social reproduction and closure are ensured by the rigorous “selection and indoctrination” processes of academia and the “relations of dependency” they foster.38 Homo academicus is a figure lured by the magnetizing pull of the centre of the academic field. For that reason, it is difficult to conceive of where the intrinsically marginal figure of the exile fits. For “outsiders,” the rules of the game are often out of reach.39 Tellingly, there are few migrants in the academic institutions that Bourdieu researches, and he seems rather dismissive of the cognitive advantages that may derive from “foreignness” or loose ties to the power networks and strategizing logics of the intellectual field. In a footnote, he lambastes a form of sociology that “enthrones ethnocentrism as method,” and that “can be the product of émigrés needing to justify, in their own eyes, the fact that they have emigrated.”40 Something significant occurred in the sociological approach to intellectuals that developed in Bourdieu’s work, traceable into what has been called “the new sociology of ideas.”41 Inasmuch as it is concerned with ideas, these tend to be rendered epiphenomenal. Attention is directed toward the situated activity of intellectual work, the sui generis frames of conflict, competition, and co-operation organized within the institutional settings of academic departments, laboratories, disciplinary networks, and so on. The factuality and normativity of ideas in themselves came to matter less than the process of their legitimation and their circulation within a network of intellectual relations. The sociology of intellectuals becomes an example of what Arendt termed the “two-world” approach, a schism between a space of appearances (the surface level of individual intentionality in which ideas circulate) and a hidden realm of deep generative mechanisms and structural regularities that cause phenomena to appear, which it is the prerogative of the sociologist to “uncover.”42 Randall Collins’s magisterial Sociology of Philosophies similarly brackets ideas in the elucidation of their conditions of emergence. Ideas are “successful” on account of their echoing through time and space. Successful ideas are adumbrated within and disseminated from a central position within an “intellectual network,” Collins’s term for those totalities of nodal figures and spatialized centres of scholarship

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in which intellectual life is situated. This approach to intellectuals is a corrective to a tendency to be overly concerned with texts at the expense of what Collins calls “interaction rituals,” those real-time gatherings of promulgators of ideas at lectures, conferences, and other fora for proximate communications that are the seedbed of thought.43 The corporeal framework of the interaction ritual tends to ground intellectual activity in terrestrial space. Exiles, however, formed extraterritorial networks, generated as a result of the scattering of intellectual traditions and the maintenance of relationships via correspondence.44 The enormous creativity of twentieth-century émigré intellectuals was embedded in complex processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. The oft-touted creativity of exile is derived in large part from the loose ties to multiple intellectual networks, the fact that the exile can be located in a variety of networks simultaneously, and is presented with numerous structures of opportunity for reinvention. More recently, attention has turned to the process of the mobilization of knowledge and expertise into value-laden public interventions. This has coincided with an interest in public intellectuals, figures whose success is determined not just by other intellectuals or acclaim within the academy, but within the organs of civic life – by journalists and professional commentators, trade publishers, social movements, and so on. By any measure, Bauman was such a public intellectual. Patrick Baert’s “positioning theory”’ is at the forefront of this scholarly interest. Baert deems intellectual activity to possess a constitutive “performativity.” The intrinsic qualities of ideas alone do not account for their reception and diffusion. Rather, these are dependent on “the range of rhetorical devices which the authors employ to locate themselves (and position others) within the intellectual and political field.”45 Intellectual interventions, as with J.L. Austin’s “speech acts,” achieve things. Thought as concretized in concepts, theories, narratives, symbols, metaphors, and so on does not simply mirror the world but is an effective force within it. Moreover, positioning theory implies that ideas acquire significance as a result of their location in the totality of the intellectual and cultural field of which they form a part and within which they are self-consciously positioned. The task, therefore, of a sociology of intellectual positioning is to trace performative interventions in the intellectual and cultural field in terms of their observable consequences.46

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In emphasizing the agency of intellectuals to position, however, positioning theory curiously de-emphasizes the question of how intellectual life is positioned. For exiled intellectuals, in particular, are positioned as apostates of the faith, or traitors of the regime. They are positioned by the historical experiences and events that compel them to move, and by the conditions of their space of refuge, as an outsider. Seen comparatively, the capacity to intellectually position oneself relatively autonomously from the positioning of others is a clear vector of privilege.47 But exile also generates possibilities for re-positioning. Indeed, Baert himself suggests in his study of Jean-Paul Sartre that a major extraneous event such as war that may result in displacement and the experience of exile paradoxically provides greater opportunity for repositioning because it is the case that “the more the intellectual is known, the more likely the repositioning will have to be accounted for.”48 This possibility of intellectual exile – its necessitation of reinvention and reorientation amid ruptures within the life course – was noted by Maria Márkus, who with her husband György was a long-time friend of the Baumans. First a migrant from Poland to Hungary, then an intellectual exile from Hungary to Australia with other members of the Budapest School, Márkus said: “While migration – even where voluntary – always involves pain and loss, it is also considered by many to offer a chance of a new beginning, of a more autonomous construction of the self, rendering possible a choice among cultural patterns to be selectively incorporated into their development.”49

Standpoint, Process, Generation As the Second World War neared its end, another figure with strong connections to Budapest penned a short, sharp rejoinder to an article published in the New English Weekly by the conservative British veteran Montgomery Belgion. Belgion had taken exception to the presence of “German refugees” in England and the brand of “German speculation” they brought with them. Just “as we are undergoing and pouring out our lifeblood and treasure in an effort to break the German sword,” he wrote, “no step whatsoever is being taken to oppose that less violent but more insidious permeation by means of the German pen.”50 Karl Mannheim, the foremost target of the article, did not remind Belgion

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that he had arrived in the Weimar Republic an exile from the white terror in Hungary.51 Nor did he make the obvious point that, for those who had initiated his exile, he and other Jews like him could never have been German. Mannheim said instead that he saw three responses to the question of the “function of the refugee.” There was, first, the interiorization of the Nazi world view in which the refugee appears “as vermin, disease bacilli, causing dangerous infection.” Second, there was the attempt “to try to become as English as possible, which automatically leads to over-assimilation until we get the type which wants to be more English than the English themselves.” Third, there is the possibility that “instead of taking a negative attitude toward themselves,” the refugee tries “to discover the constructive element which may be present in the very peculiarity of their own position in the world.” In a time of belligerent, inward-looking nationalism “a new constructive task awaits the refugee or any person who has absorbed the mental climate and the scientific thought of different countries – to serve as a living interpreter between different cultures and to create living communication between different worlds which so far have been kept apart.”52 Mannheim was undoubtedly advocating for the third option. Indeed, one might consider his depiction of the freischwebende intelligenz – composed amid fierce debates about the loyalty and treason of intellectuals in interwar Europe – as an extension of the specific standpoint generated by his own interpretation of the exilic experience. The emergence of the “free-floating intelligentsia,” that “relatively classless stratum which is not too firmly situated in the social order,” gave rise to the possibility of a “socially unattached” standpoint, distanced from the partisan orientations of ideology, which sought to preserve the social order, and utopia, which aimed at its destruction and transformation.53 The task and promise of exile, in this characterization, is analogous to that of the sociology of knowledge, whose “inexhaustible theme” is to “show how, in the whole history of thought, certain intellectual standpoints are connected with certain forms of experience, and to trace the intimate interaction between the two in the course of social and intellectual change.”54 The exile moves in the middle of varying conflictual world views articulated from competing and unequal social positions, rather like the “interpreter” of Bauman’s sociology of knowledge under conditions of postmodernity.55

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As a “double exile,” Mannheim also knew very well that the position of the thinker, their situationally determined standpoint, is not fixed and static.56 A standpoint is established in the mutable, relational force field of a situation defined over and again in the wake of historical experience. The standpoint of a thinker, which arises from their social position, is a foothold carved out in the “flux of history.” The intellectual in exile – who, as Csesław Miłosz said of the “Eastern” intellectual in the West, is prompted by their experience “to think sociologically and historically” – knows particularly well how the flux of history can wash away a social position and necessitate the search for another.57 As Mannheim’s erstwhile Habsburg compatriot, Stefan Zweig, wrote, the condition of exile inheres in “knowing that wherever you find a foothold you can be thrust back into the void at any moment.”58 If the primary role of secular intellectuals is to process the experience of modernity into interpretation, then intellectuals in exile in the twentieth century are distinctive on account of processing their biographical experience of trauma into a generalizable interpretation of modernity attentive to its multiplicitous, ambiguous, and aporetic constitution, its ultimate groundlessness and contingency.59 These figures of the exilic experience, its anchorless drift in the flow of history, came to constitute a generation: When as a result of an acceleration in the tempo of social and cultural transformation basic attitudes must change so quickly that the latent, continuous adaptation and modification of traditional patterns of experience, thought, and expression is no longer possible, then the various new phases of experience are consolidated somewhere, forming a clearly distinguishable new impulse, and a new centre of configuration. We speak in such cases of the formation of a new generation style, or of a new generation entelechy.60 The generation of which Bauman was a figurehead, as I will explore, coalesced around the diagnosis and interpretation of the condition of postmodernity, itself attuned to the ambivalence and liquidity of modernity shorn of illusions. David Kettler – born David Ketzlach in Leipzig before sailing on the last peacetime Italian Line ship from Genoa to New York in 1940 – might

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also be positioned in this generation. Among the most prominent interpreters and translators of Mannheim, he is one of the few sociologists to explore intellectual exile in its material and situational dimensions.61 His contribution is a theorization of the exilic position and the multiple standpoints that it generates as situated within a trajectory. Exile begins with a starting point, which characterizes the moment before the process of displacement begins. Rather than a “home,” Kettler understands the starting point as a connectedness to “a scene of power and resistance in which” the exile was “an active participant, with allies and enemies, with projects and resources.”62 In Bauman’s case, it refers to being a prominent Jewish, revisionist intellectual in Poland, where the intellectual sphere was highly politicized. Second, there is the event of displacement which, considering Bauman, is the Polish “March events” of 1968. The third aspect of exile is its locus, which points to the special possibilities and limitations of the place of asylum. In Bauman’s trajectory, we must speak of loci, because before he remade his career in Britain he spent a brief but highly consequential period in Israel from 1969 to 1971. Fourth, Kettler speaks of the project of the exile, made as one prepares to be confronted with the question of return. For Bauman, the late 1980s take on a special importance at this point; it is no coincidence, as I discuss further on, that he returns to Poland as an “unwelcome stranger” at the time he is developing his most significant sociological work, much of it engaging with Jewish history and culture, and when he and Janina were engaged in autobiographical writing. The fifth and final stage in Kettler’s schema is a characterization of the exile’s mission and end, as seen in retrospect from the vantage point of return. Return for Bauman (as for many exilic writers) leads to an engagement with the theme of exile itself. Here, the intellectual in exile processes biographical experience into collectively shared interpretation, nowhere more so than in the exile’s writing on exile, the self-positioning of the exile par excellence. This trajectory, which I use as a heuristic frame, implies a linearity. There is, however, no direct path between the experience and the interpretation, which unfolds from the mutable positionality and multiple standpoints of the exilic process. Experience and interpretation are congealed within each other. In some cases, the sharp irruption of an event dramatically alters the interpretive work. In others, the interpretation of the experience unfolds sometime after it is lived through, as is the case with a traumatic event that “leaks slowly into memory

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from the place where it was not forgotten since it was not remembered in the first place.”63 This is true of what might be termed Bauman’s “first displacement.”

The First Displacement The intellectual generation to which Bauman belongs is marked by a particular kind of “double exile.” Its members, including Agnes Heller, Ferenc Fehér, and Ernest Gellner, were exiles from Soviet occupations, and their experiences are arranged around a constellation of dates in the history of communist Central and Eastern Europe, including Stalin’s death in 1953, the Polish October and Hungarian uprising in 1956, the Prague Spring, and Polish “March events” of 1968, the peak of Solidarność in 1981, and the transition to “post-communism” in the 1990s. But the members of this generation grew up in Central and Eastern Europe as Jews. As youth, prior to their academic careers, they experienced the rise of fascism, anti-Semitic violence, Nazi occupation, displacement, and genocide. The individual experiences of this generation and their directions of flight into exile are multifarious, but Romanian writer Norman Manea captures both their experience of dual totalitarianisms as well as its conditioning effects on their interpretations: I was five years old when in 1941 I first left Romania, sent to death by a dictator and an ideology. In 1986, at 50, by an ironic symmetry, I left again, because of another dictator, another ideology. Holocaust, totalitarianism, exile – these fundamental experiences of our contemporaneity – are all intimately related by a definition of the stranger and of estrangement.64 Bauman experienced the Second World War not from a point of detachment as a professional intellectual but as a teenage soldier involved in combat.65 The war was not a caesura in need of integrating into a pre-existing theoretical schema, but rather “a limit experience that wrenches the subject from itself,” the event that established the experiential horizon in which his subsequent interpretations formed.66 Toward later life, especially in interviews, Bauman turned to the first displacement, the flight from Nazi occupation into the Soviet Union and back again with a Polish army unit under Soviet command.67 There

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are also unpublished pieces – bound inextricably with Janina Bauman’s testimonial writing – such as the autobiographical typescript “The Poles, the Jews and I,” written in 1987 and intended for family members. Here, in this memoir, he recalled childhood bullying at school in Poznan, itself folded into the pullulating menace of European fascism: We read of the mounting physical violence – of the beatings of Jewish students in the universities, of mini-pogroms in the rising number of rural areas and small provincial towns, of self-styled fascist troopers marching through the Jewish shtetls while watched rather apathetically by the police not particularly eager to be involved.68 Recalled also are the terrors of fleeing, the bombs that rained relentlessly down onto Poznan and didn’t stop until the family left on one of the last trains on the night of 2 September 1939. There are recollections of how the train itself, packed with refugees, was pursued by aerial bombers who “flew over so close that I can bet I saw the malicious grin on the face of the pilot.” He remembers the day the Germans came on motorcycles, trucks, and tanks to Włocławek, where the train had stopped. His mother sewed cut-up bits of his pajamas into stars to be worn on the back of the family’s coats: “the signs of our Jewish distinction, now officially recognised by our new rulers.”69 In October, they moved eastward, toward the Russian-occupied part of Poland. Held at the border, and initially refused entry, they narrowly missed being evacuated to Ostrów Mazowiecka, the site of the first wartime massacre of Polish Jews. These reflections on early life are viewed through the cataract of exile and are difficult to interpret.70 They are inseparable from a particular instantiation of the exilic position, one posed by the Baumans’ return to Poland in 1988 and which centralized the question of the relationship between Polishness and Jewishness, as well as a general proliferation of Holocaust memorialization in the decade in which it was born. Written as Bauman was embarking on his “modern trilogy” – his groundbreaking elucidation of the condition of postmodernity – they are also shot through with sociological insight.71 Indeed, it is striking how often “The Poles, the Jews, and I” evokes themes that are central in the work that attracted international acclaim. The discussion of his maternal grandfather, a learned man and builder by trade, brings to

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mind the “drama of Jewish assimilation” as depicted in Modernity and Ambivalence: he was among the “pioneers of progress,” at the time of the “great assimilatory spurt of the late nineteenth century” where the “line of progress from the shtetl led straight into Polish culture, and Polish language was the main vehicle of the journey.”72 The personal meaning of Modernity and Ambivalence is itself revealed in a typescript of its unpublished forerunner, “Paradoxes of Assimilation,” which bears the epigraph: “To my father, who brought me there; to the memory of my Father, which brought me here.”73 The meetings of the socialist-Zionist youth group Hashomer Hatzair, which Bauman attended in pre-war Poznan, are described in ways that both evoke his version of the vocation of the sociologist in Thinking Sociologically – the “defamiliarization of the familiar” – and the commitment to socialism as an “active utopia”: The world I wished to put in place of the existing one was conceived after the pattern of the Hashomer Hatzair branch. Looking back, I think it was the life we practised, rather than the life we fantasized about, which sedimented in the lasting image of a just world which from then on, and up to this day, I was to dream of, run after, mislead myself of finding.74 Something of Bauman’s interest in labour and class history, redolent of Memories of Class, is present in the description of his period of volunteering in the Shakhunya railway workshop in Russia. When the situation at the front line in the West was deteriorating and “Russia fought alone the united industrial might of Europe,” he recounts dignity and solidarity: “We were all hungry and tired. We all spoke in hoarse voice and coughed up phlegm. We strained our eyes, bloodied and itching. Our hands were covered with burns and scars. Yet there was meaning in everything we did … Not all inhuman conditions de-humanise. Some disclose humanity in man.”75 The reference to the dehumanizing consequences of inhuman conditions is a direct allusion to Janina Bauman’s Winter in the Morning, which greatly influenced her husband.76 Both of their turns to their tumultuous life experiences of persecution and exile were folded within a broader “Jewish turn.”77 In the early 1990s, when Zygmunt Bauman attained a stature which led to him giving interviews, he admitted there

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were three points at which Jewishness played a significant role in his life. First were the March events of 1968 when, he said, “My Polishness was publicly cast in doubt.”78 The second was Janina working on Winter in the Morning in the early 1980s, and the third was his period of work on the Jewish experience of modernity in the latter parts of the same decade which was also, we have seen, a period of autobiographical reflection. In between, there is silence.

Poland, Israel, Britain: Scene, Event, and Loci of Exile The wartime experience and the first expulsion from Poland led not to questions of Jewish heritage or the exclusion from the Polish nationstate, but rather to a co-extensive investment in sociology and socialism. It is well-established – and remains a source of controversy, especially in Poland – that Bauman’s formative development as a professional sociologist was deeply tied to the communist project in the Polish People’s Republic. His sociological imagination was also formed within the horizons of wartime devastation, which he vividly describes, for instance, at the beginning of an unpublished essay: Sixty years ago I returned from the battlefields of war to a devastated country, ravaged by the armies marching first from the West to the East and then back and each time marking their progress with towns and villages reduced to ashes and mounds of mutilated human corpses. Already before the German invasion Poland was an unhappy country, plagued by massive poverty and by myriads of wasted lives stripped of human dignity and robbed of hope; but now it lay prostrated, in ruins, plundered of whatever resources it could count on in pursuing the daunting task of recovery; the country was unsure of its future and uncertain of its powers to control and guide its course.79 It was this cataclysmic scene which prompted a turn from a childhood interest in physical sciences and cosmology to humanistic studies and social sciences.80 This depiction of being propelled in a particular direction by the history of violence is strikingly similar to his account

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of the embrace of communism. Asked about his relationship with fellow exile Leszek Kołakowski, and their affiliations with the Communist Party, Bauman said that both had believed the Polish communists offered the only plausible program for transcending the cataclysm of the war.81 Bauman’s position is congruent with those Polish Jews whose family members had been murdered over pits, in forest clearings, and in extermination camps, and who saw a chance to reconstitute their lives in communism. Bauman had seen with his own eyes the aftermath of Majdanek on the day after its liberation: “One of the first things I saw when my artillery group reached Lublin was Majdanek, one of the most terrible extermination camps that the Nazis built in occupied Poland. There were still heaps of corpses everywhere; their removal had only just begun.”82 Liberal institutions had seemed to many, Bauman included, at best powerless to prevent the atrocities. They appeared to many in the 1930s and 1940s to be unravelling in the face of challenging interpretations of the modern cultural and political programs, namely fascism and communism.83 Bauman must be understood as a product of the historical development whereby, as Dan Diner and Jonathan Frankel summarized, “communism represented for the Jews perhaps the most radical encounter with modernization and modernity. As an ideology, it posited the total merger and disappearance of the Jewish people into mankind.”84 Disappeared into humanity, Bauman turned to Marxism-Leninism, and gradually to the revisionist form known as Marxist-humanism. It is too often forgotten that it was Bauman’s involvement in this movement and especially with the student movement, in addition to his Jewishness, which led to expulsion and exile in 1968. Bauman’s concerns were networked, emerging in dialogue with figures including Bronisław Baczko, Maria Hirszowicz, Julian Hochfeld, Leszek Kołakowski, and Stefan Morawski. Hochfeld and his young collaborators Bauman  and Hirszowicz, along with others like Szymon Chodak, Włodzimierz Wesołowski, and Jerzy Wiatr, established a centre for the sociology of political relations at the University of Warsaw. Their manifesto, “Marxism and the Sociology of Political Relations,” was published in the inaugural edition of Studia Sociologiczno-Politycnze, a prominent revisionist publication edited by Julian Hochfeld from 1958 until he became deputy director of the UNESCO Social Sciences

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Department in 1962.85 Their revisionism under the banner of Hochfeld’s “open Marxism” also encompassed an openness to other traditions of thought: phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory, structuralism, hermeneutics, and so on. This frequently led Bauman to be charged with opening up the young people that he taught to Western ideas.86 There were also international networks. The period in Poland inaugurated by the death of Stalin and cemented with the Polish October, following the establishment of the International Sociological Association in 1949, coincided with the development of a transnational intellectual space in which international sociology was itself situated and which challenges the myth that the Cold War period allowed no room for east-west communication. Good timing was a theme in Bauman’s life, personal and professional. As Wagner suggests, “Bauman was fortunate to graduate in 1956, a year that witnessed a spectacular increase in the ability of Polish scholars to travel abroad … He became a scholar with international mobility.”87 Key in Bauman’s case was the Ford Foundation scheme that enabled him to work at the LSE with Robert McKenzie. Later, in 1966–67, he was a visiting Simon fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, where he worked with Max Gluckman, himself a Jewish émigré from South Africa and a leading figure in social anthropology in the late-colonial and decolonial periods. He also visited other departments in Britain, including Leicester (on invitation of the exile Ilya Neustadt).88 This British connection is part of the story of how Zygmunt Bauman made a name for himself in a networked scene of power of some consequence for his exile. As the anthropologist-turnedsociologist of colonialism and the Third World, Peter Worsley wrote in his autobiography about the 1965 ISA World Congress in Stressa, Italy, “I was particularly impressed by Zygmunt Bauman, and was able later to play an intermediary part in getting him to the UK when he was thrown out, firstly, from Poland, during a phase of antisemitism, but allowed to go to Israel.”89 Bauman also travelled across the Atlantic for conferences, and his name circulated among the elite networks of Western sociology. His Marxist-humanism saw him rub shoulders with international figures of the New Left like Ralph Miliband and C.W. Mills, the latter of whom wrote to Bauman as early as 1961 to express his wish to return to Warsaw

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to see “all my friends in Poland.”90 Bauman also had contact with significant names in US sociology circles. Reinhard Bendix requested that he oversee the Polish translation of his book on Max Weber, and Amitai Etzioni made a similar request about his book on organizations.91 Nevertheless, this was not power-free intellectual space that transcended the Iron Curtain and the core-periphery dynamics of knowledge production. Most obviously, there were the difficulties associated with obtaining exit visas. Scholars from the East were also subject to more subtle forms of differencing. Bauman was invited to participate in international symposiums and conferences, but mostly on the proviso that he talk about “Polish issues.” Seymour Martin Lipset invited him to a session on political sociology to speak on the party system in Poland.92 Serge Hurtig, general secretary of the International Political Science Association, invited Bauman to a meeting in Brussels to speak on Polish youth and politics.93 Though he wrote on each of these Polish issues, his broader interests did not seem as appreciated. Tellingly, those of his works that were translated in English language annual reviews of journals like The Polish Sociological Bulletin, obviously intended as a presentation of Polish sociology for an international readership, tended to be essays on Polish issues likely to have been developed out of these conferences.94 His more general contributions to the sociology of culture, sociological theory, and class in comparative perspective, dating from the middle of the 1950s, remained in Polish until the late 1960s. The situation was different across the Berlin Wall on the continent of Europe itself, especially in France. Here, Bauman was one of the figures that circled on an outer orbit around Recherches sémiotiques, edited by Julia Kristeva, whom he corresponded with in French. That journal published his essay “Semiotics and the Function of Culture,” originally delivered at the 1966 International Conference in Semiotics in Kazimierz Dolny, at which he had met Kristeva and others.95 He also exchanged letters with Maurice Godelier, first a student of Claude Lévi-Strauss and now one of his foremost interpreters.96 This was Bauman’s “Lévi-Straussian period,” as he wrote in the “lost book” Sketches in the Theory of Culture, seized at the point of exile and rediscovered by Dariusz Brzeziński.97 This remarkable collection of essays is a symbol of a lost connection to French structuralism, of an intellectual network that was not rewoven after the severance of exile following the March events of 1968. Bruno

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Latour would later remark to Bauman, while inquiring about translating Bauman’s 1992 book Intimations of Postmodernity, that “I discover with amazement that there is nothing of yours available in France.”98 Another symbol is the paper “Marx and the Contemporary Theory of Culture,” submitted as a background paper to a Paris symposium in May 1968 in the midst of France’s social and political convulsions.99 Over forty contributions to the conference were published in a volume called Marx and Contemporary Scientific Thought; Bauman’s text appears alongside the likes of Raymond Aron, Mihailo Marković, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Anouar Abdel-Malek. In exile at the time of its occurrence, Bauman’s non-attendance at the conference was a micro-illustration of Tony Judt’s reminder that the vista of 1968 looked very different depending on whether the vantage point was the streets of Paris or those of Prague or Warsaw.100 As Bauman noted in an unpublished essay from this period: “It would seem that the young people from the Sorbonne and London School of Economics would like to ‘Easternize’ their West somewhat — while their colleagues behind the Iron Curtain dream, instead, of ‘Westernizing’ their East.”101 Bauman had been removed from his academic position in Warsaw for his purported role in fomenting student protests, and in a campaign of intimidation and anti-Semitic vitriol he and his family were effectively forced into exile. How he might have longed to be in Paris. The city had more significance for the Baumans than its reputation as a centre of intellectual exile. As Janina Bauman recounts, after her husband’s 1966 stint in Manchester, he met her at the Le Bourget airport whereupon they began a journey in a new Cortina along the Loire, into Italy, round Yugoslavia, Austria, and Prague, and back to their home in Warsaw: Those spring days in Paris shine in my memory like a dazzling light that casts into shade all the miseries of earlier and later times. We were young again, we were free, we were together. Paris offered up its beauty like a huge table spread with delicacies for the starving. A thrilling day imperceptibly grew into an intoxicating night and then there was a day again.102 Not long after their return, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, things darkened. Masked thinly by the label of “anti-Zionism,” General Mieczysław Moczar, with Władysław Gomułka’s approval, led a campaign

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of cleansing that resulted in a mass emigration of Jewish intellectuals, professionals, and party officials. Between 1968 and 1972, more than 13,000 Jews emigrated from Poland after being dismissed from their professional posts. Communism in Poland, including its promises of universal humanity, revealed itself to Bauman as an illusion. There is a wonderful image presented by Anna Sfard in Izabela Wagner’s account of Bauman’s stay in Israel between 1969 and 1971. So concerned was he to be able to understand Hebrew (in which he would lecture his students in Tel Aviv and Haifa) that he would read from his notebook of Hebrew words while waiting at red traffic lights.103 This evokes a specific challenge of the writer in exile.104 Visual artists in exile, for example, do not feel the same effect on their interpretation of experience into cultural forms. Exilic writers from East-Central Europe were presented, by and large, with different linguistic communities.105 An aptitude for language learning is therefore often a key criterion of successful exile. Bauman the polyglot – raised in Polish, in proximity to Yiddish, and for whom it was incumbent to learn Russian in the context of the flight into the Soviet Union – undoubtedly had this. He wrote in Russian and Hebrew in his correspondence of the 1960s, and could understand and speak Czech, Italian, and Spanish. In order to position himself in elite networks in international sociology, Bauman had to speak the “international” languages of the rest, mainly English but also French and German. It is often remarked that he was an excellent writer in English, and it is worth noting that some of the most personal of his unpublished autobiographical writings were written in English. In Israel however, the majority of his manuscripts and correspondence were in Polish, continuous with generations of European Jewish migrants to Israel who often lived in linguistic enclaves and continued to write in their native languages.106 In Israel, Bauman made tentative steps toward the reconstitution of intellectual networks. The opportunities opened up by migration led to projects such as an unsuccessful research proposal for a project in “cultural focus and semiotic density” that would lead, in the author’s eyes, to “creating in the Tel-Aviv University the first in Israel and one of the very few in the world centre for cultural semiotics.”107 Disappointed ambition seems to have been a theme of his stay in exile, in part a product of the generational aspects of migrations to Israel,

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where there was sometimes a hostility toward newcomers among those who arrived earlier, not least with Bauman as an avowed socialist and former communist.108 Exiles and émigrés formed a readership that made possible the publication of exilic newspapers, journals, and books.109 Among the most important from the Polish perspective was Kultura, established in 1947 by Instytut Literacki (the Literary Institute) and based in Paris after a short stint in Rome. Edited by Jerzy Giedroyc and ceasing publication in 2000 after Giedroyc’s death, Kultura played a prominent role in the Polish underground literary scene, publishing the likes of Miłosz, Jan Kott, and Adam Michnik. Bauman published an article in Kultura, from exile in Israel, called “O frustracji i kuglarzach” (On frustration and the conjurers) in 1968, a political analysis of the March events, the student movements, and the problem of youth and generations from the comparative East-West perspective already honed during the years in Britain. This piece, among several others, is emblematic of an attempt to rescue socialism from the Soviet barbarism from which he had been ejected, foreshadowing the arguments in his Socialism: The Active Utopia. As he wrote in the final line of the unpublished and evocatively titled “At the Crossroads in a World at a Crossroads,” “despite all forms of social oppression throughout the world today, against all forms of capitalist reaction and degenerate offshoots of communism – the future world will be socialist. Or it will not be at all.”110 Throughout all the texts of this period, which take up the various social-historical strands whose concatenation forced him and his family into exile (Marxist-humanism, the student movement, Polish-Jewish relations), one detects a profound disappointment. As Tony Judt wrote, 1968 heralded the end of “the revisionist moment in Eastern Europe [which] afforded writers, filmmakers, economists, journalists and others a brief window of optimism about an alternative Socialist future.”111 And thus, in his second exile, Bauman no longer saw any salvation in large-scale ideational projects of redemption, be that Soviet communism or nationalism, not least Israeli nationalism.112 This was intimated in a 1971 piece published in Haaretz, which Bauman later opined was the only prediction he ever made that came true. Titled “Israel Must be Prepared for Peace,” it explored through various sociological lenses, including the problems of unemployment, education, youth, and demilitarization, the effect of military occupation on society. The country, he asserted,

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stood at a crossroads between demilitarization and further militaristic entrenchment, and if it proceeded in the latter direction, it would have devastating consequences for the region: “The time has come to harness all of our energy towards the discussion, experimentation and planning required so that we are not caught by peace unawares, not ready to win the battle to build a society as we had learned to vanquish enemies at war. We will do our future a disservice if we adhere too closely to priorities rooted in the past.”113 Bauman later said that he had left Israel because he did not want to become a perpetrator of a nationalism, having arrived as a victim of one.114 He held that the dark scenario intimated in the Haaretz piece had come to pass. He visited Israel in the early 1990s, two decades after leaving, during the brief episode of the government of Yitzhak Rabin. This was, Bauman said, a “time of hope that the nation was about to come to its senses, stop the rot and follow the road out of the impasse,” which was extinguished when Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli nationalist in 1995.115 Bauman returned to Israel again some twenty years later in 2013, having two years prior argued in the Polish periodical Polityka for a connection between the policy of separation in the West Bank and the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto.116 Bauman’s exilic experience and interpretation of matters in Israeli politics and society were marked by a vocabulary of inevitability, with words like “mission,” “duty,” and “premonition.” The British period of his exile began with a lesson in contingency. Edward Boyle, an English parliamentary Conservative and vice chancellor of the University of Leeds, thought his campus too ideologically uniform and recruited two Marxists for the Department of Social Studies: Ralph Miliband and Zygmunt Bauman. As Shaun Best notes, Boyle may also have been seeking to take the sting out of the Warwick Files affair, the issue of conservative-minded universities collecting information on the political positions of students and staff.117 Then, the head of department, Albert Hanson, a professor of politics who had established politics and public administration at the university, collapsed and died in the House of Commons while attending a select committee hearing on nationalized industry. Boyle asked Bauman to step in.118 Of course, this opportunity presented itself because Bauman had a name, the particularly prominent position of the intellectual sphere in Poland and the prominence of sociology undoubtedly a factor in his exile.

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C.W. Mills, commenting on Kołakowski being singled out by Gomułka (by implication this was also a comment on Bauman), noted in amazement, “However hard did I try to push and kick the American political establishment and spit in its face no one paid attention. In your country the word counts. And so words can change things. What you, intellectuals, do matters.”119 In Britain, as in Mills’s America, intellectuals – and especially sociologists like Bauman – were largely left alone and paid little attention. This was both a bane and a privilege, as Bauman reflected: To say that sociology had a “bad press” [in Britain] would be to play down that mixture of hostility and ridicule in which it seemed to be held … Once more, I was shocked: how remarkably prestigious the public position of sociology was by comparison in France, Germany, or indeed my native Poland, where it settled in the public worldview on the tide of the late-nineteenth[-]century rising optimism and self-confidence. But it was the “internal exile,” imposed externally and adopted without much disquiet, that for Bauman characterized the distinctive quality of British sociology, one which seemed to tessellate neatly with his own exilic position.120 In Britain, exile offered opportunity for Bauman, specifically the chance to utilize his weak ties to the new intellectual networks in which he became enmeshed. His intellectual trajectory in exile did not inhere in the total severing of intellectual networks but in their reconstitution, often in loose ties to a number of networks simultaneously. He remained active in circles of “Sovietology” and the study of communist politics and societies, and in recognition of this work, on the eve of his retirement from Leeds, he was offered a visiting chair at Yale University in the field of “Soviet and/or Comparative Communist studies.”121 At Leeds, he seemed to go out of his way to avoid the label of Sovietologist. As he admitted in an interview, “After leaving Poland I was inundated with offers to join all sorts of ‘Sovietologist’ establishments, and with invitations to write for their journals … I refused the offers, I had no intention of living the second half of my life off the first.”122 In exile Bauman saw, in a British sociology in a state of “internal exile,” an opportunity to distance himself from the position of providing Eastern grist to the

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Western mill of theoretical tracts on modernization and its pathologies behind the iron curtain. The focus, building on his late-Polish and Israeli concerns, was on the sociology of culture, spelled out in his inaugural lecture at Leeds, “Culture, Values and the Science of Society,” and culminating in his Culture as Praxis.123 There were also engagements with critical theory, such as in Towards a Critical Sociology, and a confrontation with the legacy of socialism. In Socialism: The Active Utopia, published in a series edited by Tom Bottomore, Bauman argued that socialism could be posited only as a counter-culture of the existing reality, capitalist and communist, and that lost its critical power whenever institutionalized in a declared final form. Bauman was surrounded by colleagues at Leeds who were, as he was in Hermeneutics and Social Science, engaged in reckonings with hermeneutics.124 In Memories of Class, published in 1982, Bauman developed a fascinating and somewhat neglected intermediary text, which delved back into his long-standing interest in the UK labour movement and looks forward to the development of his sociology of postmodernity. Even accounting for Bauman’s frosty reception among the intellectuals of the New Left, Memories of Class is surprising for how little attempt the author makes to ingratiate himself to the more mainstream proclamations and intellectual concerns of his British counterparts, though there were constructive and critical comments on the manuscript from his friend Ralph Miliband.125 After exile, Bauman was positioned in the country he had been forced to leave as a persona non grata. By decree, he would no longer be cited, his texts would no longer be stocked in libraries, and he would be unable to appear physically in Poland for another two decades. Here, the positioning of Bauman consisted in the attempt to remove all traces. And herein lies another crucial challenge the exile poses to the sociology of intellectuals. With Bauman, one cannot make do with position and reception in one society but has to deal with the challenge of a plurality of sociopolitical fields and publics; Bauman is not the same sociologist and intellectual in Britain and in Poland. Bauman knew full well the double-sided nature of establishment figures paying attention to what he said. This awareness was something that dogged him, certainly in relation to Poland, from his exile as a dissident intellectual until his death as an ex-communist and defender of the marginalized, and it continues

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to this day. Nevertheless, he continued to write on Poland – notably on the Solidarność movement and on the dissolution of communism – in journals like the US-based New Left publication, Telos, throughout the 1980s. From then on, as the communist order unravelled, the question of return was posed.126

Return: Exile as Project and Mission In 1988, Bauman was invited to give a lecture at the University of Warsaw. This crystallized a change in his thought. As he noted to his interlocutor in a Polish interview entitled “Homecoming,” after an Alfred Schutz essay, “When you proposed a conversation on the topic of émigré life and I started thinking about it, I was shocked to realise that I had never thought of myself in those categories.”127 The theme of exile assumed a particular importance for Bauman around this time. In an extraordinary document in the Bauman archive – a collection of aphoristic fragments composed during a visiting position at St John’s College, Newfoundland, a world away from Leeds128 – Bauman wrote that “it is only in exile that one realises to what an important degree the world has always been a world of exiles. And so noted, each in his own way, other residents: Simmel, Mannheim, Schutz, Adorno.”129 These figures, and others besides, no longer appeared to Bauman only as theoretical reference points but simultaneously as actors in the drama of Jewish modernity (which I turn to in chapter 4). Deeply personal questions of lost time and memory were foregrounded in the work of Bauman’s Jewish turn, whose apex was Modernity and the Holocaust, a major intellectual intervention emerging in the wake of the proliferation of Holocaust memorialization from the 1980s onward, and whose influence can be traced across numerous comparative contexts. Modernity and the Holocaust was avowedly universalistic in its approach. Elsewhere, he claimed that “the mission of the Holocaust survivors is salvation of the world from another catastrophe. For this purpose, they need carry witness to the hidden, yet all the same very much alive and resilient gruesome and murderous tendencies” that lurk in the everyday.130 He candidly wrote, in a knowingly normative idiom in his autobiographical reflections, “Being truly Jewish, means to strive for a world without tribes.”131

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The reception and role of Bauman’s Holocaust sociology in his rise to public prominence in various contexts has also to do with the question of European unification. It was especially resonant in the “post-communist” moment, in which societies of the former Eastern bloc encountered the European drive for a cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust in order to access the European Union and other institutions like the Council of Europe.132 Holocaust remembrance became, in Tony Judt’s memorable phrase, a “European entry ticket.”133 Bauman’s book is firmly part of this cosmopolitan vision. Modernity and the Holocaust was, he said in his Amalfi Prize lecture of 1991, addressed to a “common European experience,” which transcended the “until recently deep and seemingly unbridgeable divide between what we used to call ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Europe.” He continued, “The ideas that went into the book and its message gestated as much in my home university of Warsaw as they did in the company of my colleagues in Britain, the country that – in the years of exile – offered me my second home.”134 Another major influence during this time of return was an engagement with a body of Polish-Jewish literary writing represented by the likes of Adolf Rudnicki, Julian Stryjkowski, and Julian Tuwim. Referencing Edmond Jabès’s wry observation that “First I thought I was a writer … then I realised I was a Jew. Then I no longer distinguished the writer in me from the Jew,” Bauman suggested that such Polish-Jewish writers would almost certainly have added that “the difficulty of writing is also the same as the difficulty of being a Pole, a Jew, and a Pole and a Jew at the same time. And that only when one is all this – Pole, Jew, Jewish Pole, Polish Jew – can one truly appreciate what the difficulty of writing is like.”135 This is a difficulty that inheres in the vanishing of Polish Jewry, Poland figuring in the aftermath of the Holocaust as a “haunted land.”136 Bauman described it thus: The creative part of the Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust and the Gulag has been one way or another pushed out of the homeland of culture to which they belonged. Most of them found it impossible to accommodate to another culture. They took the Polishness, with which they were filled to the brim, with them. But the Polishness they took and with which they found themselves conversing when abroad resided solely inside them; they built

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for themselves an imaginary Poland, a Polish-Jewish homeland which existed nowhere else. They found communication with the “native” Jews no less, if not more, difficult than that of the country they left behind. They still belonged to Poland, but lived far away. Life in exile is always full of tragedies. In their case, however, the tragedy was two-fold: the Poland they belonged to existed no more. Their homelessness was their only homeland.137 The personal resonance of these writers is apparent in his avowedly autobiographical writing from around this time. In his essay on Adolf Rudnicki, he pulls out a line uttered by a character in his novel Live Sea, Dead Sea: “I always think of myself as a Pole; the rest is my, complicated, business. If Poland thinks otherwise, it is Her, complicated, business.”138 The similarity with various passages in “The Poles, the Jews and I” is striking: Yes, I am a Pole. Polishness is my spiritual home, Polish language is my world. This is my decision. You do not like it? I am sorry, but this is your decision. I am a Polish Jew. I’ll never shed my Jewishness, membership of a tradition which gave the world its moral sense, its conscience, its thrust for perfection, its millennial dream. I do not see why my Jewishness should be difficult to square with my Polishness. This is my problem. You think it cannot be squared? I am sorry, but this is your problem.139

An Exilic Self-Concept? The Universalization of Exile In a study of Richard Rorty, a thinker whom Bauman read, admired, and corresponded with in the 1980s, Neil Gross developed the framework of the “intellectual self-concept” as a contribution to the sociology of intellectuals and ideas: Thinkers tell stories to themselves and others about who they are as intellectuals. They are then strongly motivated to do intellectual work that will, inter alia, help to express and bring together the disparate elements of these stories. Everything else being equal, they will gravitate toward ideas that make this kind of synthesis possible.140

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Gross’s Rorty, as with Baert’s Sartre, or those nodal figures of Bourdieu’s academic field or in Collins’s intellectual networks, is unproblematically positioned in space. These figures are centred. Exile, by contrast, is experienced in a fractured register as centrelessness. This is thematized in many statements on exile by intellectual exiles themselves. Exilic life is “damaged” or “mutilated” (Adorno); the exile’s standpoint shifts amid the flux of history, which propels them (Mannheim); it is “contrapuntal” and suspended between the twin temptations of belonging and estrangement (Said). In the afterword to Liquid Modernity, Bauman argued that exile pertains not so much to a relation with a particular physical space – the leaving of one territory to take up residence in another – but instead to an ethos. He also argued that the denizens of the liquid modern world, a “world sliced into fragments and episodes, the tangled network of criss-crossing connection, looped or blind tracks and an absent centre,” all have a “pre-taste of exile.”141 Elsewhere, he wrote with a significant autobiographical inflection: “The peculiarities of my biography have only dramatized and brought into full view the kind of condition which is nowadays quite common and on the way to becoming almost universal.”142 But most consciousness and reflection on exile, as well as action and conduct in exile, is immature. The pre-taste takes on a maturity once it transforms from fate into destiny. To embrace exile as destiny, Bauman argued, is nothing less than to make a vocation of the endeavour “to explore in depth the quandary of the human condition,” as does the critical sociologist.143 Critical sociology is exilic. In her Placeless People, Lyndsey Stonebridge speaks of “the risk of erasure between forms of literary cosmopolitanism and the historical reality of forced migration … the so-called greatness of the ‘writer in exile’ is challenged by the fact that millions do not, in fact, come and go freely.”144 Bauman knew this well. The late-twentieth-century intellectual movements of which he was a foremost figure were, in a sense, a product of the unprecedented diffusion of spaces for interaction that accompanies the rise of mass air travel, as well as the development of an international mail system and later of email. Many of the letters in Bauman’s archive, including his own, contain anguished reflections on busy travelling schedules.145 Bauman was uneasily part of a global academic elite, which experienced the world in a manner akin to the tourist.146 In his Globalization, he wrote of a new bifurcation between a world of tourists and one of vagabonds:

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For the inhabitants of the first world – the increasingly cosmopolitan, extraterritorial world of global businessmen, global culture managers or global academics, state borders are levelled down, as they are dismantled for the world’s commodities, capital, and finances. For the inhabitant of the second world, the walls built of immigration controls, of residence laws and of ‘clean streets’ and ‘zero intolerance’ policies, grow taller; the moats separating them from the sites of their desire and of dreamed-of redemption grow deeper, while all bridges, at the first attempt to cross them, prove to be drawbridges.147 Exile, then, is not banalized or metaphorized. It nevertheless contains possibilities. Bauman saw that the refugee – forced across borders into the exilic condition – brings with them a message. They are, Bauman wrote in one of his last books, “embodiments of the collapse of order … of an order that has lost its binding force … Those nomads – not by choice but by the verdict of a heartless fate – remind us, irritatingly, infuriatingly and horrifyingly, of the (incurable?) vulnerability of our own position and of the endemic fragility of our hard-worn well-being.”148 Bauman’s words echo those of the American journalist Dorothy Thompson, expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934. In her times, as in ours, nationalism was “turning the world into a jungle” and refugees were “merely people forced to run away from one part of the jungle to another part of it.” Like Mannheim, Bauman, Arendt, Said, and other occupiers of the exilic position, “their personal tragedy” serves “one great social purpose.” She continued, “They are and should be recognised as an advancing crowd shouting a great warning: The jungle is growing up, and the jungle is on fire.”149 These words, written in 1938, are deeply expressive of that conjunction of biography and history that C.W. Mills termed the sociological imagination. They are also full of foreboding. They evoke jungles like the infamous refugee camp at Calais – itself part of what Bauman termed the “archipelago of exceptions”150 – and point toward the possibility of cataclysmic migrations forced by global heating. Our global interdependence means that disaster cannot be compartmentalized. It seeps, and its amorphous movement unravels the boundaries that we draw to demarcate who and what belong where. It simply overcomes, submerges, drowns those architectural semblances of order which comprise the human artifice. For Czesław Miłosz, this

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message of indivisibility was carried by the intellectuals in exile from the east who find themselves in the West: if the disaster exists in one place, it will exist everywhere.151 “Imagination,” wrote Miłosz elsewhere, in his semi-autobiographical notes on exile, is “always spatial” and as such “points north, south, east and west of some central, privileged place.”152 Herein lies another possibility of exile. The marginal yet creative standpoint of exile and its hermeneutics of estrangement does not simply inhere in the co-existence of two centres from which understanding emanates. The centres do not coalesce to create yet another centre, as in a Venn diagram. In the dialogical tension between the centre of expulsion and the centre of refuge, both centres are relativized. Exilic positionality is itself a bulwark against the myopic universalization of Eurocentrism, because it brings into question the very idea of a (European) centre from which to universalize. The exilic position does not determine, delimit, and circumscribe the standpoint, but makes possible the appearance of figures, events, and phenomena within its field of vision precisely because it is a position of movement. The exilic intellectual, in Bauman’s words, is a “universal stranger” whose position – which he termed, counter-intuitively, an “un-position” – is “the only cognitive determinant of universally binding truth.” The exilic intellectual “aims at the effacement of all divisions which stand in the way of uniform, essential humanity.”153 It is thus that the exilic position opens up onto the multiplicity of modernity.

2

Writing the Multiplicity of Modernity

“I’ve failed to learn any other form of life except writing,” wrote Zygmunt Bauman in This Is Not a Diary; “a day without scribbling feels like a day wasted or criminally aborted, a duty neglected, a calling betrayed.”1 Writing was a daily task, beginning before sunrise.2 It seemed to be a compulsion. To a friend, he described Postmodernity and Its Discontents, published in 1997, as “the last book in my life.”3 In 2003, to the same friend, he wrote that he was writing Liquid Love and Wasted Lives, “my two really and truly last books.”4 Such declarations of finality, followed by a flurry of publications, were common.5 Writing was continuous with reading. As he put it in Modernity and Ambivalence, “Reading cannot be fulfilled without writing. The reader is a writer while he reads; readers write their books into the books they are reading so that these books could be read.”6 He described their relationship as akin to that between investment and production, a binary that aided the division of a day’s work, writing taking place in the morning and reading following in the afternoon.7 This union of reading and writing can be called thinking. This mundane intellectual activity generates “social knowledge,” to use the terms of a recent contribution to the sociology of intellectuals.8 Sociologists, as one might expect, are among the foremost contributors to the bundles of description, analysis, and interpretation of human action, behaviour, and subjectivity which constitute social knowledge, and the groups, networks, markets, and organizations in which they are situated. And yet the process of the creation of sociological knowledge, and the forms in which such knowledge is registered and communicated, has only rarely been the subject of sociological study. Neglected are

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the practices of sociologists, “the ensembles of patterned activities” by which they “confront and structure the situated tasks with which they are engaged.”9 Bauman is an exemplary figure of a public sociology, one whose descriptive, analytical, and normative statements constitute public interventions in matters of social and political significance. As a public  intellectual, Bauman’s interventions into such matters were overwhelmingly written. This includes lecturing and interviews, which both took written forms; his lectures were typically read from transcripts prepared in advance and dialogic interviews were preferably conducted in writing. Moreover, Bauman is among the most self-consciously writerly of sociologists. His sociology unashamedly breached that line between science and literature that constitutes the discipline’s founding tension.10 He frequently made reference to literary texts in his writings, and when asked about influences, often named literary sources over scholarly ones, among them Cervantes, Kafka, Musil, Borges, Canetti, Calvino, and later Saramago, Sebald, and Houellebecq. Consequentially, most of these were essayists as well as novelists, and to varying degrees essayistic novelists. Bauman’s sociology is avowedly literary, deploying tropes of analogy, dialogue, narrativity, and especially metaphor.11 He self-consciously imbibed the “spirit of the novel” as understood by Milan Kundera. Just as literature is “grounded in the relativity and ambiguity of all things human” and is thus “incompatible with the totalitarian universe … of one single Truth,” so sociology pierces through the curtain of “common sense” appearances to reveal disavowed possibilities.12 Despite writing propaganda novels in the 1950s under the pen name Julian Żurowicz, Bauman was not a “literary-sociological hybrid” as we might call the likes of Gabriel Tarde, W.E.B. Du Bois, Albert Memmi, Ann Oakley, and Steven Lukes, who wrote or have written novels in addition to specialist sociological tracts.13 Like certain of his peers and friends, his intellectual creativity was pursued in other forms, especially in photography at a time of disillusion with academic sociology in the mid-1980s.14 His writing, however, was always sociological writing, broadly understood, unlike correspondents such as Kurt H. Wolff, who wrote poetry and composed operas. The writerly aspirations of Bauman’s sociology would come to be used against him. In C.W. Mills’s terms, from the notes on intellectual

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craftmanship at the end of his Sociological Imagination, Bauman was especially in his later years dismissed in a manner akin to the “mere literary man” or, worse still, “a mere journalist.”15 The label of “writer,” to evoke Adorno’s reflections on the essay form, was cast upon Bauman as a pejorative “garland” by the self-appointed guardians of the discipline of sociology.16 As if acutely aware of such ascriptions, Bauman opined that “I am certainly not what the French call a ‘littérateur,’ or the German a ‘Dichter.’ My craft is not that of belles-lettres – literature as an end in itself. But it would make me happy if I possessed the skill.”17 Nevertheless, I want to follow the thread that presents itself when we consider Bauman as a writer. My contribution in this chapter is to an outline of a sociology of writing, building on the previous chapter on the “exilic position.” The experience and social positioning of exile points toward a certain preoccupation with writing, and writing is itself a particular modality of exilic creation. Indeed, Bauman himself draws a connection between what he calls the “exilic condition” and creation, including the activity of writing, referring to the specific qualities of literary and artistic exile, “an exile which articulates itself in words or images, which constitutes itself into a communicable experience of exile.”18 More than this, though, I intend to centralize form as a key dimension of sociological commentary. Seen in this way, Bauman’s writing opens up onto those cognate disciplines of sociology in which questions of style and form are central. Griselda Pollock reminds us that all “sociological analysis,” like the visual arts, cinema, or literary fiction, “is itself a conditioned practice of representation of the social.”19 How, then, does the social situation of intellectual exile condition a particular form of representation of the social practised in sociological writing? In pursuing an answer to this question, I suggest that a certain form of writing – essayism – has frequently figured as an adequate way of registering in writing the interpretation of the exilic experience. Of course, essayists are not only exiles and exiles are not only essayists. What I highlight, rather, is an elective affinity between the exilic position and the essayistic orientation. The position of the exile corresponds to an essayism that itself mirrors and captures the multiplicity of modernity experienced most markedly by the exile.

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The Sociologist as Writer Reinhart Koselleck used the term Sattelzeit (saddle period) to capture the sense of the transformation of historical consciousness in the eighteenth century. Above all manifested in the intellectual movement of Enlightenment, this transformation inhered in an opening between, in his famous pairing, a “horizon of expectation” and a “space of experience.”20 This was the basis for Koselleck’s investigation into a semantic field of “concepts of movement” – revolution, progress, growth, crisis, evolution – the concepts which, in short, constitute the universe of modern social and political discourse. Each corresponded to an ever-burgeoning sense that the course of time did not unfold as sheer repetition or according to circular rhythms of ascent and decline. It was instead linear and pointed to a future that appeared as an empty space on the horizon of the present, into which all manner of designs and blueprints could be projected. More and more, the future came to be understood as pliable, open to human agency and mastery, and not requiring appeals to transcendental or divine authority or aeonian tradition. This novel understanding of time and the role of human agency within its flow constitutes what we call the condition of modernity. “New experiences,” wrote Koselleck, “force consciousness to work through them.”21 The novel experience of modernity therefore needed interpretation.22 Koselleck argued that the novel, and more generally the figure of the writer, took on a crucial significance. The writer stepped in to address the incommensurability of a newly emerging historical reality and its linguistic processing. The literary analyst, the historian, the novelist, and the poet formed in their distinctive styles part of an avant-garde who could elucidate the new times and find a conceptual language capable of solidifying them.23 The experience of change was also felt within the transformation of social figurations in which writers were themselves situated. Writing increasingly came to be regarded as a specialized type of production, in communion with a “superior reality” of imaginative truth accessible by the artist. It is in this sense that the autonomous creative writer emerged as a social type.24 The nineteenth century – which at once inherited and institutionalized the spirit of Enlightenment – was an extraordinarily fertile moment in the history of literary institutions, especially national archives. National literatures had played a key role in the development of nation-states

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and the dissolution of local vernaculars and dialects into a common language, and archival collections had come to serve as catacomb-like repositories of monuments to the national spirit.25 Amid the tumult and social conflict of the sattelzeit, experienced as a time of increasing acceleration and dislocation, there developed a feverish concern with the preservation, conservation, and, as Ranger and Hobsbawm canonically put it, the invention of tradition.26 Hans-Georg Gadamer identified this “Romantic refraction” as a sufficient condition for the emergence of nineteenth-century historical sciences and, as such, the genesis of modern historiography.27 The literary avant-garde and the Romantic historians would come to take their place in a field of tensions that also included an entrenched scientific world view. The nineteenth century saw the development of institutional forms for the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, including the research university, the laboratory, and the humanities seminar. The self-definition of science as a counter to religious world views gained traction, as new disciplines such as biology and physics became established. There also emerged the social type of the “scientist” as a distinct figure from the “scholar” or “intellectual”; while the latter two addressed wider publics and were politically engaged, the scientist was a detached “professional” specialist in a narrowly defined area of expertise.28 This modern notion of science was inextricable from industrialization, with its incursion into nature and exploitation of human labour and raw materials. This was, as Jürgen Osterhammel termed it, the “century of coal” with energy as its “leitmotif.”29 The figure of the sociologist emerged in the nineteenth century into this force field of literary, historical, and scientific orientations, and as such they bore its epistemological tensions (explanation versus interpretation; nationalism versus cosmopolitanism; modernity versus tradition) most intensely. As Wolf Lepenies put it, from its inception as a selfconscious pursuit, sociology “oscillated between a scientific orientation which has led it to ape the natural sciences and a hermeneutic attitude which has shifted the discipline towards the realm of literature.”30 Many made appeals to the procedure and orientation of the natural sciences as a means to lend legitimacy to the new field of social sciences. Emulating the emergence of natural history in the eighteenth century, there appeared novel conceptualizations of social and political change that saw social formations passing through sequential stages of

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evolutionary development.31 Auguste Comte, in elaborating his “social physics” as an early forerunner of what he came to term “sociology,” developed a historical schema, which passed from theological through metaphysical to the positive stage of development. Herbert Spencer posited a scale between “militant” and “industrial” society on which varied forms of human cohabitation could be plotted. Social and political change, ultimately, was seen to be animated by hidden laws, which could be inferred through the application of reason. Moreover, taxonomic sciences such as ethnology and anthropology also flourished alongside the colonial enterprise. Armed with knowledge, the social scientist formed an alliance with state power. Space and time could be ordered and regulated, populations could be counted and categorized. Where disorder reigned, order could be imposed.32

Exile, Writing, and the Multiplicity of Modernity Such a vision was blown apart by the advent of the “European civil war” from 1914 to 1945.33 The profound temporal breach that the First World War represented is captured in Walter Benjamin’s elegy for the storyteller: “A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.”34 For the likes of Comte and Spencer, war was to become a relic in industrial society.35 For many soldiers conscripted from rural communities, the war was in fact a deadly initiation into industrial society. A fin de siécle gloominess born of profound skepticism toward the Whiggish narrative of Comte and Spencer was already present in the figures who institutionalized sociology, in Max Weber’s “disenchantment” and Durkheim’s “anomie,” for example. But it was rendered fully untenable by the First World War, not least because the war so deeply impacted the institutional development of sociology, destroying the continuity between the generation of “classical’ sociologists, who died shortly after the war, and lost promising students who had died in the fighting.36 The war entrenched the social form of Marxism that had preceded it and paved the way for the fascist project of modernity. In this interwar period, sociology became an extraterritorial enterprise, to evoke George Steiner’s terms, to a degree which undermines the tendency

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to narrate its history in terms of national traditions.37 The founding chair of the British Sociological Association, Morris Ginsberg, was born in Kelmė, a provincial town in Lithuania, occupied by the Russian Empire. Robert Merton (born Meyer Robert Schkolnick into a family of Yiddish-speaking Russian Jews who had left for the United States in 1904) and Reinhard Bendix (who had been part of anti-fascist groups in Germany in the 1930s) both served as presidents of the American Sociological Association. Jean-Michel Palmier argues that “there is an emigrant Dasein which determines the majority of exile creations.”38 How did this Dasein effect the formal dimensions of the writing of social thought? The fragmented life and the exilic position it bequeathed entailed the search for a style. To use Dubravka Ugrešić’s expression, it is through writing that the exile attempts to put their “broken life into some sort of shape,” to “order the chaos [they have] landed in through writing.”39 The fragmentary became a key theme or concept in the work of the exilic generation, as exemplified by Bauman himself (Life in Fragments), Cornelius Castoriadis (World in Fragments), and Agnes Heller (Philosophy of History in Fragments). Earlier, Hannah Arendt’s “fragmentary constellations,” drawing heavily on her friend Walter Benjamin’s famous theses on the philosophy of history, were complexes that illuminated “the criss-crossings of tendencies, trends and structures in culture, history, and society, all of which could have happened otherwise.”40 Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment was passed among friends in 1944 under the title of Philosophische Fragments.41 Adorno also deployed the image of a “message in a bottle” to articulate a particular form of communication. Indeed, ten entries omitted from Minima Moralia, an exemplary form of fragment writing, were entitled “messages in a bottle.”42 Recalling a wartime gathering of the exiled Institut für Sozialforschung on a Californian beach, a melancholy Adorno was noted by Leo Löwenthal to have said, “We should throw out a message in a bottle.”43 It was an image that also captured the mind of Horkheimer, who wrote, “In view of what is now threatening to engulf Europe … our present work is essentially destined to pass things down through the night that is approaching: a kind of message in a bottle.”44 In a 1931 letter, in a striking example of Hans Blumenberg’s metaphorology of the shipwreck as a paradigmatic vantage point of calamity, Walter Benjamin described himself as “a shipwrecked man on a sinking boat,

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clinging to the top of an already broken mast and trying to send a rescue signal.”45 The Frankfurt School thinkers in exile wrote for posterity, for readers of the future who might be on the other end of dark times (if they indeed did end), and as harbingers of a darkness that could recur if its generative conditions were not learned and the subject of constant vigilance. Expelled from European culture, they were attuned to the idea that modernization does not entail a straightforward progression toward more peaceable forms of cohabitation. More than this, modern societies contain within themselves the potential for specifically modern forms of barbarism, which undermine the core premises of modernization. “Modernity,” they sought to communicate in their messages, is shot through with contingency and indeterminacy and is thus liable to be realized in a plurality of paradoxical and contradictory forms, among which are included the destructive possibilities of Fascism and Nazism. In doing so, such thinkers critiqued the prevailing view of modernity as a master-concept denoting “an era and a set of institutions,” forming in Enlightenment Europe before exportation to all corners of the Earth.46 What the exiles experienced and interpreted was the multiplicity of modernity. Modernity is best conceived as a condition, defined by a distinct time-orientation and conception of human agency, a condition in which social life is increasingly oriented to a future that appears as a space for projecting possibilities within the present. These possibilities can only be realized by human beings themselves without recourse to some transcendental agency. This requires active, creative, and often conflictual interpretation of the modern social imaginary, a complex of significations, symbols, and claim-making concepts that give meaning to the condition of modernity. These interpretations are formed against the background of distinct historical experiences and socio-cultural traditions. Interpretation also has an anticipatory dimension – an orientation to a world to come. Differing interpretations of the time-orientation of modernity, mediated via an engagement with socio-cultural traditions and historical experiences, give rise to distinct institutional orders. Modernization refers to the institutionalization, or attempt at institutionalization, of these combined cultural and political interpretations across a range of interdependent sectors of society, which unfolds processually along specific historical trajectories or routes.47

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It does not follow, therefore, that interpretations of modernity and their institutionalization lead to “Modern Society” in the “Westerncentred” sense. “Modernization” is instantiated in a variety of specific forms that are entangled both with one another and in transnational relations of power. The challenge is to understand these different trajectories not as, to use the terms of Achille Mbembe, “a successionist gesture” but rather as “a particular fold or twist in the undulating fabric of the universe … a set of continuous, entangled folds of the whole.” In this sense, modernity is theorized and written as a “multiplicity with no outer limit.”48 There is an affinity between the multiplicity of modernity and the essay, a form which notoriously eludes classification and typification. Like sociology, the essay occupies the ambiguous space between science and literature.49 It is said to be typically a short non-fiction prose, but long novels by the likes of Broch, Joyce, Melville, and Musil are also called essayistic. Almost all definitions agree that the essay is marked by specific formal features. It is open-ended, provisional, and exploratory, a “fragmentary and ambulatory form,” which begins from concrete particulars and not from an overarching system.50 Moreover, the essay indicates the presence of an author as a constitutive feature, elucidating the position from which they disclose themselves. The essay also entails a dramatization of thought and constitutes a form of intellectual storytelling; ideas and their creators form part of the world being subjected to thought.51 Further, essays are positioned within a present but also transcend it, thus making them distinct from articles. Cynthia Ozick, for example, wrote that “an essay defies its date of birth, and ours too,” whereas an article is topically relevant and ephemeral.52 Almost all histories of the form begin with Michel de Montaigne’s Essais. The audacity of the form was rooted in its indeterminacy and provisionality, a working through of an idea or judgment rather than a final presentation of it.53 The term essai itself, as is well known, comes from the French word for “trial” or “attempt,” connoting a judgment. By the time of the Enlightenment, it was conceived of as a generic form, which had special appeal to an emergent reading public. As David Hume wrote, the essay was able to establish a “league betwixt the learned and the conversible worlds.”54 The essay reached its apogee at the turn of the twentieth century, at the time of the institutionalization of sociology, in the writings of figures as diverse as Emerson, Ortega y

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Gasset, Thoreau, Woolf, and Wordsworth. Essays, at this point, were texts with both literary and philosophical traits.55 In sociology, the essay was represented best in the work of Georg Simmel, for whom it is linked to the notion of multiplicity, the secret force of “interaction and dynamic interweaving” behind any perception of unity.56 Thus, Simmel’s apparently disparate and fragmentary social thought is not antithetical to totality but is rather attuned to the fundamentally relational and entangled constitution of sociality as such.57 The totality is only graspable, in this sense, in terms of the relations between the fragments that constitute it. As Siegfried Kracauer wrote of Simmel, the approach is not to formulate “a concept of its entirety” and subsume “all particulars into it,” but is rather to begin with “the particulars and [advance] from them into increasingly remote regions of the manifold, gradually forcing the entirety into the field of view.”58 György Lukács, channelling his teacher Georg Simmel, theorized the essay as “a form which separates it, with the rigour of a law, from all other art forms,” including those encompassed in the literary imagination. “The essay,” he argued, “is an autonomous and integral giving-of-form to an autonomous and complete life.”59 Its defining characteristic, for Lukács, is the processual character of its judging rather than its final judgment. The essay is thought-in-action, an attempt at understandingin-the-writing, corresponding to the incompleteness of any thought and understanding. In the interwar period, the essay came to stand as a form adequate to the experience of dislocation and trauma in need of interpretation. The era of the “novel-essay” culminated in the interwar period and stood as a symbol of the crisis of modernity.60 Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is an exemplary text in this regard.61 Through the cipher of Ulrich, Musil heralds the return of uncertainty, and posits the essayistic orientation as the adequate response since it is an inherently uncertain mode, a trying and a testing instead of an assertion of axiomatic truth. Essayism was, for Musil, an ethic corresponding to an attitude that he termed “possibilitarianism”: “If there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its justification for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility … a conscious utopianism that does not shrink from reality but sees it as a project, something yet to be invented.”62 This utopianism corresponds to the modality of the essay:

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It was more or less in the way an essay, in the sequence of its paragraphs, explores a thing from many sides without wholly encompassing it – for a thing wholly encompassed suddenly loses its scope and melts down to a concept that he believed he could rightly survey and handle the world and his own life … What is seemingly solid in this system becomes a porous pretext for many possible meanings; the event occurring becomes a symbol of something that perhaps may not be happening but makes itself felt through the symbol; and man as the quintessence of his possibilities, potential man, the unwritten poem of his existence, confronts man as recorded fact, as reality, as character.63 The tradition of essayism qua Musil has strong roots in Eastern and East-Central Europe. It links the novels of Franz Kafka and Joseph Conrad to the essays and poetics of Czesław Miłosz, for whom the indeterminacy and fragmentation of the essay form corresponded to the recognition of the fragility of the small nations of East-Central Europe. It also marks the writings of the exilic contemporaries of Bauman, such as Witold Gombrowicz, Danilo Kiš, Milan Kundera, and Dubravka Ugrešić. It is represented today in the writings of Olga Tokarczuk and her “constellation novels,” arrangements of fragments “that create constellations capable of describing more, and in a more complex way, multi-dimensionally.”64 A form based on fragments especially reflects Polish writing, born as it has been in the context of occupation and territorial contraction and expansion, and where multiple cultural populations have lived, spoken, and experienced together. As a character says in Tokarczuk’s Flights, “Constellation, not sequencing, carries the truth.”65 Karl Mannheim is part of a sociological lineage that strikes on similar formal qualities and elucidates the affinities between essayism and exile, which Bauman would come to inherit. Ideology and Utopia is, Mannheim writes, born of an “essayistic-experimental attitude,” marked by a “feeling of standing at the beginning of a movement instead of the end.” As sociology is preoccupied with social problems about which neither textbooks nor totalizing, consistent theoretical systems can be conceived, with questions “which an age has as yet neither fully perceived nor fully thought through,” it offers ripe material for applying the technique of

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the essay, which inheres in “leaping into any immediate problem … conveniently at hand and observing it for so long and from so many angles that finally some marginal problem of thought and existence [is] disclosed and illuminated.”66 The essay thus proceeds from and works with the kind of uncertainty that was rife in Mannheim’s time, acutely painful but also generative of new insights. The experimental form of the essay, “unceasingly sensitive to the dynamic nature of society” is precisely the outlook of the free-floating intelligentsia modelled after Mannheim’s own exilic position.67 In his 1931 essay “The Actuality of Philosophy,” Adorno also argued that the essayistic writer, because their thinking struck on the power of “freshly disclosed reality,” was continuously forced into the “risk of experimentation.”68 The essay is a modest form that springs from and speaks to experience, best suited for thinking without “first principles”; an essay begins from the cultural product or social phenomena that it takes as its object, and not from pre-defined theoretical frameworks and postulates.69 Adorno explicitly opposes the essay to the totalizing synthesis that aims at unity in harmony, the central tenet of “identity thinking,” the removal of any “non-identifying”’ entity or fact from a theoretical schema that is imposed onto social reality. The essay, in Adorno’s words, “thinks in breaks because reality is brittle and finds its unity through the breaks, not by smoothing them over.”70 “Only polemically,” he continues, “does reason present itself to the knower as total reality, while only in traces and ruins is it prepared to hope that it will ever come across correct and just reality.”71 The essay thus opposes those “totalizing” theoretical frameworks that dress themselves up “with the nobility of the universal.”72 In the totalizing mode, as read by Adorno, all individual parts of a sociologist’s output must “build a continuum of operations” and “advance in a single direction” along “the main road to the origins.” By contrast, the essay abandons the main road to embark on multiple paths. The result is that “the aspects of the argument” as presented in an essay “interweave as in a carpet” and “the fruitfulness of the thoughts depends on the density of [the] texture” created by this interweaving.73 The oeuvre of Hannah Arendt, another exile, is also a contribution to the lineage of the essay form. Her emphasis on natality and unprecedentedness are part of her concern with historical contingency and her

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antipathy toward deterministic, causal models of the past in terms of laws of movement. “Once the contingent has happened,” she wrote, it is as if “we can no longer unravel the strands that entangled it until it became an event, as though it could still be or not be.”74 The elucidation of the configuration of disparate elements, processes, and logics that takes place in the form of narrative essayism can be seen as her attempt to unravel the strands, to fight against the tendency to view the past in terms of inevitability rather than possibility. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, a dizzyingly essayistic treatise, this is given a profoundly normative dimension. Arendt was hostile to the “belief in historical causality,” in “causes that inevitably led to certain effects.” She much preferred to think about the emergence of totalitarianism as a “crystallization” of various “subterranean elements,” an emergent and unprecedented form of political evil that arose from the entanglement of a multiplicity of processes. Totalitarianism appeared to Hannah Arendt in the image of “a crystallised structure which I had to break up into its constituent elements in order to destroy it,” an image which troubled the historiographical imperative “to save and conserve and render fit for remembrance.”75 Essayism is also consequential for Arendt’s understanding of action and the public sphere. Human beings disclose themselves in words as well as deeds, and thus storytelling constitutes a mode of appearance in the “space of appearances,” that world in common where people confront one another as political beings. Arendt said that the essay form possessed a natural affinity with the political thinker’s endeavour to ascertain the actuality of “political incidents.”76 The essay itself is the medium of writing in the nunc stans, that space of appearance between past and future, between thinking and willing, a formal expression of the faculty of judgment.77 At this point, aware that I have spent considerable time sketching out the tradition that Bauman inherits from a lineage of social thinkers, I turn now to the essayistic form as it figures in and expresses Bauman’s own thought.

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Bauman: Elements of a Sociological Essayism In an illuminating interview from 2002 in Thesis Eleven, Bauman discussed the difficulties of writing and representing the world adequately: The problem with writing is the linear nature of writing, that you have to express your ideas in a linear form. The ideal form of expressing would be a circle. But because of the nature of writing it is impossible unfortunately … In all my books I constantly enter the same room, only that I enter the room through different doors. So I see the same things, the same furniture, but out of a different perspective … It is the idea of the hermeneutic circle, you go round and round, you turn to the same subject with a different knowledge, you see it in a different light. And that’s how human experience, personal experience works, unlike scientific experience … There is an adequacy between the form of writing and the form of reality.78 I suggest that Bauman’s response to the problem of adequacy between the form of writing and the form of reality was sociological essayism. When I talk about the essayistic dimension of Bauman’s sociology, I refer to its constitution as a totality, rather than an agglomeration of individual essays (although he wrote in different modalities – epistolary dialogue and diarism, for example – the essay was the most common form). In Bauman’s sociology, tracts on clearly defined substantive themes or analyses of particular events do not come neatly bound in stand-alone works, as definitive statements on a particular issue. Bauman’s sociological writing does not proceed in a linear fashion that constructs and consolidates a theoretical framework in its forward movement, nor by supersession and leaving what came before in its wake. Rather, it meanders down multiple paths, which split off, proliferate, reroute, and tangle together at specific points.79 The “room,” to take his own metaphor, into which these paths lead and out of which they spill is “modernity,” the universal category graspable only in the agglomeration of the specific and fragmented trajectories which constitute it as a multiplicity. Roland Barthes once wrote that “in the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered.”80 To understand Bauman’s writing of the multiplicity of modernity, we have to

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disentangle its manifold paths. As I demonstrate over the course of the next few chapters, these paths include engagements with colonial history and the processes of decolonization, Jewish experience in East-Central Europe, and the trajectories of the communist experiment. Before this, however, I want to outline some formal elements that constitute Bauman’s essayism. The essayistic form derives from Bauman’s emphasis on possibility. It also reflects the fundamentally uncertain and indeterminate nature of the social world it attempts to grasp. The essay strikes off experience and experiments with language that renders ineffable experience interpretable, and it is in this sense that Bauman’s predilection for metaphor ought to be contextualized. Moreover, the essay is an open, dialogical form, speaking to broad publics and constructing a shared space of understanding. Because it corresponds to an indeterminate social world that points beyond itself to multiple possibilities, the essay is a process of judgment and therefore a critical form. In this sense, the composition of Bauman’s work is inextricable from his criticism of the social world.81 This situates Bauman closely to two aforementioned thinkers who exercise perhaps the most significant formal influence on Bauman’s work: Adorno and Arendt.82 This influence, I suggest, is more significant than any substantive similarity that runs across their work, such as the preoccupation with the propensity for ordinary people to commit evil (Arendt) or the dialectics of modern civilization (Adorno). Through them, Bauman inherits an essayistic tradition which is, at once, an exilic tradition. This form effectively became exilic because its exemplars – East-Central European intellectuals, many of whom were Jewish – were scattered in the biggest movement of refugees the world has ever seen, until today.83 Essayism corresponds to the possibilitarian dimension of Bauman’s sociology. Bauman himself makes these connections in his important afterword to Liquid Modernity (2000). The essay offers good insight into the profound influence of literature on Bauman’s sociology, from writers and poets like Borges, Juan Goytisolo, Kundera, José Saramago, and Jan Skácel. What drove these writers and poets, Bauman argued, was the imperative to uncover human possibilities latent in the present. Doing and writing sociology ought also to be aimed at “disclosing the possibility of living together differently, with less misery or no misery: the possibility daily withheld, overlooked and unbelieved.”84

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Moreover, he goes on to point to the relationship between this form of writing and the condition of exile, the distinguishing feature of which, especially the “writer’s exile,” is the “autonomous stand taken towards space as such.”85 The sociologist ought to stand as such in the web of relations they themselves are woven into in an explicit, self-conscious process of estrangement. Distance and solitude – these are not the same thing as apolitical quietism. “The detached observer is as much entangled as the active participant,” as Adorno noted, adding that “the only advantage of the former is insight into his entanglement and the infinitesimal freedom that lies in knowledge as such.”86 “Distance,” he wrote later, “is not a safety zone but a field of tension.”87 Solitude, as Arendt posited in the starkly existential conclusion to her masterwork on totalitarianism, is not tantamount to isolation and it is opposed to the “organised loneliness” of mass society: “All thinking, strictly speaking, is done in solitude and is a dialogue between me and myself; but this dialogue of the two-in-one does not lose contact with the world of my fellow-men because they are represented in the self with whom I lead the dialogue of thought.”88 The essay – because its writer knows that they cannot help but stand in the middle of the social figuration in which they are entangled – is situated not in some region outside of time and space but rather in “a curious break in time, that is, between the forces of the past and the forces of the future.”89 The essay is an untimely form. A key aspect of Bauman’s sociology, it follows, is a social diagnosis manifesting a tension between distance and engagement. As with Adorno, in Bauman’s work this often took on a melancholic tone, as I explore in the conclusion to this book, for “in the case of an ailing social order, the absence of an adequate diagnosis … is a crucial, perhaps decisive, part of the disease.”90 To paraphrase Adorno, who was speaking of philosophy, critical sociology must come to know, without any mitigation, why the world – which could be paradise here and now – can become hell itself tomorrow.91 This emphasis on possibility is especially apparent in Bauman’s formative books of the 1970s, in particular to his discussions of utopia. Utopia, Bauman says, is an ascription accorded to an idea that smacks of “unrestrained fantasy,” that is “unscientific, at odds with reality.”92 It is counterposed to, indeed hostile to, a managerial perspective of rationalmastery that figures possibility as a “pre-scientific state,” receding as the future becomes more knowable. The hidden assumption of this

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perspective, as Bauman wrote in an unpublished lecture entitled “Is the Science of the Possible Possible?,” is that “the past will last indefinitely”; the future becomes “an admissible object of science only when ‘made like’ the past.”93 On the contrary, Bauman argued, the utopian stance legitimizes “the status of ‘the possible’ in valid knowledge.”94 The elucidation of a possibility is performative; possibilities condition the present into their actualization through human beings who interpret and act. This is why Bauman spoke of an “active” function of utopia, itself corresponding to an “activistic” image of humanity.95 Critical sociology, in Bauman’s definition, is an activity that redeems the activistic function of man, imploring us to consider how “the cognitive horizon of sociology may be widened to embrace the heretofore neglected human potentialities.”96 In doing so, sociology shares crucial features with art: Like the artist broadens and enriches our esthetic [sic] sensibility and opens our eyes to the kind of beauty we would otherwise never suspect, the student of the social may open our eyes to the kinds of life we would otherwise hardly suspect, and thanks to that he may widen our horizons in such a way that our “reality,” to which we are routinely exposed, is reduced to its true historical proportions.97 The essay is a provisional, experimental, and improvisatory form, which corresponds to the fundamentally uncertain and open nature of a social world that is formed processually.98 The essay strikes on reality as configured in the present and reveals it as vulnerable. Critical sociology in the essay form is “inconclusive” and this makes it “imperfect by much more severe scientific standards”; it possesses the constant possibility of “error and postponing the admission of failure indefinitely – unheard of in the field of scientific discourse.”99 The uncertainty of the essayistic mode also indicates its “openness.” Bauman proclaimed that sociology ought always to say “and yet …” to life, in contrast to those totalizing sociological frameworks that tend “towards completeness, conclusiveness and closure” and “strive to unravel the uniform and general while eliminating the peculiar and distinct as quaint and anomalous.”100 It should also be said that this resists reading an oeuvre like Bauman’s in progressivist or successionist terms, where the earlier iterations are but building blocks of an overall scheme. This, again, is an argument for

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revisitation of earlier decades of writing on the basis that the meaning of them changes for us, depending on where we view them from. In the next chapter, for example, I argue that viewing his cultural sociology from the 1960s and ’70s from the perspective of the present offers resources for decolonizing sociology that are not sufficiently appreciated. Following the paths backwards allows us to explore the possibilities in Bauman’s thought which may never have materialized, now suppressed in the reading of his work. Here, my logic approximates what Bauman, borrowing from Odo Marquard, defined as “widening hermeneutics” as against the “narrow hermeneutics” which dominated in the “solid” interpretation of the condition of modernity and which strives for definitiveness. The former, by contrast: Opens up paths and reveals clues leading from the texts to other texts, which the interpreted text has obscured for the sake of the precision of its own meaning, and which it did not include in the route it mapped out for itself; a widening hermeneutics cannot manage without such mappings, but it leaves no doubt as to the fact that the act of cartography can only be stopped at some arbitrary point, but never ended, and that every decision is temporary and can be reversed.101 The “firstness” of exile, the sense in which the condition serves as a kind of a frontier or reconnaissance role, is also reflected in Bauman’s discussions on writing. Referring to the specific qualities of literary and artistic exile, “an exile which articulates itself in words or images, which constitutes itself into a communicable experience of exile,” Bauman argued that “the exilic creation plays [an] avant-garde role in relation to human existential condition. It processes the experience which for many others stays unprocessed. It experiments with a language fit to grasp and express and communicate what most of us find irritatingly ineffable.”102 Metaphor is key here, in that, for Bauman, the conscious deployment of metaphors appeals directly to this commonality. They play a key role in the sustenance and elucidation of the world which divides and separates, to use the terms of Hannah Arendt.103 It is, she said, through naming things that human beings “disalienate” the world into which every one of us arrives as both newcomer and stranger. As Arendt continues, “analogies, metaphors, and emblems are the threads by which the mind holds

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on to the world even when, absent-mindedly, it has lost direct contact with it, and they guarantee the unity of human experience.” Metaphor bridges the two worlds posited between the knower and the spoken to; the deep world of regularity, law, causation in the realm only accessible to the intellectual, and the surface world of appearances in which the majority dwell. “There are not two worlds,” Arendt argues, “because metaphor unites them,” and she points out that “all philosophical terms are metaphors, frozen analogies, as it were, whose true meaning discloses itself when we dissolve the term into the original context, which must have been vividly in the mind of the first philosopher to use it.”104 Metaphor is essentially a technique of essayism. Because it is openended and experimental, the essay is a form adequate for approaching what is unprecedented and novel, what cannot be grasped in terms of concepts grounded in precedents rendered redundant by experience. The essay deploys concepts in an experimental way.105 In Bauman’s sociology, concepts are not fixed; they are retained and offered as metaphors, understood as “scaffolds for the imagination.”106 Bauman’s sociologizing was never tantamount to the development of a totalizing theoretical framework. It only ever aimed at developing a multiplicity of interpretive constructs for understanding a pluralistic world in motion, that which has become and that which is becoming, at distinct points in time and space. The essay, in this sense, is anti-systemic, opposed to totalization. The metaphor appears to have two functions or roles in Bauman’s essayistic sociology. First, it entails an elucidation of how solidified or familiarized concepts have their provenance in metaphor, and how their appropriation reveals the working of social processes. He put it thus in a letter, “as an incurable sociologist and devotee of what I call ‘sociological hermeneutics,’ I cannot but treat the ‘abstractisation’ [of metaphor] itself … as an outcome of social processes – and I am most interested in precisely these social processes of which it is a product.”107 The elucidation of these processes he names defamiliarization, an attempt to unravel what Hans Blumenberg termed the “complex field of transitions from metaphors to concepts,” wherein the metaphor is “absorbed by the word.”108 The second role of metaphor is to provide a more adequate language for capturing societal shifts, one that is drawn from the “space of appearances” and which speaks directly to the lives of humans as situated in social space and time. The task is to subject the unarticulated, that which escapes linguistic capture, to a process of familiarization.109

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In this sense, the essayistic writer leaves elements of the work open to the interpretation of the reader, and this interplay between writer and reader, or artist and audience, constitutes the work itself.110 This is redolent of the play of interpretations that occurs in the “fusion of horizons,” to use the terms of Hans-Georg Gadamer.111 “Far from being once and for all fastened to the text by the author’s intention,” Bauman wrote, “meaning keeps changing together with the readers’ world. In this latter world it is a part, and only inside can it be meaningful. The text the author has produced acquires its own life.”112 This is what constitutes the essay as a dialogical form; it refuses to make any claims of completeness. As the essay is temporally rooted, responsive to collective experience, it is borne of a preoccupation with communicability, speaking to the collective who experience in common.113 This preoccupation is behind Bauman’s characterization of his writings, especially in its “liquid” iteration, as so many messages in bottles. This is made fascinatingly clear in another unpublished essay, “Letter to Posterity.” “Are you still there, Posterity? I am not sure you are; one can no longer be sure, it seems … ?” he wrote, noting how the “planet looks ever more as a gigantic man-made volcano.”114 Bauman’s “ethics of distance” here encompasses temporal distance, stretching into the future, addressed to those who will come.115 “Now let me find a bottle,” he ended.116 The message in a bottle metaphor, an exilic motif, is also a hopeful form. As Bauman wrote in the concluding chapter to Liquid Life (2005): The “message in a bottle” expedient makes sense if (and only if) the person who resorts to it trusts values to be eternal, believes truths to be universal, and suspects that the worries that currently trigger a search for truth and a rallying in defence of values will persist. The message in a bottle is a testimony to the transience of frustration and the duration of hope, to the indestructability of possibilities and the frailty of adversities that bar them from implementation.117 A dialogue takes place on a plane genuinely distinct from those on which the participants ordinarily reside in their separateness. The dialogical dimension of essayism is therefore an orientation to the universal. There is a general unity of humanity that itself makes the task

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of understanding possible; for understanding to be possible there needs to be something in common with those who are to be understood and who constitute the world in its plurality. As Bauman wrote in Hermeneutics and Social Science (1978): Understanding, as it were, is not about “feeling the feelings” and “thinking the thoughts” of others, but about sharing in a form of life. Or, in the case of an encounter between hitherto alien forms – about constructing a form of life of a “higher order,” which will incorporate the previous two as its sub-forms. This form of life of the higher order will contain all those “contiguous points” where the previous two becomes [sic] elements of each other’s situation.118 In his Freedom, published a decade after the work on hermeneutics, Bauman wrote: Human history is not pre-empted by its past. Human history is not predetermined by its past stages. The fact that something has been the case, even for a very long time, is not a proof that it will continue to be so. Each moment of history is a junction of tracks leading towards a number of futures. Being at a crossroads is the way human society exists. What appears in retrospect an “inevitable” development began in its time as stepping onto one road among the many stretching ahead.119 The future is the realm of possibility and possibility entails choice. It is in relation to choice that sociology may be of value to thinking about the future. It cannot predict the future, or tell us that our efforts to develop society in a particular way will be good or bad, better or worse. It offers us no certainty. An objective, complete understanding is never attainable. Control over the life situation, in which the problem of understanding is really rooted, is doomed to be unsuccessful. The belief that it was, according to Bauman, accounted for the failure, grandeur, and horror of “solid” modernity: “A truly objective understanding would be accessible only in conditions which do not require it: which do not posit such an understanding as a problem.”120

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Perhaps the closest we have come to these conditions is in totalitarian regimes. There is a line in Borges’s “Garden of Forking Paths” – an essential reference point for Bauman’s essayism – that hints at the dystopian potential of a social science that seeks definitiveness, enclosure, and totality: “the author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.” The worst “futurology” of all is one that declares “there is no alternative,” that what happens happens necessarily and that necessity is a matter of prediction and mastery. This is truly dystopian because the hallmark of any dystopian society, as Bauman wrote in Freedom, is “the elimination of alternatives to themselves.”121 The notion of truth is itself a “utopian horizon,” which “remains a powerful factor guiding scientific activity … as long as it is seen as an objective and not mistaken for a description of a specific state of things reached here and now.”122 If modernity is a condition of indeterminacy and uncertainty in which human beings must choose in the absence of certainty then, to use the phrasing of philosophical essayist and exile Leszek Kołakowski’s, recalling the etymology of the essay as judgment, modernity is on endless trial.123 Bauman opens Wasted Lives with the admission that “there is more than one way in which the story of modernity (or any story for that matter) can be told.”124 Modernity looks different depending on the vantage point and the path followed: at once emancipatory and oppressive, civilized and barbaric, rational and irrational, and so on.125 To put it in Bauman’s metaphorical terms, it requires one to view it from a multiplicity of windows and to follow its forking paths. The following four chapters can be seen as essayistic attempts at the disentanglement of paths of Bauman’s sociology as they pertain to the problem of the West. First, I explore the possibility of a decolonized Zygmunt Bauman, addressing his reflections on colonialism and decolonization. Then, I discuss the ambivalent status of his engagements with Jewish history and culture vis-à-vis Europe and the West. After that, I discuss his writings on communism, post-communism, and East-Central European experience, perhaps the longest-running path in his oeuvre. Finally, I consider his “late style” and the thematization of the decline of the West and the crisis of humanity.

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Decolonizing Zygmunt Bauman?

“Europe is literally the creation of the third world,” wrote Frantz Fanon in his famous essay on violence in the late stages of the Algerian decolonizing war, as similar movements for independence were unfolding across Africa and beyond.1 In 1961, the year Fanon’s reflections were published, the trial of Adolf Eichmann began in Jerusalem. For the first time, with testimonies from survivors, the attempted destruction of European Jews was brought into an international public sphere. This was the inauguration of, in Annette Wieviorka’s terms, “the era of the witness”;2 a turning point in Holocaust memory interfaced with a key moment in the struggles of decolonization.3 Fanon followed a distinguished line of anti-colonial writer-activists who recognized that recourse to the mid-century crisis of Europe served more than the rhetorical function of debunking European claims of universal civilization. Imperialism and fascism bore structural similarities and were products of entangled histories. “Nazism,” he argued, “transformed the whole of Europe into a veritable colony,” deploying the methods of “deportations, massacres, forced labour, and slavery” tried and tested all over the “underdeveloped world.”4 This echoed the words of Aimé Césaire, who argued that the Holocaust had brought to Europe something that “had only been applied to non-European peoples … before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilisation in its reddened waters.”5 In the immediate aftermath of the war, and two years prior to his visit to Warsaw, crucial in the development of his view that anti-Semitism could be tied to the experience of black America, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that “there was no Nazi atrocity … which the Christian civilisation of Europe had not long been practising against coloured folks in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defence of a Superior Race born to rule to world.”6

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These claims were mobilized in the context of movements for decolonization, and their rhetorical function requires recognition. But it is worth noting how they echoed the messages contained within the urgent wartime writings of exiled Jewish social scientists. Eugene Erdely, for example, referred to occupied Czechoslovakia as “Germany’s First European Protectorate,” and Gerhard Jacoby argued that the Nazi occupation of Bohemia and Moravia amounted to a “complete colonial subjection.” Franz Neumann, in his Behemoth (1944), developed the concept of “racial imperialism,” which entailed “reducing the vanquished states and their satellites to the level of colonial peoples.”7 Then, in his Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), Raphaël Lemkin introduced the concept of genocide to denote a “technique of occupation.”8 After ratification of the legal concept of genocide in 1948, Lemkin developed his concept in unpublished historical studies into mass violence in settler colonies of the Pacific, the Americas, and Africa.9 He wrote these neglected historical sources amid the era of postwar decolonization, and they include reflections on the Algerian war of independence which gripped Fanon.10 Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism also forms part of this lineage. In its second volume, she wrote that “it may be justifiable to consider the whole period [of imperialism] a preparatory stage for coming catastrophe” that engulfed Europe in the world-conquering totalitarian movements.11 Totalitarianism was produced as a concatenation of possibilities, processes, and logics, including racist classification, worldlessness, bureaucratic dehumanization, and the “administrative massacre,” all of which were part of nineteenth-century European colonial-imperial history. It is notable that foremost among Arendt’s sources for this claim are two Polish writers. She called Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness “the most illuminating work on actual race experience in Africa.”12 And indeed, her own uneasy depictions of Africans as a people for whom “nature had remained, in all its majesty, the only overwhelming reality” – recalling Marlow’s fleeting glimpses of mute, shadow-figures on the banks of the Congo River from the steamship on which he travelled – are open to the same critique that Chinua Achebe levelled at Conrad: that Central Africa is serving as nothing other than “a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognisable humanity.”13 The other figure was Rosa Luxemburg, who had provided for Arendt an insight into the political economy of imperialism. Writing as the First World War loomed on the horizon, Luxemburg wrote of how Europe was

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now “only a link in the tangled chain of international connections and contradictions.”14 These connections and contradictions were principally economic. Luxemburg held that capitalism is marked by an intractable tension between the capacities of consumption and production, and this renders the absorption of non-capitalist social formations necessary for its survival. In processes of primitive accumulation, capital destroys “‘local” forms of economic organization through means of taxation, warfare, or conquest and monopolization of land, and in the process suppresses attempts at emancipation and autonomous forms of political organization.15 But this process of expansion and growth cannot be limitless, and thus in Luxemburg’s account of economic globalization, capitalism effectively devours itself; once it covers the world in its entirety and has nowhere else to offload its crisis tendencies, it collapses into a barbarism whose only alternative, as Luxemburg infamously posed it, is socialism. Born under Russian occupation before moving to Warsaw as a young child, Luxemburg was assassinated before it was possible to imagine that Eastern Europe would in a few decades be the scene of an attempted destruction of the Jewish people. In her own life she effaced her Jewish identity, despite or perhaps because of having experienced a pogrom on Christmas day of 1881, which left her with a “horror of crowds” and may well have been at the root of her vehement anti-nationalism.16 In a letter sent from the Wronke prison in early 1917, she wrote to a friend: “What do you want with this theme of the ‘special suffering of the Jews’? I am just as much concerned with the poor victims of the rubber plantations in Putamayo, the blacks in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch.” At the forefront of her mind was General Lothar von Trotha and his “campaign in the Kalahari desert.”17 In the context of anti-colonial insurgency in 1904, Von Trotha ordered the annihilation of the Herero and Namaqua people of what was then German South West Africa, now Namibia. Later, the general became a member of the Thule Society, the occultist group which served as a wellspring for the Nazi party. Josef Mengele’s mentors had experimented on the bodies of colonial subjects in German South West Africa as ethnologists, and the father of Hermann Goering served as the colony’s first political governor. Luxemburg, though she cannot have known it, was evoking the first example of the “century of genocide,”18 and the primary scene of the contemporary endeavour to trace the twisted path “from Africa to Auschwitz.”19

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This intimation of a dialogue across the entangled histories of the “racial century” illustrates how narrations of historical experience, and the development of thought-forms and conceptualization which correspond to them, include and exclude.20 Fanon is situated today as part of the original wave of postcolonial theorists, postcolonialism being identified with the creation of the so-called Third World at the end of the Second World War and with the decolonizing states in Asia and Africa.21 Neglected in this conceptualization, however, are those regions that do not fall into this spatiotemporal envelope, such as the Pale of Settlement into which the likes of Luxemburg and Lemkin were born, the Western stretch of Imperial Russia which, from 1791 to 1917, was the designated territory in which Jews were allowed residency. In 1844, the year Marx penned the famous manuscripts that later propelled the revisionist critique of Soviet communism in which Bauman partook, the Russian empire decreed that Jewish settlements were no longer permitted to live within the theocratic organizational structure of the Qahal and must instead conform to the structure of the Russian commune. It was thus, as Alexander Etkind wrote, that in suppressing traditional means of organization and ordering direct rule over “an enormous ghetto,” “East European Jews under the Russian yoke responded with two protest movements that defined the twentieth century, Zionism and Communism.”22 In the early twentieth century, the Pale was a territory of exploration and adventure, described by explorers and historians as a kind of “Jewish Dark Continent.”23 The settlement ended with the onset of the explosively nationalistic world war in 1914, when it became a “shatterzone of empires,” finally collapsing in the wake of the 1917 Russian revolution.24 Zygmunt Bauman was born to Jewish parents less than a decade after the Russian revolution. He was a product of this space of “interimperiality” between the Russian, Habsburg, and German empires.25 As he writes in his autobiography: “My father’s family lived in the part of Poland which during the partitions went to Prussia, to be later inherited by the united Germany [Słupca]. My mother’s family lived in the part of Poland appropriated by Russia [Włocławek].”26 He grew up in independent Poland, one of East-Central Europe’s “small nations,” to use Milan Kundera’s terms, “whose very existence [could] be put in question any moment.”27 Indeed, it would again be wiped off the map in another “inter-imperial” space, that of the “bloodlands,” Timothy

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Snyder’s evocative term for the genocidal interaction between the Nazi empire and its Soviet counterpart under Stalin.28 What kinds of possibilities emerge if these notionally distinct theoretical traditions, themselves corresponding to historical experiences that are often kept separate, are viewed as conversants? In the following, I pursue an answer to this question through considering Bauman’s reflections on colonial-imperialism and decolonization, a path which persistently if fragmentarily cuts through his work, from the Polish period to his late reflections on the twenty-first-century refugee crisis from the vantage point of exile in postcolonial Britain. In doing so, I claim that his thought was much more attentive to colonial-imperialism and thus offers a far greater resource for decolonizing sociology than is commonly thought. This argument necessitates revisiting in some detail Bauman’s oft-neglected works of cultural sociology in the 1960s and 1970s. These were foundational to his better-known tracts on postmodernity and beyond, but remain under-appreciated in their importance and for their own substantive contents, even by enthusiastic and sympathetic readers.29 I then move on to the “postmodern turn” of the 1980s, in which colonialism figures as part of the proselytizing or universalizing impulse of modern order-building. Finally, I consider the “liquid turn” of the 2000s, which turns to the “social question” in the twenty-first century.

The “Cultural Turn” and the Sociologies of Decolonization Bauman’s thinking in the 1960s and ’70s was shaped by the event, process, and ultimately unfinished project of decolonization. He was not alone. His formative cultural sociology developed in an era of “sociologies of decolonization,” stretching from the end of the Second World War to the crises of the Third World in the 1970s.30 It was a period of possibility wherein a multiplicity of trajectories for exiting colonial empires were still in play.31 Sociologists were compelled to interpret the novel and unprecedented experience of independence, scarcely imaginable in the late-nineteenth and earlier parts of the twentieth centuries when sociology emerged. They did so in the decolonizing countries, of course, but the rupture of decolonization also necessitated its interpretation in the metropolitan

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centres of empire themselves. In France, for example, Georges Balandier developed his sociology of the “colonial situation,” the conjunction of the historical formations of colonized and colonizers, as the nascent new nations were in the throes of extricating themselves from former colonial administrations. It is also recognized that Pierre Bourdieu’s distinctive sociological perspective is rooted in the studies he conducted with Abdelmalek Sayad while on national service during the Algerian war of independence.32 Sociologies of decolonization were also abundant in British sociology, including in the social studies department at the University of Leeds, where Bauman was to arrive in 1971. The South African émigré sociologist John Rex – described in a letter to Bauman as fundamental to the establishment of the “Leeds tradition” of sociology during his tenure from 1949 to 196233 – pioneered the sociology of race and ethnicity, attending to the centrality of racial differencing in the formation of modernity and to the ongoing effects of the injuries born of colonialimperialism.34 The Jamaican social anthropologist Fernando Henriques particularly focused on the trauma that Atlantic slavery and colonization had wrought on the Caribbean island, particularly on family structure.35 Roland Robertson, in the formative work that paved the way for his coining of the term globalization, evoked “multiple modernities” long before S.N. Eisenstadt. In a book written with the Czech émigré J.P. Nettl, best known today for an authoritative biography of Rosa Luxemburg, Robertson critiqued the prevailing notion of modernization on the basis that it assumed that “the typical condition of modernity pertains to the social, political and economic characteristics of Western industrial democracies” and that “modernity represents a single, final state of affairs, name ‘the state of affairs’ to be found in a number of Western societies which everyone should try to emulate, and which the most successful could reach.”36 And John E. Goldthorpe, who helped the Baumans buy the house in Leeds which became the family home for forty-five years,37 turned to the new postcolonial societies, particularly those in east Africa.38 Decolonization also altered the international setting of the transmission, sharing, and resourcing of sociological work, with the emergence of the various scholarly and research initiatives of social science that bloomed out of UNESCO and were collected together in the International Social Science Council. Bauman’s sociological career coalesced with

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what Richard Hoggart termed the “operational” world of UNESCO, which “effectively came into being about 1960, with the appearance of so many new and formerly colonised nations, especially in Africa and Asia.”39 His teacher, Julian Hochfeld, had in the final four years of his life been UNESCO’s assistant director of the Department of Social Sciences. Another major influence, Stanisław Ossowski, had been a founding member of the International Sociological Association and later its vice-president. Distinct national traditions of sociology in Brazil, Cuba Ecuador, Egypt, India, Mexico, Uruguay, and Zambia, as well as Poland, were represented in the early stages of the new association, and it was also shaped significantly by the emergence of the Third World.40 The conference at Evian that Bauman attended in 1966, for example, included papers on conflicts in plural, postcolonial societies by the Nigerian sociologist Akinsola Akiwowo and the South African Leo Kuper. The Togolese sociologist Ferdinand N’Sougan Agblemagnon presented a paper titled “Interprétation sociologique de la décolonisation: le cas de I’Afrique Noire,” and Santosh Kumar Nandy of India presented on the question, “Is Modernization Westernization? What about Easternization and Traditionalization?”41 Bauman’s position within this figuration was inflected by his central involvement in the intellectual movement of Marxist-humanist revisionism, inspired by the discovery of the young Marx of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, who emphasized the creative dimensions of humans’ activity in giving shape to their own world, as against the idea that humans are mere conduits through which economic forces pass. Indeed, much anti-colonial theory and practice during this time were set within this movement, broadly defined. In Africa, for example, the likes of Amílcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, and Léopold Senghor sought to develop a humanism and socialism adequate for the age of decolonization.42 In Eastern Europe, where a form of Marxism was the dominant ideology of the Communist Party, humanist revisionism constituted a serious critique of the ruling basis of legitimation. This was embodied by the Budapest School in Hungary and the Praxis Group in Yugoslavia, as well as the more loosely constructed group of revisionist figures in Czechoslovakia and Poland.43 Here it developed specifically as a response to the death of Stalin in 1953, a growing awareness of the nature of the Soviet system under Stalinist dictatorship (and its residues

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in his absence), and the specific forms of inequality, exploitation, and dehumanization that were generated in Soviet-type societies. This factor was of especial importance for the social sciences under conditions of Soviet colonization, as Bauman recognized (see chapter 5 of this book). In an obscure 1976 article on the Soviet social sciences, originally delivered as a paper at a conference on Russian and East European studies in 1970, he wrote of how a “principle of unidirectional communication” from the core of Soviet empire to Poland was enforced ruthlessly, and “a cultural ban was placed on the idiosyncrasies of the new members of the socialist family.”44 Polish sociology returned from its Stalin-imposed banishment to the wilderness in 1953, and it was also the time that Bauman was summarily dismissed from the military and began his career in sociology. After Stalin’s death, Polish sociology and intellectual fields more broadly developed particularly quickly and effervescently. Alongside the early Marx, the writings of Antonio Gramsci were particularly significant and inaugurated Bauman’s self-confessed “cultural turn” in the early 1960s. Where before he had seen culture as an integrative mechanism that ensured the reproduction and equilibrium of social order, as in the internationally dominant sociological framework of Talcott Parsons, he now saw it as “a sharp edge pressed obstinately against what-already-is.”45 At the centre of this conception of culture stood an “activistic image of man,” consciously distinct from a “mechanistic image” that reduces the human to the status of a “reactive being … determined by outer forces or inner drives.” This image is inextricably connected with a “managerial sociology,” which frequently fuses the scientific ambition of prediction with the practical exigencies of control.46 Here, where human action is framed in terms of repetition, creativity is aberration.47 The activistic image, by contrast, emphasizes human acts as “creations,” and holds that human behaviour is at best only partly predictable. The humanistic sociology built upon this activistic philosophical anthropology aims to reduce the determinacy of the social world by “supplying the human beings with ampler knowledge of their situation and so enlarging the sphere of their freedom of choice.”48 This formulation is maintained more or less consistently throughout his work.49 Bauman’s work of this Polish period is a marriage of the precepts of Marxist-humanism with anthropological structuralism. Indeed, his cultural sociology of the 1960s and 1970s belies the presentist image of

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rigid boundaries between anthropology and sociology, whose disciplinary differences correspond to two differing images and types of social formation: modern and traditional societies.50 This division of labour was an institutionalized, disciplinary reflection of the tendency of the social sciences in general to posit Europe or the West at the forefront of history as against other world regions that languished behind them, a formulation which Johannes Fabian called the “denial of coevalness.”51 More than this, as Talal Asad famously argued, anthropology as conceived in the nineteenth century was inextricably bound up with the maintenance of a colonial world order.52 The works of Asad and Fabian now form part of a canonical lineage that sees anthropology continue to work through its colonial past. Sociology, on the other hand, is said to have been much slower to confront its constitutive coloniality. It is established that Bauman was particularly influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Structuralism, as developed in the thought of Lévi-Strauss, sought not to find nomothetic laws invariably at work in societies in different spaces and times but rather via a comparative technique attuned to the operations of symbolization, and aimed to develop a method for identifying variation.53 For Bauman, Lévi-Strauss seemed to provide an alternative to “the troublesome ghost of relativism,” a way that could “save the idea of a unified human species” in “an epoch of practical integration of world culture.”54 In Bauman’s reading, Lévi-Strauss was revolutionary because he thoroughly rejected the idea that cultures could be sealed within systems as the normative glue that ensured their smooth functioning. Culture became “a structure of choices – a matrix of possible, finite in number yet practically uncountable permutations,” which aimed at “reducing the indeterminacy of the human world.”55 References to anthropologists may even outnumber references to sociologists and philosophers in Bauman’s works of this period. He names Mary Douglas, especially her Purity and Danger, as the progenitor of one of his essential cognitive frames, alongside Michel Crozier. This is apparent in his discussions of order and disorder in Modernity and Ambivalence, for example.56 Also evinced is a deep engagement with Boasian anthropology, exemplified in manifold references to the likes of Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. Anthropologists also formed part of Bauman’s intellectual networks. In 1966–67 he was a visiting Simon fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, where he worked with

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Max Gluckman. Gluckman himself dispels some mythologized images of pre-Asad British social anthropology, as a resolutely anti-colonial and political activist centrally concerned with the antinomies of colonialism and the social conflicts resultant from policies of racism, especially in the South African urban context. Gluckman and the Manchester School of social anthropology he founded and headed sought to infuse Marxist framings of class conflict and inequality with the newly emerging insights of Lévi-Straussian structuralism. He was foremost among a generation of social anthropologists who undertook participant-observer fieldwork of localities around the world, not in terms of comparative difference but in terms of their interaction with each other in a global system.57 Bauman’s stay with Gluckman in Manchester, given that he was making a similar turn in his own sociology of culture, seems to have had a formative influence on the thinking of the young professor from Poland. Gluckman had been open to sociology from the beginning of his tenure, having seen it as “an ancillary of social anthropology.”58 This lay behind the use of Simon funds to secure visits from eminent sociologists, including Bauman in 1966 and Erving Goffman (also in 1966 and 1967), and earlier Edward Shils (1952) and the social historian Eric Hobsbawm (1956). There were other boundary crossers at Manchester, such as Peter Worsley who was appointed to professor of sociology in 1964. Indeed, it was Worsley who invited Bauman to apply for the fellowship. They had been in contact some years earlier, when he wrote in 1960 to tell Bauman of his survey work in Northern Saskatchewan, described by Worsley as a “colonial enclave on the Canadian mainland” in the process of decolonizing and throwing up “unintended consequences.”59 Worsley’s own published work was deeply imprinted by decolonization; he was one of the major sociological analysts of the emergence of the Third World understood as a realm of possibility, a potentially autonomous bloc steering a course between East and West under the constraints of the international system.60 In France, Bauman’s networks included the likes of Lévi-Strauss’s student Maurice Godelier, Julia Kristeva during her period as associate editor of Social Science Information, and Josette Rey-Debove. Kristeva edited a Bauman paper on sociology and semiotics, initially presented at the Second International Conference on Semiotics at Kazimierz and Wisła in Poland. This event took place in 1966 and was hosted under the auspices of UNESCO’s International Council

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for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies and the International Social Science Council. Social Science Information, in the same year, published another of Bauman’s “structuralist” pieces. This was his “Marx and the Contemporary Theory of Culture,” originally submitted as a background paper to a symposium in May 1968, held in Paris and sponsored by UNESCO and the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies. His contribution is one of over forty papers in the volume Marx and Contemporary Scientific Thought, alongside the likes of Anouar Abdel-Malek, Erich Fromm, Abdallah Laroui, and Mihailo Marković.61

From Sociological Semiotics to Sociological Hermeneutics In these papers, Bauman outlines a critique of the “traditional” interpretation of the function of cultural phenomena, which he associates with Parsons and functionalist anthropology. This interpretation emphasizes only the “conservative” dimension of culture, which afforded it “the role of a repetitive response-set built into re-active, not pro-active, organisms.” Bauman distinguishes this from the semiotic approach to culture, wherein culture consists of the continual human process of “reducing the indeterminacy of the human world,” the reduction of the probability of some events, and the increase in the predictability of the human world.62 In this process, signification is not dependent on nature or on the social reality that it signifies, nor on any naturally existing differentiation between human beings. It instead entails active evaluation and selection “among the universum of potential choices.”63 Human history, he held, is a reservoir of possibilities which are instantiated processually, in cultural praxis.64 “Nothing,” he elaborated in Culture as Praxis (1973), “but the formal universals of praxis, its ‘generative rules,’ constitutes the tough, invariant core of human history.”65 Culture is a universal propensity of humanity to impose structures on a structureless world in infinite permutations.66 It is also, therefore, the sphere of human possibility: While encompassing the future in its unique quality of irreducibility to the past, the cultural stance admits a multiplicity of realities. The set of universes it explores in the way the positive sciences investigate the real, contains also the possible, the potential, the desirable, the hankered after, even if as yet improbable worlds.67

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Earlier, in his Social Science Information essays, Bauman developed something of a conceptual history of culture, running through European colonial-imperial history, which constitutes the core object of his culturalsociological critique. Bauman argued that culture as an evaluative category becomes a particular obsession in “expanding civilizations” as they come into contact with otherness and diversity.68 An axiological concept of culture, he claimed, “grew out of an encounter between Europe and that part of the world which developed in relative isolation from Europe. The old continent ‘discovered’ this other world at a time when the ideological basis of European economic and military supremacy was clearly formed.”69 Bauman is clearly talking about colonial-imperialism here. Indeed, within the axiological concept, he distinguished between the colonialist and the romantic orientation. The colonialist-axiological concept of culture is hierarchizing and comparative and is the basis of distinctions between “superior” and “inferior” cultures. Because of the military and economic might of colonizing Europe, difference was perceived as a lack of culture, as primitiveness. This was exemplified by the likes of William Strachey and John Wesley, intellectual figureheads of the English conquest of the Americas, who demonstrated how the concept of “barbarism” served the cause of world conquest as the obverse of culture, providing “the fig leaf hoped to hide the ugly and shameful atrocities of imperialism and colonialism.”70 Physical death was preceded and legitimized by social death. Summarizing, Bauman strikes a chord with many later definitions of Eurocentrism: A statement that our cultural system – the industrial civilisation – is superior means no more than that, so far, we have been stronger economically and militarily, that we have been striking at the roots of other cultural systems, and that, in one way or another, we have been remaking them – or have attempted to do so – in our own image.71 By contrast, the romantic-axiological orientation, represented best intellectually by Michel de Montaigne, was marked by an ethos of tenderness for the virtues of “savages,” “tribes,” and “natives.” Like the colonialist-axiological orientation, it asserted that culture essentially refers to an enclosed system. This logic was taken up in Malinowskian anthropology, which defined culture as a genuine synchronic system,

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a holism in which each cultural element refers to the entire way of life of a particular human collective understood as a closed system.72 Although this was “a renunciation of the colonialist Kulturkampf waged by the European civilisation which has dominated the world, and hence a belated recognition of the equality of peoples, the equity of their culture assets, and their right to a specific way of life,” it nevertheless represented non-Western, “traditional” societies as if preserved in aspic.73 This orientation provided its own justifications for colonial-imperialism, expressed in the turn to indirect rule, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, as in the thought and practice of administrators like Frederick Lugard and Pierre Ryckmans.74 Through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the conquest formations of settler colonialism gave way to the protectorates, trust territories, and League of Nations mandates. “Native” societies were not so much presented as incomplete or defective versions of Western societies, but as hermetically sealed totalities threatened with dissolution due to the very processes of modernization.75 The conclusion of Bauman’s cultural turn – his humanist revision of Marxism, his elaboration of sociological semiotics, and his theory of culture as praxis – is that human beings make or structure their worlds, albeit in historically delimited circumstances, through culture. Culture is processual, instantiated in praxis, and the worlds that humans make are incorrigibly plural.76 What exists in the here and now is but one possibility among manifold others. The societies which European powers colonized, a process in which recourse was made to axiologicalhierarchical understandings of culture, were not lesser forms forever catching up with the West or cultural totalities at risk of dissolution when they came into contact with colonial powers. Rather they stood for alternative possibilities, and in so doing revealed the essential groundlessness of the Eurocentric claims to universal civilization, a groundlessness which became especially apparent in the moment of decolonization. This heralded, Bauman claimed, a “crisis of cultural anthropology.” Here, “the European stopped believing in the obviousness” of their world; where colonized societies had seemed “frozen in earlier phases of the road leading to our own way of being,” global history now seemed to “form a mosaic of diverging paths.”77 A hermeneutic turn in Bauman’s thought begins when he considers how cross-cultural and transhistorical understanding and dialogue

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are possible in these circumstances, in the context of decolonization and the relativization of the West. Bauman credited his humanistic education in Warsaw for his interest in and knowledge of philosophical hermeneutics, which, he claims, was barely recognized in Britain.78 Nevertheless, it became an established and important theme in the Leeds sociology department in the 1970s, a department that hosted the likes of Janet Wolff and Josef Bleicher, who each published important works on hermeneutics.79 Because the plurality of culture generates the problem of alternative and even conflicting meanings, there arises the question of how communication across cultures is possible. Such communication was unavoidable in the condition of global interdependence that Bauman noted as far back as 1960 when he wrote that, thanks to the world market, flows of culture and mass tourism (all the elements of what was later termed globalization), “we live in an era in which, as never before, the history of the world is world history, and culture of the world is world culture.”80 Hermeneutics is sketched by Bauman as a response to the problem of Eurocentrism, which resides in the “aristocratic cultural pattern” of axiology and hierarchy.81 Here, “in the era of the ‘white man’s mission,’ when Europe seemed to be gaining worldwide domination fast,” economic and military dominance were confused for the achievement of superior cultural patterns, in the light of which “natives” appeared as infantile forms which European civilization passed and left behind at some stage of its development. If the colonial-axiological conception of culture saw educational uplift or, at the other end of the scale, genocidal violence as its task, and its romantic counterpart saw its own as preservation and protection, the task of understanding was based on very different assumptions. As Bauman held, “concern with understanding comes in response to disagreement which is recognised as such and not, for instance, taken as mere obstinacy or ineptitude.”82 Understanding, moreover, was about “about constructing a form of life of a ‘higher order’” rather than the positing of unassailable boundaries between forms of life in the plural. One gains understanding in other forms of life not by dwelling in their particularity, and certainly not by disregarding and eliminating their otherness, but by “enlarging both the alien and one’s own experience so as to construct a larger system in which each ‘makes sense’ to the other.”83

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Postmodernity and the End of Empire Approaching retirement and the inauguration of the most productive and intellectually stimulating work of his career, Bauman was engaged in correspondence with S.N. Eisenstadt. “I myself,” reported Eisenstadt, gesturing toward his later work on multiple modernities, which first appeared in his scholarly vocabulary in 1993, “have been working on comparative civilizations.” He asked for an update on Bauman’s work, “on all different fronts.”84 Bauman was engaged in his own turning point. Their correspondence appears after the publication of Legislators and Interpreters and just before the publication of Modernity and the Holocaust, in which Eisenstadt was acknowledged as a key influence.85 Eisenstadt reported, however, that he had recently read Bauman’s Memories of Class, a curiously neglected text in Bauman’s oeuvre, its significance as a hinge text not often recognized. It was, Bauman admitted, “my farewell to reading history as class history.”86 It also inaugurates a thoroughgoing turn to modernity as a plane of analysis, a common point of reference between communist East and capitalist West.87 Moreover, and crucially, it turned to modernity from the vantage point of postmodernity. Bauman’s reply to Eisenstadt’s request checked off several of the themes he became renowned for treating, among them, the divorce of power from politics and the transformation from production to consumption as the predominant paradigm of social-systemic integration and legitimation. However, he wrote: “Behind all this, of course, looms the gigantic variable of the Third World, which we keep supplying with arms while refusing it a place in our modernity/postmodernity debate and in the time/space map it charts.”88 This preoccupation is also signalled in a fascinating passage that appears toward the end of Memories of Class: The pride of place among the new problems belongs to the selfassertion of the Third World. It is truly impossible to exaggerate the impact exerted by this by far the most seminal of the post-war developments upon the totality of Western mentality. It amounts to the general collapse of self-confidence and has manifold manifestations. On the intellectual level, the feverish search for the sources of Western uniqueness, defined as either an exclusive

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technological genius or incomparable scientific aptitude, alternates with gnawing uncertainty about the possible legitimation of its superiority. On the moral level, the mood vacillates between new paroxysms of national insularity and xenophobia and outbursts of remorse for the imperialist past and fits of inferiority complex. On the political level, cries and whispers to close ranks in defence of the “civilization as we know it” cohabit with the currying of favours from the up-and-coming world powers by, first and foremost, supplying them with the most sublime masterpieces of Western military inventiveness. The bewildering inconsistency of reactions on all levels is symptomatic of the situation of acute uncertainty and ambiguity.89 This was an argument that Bauman also made in a review essay on Richard Bernstein’s Philosophical Profiles. “A hundred years ago,” he wrote, “the world was Europe’s playground. There was no conquest on a similar scale in the whole of human history.” It was precisely the sense that “the world ceased to be Europe’s playground” which was one of the precipitating factors of the postmodern condition, a crisis in European thought and self-conception: “Philosophy did not establish the superiority of the western form of life,” Bauman surmised, “it only attempted to ‘naturalise’ this product of modern history. What is happening now, and what lies behind the present crisis of the old philosophical paradigm, is the disappearance precisely of this ‘evident’ superiority which for the last three centuries European philosophy was ‘naturalising.’”90 This situation, Bauman held, necessitated a special place for sociology: “an inquiry aimed at the validation of consensus by reference to the social conditions under which it has been produced.”91 Richard Rorty, commenting on Bauman’s article, recognized the significance of the social conditions of colonial-imperialism to the formation of modern knowledge in Bauman’s account, as well as the sociological project that it necessitated. Rorty disagreed that, in his words, “the last three hundred years of philosophy in Europe have been parasitic on imperialism” and instead claimed that “what you … see as the failure of nerve induced by the end of empire I see as a failure of nerve induced by the realization that the march of democracy has come to an end – that no more liberal states are going to be set up. This seems to me largely a realization that the Soviet Empire is not only not going to collapse, but is

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going to gobble up the Third World, and maybe the First too.”92 Though he was certainly not alone, Rorty was of course completely wrong about the fate of the Soviet Empire, just three years away from the collapse he deemed impossible, and his diagnosis of a crisis of liberalism would be dispelled in the triumphalist declarations of the “end of history.” (I turn to Bauman’s analysis of Soviet Empire in chapter 5.) At this point, I suggest, Bauman’s sociology converges with the contemporary program for a postcolonial sociology. One of the tasks of sociology after the postmodern turn is to play an intermediary, “interpretive” role between historically and culturally situated forms of life, in the context of “changes in the relations between the industrialised West and the rest of the world.”93 Another is to excavate the processes by which European social and political thought had been shaped by the specific social conditions of colonial-imperialism it had developed under. Like its counterparts today, it attends to the hidden biases and positionality of intellectual statements, which in the colonial era were passed off as objective and universal, in so doing disentangling the imbrications of knowledge and power. Bauman held that the modern era, that of the legislative intellectual, entailed delegitimization of all local grounds of knowledge, which were deemed philosophically uncontrolled or uncontrollable.94 This is eminently translatable to the contemporary concern with “decolonizing” knowledge, in the mode of the coloniality/modernity framework, insofar as it concerns retrieving those grounds of knowledge that were steamrollered or arrested in the experience of colonial modernity. The “postcolonial turn” in the human sciences, at root, entails an excavation of the discursive and material processes that would posit the West as the unique bearer of universal historical progress. Decolonization, in other words, was one of the experiences that inaugurated the postmodern condition, “the condition of distress caused by the progressive dissolution of certainty once grounded in the ‘evident’ superiority of Western society.”95

Colonialism and Ambivalence Bauman elaborated upon his account of the condition of modernity in his modern trilogy: Legislators and Interpreters (1987), Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), and Modernity and Ambivalence (1991). At its core,

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he argued – building on the arguments formed in his earlier cultural sociology – modernity means compulsive order building and the eradication of ambivalence and indeterminacy. Order would not occur naturally. It had to be created.96 Bauman thus conceives of modernity as “a time when order – of the world, of human habitat, of human self, and of the connection between all three – is a matter of thought, of concern, of a practice aware of itself.”97 The practice of imposing order was likened to the work of gardening.98 The modern nation-state operated with a gardening stance, “cultivating” its members into optimum producer-citizens. All this was directed toward a blueprint for a perfectly designed society, “presumed to be dictated by the supreme and unquestionable authority of Reason.”99 The gardening state “split the population into useful plants to be encouraged and tenderly propagated, and weeds – to be removed or rooted out.”100 Those cast as “weeds” required special treatment for the garden to flourish. Assimilation, spatial containment, and, at the most extreme end of the scale, extermination were modern order-building strategies.101 As is well-known, Bauman’s case study – the limit case of modernity, as it were – is the nineteenth- and twentieth-century experience of European Jewry, which I turn to in the next chapter. Although no sustained treatment of colonial-imperialism appears in his sociology of postmodernity, Bauman nonetheless recognized its significance to the broader theoretical argument that he was making. In an unpublished essay, “Europe sans frontières,” he admitted that “in my Modernity and Ambivalence I tried to show the profoundly ambivalent condition, mixture of ressentiment and imitatory zeal, in which the presence of modern universalism cast the world it transformed into colonised periphery.”102 Modern Europe, he claimed elsewhere, had historically seen other cultures as “forms temporarily arrested in their development,” a belief which produced the conception of Europe as a “collective missionary with the duty to spread the gospel of reason and convert the rest of the world to its own faith and form of life”; European modernity was marked both by “colonisation of the non-European world” and by “cultural crusades aimed at the regional, ethnic, or class-bound traditions within European societies themselves.”103 If we take Bauman’s reference to colonialism literally, the colonized periphery offers rich material for a sociology of ambivalence. Here modern order-building was at its most vulnerable, the abyss in which it was conjured most visible and most haunted by the spectre of disorder.104

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The colonial state, to use Nancy Rose Hunt’s term, was a nervous state, Janus-faced, at once preoccupied with the life and health of its subjects while brutally policing and securitizing them.105 There is an elective affinity, furthermore, between the metaphor of gardening and the establishment of colonial states.106 V.Y. Mudimbe reminds us, in his Invention of Africa, that “colonialism and colonization basically mean organization, arrangement. The two words derive from the Latin word colēre, meaning to cultivate or to design.”107 There is a double meaning to the gardening stance concerning the colonies in this sense. On the one hand, they were deemed wildernesses, terra incognita in need of taming and transformation into an orderly society. On the other, gardening refers literally to cultivation, and the transformation of colonial subjects into labourers to this end. These projects are interrelated and, according to Mudimbe, constitute the tripartite “colonizing structure”: “the domination of physical space, the reformation of natives’ minds, and the integration of local economic histories into the Western perspective.”108 Implicit in Bauman’s discussions of modernity is a connection between cultural crusades in the extra- and intra-European space, with interesting ramifications for thinking through the entanglement of colonial and metropolitan methods of managing “disorderly” populations. This aspect of his thinking can be located in Memories of Class (1982). From the seventeenth century onward, Bauman argued, an assault was launched on popular, traditional cultures in Western Europe, which were “now redefined as immoral, heretical, criminal or mad, brutal or animal-like,” akin to the savagery and backwardness of those laggingbehind cultures of the colonial territories.109 Tellingly, given Bauman’s long-standing scholarly interest in the country and his exilic position in Britain at the time of writing, British history is taken as paradigmatic. The intellectual expression of this transformation in the nature of social power (and it should be acknowledged that Bauman took the lead from Michel Foucault at this point in the development of his thought) took the form of dichotomies: reason and passion, civilization and barbarism, needs and wants. These gradually formed part of the vocabulary of religious reformers, administrators of emerging centralized states, and the “legislative” philosophers. As the web of rights and obligations that tied populations to particular localities began to unravel, most notably in the various Enclosure

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Acts, towns and cities became the repositories of itinerant, wandering peasants who had been evicted from and severed from their ties to their place. This anonymous mass of “dangerous classes” in the “dark districts” – reflecting an “obsessive fear of darkness” characteristic of Enlightenment which also extended to the “dark continent” – required a form of power capable of placing the people “in a space so organised that whatever they did was immediately visible.”110 The solution was often spatial and architectural, embodied in the institutions of the workhouse, the asylum, the hospital, the prison, and the barracks.111 This history, it has been claimed, is entangled with various spatial forms developed in the management of subjugated populations outside Europe. Indeed, Bauman hints at such an entangled history, noting how “the fresh experience of the slave trade and slave plantations of the West Indies could have played its role in the formation of factory patterns in Britain. It offered handy examples of effective surveillance, and basic outlines of a regime successful in squeezing the maximum effort out of the assumedly idle, uncommitted and uncooperative labour force.”112 Although he takes it no further, I suggest that this entangled history can be reconstructed in dialogue with contemporary scholarship on the institution of the colonial concentration camp. Bauman argued that camps were spatial and architectural embodiments of “the contradictions that had haunted ‘the modern project’ from the start.”113 Camps are borne of the fear of ambivalence and the need to separate purity from danger. Perhaps the clearest way this anxiety was manifested was in the movement of what Bauman earlier termed conceptual unbeings who “jeopardise the orderliness of the culturally tamed and assimilated part of the universe.”114 The colonial subject was often figured as such an ambivalent figure, in Bauman’s sense, and once fixed in place, the formerly transient and marginal could be, via the collection and production of statistics and spatial mapping, known and seen. Lacking in Bauman’s account of the “century of camps,” however, is their appearance in concrete political situations of exceptionality and crisis: famine, plague, and war. These are the contexts in which they were deployed across the British Empire, in the final decades of the nineteenth century when more than 10 million people were concentrated in camps during a series of colonial crises, from Bombay to Bloemfontein.115 Britain’s transnational system of imperial camps has to be understood on its own terms, not simply as analogous to the laboratories for the ghastly

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transformation of the human condition that were the Nazi extermination camps or Soviet gulags. The recourse to principles of moral and physical hygiene that legitimated these camps, and their development as tools to concentrate, contain, and rehabilitate (nominally, at least) “threatening subjects” has a great deal in common with the metropolitan workhouse that was used to intern the “threatening classes” of the urban poor, as detailed in Memories of Class and, in contemporary times, the modern extraterritorial forms of refugee camps with which, as I detail below, Bauman was preoccupied. According to Aidan Forth, Britain’s colonial camps “reflected imperial Britain’s habitual anxieties about ‘order’ … the colonial world presented Europeans with the spectre of unordered space: of teeming and potentially dangerous masses; of disorienting and unfamiliar environments; and above all, of dirt, degeneration, and disease.”116 The colonial camps, in other words, were spatial techniques for the management of ambivalence, places where colonial society could be seen and surveyed and where large nomadic populations scattered over unfathomable landscapes could be contained and classified. Here, order is not so much the desired telos of utopian, modernist blueprints and rational designs. Order is akin to maintaining boundaries in the threat of their dissolution: between the clean and the dirty, between civilization and savagery, between “purity and danger,” in Mary Douglas’s terms.117 Order had a practical, political meaning, its maintenance pursued in situations of crisis and duress, when the established social arrangement – always tenuous in the colonial context – is brought fundamentally into question. Bauman argued that efforts to impose order necessarily created more ambivalence and disorder, which ultimately gave modernity its dynamism.118 A defining feature of colonialism, which ties in with Bauman’s modernity more broadly, is that the attempts to order society in the mode of the gardener often had extremely disorderly and destructive consequences, which resulted in often violent improvisatory action. Examples of genocidal campaigns in this sense abound, from Algeria to German South West Africa, and from the Philippines to Kenya. Though metaphors should not be overstretched and the discrepancy between colonial rhetoric and policy needs to be acknowledged, it is striking how often recourse to social engineering and violence, sometimes reaching genocidal proportions, was made using gardening metaphors.

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Eliminating native Algerian “gardening” practices was a key policy of the French general Thomas-Robert Bugeaud in the 1841 extermination campaign, the point of which was to “prevent the Arabs from sowing, harvesting, pasturing, using their fields. Swarm out every year and burn their harvest. Or else exterminate them all to the last man.” During the American conquest of the Philippines, Brigadier General Jacob H. Smith, while ordering the massacre of anybody over ten years old, threatened to “transform the entire region into a howling wilderness.”119 Henry Morton Stanley, on his expedition to central Africa prior to the establishment of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State, exploited ruthlessly for rubber between 1885 and 1908, when as many as 10 million Congolese are thought to have perished, reported to the Belgian monarch: In every cordial-faced aborigine whom I meet I see a promise of assistance to me in the redemption of himself from the state of unproductiveness in which he at present lives. I look upon him with much of the same regard that an agriculturalist views his strong-limbed child; he is a future recruit to the ranks of soldierlabourers. The Congo basin, could I have but enough of his class, would become a vast productive garden.120 More broadly, so-called savage races were frequently represented with recourse to botanical and biological metaphor, akin to wilting plants, dying out in the brute process of evolution.121 Colonial-imperialism was accompanied by a “temporalisation of cultural difference,” in which the presence in history of a particular cultural form is rendered episodic and in the process of being transcended.122 This was a core component of the discourse of eugenics, central to Bauman’s discussions of racism in Modernity and the Holocaust.123 Eugenics is, for Bauman, the apogee of the violent potentiality that inheres in the twinning of legislative reason and state power.124 He explicitly recognized that Jews as a population were not to be the sole recipient of its treatment. Other “weeds” included the “carriers of congenital diseases, the mentally inferior, the bodily deformed. And there were also plants which turned into weeds, simply because a superior reason required that the land they occupied should be transformed into someone else’s garden.”125 What is being evoked here is the notion that the history of the modern form of anti-Semitism is entangled with the destruction of unwertes Leben in the

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T4 centres of Nazi Germany. It is also connected to colonial-imperial racism. Expanding on this connection, he argued that the anti-Semitism of the Nazis drew on a tradition of racial thought, which had been developed in the European encounter with overseas colonies, wherein “respectable and justly respected pioneers of science” had observed “sine ira et studio the reality as they found it … the tangible, material, indubitably ‘objective’ superiority that the West enjoyed over the rest of the inhabited world.”126 In Modernity and the Holocaust, Bauman effectively refines and concretizes with reference to the Jewish catastrophe the argument about the dark side of modernity that inheres in the protean form in his cultural sociology, particularly in Culture as Praxis where it is universalized and expounded in relation to a greater range of examples, including colonial history. This latter book, I have suggested, developed in an era of sociologies of decolonization, where assumptions of European superiority were seriously challenged in the wake of movements for independence in the colonized world. The colonial encounter was fundamentally ambivalent, uniting otherwise distinctive attitudes, “awe and repulsion, admiration and abhorrence, attachment and hatred, explorative curiosity and escape drive.”127 The “strangers” or “marginals” in the context of colonial-imperialism are a challenge precisely because they reveal that beneath order lies a world of chaos, that “the world is not pre-humanly ‘given’ as ordered; the image and the following praxis of order are culturally imposed on it.”128 The names that are ascribed to the strangers and the marginals change from epoch to epoch, location to location, reflecting “historically effectuated, unique selections of concepts and images, typical of a given cultural code in a given time.”129 Nevertheless, they are always a product of cultural praxis, of the universal ambivalence-generating human propensity toward order-building via the imposition of structures on a structureless world. Any attempt at building a totalizing social order is always haunted by the possibility of a plurality of alternative forms of social organization and those who represent this possibility, who sit at the margins where “here” meets “there,” “in” meets “out,” and “right” meets “wrong,” are particularly vulnerable as targets of opprobrium and violence.130 Foreshadowing the later analyses of the modern trilogy, Bauman wrote:

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Antisemitism – a modern phenomenon sensu stricto – emerged in connection with the coincidence between the Jews leaving their isolation and the advent of modernity; everybody who had reasons to fear the change, and who felt threatened by the gradual nibbling away of what formerly used to be the trustworthy, majestically immutable Order, could easily forge his anxiety into the weapon aimed at people who, by dint of their recent marginality, most fully reflected the advent of Chaos.131 But Bauman also noted how the inauguration of the age of rationalism and the progress of empirical science saw a spate of witch-hunting as an offshoot of the anxiety generated during that period and, on his new home in postcolonial Britain, he said that “the intrusion of Pakistanis and West Indians into the British Isles coincided with the disappearance of the imperial power which served many a Briton as the raw material from which to build up his feelings of secure order.”132 Each of these sources of modern fear represents the attempt “to prevent the hybrid of Modernity from undermining the harmonious build-up of the human Universe.”133 Jew, woman, migrant, queer, bodily impaired, colonial subject – each stand for the “ensign,” the English rendering of the term Bauman deployed in his lost book Sketches on the Theory of Culture, denoting bodies semiotically overloaded with meaning. The situation of the ensign is “both suspect and alluring because of its indeterminacy – worthy of contempt and hidden admiration, and also fear,” and he continued, evoking his own exilic position, “every ensign has painfully experienced the innate ambivalence of this situation on [their] own skin.”134

Outlands: The Social Question on a Full Planet In the final section of this chapter, I wish to turn to some of Bauman’s most explicit engagements with the history of colonial-imperialism, which appear in his later writings on liquid modernity. They figure in his depiction of what he sometimes termed the outlands of modernity, a metaphor which was frequently deployed in the titles of lectures delivered around the time of its publication of Wasted Lives (2004).135 A central motif of that book is that of narrating modernity from the perspective of those places that are typically excluded from standard

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accounts, highlighting how they are in fact constitutive of the included. In Wasted Lives, the story of modernity is narrated with metaphorical references to rubbish dumps and landfills, which house its waste products. Italo Calvino’s fictional city of Leonia offers a literary model. Like the residents of Leonia, denizens of the liquid modern world fetishize novelty, deify the street cleaners who remove traces of obsolescence, and ignore the ever-growing pile of debris beyond the city walls, horrified by the idea that these unsightly accumulations might be destined to become a permanent (indeed the dominant) fixture on the horizon. In Bauman’s rendering, waste refers metaphorically to the omitted part of the narrative of modernity as triumphal progress of order, of economic growth, of globalization, and it is predominantly measured in human lives: “When it comes to designing the forms of human togetherness, the waste is human beings.”136 This argument represents an extension of his earlier reflections on colonial-imperialism, and signals the influence of Rosa Luxemburg. Bauman’s theorization of the relationship between modernity and colonialism is that the colonies served as the repositories for the surplus populations produced as a by-product of capitalist modernization, as well as deposits of raw materials and new consumer markets for unburdening the inherent tendency for overproduction.137 The colonies were seen as release valves for the pressures of modernity at home, the social question as it came to be known, denoting the crises produced by the appearance of industrial society, mass poverty, and urban unrest. As Cecil Rhodes was once claimed to have said, “If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.”138 The industrialist, social researcher, and reformer Charles Booth developed a removal scheme for Britain’s racial and biological “degenerates,” proposing some 345,000 be shipped to overseas labour camps in colonial territories for the segregation and containment of “dangerous” social elements.139 Hannah Arendt – also influenced, as we have seen, by Luxemburg – argued that colonies offered a release valve not only for superfluous capital but also for the superfluous “mob,” the “human debris that every crisis, following invariably upon each period of industrial growth, eliminated permanently from producing society.”140 Bauman recognized, recalling his earlier discussions of the proselytizing culture of modernity and its propensity to violence against those deemed in the wake of its historical progression, that this was intrinsically connected to the logic

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of colonial genocide: “the extermination of aborigines for the sake of clearing new sites for Europe’s surplus population … was carried in the name of the self-same progress that recycled the surplus of Europeans into economic migrants.”141 In liquid modernity, Bauman held, the project of universalism gives way to globalization, which in contrast to the image of order-building on a global scale, denotes a “new world disorder” marked by “the indeterminate, unruly and self-propelled character of world affairs; the absence of a centre, of a controlling desk, of a board of directors, of a managerial office.”142 The global elite, he claimed, is now made in the image of the “absentee landlord,” ruling without administration, management of territorially bound, local populations. Nor are they preoccupied with the mission of enlightening, reforming, or civilizing the masses, as in earlier cultural crusades.143 The primary technique of contemporary power is not fixing the itinerant, the vagrant, the nomadic in space and remoulding them; it is rather “escape, slippage, elision and avoidance.”144 This power thrives on disorder – in the void of state failure and collapse, the chaos of civil and regional war – rather than engage in order-building. On our interconnected and interdependent planet, colonialist pressures have, in conditions of liquid modernity, effectively “reversed in direction.”145 The planet, Bauman said in a Luxemburgian phrase, is full. There follows a reconfiguration of the so-called social question. Europe “exported” the waste produced by its proclivity to compulsive modernization. Contemporary states, above all postcolonial states, do not have the ability to export the waste borne of their own modernization. This is the driver behind global refugee flows and our present “age of camps.”146 Speaking of an “archipelago of exceptions,” Bauman wondered “to what extent the refugee camps are laboratories where (unwittingly perhaps, but no less forcefully for that reason) the new liquid-modern ‘permanently transient’ pattern of life is put to the test and rehearsed.”147 The globalization of modernity and capitalism that has brought about the unity of humankind augurs a crisis of the waste disposal industry, the end point of the process which Rosa Luxemburg identified over a century ago. Bauman wrote: The inborn paradox of capitalism, and in the long run its doom: capitalism is like a snake that feeds on its own tail … possibly the most fatal of modernity’s global triumph, is the acute crisis

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of the “human waste” disposal industry, as each new outpost conquered by capitalist markets adds new thousands or millions to the mass of men and women already deprived of their lands, workshops, and communal safety nets.148 Bauman wrote of how those lives cast aside by economic progress often tend to the rubbish of the consumers, as domestic workers and cleaners, although as Rattansi has noted he repeatedly elides the gendered character of such work.149 There are further confluences between the signifier and signified. In places like La Chureca in Managua, the Dandora dump in Nairobi, and Bantar Gebang in West Java, entire communities daily search vast landfill sites for things to recycle and sell. In Jardim Gramacho on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, catadores sift through the refuse to recycle waste into art, as documented in the Brazilian artist Vik Muniz’s film Waste Land.150 As of 2017, when Bauman passed away, some 15 million people lived on rubbish tips in the outlands beyond the walls of Leonia.151 Understanding the possibilities of historical periods, the cognitive horizons that they open up and their closures, reminds us that knowledge is not simply made obsolete by the progression of intellectual life.152 Revisiting Bauman’s work of the 1960s and ’70s, folded in to the era of “sociologies of decolonization,” is a reminder that social experience transforms the questions that drives sociological interpretation, forcing consciousness to work through it because novel and unprecedented events transform social structures and give rise to novel and unprecedented situations.153 The interpretations of this situation contained an anticipatory dimension, a sense of an indeterminate present and a plurality of possible futures, which closed down in the historical process. In our own fraught moment of possibility and uncertainty these works, including Bauman’s, invite revisitation. To recover the sociologies of decolonization is not to absolve the era’s exemplary works and thinkers of their problems, or to retrospectively imagine postwar international sociology as some power-free space. It is also not to deny the light, which Zygmunt Bauman’s work casts on themes of colonialism, decolonization, and postcolonialism, is intermittent. He certainly cannot be considered a postcolonial or decolonial

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thinker in the sense in which these labels are conventionally understood and applied. But it is also clear that Bauman was much more attentive to colonial-imperialism and decolonization than is commonly thought, and he had more to say about varieties of modernity beyond the West than is assumed in his assimilation to a Eurocentric, colonialist, “white” canon.154 Tracing Bauman’s interventions regarding colonial-imperialism and decolonization prompts us to avoid reductive notions of “positionality” imprisoned within the embodiment of the thinker, which defines and delimits what they can see and say. Bauman, like many of his time, evinced a positionality of openness, extending toward difference for the purposes of expanding one’s own horizons and engaging in critical self-relativization. His engagements formed part of a cultural sociology of modernity in its multiplicity that can today be extended toward regions, processes, and phenomena hitherto outside of its original purview. In its hermeneutic movement, it also entailed posing questions about the adequacy and veracity of the discipline of sociology and its operative concepts in an age of decolonization. As we have seen, Bauman took these insights into the works for which he is most remembered today. In the next chapter, I consider how Bauman’s problematization of the West figures in another path of his thinking: that of the Jewish experience and interpretation of modernity.

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Postmodernity as Jewish Experience and Interpretation

In 2013, Bauman published a follow-up piece to his 2004 book Europe: An Unfinished Adventure. Titled “The Haunting Spectre of Westphalian Sovereignty,” it appeared in the Prague-based daily newspaper Hospodářské noviny and ranks among Bauman’s clearest treatments of the historical process of modern state-formation.1 His narration begins with the 1555 peace of Augsburg, when dynastic rulers seeking an exit from the enduring religious wars afflicting European Christendom rallied around the principle of cuius regio, eius religio (whoever rules, determines the religion of the ruled). Over the course of the next century, there developed a notion of sovereignty that granted the “full, unconstrained right of Kings to proclaim and execute the laws binding whoever happen to inhabit the territory under their rule.”2 This was consecrated finally in 1648, after the destruction of the Thirty Years War, in the Treaty of Westphalia. According to Bauman, here developed the mental frame for the secular political order of modern Europe: “the pattern of nation-state – that is, of a nation using the state’s sovereignty to set apart ‘us’ from ‘them’ and reserving for itself the monopolistic, inalienable and indivisible right to design the order binding for the country as a whole, and of a state claiming its right to the subjects’ discipline through invoking the commonality of national history, destiny and well-being.”3 The Westphalian model of sovereignty, Bauman claimed, was thereafter exported, “imposed by Europe-centred world empires on the planet as a whole in and through long series of wars waged against the local, all-too-often stubbornly resisted realities.”4 It was in reference to the worldwide expansion of this model, accompanying the ultimately self-cancelling expansion of capital, that Rosa Luxemburg spoke of how “European antagonisms themselves no longer play their role simply

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on the European continent but in every corner of the world and on all the oceans.”5 These antagonisms exploded in the First World War. The Westphalian model was the basis for the League of Nations and the proliferations of minority treaties, which set the scene for the Second World War and the Holocaust, as depicted by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism.6 Westphalia, Bauman argued, provided the framework for the Charter of the United Nations after the cataclysms of the earlier part of the century. New organs of global governance were born, inaugurating a period of intensified international interdependencies. Global cultural organizations like UNESCO were envisaged as mechanisms of cosmopolitan citizenship. The interpretation of the trauma of the two world wars produced novel frameworks of international jurisprudence, such as the Genocide Convention and the International Declaration of Human Rights. Both were ratified in 1948, a consequential year in which violent population removals were remaking postwar Europe into an ever more rigid container of nation-states. In the decolonizing world, as European powers retreated in the wake of anticolonial nationalism and found themselves embroiled in humiliating wars of decolonization, millions had been forcibly removed from generational homes during the Indian partition, and the Arab-Israeli war created Palestinian refugee camps, which have today become places of, in Bauman’s terms, “frozen transience.”7 In this context, Bauman held, emerged the project of political Europe and the origins of the European Union.8 The end of the Cold War heralded for some a “post-Westphalian” era, an internationalization of authority and constitutionalization of a global legal order.9 The international criminal court theoretically holds global jurisdiction to prosecute war criminals, and since 2005 the United Nations has had a global political commitment to intervene in the affairs of sovereign states to prevent genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing (the “responsibility to protect”). But Bauman was skeptical. As he wrote in an unpublished essay titled “Murderous State and the Fate of Morality,” in spite of the imperative of “never again,” “governments of all countries unite when it comes to the defence of each one’s sovereignty over their subjects.” Violence against local minorities is very often, despite lip service to the contrary, explained away as an internal affair of the country, especially when those nation-state governments are nominally allies. Indeed, Bauman noted

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the USA, at the time “the sole genuine world-power,” did not sign up for the “international tribunal against crimes committed against human rights.” The lesson that this teaches is “appalling in its inhumanity, but straightforward: when it comes to real trouble, we, like anybody else in this world sliced in private plots, are on our own and can expect no assistance, rescue or salvation from any quarter but our own resolve.”10 Bauman’s account of Westphalian sovereignty, state formation and its hauntology is by no means an original account. My interest in this piece, and the point of departure for this chapter, stems from an eye-catching note scrawled in the margins of a printed manuscript of “The Haunting Spectre of Westphalian Sovereignty” in Bauman’s archival materials. On the first page, at precisely the point that Bauman locates the modern state in the 1648 treaty and its forebear in 1555, there appears in his handwriting: “Some point to 1492 – king of Spain expelled the Jews and Columbus discovered America and declared it a fragment of Europe.”11 This consequential date does not appear in the discussion in the published text. It raises important questions. Who are those “some” that he refers to? Most obviously, it brings to mind those Latin American decolonial theorists who deal with the legacy of the Conquista, the production of a Eurocentric world order. The omission of Enrique Dussel from Bauman’s texts, for example, is all the more perplexing since he was among the most imaginative inheritors of Emmanuel Lévinas’s ethical philosophy at precisely the time it became of such consequence for Bauman.12 Columbus’s voyage was the inauguration of what Lévinas termed ontological imperialism, consisting in “suppressing or transmuting the alterity of all that is Other, in universalising the immanence of the same.”13 The age of discovery was a step in the movement toward “a reduction of all that is reasonable, to a totality wherein consciousness embraces the world [and] leaves nothing other outside of itself.”14 For Enrique Dussel, here lies the birth of modernity, inseparable from coloniality, at the moment when “Europe began to be a centre and the rest of humankind was constituted [as] a periphery,” and when “Europe could constitute itself as a unified ego exploring, conquering, colonizing an alterity that gave back its image of itself.”15 A further question arises: what if the modern state is narrated from a different point of origin, from 1492 rather than 1648? Mahmood Mamdani, for example, argues that political modernity begins with the Reconquista, the expulsions of Muslims and Jews in the pursuit of a

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homogeneous majority, accompanied by the conquest of the Americas. The history of modalities of European colonial-imperialism is framed as a transformation in logics of majority-minority distinction. Whereas direct rule mirrored top-down nation-building in Europe, seeking to make the colonized fit for membership in the colonizers’ nation, indirect rule sought to govern through native customs and authorities. In place of a national permanent majority, there was a proliferation of permanent minorities.16 Likewise, Ella Shohat has argued that the campaigns against Muslims and Jews in the Iberian Peninsula, as well as those aimed at heretics and “witches,” provided an “entire apparatus of racism and sexism for ‘recycling’ in the newly-raided continents.”17 The consideration of 1492 as a point of origin destabilizes the compartmentalization of the histories of European nation-state formation and overseas colonial-imperialism, and their corresponding theoretical traditions.18 What kinds of possibilities emerge when distinct theoretical traditions corresponding to disentangled historical experiences are brought into dialogue? If this question seems familiar, it is because it is raised in the previous chapter, where I pursue an answer by considering the reflections on colonial-imperialism and decolonization that are threaded through Bauman’s oeuvre. Here, I approach the question through a different door, to use the Baumanian metaphor. I ask whether Bauman’s better-known engagements with Jewish experience and interpretations of modernity, his narration of the drama of assimilation, estrangement, and destruction that occurred amid the tumults of the Westphalian legacy – as well as his own critique of the West that develops in his sociology of postmodernity – can be extended as a contribution to a “decolonial option.”19 In doing so, as I make explicit at the end of this chapter, my discussion converges with recent scholarly interest in conversations between Jewish, post-colonial, and decolonial writing, as well as scholarship on the historical trajectories of anti-Jewish and colonial racism, the appalling violence they bequeathed, and the normative project of “multidirectional memorialization,” which would not set these historical trajectories apart in competitive and hierarchical terms but would instead see them as part of an entangled whole.20 This experience and its interpretation are embedded in intellectual networks and shared among a generation. As I shall demonstrate, some of the most telling of Bauman’s reflections on Judaism and modernity are contained within correspondence to various figures also engaged

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in the debate around postmodernity. His work is also set within the horizons of cultural and political processes, especially those bound up with Holocaust memorialization. For Bauman, additionally, the “postmodern turn” and the Jewish turn were coeval with a third kind of turn, a re-turn to Eastern Europe, specifically Poland and the scene of Eastern European Jewry, as communism approached its dissolution (this chapter thus converges with the various themes treated in the next, on the communist form of modernity). These three turns constitute the organizing framework of this chapter. As Peter Wagner has argued, collective interpretations of the condition of modernity are framed by and emerge from particular experiences and significant historical moments, which form the horizon within which specific varieties of modernity are elaborated.21 Bauman’s interpretation of Jewish modernity occurs within a specific iteration of the exilic position and serves as an interpretative registering of his own exilic experience. At the same time, it speaks to the collective experiences of assimilation, the crisis of the Westphalian nation-state, and the legacy of Nazi totalitarianism. His critique of modernity also takes up the legacy of Soviet totalitarianism and the subsuming of Jewish identity into the universalizing project of socialism. But dialectically entwined with this destructive experience of Jewish modernity is a history of creative interpretation. In the works of Jewish intellectuals, Bauman argued, could be glimpsed a nascent social condition that was named postmodernity.

The Postmodern Moment It is ironic that so much opprobrium is offloaded today toward the idea of postmodernism. Together with neo- or “cultural-Marxism,” so-called postmodernists are the target of vociferous criticism from a burgeoning scene of prominent conservative intellectuals, defenders of liberal universalism, and thinkers of the radical left.22 What most of this discussion misses is that what might be termed, following Patrick Baert, the “postmodern moment” – as a distinctive intellectual and aesthetic project, capturing and embodying a shift in public consciousness – has long come to an end.23 Indeed, Bauman himself – one of the signal writers of postmodernity in the late 1980s and early ’90s – began to turn away before the turn of the twenty-first century, as heralded in the title of his Postmodernity and its Discontents and made definitive in the adoption of the terminology of liquid modernity.

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Novel conceptual schemes such as those associated with the postmodern moment are not simply new (or purportedly new) ways of seeing unchanging problems and concerns, but are manifestations of social consciousness being forced to work through experiences that cannot be articulated in the interpretative frameworks of the time.24 Looking back on Bauman’s postmodern moment – which crystallizes between 1987 and 2000, though it is both prefigured in his earlier cultural sociology and traceable in his “liquid” writings – raises a number of questions. What specific events heralded the postmodern moment? Why did the postmodern moment crystallize in the 1980s and ’90s and why was it accompanied in many quarters, especially Bauman’s, by a turn to Jewish history and Jewishness? What kinds of intellectual networks did these ideas circulate in? Starting with the latter question, it is important to foreground Bauman’s occupational status. His postmodern turn was instantiated as he approached retirement, after a period of disenchantment with academic sociology.25 The extraordinary productivity of this period (from 1987 he published at least one book a year, 1996 aside) has no doubt to do with a liberation from departmental administration. He also wrote, in correspondence from this time, of departing the assailed institutional environment of the university system in Thatcherite Britain as a fortuitous moment. “Bit by bit,” he told Ralph Miliband, “the flesh is cut away, and people clearly grow used to it.”26 The university, he expanded to Juan Corradi, “is not the University I joined seventeen years ago”; it is evaluated by its “service to industry” at a time when industry “is in Britain engaged in a disappearing act.”27 At this point, Bauman entered what Agnes Heller called in her biography the “years of wandering,” made possible by an increase in the accessibility of air travel and the lifting of Cold War geopolitical restrictions on the connectedness of world regions.28 The translation of his works also opened up parts of Europe where he had been relatively unknown hitherto, such as Scandinavia. The Norwegian translation of Modernity and the Holocaust, for example, inaugurated a series of trips with Janina and friendships with Norwegian intellectuals.29 This was an era of invitation, a highly significant though underdefined term in the sociology of intellectual networks, “opportunity structures” and performative positioning.30 These invitations extended to opportunities to write in popular media. From the late 1980s into the 1990s, he wrote a steady stream of shorter pieces for UK publications

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such as New Statesman and Society (later New Statesman), New Internationalist, Times Literary Supplement, and the Guardian.31 There were significant interventions in Poland too, perhaps none more so than the post-9/11 reflection in Tygodnik Powszechny, which inspired fierce debate and a riposte from Agnieszka Kołakowska, daughter of Leszek Kołakowski.32 This was not confined to Britain and Poland, however. In 1996, for example, Bauman appeared in an edition of the Swedish television series, Thinkers of Our Times.33 There were also important developments in academic publishing. Legislators and Interpreters, published in 1987, was Bauman’s first book for Polity Press, a small, independent academic publisher established in 1984 in Cambridge. Anthony Giddens, by this time an extremely significant figure in European sociology, was its first editor and oversaw the publication of many of Bauman’s most significant books with the press. Correspondence shows that he played a significant role in shaping and clarifying Bauman’s ideas, as well as disseminating them. Similar relationships were established with Chris Rojek of Routledge and Mike Featherstone of SAGE, both academic presses based in London. These correspondents, including various editors at Blackwell, a major publisher of signal academic works of the postmodernity period, are among the best represented in the copious letters contained in the Bauman archive.34 Bauman and his contemporaries may well have approached postmodernity from a variety of normative, epistemological, and disciplinary positions, but each of them was oriented to a series of key developments that have substantially shaped the social sciences and humanities. These developments are folded into what Simon Susen has termed “a paradigmatic shift from the Enlightenment belief in the relative determinacy of both the natural world and the social world to the – increasingly widespread – post-Enlightenment belief in the radical indeterminacy of all material and symbolic forms of existence.”35 This shift was inaugurated in waves, which can be seen to coalesce around specific events. There is the discovery and liberation of Auschwitz in 1945 which initiated the reckoning with the Holocaust in all its permutations, even if the process of memorialization was by no means linear. This link between postmodernity and the Holocaust is extremely strong for Bauman and others, with the intellectual historian Dominick LaCapra even surmising that “postmodernism can also be defined as post-Holocaust.”36

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More ambiguously, postmodernity entailed a reckoning with Stalinism, beginning upon his death in 1953 and intensifying with the publication of works like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, the processes of deStalinization, and the intellectual response of revisionist Marxist-humanism. As we have seen, Bauman experienced and interpreted both Nazism and Stalinism. There is also the turning point coalescing around the 1968 protests, on which Bauman had a distinctive vantage point as an exiled Jew from the March events in Poland. This date also represents the high era of postwar decolonization, explored in the previous chapter. Finally, there is 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism. Intellectually, the interpretation of these “cascades of events that withhold themselves from language,”37 was consolidated in a series of turns. There is the relativist turn in epistemology, which highlighted the positionality and perspectivality of all hitherto universalizing knowledge claims. The interpretive turn, building upon the critique of the totalizing explanatory ambitions of scientific positivism developed in such schools of thought as hermeneutics, phenomenology, and existentialism, sought to recover lived human experience as a subject of understanding. This was accompanied by a cultural turn in sociology, which aimed at elucidating the processes by which subjects make sense of the world, construct their sense of self, and elaborate and communicate meaning. The contingent turn in historiography took aim at the notion that invariant laws and patterns necessarily underpinned human development, emphasizing instead the historically conditioned situation of social reality, the radical openness of the historical process, and the unpredictability and boundlessness of social action. The autonomous turn in politics sought to recover the independent social agent from the determination of social structure, as well as the normative significance of the search for collective autonomy and recognition on the part of marginalized social groups.38 We see protean movements in all these directions in Bauman’s thoughts from at least the late 1960s, predominantly in the form of his cultural sociology.39 At the high point of Bauman’s work, the 1980s into the ’90s, his sociology attempted to come to terms with the historicity of postmodernity as a novel condition that entailed unprecedented shifts in social relations, political organization, and cultural orientation. Though deeply engaged in questions of form, as discussed in chapter 2,

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Bauman was at pains to distance himself (not always successfully) from what might be termed “postmodern style.”40 Bauman rejected the notion of postmodern sociology operating as a kind of intellectual genre.41 To this end, he made a distinction between “postmodernism” and “postmodernity.” The former is a stylistic term, denoting specific formal features of artworks or intellectual production in the era of late capitalism. He speaks of postmodern style – whose foremost exemplar, according to Bauman, was Jean Baudrillard42 – as an expression of leftist argumentation bereft of a vision of the “good society,” a “consolation for the intellectuals, wardens deserted by their wards.”43 By contrast, postmodernity denotes a social condition, one which contains and subsumes the notion of postmodernism as aesthetic style. Postmodernity is a distinctive social configuration of its own and needs treating on its own terms, not as a pathological or derivative form of modernity. Postmodernity is rather a product of the disenchantment of the modern project. The condition of modernity was defined by the recognition of human order as a vulnerable and contingent artifice, the response to which was “a dream and an effort to make order solid, obligatory and reliably founded.”44 With order conceived of as a task, disorder and contingency were problematized. Moreover, as elaborated in the previous chapter, Bauman understood modernity as a universalizing social condition, which concealed the local, particularistic, and contingent aspects of its own articulation.45 Whatever stood for relativity and marginality, condensed in the social type of “the stranger,” which Bauman borrowed from Simmel,46 was “unlicensed difference.” In managing, containing, and sometimes exterminating populations defined as “unlicensed” obstacles to order-building, the modern mentality fought the real enemy of ambivalence.47 As exemplified by the proliferation of spaces of containment and management – the factory, the workhouse, the asylum, the prison, the barracks, the camp – the condition of modernity entailed regularizing and disciplining itinerance, transience, and indeterminacy. Bauman suggested postmodernity, in contrast to the modern urge to totality, entails accepting “the ineradicable plurality of the world” as “the constitutive quality of existence.”48 Where modernity was perceived of as the superiority of a missionary Europe, postmodernity entailed a relativization of the position of Europe in world history, or, as he termed it, a “surrender of the (diachronically and synchronically) dominant

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position of the west.”49 As such, Europe-centred sociology ought to break with the concepts and metaphors of modernity. Rare are the moments of social-scientific prescription in Bauman’s work, but in a series of essays during the 1990s he offered a conceptual apparatus adequate to a sociology of the postmodern condition. Sociality was offered as an alternative to the operative concepts of “system” or “society,” both of which suggest an independent totality that exists logically prior to its constitutive parts. Sociality, by contrast, conveys “the processual modality of social reality, the dialectical play of randomness and pattern (or, from the agent’s point of view, freedom and dependence); and a category that refuses to take the structured character of the process for granted – which treats instead all found structures as emergent accomplishments.”50 In his Postmodern Ethics, somewhat contrarily, he develops an accompanying notion of socialization. Socialization and sociality are treated as two countervailing, tensional, and antinomic but always co-present processes. Socialization, as Bauman defines it, is the structure-forming principle of classification and differentiation, which became dominant as a self-reflexive practice and obsessive pursuit in the period of “solid” modernity.51 Sociality, by contrast, is non-rational and has no telos or concern with the future. Sociality is manifested in the crowd. It is aesthetic proximity, not moral proximity, that is present, not nearness to the face, but nearness to the crowd.52 Both processes, in Bauman’s moral sociology, generate the abdication of responsibility, defined after Lévinas as being-for-the-Other: “while socialisation replaces moral responsibility with the obligation to obey procedural norms, in the crowd the question of responsibility never arises.”53 Another concept is that of habitat, the social situation in which agency is instantiated and which neither determines the conduct of human beings nor defines its meaning, but rather provides the setting in which action and meaning-making are possible. The postmodern habitat is a setting of “chronic indeterminacy,” absent of a single authority or goal-setting agency, as in the nation-state, religion, or class-based collective identities of previous iterations of modernity.54 The postmodern habitat is irrevocably fragmented, and subsequently, human beings are autonomous to a much greater degree than in the order-obsessed modern habitat. This, Bauman held, was the “chance” of postmodernity for morality and autotomy. The existential mode of

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the postmodern agent is inconclusive, uncertain, and rootless. Identity construction is thus a process of trial and error, an incessant activity of “self-constitution.” The “art of life” consists of navigating the social habitat in the process of self-assembly.55 The body becomes the space for producing a supply of socially legible definitions. Jogging, dieting, fast fashion, all displace the panoptical drill of modern institutions.56 The postmodern condition generates an acute demand for points of orientation – expertise, celebrity, and so on. Access to information becomes a source of inequality. Postmodernity is defined institutionally by the decline of the state, its loss of agency, the abandonment of projects of power-assisted cultural uniformity, and universalization. Dealing with contingency thus becomes privatized. Postmodernity means individualization. This reframes notions of moral and ethical responsibility. The modern social arrangement deferred moral responsibility to a higher authority. The postmodern arrangement defers it to the individual who must make moral choices for themselves, no longer guided by a totalizing state but by a plethora of choice-influencing agencies. The pining for a neo-tribal community is one response to this situation. Another is consumerism. These are some of the “threats” of postmodernity.57 Another important dimension of Bauman’s sociology of postmodernity regards the scope of its treatment of social space. For much of its existence, the analytical boundaries of society were deemed equivalent to the borders of the nation-state. The sociology of postmodernity, Bauman argued, needed to engage seriously with the “social space beyond the confines of the nation-state.”58 As he wrote to S.N. Eisenstadt, wracked in his own thought by similar concerns, which he developed into a program of civilizational analysis: Sociology “naturally” constituted itself as a science of population crowned with, and enclosed by, a central political authority monopolising means of violence and fiscal rights; search for regularities (what sociology was and is about) was a plausible task only inside such a “structured” space, and so the most embracing category of sociology, “society,” which set the outer boundaries of sociological vision, was from the start identical with the nation state … what we feebly call “international” space cannot be subjected to treatment by traditional sociological cognitive instruments.59

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Sociology cannot but be global. This was a long-standing position of Bauman’s. Indeed, he had formulated a critique of so-called “methodological nationalism” as a corollary of his cultural sociology, writing critically in Culture as Praxis: “With hardly any exception, all the concepts and analytical tools currently employed by social scientists are geared to a view of the human world in which the most voluminous totality is a ‘society’, a notion equivalent for all practical purposes, to the concept of the ‘nation-state.’”60 Bauman’s sociology is an extraterritorial sociology, and it can be suggested that its extraterritoriality was matched in the form of his social criticism. As we have seen, Bauman fits the archetype of the “critic-as-wanderer” who, as surmised by Edward Said, goes “from place to place for his material, but remain[s] a man essentially between homes.”61 It is not, perhaps, coincidental that Bauman’s postmodern turn is coterminous with a “Jewish turn” in his writing.62

The Jewish Turn Why were the 1980s the period of the Baumans’ “Jewish writings”? One can easily enough surmise from the preface to Modernity and the Holocaust that Janina Bauman’s writings were the catalyst for her husband’s turn to “Holocaust sociology.” As we have seen, Zygmunt Bauman was engaged in autobiographical exercises around this time. But why did Jewish history and culture become a topic of joint concern almost forty years after the event of expulsion? To reconstruct this entails tracking the ebb and flow of the cultural memory of the Holocaust, and Janina and Zygmunt Bauman’s particular relationship to the process of memorialization as exiled intellectuals. In Poland, the memory of Jewish suffering was marginalized in a narrative of national martyrdom masquerading as socialist universalism.63 In Israel, Bauman feared an emerging nationalism based on the “terror of history” in which contemporary events were depicted as echoes of traumatic, genocidal experiences, which in turn led to anticipatory, self-defensive militarism.64 To Vecchi, he said: “I suppose that my Jewishness is confirmed by Israeli iniquities paining me still more than atrocities committed by other countries.”65 Britain, for its part, tended a “garden of forgetting,” to use Tony Judt’s phrase, its wartime memory emphasizing national heroism and solidarity in strife and omitting those more uncomfortable wartime measures, such as internment camps for refugees.66

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Across Europe – where all the occupied nations had their own specific form of “Vichy syndrome” borne of the complex relationship between wartime suffering and complicity67 – there was little appetite for testimony or engagement with survivors in the immediate postwar decades. Primo Levi recalled that If This Is a Man “fell into oblivion for many years” because “in all of Europe those were difficult times of mourning and reconstruction and the public did not want to return in memory to the painful years of the war that had just ended.” Jean Améry likewise reflected that he had been warned, in putting his testimony to paper, “that I should be discreet and, if at all feasible, avoid including Auschwitz in the title.”68 As Hannah Arendt commented in her “We Refugees” essay, it was as if nobody wanted to know “that contemporary history has created a new kind of human being – the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.”69 This played out against the context of postwar realpolitik, as Europe was being remade through population transfer and violent wars of decolonization were unfolding in Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. As I intimated at the beginning of the previous chapter, a fundamental departure occurred with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. However, the sedimentation of Holocaust memory in popular culture came in the 1980s and early ’90s, exactly the period of Bauman’s Jewish turn. This was when Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) was released and when Holocaust memorials, such as the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, expanded globally. These developments had followed the opening of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University in 1982 and, consequentially for both Janina and Zygmunt Bauman, the production of Claude Lanzmann’s landmark documentary Shoah (1985).70 Janina and Zygmunt saw the film on Polish television, and Zygmunt’s reflections, worth quoting at length, are contained in his unpublished Newfoundland aphorisms: Lanzmann wanted to look into the inside of the death camps. The only living witnesses able to give testimony – almost the only – were members of the Sonderkommando. It is through their eyes that Shoah shows the slaughter. We do not hear sheep or cattle – only the butchers. And so the Shoah is full of shit, vomit, people trampling over the weak and over children, sons stealing

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bread from their fathers and fathers stealing bread from their sons. People reduced to their behaviour; and behaviour at its most disgusting and nauseating. Those responsible for the slaughter linger in the background; there are few of them, clean shaved, smart, prim. In the foreground, shit, vomit, stench, cruelty, and the assistant butchers eager to get it done with. Sonderkommando as a collective Hercules cleaning the Augias’s stables. One cannot help hearing, time and again, a note of pride in their reporting, matterof-factly voices. Reason as inhumanity. Rationality as consent to crime. Well-understood self-interest as compliance with evil.71 Here, in the evocation of “reason as inhumanity” and “rationality as consent to crime,” we see the germination of the arguments of Modernity and the Holocaust, but also a visceral reconstruction of the interior of death camps, which was avoided in the 1989 book where the focus was on those “clean shaved, smart, prim” figures of the background, later styled as the “gardeners” of the modern state. Just as important as the cultural horizons of Holocaust memory and Jewish testimony were the scholarly networks and publication channels that Bauman found himself entangled in as he approached retirement. The Jewish Quarterly, under the editorship of Bryan Cheyette, at the time a neighbour of the Baumans and significant interlocutor, was a particularly important vehicle. Another was Polin, the journal of the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies, associated with the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Figures from Polin such as Ritchie Robertson and David Sorkin formed new nodal points in Bauman’s intellectual networks. Bauman’s narration of the Jewish experience and interpretation of modernity weave together a number of paths: the drama of assimilation in Western Europe, particularly Germany as a sort of frontier-space between East and West; the Holocaust; the establishment of Israel and Jewry in the USA and the assimilation/neutralization of Western Jews; and the disappearance of East-Central European Jewry. These paths are generalized in the well-known books of the time (Modernity and the Holocaust and Modernity and Ambivalence), but in journals like Telos, Jewish Quarterly, and Polin he tended to write in a more particularizing idiom than in his books.72 In these shorter writings, among the most sustained historical-sociological of Bauman’s oeuvre, he treats the specific experiences of Russian Jews and perestroika (Jewish

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Quarterly), German Jewry as a mediator between East and West (Society, Jewish Quarterly), and Polish-Jewish relations (Polin). The Polin journal shared its name with the POLIN Museum of the history of Polish Jews, work on which began in 1995. Bauman’s Jewish turn unfolded in a period of intense reflection in Poland. Bauman’s interventions, particularly Modernity and the Holocaust, also struck a chord in other highly publicized intellectual debates, as in the German Historikerstreit.73 Bauman’s scholarly concerns were also disseminated among a generation many of whose representatives experienced the war as children or young adults. S.N. Eisenstadt, Ferenc Fehér, Ernest Gellner, Agnes Heller, György and Maria Márkus, and Kurt. H. Wolff were all correspondents of Bauman during this time, and many were readers and reviewers of his work, and vice versa. There are several major points of difference for these thinkers, but all were participants in a shared engagement with overarching problems in intellectual culture in the 1980s and ’90s: Had modernity exceeded itself and tipped over into a new era of postmodernity? How should this new era be understood, sociologically, philosophically, scientifically? How does Jewish identity relate to the posing of these questions, and what resources exist in Jewish thought that might provide answers to them?

Ambivalence, Hermeneutics, Assimilation, or is there a Jewish Sociology? Another long-time, if intermittent, interlocutor of Bauman’s was Gillian Rose, whose question, “Is there a Jewish philosophy?” inspires the following reflections.74 Bauman and Rose had intermediaries in the likes of Rose’s PhD supervisor Leszek Kołakowski and Tom Bottomore, her colleague at Sussex. Their correspondence intensified in the late 1980s, when both were engaged in Jewish turns as part of the broader postmodern turn, which Rose rejected and Bauman ambiguously embraced. At the time of writing, Rose’s project – unfinished on account of her tragic early death – centred on the development of what she termed “Holocaust sociology” and a “sociology of violence,” which would examine the way in which “the attack on institutions of the middle between civil society and the state – whether it be architecture, law, medicine, education – exposes the individual most to the violence of others and to his/her own.” This substantive, institutional focus was accompanied by a philosophical

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investigation into the possible relations between modern Jewish thought and modern sociology and philosophy “precisely in terms of the crisis in the conceiving of law and ethics when philosophy, sociology, theology are separated into autonomous disciplines.”75 Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust thus spoke to Rose very powerfully. She wrote that it “constitutes a fundamentally new departure in our thinking about the Holocaust,” and that “all my thinking has been converging on this issue.”76 In reply, Bauman wrote, “I feel truly elated by your opinion that the product of my solitary efforts in darkest Yorkshire offers a new departure in thinking about the Holocaust. True, I hoped that it would offer some new thinking about modernity as well.” “But then,” Bauman concluded in a knowing allusion to Isaac Deutscher’s notion of the “non-Jewish-Jew,”77 “it is in the way we try to be un-Jewish that we are most Jewish.”78 Rose is thanked in the acknowledgments of Modernity and Ambivalence alongside Irving Louis Horowitz, the US-based sociologist and editor of Society who presided over the aborted publication of Paradoxes of Assimilation.79 In a letter to Horowitz, Bauman expanded at length on the notion of “Jewish” sociology: I fully agree with you that there is something Jewish in the sociology done by Jews (perhaps in the very act of selecting sociology? or perhaps the fact that Jews selected it in such great numbers made it a Jewish pastime? Dietrich Schafer objected in 1908 to Simmel’s chair on the ground of his Jewishness, which expressed itself above all in his “commitment to sociology: to see society as the principal formative agent of human community in place of state and church” …). But if there was or is a Jewish sociology, Bauman claims, then it does not inhere in some “Jewish spirit,” as Horowitz had suggested in previous correspondence, nor was it contained within the sealed horizons of Judaic tradition. It rather inhered in the occupation of Jews in a social position, which rendered a particular form of interpretive critique possible. He specifically mentioned Freud, Kafka, and Simmel (the only recognized sociologist among them) as representatives of this kind of positioned critique, and noted that each had little knowledge of the Judaist lore.80

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In Bauman’s Modernity and Ambivalence, published two years later, each of these figures is taken as exemplary for the discussion of Jewish assimilation. Bauman argued the concept of assimilation has a history. It was introduced, in fact, as metaphor, borrowed from biology and referring to the process by which an organism absorbs and incorporates what is outside it. He dates the first instance of this biological usage to 1578. Gradually, it came to stand for “making alike” in general, which became more and more apparent in the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, in the context of increasing nationalisms, it came to refer instead to an action of the “outsiders,” who were no longer incorporated from the outside, but rather were compelled to assimilate into the organist nation-state. This metaphorical usage was and has continued to be projected into the past and dehistoricized, as if it were a general characteristic of social life.81 This conceptual history is key to what Bauman calls “sociological hermeneutics,” elsewhere characterized as his method.82 In Modernity and Ambivalence it is stated clearly: sociological hermeneutics aims at “the disclosure of the strategies of social action that originally sought expression in the borrowed trope, only to hide later behind its new ‘naturalised’ denomination, and of such aspects of those strategies as made the borrowed term ‘fit’ in the first place.”83 To Gillian Rose, he characterized sociological hermeneutics as “my inability to see the object without seeing the seeing subject; the sociologist (the philosopher, the rabbi) is to me a part (perhaps the most illuminating part) of the picture. The most interesting [part] I find the decoding of experience in thought.”84 In other words, sociological hermeneutics aims to understand the situational context in which certain concepts arose or metaphors were appropriated, to understand what social action they legitimated or gave meaning to, to avoid projecting these into pasts in which they were not present or even possible, and to grasp the process by which they became naturalized and dehistoricized. Metaphorical thinking is proposed as a corollary of this work of defamiliarization, an attempt to familiarize the unfamiliar via provision of a more adequate language with which to grasp it. Curiously, later in Modernity and Ambivalence, Bauman discusses the concept of “Jewish hermeneutics.” Indeed, this expression arises in his consideration of the three aforementioned figures in Modernity and Ambivalence: Freud, Kafka, and Simmel. Freudian psychoanalysis,

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for instance, is situated in relation to a specific tradition of rabbinical interpretation that is counterposed to a “Protestant literalism,” characterized by the “antithesis of literal and figurative … by its fear of multiple meaning.”85 By contrast, in rabbinical interpretation, the interpretation itself is continuously interwoven with the text and is inexhaustive. The text, any text, is not a definitive collection of propositions which simply await the uncovering of their singular meaning, but is rather to be interpreted over and again in the light of new experience, a multiplicity of meanings thus actively brought into being rather than revealed.86 Hermeneutic interpretation in this mode – as a continuous reflexive process – is inimical to a tendency toward closure and finality. Totalization and completion – the erection of boundaries and dividing lines between the interpretation and its outside – are ultimately “accomplishments of power [and] … power is a fight against ambivalence.”87 Kafka shows us another category related to Bauman’s sociological hermeneutics, namely despair. Despair pertains to the incompleteness of any interpretation, that which cannot be subsumed into categorical schema, that which eludes understanding. Despair “is the product of a frustrated understanding” but “is also the beginning, the very possibility of that effort to understand which is bound to come to nought in the end but which can never reach such a terminal point beyond which there is no beginning.”88 It is the feeling of incomprehension, sprung from the soil of social experience, that lays bare the task and necessity of understanding. As Bauman earlier put it in his more formative writing on hermeneutics: “The demand to understand arises from the hopelessness experienced when the meaning of human plight is opaque and the reason for suffering impenetrable.”89 Kafka was more aware than most of the incomprehension as one of those Jews “squeezed out into the void by contradictory assimilatory pressures.”90 For his part, Simmel dismantled the solid, totalistic image of society that was prevalent in the sociology of his day. His essayistic sociology was itself lambasted as Jewish, as Bauman had recognized in dialogue with Horowitz. Simmel stood accused of “fragmentariness”: “Reality emerged from Simmel’s writings,” wrote Bauman, “as so many splinters of life and crumbs of information; a far cry from the complete, allembracing, harmonious and systematic models of ‘social order’ or ‘social structure’ offered by other sociologists and considered de rigueur by the social sciences of the time.” Indeed, the formal dimensions of Simmel’s

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work, mirroring his insistently formal sociology, pointed to the “failed engineering dreams in all its splintered, fragmentary, episodic truth.”91 As I have suggested, Simmel’s essayism, later inherited by Bauman, points to the multiplicity of social orders. This Jewish hermeneutics, a hermeneutics of estrangement as epitomized by Freud, Kafka, and Simmel (Lev Shestov and Jacques Derrida are also given honourable mentions – notably, not one of these five worked in sociology departments of their time), is counterposed by Bauman to “western hermeneutics.”92 Each of these figures was, Bauman said, representative of the “ambivalent third, the stranger, brought into the world to carry the cross of the world’s conflicts.”93 Rose is immediately brought to mind here.94 They were dwellers and witnesses to what she termed “the brokenness in the middle,” that realm of “devastation between posited thought and posited being, between power and exclusion from power.”95 Indeed, Bauman had foreshadowed her argument in his Culture as Praxis, where he recognized that “successful dichotomization implies suppression of the centre.”96 In 2001, Bauman was invited to deliver a lecture at a memorial symposium to Gillian Rose. The lecture situates Rose in relation to Hannah Arendt and T.W. Adorno, who I earlier characterized as exercising the most significant formal influence on Bauman’s work. Gillian Rose, “whose thought was a dazzling shaft of light aimed to pierce the darkness of our time,” confronted the antinomies of power and the moral discourse of rights, law and ethics, and reason and love. She situated herself in “the middle,” broken asunder by these antinomies.97 In a nod to Judaism and Modernity, Bauman said that her task was not so different from that of the “dark thinkers of the Jewish Kaballah: how to make whole what has been torn apart in the course of God’s withdrawal from the world He created.”98 Rose’s answer to the question of whether there was a Jewish philosophy rested on a rejection of the diremption between Athens and Jerusalem, Hellenism and Hebraism, Western philosophy as the search for first principles and Judaism as tradition of law and commentary. Bauman wavered in his own search for a solution to this bifurcation. In an unpublished essay on the Athens/Jerusalem diremption – composed after Modernity and Ambivalence was published – he implied that Athens stands for the ethos of modernity (reason / totality / identity), and Jerusalem for that of postmodernity (ethics / plurality / otherness). “Retreat to Jerusalem,”

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he reflected, “means the end to the dream of the safety of order and the comfort of certainty. It means resignation to the irreparable non-finality and under-determination of existence. But it also means that everything is possible, as nothing has to legitimise its right to exist.”99 This was an example of what Rose lambasted as typical of an idealization of Judaism – also prevalent in Lévinas, central to Bauman’s Jewish turn – that would see it as “perfect jurisprudence, a holy sociology.”100 But perhaps, in his discussions of Jewish hermeneutics and ambivalence, Bauman was exploring the ruins of what Rose identified as the “third city,” that which is “buried alive beneath the unequivocal opposition of degraded power and exalted ethics, Athens and Jerusalem” and which, in making a relationship between the two, implies the universal that allows us to recognize the devastation of the brokenness of the middle.101 Such a city was concretized in those cosmopolitan centres of European modernity – Vienna, Berlin, Warsaw, and so on, where Jewish intellectuals, “suspended in the empty space between a [Jewish] tradition in which they were not fully at home and the [modern] mode of life which stubbornly denied them the right of entry,” were cast in the social position of “multicentred cosmopolitans,” to refer to another handwritten note marked on a typescript on Jewish modernity contained in the Bauman archive.102

The Drama of Jewish Modernity: Destruction and Creation The sociological analysis and diagnosis of the social condition of postmodernity that appears in Bauman’s work is inextricable from what he termed “Jewish modernity.”103 The manifold paths of Bauman’s historical sociology of postmodernity as Jewish experience and interpretation coalesce around the concept of estrangement. This is prefigured in his concept of “allosemitism,” meaning “the practise of setting the Jews apart as people radically different from all the others, needing separate concepts to describe and comprehend them and special treatment in all or most social intercourse.”104 Both anti- and philo-Semitism are derived from the problem of the margins in cultural praxis, the phenomenon of “proteophobia” resultant from the “apprehension” and “vexation” provoked by something or someone that “does not fit the structure of the orderly world.”105

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The Jew was thus the archetypal stranger. This position has its roots in Christianity, which bequeathed two enduring notions: first that Jews equate to disorder, and second that individual differences can be subsumed under the “conceptual Jew.”106 In a prefiguring of his later vocabulary, Bauman intimates that the Jew historically symbolized the liquidity of the world: “in the world of melting solids, they made everything, including themselves, into a formless plasma in which any form could be born, only to dissolve again.”107 The conceptual Jew stood for the “universal ‘viscosity’ of the Western world.”108 At the centre of Bauman’s narration of Jewish modernity is a discussion of German Jews amid the cauldron of nationalisms, a “non-national nation” in a bordered world of Westphalian rigidity.109 There are several reasons for this. Almost all of Bauman’s exemplary figures of modern Jewish culture tended to write in German. Furthermore, German Jews occupied a pivotal position in that they were the most long-standing, settled, and culturally creative community in the diaspora. They moreover occupied a borderline position between the affluent Jewish communities in the West and the impoverished communities of Eastern Europe.110 “Without German mediation,” he wrote, “Eastern-European Jews would have remained both voiceless and invisible to their Western brethren – at least until the start of their massive exodus to the West in the late nineteenth century.”111 Attentive to the social stratification of European Jewry and the phenomenon of estrangement within the collectivity of the already estranged, Bauman argued that the Ostjuden were presented as the “inner demons” of assimilation.112 Assimilation was the liberal political strategy of combatting ambivalence, aimed at the conversion of problematic subjects – itinerant, traditional, rootless, and so on – from one form of life to another, superior form.113 The imperative to assimilate, moreover, presented a normative continuum from the collective to the individual. In policies of assimilation, Bauman claims, “tolerant treatment of individuals was inextricably linked to intolerance aimed at collectivities, their ways of life, their values and, above all, their value-legitimating powers.”114 But a “trap” inheres in the liberal strategy of managing ambivalence by assimilation. Liberal universality is accompanied by nationalist exclusion.115 Assimilation is declared an imperative to all ambiguous figures of foreignness, but belonging is all-too-often unattainable: “When finally it seems to be within their grasp, a dagger of racism appears from beneath

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the liberal cloak. The rules of the games are changed, or, rather, only now the earnestly ‘self-refining’ stranger discovers that what they mistook for a game of emancipation was in fact the game of domination.”116 Genocide is a potential of the totalitarian strategy of the management of ambivalence.117 It is categorical murder; it entails the eradication of ambivalence by means of eliminating the collective group defined as embodying it. The conduct and qualities of individual victims are, in the eyes of the perpetrators and architects of genocide, irrelevant against their categorization.118 So it was with Jews in the Nazi world view. As we saw in the discussion of colonialism and ambivalence in the last chapter, for Bauman, such categorization was integral to the biopolitical administration of a population, purportedly assailed by pollutants. In a society seen as a garden, a population is split into healthy plants that the gardener wishes to nourish and encourage, and unproductive or harmful weeds that must be kept separate or even destroyed if necessary. The vector of such separation and splitting was scientific racism, which for Bauman, as I have already suggested, offered a line of continuity between Nazi anti-Semitism and colonial racism.119 He also saw how the Holocaust was perpetrated in the context of pan-European imperialism, the eastern frontier continuing in its role as Germany’s “orient” following the collapse of the German overseas empire.120 Crucially, as is well known, Bauman surmised that the Holocaust was not the polar opposite of modernity but was rather its darkest possibility. The Holocaust was a unique event produced by a concatenation of ordinary features of modernity, an emergent phenomenon resultant from the contingent entanglement of historical threads hitherto unconnected. These threads included the development of bureaucratic organization and rationalization, which split the overall task of killing into a huge range of smaller tasks, thus fragmenting the end into a proliferation of means. In the substitution of technical responsibility for moral responsibility, the objects of bureaucratic action are dehumanized, reduced to a set of quantifiable measures. The ever-increasing distance, Bauman argued, between an act and its consequences – a fundamental institutional dimension of modernity – leads to a dangerous demoralization or adiaphorization of action. Each of these potentialities was radicalized in the context of the deep social dislocation of the interwar period, one of those times in which society seems “unfinished, indefinite and pliable – literally waiting for a vision

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and a skilful and resourceful designer to give it a form.”121 In the context of the dissolution of non-political powers – economic, social, cultural – modern state bureaucracy acquires total sovereignty, the unconstrained right to proclaim and enforce the law, however immoral it might be.122 But destruction is dialectically entwined with creation. It was precisely the social position Jews were forced into that provided a vantage point from which the condition of postmodernity – modernity shorn of its illusions – could be prefigured.123 Bauman looked to Jewish intellectuals in pursuit of his scholarly questions – Freud, Kafka, and Simmel, but also Adorno, Arendt, Benjamin, Mannheim, and more besides. Where such figures may have previously figured in his thought as references, here they were themselves case studies in the dialectical interplay between traumatic experience and creative interpretation. Here, I quote at length from another letter to Gillian Rose: I am moved first and foremost not by the mystery of survival, but the miracle of creative eruption. Not by Judaism as the secret of communal resilience, but by being a Jew as the secret of that collapse of communality which we call modernity; and that irreparable ambivalence we call postmodernity. Having been cast as they have been cast, the Jews have been forced into being pioneers. They went first through the experience the others were to go later. And so they were the adults ridiculed by adolescents. From the flatness of their exile they saw things invisible from the thick tribal woods.124 And what did they see through these thick tribal woods, from the flatlands of their exile? That the power-assisted universalization of the modern social arrangement harboured dark possibilities, and that Western claims to universality were groundless. As he reasoned: “Universality of absence and the void is the only universality there is; Jewish singularity is the only universality there is; all universality is Jewish.”125 The Jewish experience and interpretation of modernity was, by the end of the century, generalized into the social condition of postmodernity. The social modality of the contemporary individual who “passes through a long string of widely divergent … social worlds” was, earlier in the century, “pioneered and fully explored by Jews amidst rising European nationalisms. In this sense, now we are all Jews.”126

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Return At this point, at the so-called end of history in the West, Bauman suggested that the daily life of assimilation had become dull and uninspiring, losing its association with intellectual iconoclasm, dissent, and adventurism.127 But this was not the case in Eastern Europe, where the dissolution of the Soviet empire had led to a resurgence in nationalisms. When the Baumans returned to Poland as “unwelcome strangers,” Jews once again occupied a perilous position amid the privations of the early post-communist period. The misery of long queues in perestroikaera Russia, Bauman reflected, had at least seemed democratic. Now, misery had become “private property [that] resides in your pocket … your handicap and another’s privilege.” In this context, long-standing anti-Jewish diatribes, which configured Jew as “the favourite symbol of the West, its modern culture, its political liberalism,” were recast in an age of hypercapitalism.128 Moreover, the dissolution of the institutionalization of official Marxism was in some quarters situated within an inglorious tradition of “the Judaist distortion of communist ideas.”129 This, Bauman notes, had animated the events of March 1968 in Poland that led to his expulsion. He had written about the “Judaist distortion” of communism, whose innovations include the revisionism he helped to spearhead, in his “The End of Polish Jewry,” published in 1969. This “sociological review” was an attempt at “preserving the image of this phenomenon,” which is “undergoing the process of an irretrievable liquidation.”130 At the point of homecoming, then, Bauman’s sociology of postmodernity stands as a post-traumatic confrontation with his identity and biographical experience, as an interpretative registering of his own exilic experience of Jewish modernity. Nevertheless, notable in his published works of the Jewish turn is his distance from the thorny questions of Polish-Jewish relations.131 Bauman largely avoided responding to the challenges to the analysis in Modernity and the Holocaust provided by Polish scholars like Jan Gross and Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, who, following the opening of communist state archives after 1989 and with meticulous ethnographic study, had demonstrated significant levels of local, Polish collaboration with Nazi occupation and proximate, affective participation in genocide.132 A response to Jan Błonski’s controversial and widely read essay on the subject, “Poor Poles

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Look at the Ghetto,” is considerably restrained and barely addresses its central questions of complicity, responsibility, and forgetting.133 This is especially peculiar given how central these relations are in Janina Bauman’s testimonies. Perhaps he would have had to make significant concessions regarding his arguments about the rationality of evil, the distance between perpetrators and victims, and the “grand design” of genocide. It may also have been to do with easing the passage of return from exile, not wanting to offend Polish sensibilities – though he was not one to shy away from such controversy and such caution would in any case have proved futile given the anti-Semitic abuse he received from some Poles in later life. In no small part, however, it was because to situate memorialization in the context of the history of Polish-Jewish relations was to work against its universalization and to move away from the message that the Holocaust was, and remains, a possibility of modernity. Bauman held that “the present-day significance of the Holocaust is the lesson it contains for the whole of humanity. And whatever we say on the subject, we, Poles and Jews alike, together, inseparably, have been cast in the role of the guardians and the custodians and the apostles of this lesson. It is our duty to see to it that the lesson is not lost, that it is heard and listened to – and remembered.”134

Judaism, Social Thought, Colonial Modernity At this point, I wish to return to the questions that opened this essay, and which I have moved away from somewhat. I consider some of the recent offerings that explicitly discuss the relationships between Judaism, (colonial) modernity, and social thought. A first guide exists in the form of Santiago Slabodsky’s Decolonial Judaism. Despite the considerable overlap between the historical experiences of Jews and other collectives affected by colonial discourses, Slabodsky claims that the interpretations and proposals of Jewish thinkers have only rarely been considered in terms analogous to the critique of the West emergent from anti-imperial struggle and postcolonial thought. Slabodsky is particularly critical of the tendency to “identify the eurocentrism or the ignorance of racialisation among these proposals” from Jewish thinkers “and ultimately reduce them to Western internal critiques of modernity instead of decolonial proposals.”135

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This line of argument can certainly apply to the positioning of Bauman, at risk of inclusion among the coterie of “dead white men” whose stale writings are included on teaching curricula merely as a result of an ongoing effect of disciplinary power, rather than through any intrinsic merits or effective history. Bauman’s critique of the parochial universality of Western modernity (ergo Eurocentrism); his valorization of the Jewish hermeneutics of estrangement as against the tradition of Western hermeneutics; his analyses of the racist undertones of assimilation discourse and the complicity of the modern state and Western scientific rationality in racial terror; and not least his universalization of the Holocaust suffice to demonstrate that there are ample reasons not to dismiss his contribution to the decolonization of sociology and its operative concepts. But there is a more complex story. The decolonial approach is rooted in a Latin American experience and interpretation of a historically specific form of colonial modernity, which Manuela Boatcă has termed conquest modernity, inaugurated with Columbus’s voyage in 1492.136 This mercantilist settler colonialism was a steamroller of precolonial cultural and social order, justified with reference to a universalistic notion of a civilizing mission. If alterity was invented, it was so that it could be erased without conscience. The logic of colonial-imperialism – always varied and gradational – had shifted by the middle of the nineteenth century, by which time most of Latin America had achieved formal or administrative independence (notwithstanding the arguments of dependency theorists and world-systems analysts, and the concept of coloniality). In the context of the British Empire, for example, after the Indian mutiny in 1857 and the Morant Bay Rebellion, there was a retreat from the universalist justification for empire and a turn to “culturalist alibis” for empire, in Karuna Mantena’s terms.137 The colonialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was largely a colonialism of “protectorates” and “trust territories.” This shift – which, as we have seen, Bauman tracked in his early discussions of colonialist-axiological and romantic-axiological concepts of culture – coincides with the time of “Jewish modernity,” which is the focus of the arguments developed across Bauman’s Jewish turn. It can be claimed, for example, that the concept of allosemitism that Bauman developed does something analogous to the concept of culture deployed in indirect colonial administrations, wherein Jews were represented

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as a social and cultural totality that was separate, self-contained, and required different concepts in order to be comprehended. It is this form of differencing and estrangement that generates ambivalence and that could have been responded to in a range of ways: romantic projects of preservation of tradition, assimilationist drives, and campaigns of genocidal violence.138 As I explored in the previous chapter, these responses to ambivalence are of course all observable in the colonial record: romanticist efforts to preserve precolonial culture, attempts to Westernize certain subjects as “évolué” (those who in Homi K. Bhaba’s words were “a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite” and who in mimicry carried their own ambivalent “resemblance and menace”139), and episodes of mass violence.140 In his Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought, Chad Alan Goldberg demonstrates that Jews have not only been among the most astute and critical interpreters of modernity, but they have also been objects of social theories of modernity. For the likes of Durkheim, Marx, Park, Simmel, Weber, and Wirth, Jews served as “an intermediary through whom European and American social thinkers discerned in a roundabout fashion the nature, problems, and trajectory of their own societies.”141 Jews provided Western “moderns” with a mirror.142 This, however, has been cast aside in a Manichean image of social theorizing as binarized between “the West and the rest,” apiece with what I earlier characterized as a form of totalizing Eurocentrism, which flattens the internal variation of European experience into a singular colonial-imperial Europe. Goldberg observes: “sociology [either] appears as a response to the internal transformation of European societies or to colonial encounters with non-European others, but there is little attention in either version to how ideas about the Jews – a people in Europe yet often viewed as foreign to it – helped classical sociologists to construct their understanding of modernity.”143 This position of the Jew as the internal Other of “the West,” an oriental presence within Europe (already rather essentializing, for it forgets the geographical and socio-structural gradations within Judaism itself – Western, Ostjuden, Middle Eastern, etc.144), has been forgotten in the assimilation of Jewishness to whiteness. The position of Jews, as Bauman fundamentally recognized and theorized, was ambivalent because it entailed contradictory meanings. On the one hand, Jews were associated with the liquifying processes of (Western) modernization, as a modern vanguard that anticipated the future of social order, on the other, they represented a vestige of (Eastern) tradition and backwardness.145

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Underplayed in the admittedly impressive historical scope of Goldberg’s account, given that his focus is on the classical origins of social theory, is how Jewish historical experience figured in the works of writers who, like Bauman, sketched the contours of post-modernity. A similar elision marks the compelling if contentious argument presented by Enzo Traverso in The End of Jewish Modernity. A distinctive Jewish modernity, Traverso claims, unfolded in Europe during the two centuries from 1750 to 1950 and generated one of the most significantly productive and progressive intellectual movements of European culture. This distinctive modernity is by and large now over. Traverso’s story is one of a rise and fall. Jewish modernity was born in Europe – encapsulated in the emergence of debates about the “improvement,” “regeneration,” and ultimate “emancipation” of Jews – and died after the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel: “After having been its cradle, Europe became its tomb and its heir.”146 Jewish modernity “was obliterated in Auschwitz” and “the civil religion of the Holocaust is simply its epitaph.”147 As alluded to in the subtitle of the original French volume – histoire d’un tournant conservateur – the historical sweep of Jewish modernity is, for Traverso, a reversal from progressivism to conservatism. If the first half of the twentieth century was the age of Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Rosa Luxemburg, and Leon Trotsky, the second half was rather that of Raymond Aron, Henry Kissinger, Ariel Sharon, and Leo Strauss.148 For Traverso, Jewish modernity represented an immanent critical consciousness of the West that has now passed, the fire handed down to postcolonial intellectuals. This “supersessionist” intellectual history misses the relationality of traditions of Jewish and postcolonial thought, the multidirectional memorializations of the entangled historical trajectories to which they respond.149 In its schematization, it also neglects the persistence of a critical Jewish tradition within Europe long after the Second World War. Although Traverso gives some credence to figures like Derrida, Hobsbawm, Lévi-Strauss, Lévinas, and Taubes, he argues that these figures represent the afterlight of the tradition in the absence of its generative historical conditions.150 Traverso also avoids a discussion of postmodernity and the many Jewish intellectuals who came decades after the supposed end of Jewish modernity, Bauman among them. Many of these figures resided in or were exiled from Eastern Europe after wartime, under Soviet influence. Traverso’s claim about the all-but-vanished problem of anti-Semitism after the Second World

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War and the focusing of energies on the new target of the essentialist figure of the Muslim are especially egregious considering Bauman’s own biography, exiled during the anti-Semitic campaign of 1968 and slurred as Żydokomuna in certain circles for the rest of his life. In the valorization of historiographies of entanglement, connection, and relationality, there emerges the risk that one historical trajectory becomes assimilated into the task of enlarging another.151 The history of colonial racism can in this sense come to figure as a mere foreshadowing of what was to be visited in Europe on its internal others, the specificities of its varied trajectories flattened and seen in linear terms as a “stage” on the way to the Holocaust. This itself is a negative inversion of the sort of universalizing Eurocentrism common in Western social thought. In our hypothetical dialogue between Bauman and the sorts of postcolonial and decolonial thinkers referenced throughout this book, the risk is that their works and the histories to which they respond are appropriated in the attempt to pinpoint elements of Bauman’s sociological frame that are added post hoc, directed toward referents to which they were not intended to refer. At the same time, I claim that Bauman can be identified as an inheritor of and contributor (even if unknowingly) to the sorts of cross-cultural and transhistorical dialogues that emerged in the wake of the Second World War between anti-colonial and Jewish writers.152 Frantz Fanon, for example, who opened the previous chapter, recognized full well the connections between Nazi anti-Semitism and colonial racism when recalling the words of his philosophy teacher from the Antilles: “when you hear someone insulting the Jews pay attention; he is talking about you.”153 Conflation of historical trajectories, hasty analogy, and rough equation are not the solutions to their separation and hierarchical framing; each loses sight of the category of the specific. Perhaps, in disentangling these paths that run across Bauman’s oeuvre, it is precisely the identification of the specificity of the Jewish experience that is the best argument against Eurocentrism in his essayistic, multi-windowed account of the multiplicity of modernity. I turn to another of these paths in the next chapter: that of the communist project of modernity and its aftermath.

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Achille Mbembe recently surmised that “the object of postcolonial theory is what may be called the entanglement of histories and the concatenation of worlds.”1 Europe, so often figured as the incubator of modernity, ought to be understood as a “multiplicity with no outer limit.”2 Insofar as there is a “European” modernity, it is inextricable from the economic, political, legal, and epistemic relations that were established with the rest of the world in the course of its historical development. A question follows from Mbembe’s insistence on entanglement and multiplicity, one which has been influential for my purposes. Why has there so often been an exclusive focus on Northern European overseas colonial empires in the critical reckoning with empire? A fuller and more adequate account of the story of nineteenthcentury European colonial empires ought to incorporate the trajectories of the various coeval continental empires – Habsburg, Russian, Ottoman – as well as those outside the landmass of Europe, as in the Japanese and Chinese examples. Moving into the twentieth century, the declining imperial powers of Old Europe gave way to those two superpowers of ambiguous imperiality, the USA and the Soviet Union.3 The disentanglement of these imperial formations and their treatment in specialist sub-disciplines that can often appear to have little to say to one another reproduces a form of Eurocentrism, inherent in the totalization of “Europe” or “the West” as a colonial-imperial power, absent of the mutable peripheries, frontiers, and subjugations internal to the continent and constitutive of its history. As Johann P. Arnason has said, “The critique of Eurocentrism should be accompanied by a pluralization of the idea of Europe – in the sense of distinctions between aspects of the European experience, each with its specific historical dynamics.”4

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In this chapter, my focus turns to the question of “Soviet empire” and modernity as experienced and interpreted in Eastern Europe. As theorists of multiple modernities and civilizational analysis have written, the short century (1917–89) of Soviet history does not represent some anti- or counter-modern entity, but rather an alternative to the Western form of modernity that had broken down in the trenches of the First World War.5 This alternative drew on distinctly “Eastern” traditions of redemption and merged, as S.N. Eisenstadt wrote, “technocratic and moralistic utopian visions under one totalistic canopy.”6 Moreover, the Soviet Union is increasingly recognized as having been an imperial formation, built in various ways upon the Tsarist empire.7 Krishan Kumar has suggested that insofar as “decolonization” pertains to the loss or abandonment of colonies, it can serve as a useful term for land empires and is therefore, in principle, eminently translatable in the context of the dissolution of the Soviet empire.8 Further to this, I claim that such a work of translation has significance for what it means to “decolonize” knowledge, and the position of East-Central European intellectuals, including Bauman, within such a project. The contemporary urgency to decolonize is overwhelmingly framed in terms of European overseas colonial-imperialism, and aims at deconstructing the imbrications of the ideas, ideology, and discourses of colonialism and the human and social sciences so that they can be reconstructed anew. It is often noted that the social sciences formed during the heyday of colonial-imperialism and subsequently reflected and reinforced the world-making ambition of “European” powers. But this has little to say in terms of the formation and subsequent historical trajectory of the social science disciplines in European countries like Poland, which were not overseas colonial powers (apart from ultimately futile projects developed in the name of nationalist aspiration9) and which, like many countries in the landmass of Europe, have historical experiences of occupation, trauma, and indeed colonialism.10 One seldom hears arguments for incorporating the communist and post-communist experience into an encompassing, non-Eurocentric, globally connected historical sociology.11 Nor does one tend to come across accounts of the post-socialist or post-communist era that acknowledge the height of the Cold War coincided with the inflection point of decolonization and the proliferation of new independent states across the ex-colonial world, which immediately became proxy theatres for

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confrontation between the two major power blocs.12 Frederick Cooper pointed to the lack of recognition of 1989, especially as it shaped the former Soviet republics, as a milestone and locus of decolonization in postcolonial theoretical circles. But it should also be acknowledged that the traumatic Indonesian experience in 1965–66, the West-sponsored coup against Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, and the Angolan “transition” from colonialism into a civil war which ciphered Cold War antagonisms, are all absent from the abundance of publications referring to conditions of post-socialism or post-communism, the vast majority of which focus on the former communist bloc in Europe after 1989.13 This sense of separation corresponds to disciplinary and regional specialisms, themselves rooted in the specificities of the trajectories under investigation. As seen at the end of the last chapter, just as problematic as the positing of an abyss between historical trajectories is the collapsing of one into another. Nevertheless, the process of working through the past, of recognizing the effective power of histories sedimented into tension-laden memories, is uneven. The discourses of postcolonialism, post-communism, and multiple modernities have their own blockages and blemishes, and this has consequences for the way we understand decolonization and the critique of Eurocentrism. If, as Mbembe argues, “the philosophical aim of decolonization and of the anticolonial movement that made it possible can be summed up in one phrase: the disenclosure of the world,” attention must be paid to how historical trajectories and their attendant critical interpretations exist in their own forms of enclosure.14 We have arrived, for a third time and through a different door, at my animating question: What kinds of possibilities emerge in a dialogue between distinctive theoretical traditions that correspond to disentangled historical experiences? Bauman’s writing, especially from the late 1990s onward, appears as an extraterritorial sociology that in many senses mirrors the extraterritoriality it depicted. It was a sociology, it appeared, without a nation-state society, one thought up in airport lounges and communicated on international lecture tours. Indeed, Bauman metaphorized modes of travel as a means to capture the point at which “the ‘Heavy Capitalism’ ship” tipped into “the ‘Light Capitalism’” aircraft, recalling fellow traveller Agnes Heller’s lyrical rendering of the regimes of historicity of modernity in terms of the seaport (standing for the cyclical concept of history), the railway station (the linear), and the airport (the extraterritorial).15

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However, if one looks closer, something else comes into shape: if the articulation of liquid modernity in Bauman’s sociology comes from anywhere, it is from the postwar experience of Eastern Europe about which he wrote throughout his sociological career. My argument here is that a significant thread of Bauman’s work constitutes a major contribution to the sociology of communism and post-communism, work for which he is seldom recognized today. Furthermore, this work is crucial in terms of contextualizing those aspects of his work for which he is well known – the sociology of postmodernity and the interpretive-diagnostic metaphorology of liquidity. Here, we also see Bauman broaching the problematic of “American empire.” There is, as I highlight in this chapter, a long thread of his work that stems from and speaks to a missing “Global East” that does not figure in the binary division between a Global South and Global North that constitutes the contemporary global imaginary.16

Soviet Empire and Post-communist/colonial Poland: Locating Zygmunt Bauman In 2008, Bauman was interviewed by Ab Imperio, a foundational journal in the “new imperial history” with a focus on the post-Soviet space. The editors, by dint of selection, seem to frame Bauman as a post-imperial figure. Asked about how much his personal experience and Polish background influenced his perception of empire, and of Russian empire in particular, he replied: With the familiar caveat about the poor place of authors to answer these sorts of questions, the two influences on my work you mention must have been enormous … Coming to the Soviet Union from pre-war Poland, not a paragon of democracy and a country struggling hard to make the Polish state into a State of Poles (and Poles only), I was struck not so much by that sharply un-democratic nature of the counter of arrival (not a complete novelty to me), but by the multitude of ethnicities that lived and worked side by side paying little attention to ethnic differences between them.17 Like the editors of that journal, I claim that Bauman can productively be framed in the context of debates about Soviet imperialism in

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the twentieth century, in particular the idea of “postcolonial Poland.” These debates have turned the lens of postcolonial literary criticism toward the blind spots, myopias and false universalizations in Russian literature as concerns Eastern Europe and central Asia. Here, it is held that the ongoing axiom that colonial-imperialism was (and is) a process involving the subjugation of the Third World (the West’s former colonial territories) by the First World (the West) is evidence of the perpetuation of a Marxist internationalist framework that prevented asking questions about the so-called second world in terms of imperialism.18 The upshot has been that this has obscured a nascent anti-imperial discourse in the writings of East-Central European writers and intellectuals, observable in the Polish case. Ryszard Kapuściński, writing in his Imperium of the Bashkir settled around the Ural Mountains where Europe meets Asia, narrated a process of anti-imperial enlightenment that connected subjugated populations in western Asia with those in Africa: Our cognizant Bashkir, as he takes his look around, will find that his beautiful green country has been transformed into an enormous factory floor whose effluvia are poisoning the air. Reflecting on this turn of events, he will remember that nobody asked him whether he agreed to have his country transformed into a chemical factory. Moreoever – the Bashkir will realize that he derives no benefits from this gigantic and ever so-harmful chemical production, for the Imperium pays nothing to its internal colonies. Ah, there it is – for he will quickly realise the colonial position of his Bashkiria, the fact that the Agrochina and Chimstroy so deeply entrenched here remind him a little of the Union Miniere in Katanga (present-day Shaba, in Zaire) or Miferma in Mauritania.19 Czesław Miłosz, for his part, also saw the similarities between colonization by the Soviet Union and by the powers of the West, evoking the fateful year of 1492 in his reflections on the “lesson of the Baltics”: “The invasion of the Spanish must have been an appalling experience for the Aztecs. The customs of the conquerors were incomprehensible; their religious ceremonies, strange; the paths of their thought, impossible to follow. The invasion of the Red Army was no less of a shock for the Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians.”20

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In a more historical-sociological idiom, others attend to the peripheralization of the region within an economic world-system whose core powers were located in the West, a position developed processually since the inauguration of the age of discovery in 1492. The establishment of the eastern parts of Europe as a periphery constituted its entry in global modernity on unequal terms, subject to the economic, political, and epistemological power of the modern world-system.21 This was accompanied by discourses of differencing in Western cultural representations of the east, cast on the negative side of dualisms of “civilised – barbarian,” “rational – irrational,” and “developed – underdeveloped.”22 As Manuela Boatcă has suggested, speaking particularly of Romania, “the systematic process of constructing inferior ‘Others’ as a core mechanism of legitimation for political intervention in, economic exploitation and epistemological patronage of the periphery had also led to the emergence of ‘pathological regions’ in that area of the modern world-system whose ‘North’ was its West.”23 It has also been suggested that the divergence of eastern European countries and their criticisms of the hypocrisies of Western Europe represents a form of resistance. For Maria Mälksoo, the challenging of the “mnemopolitical authority of the West” in dominating the narrative of postwar European history amounts to eastern Europe’s post-EU accession “ideological decolonization,” inhering in the “attempt to insert a moment of radical heterogeneity into the historically largely Western European construction of ‘Europe’ – its history, memory and identity – and to consequently pluralize the ways of being European.”24 This consists in challenging the West-dominated narrative of European commonality and totality that emerges from the position of “European subalternity” bequeathed by their particular historical experiences. Central and Eastern European experience points toward the possibility and normative desirability of a unified European remembrance of the twentieth-century barbarism that nearly destroyed Europe as a unitary entity. Bauman’s own work – in its genesis in and attentiveness to the traumatic experiences of East-Central Europe, especially Poland – is itself an argument against totalizing and universalizing forms of Eurocentrism, which position Europe as a homogenized vanguard of historical progress. Most obviously, this pertains to the Jewish experience and interpretation of modernity and the Nazi form of modernity explored in the previous chapter. But, as Peter Beilharz has noted, at work in

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Bauman’s sociology is a reckoning with Europe’s “Other totalitarianism,” Soviet communism, and thus his critical theory of modernity has an Eastern basis.25 Moreover, his position is rooted in an awareness of the imperial dimensions of Soviet-communist modernity, its pretensions to rational mastery, and proselytizing tendencies. He can therefore be productively read into the debates sketched above, with the specific thread of his thought on communism and post-communism entangled along with the others treated so far. In order to make this claim, however, we must return to Bauman’s early studies of state socialism in Poland, the development of which are woven, as ever, into the unfolding of his exilic position.

Poland: Marxism, Freedom, and the Critique of Bureaucracy Keith Tester argued that Bauman’s analyses of communism ought to be considered as both the chronological and thematic hinge between his early studies of Poland and the work for which he became renowned in the late 1980s and ’90s on the darker side of modernity and on intellectuals and ambivalence.26 But this link is not straightforward. In the first instance, it is obscured by the significant stylistic and formal differentiations between works of the Polish period and works written later in English. The positing of a link also implies a basic stability and continuity in the development of his thought, eliding equally striking discontinuities. Moreover, in the rupture between these two periods (which is, to reiterate, a rupture of exile) are distinctive working conditions and configurations of intellectual networks, which need to be reconstructed. As indicated in the first chapter of this book and foregrounded in studies of Bauman by scholars working in Poland, Bauman was increasingly embedded throughout the 1960s in the Polish iterant of the intellectual movement of Marxist-humanist revisionism, after an initial period of close party alignment.27 Across Eastern Europe, revisionist intellectuals differed in terms of how far their revisionism went and to what end it was applied (to philosophy, to sociology, to intellectual history, and so on), but they nevertheless shared a number of central presuppositions. In concert with his contemporaries in Poland, Bauman afforded a central position to a set of key themes: freedom was at the

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centre, with concomitant notions of alienation, community, and human creative activity or praxis, as well as moral responsibility. These themes were to remain central to Bauman’s sociology. Refuting the standard critique of Marx’s purported “economic determinism,” Bauman sought to emphasize these themes as workable components of Marxism.28 In this sense, Marxist sociology was contrasted with the managerialism of Talcott Parsons in particular, who “in his theory of society” has moulded “a global world image out of the everyday problems as seen by those in the managerial role, thus promoting the mundane efforts of those in the managerial position to the rank of a structural principle of social organisation.”29 Managerial sociology is attuned and subservient to large scale organizations. Organization is, fundamentally, “‘an attempt at limitation of the unbounded multiplicity of opportunities; an attempt at structuration of an amorphic, homogenous universum”; thus, an organization and its managers are concerned with laws of cause and effect, predictability, and so on. Bauman argued that Marxist sociology has been deployed in some contexts, most obviously the Soviet context from which he is writing, as a managerial science. But this is contrasted with the activistic current in Marxism elaborated in Lenin, Luxemburg, Lukács, and Gramsci, which posits “human historical action” as its basic category and emphasizes above all “the active, motivating role of mental structuralisation of the human world”; here, “ideas play the role of an historically active force.”30 It should be noted that many of Bauman’s pieces written at this time were selected for translations for English language editions of The Polish Sociological Bulletin. One surmises that one of the purposes of such an edition was to project outward a particular image of Polish sociology for an “international” (read: Western) audience, to the centre of sociology as located in Europe and the USA. Thus, one finds very few examples of Marxist terminology, alongside a critique of structural aspects of Soviet-type systems. The outward-facing nature of the pieces under review also accounts for the fact that Bauman’s writing is more or less unrecognizable. The pieces are based on survey research and include tables, charts, and schematic categorization of survey respondents. However, Bauman did write essayistically and on more general theoretical themes elsewhere at this time.31 Although I am wary of framing Bauman in terms of his own categories, these pieces clearly evince a tension between Bauman the “legislator” and Bauman the “interpreter.”

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We see these contradictions in Bauman’s essay “The Limitations of Perfect Planning,” very much a product of his “Sovietology” and clearly written for an American political science audience. It was originally delivered as a paper at Minnowbrook in the State of New York, USA, where the 1964 meeting of the Comparative Administration Group took place. Bauman was an international scholar during this time but often on the terms of the West, as a specialist of Polish or Soviet issues. The technical dimension of the article is not so different from other pieces of the era, but the theoretical vocabulary is jarring, frequently Parsonian in its references to “functional requirements of the system,” “goal attainment,” and so on. Here, Bauman does not seem to be advancing a critique of managerial sociology so much as making a case for the limitations of the current planning model so that it can be more effectively managed. There are, nevertheless, critical currents at work in the article, and in order to appreciate them, the context of Polish social science must be appreciated. As a Communist Party member and intellectual in a society whose every sphere was colonized by the party, Bauman had to have been very careful about what he wrote, especially when a visa had been granted for travel across the Iron Curtain. However, we know that his writing, as arcane and technical as it sometimes seemed, led in part to his exile from Poland. There is, in other words, a coded critique of the communist system as expressed in Poland here. It is manifested in the critique of bureaucracy, which reappears in a different context in Modernity and the Holocaust.32 The perfect planning model presupposes a bureaucratic “planning agent” as “the only and unchallenged factor determining the totality of social action.”33 One also detects a critique of forecasting; the perfect planning model is predicated on the idea that the future can be known and mastered. Bauman’s cultural sociology, and his trenchant critique of the “will to order” of modernity, is a rebuttal to this very idea.34 Perfect planning negates the radical indeterminacy of the social world and represents a limitation of freedom. This piece is productively read alongside a later essay on the “uses of information.” Published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, it again appears to be written for a predominantly Western audience. There are references to the eastern political system, but the model is generalizing. It is the first encounter in Bauman’s writing with Michel Crozier who, alongside Mary Douglas, would become one of those influences so entrenched that they require no

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footnotes.35 Betraying an interest in cybernetics, Bauman argued that the movement of information is of crucial importance for social systems, the “little islands of order … in a basically disordered world” resultant from and institutionalized in the teleological pursuit of certainty, order, and stability.36 Information is inextricably related to power, since power exists in proximity to the sources of uncertainty. As such, “control over input and processing of information is the most powerful armament in the intra-organizational power struggle,” illustrated with the literary example of Kafka’s The Castle, which “forecast just what this possibility could mean and he [Kafka] did it well in advance of sociologists.”37 This is particularly important with respect to Poland: “the more a country progresses along the way of industrial development, the more the foci of ‘uncertainty’ move toward expert management of economic and social problems … social scientists become crucial figures whenever socio-economic development becomes a desirable and achievable end of a social system.”38 Or, put differently, expertise becomes significant when particular forms of knowledge and information serve the interests of power, by surveying the field of uncertainty and rendering it stable, predictable, orderly. They also become significant when, aware of this position, they elucidate, as did the revisionists, this imbrication of power and knowledge and keep uncertainty and indeterminacy uncertain and indeterminate; when multiple possibilities are kept open rather than delimited and condensed into necessity. This latter role of intellectuals and experts is their critical function. In these pieces, perhaps precisely because of their elucidatory function, we see the outlines of Bauman the critical sociologist appearing on the now untrodden path of his sociology of communism.

Israel, at a Crossroads: 1968 and the Liminality of Youth “Human history is not pre-empted by its past,” wrote Bauman in Freedom (1988), a book overshadowed by the publication of Modernity and the Holocaust the following year. He continued: “Each moment of history is a junction of tracks leading towards a number of futures. Being at a crossroads is the way human society exists.”39 To what extent did this historical ontology crystallize in the crucible of March 1968? The March

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events and the ejection from the socialist project must have felt like a practical lesson in contingency, open-endedness, the fundamentally liminal aspect of human existence. This liminality was embodied by the young Poles who fought with police on the streets, Bauman reflected in an unpublished piece on the March events written in exile in Israel. Youth, supposed to stand for an intermediary position between the child’s experience of domestic closeness and the professionalization and atomization of the adult world, was experienced by Polish young people as the realization that the possibilities of the world were being stamped out in the name of necessity. This generated a “critical positioning toward the world, suspicion and distrust towards the slogans proclaimed by the ‘adults’ representing the world and their honesty, and a yearning to formulate their own slogans and life lessons.”40 In March 1968, he wrote in the Paris-based literary journal Esprit: “young people emerged as the vanguard for all of society.”41 In another response, this time in an edition of the émigré journal Kultura (again, based in Paris), young people were cast in the role of redeeming socialism.42 It was “precisely socialism which is making its way through all the police roadblocks, to be realised in its liberal and democratic form.”43 That he came to side with youth – that he saw the problem not as intergenerational hostility but as a by-product of a dysfunctional social system – was one of the reasons, alongside anti-Semitism, that would lead to Bauman’s exile.44 The Polish events are defined as a conjurer’s trick to do away with the frustration borne of the structural and anthropological position of youth and the challenge represented by revisionism, as well as the frustrations of various strata within the Polish population, especially the new middle class of bureaucrats, administrators, functionaries, and career officers who found their capacity for advancement significantly diminished. The strategy of the Polish ruling classes was to render the elite of the Polish youth and their revisionist challenge powerless, as well as to delimit the autonomy of Polish higher education institutions. Students and universities, in this sense, could become lightning rods for the aggression of the new middle class, themselves threatened by the introduction of an atmosphere of general purge and hysteria into their respectable bureaucratic and administrative departments. A further aim of the provocation, Bauman held – gesturing specifically toward the

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translatability of decoloniality – was to deflect those growing feelings of unfulfilled demands of national independence, spreading across such Soviet satellites as Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia.45 Of course, as we have seen, this was combined with anti-Semitism. As he wrote: “Antisemitic colourings of the March events in Poland is in no degree the result of a spontaneous impulse of the nation. It is a planned out action of organisers of the provocation, and they alone bear the responsibility.”46

In Britain: Communism as Modernity Bauman says that communism occurred at “the ‘limen’ of European modernity.”47 Communism was, despite this estranged position, “modernity in its most determined mood and most decisive posture; modernity streamlined, purified of the last shred of the chaotic, the irrational, the spontaneous, the unpredictable.”48 The end of communism at its eastern reaches therefore represented the end of the order-building ambitions and aspirations to rational mastery characteristic of the form of European modernity, which had shaped the history of the previous two centuries.49 It therefore takes its place alongside those two threads of Bauman’s work treated in previous chapters: the rupture of decolonization and the drama of Jewish modernity. Richard Kilminster perceived that subsequent developments in Bauman’s work, in particular the liquid modern turn, are related to post-communism, the condition of liminality that pervaded the former Soviet Union and its satellite states, the sense of an old solid order having collapsed into uncertainty.50 To grasp this connection, we can revisit Bauman’s writings on socialism and communism in Eastern Europe written and published in the early Leeds period. Bauman’s understanding of Soviet-type societies was elaborated throughout the 1970s. On the surface, various writings of this period are continuous with his political sociology of Eastern European communism, often drawn from analyses of Polish politics and society. At another level, however, given the timing and that they treat the theme of dissent and crisis in Soviet-type societies, they might be considered expressions of an attempt to work through the traumatic experience of being expelled from a project he had been deeply invested in. Here, he depicted the communist societies in their “system management phase,” which came after 1968, after the failed utopias and barbarisms of earlier stages. The Party, as he saw it, had become

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preoccupied less with the final destination of its trajectory than with “the road itself – becoming less goal-oriented and more means-wise. Inspiring visions of the blissful times to come have been moved imperceptibly into a storeroom, to be aired only on festive occasions.”51 That these words were spoken in a paper presentation to a colloquium on “the politics of change in the Soviet Union” at UC Berkeley in 1973, under the aegis of the Center for Slavic and East European Studies, demonstrates that Bauman continued to circulate in the networks of Sovietologists during this time. Exile also afforded a greater capacity to express thought critically, in a self-consciously revisionist modality. In an essay originally presented at the 1973 British Sociological Association conference, he set himself explicitly against the “Soviet version of official Marxism” with its “vision of a tough, inflexible, solid structure,” existing independently of human action and seen to remain “unchanged and unaffected whatever the vicissitudes of the empirical historical action of classes.” This is counterposed to the radical “open-endedness and inconclusiveness of human praxis, on which Marx repeatedly insisted throughout his work.”52 In a piece on “Social Dissent,” Bauman considered the concept of revolution and the function of dissent in Soviet-type societies in relation to it. He defined a revolution as “accomplishing a change in the socio-economic structure of the society through breaking the legitimacy of the political structure.”53 A socialist revolution, however, is quite a specific entity, pertaining to “the bridging and filling up of the burrow dug by the victorious bourgeoisie between State and society.”54 In this sense, Marxist utopianism was continuous with the common thread of utopian thought as stitched through More, Campanella, Winstanley, and so on – the perfect society was one with “a planned regulation of social structure and economic distribution by some sort of political power.”55 In Socialism: The Active Utopia – a book which appeared in a series edited by Tom Bottomore, a major figure of the British New Left with which Bauman, as exemplary of the “Eastern Left,” had an ambiguous relationship56 – there is a sustained engagement with existing socialism in the Soviet Union. Bauman argued that the Soviet Union tried to institutionalize socialism in the absence of the material conditions necessary for its emergence. In the West, the advent of the modern state was synonymous with the emergence of civil society. This was not so in the East, where before the 1920s an attempt was made to institutionalize civil society from above:

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It is for this reason [the civil society strength] that the process of development of modern states in the West can be so often described as the rise of “nation-states.” In a large part of Eastern Europe the nations, in the sense of elaborate civil societies built into linguistic and cultural communities, emerged within political states which spread far beyond the boundaries of the cultural community in question. The “national problem,” a typically Eastern-European concept and preoccupation, took from the start the shape of “a nation in search of the state,” a civil society in search of a political state to lean on and support.57 Soviet states are examples of integrated state-societies, in part because the Soviet Union introduced Eastern Europe to the relative security of industrialization. This work repeatedly broaches the question of Soviet influence and the specific status of satellite states, especially pertinent to the contemporary preoccupations of the new imperial histories. The revolution in the Eastern European countries having been in some measure imported, it was rather obvious that the ubiquitous Soviet presence was a crucial, if not the decisive, factor in getting the young post-revolutionary regimes over the first awkward corners in their itinerary.58 As Bauman puts it in an article in a special issue of the International Journal of Contemporary Sociology on the theme of “Society and Sociology in Poland: Views from Polish Intellectuals Currently Outside Poland,” throughout this period he was attempting to frame theoretically the idea that “East-European experience is not a relatively undeveloped version of a uniform ‘modern society,’ but a social system in its own right, which requires its own and distinct ideal type to be intelligibly described and understood.”59 Bauman’s work is an effort “to incorporate the Soviet-type system into a wider perspective of modernity.”60 This key dimension of Bauman’s sociology is missed by those detractors who criticize his so-called Eurocentrism. It also anticipates the arguments presented after the end of communism, which sought to incorporate the rupture of 1989 into the framework of the “multiple modernities” paradigm. Eisenstadt, for example, saw the Soviet iteration of modernity

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as a combination of traditional historical, patrimonial, and bureaucratic features intrinsic to Tsarist empire with a monolithic revolutionary movement and ideology.61 What were the cultural and institutional dimensions of this alternative, distinctive rather than pathological form of Western modernity, notwithstanding their entanglements in an international system? The social system characteristic of the socialist modern societies of Eastern Europe “is shaped by two relatively autonomous and to an extent antagonistic power structures, neither of which is entirely reducible to the other.”62 These power structures are named class – standing for the traditional notion of a market-relation that determines conditions of access to the control of the means of production – and officialdom. The specificity of this power structure is related to the traditions of patronage in the pre-communist histories of the societies of Eastern Europe. Bauman makes this clear in a reply to an article, which formed the basis of a symposium organized at the Australian National University in Canberra (where he once held a visiting position), and published in Studies in Comparative Communism. The uncertainty which marked the peasant’s life amid capricious nature is now located in an uncertain social system, absent of the Weberian criteria of appointment and performance that are considered the most significant aspects of Western rational bureaucracies. Communist society is a society of clients-in-search-ofa-patron.63 Officialdom emerges from the position of the party as the principal agent of control, which permeates the entirety of society on the basis that, in a socialist society, the distinctions between economy, politics, and culture are blurred to a significantly greater degree than in a capitalist one. The power of officialdom is derived from the ability to manage the distribution of resources and their conditions through the mechanisms of the party. Weber is a foil for this discussion. Indeed, the distinction between modalities of legitimacy in capitalist and communist societies forms the basis of a critique of Weber’s West-centric focus when it comes to bureaucratic rationality: “Without losing their character of large, specialiststaffed, bureaucratic organizations, Communist-type parties in power become the sources of legitimation, command, and direction, which in Western-type systems are kept apart from the parties and vested within an institutionally separate state.”64 With this in mind, we can answer Paul du

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Gay’s question of Modernity and the Holocaust, which criticized that book on the basis of purported misunderstandings about the dark potential of bureaucracy and its hyper-rationalism, impersonalism, and neutralization of the moral impulse. Bauman, Du Gay argues, vastly overestimates the extent to which Weber, whose concerns about bureaucratic growth are limited to the case of Wilhelmine Germany, can be considered an ally. But, we might say, Bauman’s bureau is not Weber’s bureau because his understanding is informed by East European experience.65 Another key distinction vis-à-vis the West was the social mechanism of patronage, which would come to take on special importance in Bauman’s discussions of post-communism, and which I turn to below. This is expanded on in an unlikely addition to Bauman’s oeuvre, a report titled Hidden Economy, East and West, presented in 1980 at the Conference on the Soviet Second Economy at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington, DC, and part of a project contracted by the University of California-Berkeley and funded by the National Council for Soviet and East European Research. The concept of the hidden economy denotes those informal economic interactions and networks that take place outside the regulated market but do not necessarily tip into the illicit or “black” market. In the West, this entails making the best of opportunities that arise in the course of normal employment (such as making gifts for friends out of factory materials, say, at cost price) often with the tacit acceptance of employers. By contrast, the “hidden economy,” as an expression of patronage, is produced as a systemic feature of the Soviet economy. Another key figure in these discussions is Reinhard Bendix, with whom Bauman had an amicable relationship. Bendix enlisted Bauman’s help to translate some of his works into Polish, and Bauman presided over the award of an honorary doctorate to Bendix at Leeds in 1976, perhaps in part to boost the profile of the department that he headed.66 In his works of this period, Bauman is influenced by Bendix’s notion of impersonalism and plebiscitarianism as the core process of modernity.67 The impersonalism of Western society explained in Weber’s Protestant ethic is simply not present to anything like the same degree in Soviet-type societies. On the other hand, the Communist party and state are completely blended with the economy “in a strenuous and unremitting effort to transform, politically, the social and economic texture of society.”68 The legitimation of this system is premised on

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the “future-orientation” of socialism, not some appeal to tradition or charismatic authority of the leader: “the authority which implements the socialist vision seems to represent a … category of legitimation, unknown in past epochs … legitimation which is in essence futuristic.”69 The idea of “perfect planning” is central here, “the major instrument of such a teleological determination. One speaks of the emergence of capitalism, but of the construction of socialism; the advent of a socialist or communist society can only come about through a conscious and persistent effort of planning and the implementation of plans.”70 The institutional expression of this specific form of authority characteristic of communist societies is partymonialism, power derived not from a supreme leader but from the party understood as a “vanguard, to whom the road ahead is visible in contrast to the masses who must be led.”71 Peter Beilharz has written that the true object of the critique presented in Legislators and Interpreters, Bauman’s samizdat text addressing the “power-assisted universalisation” of European modernity, is not the philosophes, as it seems to be, but rather the Bolsheviks and their inheritors.72 Bauman’s writings on communist modernity before “the postmodern turn,” lend support to this intriguing idea. Particularly interesting – and relevant for our discussions of the post-communist/post-colonial dialogue – are the reflections on East-Central European intellectuals and civil society which appear in an essay published in the same year as Legislators and Interpreters. The authority of intellectuals is often said to derive from their access to a transcendent space of reason in which territorial and linguistic boundaries are overcome. On the contrary, Bauman argued that “our task demands that intellectuals and their unique role be repositioned in their specific historical and territorial context.” Thus, any study of “European intellectuals” must be attuned to the regional specificities of Europe, its cores and peripheries, and the multiplicity of its modernity. He continues, “We need to separate the conditions under which the intellectual mode, with its characteristic pursuit of universality, was brought into being, from the quite distinct conditions under which it was borrowed, absorbed and adapted far from the time and place of its origin.”73 Two features of East-Central European societies were of particular relevance in terms of the specificities of the appropriation of the concept of intellectuals. First, in the absence of absolutist states, intellectuals were

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faced with the task of constructing a coherent political body capable of effective action, without a readily available organizational entity that they could appropriate for such purposes. The second distinction related to the lack of overlap between dynastic states and the collection of ethnic and linguistic communities that occupied the same area.74 The gap between civil society, over which the intellectuals presided, exchanged ideas, debated, and so on, and the state, where the body politic resided and from where political power emanated, was minimal in EastCentral Europe, in contrast to the West. The intelligentsia veered between Western Zweckrazionalität and indigenous-collectivist Wertrazionalität: “between the idea of speeding up the destruction of the ancien régime and the need to build up the new and rational order directly on the foundations of ancient institutions and in a form fairly different from the cold, competitive and atomised world of capitalism.”75

Modernity and Stalinism At this point, having raised the question of the authority structure of Soviet communism, its future-oriented legitimation, and the imbrications of intellectuals and state, it seems important to revisit Bauman’s writings on Stalinism, which run through the thread of his work on communism and which have been neglected by his critics.76 Stalinism figured alongside the Holocaust, Bauman argued, as the most extreme example of the terror derived from the order-building obsession of modernity, and Stalin personally, with his cultivation of “official fear” as a mechanism of domination, stands as the most frightening example of a power defined as proximity to the sources of uncertainty.77 This is expounded in an obscure text titled “Stalin and the Peasant Revolution: A Case Study in the Dialectics of Master and Slave,” originally published in Polish in 1977. The piece, again an example of Bauman’s Sovietology period, discusses the form of modernization taken in the Soviet Union and Russia in particular. It can be read as a precursor to the later analysis of modernity and its development that appears in his better known works. This time, however, it tells a specific story in which the communist trajectory is distinct from that of Western Europe: “It was the eighteenth century when the historical ways finally branched away from the main branch of Western Europe – toward preservation of the peasantry instead of its destruction.”78

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The communist revolutions in China and Russia, he began, were peasant revolutions. The piece uses this frame to analyze the transformation from traditionalistic and rural Russia to socialist modernization and industrialization as inaugurated in the twentieth century by Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and finally Joseph Stalin. In the first place, peasants were thought of as willing and enthusiastic participants in the fight against the tsars. However, they were part of a historical process which would bring about, in the eyes of the Bolshevik revolutionaries, their own disintegration. The Bolshevik revolution, Bauman held, was not a workers’ but a peasants’ revolution. They were the initial driving force of the revolution and then became its victims, when the forces of modernization were set in motion by the new people in power. Modernity was thus both emancipation and destruction. In Bauman’s words, “to obtain more modernity, the screw had to be turned, time and again, one or several notches tighter.”79 The peasants were drawn from the mir and turned into an active political force; they hoped to return afterwards. As such, with this foretaste of freedom, they began to run wild and became feared as a social force by the Bolsheviks. The dream of a return to traditional Russian agriculture became a nightmare of annihilation through the processes of collectivization, state formation, and modernization of the mir. The dialectic of master and slave inhered in the tension between the hope that the revolutionaries would lead the peasants into socialism and the fear that the led might well come to lead the leader: “The horror of the peasant beast on the loose was never to leave them – until the master would murder the slave, turning into the slave of his own crime.”80 This murderer was Stalin. To quote Bauman at length: Only now could the master dare to emancipate from his slave by a really radical way: by killing him. Until that moment the master was stalling for time, alternating cracks of the whip with honey worded declarations of goodwill or condescendence. He was careful not to over play his hand and not to venture an inch further than the tether which tied him up to his slave allowed. It was, in a sense, a benevolent occupation of an alien country whose population is to be left as much of its habits and rights as necessary to keep it reasonably satisfied and, above all, to keep the level of dissatisfaction below the critical point … Even with this

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task accomplished, the occupied population retained its potential force which had to be perpetually reckoned with, while the ranks of the occupant were so saturated by vacillating native elements and – as a group – so terrified by the sheer size of the conquered population, that – given right to decide freely – would endlessly cling to the policy of feet-dragging. Only now, with martial discipline introduced inside the party and the acts of the intrepid soldiers of the dictatorship of proletariat hanging over party necks – the collective conqueror could be bullied and whipped into an open declaration of war on, in Robert Tucker’s words, “the indigenous order that was treated as though it were foreign.” 81 Stalinism appears here, as Alvin Gouldner defined it, as a form of “internal colonialism.”82

“Living without an Alternative”: The Unbearable Liquidity of the Post-Communist Condition Bauman wrote that the history of the Soviet Union could be seen as a continual effort to prevent the emergence of civil society, represented most pointedly in the form of Stalinism. The phase of “system management,” however, after the Stalinist barbarism and the tumult of 1968, was the period of the re-emergence of civil society.83 The re-establishing of civil society exploded in the moment of Solidarność. In exile, Bauman was a distant spectator to events in Poland. This did not stop him from being the subject of the reach of the communist surveillance state. After working under the codename “Armin” for the Stasi in Edinburgh and Leipzig, Robin Pearson moved to Leeds University to undertake a doctorate in German economic history. Here, he was tasked with providing information about links between members of the university’s Russian department and British intelligence. At the beginning of the 1980s, Pearson helped the Stasi and the Polish intelligence service to unearth overseas supporters of the Solidarność trade union movement, including Bauman.84 Bauman’s early engagement with Solidarność must rank as among the most optimistic of his writings. It also constitutes his first offering in the pages of Telos, established in New York in 1968 as a publishing and networking outlet for the western New Left. Some of Bauman’s

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most interesting and neglected political-sociological works appear in the pages of this journal. In 1981, he framed Solidarność as a “maturation of socialism.” With the trade union movement, a historical alternative to Western liberal capitalism and Soviet communism had been created. Solidarność was “a socialist resistance to bureaucratic domination,” a genuine moment of Ernst Bloch’s novum or Castoriadisian “historical creativity.”85 What was genuinely new and creative in the Polish events was that “a process leading from an absolutist state to the separation of civil society from the state is both carried out and led by workers.”86 He frames it as the culmination of a series of Polish events – the 1956 thaw, the intellectual dissent of the 1960s, the bloody workers’ strikes of the winter of 1970, and so on – and the zenith of the twin processes of “collective learning and historical praxis.”87 The aim was to reintroduce civil society in a social formation, which had seen it historically as an obstacle to modernization. What’s more, the movement had managed to articulate its concerns in non-party political language. Bauman situated Poland on something like a trajectory of decolonization. The Soviet Union is configured as “Soviet Empire”88 and the experience of East-Central European satellite states as an occupation. Poland was, echoing the language of the piece written in Israel a decade earlier, “at the crossroads,”89 looking ahead to a time when it would be “on its own” on a “Polish road to socialism”:90 The post-war political colonization of Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union came on top of a well-entrenched civil society in at least some of the colonized countries. There was already an institutionalised network of social debate mediating between the level of “popular folklore” and the central value cluster supporting the state structure. The imported Soviet pattern squared ill with a society integrated in such a complex way. Hence, the postwar history of most East European countries can be seen as a series of efforts to subdue or eradicate civil society already in existence [of which sociology formed a part] … the campaign of “depoliticization” waged by the Polish workers can be interpreted as an attempt to regain the lost authority for civil society … a civil society grounded on the autonomy of the public sphere won by the workers.91

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Bauman would come to temper his position, identifying his optimism as misplaced.92 In later Telos articles, the crushing of Solidarność was a product of the “Polonisation of communist rule.”93 A melancholic tone increasingly set in, as I shall consider in the next chapter. He suggested that “the last vestiges of authority once carried by a socialist vision of a better and more dignified future have been definitively and irretrievably buried under the debris of false and frustrated hopes aroused by Edward Gierek’s promise to ‘build a second Poland’ and make the country into a world industrial power.”94 If there were to be a Polish glasnost – an increased transparency and opening up of government institutions and activities – then it consisted in a “devaluation of the word, the political disenfranchisement of opinion, and the separation between the political process and public debate,” a diminishment of the prospect of a Polish perestroika, the restructuring of a stagnating economic and political system.95 A decade after Solidarność, in the wake of the 1989 revolution, Bauman famously wrote that we were “living without an alternative.”96 What did he mean by this? Poland found itself in a “liminal” situation, Bauman’s language at this point prefiguring the metaphor of liquidity, but this did not ipso facto entail the elimination of alternatives. “All post-communist regimes” such as Poland, he wrote, “find themselves in a predicament of liminality in which everything may happen yet little can be done.”97 Liminality, like liquidity, means living with and in indeterminacy: “The moment society is sunk in the liminal condition, there is no way of predicting the shape of things to come.”98 Poland thus found itself in a period of interregnum, to deploy the Gramscian term that Bauman would frequently use toward the end of his life. The revolution of 1989 was not a political revolution, in which the illegitimate old rulers were cast aside for new rulers to preside over a system that remained legitimate, but rather a systemic revolution. Systemic revolutions see the system itself as an obstacle and thus demand a change of socio-economic structure itself.99 Bauman himself suggests that the contradiction of the systemic revolution inheres in the disparity between the social forces of revolution and those who ultimately benefit from it.100 In the dismantling of communism in Poland, the workers’ unions behind the Solidarność movement were simultaneously the most

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significant social force behind the revolution in Poland and its biggest losers, in the form of acute insecurity, worsening living standards, and cruel austerity. With the end of communism, post-communist Europe faced the awesome task of large-scale social engineering at a time when the very notion of engineering was the subject of protest. What sharply distinguished the anti-communist revolutions from the classical model established in the French, American, and Russian cases was the absence of a “Jacobin” vision, a totalistic and utopian projection of a new type of society.101 Bauman’s ideal typical formulation for the object of revolutionary change is what he terms the “patronage state,” representing a “coercively imposed trade-off between freedom and security” in which “freedom of individual choice in all its dimensions was to be permanently and severely curtailed, yet in exchange the less prepossessing aspects of freedom – like individual responsibility for personal survival, success and failure – were to be spared.”102 The patronage state was an iron cage, but it was also felt as a shelter. The collapse of communism is essential to Bauman’s sociology of  postmodernity. As the most faithful adherent to the cultural program of modernity, communism trundled on in the twilight of solid modernity.103 It “could not and did not brace itself … to match the performance of the capitalist, market-centred society once that society abandoned its steel mills and coal mines and moved into the post-modern age.”104 Consumption becomes key here, in Bauman’s analysis. Fehér, Heller, and Márkus defined the Soviet-type state (the “patronage state” in Bauman’s terms) as a dictatorship over needs, in which the inner drives and social, economic, and cultural requirements of individuals are imposed and delimited by the state.105 The Soviet system, Bauman wrote in his contribution to a symposium on the Budapest School exiles’ book, was “about control over bodies, control over souls. Control over the way in which men and women satisfy their needs. And control over what they feel there is to satisfy in the first place.”106 It thus became particularly oppressive once held in the relief of consumer-oriented happiness being equated with the cultivation of the self and the acquisition of goods.107 What is more, post-communist states faced the challenge of institutionalizing capitalist orientations and organizations in the absence of a capitalist ethic in Weber’s sense.108 As Bauman had noted even in

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the 1960s in his reflections on the vagaries of “perfect planning,” few were the puritans; the dominant modality was not this-worldly ascetism but rather lavish consumption and self-enhancement. It was “the overwhelming desire to share (and to share immediately) in the delights of the post-modern world, that mobilised the massive dissent against communist oppression and inefficiency.”109 Liquid modern consumerism sounded the death knell of solid modern communism.110 Bauman argued that the major role in this search for capitalists with which to populate and propagate the new shoots of capitalism was played by intellectuals.111 Particularly affected, however, were the very conditions of the intelligentsia bequeathed by the transition. Publishing organizations heavily subsidized by the patronage state ceased to exist when they had to become reoriented to commercial success. As in the West, intellectual and cultural freedom came to be haunted by the spectres of triviality, banality, meaninglessness, detachment, and self-referentiality.112 Moreover, post-communist governments had little room for manoeuvre in the context of strict regimes legislated and imposed by Western-led financial institutions, which ran roughshod over local initiatives with the express intention of making the “liberated” territories hospitable to capital.113 The mode of life, then, to which there was no alternative was that which unfolded under the shadow of “American empire,” the unfettered expansion of free market fundamentalism, which wreaked havoc in Eastern Europe. The West no longer had an alternative against which to define itself.114 In a letter from which it is worth quoting at length, Bauman put it to a friend in Belgrade, who had written to him of the convulsions of the disintegration of Yugoslavia: In Jugoslavia, I guess, insecurity grows faster than freedom, and no wonder that many put two and two together and draw conclusions. Much the same feel the Poles, with four million unemployed, housing rents rising astronomically, health service and education costlier by the day – and so many newly rich who parade their wealth all around. So “a bit less freedom in exchange for a bit more security” sounds attractive to many (the rapid growth of the populist and deeply reactionary right shows it). Freedom is a delight for such people who have resources to use it to their satisfaction. But how many people can claim that condition?

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Sorry for sounding so gloomy – you have enough on your plate without my caviling. I wish I could sound more joyful. Long ago I lost faith in a “perfect world,” but I dreamed all along that on my leaving the world would be a bit better than it was when I came. It seems I was wrong. The arrogance of the Americans (and I say Americans, since alas this is not the matter of a stupid president and blinkered military commanders), their unashamed application of the deux poids, deux mesures rule, their treatment of all the rest of us as the Lebensraum of America’s opulent comfort, portends unheard-of trouble. With the art of exclusion (from the moral universe) matching or perhaps already out-spitting Nazi excellence and the temptation to apply it on an ever wider scale rising with every successive genuflection of the charmed/ bribed/frightened world – you may only repeat after Ronald Reagan: You ain’t seen nothing yet!115

Futures that Failed For Bauman, history is not only the medium for the realization of possibilities and alternatives but also their repository. The episode of Solidarność and the opening offered by the collapse of the Soviet Union had been consigned to the storehouse of historical possibilities that had failed to materialize. At times such as these, the past appears as a graveyard. The testimonial tapestry presented in Svetlana Alexievich’s magisterial Secondhand Time, which Bauman thought best encapsulated the collapse of communism, crystallizes this sense of failed possibility. Many of the interview accounts woven into Alexievich’s vast tapestry of the collapse of the Soviet experiment reflect that it was an attempt to build an alternative future. “Our Soviet life,” says one, “was an attempt at creating an alternative civilization.”116 Haunting is her repeated motif of people throwing away their books after 1989 because they corresponded to a past whose future was no longer plausible. “Mountains of books!,” another interviewee exclaimed. “The intelligentsia were selling off their libraries. People had grown poor, of course, but it wasn’t just for the spare cash – ultimately books had disappointed them.”117 J.P. Arnason described the Soviet trajectory of modernity as the “future that failed.”118 The year 1989 marked the end of an alternative modernity. This, I have suggested, generates some of the power of Bauman’s claim that the post-communist era was a world without an

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alternative, one dominated by US financial capital and globalization. I have said that Bauman’s analysis of liquid modernity, which is a sociology without a national-territorially defined society because it unfolds at the transnational level and the level of the subject, draws much more from the Central and Eastern European experience than is commonly realized.119 Furthermore, however, the events were generalized into a vision of some of the crisis tendencies of modernity per se, mirroring arguments developed in the interpretations by the likes of Eisenstadt and Arnason.120 Further futures that failed are articulated in Bauman’s sociology of the post-communist moment. The opening of Solidarność; the alternative presented by central Europe; the socialist revisionism represented in the student movement of 1968. It was here that we also saw a prefiguring of the retrotopian moment, after 1989. As Gillian Rose put it, “We have given up communism – only to fall more deeply in love with the idea of ‘the community.’”121 Bauman would come to locate what he termed “explosive community” within the crucible of the post-Soviet space, which he recognized had some structural connection to the sorts of “traumas of modernity” unfolding in places as varied as sub-Saharan Africa and the Balkans.122 In a letter to a friend he recognized the effects of Soviet coloniality, which played out in post-communist conflict in Central Asia, writing: It is indeed trivial by now to say that Stalin put oriental nations in the fridge and that they now get out slightly rotten. But there is more to it: a parallel with post-colonial Africa with its straight-line boundaries drawn by armistice meetings. One hears of independent Kyrgystan [sic], Tadjikstan [sic] or Belarus, but somehow not of – say – Bukhara, Khiva or Samarkand, all well-established and ‘identified’ states before. One does not hear either of all those countless ‘nations’ (by your criteria of tradition, culture, language, distinct ethnicity) whom Stalin, the Great Mapmaker, left without the trappings of statehood (parliament, president, ministers). The condition of postmodernity  – which includes the posts of post-communism, post-colonialism, and post-Holocaust – induced a sense of crisis and insecurity, which produced frantic attempts to

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reconstitute social space. Such bouts of insecurity are heightened after war, violent revolutions, collapse of empires, and so on. Bauman lists the respacing efforts of the postcolonial world alongside those in Europe following the collapse of what he termed Pax Sovietica and their resurgences of tribalism and parochialism.123 Today, the model of Western liberal democracy increasingly figures – in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and far beyond – as a future that failed.124 The new authoritarian politics in East-Central Europe is a reaction against a decadent, degenerate West and its corollaries of individualism, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism. Polish political discourse, in particular, is sometimes exemplary of conservative and reactionary decoloniality. As Aleksander Fiut has argued, it propels the narrative of a nationalistic martyrology of a country still “unjustly persecuted and always crushed under the invader’s heavy boot.”125 Today, it is awkwardly aligned with a xenophobic element in contemporary right-wing political discourse. Before coming to power, Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of the ruling PiS (Law and Justice party), lambasted the centrist Platforma Obywatelska (Civil Platform party) as a “German-Russian condominium.” The highly acclaimed conservative poet Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz, a high-profile supporter of PiS, lamented that “the occupiers – colonisers still possess huge influences: they control the economy, their special services are still in operation.”126 Bauman, in this vilification of Russia, Germany, and multinational federal institutions like the European Union, cuts a complicated, quasi-imperial, and foreign figure as an ex-communist Polish Jew. In the post-communist reckoning following the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the stereotype of the Żydokomuna has acquired a significant affective power, tying together Russophobia and anti-Semitism. This foreign figure must have been present in the minds of those who burned Zygmunt Bauman’s picture in the streets of Polish cities, and who disrupted his lectures in the universities of those cities with ultranationalist chanting. Where does one turn when the “terror of history” can be sensed returning? Where to go when the future has failed? Often, into an idealized, highly exclusionary version of the past as supposedly experienced by a primordialist collectivity. Approaching the end of his life, Bauman saw and felt this foreboding movement. It is to this that I now turn.

Conclusion

Melancholic Hope

Reading Bauman is conditioned by the conditions in which one reads him. The meanings of his works change depending on the direction from which the reader approaches them. Throughout this work, I have sought to show how treading some of the subterranean paths of Bauman’s social thought, and acknowledging how they were charted from the centreless and mutable vantage point of the exilic position, opens up onto significant contemporary concerns that could not originally have been anticipated in them. Encompassed in an interpretive framework that I have called the “multiplicity of modernity,” Bauman’s treatments of the entangled histories of colonial-imperialism, the Jewish experience and interpretation of modernity, and the trajectories of communist and post-communist societies in Central and Eastern Europe amount to an intricate and enduring critique of Eurocentrism. Here, to conclude my study, I explore how the forking paths of Bauman’s problematization of the West carry on into his late period when, in a further iteration of his hermeneutics of estrangement, he turned to a resurgence of declinist narrative tropes in discourse on the West and also continued to defend the “project” of Europe. Moreover, I address questions pertaining to the “late style” of Bauman’s writing, arguing that they are expressive of a notion of hope founded on unceasing confrontation with loss and melancholy. Finally, I consider questions of Bauman’s legacy and how his sociology can continue to speak in and to a world which he has himself departed.

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Late Style and Liquidity Two of Keith Tester’s last essays were characteristically important interventions on Bauman. One addressed the unsavoury episode surrounding the repetition of text in Bauman’s work.1 Tester argued that repetition in Bauman’s work is explicable in terms of his “sociological hermeneutics.”2 True understanding goes in circles or spirals. Even if repeated, a selection of text does not mean the same thing, since it is always configured differently in relation to the ideas and referents that surround it. A similar point can be made, Tester claims, about reading Bauman’s works. As Bauman wrote in Hermeneutics and Social Science, “attempts to gain objective understanding” of his work “will always be repeated” and are in principle “never successful.”3 The other of Tester’s texts approached the formal and tonal dimensions of Bauman’s last writings, which evince a “late style.”4 From the “conversation” books, the first of which appeared (with Tester) in 2001 but which proliferated from 2012, and the attendant short works from around that time (beginning with This is not a Diary), Bauman’s writing is marked by repetition and self-quotation, by unsettled shifts between short phrases and multi-clause, paragraph-length sentences. The content of a given book does not straightforwardly follow its title, and chapters are frequently divided into fragments which seem to bear little relation to one another. These works are generally shorn of the trappings of academic authority – bibliographies, indexes, references. Tester calls this style – which I claim is a development of Bauman’s sociological essayism, addressed in my second chapter – an “active catastrophe”: “the texts are other than themselves … [and] increasingly indifferent – if not maybe actively hostile – to unthought disciplinary conventions and tropes which invariably stop thought short.”5 The concept of “late style” is introduced in a short essay by T.W. Adorno on Beethoven. “The maturity of the late works of significant artists,” Adorno wrote, “does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are, for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged,” showing “more traces of history than growth.”6 The late period of life, as Edward Said wrote during his own battle with the leukaemia which was to kill him, brings forward “the decay of the body, the onset of ill health,” disrupting the abiding timeliness inherent to common sense

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understandings of the passage of human life.7 The untimely intrusion of corporeal decline also played on Bauman’s mind, as is evident in one of the most candid and pathos-ridden items among his personal papers. Under the heading “the last words of Zygmunt Bauman, recorded at some time before the last moment,” composed in 2013, he wrote: Time to take a leave … Whatever (if anything) original and lasting (in the sense of being destined to be sheltered for safe keeping in the thoughts too common for the names of its authors to be remembered) I managed to create, was thought through, written up and made public between 1987 and 2000. Whatever emerged from my keyboard since then, consisted in regurgitating, occasionally polishing up a few still rough and insufficiently scoured edges and crossing here and there a “t” or dotting an “I,” but mostly reiterating in a somewhat more accessible form the thoughts already rounded up and given better or worse, but nevertheless the final shape. Since then, no idea truly novel and worth being recorded gestated and was born in my mind. I went on writing by sheer inertia – by habit rather than inner impulse – as well as publishing; something I am increasingly inclined to regret as my intellectual powers, however high they might or might not have risen in the peak time, I am now coming to see as tumbling … I hoped however that the decline was temporary and recovery was still possible despite the merciless yet inexorable logic of advancing age – if only I assist it by keeping trying. Well, those hopes have been by now dashed … Let this be a warning to you, whoever reads these words.8 Of course, these would not be Bauman’s “last words.” Including posthumous titles, he published thirteen more books, albeit mostly with co-authors. His self-excoriation ought to be seen in the context of his periodic admissions that he had said all he had to say. These admissions were themselves marked by crises in confidence often heralded by bad reviews, which affected Bauman more than the contemporary reader might realize. The E.P. Thompson review that opens this book is a case in point, as is a review of Memories of Class written by Lewis Coser, which ended with the following:

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Bauman, who now teaches in England, was born in Poland, where he taught until driven out during the anti-Semitic wave instigated by the government in the late sixties. It would have been splendid had he attempted to show how issues of control rather than the disposition of surplus have been central in Poland and other state-socialist societies … [rather than this] turgid, derivative, and unenlightening collection of obiter dicta about the sources of our present discontents and the decline of the labour movement.9 This kind of scathing assessment and patronizing directive to stick to the East was a significant factor in Bauman’s disillusion with sociology in the 1980s. More subtly, but no less insidiously, both reviews are redolent of the many letters in the archive from US sociologists addressed to Zygmunt Bauman in the 1960s inviting him to speak at prestigious international conferences on “Polish issues” (see chapter 1). Externally imposed “estrangement” was a constant throughout his career.10 Coser’s words are also a harbinger of the sorts of commentaries and reviews that effectively amount to an exclusion of Bauman’s work from the disciplinary conventions of sociology. Here, however, another meaning of late style is evoked – one more sympathetic than, and in important senses opposed to, the evocation of a declining body and mind. Late style inheres in, as Said wrote, “a moment when the artist who is fully in command of his medium nevertheless abandons communication with the established order of which [they are] a part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it.” Late works, thus, “are a form of exile from [their] milieu.”11 It is certainly plausible that many sociologists would agree with Bauman’s self-excoriating assessment of his work. As William Outhwaite has noted, Bauman published so many “liquid” books that readers have at times “called for something to stop the flow.”12 But it is important to remember that Bauman had long since decided not to write for sociologists. In his case, the late works constitute something of an exile from the formal conventions of a sociological milieu from which he and others like him were more and more estranged. Indeed, he wrote in an essay on “strangers” in the late 1980s that “estranged and marginalized intellectuals” were becoming “fewer and most exotic in the world of a well-settled, practically engaged knowledge class,” and as this occurred, “the more radical and otherworldly becomes their

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commitments to the universal and the absolute.” First and foremost, intellectuals like Bauman “are strangers in relation to the fellow members of the knowledge class.”13 Moreover, against the tendency to interpret lateness in the history of art in terms of the themes of biography and fate, Adorno held that “late works are the catastrophes,” wherein the objectively “fractured landscape” is illuminated by the subject who does not wish to make it whole.14 Tester proffers that Bauman produced so much material and presented it in such a fractured way precisely because it was no longer possible to bring it all together into a single form: “Subjective intention can now only stake a wager on the possibility of being able to cast an illuminating light – but such a wager makes it necessary for many lights to be lit if one is going to stand the chance of casting illumination before its own death.”15 The evocation of catastrophe and fracture coheres with Bauman’s late offerings. They were explicitly geared toward illuminating the global entrenchment of authoritarian politics (Chronicle of Crisis, 2017), xenophobic and nostalgist communitarianism (Retrotopia, 2017), rampant inequality (Does the Richness of a Few Benefit Us All, 2013), and mass statelessness on a scale not seen since the Second World War (Strangers at Our Door, 2016). These currents congealed into what he termed a “crisis of humanity,” like José Saramago’s image from his allegorical novel of the same name of the plague of blindness that spread like “an insidious infiltration of a thousand and one turbulent rivulets which, having slowly drenched the earth, suddenly submerge it completely.”16 Many reflections on Bauman’s late work thus identify a significant gloominess and pessimism running through it. Charles Turner, for example, suggests that many of Bauman’s writings after 1989 are constituted by “the words not of a postmodernist, but of an old socialist lamenting the individualism and selfishness of the times.”17 The fall of communism had inaugurated a regime of historicity that François Hartog later characterized by its overwhelming “presentism”; Western societies were henceforth suspended between a past that could not be escaped or mourned and a future that could not be imagined except as catastrophe.18 This is the temporal order of liquid modernity as Bauman sees it, a world haunted by “the spectre of the absence of alternative.”19 Thus, the strange solidity of liquidity, a condition of permanent impermanence.20 As I addressed in my last chapter, important questions are raised by Bauman’s response to events in East-Central Europe during the 1980s and ’90s, as manifested in his liquid modern works. What role, now,

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for the political left? And what place for socialism after communism? How to square his possibilitarian sociology with the catastrophes it depicts? Where, in short, might hope be invested? Bauman’s late style, I claim, can be located in a tradition of left-wing writing, which mediates between possibility and catastrophe, in a space that Bauman terms the third camp of hope.21 This is the basis of Bauman’s continuing socialism: cognizant of the barbarisms and repression of communist modernity he experienced first-hand, he nevertheless refuses to mourn the passing of socialism. Bauman’s socialism, and his sociology, are melancholic.

Bauman and Left-Wing Melancholia In the wake of the systemic revolution of 1989, and amid his reflections on the profound convulsions of Eastern Europe into which his concept of liquid modernity was born, Bauman wrote a short essay on Walter Benjamin, published in English in the left-wing journal New Formations.22 History, for Benjamin as interpreted by Bauman, was “a graveyard of possibilities.”23 “It is,” he continued, “the awesome power and the exhilarating task of imagination to recapture the past possibilities, to recapture them in a mode which was not their lot ever before.”24 Benjamin, as is well established, was attentive to the creative potential and political value of grief and mourning. He was surprisingly unambiguous, however, in his dismissal of melancholy. Reviewing the poetry of Erich Kästner, Benjamin lambasted a form of left-wing discourse written “for the higher-income bracket, those mournful, melancholy dummies who trample anything or anyone in their path,” and which had in mind only “to enjoy itself in negativistic quiet,” transforming political struggle from “a means of production into an article of consumption.”25 To be sure, there are some who posit that Bauman’s late-style writing effectively amounted to a self-nourishing “negativistic quiet,” ironically complicit with “nowist,” consumerist culture.26 Left-wing melancholia, Wendy Brown suggests, is Benjamin’s identification of a “conservative, backward-looking attachment to a feeling, analysis, or relationship that has been rendered thing-like and frozen in the heart of the putative leftist.”27 For the left-wing melancholic, history is a litany of losses that cannot be relinquished: lost opportunities, lost possibilities, lost movements, moments and ways of life, lost convictions. This is situated in the Freudian tradition that posits melancholia as the pathological counterpart to the healthier process of mourning,

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in which the libido is consciously and distressfully drawn from a lost love object. Melancholia, by contrast, is a type of grieving that does not comprehend what has been lost and thus retreats into denialism, resignation, and nostalgia.28 Enzo Traverso has sought to recover a critical dimension in melancholia, one which is present in Benjamin’s account and which is also at work across Bauman’s corpus.29 For Traverso, 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall inaugurated the eclipse of utopia. The principle of hope which had been projected onto the horizon of expectation for the previous two centuries, given succour by the history of unfinished revolutions, was substituted for the principle of responsibility, which turned to look at the past as a field of ruins. The victim came to stand as the representative figure of the twentieth century for the onlookers of the twenty-first. The gulag replaced the history of working-class revolutions; the camp stood in for the memory of anti-fascism; the horrors of transatlantic slavery and colonial genocide were emphasized over and above slave revolts and anti-colonial nationalism. Furthermore, swathes of Central and Eastern Europe, where a glimmer of hope in the form of democratic socialism had fulgurated before fading into darkness, reinvigorated nationalistic traditions suppressed by the Soviet Union, and appropriated the symbolism of Holocaust memory in order to articulate suffering and martyrdom at the hands of Soviet communism.30 In the West, in Fredric Jameson’s expression, it became easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.31 Revolutionary movements became suffused with disappointment and the cultural trauma of defeat, and a unified struggle for socialism collapsed into competing narratives of victimhood, which deprived the past of its hopeful possibility and its actors of their historical agency. In this context, melancholia denotes an orientation that refuses to mourn the passing of a socialist utopia after the end of state-socialism: Left wing melancholy does not mean to abandon the idea of socialism or the hope for a better future; it means to rethink socialism in a time in which its memory is lost, hidden, and forgotten and needs to be redeemed. This melancholia does not mean lamenting a lost utopia, but rather rethinking a revolutionary project in a nonrevolutionary age.32

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Melancholia is therefore a generative disposition, which accompanies a highly ambivalent and aporetic understanding of progress, attuned to the potential for catastrophe that resides inside of it. Bauman’s is a utopianism, to echo Michael Hviid Jacobsen’s claim, that is suitably shot through with ambivalence.33 It is a variation on the theme presented in Joseph Winters’s study of the melancholic hope expressed by Black American writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison: the orientation to “the possibility of a better world” is continually accompanied by and expressed in “a heightened capacity to remember, register, and contemplate the damages, losses, and erasures of the past and present.”34 Such a melancholic strand in Bauman’s social thought, I suggest, is detectable in two obscure papers that he wrote in Israel, both of which constitute a response to the experience of expulsion from an avowedly socialist country. In a Haaretz editorial from 1971, Bauman explored Israel’s readiness for transition from war to peace through various lenses, including the problems of unemployment, education, youth, and demilitarization. Bauman’s prediction (and it was, he maintained, the only prediction he had ever made that had come true) was that the country stood at something of a crossroads between demilitarization and further militaristic entrenchment, and that if it chose the latter it would have devastating consequences for the region: “The time has come to harness all of our energy towards the discussion, experimentation and planning required so that we are not caught by peace unawares, not ready to win the battle to build a society as we had learned to vanquish enemies at war. We will do our future a disservice if we adhere too closely to priorities rooted in the past.”35 An unpublished piece from this time, originally written in Polish and titled “At the Crossroads in a World at the Crossroads,” is a rejection by Bauman of the temptation of Israeli nationalism, for the reasons detailed in the Haaretz piece and also because a return to (ethnonational) roots in an interconnected world is not a possibility. To quote from this document, “Because our fate, in the final accounting, always depended, depends, and will depend on the fate of the world. So the conflicts of this world should also be the subject of our concern. If today the world is at a crossroads, then so too are we standing at the crossroads alongside it.”36

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Bauman was also writing under the spectre of nuclear extinction, its Cold War foreboding undeniable: “At the height of its power humanity has found itself on the verge of self-annihilation.”37 It is also an attempt to work through the problem of a commitment to socialism, socialism being specifically counterposed, à la Rosa Luxemburg, to the barbarism of a world without humanity. As he concluded, “Despite all forms of social oppression throughout the world today, against all forms of capitalist reaction and degenerate offshoots of communism — the future world will be socialist. Or it will not be at all.”38 Bauman, as I have discussed in chapter 3, can be counted among a generation for whom Rosa Luxemburg’s activistic anthropology of freedom, her insights into the political economy of imperialism and surplus populations, and her attentiveness to the dialectics of civilization and barbarism were highly influential. Bauman’s reading of the socialist tradition came after events she could not have anticipated, in the wake of the Second World War, the destruction of European Jewry and, after March 1968, from the estranged vantage point of exile from the Polish People’s Republic. As Bauman wrote in the early Leeds period, socialism had to be recognized as an active utopia. His conviction, which he maintained throughout his life, was that socialism cannot stand for a preconceived institutional arrangement but must rather provide an open-ended and inexhaustible critique of the present: Socialism shares with all other utopias the unpleasant quality of retaining its fertility only in so far as it resides in the realm of the possible. The moment it is proclaimed as accomplished, as empirical reality, it loses its creative power; far from inflaming human imagination, it puts on the agenda in turn an acute demand for a new horizon, distant enough to transcend and relativize its own limitations.39 The dimensions of the active utopia are fourfold. First, an active utopia relativizes the present by pointing to both to its historical contingency and the multiplicity of possibilities on the horizon of the future, thus giving socialism its transformative dimension. Second, active utopias are cultural forms in which these multiple future possibilities can be imagined. This gives socialism its creative dimension. Third, active utopias are pluralistic, generative of competing visions of how

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to interpret and solve present problems. This accounts for the critical dimension of socialism. Finally, active utopias constitute effective forces in history, animating the action of human beings and thus the direction of human societies, giving socialism its practical dimension. Bauman’s position developed during the 1980s, after the opening of Solidarność. The “Left” – understood as the activist movement of socialism – emerged as a counter-culture of capitalism. Socialism held capitalism to task for betraying the Enlightenment values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. As Bauman wrote later, “Socialists accused the capitalist version of modernity of the double sin of wastefulness and injustice.” Both capitalism and socialism (and by extensions, its “hot-headed, impatient and reckless younger brother,” communism40) were grounded in Enlightenment. Both were founded on the notion that the world can be changed through the application of human resources and improved through rational human intervention. Both presupposed that to do this, the material wealth at the disposal of humanity must be increased and that nature ought to be mastered and made productive for humanity. Both were defined by the idea that, as material wealth grows, so also does happiness understood as a freedom from necessity, which itself promotes liberty, equality, and fraternity. Socialist and capitalist societies shared the conviction that societies can be judged according to the realization of these values.41 The Left located the industrial working class as a historical agent. In postmodern times, which are post-industrial times, this is significantly altered by social-historical circumstance. Organized labour had rapidly diminished, employees were diffuse and scattered, and the entertainment industry had taken over from the intellectuals. The rich and powerful, in this context, were configured not as enemies but as role models to aspire to. The dangerous class was the new poor, the “flawed consumers,” whose poverty is effectively criminalized.42 Thus, “the Left is reluctant to throw in its lot with this particular form of suffering. There can be pity and compassion, but no political identification.”43 The turn to postmodern theory was a cul de sac, Bauman claimed, because it is a “philosophy of surrender,” which resigns itself “to the powerlessness of critique in influencing other communities.” This is because a Left program relies on the notion of a future society that is better than the present. Bauman proposes another option, then. That is, “the reconstitution of the Left critique as the counter-culture of modernity.”44 As he

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described elsewhere, the Left could only exist as “a stance of permanent criticism of the realities of social life” that “cannot be anything but democratic.”45 Here, the Left was without a historical agent.46 Bauman had already bid farewell to the reading of history as class history with his Memories of Class, which heralded his identification with “suffering” in general, embodied in those cast in the social position of the stranger, the “waste” of order-building modernity, and the consumer societies of liquid modernity.47

The Decline of the West and Europeanism against Empire In the later years of his life, Bauman turned to notions of decline, particularly as they appeared in the work of Oswald Spengler.48 As H. Stuart Hughes put it, Spengler “held that the value-system of one society was a closed book to a member of another culture, and that the best a historian could do was to defend his own ethos with strident self-confidence against all comers.”49 Spenglerian themes are thus echoed in more contemporary notions of the “clash of civilizations,” of the West under siege from “cultural Marxists” who wish to repopulate Europe with immigrants of African and Middle Eastern provenance. Spengler’s anti-urban and anti-cosmopolitan vision chimes with contemporary world-pictures promulgated by the likes of Steve Bannon, Alain de Benoist, and Alexander Dugin: In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman … The world-city means cosmopolitanism in place of “home” … To the world-city belongs not a folk but a mob.50 Spengler’s is an argument against a world of exiles. He talked of “saving the traditional culture of Europe,”51 and of course Bauman came to do something similar too. However, their means were very different.

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Whereas Bauman wanted to resurrect the possibilities of dialogue and the “art of living together”’ that was a part of European heritage – itself extinguished in the age of tribal nationalism and cast into the wastelands of history – Spengler’s cyclical and comparative theory of historical change took aim at the “illusions of progress” that had come to the surface in an atmosphere of decay and decline. Spengler’s world-history was “a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvellous waxing and waning of organic forms”; its vocabulary, befitting of an organic form, included words like “youth,” “growth,” “maturity,” and “decay.”52 His age was analogized with reference to the transition from Greek to Roman antiquity, Hellenism to Caesarism, Athens to Rome. This transition was one from enlivened culture to dead civilization: “Pure Civilization, as a historical process, consists in a progressive exhaustion of forms that have become inorganic and dead.”53 In a posthumously published set of musings with Aleksandra Kania, Bauman wrote that the decline of the West can be distinguished in three milestones. First, the 1648 Westphalian settlement; second, the 1755 catastrophe in Lisbon; and finally, the 1848 spring of nations. He also harks back to the significance of decolonization that he confronted in real-time, as documented in chapter 3, throughout his works of cultural sociology in the 1960s and ’70s. A lengthy quote to illustrate is worthwhile: From these milestones … a string of new departures and transformations took off that prompted, in their turn, a long line of attempts to summarise and evaluate the consequences of such a fateful step, as well as to anticipate the various plausible scenarios of their future impacts. That line veered consistently upwards on the scale of philosophical and public optimism through the halcyon days of the unprecedented growth of Europe’s industry, wealth, territorial conquest, and self-confidence, only to slip down on that scale and start sliding into a space filled by ever darker premonitions under the shocks delivered by the horrors of world wars, the rising gravity and frequency of economic crises, and the first signals of the imminent end to the era of Europe’s imperialism and colonialism. Intimations went on accruing, to be eventually synthesized and condensed into the family of ideas, from a decline

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of the West, through the collapse of civilization as we know it, right to the one of the end of world; all such ideas were able to trace their provenance to the rapid shrinking of Europe’s world-wide material domination and spiritual hegemony.54 Bauman’s interest in and normative writings on Europe partly stem from the elite intellectual networks he circulated in following the publication of Modernity and the Holocaust, and from the fact that his rise to prominence coincided with the post-communist transition. In his Amalfi Prize acceptance speech, given in 1990, two years prior to ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, he explicitly wrote that the book both gestated within and spoke to a “shared European heritage,” across East and West.55 Bauman’s orientation to and embeddedness within a “common European experience” makes clear his divergence from Sonderweg readings of European history, in which Germany took a uniquely twisted path, distinct from European modernity proper, and which contained the propensity for genocidal anti-Semitism. Having been made by a Jew born in Poland before being forced to move from the communist bloc, Bauman’s arguments particularly resonated in the context of the German Historikerstreit whose embers had barely cooled in 1989 upon its publication. This is one of the reasons why the eminent German sociologist Hans Joas termed Modernity and the Holocaust “one of the decisive texts of a sociology after Auschwitz.”56 This was coeval with the idea that remembering the Holocaust, as Tony Judt put it in his epilogue to Postwar, came to constitute something like a “European entry ticket.” For people in the Eastern Bloc, as the 1980s wore on: “The opposite of Communism was not ‘capitalism’ but ‘Europe.’ ”57 Europe, likewise, figures as a source of hope in Bauman’s sociology, an “active utopia.” Bauman also had personal relationships with key figures of the post-communist transition in East-Central Europe, including Adam Michnik, Václav Havel, and later the likes of Leonidas Donskis. In his conversation on Spengler and the decline of the West with Donskis, Bauman said: I base my belief on hope, that third stance which exposes the binary of optimism versus pessimism in the division of available Weltanschaungen as wrong, because not exhaustive. And I

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attach that hope to Europe and only to Europe, because it was Europe that invented the first, and so far the only self-critical and self-transgressive mode of being-in-the-world, a mode of being that consists in a perpetual becoming and, as Ernst Bloch put it bluntly, in living towards the future.58 But what, for Bauman, is Europe? Is Europe simply a geographical entity? If so, Europe has lost, Bauman claims, a geographical function, because it is no longer “the centre that made the rest of the planet a periphery.”59 Is Europe a political entity? The European Union, Bauman argued, is itself a product of the relativization and provincialization of Europe, the blow to the hubris of the northwestern peninsula. As Bauman put it, “political Europe” ought to be understood as “the by-product of an abrupt fall of European self-assurance.”60 Decolonization is part of the background here, the end of the power-assisted universalizing project of colonial-imperialism. It accompanies the attempt to institutionalize a new European identity, alongside a European political federation, that can bring power and politics back together following their separation. The European Union is such an institutional framework. Bauman also spoke of a collective mission ascribed to Europe, one highly distinct from (perhaps even opposite to) the proselytizing colonial-imperial “civilizing mission” that it took from the fifteenth until the mid-twentieth century. “Europe is,” as he put it, “a mission – something to be made, created, built.”61 It is in this sense that Europe is a cultural project. In a moment of normative clarity, he argues that “the future of political Europe hangs on the fate of European culture.”62 For Bauman, it is the European experience – a truly antinomic and tensional experience, combining trauma and triumph in equal measure – of living with difference that defines Europe’s culture, a specific mode of hospitality extended to other forms of life. “Being European”’ is not limited to those in the geographical boundaries of the continent, nor is it by any means an intrinsic quality of those within those boundaries. The pursuit of this essence or ideal and its positive valuation, Bauman called “Europeanism,” which “cannot be denied to the ‘other’ since it incorporates the phenomenon of ‘otherness.’ ”63 Moreover, this is counterposed to “Europocentrism,” as he terms it, which refers to “the past European tendency to soliloquy when dialogue was in order … the teacher’s authority and resentment of the learner’s role; the notorious

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misuses of European military and economic superiority that marked its conspicuous, centuries-long presence in the world’s history … the high-handed treatment Europe accorded other forms of human life and its obliviousness to the wishes and voices of those who practiced them … and the atrocities committed under the cover of the civilising mission.”64 As detailed in chapter 3, Bauman argued that Europe “exported” its proclivity to compulsive modernization and its by-product, “surplus population,” via the mechanisms of colonial-imperialism.65 Postcolonial states do not have the ability to export the waste born of their own modernization. This is the logic behind “tribal wars and massacres” – claustrophobic, Gemeinschaft genocides in the mode of “neighbourly imperialism,” as he put it elsewhere with reference to the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia and the African Great Lakes region in the 1990s.66 It is also the driver behind global refugee politics and our “age of camps,” as Europe turns inward and closes borders except to cheap and exploitable labour, and to global wealth.67 The world no longer seems an adventure to be discovered, but a source of threats to be feared or a tourist space for the accumulation of experience.68 The “Western way of life” is no longer legitimated in the humanist terms of Enlightenment but in terms of the disciplinary power of the market and its attendant vocabulary of efficiency, flexibility, and marketization.69 Power is global but politics remain national; ours is a negative globalization, a “selective globalisation of trade and capital, surveillance and information, coercion and weapons, crime and terrorism,” which move in an “extraterritorial” space, unhindered by national borders and international law.70 In our globalized world, the unity of mankind means, to paraphrase Milan Kundera as Bauman was fond of doing, no escape for anyone, anywhere.71 Bauman terms this formation “empire” and claims that the making of this “new world disorder” exists by the design of US foreign policymakers. Rumsfeld, Kagan, Nye – these figures of the Bush administration, and their forerunners in Kissinger and Brzeziński, all saw the USA as an echo of Roman imperium. But the USA is an ambiguous imperial formation, which seems to have coercive force as its sole resource, the acute nervousness of US power and its ambivalent status as an empire related to the fact that it came of age after the era of anti-colonialism.72 This iteration of empire is seemingly less interested in the acquisition of territories for colonization, than in the projection of the conditions of a “frontier-land” onto global space:

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A “frontier-land” has a strictly limited life expectation unless it expands extensively and intensively. In these hit-and-run tactics, the empire transforming the planet into a frontier-land seeks the magic formula of its own survival. There is no reciprocal feedback between the frontier-land conditions and the capitalism of the globalisation era. The “new empire” exists in the realm of a frontier-land. This is the only realm where it can breathe freely; the only space where it can monotonously resuscitate the conditions of its survival and replenish the sources of its vitality.73 Can Europe offer an alternative? The “social state,” Bauman retrojected, was a “solution to the problem posited by Europe’s retreat from its overseas colonial possessions,” but since the 1970s and the neoliberal revolution it has given way to the “security state.”74 There is also the elusive “art of dialogue,” Europe’s heritage as a fertile space for the development of hermeneutics. Then there are Europe’s values: rationality, justice, and democracy. Each are defined as “critical orientations,” aware of their invocation to denote irrationality, injustice, and dictatorship. Moreover, there are the cities which, pace Spengler, are the laboratories in which the art of living with other is practised, where friendship and hospitality are extended or retracted most forcefully, and where globally produced problems are grounded and confronted in their purest form. But Europe’s mission is not, Bauman suggested, a completely unprecedented task. As he put it, “central Europe’s memory … shows Europe’s future.”75 He wrote of how the Roman Empire, the epitome of Spengler’s decadent cosmopolitan zivilization, went from humble beginnings to eternal glory via a practice of granting all those who were conquered full citizenship rights and access to the high offices of the expanding empire, as well as paying duty to those Gods whom the new citizens worshipped. There are other examples, including ones that run counter to the Westphalian model of sovereignty. Chief among them is the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, generous in its extensions of the rights to self-government and identity preservation among its numerous ethnic, linguistic, and religious minorities as Western Europe was being torn asunder by religious war.76 This tradition was brought to an abrupt end by “partition of the Polish-Lithuanian fortress of tolerance by its voracious neighbours – the dynastic empires of nation-state aspirations,” raising the question of intra-continental imperialism with which I have

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been concerned throughout this book: “previously autonomous cultures, small and large alike were subjected, respectively, to a forceful Russification on its eastern side and a similarly ruthless Germanisation in the West,” accompanied by an (unsuccessful) anti-Catholic crusade led by Orthodox and Lutheran Christian churches.77 Austro-Hungary stands as another example, led from Vienna, that “greenhouse of cultural creativity and incubator of by far the most exciting and seminal contributions to European philosophy, psychology, literature, music, and the visual and performing arts” that was also one of the foremost urban locales of Jewish modernity. It also happened to be where “the practice of equality and self-government of cultures was raised, by most insightful minds of the time, to the rank of a model for the future of Europe; a model constructed with the intention, and hope, of cleansing the coexistence of European nations from the ghastly merger of cultural identity with territorial sovereignty.”78 This distinctive experience, interpretation, and attempted institutionalization of modernity within Europe – elaborated by intellectuals like Otto Bauer, Vladimir Medem, and Karl Renner – were shattered and their blueprints destroyed in the trenches of the First World War and in its aftermath, when led by Woodrow Wilson, the Versailles settlement decreed that the sovereignty of nations as laid out in the treaty of Westphalia was the universal form for the organization of humanity and needed to be accepted as the fulcrum of postwar reconstruction. Today, Europe is again a “belt of mixed populations,” at the apex of a third historical phase of modern-era migration. The first phase, organized by Bauman under the rubric TRG (standing for “territoriality of sovereignty,” “rooted” identity, and “gardening posture,”) was the migration of the “waste-products” of modernization and economic progress to those “recycling plants” of the New World, “whose native population could be struck off the calculations of the ‘modernisers … presumed either non-existent or irrelevant” and, if they “survived the massive slaughters and massive epidemics,” could be recast as objects of the civilizing mission. The second wave of migration was the “boomerang rebounding,” back to Europe in the course of the retraction and dismantling of colonial empires. Upon arrival, these migrants (former subjects who had, in the British case at least, become citizens) were earmarked  – as is consistent with the era of modern nation-state

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order-building – with the task of assimilation. The third wave – the one that we are in the midst of – is the migration of the “age of diasporas,” contained under the rubric EAH (extraterritoriality replacing territorial fixing of identity, “anchors” displacing “roots,” and the “hunters’ strategy” replacing the gardeners). Our “age of diaspora” presents in clearest form the awesome task of living together with difference. Bauman argued that human rights – the right to remain different and be recognized and protected as such – is an inadequate discourse inasmuch as it has tended only to generate tolerance, which, as he said of strangers, is the liberal cloak that conceals the dagger  of racism. It has not succeeded yet in fostering solidarity: the sentiments of mutual belonging and of shared responsibility for the common future, the willingness to care for each other’s well-being, and to find amicable and durable solutions to sporadically inflamed conflicts.79 In 2012, Bauman wrote of “dark clouds … gathering over the European Union.”80 In the last lecture he gave at the University of Leeds, he addressed how these dark clouds had presaged his adoptive home country’s decision to leave the European Union, prefacing his arguments in terms of the vantage of the exilic position. Bauman voted in the referendum to remain (unlike the many thousands of Poles living in the UK who were disallowed a stake in their adoptive country’s future) and he explicitly framed his decision to do so, in personal terms, his commitment to Europe as a political community born of the experience of “double exile,” first from Nazi occupation then the Polish People’s Republic.81 The referendum, he said, could be seen as a “window,” through which broader processes can be glimpsed and named. The later election of Donald Trump, and the entrenchment of illiberalism and xenophobia in Orbán’s Hungary, Fico’s Slovakia, and Kaczyński’s Poland represent different vantage points. To the Bauman reader, the deployment of the metaphor of the window is a red flag; it evokes the preface from Modernity and the Holocaust, a book which prompts us remember that “the unimaginable ought to be imagined.”82 In his last writings, Bauman is describing a moment of danger, in broad strokes. The “retrotopian” turn to tribes and the election of decisionist leaders is a response to the divorce of power from politics, which so marked the era beginning in 1989, following the end of the Cold War, and which appears to be morphing into something new before

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us. The complementary turn to the self in the modality of consumerism and the election of the decisionist leader who promises personal safety and the reinstatement of “law and order” in the midst of a decadent and decaying society are two sides of the same coin. They result from the lack of a cosmopolitan understanding (which is, I’d suggest, an exilic understanding) to aid our interpretation of and praxis in a de facto cosmopolitan situation of global interdependence. In this context, the stranger is again the target of popular discontents and public violence.83

Final Thoughts: An Ongoing Dialogue For Bauman, ever the essayistic sociologist, narrativization has a redemptive function. As for Walter Benjamin, the memory of alternatives – failed, stillborn, dormant, buried in the rubble of history – appears in a flash at the moment of danger.84 Alongside redeeming the futures of times past which failed to materialize, there is a redemptive function in narrating the barbarism left in the rubble after the piercing light of civilization has moved on. It tells us that barbarism is itself constitutive of the present and is thus its constant potential. As Benjamin wrote in his reflections on melancholia, “the truly political poetry of the last decades has for the most part hurried on ahead of things as a harbinger.”85 There is an “active dystopia” at work across Bauman’s sociology, accompanying the “active utopia” in lockstep.86 Bauman’s late-style sociology speaks directly to a world in which people fleeing conflict, environmental degradation, and economic immiseration are blocked, expelled, and left to drown in the sea, and in which the self-appointed defenders of human rights separate families and detain people indefinitely in remote camps. It continues to speak to a world in which anti-Semitic conspiracy theories coalesce with other forms of racism in a resurgence of what Hannah Arendt termed “doctrines of decay,” the fantasies of “white genocide” and the “great replacement.”87 It speaks to a world in which democratic institutions, designed to protect human plurality, are put under severe strain, and one whose organs of global normativity are increasingly hollowed out. As wildfires burn and floodwaters rise, Bauman’s sociology continues to speak and it does so with neither pessimism nor reservation, for it retains a melancholic hope that the harbinger can be averted.

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In his distinctive vision of critical sociology, crisis is the event that gives renewed impetus to the vocation of the sociologist. In the event of crisis, society is revealed to be a product of human action and is thus opened up to critique.88 As Bauman put it: The death knell to the allegedly invulnerable routinecommonsense compact sounds when the habitual split is suddenly seen in the light of another possibility. Then, and only then, does the natural begin to be perceived as artificial, the habitual as enforced, the normal as unbearable.89 If sociology responds to crises in the present that bring the present into question, it can only be provisional. This corresponds to the essay as a provisional, experimental, and dialogical form. Critical sociology in the essay form is “inconclusive,” making it “imperfect by much more severe scientific standards”; critical sociology possesses the constant possibility of “error and postponing the admission of failure indefinitely – unheard of in the field of scientific discourse.”90 Maurice Blanchot observed in his Writing of the Disaster that not writing is “a means of expression at grief ’s disposal.”91 Where there is writing, there is no grieving for humanity, for the world and the Earth. Not yet. Writing the possible in its multiplicity – disclosing oneself in the world and providing an invitation to speak back – is an act of hope.92 A commentary on a given social thinker is never simply an exegesis but must necessarily also take a stance on the collective identity of the discipline itself.93 Such is the case with this book, and thus I must take a position. What is to be retained from Bauman? What is his legacy? I hope to have steered a course between two contrasting approaches to public intellectuals. This has not been a scholastic exercise in hagiography, the uncritical biography of a hero and his monuments. But neither has it aspired to the kind of writing on intellectuals that renders their ideas epiphenomenal to their strategic positioning in the struggle for resources and kudos, their jostling for influence and theattainment of acclaim. With no small influence from Tester, this book has in general sought to “pay more focused attention to the work itself and to stand against the tide of fame (and its opposite, envy) that was tending to swamp it.”94 An intention of my work – whose success or failure is my

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own – has been to engage Bauman’s sociology in dialogue, testing the possibilities of his work to speak, with and to others, beyond the West. I hope to have shown that a number of entangled paths in Bauman’s thinking amount to a long-running and erudite problematization of the West and a critique of Eurocentrism that has much to offer both the more specialized task of “decolonizing sociology” and, more generally, that of developing more encompassing and inclusive accounts of global modernity in all its permutations. Recoverable and usable in Bauman’s sociology is an ethos consisting of an attempt to retain an orientation to the universal experience of the condition of modernity while recognizing the specificity of its multiplicitous groundings in time and space.95 There is, moreover, a normative and political dimension in this work of recovery, one which resonates with Enzo Traverso’s account of leftwing melancholia. “Observed from a Western, Eastern, or postcolonial perspective,” Traverso stated, “the history of the twentieth century takes a different aspect.” He continued: Until now … their different focus – Holocaust, communism, and colonialism – illustrates the tendency to draw competitive rather than complementary “history lessons.” The global memory of the beginning of the twenty-first century sketches a landscape of fragmented sufferings. New collective hopes have not yet risen above the horizon. Melancholy still floats in the air as the dominant feeling of a world burdened with its past, without a visible future. The West, the East, and the South: the former “three sectors” of world revolution have become three realms of wounded memories.96 The severing of connected histories also has damaging effects when attempts are made to reckon with their legacies: the tendency to memorialize in competitive and hierarchical terms, and when the process, act, and form of remembrance become a zero-sum game for the prize of recognition. Recoverable in Bauman’s work, I have suggested, is an antidote to the tendency to disentangle the trajectories of colonialimperialism and decolonization, the Jewish “drama of assimilation” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the cataclysm of the Shoah, and the travails of communism and post-communism – as well

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as the traditions of critical social thought that developed within and in response to these trajectories. The multiplicity of modernity is thus intimately connected to what Michael Rothberg has termed multidirectional memory, where shared memory is “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing” and in this dialogical process has the potential “to create new forms of solidarity and new visions of justice.”97 Amid the rancorous memory wars of the present and acute uncertainty about the future and its hospitableness to life, perhaps the most valuable legacy of Bauman’s life and work is its rootedness in the view that there is a multiplicity of ways of being and of being together.98

Notes

Bibliographical Note 1 For a commentary on this endeavour, see Jack Palmer, Dariusz Brzeziński, and Tom Campbell, “Sixty-Three Years of Thinking Sociologically: Compiling the Bibliography of Zygmunt Bauman,” Thesis Eleven 156, no. 1 (2020): 118–33. 2 I thank Li Tian Lang for his correspondence on the issue of interest in Bauman in China. See also Jiayang Qin and Peter Beilharz, “Bauman in China,” Thesis Eleven 159, no. 1 (2020): 110–27. I also thank C.V. Cassol for his correspondence about Bauman studies in Brazil. See C.V. Cassol, J.N.M. Manfio, and S.P. da Silva, eds, Dicionário Crítico-Hermenêutico Zygmunt Bauman (Ijuí: Editora Unijai, 2021).

Introduction 1 See Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin, 2008), 24. 2 E.P. Thompson, “Boring from Without,” Guardian, 28 December 1972, 12. 3 Izabela Wagner, Bauman: A Biography (Cambridge: Polity, 2020), 197. 4 KRE, BCE. This followed another Polish-language work on British socialism, SB. 5 Bauman quoted in Keith Tester and Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Bauman Before Postmodernity: Invitation, Conversations and Annotated Bibliography, 1953–1989 (Aalborg: University of Aalborg Press, 2005), 91. 6 Quoted in Igor Czernecki, “‘An Intellectual Offensive: The Ford Foundation and the Destalinization of the Polish Social Sciences,” Cold War History 13, no. 3 (2013): 299. Bauman reflects on the LSE visit in “The Journey Never Ends: Zygmunt Bauman talks with Peter Beilharz,” in The Bauman Reader, ed. Peter Beilharz (London: SAGE, 2001), 337.

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7 Robert McKenzie to Zygmunt Bauman, 28 June 1967, JZB, MS 2067/B/5/1. 8 Thompson, “Boring from Without,” 12. 9 E.P. Thompson, “An Open Letter to Leszek Kołakowski,” The Socialist Register 10, no. 10 (1973): 1–100. 10 Bauman quoted in Tester and Jacobsen, Bauman Before Postmodernity, 45. 11 Keith Tester, “Intellectual Immigration and the English Idiom (Or, a Tale of Bustards and Eagles),” Polski Towarzystwo Socjologiczne 155, no. 3 (2006): 290. See also Peter Beilharz who imputes Thompson’s response to Bauman’s reception, along with other East European dissidents, in large part to a “stiff Anglo superiority,” in Intimacy in Postmodern Times: A Friendship with Zygmunt Bauman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 126. A similar reception greeted the “Budapest School” exiles, such as Agnes Heller, Ferenc Fehér, and György and Maria Márkus, who landed in Melbourne in the late 1970s, and who Peter Beilharz reports would comment to their new colleagues that “we are just leaving the circus you are arriving at.” I thank Peter for this observation. 12 Bauman quoted in Tester and Jacobsen, Bauman Before Postmodernity, 92. On Mills and Miliband, see Zygmunt Bauman and Keith Tester, Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 24–8. 13 See Eric Hobsbawm, The Forward March of Labour Halted? (London: Verso, 1981); André Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on PostIndustrial Socialism (London: Pluto Press, 1982). 14 Janina’s testimony chiefly includes Winter in the Morning (London: Virago, 1986), her memoir of her teenage years in wartime Poland, including the Warsaw ghetto, and A Dream of Belonging (London: Virago, 1988), her account of postwar Poland, the development of events which led to their exile, and her reflections on the condition of exile from Leeds; see Zygmunt Bauman, “The War Against Forgetfulness,” Jewish Quarterly 36, no. 1 (1989): 47. 15 Zygmunt Bauman, “The Homecoming of Unwelcome Strangers: Eastern European Jewry 50 Years after the War,” Jewish Quarterly 36, no. 3 (1989): 14–23. 16 Zygmunt Bauman, “Assimilation into Exile: The Jew as a Polish Writer,” Poetics Today 17, no. 4 (1996): 574. Reproduced in CA: 119–48. 17 Zygmunt Bauman, “The End of Polish Jewry: A Sociological Review,” Bulletin on Soviet and East European Jewry, 3 (1969): 3–8. 18 On the “Jewish turn,” see Bryan Cheyette, “Zygmunt Bauman’s Window: From Jews to Strangers and Back,” Thesis Eleven 156, no. 1 (2020): 67–85; Matt Dawson, “The War Against Forgetfulness: Sociological Lessons from Bauman’s Writing on European Jewry,” Thesis Eleven 156, no. 1 (2020): 86–101. On Janina Bauman, see MH, vii.

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19 Bryan Cheyette, “The Dignity of Janina Bauman: A Personal Reflection,” Thesis Eleven 107, no. 1 (2011): 94–100. 20 As told to me by Richard Kilminster, one of Bauman’s first PhD students and long-time colleague at the University of Leeds. I thank him for this observation. 21 The preface to Modernity and the Holocaust is interesting, for instance, because it draws inspiration from Janina Bauman’s autobiographical reflections and shows how what she experienced was something alien to him as he had escaped to the “far-flung reaches” of Europe. MH, vii. 22 Zygmunt Bauman, “The Poles, the Jews, and I: An Investigation into Whatever Made Me Who I Am,” Unpublished autobiography (1987), 23. In JZB, MS 2067/B/1/4. For Izabela Wagner, in her Bauman: A Biography, this tension between ethno-cultural categories simultaneously felt subjectively and imposed exogenously is the central frame for understanding Bauman’s life trajectory. 23 See in particular Shaun Best, Zygmunt Bauman: Why Good People Do Bad Things (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); Andreas Hess, “Postmodernism Made Me Do It: A World without Blame,” Irish Times, 13 April 2007, 16; Andreas Hess, “The Liquefaction of Memory: An Intellectual History and Critique of Zygmunt Bauman’s Diffusionist Social Theory,” Global Intellectual History 6, no. 2 (2021): 190–214. Hess speaks of an “absence of any talk about responsibility in Bauman’s theory and practice; it is now simply the liquid condition that is responsible and postmodern ethics does the rest” (in Andreas Hess, review of Investigating Sociological Theory, by Charles Turner, History of the Human Sciences 24, no. 5 (2011): 188). This is based on a misreading – or, one suspects, a non-reading – of Bauman’s moral sociology, which has individual responsibility as its linchpin. Any reader of Postmodern Ethics, or indeed any of Bauman’s sociological works from Modernity and the Holocaust onward, will find a plethora of discussions about moral responsibility. For Bauman, it could even be said that there is nothing, sociologically speaking, without responsibility because responsibility is an inherent property of sociation; in the face-to-face meeting of two, we are responsible for the Other simply by virtue of our co-presence (see AL, 123–4). He argued that structural properties and institutional mechanisms of societal systems divert or silence moral impulses in some situational settings, but they can never do so totally. In postmodernity these properties and mechanisms begin to dissolve, to liquefy – this was the “chance” of postmodernity, that it would, contra Hess, open up new horizons for moral responsibility and possibilities for taking responsibility, not excusing individual moral actions. For a less involved and much more thoroughgoing critique of Bauman’s sociology of moral responsibility, see Benjamin Adam Hirst, “After Lévinas:

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Notes to pages 8–9

Assessing Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘Ethical Turn.’ ” European Journal of Social Theory 17, no. 2 (2014): 184–98. Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 239–40. Wagner, Bauman: A Biography. See also Artur Domosławski, Wygnaniec: 21 scen z życia Zygmunta Baumana (Warsaw: Wielka Litera, 2021); Dariusz Roziak, Bauman (Wałbrzych: Mondo, 2019). Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018). Dariusz Stola, “Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance: A Ministry of Memory?,” in The Convolutions of Historical Politics, ed. Alexei Miller and Maria Lipman (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2012), 45–58. See also Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Vintage, 2005), 696–700. Nowhere is this Orwellian administration of memory more apparent than in the so-called “Poland Holocaust Law.” In early 2021, Barbara Engelking, founder and director of the Polish Center of Holocaust Research, and Jan Grabowski, a Polish-Canadian historian of the Holocaust at the University of Ottawa, were trialled according to legislation passed in 2018 that enables civil suits against anyone deemed to be supporting the historical claim that “the Polish Nation or the Republic of Poland is responsible or coresponsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich.” This development raises the question of where Bauman would have been positioned. See David Matthews, “Scholars Fear Impact of Poland’s Law on the Holocaust,” Times Higher Education, 15 April 2021, https://www.insidehighered.com/ news/2021/04/15/scholars-fear-impact-polands-new-law-holocaust. Václav Havel and Adam Michnik, “Confronting the Past: Justice or Revenge?,” Journal of Democracy 4, no. 1 (1993): 20–7. Among the disrupters were members of the far right party Narodowe Odrodzenie Polski (NOP, National Rebirth of Poland). Following the announcement of the honorary doctorate, Gazeta Wyborcza reported that Bauman was being denigrated and abused on social media with comments such as, “I cannot stand the Jewish Bolshevik,” “Death to the Zionist plague of mankind,” and “Down with Judeo-Communism” (Cheyette, “Zygmunt Bauman’s Window,” 82–3n23). Andreas Hess’s response to this episode was that these events were “problematic” only from the view of “prohibiting free speech” and “a pity because they contributed to distracting from Bauman’s own involvement in past communist activities and from his own deeply problematic arguments concerning the cataclysm of the twentieth century.” They also “allowed Bauman to continue to see himself as a victim of circumstances and, even more problematically, to make the case for universal victimhood” (Hess, “The Liquefaction of Memory,” 198).

Notes to pages 9–10

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30 See Joanna Michlic, “The Soviet Occupation of Poland, 1939–41, and the Stereotype of the Anti-Polish and Pro-Soviet Jew,” Jewish Social Studies 13, no. 3 (2007): 135–76; Jelena Subotić, Red Star, Yellow Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019). 31 See John Rundell’s introduction to Agnes Heller, After Thoughts – Beyond the ‘System’: Political and Cultural Lectures by Agnes Heller (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 1–9. 32 See “This Is Not an Obituary” on the Bauman Institute website for an extensive list: https://baumaninstitute.leeds.ac.uk/this-is-not-an-obituary/. 33 See bibliographical note. 34 This is an expression attributed to Jürgen Habermas who said it upon listening uneasily to a laudation while attending a conference dedicated to his life’s work. See William Outhwaite, “Continuities and Discontinuities in Habermas’ Relation to Historical Materialism,” Theory, Culture & Society Think-Pieces, 12 September 2014, https://www.theoryculturesociety.org/ william-outhwaite-on-habermas-and-historical-materialism/. 35 See Emmanuel Loyer, “Anthropology, Literature and the Paradigm of the Last Witness” (lecture, St. Andrews University Franco-Scottish Research Network in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 1–2 December 2016), https://cfhc. wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/workshops/franco-scot-humanities/temoignages2016/ loyer-en/. For an example of this paradigm in action, see: “The likes of Zygmunt Bauman will never be found in the world of academia again. He is one of that generation of Central and Eastern European intellectuals who literally lived through the disasters of the twentieth century. He experienced what others only write about,” from Keith Tester, The Social Thought of Zygmunt Bauman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 1. 36 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Abacus, 1994). 37 Similar tributes were paid more recently to the life and work of Agnes Heller after her death in July 2019. She characterized her social philosophy in avowedly biographical terms, with the deaths of family members in mind, “I promised myself to solve the dirty secret of the twentieth century, the secret of the unheard-of mass murders, of several million corpses ‘produced’ by genocides, by the Holocaust, and all of them in times of modern humanism and enlightenment!” Agnes Heller, A Short History of My Philosophy (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010), 107; see also Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (London: Penguin, 2012). 38 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; repr., London: Penguin, 2017). 39 William Outhwaite, “Canon Formation in Late Twentieth-Century British Sociology,” Sociology 43, no. 6 (2009): 1029–45; Charles Turner, “Exiles in

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45 46

47 48

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Notes to pages 10–12

British Sociology,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sociology in Britain, ed. John Holmwood and John Scott (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 282–301. Neil Gross, “How to Do Social Science without Data,” New York Times, 9 February 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/opinion/sunday/ how-to-do-social-science-without-data.html. Charles Turner, Investigating Sociological Theory (London: SAGE, 2010), 32–3; Richard Kilminster, “Overcritique and Ambiguity in Zygmunt Bauman’s Sociology: A Long-Term Perspective,” in Beyond Bauman: Critical Engagements and Creative Excursions, ed. Michael Hviid Jacobsen (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 201–23. Göran Therborn, From Marxism to Post-Marxism (London: Verso, 2008), 168. Enzo Traverso, “Dialectic of Irrationalism: Historicizing Lukács’s Destruction of Reason,” introduction to The Destruction of Reason by György Lukács (1962; repr., London: Verso, 2021), xlv. Ali Rattansi, “Zygmunt Bauman: An Adorno for Liquid Modern Times?,” The Sociological Review 62, no. 4 (2014): 908–17. Rattansi does not address the stylistic and formal similarities across the works of these exiles, which I think are more interesting than their tonal similarities. See chapter 2 for a discussion of this connection. Ali Rattansi, Bauman and Contemporary Sociology: A Critical Analysis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), 212–13. See also Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (London: Penguin, 2000), 87. Zygmunt Bauman to Richard Sennett, 27 June 1994, JZB, MS2067/5/4. Zygmunt Bauman, “Philosophy for Everyday – Though not for Everyone,” Economy and Society 22, no. 1 (1993): 115. This approach to reading and reviewing occasionally landed Bauman in trouble. Gillian Rose was recorded as saying that Bauman wrote a “wicked review” of her Judaism and Modernity because, in his “inspired reading,” he had turned her into Zygmunt Bauman. I thank Bryan Cheyette for this observation. Richard J. Bernstein also noted, rather tersely, that Bauman’s review of his Philosophical Profiles amounted to “an ‘occasion’ to develop [your] own reflections rather than to focus on what the book is about” and that the reader would find it “very difficult to infer from your essay what is my own position and views” (Richard Bernstein to Zygmunt Bauman, 10 September 1986, JZB, MS2067/B/5/2). Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (1975; repr., New York: Continuum, 2004). Zygmunt Bauman, “A jesli etyki zabraknie,” Kultura Współczesna, 1–2 (1995): 146, my translation.

Notes to pages 13–18

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51 Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1969): 3–53. 52 Quentin Skinner, “A Reply to My Critics,” in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1988), 234. 53 Alvin Gouldner, Enter Plato: Classical Greece and the Origins of Social Theory (London: Routledge, 1965), 168. 54 ISP, 129. 55 LI, 1. 56 Zygmunt Bauman, “Two Notes on Mass Culture,” The Polish Sociological Bulletin, 14 (1966): 74. 57 “INTERVIEW – Patrick,” JZB, digital files, disk 92. 58 Harald Welzer, “The Rationality of Evil: An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman,” Thesis Eleven 70, no. 1 (2002): 102. 59 Mark Davis, Freedom and Consumerism: A Critique of Zygmunt Bauman’s Sociology (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), 12. 60 For an interesting treatment of such questions, see Maryanne Dever, “The Intimate Archive,” Archives and Manuscripts 38, no. 1 (2010): 94–137. 61 Ken Plummer, Documents of Life 2: An Invitation to Critical Humanism (London: SAGE, 2001). 62 For a useful survey of the use of correspondence in sociological studies see Liz Stanley, “To the Letter: An Overview of Letters in Sociology,” University of Edinburgh: Whites Writing Whiteness Working Paper (2018), https://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/files/2018/02/ pdfToTheLetter21feb18.pdf. 63 Quoted in Bryan Cheyette, Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History (Newhaven: Yale University Press, 2013), 21. 64 Ulrich Raulff, “Grand Hotel Abyss: Towards a Theory of the Modern Literary Archive,” Comparative Critical Studies 8, no. 2–3 (2011): 165. 65 Lydia Bauman, “To Remain Human in Inhuman Conditions,” in Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust: Heritage, Dilemmas, Extensions, ed. Jack Palmer and Dariusz Brzeziński (London: Routledge, 2022), 146–7. 66 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 27. 67 See bibliographical note. 68 Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 1964), 53; Zygmunt Bauman, “Jorge Luis Borges, or What Understanding Is Not

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Notes to pages 18–21

What It Seems to Be” (1976) in CA, 84; and Zygmunt Bauman and Keith Tester, Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 24. Stuart Hall, “Constituting an Archive,” Third Text 15, no. 54 (2001), 92. George Steinmetz, ed., Sociology and Empire: The Imperial Entanglements of a Discipline (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013); Gurminder Bhambra, Connected Sociologies (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Julian Go, Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Encarnacion Gutierrez Rodriguez, Manuela Boatcă, and Sérgio Costa, eds, Decolonizing European Sociology: Transdisciplinary Approaches (London: Routledge, 2016); Ali Meghji, Decolonizing Sociology: A Guide to Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Polity, 2021); Gurminder Bhambra and John Holmwood, Colonialism and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2021). Anthony Giddens, Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), 1. Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia (Orlando, FL: Mariner Books, 1969). Arendt, Life of the Mind, vol. 1, 104. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (1975; repr., Cambridge: Polity, 1987); Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). Manfred Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the War on Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Max Weber, “The Social Psychology of World Religions,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H.H. Gerth and C.W. Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 280. The key line, as is often noted (with due emphasis on the qualification in parentheses) is: “A product of modern European civilization, studying any problem of universal history, is bound to ask himself to what combination of circumstances the fact should be attributed that in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of development having universal significance and value.” Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (1930. repr., London: Routledge, 1992), xxviii. Enrique Dussel, “Eurocentrism and Modernity,” Boundary 20, no. 3 (1993): 65–76; Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans Richard Howard (1982; repr., New York: Harper Perennial, 1992). Alastair Bonnett, The Idea of the West: Culture, Politics and History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 5.

Notes to pages 21–5

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80 Stuart Hall, “The West and the Rest,” in Formations of Modernity, ed. Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1992), 187. 81 Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin Books, 1978). 82 Victor Seidler, Jewish Philosophy and Western Culture: A Modern Introduction (London: IB Taurus, 2007), 1. See also Hall, “The West and the Rest,” 199–201. 83 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 275. 84 Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality? (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1974); Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987). 85 Couze Venn, Occidentalism: Modernity and Subjectivity (London: Sage, 2000). 86 Bonnett, Idea of the West, 4. 87 Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knöbl, Social Theory: Twenty Introductory Lectures, trans. Alex Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 308–38. 88 W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 134. 89 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” National Interest, 16 (1989): 3–18. 90 Robert Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War World (New York: Vintage, 2002). 91 Göran Therborn, “Entangled Modernities,” European Journal of Social Theory 6, no. 3 (2003): 293. 92 Duncan Bell, Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 99. 93 Anouar Abdel-Malek, “Orientalism in Crisis,” Diogenes, 44 (1963): 108. 94 Said, Orientalism, 109. 95 Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, trans. Russell Moore (1988; repr., Oxford: Pambazuka Press, 2009), 165. 96 Turner, “Exiles in British Sociology,” 297–8. 97 For example, see Mahmood Mamdani who writes in reference to postcolonial civil wars in Africa that “Europe’s past, ethnic cleansing and all, has become our present.” Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020), 34. 98 Gurminder Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 99 Johann Pall Arnason, Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 2003).

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100 This is most notable in Rattansi, Bauman and Contemporary Sociology. 101 Laura Doyle, Inter-Imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor and the Literary Arts of Alliance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020). 102 Said, Orientalism; Valentin Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (London: James Currey, 1988); Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009); Ivor Neumann, Uses of the Other: ‘The East’ in European Identity Formation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Maria Todorova, “The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention,” Slavic Review 52, no. 2 (1994): 453–82. 103 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8; Octavio Paz, “In Search of the Present,” trans. A. Stanton. Inti: Revista de literatura hispánica 1, no 32 (1990): 13–22. 104 Omer Bartov and Eric Weitz, eds, Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013); Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Random House, 2011). 105 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. 106 Austin Harrington, German Cosmopolitan Social Thought and the Idea of the West: Voices from Weimar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 5. 107 Ivan Gerasimov et al., “In Search of a New Imperial History,” Ab Imperio 1, no. 1 (2005): 33–56; Marina Mogilner, “New Imperial History: Post-Soviet Historiography in Search of a New Paradigm for the History of Empire and Nationalism,” Revue d’études comparatives Est-Ouest 45, no. 2 (2014): 25–67; Maxim Waldstein and Sanna Turoma, eds, Empire De/Centered: New Spatial Histories of Russia and the Soviet Union (London: Routledge, 2016).

Chapter One 1 Joanna Waley-Cohen, Exile in Mid-Qing China: Banishment to Xinjiang, 1758–1820 (Newhaven: Yale University Press, 1991); Christine Brooke-Rose, “Exsul,” Poetics Today 17, no. 3 (1996), 290; Renato Camurri, “The Exile Experience Reconsidered: A Comparative Perspective in European Cultural Migration during the Interwar Period,” Transatlantica [online] 1 (2014), http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/6920; Kouamé Adou, “Memory and Exile: The Transatlantic and Diasporic Dimensions of the Myth of Ashanti Princess Abla Pokou,” Études littéraires africaines, 39 (2015): 145–59.

Notes to pages 28–31

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2 Mary McCarthy, “A Guide to Exiles, Expatriates, and Internal Emigrés,” New York Review, 9 March 1972, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1972/03/09/ a-guide-to-exiles-expatriates-and-internal-emigres/. 3 Leszek Kołakowski, “In Praise of Exile,” in Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 57. 4 Paul Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 213. 5 Hannah Arendt’s wartime essay “We Refugees” remains a defining statement on this experience. In Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ben Feldman (1943; repr., New York: Schocken Books, 2007): 264–5. 6 Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (1984; repr., London: Granta Books, 2001), 173–9. Said knew, as did Bauman of course, that the realization of the “temptation” of assimilation is ultimately determined by those who the exile is attempting to join and is always provisional. I thank Eric Ferris for reminding me of this important point. 7 Peter Burke, Exiles and Expatriates in the History of Knowledge, 1500–2000 (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2017), 16. 8 Michiel de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and other Italic Languages (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 196. 9 Gert-Jan van der Heiden, “Exile, Use and Form-of-Life: On the Conclusion of Agamben’s Homo Sacer Series,” Theory, Culture & Society 37, no. 2 (2020): 66. 10 Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things before the Last, ed. and trans. P.O. Kosteller (1969; repr., Princeton: Markus Weiner Publishers, 1995), 84. 11 Edward Said, “Between Worlds,” Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (1998; repr., London: Granta Books, 2001), 565; Said, “Reflections on Exile,” 186. 12 Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); Kołakowski, “In Praise of Exile,” 55. 13 Hannah Arendt quoted in Lucy Stonebridge, Placeless People: Writing, Rights and Refugees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 4. 14 On naming and namelessness, see Griselda Pollock, “Introduction: Finding a Name,” in Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory (Newhaven: Yale University Press, 2018), 26–61. 15 Dubravka Ugrešić, “The Writer in Exile,” Thank You for Not Reading: Essays in Literary Trivia, trans. Celia Hawkesworth (Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press, 2001), 127. 16 David Kettler, The Liquidation of Exile: Studies in the Intellectual Emigration of the 1930s (London: Anthem, 2011), 2.

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Notes to pages 31–3

17 Lisa Malkki, “Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 24 (1995): 513. 18 Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global History of Intellectual Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 64. 19 On Bauman as a “successful outsider,” see Dennis Smith, “Zygmunt Bauman: How to be a Successful Outsider,” Theory, Culture & Society 15, no. 1 (1998): 39–45. 20 T.W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. Edmund Jephcott (1951; repr., London: Verso, 2005), 33; Jean-Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America (1987; repr., London: Verso, 2006), 240; Charles Turner, “Exiles in British Sociology,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sociology in Britain, ed. John Holmwood and John Scott (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 284. 21 Janina Bauman, A Dream of Belonging: My Years in Postwar Poland (London: Virago, 1988), 144–6. 22 Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 247–9; Lawrence King and Iván Szelényi, Theories of the New Class: Intellectuals and Power (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 23 Burke, Exiles and Expatriates in the History of Knowledge, 5; and Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 227–66. 24 Stonebridge, Placeless People, 32. 25 Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 228. 26 Max Weber, The Sociology of World Religions, ed. and trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963); S.N. Eisenstadt, “The Axial Age: The Emergence of Transcendentalist Visions and the Rise of Clerics,” European Journal of Sociology 23, no. 2 (1982): 225–52. 27 Charles Camic, Neil Gross, and Michelle Lamont, eds, “Introduction: The Study of Social Knowledge Making,” in Social Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 1–40. 28 Karl Mannheim, “The Sociology of Intellectuals,” Theory, Culture & Society 10, no. 3 (1993): 69–80. 29 Patrick Baert and Joel Isaac, “Intellectuals and Society: Sociological and Historical Perspectives,” in Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Social and Political Theory, ed. Gerard Delanty and Stephen Turner (London: Routledge, 2011), 200. 30 Amitai Etzioni and Alyssa Bowditch, Public Intellectuals: An Endangered Species? (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000); Russel Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 1987); and Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Vintage, 2005), 564, 785. 31 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971).

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32 Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (1928; repr., New Brunswick: Transaction Press, 2007), 27. 33 Gil Eyal and Larissa Buchholz, “From the Sociology of Intellectuals to the Sociology of Interventions,” Annual Review of Sociology, 36 (2010): 117–37. 34 Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. James Faubion (1976; repr., New York: New Press, 2002), 126–7. 35 Indeed, in an interview in 1986, just two years after the French publication of Homo Academicus, Bourdieu himself revealed that “I think if there is a great cause left today it’s the defence of the intellectuals.” Quoted in Judt, Postwar, 564. 36 Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, 13. 37 Ibid., 84. 38 Ibid., 40–1, 90–5. 39 Nirmal Puwar, Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place (Oxford: Berg, 2004). 40 Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, 278. 41 Charles Camic and Neil Gross, “The New Sociology of Ideas,” in The Blackwell Companion to Sociology, ed. Judith Blau (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001): 236–49. 42 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 1:42. 43 Collins, Sociology of Philosophies, 25. 44 “Letters assumed a special importance in exile. It was these that bound the writers together, as well as to their country, their fate, their mother tongue and their common struggles, both political and in daily life.” Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 248–9. 45 Patrick Baert, “Positioning Theory and Intellectual Interventions,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 42, no. 3 (2012): 304. 46 Patrick Baert and Marcus Morgan, “A Performative Framework for the Study of Intellectuals,” European Journal of Social Theory 21, no. 3 (2018): 326; Patrick Baert, The Existentialist Moment: The Rise of Sartre as a Public Intellectual (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), 181. 47 Simon Susen, “Reflections on Patrick Baert’s The Existentialist Moment,” in The Sociology of Intellectuals: After the Existentialist Moment, ed. Patrick Baert and Simon Susen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 26. 48 Baert, The Existentialist Moment, 183. 49 Maria Márkus, “Cultural Pluralism and the Subversion of the ‘Taken for Granted’ World,’” in Blurred Boundaries: Migration, Ethnicity, Citizenship, ed. Rainer Bauböck and John Rundell (Farnham: Ashgate, 1998), 245. 50 Montgomery Belgion, “The Germanization of Britain,” New English Weekly, 15 February 1945, 137.

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51 Lee Congdon, Exile and Social Thought: Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany and Austria, 1919–1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 52 Karl Mannheim, “The Function of the Refugee,” New English Weekly, 19 April 1945, 6. 53 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936), 137. 54 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 72. 55 LI. Elsewhere, Bauman makes this connection between Mannheim’s exilic experience and the sociology of knowledge explicit, see MA, 84. 56 Tibor Frank, Double Exile: Migrations of Jewish-Hungarian Professionals through Germany to the United States, 1919–1945 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008). 57 Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (1953; repr., London: Penguin, 2001), 30. 58 Stefan Zweig quoted in Stonebridge, Placeless People, 2. 59 Peter Wagner, Modernity as Experience and Interpretation: A New Sociology of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2008). 60 Karl Mannheim, “The Problem of Generations,” in Karl Mannheim: Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1952), 309. 61 Kettler, The Liquidation of Exile, 22. 62 Ibid., 15. 63 Griselda Pollock, “Concentrationary Legacies: Thinking through the Racism of Minor Differences,” in Racism, Postcolonialism, Europe, ed. Ian Law and Graham Huggan (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 25. 64 Norman Manea, The Fifth Impossibility: Essays on Exile and Language (Yale: Yale University Press, 2012), 5. 65 War, it could be said, constitutes the experiential horizons of a generation of key postwar social thinkers. Bauman was only four years older than Jürgen Habermas when the latter joined the Hitler Youth. His work – and certainly his interventions in the Historikerstreit – can be read as a self-conscious “redemption” in response to this personal history, generalized to the level of Germany (see Peter Osborne, “Redemption through Discourse?,” New Left Review, 108 [2017]: 126–40). S.N. Eisenstadt, who had migrated to Palestine with his widowed mother in the early 1930s, was involved in 1948 war that produced Israel-Palestine in “ways of which he did not speak” (Edward Shils quoted in Stavit Sinai, Sociological Knowledge and Collective Identity: S.N. Eisenstadt and Israeli Society [London: Routledge, 2019], 39). Pierre Bourdieu, as is well known, turned to sociology in the context of Algeria’s war of decolonization (see Pierre Bourdieu, Algerian Sketches, ed. Tassadit Yacine, trans. David Fernbach [Cambridge: Polity, 2013]). Norbert Elias’s writings on the fragile processes of civilization – which can unravel into processes of decivilization – are arguably informed by his experiences in the

Notes to pages 41–3

66

67

68 69 70

71 72 73

74

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trenches of the First World War (Tatiana Savoia Landini, “War, Hope and Fear: Writings on Violence at the End of a Long Life,” in Norbert Elias and Violence, ed. Tatiana Savoia Landini and François Dépelteau [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017], 13). Michel Foucault, “An Interview with Michel Foucault,” in Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. James Faubion (New York: New Press, 1997), 241. Zygmunt Bauman and Thomas Leoncini, Born Liquid (Cambridge: Polity, 2019); Zygmunt Bauman, Making the Familiar Unfamiliar: Conversations with Peter Haffner (Cambridge: Polity, 2020). Zygmunt Bauman, “The Poles, the Jews, and I: an investigation into whatever made me what I am,” typescript, 1987, 14, JZB, MS 2067/B/1/4. Bauman, “The Poles, the Jews, and I,” 27. Izabela Wagner has presented the period of Bauman’s childhood and teenage war-time years – drawing heavily on “The Poles, the Jews, and I” – in detail in her biography, Bauman: A Biography (Cambridge: Polity, 2020). I do not reconstruct this here, instead directing the reader toward her book. The “modern trilogy” includes Bauman’s Legislators and Interpreters (1987), Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), and Modernity and Ambivalence (1991). Bauman, “The Poles, the Jews, and I,” 6. “Paradoxes of Assimilation” was the title of a book manuscript that was in a complete form as early as August 1989. In a letter to US sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz, Bauman termed them “my Jewish studies” (19 May 1989, Amstrad file “horomay.pdf ”). It includes chapters that were straightforwardly absorbed into Modernity and Ambivalence (“Social Construction of Strangers” and “Self-Constitution of the Stranger”), and others which were published elsewhere (“Orphans of Enlightenment: A Case in the Sociology of Assimilation” became “Assimilation and Enlightenment,” Society, 6 (1990): 71–81; “Exit Visas and Entry Tickets” was published in Telos 77 (1988): 45–77). The book was earmarked for publication by the now-defunct New Jersey–based publishing house Transaction Publishers, headed by Horowitz. In the end, Bauman felt it was being rushed through into publication and declined to sign a new contract, giving the following explanation to Horowitz in a letter: “Please try to see it my way: I have entered a new (fascinating, but unexplored before) area, and I am not in a mood to rush into print as I cannot know yet whether I said what I wished to say and what was there to be said. This book is too important to me to treat lightly the chance of lifting it to the level where it could be important for others as well” (5 October 1989, Amstrad file “horowoct.pdf ”). Bauman, “The Poles, the Jews, and I,” 25. As recounted in Bauman, Making the Familiar Unfamiliar, 30: “A few months later, the war broke out and I ended up in the Soviet Union. My conversion was an easy one: I simply

204

75 76

77

78 79 80 81

82 83

84

Notes to pages 43–5

dropped the ‘Zionist’ part that had been loosely and artificially attached to the ‘socialist’ part.” Bauman, “The Poles, the Jews, and I,” 42. “During the war I learned the truth we usually choose to leave unsaid: but the cruellest thing about cruelty is that it dehumanises its victims before it destroys them. And that the hardest of struggles is to remain human in inhuman conditions.” Janina Bauman, Winter in the Morning: A Young Girl’s Life in the Warsaw Ghetto and Beyond (London: Virago, 1986), ii. Bryan Cheyette, “Zygmunt Bauman’s Window: From Jews to Strangers and Back,” Thesis Eleven 156, no. 1 (2020): 67–85; Matt Dawson, “The War Against Forgetfulness: Sociological Lessons from Bauman’s Writing on European Jewry,” Thesis Eleven 156, no. 1 (2020): 86–101. Zygmunt Bauman, Identity: Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 11–12. “On Practicality of Sociology,” 2005, JZB, disc file #78. See also Bauman, Making the Familiar Unfamiliar, 18–19, 24–35. Bauman, Making the Familiar Unfamiliar, 9–12. For less directly personal, though no less illuminating, reflection from Kołakowski himself, see “Genocide and Ideology,” in Is God Happy? Selected Essays (1977; repr., London: Penguin, 2012), 80–1. Bauman, Making the Familiar Unfamiliar, 31. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Vintage, 1999), xii–xiv, 2–3. See also Gerard Delanty, The European Heritage: A Critical Re-Interpretation (London: Routledge, 2018), 57. As Bauman put it: “The communist movement was the only movement that was consistently anti-Nazi. And I remember many people in the 1930s – I was a child at the time – saying that the only choice was that between Nazism and communism. Those were the only options. The attitude of western democracies toward the Nazis was very lax. They treated them as partners, as equal players in the political game. And the Jews sensed what was coming.” In Making the Familiar Unfamiliar, 6. On Jews and communists in Poland, see Jaff Schatz, The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland (Oakland: University of California Press, 1989). Dan Diner and Jonathan Frankel, “Dark Times, Dire Decisions: Jews and Communism,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry, an Annual, vol. 20 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 11. See also Aleksandra Jasińska-Kania, “Bloody Revenge in ‘God’s Playground’: Poles’ Collective Memory of Relations with Germans, Russians, and Jews,” International Journal of Sociology 37, no. 2 (2007): 30–42; and Judt, Postwar, 181. Bauman puts the matter differently in one of his most autobiographical essays: “The Germans were not the only invaders of Polish soil. The eastern lands of Poland, where

Notes to pages 46–7

85 86 87 88

89 90 91 92 93 94

95

96 97

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most of the national minorities lived, were occupied in 1939 by Soviet forces. To the Poles, there was little difference between the two enemies. For the Jews, the difference was one between life and death.” In “Assimilation into Exile: The Jew as a Polish Writer,” Poetics Today 17, no. 4 (1996): 584 (republished in CA, 119–48). See also Zygmunt Bauman, “Adolf Rudnicki: The Jew and the Polish Writer,” The Jewish Quarterly 38, no. 4 (1991): 42. Another 1968 exile, Stefan Morawski, recounted the situation on similar lines in his contribution to Bauman’s 1998 Festschrift: “The realities of that time called for radical change. Poverty, injustice, undemocratic rules and xenophobia predominated, pushing intellectuals and young people sensitive to the surrounding ills to join the radical movements. Zygmunt chose Marxism in the Soviet guise because he had no other version to appropriate. But this was not peculiarly Polish. Many youngsters, his peers all over Europe, did the same in this period, when you could not stand silently and blindly in the face of rising Nazism.” In Stefan Morawski, “Bauman’s Way of Seeing the World.” Theory, Culture & Society 15, no. 1 (1998): 30. Hieronim Kubiak, “Hopes, Illusions and Deceptions: Half a Century of Political Sociology in Poland,” Current Sociology 44, no. 3 (1996): 23–4. This Polish network is depicted in close detail in Wagner, Bauman, 168–257. Wagner, Bauman, 205. In a letter dated 10 May 1966, Neustadt says that they found Bauman’s talk very stimulating and that “there is a genuinely great interest here in sociological developments in Poland.” JZB, MS2067/B/5/1. Peter Worsley, An Academic Skating on Thin Ice (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 136. C.W. Mills to Zygmunt Bauman, 17 February 1961, JZB, MS2067/B/5/1. Reinhard Bendix to Zygmunt Bauman, 27 September 1965; and Amitai Etzioni to Zygmunt Bauman, 10 December 1965, JZB, MS2067/B/5/1. S.M. Lipset to Zygmunt Bauman, 18 November 1965, JZB, MS2067/B/5/1. Roy Macridis to Zygmunt Bauman, 16 February 1967, JZB, MS2067/B/5/1. See for example “Values and Standards of Success of the Warsaw Youth,” The Polish Sociological Bulletin, 1–2 (1962): 77–90; and “Social Structure of the Party Organization in Industrial Works,” The Polish Sociological Bulletin, 3–4 (1962): 50–64. This conference was a joint venture of UNESCO’s International Council for Philosophy and the International Social Science Council. See letters from Julia Kristeva to Zygmunt Bauman, 8 March 1967 and 22 January 1968, JZB, MS2067/B/5/1. Maurice Godelier, Claude Lévi-Strauss: A Critical Study of his Thought, trans. Nora Scott (2013; repr., London: Verso, 2018). STC, 251–2.

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Notes to pages 48–52

98 Bruno Latour to Zygmunt Bauman, 23 October 1999, JZB, MS 2067/B/5/9. 99 This event was also sponsored by UNESCO and the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies. For some reflections on this event, set within the midst of the Paris protests, see Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London: Abacus, 2002), 246–7. 100 Judt, Postwar, 421. 101 “Bunt młodzieży, który nie jest walką pokoleń” [The rebellion of the youth, which is not a clash of generations], trans KB, 1; JZB, MS2067/3/1. 102 J. Bauman, A Dream of Belonging, 165. 103 Wagner, Bauman, 290. 104 Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 230. 105 John Neubauer, “Exile: The Home of the Twentieth Century,” in The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe: A Compendium, ed. John Neubauer and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 12. 106 Neubauer, “Exile,” 97. 107 “Cultural Focus and Semiotic Density,” unpublished research project proposal, 3, JZB, MS2067/3/1. 108 See Wagner, Bauman, 287–313. 109 Neubauer, “Exile,” 107. 110 “Na rozdrożu w swiecjie na rozdrożu” [At the crossroads in a world at the crossroads], trans KB, 7. JZB, MS2067/3/1 (published in HP, 75–79). 111 Judt, Postwar, 427. 112 Bauman, Making the Familiar Unfamiliar, 37–8. 113 ‘‫[ ’םולשל ןנוכתהל לארשי לע‬Israel must prepare for peace], Haaretz, 8 August 1971, 6; trans. MJ. 114 To quote from a response to a question from Citlali Rovirosa-Madrazo, omitted from the conversation in Living on Borrowed Time: “I found Jewish nationalism every bit as repulsive as that nationalism of which I fell victim and that other which appointed me as a victim-to-be; the Jewish (Israeli) variety felt perhaps all the more revolting because in its case I was invited (more precisely, demanded and pressed) to move from the crowds of victims to the camp of the victimizers,” “CITLALI – Palestine 1,” JZB, USB 09. 115 “INTERVIEW Avner Shapira,” 7, JZB, USB 19 (published in Haaretz, 16 February 2013). 116 “INTERVIEW Avner Shapira,” 6. 117 Shaun Best, Zygmunt Bauman: Why Good People Do Bad Things (London: Routledge, 2013), 35. 118 J.V. Loach to Zygmunt Bauman, 3 May 1971, JZB, M22067/3/1. 119 Quoted in Zygmunt Bauman, “Intellectuals in East-Central Europe: Continuity and Change,” East European Politics and Societies 1, no. 2 (1987): 162.

Notes to pages 52–4

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120 Zygmunt Bauman, “Contribution to ‘Epilogue in Eight Essays,’” in A.H. Halsey, A History of Sociology in Britain: Science, Literature and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 207. 121 The inviter told Bauman that “none of the area specialists were nearly as interesting as you in their observations and ideas about the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe, and certainly none is remotely in the same league from a theoretical standpoint.” In David Apter to Zygmunt Bauman, 14 March 1989, JZB, MS2067/B/5/2. While open to the prospect, Bauman eventually turned the offer down on account that he was a sociologist not a political scientist, and he was not a Soviet specialist. 122 Bauman quoted in Keith Tester and Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Bauman Before Postmodernity: Invitation, Conversations and Annotated Bibliography, 1953–1989 (Aalborg: University of Aalborg Press, 2005), 44. 123 Zygmunt Bauman, “Culture, Values and Science of Society,” The University of Leeds Review, 2 (1971): 185–203, republished in CA, 67–83. Culture as Praxis occupies a fundamental place in Bauman’s oeuvre. In 1996, Chris Rojek – then editor of SAGE publications and one of the key players in the publication network that facilitated the development of the sociology of postmodernity as an effervescent field of intellectual activity – wrote to Bauman and proposed that Culture as Praxis be republished. Bauman responded, “It all began from here. This was the only place and time when and where I clarified, for my at least satisfaction, the notion of ‘culture,’ and the results I applied in all my later work, sticking by and large to the formulations I have arrived at then and there.” In Zygmunt Bauman to Chris Rojek, 1 March 1996, JZB, MS2067/3/6. 124 Bauman quoted in Simon Tabet, “Interview with Zygmunt Bauman: From the Modern Project to the Liquid World,” Theory, Culture & Society 34, no. 7–8 (2017): 132. 125 See letter from Ralph Miliband to Zygmunt Bauman, 8 November 1980, Ralph Miliband Papers, Special Collections of the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, MS1712, CO20. 126 Wagner, Bauman, 371–5. 127 A. Mieszczanek, “Homecoming,” in Krajobraz po szoku, ed. A. Mieszczanek (Warszawa: Przedświt, 1988), 162; trans. KB. 128 Bauman, in an unpublished typescript marked “St Johns, Newfoundland, 1986,” 1; JZB, MS 2067/B/2/4. I write about this document, as well as a photograph dating from Janina and Zygmunt Bauman’s stay in St. John’s in my “Praxis, Time, Seeing: Thoughts on the Relationship between Zygmunt Bauman’s Sociology and his Photography,” in The Photography of Zygmunt Bauman, ed. Peter Beilharz and Janet Wolff (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming).

208 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140

141 142 143 144 145

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Notes to pages 54–7

Bauman, “St. Johns, Newfoundland, 1986,” 5. “On Jews and Israelis”; JZB, USB 12, my emphasis. Bauman, “The Poles, the Jews and I,” 44. Jelena Subotić, Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 21. Judt, Postwar, 803. MH, 208. Bauman, “Adolf Rudnicki,” 42. Zygmunt Bauman, “The War Against Forgetfulness,” Jewish Quarterly 36, no. 1 (1989): 44–7. Bauman, “Adolf Rudnicki,” 44. Ibid., 40. Bauman, “The Poles, the Jews and I,” 23. Gross, Richard Rorty, 272. Peter Beilharz notes that Janina and Zygmunt Bauman’s visit to the University of Canberra between July and September 1982 coincided with Richard Rorty’s visit to the same institution. See Peter Beilharz, Intimacy in Postmodern Times: A Friendship with Zygmunt Bauman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 60. Zygmunt Bauman, “Some Thoughts on Exile and Thinking in Exile,” Acta Sueco-Polonica, 6 (1997): 159. Bauman, Identity, 12–13. See also Keith Tester, The Social Thought of Zygmunt Bauman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 7. Bauman, “Some Thoughts on Exile and Thinking in Exile,” 160. Stonebridge, Placeless People, 32. Ernest Gellner used to tell a joke about S.N. Eisenstadt: “Two planes crash over Tel Aviv: both contained Shmuel Eisenstadt” (recounted in John Hall, Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography [London: Verso, 2010], 100). This was a jocular play on the fact that Eisenstadt was a notoriously avid attendee of international conferences. As Hall notes, it could very easily have been modified so as to be about Gellner himself, in his 1990s heyday following the publication of his Nations and Nationalism. It could also be about Zygmunt Bauman. His experience in Leeds, particularly through the 1990s and beyond, is similar to that of Agnes Heller. As she writes of her “age of globetrotting” in A Short Biography of My Philosophy (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010), 55–6: “It was from Melbourne that I got the opportunity to fly, in fact, to all parts of the world. I became acquainted with worlds hitherto entirely unknown to me. I, who almost until my fiftieth birthday could hardly leave my tiny country, suddenly came to live as a globetrotter. Vienna was ‘closer’ to Melbourne than to Budapest, for it could be reached in twenty-five hours without waiting for months for an exit-visa.” See LLb, 145.

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GHC, 89. SD, 15–16, my emphasis. Quoted in Stonebridge, Placeless People, 23. This idea developed at a 2003 colloquium in Barcelona, in which Bauman was in dialogue with Giorgio Agamben. The “archipelago” is a metaphor for a global spatial order no longer predicated on nation states and their relations but is instead split into a multiplicity of extraterritorial zones and spaces of exception. “BARCELONA – Archipelago of exception,” JZB, USB 1. 151 Miłosz, The Captive Mind, 29. 152 Czesław Miłosz, “Notes on Exile,” Books Abroad 50, no. 2 (1976): 282–3. 153 Zygmunt Bauman, “Strangers: The Social Construction of Universality and Particularity,” Telos, 78 (1988/9): 26.

147 148 149 150

Chapter Two 1 TnD, 1. 2 Aleksandra Kania, “Living with Zygmunt Bauman, Before and After,” Thesis Eleven 149, no. 1 (2018): 86–90. 3 Zygmunt Bauman to Judith Adler, 7 January 1996, JZB, MS 2067/B/5/6. 4 Zygmunt Bauman to Judith Adler, 24 November 2003, JZB, “Judith Adler – 24 nov,” disk file 139. 5 Peter Beilharz reports that on his annual visits from Australia he would be given the manuscript of Bauman’s latest book and told, “Here it is, my last book.” In part, this reflects a playfulness of character, but also a deeper existential anxiety. In correspondence during 1999, Bauman informed Beilharz that he did not know whether he would be alive long enough to finish Liquid Modernity. Peter Beilharz, Intimacy in Postmodern Times: A Friendship with Zygmunt Bauman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 62. 6 MA, 192. 7 Zygmunt Bauman, Making the Familiar Unfamiliar: Conversations with Peter Haffner (Cambridge: Polity. 2020), 42. 8 Charles Camic, Neil Gross, and Michelle Lamont, eds, Social Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011). 9 Charles Camic, Neil Gross, and Michelle Lamont, eds, “Introduction: The Study of Social Knowledge Making,” in Social Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 7. 10 Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1. 11 Mark Davis, ed., Liquid Sociology: Metaphor in Zygmunt Bauman’s Analysis of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2013).

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Notes to pages 61–3

12 Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Grove Press, 1988), 12–13. See Bauman on Milan Kundera in (with Riccardo Mazzeo) In Praise of Literature (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 9; and Zygmunt Bauman, What Use is Sociology? Conversations with Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Keith Tester (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 16–18. 13 I adapt this term from Randall Collins’s description of the French existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus as “literaryphilosophical hybrids,” Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 764–82. On Bauman’s propaganda fiction, see Izabela Wagner, Bauman: A Biography (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 99. 14 Bauman was, for about a decade, a serious and dedicated amateur photographer, capturing urban scenes, landscapes, portraits, and nudes. He belonged to Leeds Camera Club, won several prizes and certificates of merit, and had solo exhibitions in different venues in Leeds as well as in Warsaw and Poznań. A selection of his photographs and related materials are contained in the Papers of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman, University of Leeds. For a rare reflection on photography, see the posthumously published “Thinking Photographically,” CA, ch. 6. For commentary, including my own reflections, see Peter Beilharz and Janet Wolff, eds, The Photographs of Zygmunt Bauman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming). 15 C.W. Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 218. 16 T.W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” New German Critique, 32 (1958; repr., 1984): 151. 17 Zygmunt Bauman, Making the Familiar Unfamiliar: Conversations with Peter Haffner (Cambridge: Polity, 2020), 44. 18 Zygmunt Bauman, “Some Thoughts on Exile and Thinking in Exile,” Acta Sueco-Polonica, 6 (1997): 158, 160. As he puts it elsewhere, “in exile, uncertainty meets freedom. Creation is the issue of that wedlock.” Zygmunt Bauman, “Assimilation into Exile: The Jew as a Polish Writer,” Poetics Today 17, no. 4 (1996): 569 (republished in CA, 119–48). 19 Griselda Pollock, “Thinking Sociologically, Thinking Aesthetically: Between Convergence and Difference with some Historical Reflections on Sociology and Art History,” History of the Human Sciences 20, no. 2 (2007): 161, my emphasis. 20 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (1979; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 255–76. 21 Reinhart Koselleck, “Sluices of Memory and Sediments of Experience: The Influence of the Two World Wars on Social Consciousness,” in Sediments

Notes to pages 63–5

22 23

24 25

26

27 28

29

30 31

32

33 34

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of Time: On Possible Histories, ed. and trans. S. Franzel and S.L. Hoffmann (1984; repr., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 207. See Peter Wagner, Modernity as Experience and Interpretation: A New Sociology of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2008). Reinhart Koselleck, “Fiction and Historical Reality,” Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, ed. and trans. S. Franzel and S.L. Hoffmann (1976; repr., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 14. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1850 (New York: Anchor, 1960), 35. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983); Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.B. DeBevoise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 35. Ulrich Raulff, “Grand Hotel Abyss: Towards a Theory of the Modern Literary Archive,” Comparative Critical Studies 8, no. 2–3 (2011): 158; Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall ([1975; repr., New York: Continuum, 1999), 275. Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 779–80. Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, 652; see also Anson Rabinbach, chapter 2, “Social Energeticism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe,” in The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 28–52. Lepenies, Between Literature and Science, 1. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), 269; Reinhart Koselleck, “Sediments of Time,” Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, ed. and trans. S. Franzel and S.L. Hoffmann (1995; repr., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 3–9. The critique of this form of social science is a long-standing feature of Bauman’s sociological writing: “managerial thinking,” the “Durksonion consensus,” and “legislative reason” are some of the names that Bauman gives to it. See “Modern Times, Modern Marxism,” Social Research 34, no. 3 (1967): 402; TCS; LI. Enzo Traverso, Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914–1945 (London: Verso, 2015). Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt ([1955; repr., New York: Schocken, 2007), 84.

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35 Hans Joas, “The Classics of Sociology and the First World War,” Thesis Eleven 27, no. 1 (1990): 103. 36 Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knöbl, War in Social Thought: Hobbes to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 37 See for example Donald Levine, Visions of the Sociological Tradition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995). 38 Jean-Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America (1987; repr., London: Verso, 2006), 227–8. 39 Dubravka Ugrešić, Thank You for Not Reading: Essays in Literary Trivia, trans. C. Hawkesworth (Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press, 2001), 127–8. 40 Seyla Benhabib, Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 36. See also Lyndsey Stonebridge, Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 20. 41 Stewart Martin, “Adorno’s Conception of the Form of Philosophy,” Diacritics 36, no. 1 (2006): 57–9. 42 These were published in the New Left Review in 1993. 43 James Hellings, “Messages in a Bottle and Other Things Lost to Sea: The Other Side of Critical Theory or a Re-evaluation of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory,” Telos, 160 (2012): 78. 44 Max Horkheimer quoted in Hellings, “Messages in a Bottle,” 79–80. 45 Walter Benjamin quoted in Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 263; Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence (1979; repr., Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997). 46 Peter Wagner, Modernity as Experience and Interpretation: A New Sociology of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 8. 47 For a longer form treatment of this idea, see chapter 2, “Theorising the Multiplicity of Modernity” in my Entanglements of Modernity, Colonialism and Genocide: Burundi and Rwanda in Historical-Sociological Perspective (London: Routledge, 2016), 42–64. This position is substantially informed by a range of historical-sociological attempts to theorize modernity in the plural including, inter alia: J.P. Arnason, “Modernity as Project and as Field of Tensions,” in Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s ‘The Theory of Communicative Action,’ ed. Axel Honneth and Hans Joas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 181–213; Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (1975; repr., Cambridge: Polity, 1997); S.N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129, no. 1 (2000): 1–29; Shalini Randeria, “Entangled Histories of Uneven Modernities: Civil Society, Caste Solidarities and Legal Pluralism in Post-colonial India,” in Unravelling Ties: From Social Cohesion to New Practices of Connectedness, ed. Yedhuda Elkana, Ivan Krastev, Elisio Macamo, and Shalini Randeria (Frankfurt au Main:

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Campus Verlag, 2002), 284–311; Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Göran Therborn, “Entangled Modernities,” European Journal of Social Theory 6, no. 1 (2003): 293–305; and Peter Wagner, “Multiple Trajectories of Modernity: Why Social Theory Needs Historical Sociology,” Thesis Eleven 100, no. 1 (2010): 53–60. Achille Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization (2010; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 77, 80. Claire de Obaldia, The Essayistic Spirit: Literature, Modern Criticism, and the Essay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 5. De Obaldia, The Essayistic Spirit, 4. On Bauman as “storyteller,” see discussion in Dennis Smith, Zygmunt Bauman: Prophet of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 5–6. Cynthia Ozick, “She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body,” Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, ed. Carl H. Claus and Ned Stuckey-French (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 150. Michel de Montaigne, “On Democritus and Heraclitus,” Essays, trans. J.M. Cohen (1580; repr., London: Penguin Books, 1993), 130. David Hume, “Of Essay-Writing,” in David Hume: Essays – Moral, Political and Literary, ed. E.F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), 535. Krista Brune, “The Essayistic Touch: Saramago’s Version of Blindness and Lucidity,” Mester 39, no. 1 (2010): 90. Georg Simmel, “On the Essence of Culture,” in Simmel on Culture, ed. D. Frisby and M. Featherstone (London: SAGE, 1997), 44. Austin Harrington, “Introduction,” Georg Simmel: Essays on Art and Aesthetics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2020), 18–19. See further discussion in chapter 4 of this book. Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 240. György Lukács, Soul and Form, trans. A. Bostock (1910; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974), 1–2, 18. Stefano Ercolino, The Novel-Essay, 1884–1947 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), xv, xvii. For a reflection of Bauman on Musil, see foreword to LLa, vii–xiii. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, trans. S. Wilkins (New York: Picador, 1997), 11–12. Musil, The Man without Qualities, 270–1. See discussion in Charles Turner, Investigating Sociological Theory (London: SAGE, 2010), 184–7. Olga Tokarczuk, “The Tender Narrator,” Nobel Lecture (Svenska Akademien, 2018), 22. Olga Tokarczuk, Flights, trans. Jennifer Croft (2007; repr., London: Fitzcarraldo, 2017).

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66 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Harcourt Brace 1936), 47. 67 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 137. 68 T.W. Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” Telos, 31 (1931; repr., 1977): 120–33. 69 Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science (1978; repr., London: Verso, 2014), 19. 70 Quoted in Rose, Melancholy Science, 20. 71 Adorno, “Actuality of Philosophy,” 120. 72 Adorno, “Essay as Form,” 151. 73 Ibid., 159–60. See also Benhabib, Exile, Statelessness, and Migration, 189. 74 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 1:139. 75 Hannah Arendt, “Totalitarianism,” in Thinking Without Bannisters: Essays in understanding, 1953–1975, ed. Jerome Kohn (1958; repr., New York: Schocken Books, 2018), 157–8. See also Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 64. 76 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1961), 14–15. 77 On Arendt’s essayism, see Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen, “Tentative Lessons of Experience: Arendt, Essayism and ‘The Social’ Reconsidered,” Political Theory 42, no. 5 (2014): 569–89. 78 Harald Welzer, “The Rationality of Evil: An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman,” Thesis Eleven 70, no. 1 (2002): 108–9, emphasis added. 79 On the notion of “paths” in Bauman’s sociology, see Tom Campbell, Mark Davis, and Jack Palmer, “Hidden Paths in Zygmunt Bauman’s Sociology,” Theory, Culture & Society 35, no. 7–8 (2018): 351–74; Keith Tester, “Paths in Zygmunt Bauman’s Social Thought,” Thesis Eleven 70, no. 1 (2002): 55–71; and Keith Tester, “Reflections on Reading Bauman,” Cultural Politics 13, no. 3 (2017), 307. 80 Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author,” Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana, 1977), 147. 81 Rose, Melancholy Science, 16. 82 Bauman renders this influence especially clear in his essay “Thinking in Dark Times (Arendt and Adorno Revisited),” LLb, 129–53. 83 I do not want to suggest that this lineage is the only available resource of essayistic thinking. As essayism pertains to the multiplicity of modernity, it follows that there are multiple essayisms. We might consider a figure like Édouard Glissant who, as Bauman did for the Jewish experience, framed Caribbean experience as a privileged anticipatory condition. Here, as in Jewish Europe, experimentation derives from the social position of the first, the often destructive experience of imposed strangerhood, disorderliness

Notes to pages 74–6

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which carries within it a potential for significant creativity. Christy Wampole argues that essayism extends through the writers of négritude and, later, into the writing of Deleuze and Guattari, from where it enters the writings of Glissant: “Glissant, who was instrumental in the conceptualization of new aesthetic theories about Caribbean writing, used the figure of the rhizome to illustrate a knowledge structure that could accommodate the confluence of cultural influences present in the archipelago. He also developed a theory about essayistic thought, which he calls la pensée archipélique in his Philosophie de la Relation.” There is, we might say, a Francophone/ Black Atlantic tradition of essayism which runs counter to the central European one. Achille Mbembe, drawn on in this chapter, is perhaps the most significant contemporary figure in this parallel essayism. See Christy Wampole, “Essayism and the Multiplication of Possibility in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Biblique des derniers gestes,” Small Axe, 42 (2013): 37. LM, 215. Ibid., 210. T.W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (1951; repr., London: Verso, 2005), 26. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 217. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 625–6. Hyvönen, “Tentative Lessons of Experience,” 573. LM, 214–15. T.W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia Press, 2005), 43. SAU, 9. Zygmunt Bauman, “Is the Science of the Possible Possible?,” 5. Unpublished typescript in JZB, MS 2067/B/1/1. It is not clear where or when Bauman delivered this lecture. However, given that its themes evoke SAU and TCS, and that it appears in the archive alongside other manuscripts written and/or published in the 1970s, I am confident that it was published c. 1976. SAU, 33. See Zygmunt Bauman, “Image of Man in the Modern Sociology (Some Methodological Remarks),” The Polish Sociological Bulletin, 14 (1967): 12–21. Bauman, “Is the Science of the Possible Possible?,” 14–15. Ibid., 15–16. At this point, it is worth signalling the fundamental importance of Ernst Bloch in Bauman’s sociology of possibility, apparent in SAU and TCS. Bloch similarly defined art as “a laboratory and also a feast of implemented possibilities,” in The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (1938–47; repr., Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 216. As he writes of writing letters: “Surprises and challenges are scattered all over the spectrum of human experience – and so every stopping point for

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reporting them in letters, and by the same token limiting their range, must inevitably be arbitrarily chosen,” 44L, 4–5. TCS, 109. Zygmunt Bauman and Riccardo Mazzeo, In Praise of Literature (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), x. As Bauman writes elsewhere, “I came to believe that the stories sociologists tell, those secondary, derivative interpretations of the experience of life-in-common which the sociologists share with the ‘lay,’ ‘non-professional’ story tellers, are bound to be and to forever remain stages of the on-going communication unlikely ever to grind to a halt; successive links in an unfinished and unfinishable string of exchanges.” Zygmunt Bauman, “Bauman on Bauman – Pro Domo Sua,” in The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman: Challenges and Critiques, ed. Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Poul Poder (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 236. “Beyond the Limits of Interpretive Anarchy” (1997), in CA, 156. Bauman, “Some Thoughts on Exile and Thinking in Exile,” 158–9, my emphasis. See also Benhabib, Exile, Statelessness, and Migration, 56. Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 100–10. This elasticity of concepts is a component of what Peter Nijhoff termed Bauman’s “right to inconsistency.” The composition of Bauman’s writing, Nijhoff argues, demonstrates in a stylistic way that our reality is multiplicitous. This chapter builds on many of Nijhoff ’s arguments, albeit linking them with the tradition of essayism. Peter Nijhoff, “The Right to Inconsistency,” Theory, Culture & Society 15, no. 1 (1998): 87–112. Bauman, What Use Is Sociology?, 89. For selected commentary see Mark Davis, ed., Liquid Sociology: Metaphor in Zygmunt Bauman’s Analysis of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2013); and Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Sophia Marshman, “Bauman’s Metaphors: The Poetic Imagination in Sociology,” Current Sociology 56, no. 5 (2008): 798–818. Zygmunt Bauman to Chris Mathieu, 16 April 1995, JZB, MS2067/B/5/5. Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 81. This is how he characterized his vision of the sociological imagination in Thinking Sociologically: “This book has been written with one aim in mind: to help an ordinary person like you and me to see through our experience, and to show how the apparently familiar aspects of life can be interpreted in a novel way and seen in a different light,” TS, 18. Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962). Gadamer, Truth and Method. HSS, 229.

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113 Zygmunt Bauman, “Hermeneutics and Modern Social Theory,” in Social Theory of Modern Societies: Giddens and his Critics, ed. David Held and John Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 53. 114 Zygmunt Bauman, “Letter to Posterity,”’ June, 2005, 1, 11, unpublished typescript, JZB, disc. 80. 115 Bauman’s ethics of distance is articulated in the Amalfi Prize Lecture following the award in 1991. Concerned with how human rational-mastery has increased to such an extent that it runs the risk of transcending “nature’s self-healing capacity,” Bauman proposed an “ethics of distance and distant consequences, an ethics commensurable with the uncannily extended spatial and temporal range of the effects of technological action,” MH, 217, 220. 116 Bauman, “Letter to Posterity,” 12. 117 LLb, 142–3. See also Zygmunt Bauman, “Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno – An Intellectual in Dark Times,” in Theodor W. Adorno: Philosoph des beschädigten Lebens, ed. Moshe Zuckermann (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2004): 25–45. For Bauman on the “message in a bottle,” see What Use Is Sociology?47–8; LF, 172–3, 176. 118 HSS, 217. 119 Fr, 89. 120 HSS, 231. 121 Fr, 92. 122 HSS, 238. See Mark Davis, “Hermeneutics contra Fundamentalism: Zygmunt Bauman’s Method for Thinking in Dark Times,” Thesis Eleven 156, no. 1 (2020): 27–44. 123 Leszek Kołakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial, trans. Stefan Czerniawski, Wolfgang Freis, and Agnieszka Kołakowska (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990). 124 WL, 1. 125 Tony Blackshaw refers to this effect of Bauman’s sociology of modernity as having “the effect of a parallax,” a term for the displacement of an object depending on the angle from which it is viewed. Tony Blackshaw, Zygmunt Bauman (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 26.

Chapter Three 1 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (1961; repr., New York: The Grove Press, 1963), 102. 2 Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (1998; repr., Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). 3 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 176–80.

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4 Fanon, Wretched, 101. 5 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (1955; repr., New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 37. 6 W.E.B. Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History (1947; repr., New York: International Publishers, 1965), 23. See also W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto,” Raisons Politiques 21, no. 1 (1949; repr., 2006): 131–5. 7 Eugene Erdely, Germany’s First European Protectorate: The Fate of the Czechs and the Slovaks (London: Robert Hale, 1942); Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944 (1944; repr., Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009), 193; Gerhard Jacoby, Racial State: The German Nationalities Policy in the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia (New York: Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1944). For discussion, see A. Dirk Moses, Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 189–99. See also Mark Mazower, “An International Civilization? Empire, Internationalism and the Crisis of the Mid-Twentieth Century,” International Affairs 82, no. 3 (2006): 562–3. 8 Raphaël Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress, 2nd ed. (1944; repr., Clark, NJ: The Lawbook Exchange, 2014), 79–81. 9 Andrew Fitzmaurice, “Anticolonialism in Western Political Thought: The Colonial Origins of the Concept of Genocide,” in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 55–80; Michael A. McDonnell and A. Dirk Moses, “Raphael Lemkin as Historian of Genocide in the Americas,” Journal of Genocide Research 7, no. 4 (2005): 501–29; and Jack Palmer, “Genocide, Extinction, Occupation: A Conceptual Constellation in Raphael Lemkin’s Thought,” in European Holocaust Studies Yearbook 4: Colonial Paradigms of Violence, ed. Michelle Gordon and Rachel O’Sullivan (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2022): 61–81. 10 Douglas Irvin-Eriksen, “Genocide, the ‘Family of Mind’ and the Romantic Signature of Raphael Lemkin,” Journal of Genocide Research 15, no. 3 (2013): 273–96. 11 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; repr., London: Penguin, 2017), 159. This suggestion of Arendt’s is curiously phrased. It implies that colonial-imperialism was a precedent from which totalitarianism could be deduced, and thus commits precisely the kind of sin for which she excoriated social scientists – the assimilation of the unprecedented event to interpretive categories developed with reference to past events. The Origins of Totalitarianism (a title which Arendt did not

Notes to pages 83–5

12 13

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16 17

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herself choose and which she thought unfortunate and misleading, with its connotation of cause and effect) contains the contrary argument that the event of totalitarianism was unprecedented. On the unfortunate title of Origins of Totalitarianism, see Hannah Arendt, “Totalitarianism,” in Thinking without a Bannister: Essays in Understanding, 1953–1975, ed. Jerome Kohn (1958; repr., New York: Schocken, 2015), 157–9. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 241. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 251; Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” in Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Background and Sources, Criticism, ed. Robert Kimbrough (London: W.W. Norton, 1988), 256. Rosa Luxemburg, “Peace Utopias,” in Discovering Imperialism: Social Democracy to World War 1, ed. Richard Day and Daniel Gaido (1911; repr., Leiden: Brill, 2012), 454–5. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzschild (1913; repr., London: Routledge, 2003), 327, 376. See also Roberto Veneziani, “Global Capitalism and Imperialism Theory: Methodological and Substantive Insights from Rosa Luxemburg,” Review of Political Economy 21, no. 2 (2009): 195–211. Elżbieta Ettinger, Rosa Luxemburg: A Life (London: Harrap, 1987), 14–15. Rosa Luxemburg to Mathilde Wurm, 16 February 1917, in The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Georg Adler, Peter Hudis, and Annalies Laschitza, trans. George Shriver (London: Verso, 2011), 375–6. Israel Charny, W.S. Parsons, and Sam Totten, eds, Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views (New York: Garland, 1997); Mark Levene, “Why Is the Twentieth Century the Century of Genocide?,” Journal of World History 11, no. 2 (2000): 305–36; Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Matthew Fitzpatrick, “The Pre-history of the Holocaust? The Sonderweg and Historikerstreit Debates and the Abject Colonial Past,” Central European History, 41 (2008): 477–503; Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski, “Hannah Arendt’s Ghosts: Reflections on the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz,” Central European History, 42 (2009): 279–300; and Jürgen Zimmerer, “The Birth of the Ostland Out of the Spirit of Colonialism: a Postcolonial Perspective on the Nazi Policy of Conquest and Extermination,” Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 2 (2005): 197–219. I borrow the term racial century from A. Dirk Moses and it denotes the period 1850–1950, when European racial systems of classification and normalization were significantly advanced and influential both inside and outside of the continent, “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas

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in the ‘Racial Century’: Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust,” Patterns of Prejudice 36, no. 4 (2002): 7–36. See for example Julian Go, Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 147–8. Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 379; Nathaniel Deutsch, The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 7–8. Omar Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, eds, Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013). Laura Doyle, Inter-Imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labour and the Literary Arts of Alliance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020). Zygmunt Bauman, “The Poles, the Jews and I,” typescript 1987, 3, JZB, MS 2067/B/1/4. Milan Kundera, “A Kidnapped West, or Culture Bows Out,” trans. Edmund White, Granta, 1 March 1984, https://granta.com/a-kidnapped-west-orculture-bows-out/. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Vintage, 2010). Keith Tester, “On Repetition in the Work of Zygmunt Bauman,” Thesis Eleven 149, no. 1 (2018): 114–15. For an elaboration of this argument see my “Leapfrogging Legacies and the British Sociologies of Decolonisation, 1945–75: The Case of Leeds,” in Rethinking British Sociology: Postcolonial and Decolonial Transformations, ed. Ali Meghji, Saskia Papadakis, and Meghan Tinsley (London: Routledge, forthcoming). Frederick Cooper, “Decolonizing Situations: The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Colonial Studies, 1951–2001,” French Politics, Culture & Society 20, no. 2 (2002): 47–76. Georges Balandier, The Sociology of Black Africa: Social Dynamics in Central Africa (London: Andre Deutsch, 1970); Pierre Bourdieu, Algerian Sketches, ed. Tassadit Yacine, trans. David Fernbach (Cambridge: Polity, 2013). Alan Dawes to Zygmunt Bauman, 7 January 1971, MS2067/3/1. Dawes writes: “There are a number of us who are conscious of the tradition and who have done what we can to keep it alive. I think it really originated in the work and teaching of John Rex. Two of us – Bob Towler and myself – were taught by him and, although we have diverged from his own views in different ways, we share his basic perspective and regard it as intrinsic to this department.”

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34 John Rex, Sociology and the Demystification of the Modern World (London: Routledge, 1974). 35 Fernando Henriquez, Family and Colour in Jamaica (London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1953). 36 J.P. Nettl and Roland Robertson, International Systems and the Modernization of Societies: The Formation of National Goals and Attitudes (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 42–3; and J.P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg: The Biography (London: Verso, 1966). 37 John E. Goldthorpe to Zygmunt Bauman, 11 June 1971, MS2067/3/1. 38 John E. Goldthorpe, Sociology of the Third World: Disparity and Involvement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 39 Richard Hoggart, An Idea and its Servants: UNESCO from Within (London: Chatto and Windus, 1978), 31. 40 Jennifer Platt, A Brief History of the ISA: 1948–1997 (Amsterdam: International Sociological Association, 1998), 15–16. 41 Transactions of the 6th World Congress of Sociology, Evian 1966, vol. 3. International Sociological Association, https://www.isa-sociology.org/ frontend/web/uploads/files/Transactions%20of%20the%20Sixth%20 World%20Congress%20of%20Sociology.%20Evian_1966.%20Vol.%20I.pdf. 42 See Reiland Rabaka, Africana Critical Theory: Reconstructing the Black Radical Tradition, from W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James to Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010). 43 James Satterwhite, Varieties of Marxist-Humanism: Philosophical Revision in Postwar Eastern Europe (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 3. 44 Zygmunt Bauman, “East Europe and Soviet Social Science: A Case Study in Stimulus Diffusion,” in The Influence of East European and the Soviet West on the USSR, ed. Roman Szporluk (New York: Praeger, 1976), 93. 45 Zygmunt Bauman quoted in interview in Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Keith Tester, Bauman Before Postmodernity: Invitation, Conversations and Annotated Bibliography, 1953–1989 (Aalborg: Aalborg University Press, 2005), 147. See also “The Journey Never Ends: Zygmunt Bauman talks with Peter Beilharz,” in The Bauman Reader, ed. Peter Beilharz (London: Sage, 2001), 334–5. 46 Zygmunt Bauman, “Image of Man in the Modern Sociology (Some Methodological Remarks),” The Polish Sociological Bulletin, 14 (1967): 13. 47 CP, 115; and Bauman, “Image of Man,” 14. 48 Bauman, “Image of Man,” 15. 49 See for example Fr, 90; TS, 50; and Zygmunt Bauman, What Use Is Sociology? Conversations with Michael-Hviid Jacobsen and Keith Tester (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 80. 50 See for example Gurminder Bhambra, “Sociology and Postcolonialism: Another ‘Missing’ Revolution?,” Sociology 41, no. 5 (2007): 875; and Sujata

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Patel, “Are the Theories of Multiple Modernities Eurocentric? The Problem of Colonialism and Its Knowledge(s),” in Worlds of Difference, ed. Saïd Amir Arjomand and Elisa Reis (London: SAGE, 2013), 47. For a discussion of Bauman and anthropology, see Peter Beilharz, “Another Bauman: The Anthropological Imagination,” in Bauman’s Challenge: Sociological Issues for the 21st Century, ed. Mark Davis and Keith Tester (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 62–9. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Talal Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (Ithaca: Ithaca Press, 1973). Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Russell (1955; repr., New York: Criterion, 1961), 160. Zygmunt Bauman, “The Structuralist Promise,” The British Journal of Sociology 24, no. 1 (1973): 67; chapter 1, “The Origins of the Semiotic Theory of Culture, or the Crisis of Cultural Anthropology,” in STC, 20–1. CP, xxvii; and Zygmunt Bauman, “Semiotics and the Function of Culture,” Social Science Information 7, no. 5 (1968): 71. See also chapter 2, “Toward a Semiotic Theory of Culture,” in STC, 57–8. Zygmunt Bauman and Keith Tester, Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 35–6. See Grahame Philip Foreman, “Horizons of Modernity: British Anthropology and the End of Empire” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2013). Robert Gordon, The Enigma of Max Gluckman: The Ethnographic Life of a ‘Luckyman’ in Africa (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 374; and Richard Werbner, Anthropology After Gluckman: The Manchester School, Colonial and Postcolonial Transformations (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2020). Peter Worsley to Zygmunt Bauman, 8 November 1960, JZB, MS 2067/B/5/1. Peter Worsley, The Third World (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1964). International Council for Philosophical and Humanistic Studies, Marx and Contemporary Scientific Thought (Paris: UNESCO, 1969). Bauman, “Semiotics and the Function of Culture,” 71; and Bauman, “The Structuralist Promise,” 68–9. Bauman, “Semiotics and the Function of Culture,” 73. Zygmunt Bauman, “Marx and the Contemporary Theory of Culture,” Social Science Information 7, no. 3 (1968): 29. CP, 116; and Zygmunt Bauman, “Praxis: The Controversial Culture-Society Paradigm,” in Rules of the Game: Cross-Disciplinary Essays in Scholarly Thought, ed. Teodor Shanin (London: Tavistock, 1972), 303–21.

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66 CP, 39–41. See also Bauman, “The Structuralist Promise,” 67. 67 CP, 139. 68 Bauman, “Marx and the Contemporary Theory of Culture,” 19–20; and chapter 1, “The Origins of a Semiotic Theory of Culture, or the Crisis of Cultural Anthropology,” STC, 9. 69 Bauman, “Marx and the Contemporary Theory of Culture,” 22. 70 Zygmunt Bauman, chapter 13, “The Spectre of Barbarism,” in CA, 187. 71 Bauman, “Marx and the Contemporary Theory of Culture,” 22, my emphasis. 72 Zygmunt Bauman, “Two Notes on Mass Culture,” The Polish Sociological Bulletin, 14 (1966): 67. 73 Bauman, “Marx and the Contemporary Theory of Culture,” 24–5; “The Origins of a Semiotic Theory of Culture,” 9; and HSS, 201. 74 Frederick Lugard, The Dual Mandate in Tropical Africa (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1922); and Pierre Ryckmans, Dominer pour servir (Paris: Universelle, 1948). Lugard was governor of Hong Kong (1907–1912), the Southern and Northern Nigeria Protectorates (1912–1914), and the first governor general of Nigeria (1914–1919). Ryckmans was governor general of the Belgian Congo (1934–1946). 75 Bauman, “Marx and the Contemporary Theory of Culture,” 22. See Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 2. 76 Peter Beilharz, “The Worlds We Create,” Polskie Towarzystwo Socjologiczne 255, no. 3 (2006): 325–36. 77 “The Origins of the Semiotic Theory of Culture,” STC, 15–16. See Maurice Godelier, Claude Lévi-Strauss: A Critical Study of His Thought, trans. Nora Scott (2013; repr., London: Verso, 2018), xiv. 78 Simon Tabet, “Interview with Zygmunt Bauman: From the Modern Project to the Liquid World,” Theory, Culture & Society 34, no. 7–8 (2017): 132. 79 Janet Wolff, Hermeneutic Philosophy and the Sociology of Art: an Approach to some of the Epistemological Problems of the Sociology of Knowledge and the Sociology of Art and Literature (London: Routledge, 1975); and Josef Bleicher, Contemporary Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics as Method, Philosophy and Critique (London: Routledge, 1980). 80 CSS, 84, quoted in Dariusz Brzeziński, Zygmunt Bauman and the Theory of Culture (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022), author’s pre-proof copy, 38. 81 HSS, 199. 82 Ibid., 202–3. 83 Ibid., 217–18. See also TS, 228–9. 84 S.N. Eisenstadt to Zygmunt Bauman, 11 January 1989, JZB, MS 2067/B/5/2; and S.N. Eisenstadt, “Globalization, Civilizational Traditions and Multiple

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86 87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94 95 96

97

98

99 100 101 102

Notes to pages 96–9

Modernities,” in Regime Transformations and Global Realignments: IndoEuropean Dialogues on the Post-Cold War World, ed., K. Ahuja, H. Coppens, and H. van der Wusten (London: SAGE, 1993), 401–10. On the correspondence between Eisenstadt and Bauman, specifically concerning discussions of the Holocaust as exemplary of the dark side of modernity, see my “Genocide and the Multiplicity of Modernity,” in Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust: Heritage, Dilemmas, Extension, ed. Jack Palmer and Dariusz Brzeziński (London: Routledge, 2022), 125–41. Zygmunt Bauman quoted in Ulrich Bielefeld, “Conversation with Janina Bauman and Zygmunt Bauman,” Thesis Eleven 70, no. 1 (2002): 116. Keith Tester, The Social Thought of Zygmunt Bauman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 101. Zygmunt Bauman to S.N. Eisenstadt, 25 January 1989, JZB, Amstrad files – “eisenjan.” MoC, 172, my emphasis. Zygmunt Bauman, “The Philosopher in the Age of Noise: A Reading of Richard Bernstein’s Philosophical Profiles,” Theory, Culture & Society 4, no. 1 (1986): 159–62. Bauman, “The Philosopher in the Age of Noise,” 165. Richard Rorty to Zygmunt Bauman, 30 September 1986, JZB, MS2067/3/4. LI, 6. LI, 3–4; and MA, 24; and MIOLS, 99, 117. LI, 143–4. See also Simon Susen, The Postmodern Turn in the Social Sciences (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), 169–70. Zygmunt Bauman, “Modernity and Clarity: The Story of a Failed Romance,” in Ambivalenz: Studien zum kulturtheoretischen und empirischen Gehalt einer Kategorie der Erschließung des Unbestimmten, ed. Heinz Otto Luthe and Rainer Wiedenmann (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1997), 115. Zygmunt Bauman, “Modernity and Ambivalence,” in Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, ed. Mark Featherstone (London: SAGE, 1990), 163; and IP, 10. Bauman takes this expression from Ernest Gellner, who distinguishes between “wild” and “garden” cultures in Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 50. It is elaborated in Bauman’s work for the first time in Legislators and Interpreters (1987), before being taken up again in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) and Modernity and Ambivalence (1991). MA, 20. Ibid., 20. TS, 61; and MA, 24–6. Zygmunt Bauman, “Europe sans frontiers” (nd), 1, JZB, Amstrad files – “europe,” my emphasis.

Notes to pages 99–103

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103 Zygmunt Bauman, “Modernity,” in The Bauman Reader, ed. Peter Beilharz (1993; repr., Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 165. 104 Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 85–92. 105 Nancy Rose Hunt, A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 106 For a specific argument concerning its translatability to colonial Indonesia, see Tilman Schiel, “Modernity, Ambivalence and the Gardening State,” Thesis Eleven 83, no. 1. (2005): 78–89. 107 Valentin Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (London: James Curry, 1988), 1. 108 Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, 2. 109 MoC, 40–2. 110 Ibid., 49. See also MIOLS, 101. 111 LI, 44–5; and TS, 61. 112 MoC, 53. 113 Zygmunt Bauman, “The Camps: Eastern, Western, Modern,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Volume XIII: The Fate of the European Jews, 1939–1945: Continuity or Contingency, ed. J. Frankel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 32. See also chapter 7.3, “A Century of Camps,” in LF, 192–206. 114 CP, 100. 115 Aidan Forth, Barbed Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876– 1903 (Oakland: California University Press, 2017), 2. Britain was not the only imperial power to concentrate colonial subjects in camps of course. See, for example, Aidan Forth and Jonas Kreienbaum, “A Shared Malady: Concentration Camps in the British, Spanish, American and German Empires,” Journal of Modern European History 14, no. 2 (2016): 245–67; Jonas Kreienbaum, A Sad Fiasco: Colonial Concentration Camps in Southern Africa, 1900–1908 (New York: Berghahn, 2014); Anne Laura Stoler, “A Deadly Embrace: Colony and Camp,” in Duress: Imperial Durabilities of Our Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 68–121; and Andreas Stucki, “‘Frequent Deaths’: The Colonial Development of Concentration Camps Reconsidered, 1868–1974,” Journal of Genocide Research 20, no. 3 (2018): 305–26. 116 Forth, Barbed Wire Imperialism, 6–7. 117 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966). See especially Bauman, “Praxis,” 312. 118 MA, 14. 119 Examples from Gerwarth and Malinowski, “Hannah Arendt’s Ghost,” 286, 289.

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Notes to pages 103–7

120 Henry Morton Stanley quoted in David Renton, David Seddon, and Leo Zeilig, The Congo: Plunder and Resistance (London: Zed Books, 2007), 20. See Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Basingstoke: Pan Macmillan, 1997). 121 Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). 122 MIOLS, 119. 123 Chapter 2, “Modernity, Racism and Extermination I,” and chapter, 3 “Modernity, Racism and Extermination II,” both in MH, 31–82. 124 MA, 28. 125 Ibid., 29, my emphasis. 126 MH, 69. 127 CP, 100. 128 Ibid., 99. 129 Ibid., 103. 130 Ibid., 104. 131 Ibid., 108. 132 Ibid. 133 Ibid., my emphasis. 134 Chapter 4, “The Problem of Universals and the Semiotic Theory of Culture,” in STC, 110. 135 “Outlands” – unpublished lecture delivered in Kontanz by Zygmunt Bauman, 15 April 2004, JZB, disc 76, “Konstanz.” 136 WL, 30. 137 LM, 114–16; Zygmunt Bauman, “Wars of the Globalization Era,” European Journal of Social Theory 4, no. 1 (2001): 12; and Zygmunt Bauman, “The Fate of Humanity in the Post-Trinitarian World,” Journal of Human Rights 1, no. 3 (2003): 289. On Bauman and “surplus population,” via Marx, see Peter Beilharz, Circling Marx: Essays 1980–2020 (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 327–9. 138 Pankaj Mishra, “How Colonial Violence Came Home: The Ugly Truth of the First World War,” Guardian, 10 November 2017, https://www.theguardian. com/news/2017/nov/10/how-colonial-violence-came-home-the-ugly-truthof-the-first-world-war. 139 Forth, Barbed Wire Imperialism, 31. 140 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 195. 141 WL, 38. 142 GHC, 59. 143 LM, 13. 144 Ibid., 5. 145 WL, 6–7.

Notes to pages 107–10

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146 Zygmunt Bauman, “In the Lowly Nowherevilles of Liquid Modernity: Comments on and around Agier,” Ethnography 3, no. 3 (2002): 344. 147 Zygmunt Bauman, “Archipelago of Exceptions,” lecture delivered in Barcelona on 10 November 2005, 24. Transcript in JZB, USB 1, “BARCELONA – archipelago of exceptions.” 148 Chapter 2, “Humanity on the Move,” in LT, 27–8. See also WL, 59; and Zygmunt Bauman, “The Crisis of the Human Waste Disposal Industry,” in The Globalization of Racism, ed. Donaldo Macedo and Panayota Gounari (London: Routledge, 2006), 42–6. 149 WL, 59; and Ali Rattansi, Bauman and Contemporary Sociology: A Critical Analysis (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2017). 150 Vic Muniz, Waste Land [documentary film] (São Paulo: O2 Filmes, 2011), 99 min. 151 “About Garbage Dump Communities,” International Samaritan, https:// www.intsam.org/about-garbage-dump-communities/. 152 As Hans Joas writes in his study of war and social thought, “The notion that previously existing ideas of thought have rightly fallen into oblivion is itself the product of the myth of progress.” See War and Modernity: Studies the History of Violence in the 20th Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 2. 153 William Sewell Jr, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005); and Peter Wagner, Modernity as Experience and Interpretation: A New Sociology of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2008). 154 Rattansi, Bauman and Contemporary Sociology; Lucy Mayblin, “Soil, Blood and Identity,” The Sociological Review Blog, 13 March 2017, https:// thesociologicalreview.org/collections/zygmunt-bauman/soil-blood-andidentity/; Ali Rattansi, “A Postcolonial/Decolonising Critique of Zygmunt Bauman: A Response to Dawson,” Thesis Eleven 167, no. 1 (2021): 141–4. More subtly, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), 212–13; and Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (London: Penguin, 2000), 87.

Chapter Four 1 Zygmunt Bauman, “Polský sociolog Zygmunt Bauman: The Haunting Spectre of ‘Westphalian sovereignty,’” Hospodářské noviny, 7 March 2013, https://nazory.hn.cz/c1-57447560-polsky-sociolog-zygmunt-bauman-thehaunting-spectre-of-westphalian-sovereignty. 2 Zygmunt Bauman, “The Haunting Spectre of Westphalian Sovereignty” (2012), 1, JZB, MS 2067/B/2/7/4.

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Notes to pages 110–12

3 Bauman, “The Haunting Spectre of Westphalian Sovereignty,” 2. 4 Ibid.; and chapter 2 “In the Empire’s Shadow,” in Eu, 45–90. 5 Rosa Luxemburg, “Peace Utopias,” in Discovering Imperialism: Social Democracy to World War 1, ed. Richard Day and Daniel Gaido (1911; repr., Leiden: Brill, 2012), 454. 6 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; repr., London: Penguin, 2017), 349–98. 7 Zygmunt Bauman, “In the Lowly Nowherevilles of Liquid Modernity: Comments on and around Agier,” Ethnography 3, no. 3 (2002): 345; and Michel Agiers, Managing the Undesirables: Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Government, trans. David Fernbach (2008; repr., Cambridge: Polity, 2011). On population removal in postwar Europe see Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Vintage, 2005), 13–62; A. Dirk Moses, Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 332–63; and Martin Shaw, Genocide and International Relations: Changing Patterns in the Transitions of the Late Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 78–89. 8 Bauman, “The Haunting Spectre of Westphalian Sovereignty,” 2. 9 See Christian Kreuder-Sonnen and Bernhard Zangl, “Which PostWestphalia? International Organizations between Constitutionalism and Authoritarianism,” European Journal of International Relations 21, no. 3 (2015): 568–94. 10 Zygmunt Bauman, “Murderous State and the Fate of Morality” (June 2001), 1–2, JZB, disc file 66 “MURDEROUS STATE.” 11 Bauman, “The Haunting Spectre of Westphalian Sovereignty,” 1. 12 Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation (New York: Orbis Books, 1985); Arturo Escobar, “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: The Latin American Modernity/Coloniality Research Program,” Cultural studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 179–210; and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). For an example of Bauman’s writings on Lévinas, see “Effacing the Face: On the Social Management of Moral Proximity,” Theory, Culture & Society 7, no. 1 (1990): 5–38. 13 Emmanuel Lévinas, Basic Philosophical Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 11; Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (1961; repr., Boston, MA: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1979), 44. 14 Emmanuel Lévinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 75. 15 Enrique Dussel, “1492: The Discovery of an Invasion,” CrossCurrents 41, no. 4. (1991): 445; and Enrique Dussel, “Eurocentrism and Modernity,” Boundary 20, no. 3 (1993): 65–76.

Notes to pages 113–15

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16 Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020), 10–11. 17 Ella Shohat, “Rethinking Jews and Muslims: Quincentennial Reflections,” Middle East Report, no. 178 (1992): 26 18 Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native, 1–2. 19 Walter Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto,” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1, no. 2 (2011): 44–66. 20 See, for example, Bryan Cheyette, Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History (Newhaven: Yale University Press, 2013); Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (London: Allen Lane, 2000); Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); and Max Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015). 21 Peter Wagner, Modernity as Experience and Interpretation: A New Sociology of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 4. 22 Most prominent among the conservative figures and radical left are, respectively, Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek. Their 2019 debate, “Happiness: Marxism vs Capitalism” can be viewed online: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=lsWndfzuOc4. For a critique, specifically of the implication of the Frankfurt School in the identification of “cultural Marxism,” see Martin Jay, “Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe,” Salmagundi 168/169, no.3 (2010): 30–40. See also Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody (London: Swift Press, 2020). 23 I borrow the use of the temporal marker moment from Patrick Baert’s study of Sartre and existentialism. Where a “postmodern turn,” to use Simon Susen’s phrase, might denote a paradigm shift within academic disciplines, a “moment” suggests a broader resonance with matters of public perception and concern. See Patrick Baert, The Existentialist Moment: The Rise of Sartre as a Public Intellectual (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015); and Simon Susen, The ‘Postmodern Turn’ in the Social Sciences (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 24 Reinhart Koselleck, “Sluices of Memory and Sediments of Experience: The Influence of the Two World Wars on Social Consciousness,” in Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, ed. S. Franzel and S.L. Hoffman (1984; repr., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 207. 25 I thank Anna Sfard for this observation.

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Notes to pages 115–17

26 Zygmunt Bauman to Ralph Miliband, 26 January 1981, Ralph Miliband Papers, Special Collections of the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, MS1712, CO16. 27 Zygmunt Bauman to Juan Corradi, 29 June 1987, JZB, MS 2067/B/5/2. 28 Agnes Heller, A Short History of My Philosophy (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010), 55–6, 109–10. 29 I thank Arne Johan Vetlesen for detailing this to me. 30 The correspondence in the Bauman archive especially emphasizes the importance of invitation (to perform, to publish, to meet, and so on). These invitations are themselves a vector of positioning, à la positioning theory. To take one example, Juan Corradi’s letter of 8 December 1986 (JZB, MS 2067/B/5/2) invited Bauman to take a seminar series at New York University, where prior speakers have included Bourdieu, Castoriadis, Offe, and Touraine. Two things are happening here: first, an invitation to perform, and second, a positioning of Bauman within a particular field of critical intellectuals. 31 See for example “Freedom at a Price: Postmodern and Consumerism,” New Statesman, 25 September 1987, 20–1; “From Here to Modernity – Redefining the Project of the Left,” New Statesman, 23 October 1987, 20–2; “Britain’s Exit from Politics,” New Statesman and Society, 8 (1988): 34–8; “The Haunted House,” New Internationalist, 289 (1997): 24–6; “Totalitarianism as a Historical Phenomenon,” Times Literary Supplement, 4567 (2000): 1095; and “Quality and Inequality,” Guardian, 29 December 2001. 32 Zygmunt Bauman, “Imiona cierpiernia, imiona wstydu,” Tygodnik Powszechny, 38 (2001): 9 (republished in translation as “Names of Suffering, Names of Shame” in HP, 154–62). See discussion in Izabela Wagner, Bauman: A Biography (Cambridge: Polity, 2020), 360. 33 Fax from Goran Rosenberg to Zygmunt Bauman, 27 December 1996, JZB, MS2067/B/5/6. 34 The London-based left-wing publisher Verso also ought to be mentioned as an important forum for the sorts of discussions I am referring to. Bauman never published with Verso but he was approached, early on in his relationship with Polity, to make the switch, which he declined. See letter from Malcom Imrie to Zygmunt Bauman, 16 August c. 1988, JZB, MS 2067/B/5/2. 35 Simon Susen, The Postmodern Turn in the Social Sciences (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 1. 36 Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2001), 179. 37 Reinhart Koselleck, “Linguistic Change and the History of Events,” in Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, ed. S. Franzel and S.L. Hoffman (1988; repr., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 140.

Notes to pages 117–19

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38 Susen, The Postmodern Turn in the Social Sciences. 39 Dariusz Brzeziński, “From Revisionism to Retrotopia: Stability and Variability in Zygmunt Bauman’s Theory of Culture,” European Journal of Social Theory 23, no. 4 (2020): 459–76. 40 Even a commentator as perceptive as Bryan S. Turner narrates Bauman’s intellectual trajectory as a transition “from socialism to hyperpostmodernism”; see “Marxism and Exile: Reflections on Intellectual Migration,” in Engaging Agnes Heller: A Critical Companion, ed. Katie Terezakis (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009), 32. 41 IP, 41. 42 Bauman wrote a series of serious engagements with Baudrillard: “The Second Disenchantment: Review of Jean Baudrillard ‘La gauche divine,’ ‘Les strategies fatales,’ Theory, Culture & Society 4 (1988): 738–43; “‘Disappearing into the Desert’: Review of ‘America,’” Times Literary Supplement, 4472 (1988): 1391; “The Sweet Scent of Decomposition,” in Forget Baudrillard?, ed. Chris Rojek and Bryan Turner (London: Routledge, 1993), 22–46; and “Desert Spectacular,” in The Flâneur, ed. Keith Tester (London: Routledge, 1994), 138–58. 43 Bauman quoted in Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Keith Tester, Bauman Before Postmodernity: Invitation, Conversations and Annotated Bibliography, 1953–1989 (Aalborg: Aalborg University Press, 2005), 150. 44 IP, xi. 45 Ibid., 12. 46 Zygmunt Bauman, “Strangers: The Social Construction of Universality and Particularity,” Telos 78 (1988/89): 7–42; Zygmunt Bauman, “Simmel, ou l’éclosion de l’expérience postmoderne,” Sociétés, 35 (1992): 3–16; Zygmunt Bauman, “Making and Unmaking of Strangers,” Thesis Eleven 43, no. 1 (1995): 1–16; and chapter 5, “The Stranger Revisited – and Revisiting,” in LF, 126–38. For a summary of some deployments of the stranger as a sociological type, including in Bauman, see Shaun Best, The Stranger (London: Routledge, 2019). 47 See introduction and chapters 1–3 in MA, 1–101; and Zygmunt Bauman, “Modernity and Ambivalence,” Theory, Culture & Society 7, no. 2–3 (1990): 143–69. 48 Zygmunt Bauman, “Strangers,” 39. See also Zygmunt Bauman, “Narrating Modernity,” Poznań Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, 37 (1994): 97. 49 IP, 35. 50 Ibid., 190. 51 PE, 120.

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Notes to pages 119–22

52 Ibid., 130. 53 Ibid., 132. For a critical reading of Bauman’s turn to Lévinas, see Benjamin Adam Hirst, “After Lévinas: Assessing Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘Ethical Turn,’” European Journal of Social Theory 17, no. 2 (2014): 184–98. 54 IP, 193. 55 See later development in AL. 56 See chapter 4, “A Catalogue of Modern Fears,” in LF, 105–25. 57 For essayistic developments on the themes of these “threats,” see Com; CL; and Re. 58 IP, 59. 59 Letter from Zygmunt Bauman to S.N. Eisenstadt, 9 November 1987, JZB, MS 2067/B/5/2. 60 CP, 62.Oon methodological nationalism see Ulrich Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Condition: Why Methodological Nationalism Fails,” Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 7–8 (2007): 286–90; and Daniel Chernilo, “The Critique of Methodological Nationalism: Theory and History,” Thesis Eleven 106, no. 1 (2011): 98–117. 61 Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 8. 62 Bryan Cheyette, “Zygmunt Bauman’s Window: From Jews to Strangers and Back Again,” Thesis Eleven 156, no. 1 (2020): 67–85; and Matt Dawson, “The War against Forgetfulness: Sociological Lessons from Bauman’s Writings on European Jewry,” Thesis Eleven 156, no. 1 (2020): 86–101. 63 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Vintage, 2005), 822–3; and Bryan Cheyette, “Off the Scene: An Afterword,” in Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust: Heritage, Dilemmas, Extensions, ed. Jack Palmer and Dariusz Brzeziński (London: Routledge, 2022), 241. 64 I borrow this term from A. Dirk Moses who himself took it from Mircea Eliade. See “Genocide and the Terror of History,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 96–7. 65 Zygmunt Bauman, Identity: Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 11–12. 66 Judt, Postwar, 772; and Simon Parkin, “‘I Remember the Feeling of Insult’: When Britain Imprisoned its Wartime Refugees,” Guardian, 1 February 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/01/when-britainimprisoned-refugees-second-world-war-internment-camps. 67 Judt, Postwar, 808–9. See Henry Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy: De 1944 à nos jours (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987). On complicity, see Donald Bloxham, Genocide, the World Wars and the Great Unweaving of Europe (Portland: Valentine Mitchell, 2008), 14.

Notes to pages 122–8

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68 Levi and Améry quoted in Sophia Marshman, “From the Margins to the Mainstream? Representations of the Holocaust in Popular Culture,” eSharp 6, no. 1. (2005): 3. 69 Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” in The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn (1943; repr., New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 265. 70 Cheyette, “Off the Scene,” 232–3. 71 Zygmunt Bauman, unpublished typescript marked “St Johns, Newfoundland, 1986,” 18, JZB, MS 2067/B/2/4. 72 I thank Bryan Cheyette for this observation. 73 See Hans Joas, “Bauman in Germany: Modern Violence and the Problems of German Self-Understanding,” Theory, Culture & Society 15, no. 1 (1998): 47–55; and Ian Varcoe, “Identity and the Limits of Comparison: Bauman’s Reception in Germany,” Theory, Culture & Society 15, no. 1 (1998): 57–72. 74 Gillian Rose, “Is there a Jewish Philosophy?,” Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (London: Verso, 1993), 11–24. 75 In Gillian Rose Papers, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, MSS 377/47. 76 Gillian Rose to Zygmunt Bauman, 15 March 1989, JZB, MS 2067/B/5/2. 77 Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew: and Other Essays (London: Verso, 2017). 78 Zygmunt Bauman to Gillian Rose, 9 March 1989, JZB, Amstrad file DO101-B_User-00-gillimar. 79 See discussion in chapter 1, n73. 80 Zygmunt Bauman to Irving Louis Horowitz, 21 April 1989, JZB, Amstrad file “horowapr.” 81 MA, 102. See my discussion of the function of metaphor in Bauman’s sociology in chapter 2 of this book. 82 Mark Davis, “Hermeneutics Contra Fundamentalism: Zygmunt Bauman’s Method for Thinking in Dark Times,” Thesis Eleven 156, no. 1 (2020): 27–44. 83 MA, 103. 84 Zygmunt Bauman to Gillian Rose, 25 September 1989, JZB, Amstrad file “gillisep,” my emphasis. 85 MA, 190. See also Susan A. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany: State University of New York, 1982), 42, 49, 147. 86 MA, 173. 87 Ibid., 173–5. 88 Ibid., 181. 89 HSS, 193. 90 MA, 181. 91 Ibid., 185.

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Notes to pages 128–30

92 Ibid., 190. See also Zygmunt Bauman, “Roundtable: At the Crossroads of History – is There a Future for the Jewish People?,” Jewish Quarterly 40, no. 2 (1993): 30. 93 Bauman, MA, 171. See Vince Marotta, “Zygmunt Bauman: Order, Strangerhood and Freedom,” Thesis Eleven 70 (2002): 36–54. 94 And little wonder, given that Bauman wrote glowing reviews of two of her works during this time: “Philosophy for Everyday – Thought not for Everyone: Review of ‘The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society,’” Economy and Society, 1 (1993): 114–22; and “Review of ‘Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays,’” The Sociological Review, 3 (1994): 572–6. 95 Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 10. See also Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). 96 CP, 106. 97 Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle. 98 Zygmunt Bauman, “Repairing the Broken Middle,” unpublished lecture delivered 19 February 2001, 5–6. JZB, MS 2067/B/4/1/160. 99 Zygmunt Bauman, “Athens and Jerusalem: Variations on a Theme” (c. 1993), 9, unpublished typescript, JZB, Amstrad files, “athens.” 100 Rose, “Is there a Jewish Philosophy?,” 20. 101 Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, 10–11. For Rose, there was also a fourth city – the city of Auschwitz, an “emblem of contemporaneous Jewish history and now of modernity as such, [that] has emerged from the ruin of theoretical and practical reason to provide the measure for demonic anti·reason” (Mourning Becomes the Law, 26). 102 “Multicentred cosmopolitans” is an expression written by hand on a printout of Zygmunt Bauman, typescript of “Jews and Other Europeans, Old and New,” (2008), 13, MS 2067/B/2/6/2. See discussion in chapter 1; quotation from Bauman, “Roundtable: At the Crossroads of History…,” 31. 103 Zygmunt Bauman, “Exit Visas and Entry Tickets: Paradoxes of Jewish Assimilation,” Telos 77 (1988): 46. 104 Zygmunt Bauman, “Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern,” in Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew,’ ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 143. 105 Ibid., 144. 106 Ibid., 148–50. 107 Ibid., 150. 108 MH, 40. 109 MH, 52; MA, 108. 110 MA, 121. 111 Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Assimilation and Enlightenment’, Society 27, no. 6 (1990), 71.

Notes to pages 130–4 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120

121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131

132

133

134

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Bauman, “Exit Visas and Entry Tickets,” 58; and MA, 123. LI, 49; and MA, 105–6. MA, 107. Zygmunt Bauman, “Roundtable: At the Crossroads of History …,” 29. Bauman, “Strangers,” 15. MH, 111–12; TS, 61; and MA, 51–2. DEHCWC, 82. MH, 114. “The Slav and other neighbours inhabiting the lands to the east of the border were an easy target for the rampant all-German nationalism of the era of Birsmarckian unification … Following the twisted logic of boundary building, the insalubrity of the orientals was related to their pre-human standards, barbaric language … inborn restlessness and incapacity for national feelings and loyalty.” In MA, 134. MH, 114. DEHCWC, 85. Timo Cantell and Poul Poder Pedersen, “Modernity, Postmodernity and Ethics – An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman,” Telos, 93 (1992): 19. Zygmunt Bauman to Gillian Rose, 30 May 1989, JZB, Amstrad file, “gillimay.” MA, 191, my emphasis. Bauman, “Strangers,” 37. MA, 160. Bauman, “Twisted Road to Perestroika,” 12. Ibid. Zygmunt Bauman, “The End of Polish Jewry: A Sociological Review,” Bulletin on Soviet and East European Jewish Affairs, 3 (1969): 5. For a summation of Polish debates on the Holocaust and on Polish-Jewish relations more broadly, published around the time of Modernity and the Holocaust, see Antony Polonsky, ed., My Brother’s Keeper: Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust (London: Routledge, 1990). I thank Arne-Johan Vetlesen for recounting to me a story of a rarely unanswered letter about Gross’s Neighbours that he had sent to Bauman. See Jan Gross, Neighbours: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Joanna TokarskaBakir, “The Sociology of Modernity, the Ethnography of the Holocaust: What Zygmunt Bauman knew,” in Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust: Heritage, Dilemmas, Extensions, ed. Jack Palmer and Dariusz Brzeziński (London: Routledge, 2022), 39–56. Zygmunt Bauman, “On Immoral Reason and Illogical Morality,” Polin, 3 (1988): 294–301; for the influential essay this piece refers to, see Jan Błonski, “Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto,” Yad Vashem Studies 19 (1988): 341–55. Bauman, “On Immoral Reason and Illogical Morality,” 299.

236

Notes to pages 134–8

135 Santiago Slabodsky, Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 17–18. 136 Manuela Boatcă, “Gendering Modernities: Tracing Multiple Alterities in the Longue Durée,” Multiple Gender Cultures, Sociology and Plural Modernities, ed. Heidemarie Winkel and Angelika Poferl (London: Routledge, 2020), 20. 137 Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 138 Zygmunt Bauman, “Jews and Other Europeans, Old and New,” Institute of Jewish Policy Research, 1 (2008), 122. 139 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 122–3. 140 The record of German colonialism is a case in point. As George Steinmetz has demonstrated, there are very stark differences in colonial policies in South West Africa (now Namibia), East Africa, Samoa, and Qingdao, from paternalistic defence of “native culture” to genocide. George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 141 Chad Alan Goldberg, Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 1. 142 See also David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013); and Abigail Green and Simon Levis Sullam, Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism: A Global History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). 143 Goldberg, Modernity and the Jews, 4. 144 Ibid., 122. 145 Ibid., 7, 125. 146 Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity, trans. David Fernbach (2013; repr., London: Pluto Press, 2016), 8. 147 Traverso, End of Jewish Modernity, 127. 148 Ibid., 4. 149 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory; and Bryan Cheyette, “Against Supersessionist Thinking: Old and New, Jews and Postcolonialism, the Ghetto and Diaspora,” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 4, no. 3 (2017): 424–39. See critique of “methodological separatism” in Robert Fine and Philip Spencer, Antisemitism and the Left: On the Return of the Jewish Question (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 7. 150 Traverso, End of Jewish Modernity, 17, my emphasis. 151 Bryan Cheyette terms this the “anxiety of appropriation,” Diasporas of the Mind, xiv. 152 Ibid., xii. 153 Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, trans. C.L. Markmann (1952; repr., London: Pluto Press, 1986), 92.

Notes to pages 139–40

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Chapter Five 1 Achille Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization (2010; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 112. 2 Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night, 77, my emphasis. 3 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 22–3. 4 J.P. Arnason, Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 349–50. Bauman himself seemed to have advocated for this position, while recognizing how the homogenization of “the West” was both explicable in the light of the experience of colonialism and a rhetorical necessity in the movements for decolonization. To quote him: “Just as the European perspective collapsed the many-coloured variety of non-European forms of life into one sorely truncated and flattened image of ‘the Orient’, the variegated experience of non-European peoples exposed to many and different colonial regimes and strategies pursued by European colonisers tended to mix, blend and condense into one homogenous notion of ‘the West.’” In Eu, 51. 5 J.P. Arnason, “Communism and Modernity,” Daedalus 129, no. 1 (2000): 82. 6 S.N. Eisenstadt, Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 500; and J.P. Arnason, The Future that Failed: Origins and Destines of the Soviet Model (London: Routledge, 1994). 7 Mikhail Maslovskiy, “The Imperial Dimension of Russian Modernisation: A Multiple Modernities Perspective,” Europe-Asia Studies 68, no. 1 (2016): 20–37; and Krishan Kumar, Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 213–14. 8 Kumar, Visions of Empire, 467. 9 Bolaji Balogun, “Polish Lebensraum: The Colonial Ambition to Expand on Racial Terms,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 41, no. 14 (2018): 2561–79; and S. Sayyid, “Islamophobia and the Europeanness of the Other Europe,” Patterns of Prejudice 52, no. 5 (2018): 421. 10 David Chioni Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique,” PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001): 111–28; Neil Lazarus, “Spectres Haunting: Postcommunism and Postcolonialism,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48, no. 2 (2012): 130–42; Cristina Şandru, Worlds Apart? A Postcolonial Reading of post-1945 East-Central European Culture (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012); Madina Tlostanova, “The Postcolonial Condition, the Decolonial Option, and the PostSocialist Intervention,” in Postcolonialism Cross-Examined: Multidirectional Perspectives on Imperial and Colonial Pasts and the Neocolonial Present, ed. Monika Albrecht (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020): 165–78.

238

Notes to pages 140–2

11 See the absence of any discussion of communism or post-communism in, for example, Gurminder Bhambra, Connected Sociologies (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); and in a special issue of Cultural Sociology dedicated to global historical sociology, Gennaro Ascione and Iain Chambers, eds, “Global Historical Sociology: Theoretical and Methodological Issues – an Introduction,” Cultural Sociology 10, no. 3 (2016): 301–16. See also the very minimal attention devoted to communism in Julian Go and George Lawson, eds, Global Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Furthermore, a website dedicated to “global social theory” (www. globalsocialtheory.org) with the admirable and necessary aim of providing a resource for students, teachers, and researchers, which places social theory in global perspective and reflects “a long-standing concern with the parochiality of standard perspectives on social theory”’ contains no entries on communism or post-communism and no profiles of social thinkers from regions within Central and Eastern Europe. The casual observer or the contemporary undergraduate student would not think that such thinkers overwhelmingly also tend to be excluded from “mainstream” canons in Western, anglophone universities. How many reading lists in undergraduate or postgraduate courses in social thought in Britain would include the likes of, for instance, Agnes Heller, Vytautas Kavolis, Maria Márkus, Jan Patočka, or Pitirim Sorokin? 12 See Timothy Brennan, “The Cuts of Language: The East/West of North/ South,” Public Culture 13, no. 1 (2001): 42. 13 Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 23. See also Dorota Kołodziejczyk and Cristina Şandru, “Introduction: On Colonialism, Communism and EastCentral Europe–Some Reflections,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48, no. 2 (2012): 114; Manuela Boatcă and Anca Parvulescu, “Creolizing Transylvania: Notes on Coloniality and Inter-Imperiality,” History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History 10, no. 1 (2020): 9–27; Benedict Anderson, “Radicalism after Communism in Thailand and Indonesia,” New Left Review 1, no. 202 (1993): 3–14; Patrick Chabal, “Angola and Mozambique: The Weight of History,” Portuguese Studies 17 (2001): 216–32. 14 Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night, 61. 15 LM, 59; and Agnes Heller, A Philosophy of History in Fragments (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 222–3. 16 Martin Müller, “In Search of the Global East: Thinking between North and South,” Geopolitics 25, no. 3 (2020): 734–55. See also Nataša Kovačević, Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilisation (London: Routledge, 2008). 17 Zygmunt Bauman, “Interview: In the Court Where Multi-Ethnic Polities Are on Trial the Jury Is Still Out,” Ab Imperio 8, no. 1 (2008): 11.

Notes to pages 143–5

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18 Clare Cavanagh, “Postcolonial Poland,” Common Knowledge 10, no. 1 (2004): 82–92; Marta Grzechnik, “The Missing Second World: On Poland and Postcolonial Studies,” Interventions 21, no. 7 (2019): 1001; Lucy Mayblin, Aneta Piekut, and Gill Valentine, “‘Other’ Posts in ‘Other’ Places: Poland through a Postcolonial Lens?,” Sociology 50, no. 1 (2016): 60–76; Emilia Kledzik, “Inventing Postcolonial Poland: Strategies of Domestication,” in Postcolonial Europe? Essays on Post-Communist Literatures and Cultures, ed. Dobrota Pucherová and Róbert Gáfrik (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 85–103; Dorota Kołodziejczyk and Cristina Şandru, eds, Postcolonial Perspectives on Postcommunism in Central and Eastern Europe (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016); and Eva Thompson, Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000). 19 Ryszard Kapuściński, Imperium, trans. Klara Glowczewska (1993; repr., London: Granta, 2019), 167–8. 20 Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (1953; repr., London: Penguin, 2001), 227. 21 Manuela Boatcă, “Coloniality of Labor in the Global Periphery: Latin America and Eastern Europe in the World-System,” Review (Fernand Braudel Centre) 36, no. 3–4 (2013): 287–314; Dace Dzenovska, “Historical Agency and the Coloniality of Power in Postsocialist Europe,” Anthropological Theory 13, no. 4 (2013): 394–416; and Veronika Sušová-Salminen, “Rethinking the Idea of Eastern Europe from a Postcolonial Perspective: Coloniality, Eurocentrism, Border Thinking and Europe’s Other,” Vieraan Rajalla: Studia Historica Septentrionalia, 64 (2012): 191–212. 22 Maria Todorova, “The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (1994): 453–82; Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995); Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Iver Neumann, Uses of the Other: ‘The East’ in European Identity Formation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); J.P. Arnason, Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 2003). 23 Manuela Boatcă, ‘The Eastern Margins of Empire: Coloniality in Nineteenth Century Romania’, Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007), 372. 24 Maria Mälksoo, ‘The Memory Politics of Becoming European: The East European Subalterns and the Collective Memory of Europe’, European Journal of International Relations 15, no. 4 (2009), 656; see also Jelena Subotić, Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019). 25 Peter Beilharz, ‘Modernity and Communism: Zygmunt Bauman and the Other Totalitarianism’, Thesis Eleven 70, no. 1 (2002): 88–99.

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Notes to pages 145–8

26 Keith Tester, The Social Thought of Zygmunt Bauman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 82. 27 The movement in Poland, the Polish intellectual milieu of the time and Bauman’s place within it is meticulously reconstructed in Izabela Wagner, Bauman: A Biography (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 168–257; see also Dariusz Brzeziński, “Human Praxis, Alternative Thinking, and Heterogeneous Culture: Zygmunt Bauman’s Revisionist Thought,” Internetowy Magazyn Filozoficzny Hybris 37 (2017): 61–80; for more orthodox, Party-aligned works of Bauman’s Polish period, see ZCDP; Zygmunt Bauman and Jerzy Wiatr, “O roli mas w historii” [On the Historical Role of the Masses], Myśl Filozoficzna, 3 (1953): 69–99; Zygmunt Bauman and Jerzy Wiatr, “Obiektywny charakter praw przyrody i społeczeństwa. W świetle pracy J. W. Stalina: ‘Ekonomiczne problemy socjalizmu w ZSRR’” [The objective character of the laws of nature and society. In the light of J. W. Stalin’s work, “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR”], Zeszyty Społeczno-Naukowe ‘Po Prostu’, Warszawa (1953): 1–16. 28 Zygmunt Bauman, “Modern Times, Modern Marxism,” in The Bauman Reader, ed. Peter Beilharz (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001 [1968]), 40–1. 29 Ibid., 46. 30 Ibid., 51. For general discussion of the philosophical dimensions of revisionism, see Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, trans. P.S. Falla (1976; repr., New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 1153–66. 31 For early examples of Bauman’s essayism, see “Wariacje na tematy socjologiczne” [Variations on Sociological Themes], Kultura i Społeczeństwo, 2 (1962): 47–64; and “Notatki poza czasem,” Twórczość, 10 (1967): 77–89 (published in translation as “Notes Beyond Time,” in CA, 33–49). For examples of Bauman’s Poland-era general sociology see ZWSA; SNCD; SKZ; ZS; WLS; ZMTS; and KS. 32 Satterwhite, Varieties of Marxist-Humanism, 21–3. 33 Zygmunt Bauman, “The Limitations of Perfect Planning,” Co-existence, 5 (1966): 146. 34 On Bauman and the “will to order,” see Mark Davis, Freedom and Consumerism: A Critique of Zygmunt Bauman’s Sociology (London: Routledge, 2008). 35 Zygmunt Bauman and Keith Tester, Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 36. See Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). 36 Zygmunt Bauman, “Uses of Information: When Social Information becomes Desirable,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 393, no. 1 (1971): 20–31. 37 Bauman, “Uses of Information,” 26.

Notes to pages 148–51

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38 Ibid., 30–1. 39 Fr, 89. 40 Zygmunt Bauman, “Bunt młodziży, którie nie hes walką pokoleń” [The rebellion of the youth, which is not a Clash of Generations], 6, unpublished typescript in the Papers of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman, MS 2067/B/1/1, trans KB. 41 Zygmunt Bauman, “Les Etudiants Polonais,” Espirit 381, no. 5 (1969): 864. 42 Zygmunt Bauman, “O frustracji i o kuglarzach” [On Frustration and Conjurers], Kultura, 12 (1968): 5–21. 43 Bauman, “Les Etudiants Polonais,” 861. 44 The social position of youth and matters of education were key foci of Bauman’s sociology in Poland. The changes in the nature of these discussions reflects the trajectory of his revisionism and his more critical position visà-vis the party. He remarked in an interview with Jacobsen and Tester that “looking back, I suspect that the outcome of our research into the attitudes of Polish youth marked, perhaps not the first, but certainly the most profound, of my disenchantments.” See interview in Michael-Hviid Jacobsen and Keith Tester, Bauman Before Postmodernity: Invitation, Conversations and Annotated Bibliography (Aalborg: Aalborg University Press, 2005), 44. See also Zygmunt Bauman, “Values and Standards of Success of the Warsaw Youth,” The Polish Sociological Bulletin, 1–2 (1962): 77–90; Zygmunt Bauman, “Three Remarks on Contemporary Educational Problems,” The Polish Sociological Bulletin, 1 (1966): 77–89; and Zygmunt Bauman, “Polish Youth and Politics,” Polish Roundtable, 1 (1967): 69–77. 45 Bauman, “O frustracji i o kuglarzach,” 16–17. 46 Ibid., 19. See also Zygmunt Bauman, “The End of Polish Jewry,” Bulletin on Society and East European Jewish Affairs, 3 (1969): 3–8. 47 Zygmunt Bauman in Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon, Liquid Surveillance (Cambridge, Polity: 2013), 82. 48 IP, 167. 49 Ibid., xvv; and CD, 35. 50 Richard Kilminster, “Over-Critique and Ambiguity in Zygmunt Bauman’s Sociology: A Long-Term Perspective,” in Beyond Bauman: Critical Engagements and Creative Excursions, ed. Michael Hviid Jacobsen (London: Routledge, 2016), 214. 51 Zygmunt Bauman, “The Party in the System-Management Phase: Change and Continuity,” in Authoritarian Politics in Communist Europe: Uniformity and Diversity in One-Party States, ed. Andrew Janos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 88. 52 Zygmunt Bauman, “Officialdom and Class: Bases of Inequality in Socialist Society,” in The Social Analysis of Class Structure, ed. Frank Parkin (London: Tavistock, 1974), 132.

242

Notes to pages 151–6

53 Zygmunt Bauman, “Social Dissent in the East European Political System,” European Journal of Sociology 12, no. 1 (1971): 27. 54 Bauman, “Social Dissent in the East European Political System,” 30. 55 Ibid., 31. 56 On the tension between the “Eastern” and “Western” left, see the collection of essays in Ferenc Fehér and Agnes Heller, Eastern Left, Western Left: Totalitarianism, Freedom and Democracy (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1987). 57 SAU, 82. 58 Bauman, “Social Dissent in the East European Political System,” 31. See also Tester, The Social Thought of Zygmunt Bauman, 86. 59 Zygmunt Bauman, “Between State and Society,” International Journal of Contemporary Sociology 10, no. 1 (1973): 25. 60 Bauman, “The Party in the System-Management Phase,” 83. 61 S.N. Eisenstadt, “The Breakdown of Communist Regimes and the Vicissitudes of Modernity,” Daedalus 121, no. 2 (1992): 28. 62 Bauman, “Officialdom and Class,” 140. 63 Zygmunt Bauman, “Comment on Eastern Europe,” Studies in Comparative Communism, 2–3 (1979): 184. 64 Bauman, “The Party in the System-Management Phase,” 85. 65 Paul du Gay, “Is Bauman’s Bureau Weber’s Bureau? A Comment,” The British Journal of Sociology 50, no. 4 (1999): 575–87. See also Maria Hirszowicz, The Bureaucratic Leviathan: A Study in the Sociology of Communism (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1980). 66 See, for example, a letter detailing the Polish translation of Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait from Reinhard Bendix to Zygmunt Bauman, 24 May 1971, JZB, MS2067/3/1. 67 Reinhard Bendix, Nation-building and Citizenship (New York: Doubleday, 1969). 68 Bauman, “Between State and Society,” 12. 69 Ibid., 17. See also Arnason, “Communism and Modernity,” 72. 70 Bauman, “Officialdom and Class,” 138. 71 Ibid., 136. 72 Beilharz, “Modernity and Communism,” 88–9, 97. See LI, 4; on “powerassisted universality,” see MIOLS, 98–104. See also William Outhwaite and Larry Ray, Social Theory and Postcommunism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 10. 73 Bauman, “Intellectuals in East-Central Europe,” 164. 74 Ibid., 168. 75 Ibid., 170. 76 See, for example, Andreas Hess who claims, rather tendentiously, that Bauman avoided discussions of communism in general. In particular, Hess

Notes to pages 156–9

77

78

79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86 87 88 89 90 91

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suggests, Bauman neglected Stalinism on account of being implicated in the postwar Stalinist administration in Poland. Hess writes that “exactly at the historical juncture in which the actually existing socialist project came to an end we get from Bauman a theoretical reflection about the inherent tendencies of modernity as exemplified in the Holocaust instead of a critical self-reflection about the thinking about socialist notions of equality and class and their more extreme political consequences. Bauman’s critique was not only totally blind in one eye – on Stalinism he had very little or next to nothing to say ‒ his obsession with capitalist modernity actually didn’t allow him to perceive the world in colour.” Andreas Hess, “The Liquefaction of Memory: An Intellectual History and Critique of Zygmunt Bauman’s Diffusionist Social Theory,” Global Intellectual History 6, no. 2 (2021): 200. As Bauman writes, “Stalin was the master supreme of the mass production of vulnerability and insecurity and so, in consequence, of the official fear. This is why the most terrifying trait of Stalin’s terror, its randomness, was also its most seminal,” in “Stalin,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 4, no. 1 (2004): 8. See also CD, 119–22. Zygmunt Bauman, “Stalin and the Peasant Revolution: A Case Study in the Dialectics of Master and Slave,” Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift 4, no. 4 (1978): 403. Note, this piece was also published in Leeds Occasional Papers in Sociology, 19 (1985): 1–54. Originally published in Polish in Aneks 15 (1977): 102–39. Bauman, “Stalin and the Peasant Revolution,” 403. Ibid., 414. Ibid., 424. Alvin Gouldner, “Stalinism: A Study of Internal Colonialism,” Telos, 34 (1977): 5–48. Bauman, “The Party in the System Management Phase,” 100. As reported by Timothy Garton Ash, who noted, “the fact that the exiled Polish professor, Zygmunt Bauman, on whom Pearson reported, was a stalwart supporter of Solidarity, was hardly news to anyone who followed Poland at the time.” Timothy Garton Ash, “It Used to Be the Stasi Who Spied on Us. Today, the Media Does the Snooping,” Independent, 21 September 1999, 4. Zygmunt Bauman, “On the Maturation of Socialism,” Telos 47 (1981), 48, 54. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 50. Bauman, “Poland: On its Own,” Telos 79 (1989): 50. Bauman, “On the Maturation of Socialism,” 54. Zygmunt Bauman, “Poland: On Its Own,”47. Bauman, “On the Maturation of Socialism,” 52–3, my emphasis.

244

Notes to pages 160–2

92 As Bauman reflected: “The phenomenon of Solidarity figures high on the list of mistaken diagnoses of which I was guilty and of which I admit to be … The founders of the Solidarity movement played the role of a battering ram, but they had little impact on how the ruins were to be cleared and the house rebuilt. On the contrary, they were the first and most painfully hit victims of history.” Zygmunt Bauman in Keith Tester and Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Bauman Before Postmodernity: Invitation, Conversations and Annotated Bibliography 1953–1989 (Aalborg: Aalborg University Press, 2005), 97–8. 93 Bauman, “Poland: On Its Own,” 48. 94 Ibid., 58. 95 Ibid., 49, 60. 96 Zygmunt Bauman, “Living without an Alternative,” The Political Quarterly 62, no. 1 (1991): 35–44. 97 Zygmunt Bauman, “The Polish Predicament: A Model in Search of Class Interests,” Telos 92 (1992): 130. 98 Bauman, “The Polish Predicament,” 115, my emphasis. 99 Ibid., 114; and IP, 157. 100 Zygmunt Bauman, “A Postmodern Revolution?,” in From a One Party State to Democracy: Transition in Eastern Europe, ed. J. Frentzel-Zagorska (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 5. 101 Eisenstadt, “The Breakdown of Communist Regimes…,” 25. 102 Bauman, “A Postmodern Revolution?,” 10. See theoretical discussion of the tension between freedom and security in Fr. 103 See chapter 2, “Requiem for Communism,” in CD, 27. 104 Bauman, “A Postmodern Revolution?,” 15. See also Bauman, “A Revolution in the Theory of Revolutions,” 21–2. 105 Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller, and György Markus, Dictatorship over Needs: Analysis of Soviet Societies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). 106 Zygmunt Bauman, “Contribution to Symposium on Dictatorship Over Needs,” Telos 68 (1984): 173. 107 Zygmunt Bauman, “Dismantling a Patronage State,” in From a One Party State to Democracy: Transition in Eastern Europe, ed. J. Frentzel-Zagorska (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 139. 108 Bauman, “A Postmodern Revolution?,” 19; and Bauman, “The Polish Predicament,” 117. See also Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Vintage, 2005), 688–9. 109 Bauman, “A Postmodern Revolution?,” 17. 110 CD, 36; and Outhwaite and Ray, Social Theory and Postcommunism, 102. 111 Bauman, “Dismantling a Patronage State,” 144. 112 Bauman, “The Polish Predicament,” 121.

Notes to pages 162–5

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113 Bauman, “The Polish Predicament,” 124. For an alternative view, see Larry Ray, “Post-Communism: Postmodernity or Modernity Revisited?,” British Journal of Sociology 48, no. 4 (1997): 543–560; and Paul Blokker, “PostCommunist Modernisation, Transitions Studies, and Diversity in Europe,” European Journal of Social Theory 84, no. 4: 503–25. 114 IP, 183. 115 Zygmunt Bauman to “Zaga,” JZB, disk 134, “Zaga - 20 Jan.” 116 Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, trans. Bela Shayevich (2013; repr., New York: Random House, 2017), 53. 117 Alexievich, Secondhand Time, 29. See also the aptly titled, influential work by Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 118 Arnason, The Future That Failed. 119 See also Leonidas Donskis, Loyalty, Dissent and Betrayal: Modern Lithuania and East-Central European Moral Imagination (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 4. 120 Eisenstadt wrote: “The turbulence evident in Eastern Europe today bears witness to some of the problems and tensions inherent in modernity itself, attesting to the potential fragility of the whole project of modernity.” In Eisenstadt, “The Breakdown of Communist Regimes…,” 35. These were parallel to those processes, Eisenstadt claimed, which have been associated with postmodernity: “the decharismatisation of the centres; the weakening of the overall society-wide utopian political vision and of the missionary ideological component … ‘daily’ and semi-private spheres of life become central” (34). Arnason wrote: “If Communism can be located within the spectrum of multiple modernities, the crisis and collapse of the Soviet empire may have some bearing on the question of more general crisis tendencies inherent in modernity.” In Arnason, “Communism and Modernity,” 61. 121 Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 15. 122 I borrow the term “traumas of modernity” from S.N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129, no. 1 (2000): 25–6. 123 Zygmunt Bauman, “Racism, Anti-Racism and Moral Progress,” Arena Journal, 1 (1993): 9–21. See also Leszek Kołakowski, “Amidst Moving Ruins,” Daedalus 121, no. 2 (1992): 51–5. 124 See Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, The Light That Failed: A Reckoning (London: Penguin, 2020). 125 Aleksander Fiut, “In the Shadow of Empires: Postcolonialism in Central and Eastern Europe – Why Not,” Teksty Drugie, 1 (2014): 37. 126 Kaczyński and Rymkiewicz quoted in Claudia Snochowska-Gonzalez, “Postcolonial Poland – On an Unavoidable Misuse,” East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 26, no. 4 (2012): 709.

246

Notes to page 167

Conclusion 1 This “scandal” – which generated some minor media interest – occurred in 2015 when Peter Walsh of the University of Cambridge purportedly discovered the repetition of passages across Bauman’s work. This later led to a co-written article with David Lehmann – published online without review – which showed that around 90,000 words had been “inappropriately reproduced” across his many books and articles. This already unedifying spectacle was compounded by the intervention of Brad Evans and Henry Giroux who, defending Bauman, wrote that Walsh and Lehmann were, in effect, operating an episode of “public shaming … tantamount to a Stasi witch hunt.” For what it’s worth, my own position is to agree with Tester – returning to an idea via a different theme changes the idea, though Tester is perhaps too uncritical in failing to make a distinction between the repetition of ideas (rephrased) and the repetition of text (verbatim). There is, however, a simpler explanation. Bauman was, as one might expect, deluged by invitations to write for various publications as his renown increased, and as records in the archive show, he often agreed. Bauman, ever the essayist, tended to write out of compulsion, and not for particular publications. He often drew from these bits of writing when answering questions in interviews, or in his lectures, and passages from them also found their way into his books, hence the repetition. Thus, repetition is both an effect of his writing approach and of publishing demand. Walsh and Lehmann later implied that Bauman got away with circumventing academic standards because he was an “academic celebrity” (a term distinguished from “public intellectual”). There is no doubt that demand increased the probability of repetition, but it is worth saying that academic celebrity is a misnomer for Bauman. His period of international renown coincided with his retirement from academia and his escape from the strictures of the formal intellectual field as located in the university. Regardless of the moot question of “self-plagiarism” (a contentious, if not oxymoronic term), Bauman had by and large stopped writing for other academics by the time his work turned toward liquid modernity. See Peter Walsh and David Lehmann, “Problematic Elements in the Scholarship of Zygmunt Bauman,”’ 2015, https://www. academia.edu/15031047/Problematic_Elements_in_the_Scholarship_of_ Zygmunt_Bauman; Brad Evans and Henry Giroux, “Self-Plagiarism and the Politics of Character Assassination: The Case of Zygmunt Bauman,” Truthout, 30 August 2015, https://truthout.org/articles/self-plagiarism-and-the-politicsof-character-assassination-the-case-of-zygmunt-bauman/; and Peter Walsh and David Lehmann, “Academic Celebrity,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 34 (2021): 21–46.

Notes to pages 167–71

247

2 Keith Tester, “On Repetition in the Work of Zygmunt Bauman,” Thesis Eleven 149, no. 1 (2018): 104–18. 3 HSS, 231. 4 Keith Tester, “Sociology: The Active Catastrophe,” Revue internationale de philosophie 277 (2016): 399–412. 5 Tester, “The Active Catastrophe,” 403. 6 T.W. Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan Gillespie (1937; repr., Los Angeles: University of California Press (2002), 565. 7 Edward Said, “Thoughts on Late Style,” London Review of Books 26, no. 15 (2004): 5. See also Edward Said, On Late Style: The Evolution of the Creative Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2007). 8 “Last words of Zygmunt Bauman, recorded at some time before the last moment,” 18 May 2013, JZB, USB 32, “Last words of Zygmunt Bauman.doc.” 9 Lewis Coser, “Review of Memories of Class by Zygmunt Bauman,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 9, no. 3 (1984): 363. 10 I thank Anna Sfard very much for sharing her recollections of this time with me. 11 Said, “Thoughts on Late Style,” 5. 12 William Outhwaite, “Canon Formation in Late 20th-Century British Sociology,” Sociology 43, no. 6 (2009): 1032. 13 Zygmunt Bauman, “Strangers: The Social Construction of Universality and Particularity,” Telos, 78 (1988/89): 34–5. 14 Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” 566. 15 Tester, “The Active Catastrophe,” 410. 16 Jose Saramago, Blindness (London: Vintage Books, 1997), 116. 17 Charles Turner, Investigating Sociological Theory (London: SAGE, 2010), 174. See also Ali Rattansi, “Zygmunt Bauman: An Adorno for Liquid Modern Times?,” The Sociological Review 62, no. 4 (2014): 908–17. For a counterargument, see Matt Dawson, “Optimism and Agency in the Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman,” European Journal of Social Theory 15, no. 4 (2012): 555–70. 18 François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and the Experiences of Time, trans. Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). See also Eva Horn, The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age, trans. Valentine Pakis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 19 Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis, Liquid Evil: Living with TINA (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 13. 20 LM, viii. 21 Zygmunt Bauman, “Has the Future a Left,” Soundings (2007), http://www. iceta.org/zb150507.pdf.

248

Notes to pages 171–3

22 Zygmunt Bauman, “Walter Benjamin, the Intellectual,” New Formations, 20 (1993): 47–58. Quotations taken from reprinted chapter in Laura Marcus and Lynda Nead, eds, The Actuality of Walter Benjamin (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998), 72–84. 23 Bauman, “Walter Benjamin, the Intellectual,” 75. See also Timo Cantell and Poul Poder Pedersen, “Modernity, Postmodernity and Ethics – An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman,” Telos 93 (1992): 28. 24 Bauman, “Walter Benjamin, the Intellectual,” 76. 25 Walter Benjamin, “Left-Wing Melancholy,” in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994 [1931]), 305–6. 26 See, for example, Ali Rattansi, Bauman and Contemporary Sociology: A Critical Analysis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 212. 27 Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy,” Boundary 2 26, no. 3 (1999): 22. 28 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in On Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia,’ ed. Leticia Glocer Fiorini, Sergio Lewkowicz, and Thierry Bokanowski (1917; repr., London: Routledge, 2009), 19–36; Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behaviour, trans. B.R. Placzek (New York: Grove Press, 1975); Martin Jay, “Once More an Inability to Mourn? Reflections on the Left Melancholy of Our Time,” German Politics & Society 27, no. 3 (1992): 69–76. 29 Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 30 Jelena Subotić, Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019). 31 “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism: perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations,” Frederic Jameson, “The Antinomies of Postmodernity,” in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (1989; repr., London: Verso, 1998), 50. 32 Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia, 20. 33 Michael Hviid Jacobsen, “Zygmunt Bauman – An Ambivalent Utopian,” Revue internationale de philosophie 3, no. 277 (2016): 347–64. See also Mark Davis on the oscillation between pessimism and hope in “Bauman’s Compass: Navigating the Current Interregnum,” Acta Sociologica 54, no. 2 (2011): 183–94. 34 Joseph R. Winters, Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy and the Agony of Progress (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 7. This is also the basis of Amy Allen’s program for decolonizing critical theory in The End of Progress: Decolonising the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

Notes to pages 173–8

249

35 “‫[ םולשל ןנוכתהל לארשי לע‬Israel must prepare for peace],” Haaretz, 8 August 1971, 6, trans. MJ. 36 Zygmunt Bauman, “Na rozdroźu w swiecje ne rozdroźu” [At the crossroads in a world at the crossroads], 2, unpublished typescript, JZB, MS 2067/B/1/1, trans. KB (republished in HP, 75–89). 37 Bauman, “Na rozdroźu w swiecje ne rozdroźu,” 5. 38 Ibid., 7. 39 SAU, 36. 40 CD, 32–3. 41 Zygmunt Bauman, “The Left as a Counter-culture of Modernity,” Telos, 70 (1986): 81–2. 42 WCNP, 87–121. 43 Bauman, “The Left as a Counter-Culture of Modernity,” 83. 44 Ibid., 86. 45 Bauman, “Has the Future a Left?,” 10. 46 Bauman, “The Left as a Counter-Culture of Modernity,” 93. 47 As he admitted to Richard Kilminster and Ian Varcoe, Memories of Class “was a farewell not to the working class, but to the identity between the working class and the problem of injustice, and inequality,” in IP, 206. See also WCNP; and CL, 117–50. 48 This is particularly apparent in his discussions with Leonidas Donskis in Moral Blindness, and the posthumously published dialogical piece with Aleksandra Kania. 49 H.S. Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1800–1930 (New York: Knopf, 1958), 377. 50 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, abridged edition from trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (1918–1923; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 25. 51 Hughes, Consciousness and Society, 375. 52 Spengler, Decline of the West, 19, 21. 53 Ibid., 25. 54 Zygmunt Bauman and Aleksandra Kania, “That West Meant to Be Declining,” Thesis Eleven 149, no. 1 (2018): 93, my emphasis. 55 Zygmunt Bauman, “The Social Manipulation of Morality: Moralising Actors, Adiaphorising Action,” Theory, Culture & Society 8, no. 1 (1991): 137. 56 Hans Joas, “Bauman in Germany: Modern Violence and the Problems of German Self–Understanding,” Theory, Culture & Society 15, no. 1 (1998): 47–55. See discussion in Jack Palmer and Dariusz Brzeziński, “Editor’s Introduction: Through the Window Again: Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust,” in Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust: Heritage, Dilemmas, Extensions (London: Routledge, 2022), 1–3.

250

Notes to pages 178–81

57 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Vintage, 2005), 630–1. See Ferenc Fehér and Agnes Heller, “Europe – An Epilogue?,” in The Postmodern Political Condition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 146–60. 58 Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis, Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modern Times (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 182. 59 Zygmunt Bauman, “What Is Central in Central Europe?,” Revista Lusófona de Estudos Culturais / Lusophone Journal of Cultural Studies 1, no. 1 (2013): 68. Also published in Leonidas Donskis, ed., Yet Another Europe after 1984: Rethinking Milan Kundera and the Idea of Central Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 1–15. 60 Bauman, “What Is Central in Central Europe?,” 70. 61 Eu, 2. 62 Bauman, “What Is Central in Central Europe?,” 78. 63 Eu, 7. On Europeanism, see also Austin Harrington, German Cosmopolitan Social Thought and the Idea of the West: Voices from Weimar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 53. 64 Eu, 10. 65 WL, 9–33; and LT, 27–54. 66 See chapter 2 in DEHCWC, 78–109. Also conversation four in Living on Borrowed Time: Conversations with Citlali Rovarosa-Madrazo (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 99–107. 67 LLa, 119–56; and SD. 68 CLMW, 35–50. 69 GHC, 59–60; and ISP, 20. 70 LF, 96, 127–8; IS, 31–40; and Zygmunt Bauman and Carlo Bordoni, State of Crisis (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 1–54. 71 Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 11; and Zygmunt Bauman, On Education: Conversations with Ricardo Mazzeo (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 72. 72 Eu, 51. 73 Eu, 68, 72. See also chapter 3 in SUS, 87–117; Zygmunt Bauman, “Wars of the Globalization Era,” European Journal of Social Theory 4, no. 1 (2001): 11–28; and Zygmunt Bauman, “Reconnaissance Wars of the Planetary Frontierland,” Theory, Culture & Society 19, no. 4 (2002): 81–90. 74 Eu, 76. 75 Bauman, “What Is Central in Central Europe?,” 82. 76 See Olga Tokarczuk’s astonishingly detailed literary representation of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth and its inter-imperial entanglements with the Habsburg and Ottoman empires in The Books of Jacob, trans. Jennifer Croft (2014; repr., London: Fitzcarraldo, 2021).

Notes to pages 182–5

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77 Bauman, “What Is Central in Central Europe?,” 79. 78 Ibid., 80. 79 Bauman, “Strangers,” 15; Bauman, “What is Central in Central Europe?,” 75–6; Zygmunt Bauman, “Migration and Identities in the Globalised World,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 37, no. 4 (2011): 425–35; and SD. 80 Zygmunt Bauman, “Reconstructing Europe,” RSA Journal 158, no. 5551 (2012): 24. 81 Izabela Wagner, “Bauman as a Refugee: We Should Not Call Refugees ‘Migrants,’” Thesis Eleven 156, no. 1 (2020): 102–17; Elena ÁlvarezÁlvarez, “Where the Response to Migration Begins: Zygmunt Bauman’s Considerations about Exile and Migration,” Revista Internacional de Ciencias Sociales 10, no. 3 (2021): 209–26. 82 MH, 85. 83 Zygmunt Bauman and Rein Raud, Practices of Selfhood (Cambridge: Polity, 2015); and Zygmunt Bauman, “Some of the Foremost Challenges to the Status Quo,” Studia Socjologiczno-Polityczne 7, no. 2 (2017): 31–45. See also “Europe’s Adventure? Still Unfinished,” lecture delivered at the University of Leeds, 5 October 2016 (published in HP, 198–209); Re, 49–85, 154. See also Mark Davis, Freedom and Consumerism: A Critique of Zygmunt Bauman’s Sociology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 51. 84 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 255. Bauman identifies the same at work in the critical thought of Adorno: “Adorno’s precept – that the task of critical thought ‘is not the conservation of the past, but the redemption of the hopes of the past’ – has lost nothing of its topicality, and it is precisely because of that precepts continuing topicality that critical thought requires continuous rethinking in order to remain up to its task.” In Zygmunt Bauman, “Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno – An Intellectual in Dark Times,” in Theodor W. Adorno: Philosoph des beschädigten Lebens, ed. Moshe Zuckermann (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2004), 45. 85 Benjamin, “Left-Wing Melancholy,” 306. 86 I make this argument in greater detail in “Barbarism – the Active Dystopia,” Studia Literraria et Historica (forthcoming). See also the acknowledgment that “the optimism of utopia and the pessimism of dystopia represent opposite sides of the same coin – the hope of what the future could be at best, the fear of what it could be at worst.” In Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, 2nd ed. (1990; repr., Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 159. 87 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; repr., London: Penguin, 2017), 223. 88 See Rodrigo Cordero, Crisis and Critique: On the Fragile Foundations of Social Life (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). 89 TCS, 93–4.

252

Notes to pages 185–7

90 Ibid., 109. 91 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (1980; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 11. 92 As he reflected on writing about catastrophe and hope: “It seems that one needs catastrophes to happen in order to recognise and admit (retrospectively, alas, only retrospectively …) their coming. A chilling thought, if there ever was one. Can we ever refute it? We will never know unless we try: again and again, and ever harder,” DRFBA, 96. 93 See Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global History of Intellectual Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 15. 94 Keith Tester, “Reflections on Reading Bauman,” Cultural Politics 13, no. 3 (2017): 306. On my own considerable personal debt to Keith Tester, see my “Encounters with Keith Tester, Personal and Intellectual,” Thesis Eleven 158, no. 1 (2020): 8. 95 “Universality of humanity does not stand in opposition to the pluralism of the forms of human life; but the test of truly universal humanity is its ability to accommodate pluralism and make pluralism serve the cause of humanity,” in Com, 140. 96 Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia, 18–19. 97 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in an Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 3, 5. 98 “The preliminary condition of peace, solidarity and benevolent cooperation among humans is consent to the multiplicity of ways of being human and willingness to accept the model of co-existence that such multiplicity requires.” In Zygmunt Bauman and Stanisław Obirek, On the World and Ourselves (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), 112.

Index

active utopia, 76; and “active dystopia,” 184; Europe as an, 178; socialism as an, 43, 53, 174–5 activistic image of man, 76, 89 adiaphorization, 131 Adorno, Theodor W., 11, 66; on the essay, 71, 74–5; on “late style,” 167–70 allosemitism, 129, 135 ambivalence, 98–9, 101–2, 104–5, 118, 124–32, 136 anthropology, 89–94 anti-Semitism, 9, 103–4, 150, 165, 184; Bauman’s experience of, 41, 48, 134, 137–8; and colonial racism, 82, 131, 138 archives, 63–4; Janina and Zygmunt Bauman papers, 15–18, 57; imperialism, 106, 111; ipn, 7, 16 Arendt, Hannah, 128, 184; totalitarianism, 83, 111; and writing, 71–2, 74–5, 77–8 Athens and Jerusalem, 21, 128–9 axiological concept of culture, 93–5, 135 Baert, Patrick, 36–7 barbarism: colonial-imperialism and concept of, 93; modernity and, 67; socialism or, 84, 174 Bauman, Janina, 6–7, 31–2, 42–4, 48, 121–2, 134

Benjamin, Walter, 171–2 Bolsheviks, 155, 157 Borges, Jorge Luis, “Garden of Forking Paths,” 18, 81 Bourdieu, Pierre, 34–5 Britain: Bauman in, 46, 51–3, 100–1, 150–1; and Empire, 101–2, 105– 6, 135; and Holocaust memory, 121; Labour movement in, 4; New Left in, 4–6; sociology in, 10, 52, 87 Budapest school, 37, 88, 161 camps, 101–2, 106–7, 180 civilization: and barbarism, 81, 174, 184; and colonial-imperialism, 82, 94, 135, 179; Western, 21–4 Collins, Randall, 35–6 colonial-imperialism, 25, 112–13, 135, 143; Bauman on, 93, 97–9, 103–6, 179–8; and sociology, 18–19, 140–1 communism: Bauman and, 44–5, 50; Bauman on, 139–65; end of, 22, 117 consumerism, 108, 120, 161–2, 184 decline of the West, 176–9 decolonization, 23, 82–3, 86–8, 179; Bauman on, 94–5, 98, 108–9; of sociology, 18–19, 135–6; Soviet Empire, 140–1, 159

254

Index

defamiliarization, sociology as, 43, 78, 126 dystopia, 81, 184 East-Central Europe, 85, 143–4, 159, 165, 178; essayism in, 70; exiles from, 16, 26, 49, 74; intellectuals in, 155–6 Eastern Europe, 25, 144; experience of modernity, 140; Jews in, 114, 130, 133; Marxist-revisionism in, 88–9, 145–6 Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., correspondence with, 96–7, 120 empire, end of, 96–8 entangled histories, 26, 82, 101, 139 essayism, 62–72, 127–8, 214–15n83; Bauman and, 73–81 ethics: of distance, 79, 217n115; and postmodernity, 119 Eurocentrism, 11–12, 23–6, 59, 139; Bauman on, 93, 95, 135, 138, 144–5, 179 Europe, 13, 19–21, 23–7, 82–3, 139; Bauman on, 93–5, 97–100, 107, 110–11, 118–19, 176–83; and communism, 150; and Holocaust memory, 122 European Union, 55, 111, 179, 183 exile, 8, 11, 28–59; Bauman on, 75, 77; and essayism, 70–2; and writing, 65–7

131–2, 180; and colonialism, 102–3, 106–7, 136 Germany, 37–8; and colonialism, 84, 131; and Jews, 130 Giddens, Anthony, 116 glasnost, 160 globalization, 87, 95, 106–7, 180–1 Gluckman, Max, 46, 91 Goldberg, Chad Alan, 136–7 Gramsci, Antonio, 89, 160 Gross, Neil, 56 gulag, 102, 117, 172 Haaretz, 50–1, 173 Habsburg Empire, 182 Hashomer Hatzair, 43 Heller, Agnes, 9, 115, 141 hermeneutics: Bauman on, 77–80, 94–5, 124–9, 167; of estrangement, 18, 33, 59, 135, 166 Historikerstreit, 124, 178 Hochfeld, Julian, 45–6, 88 Holocaust: Bauman on the, 54–6, 103–4, 123–4, 131–4, 178; memory of, 27, 42, 82, 114, 121–3, 172; and modernity, 24, 116; and sociology, 124–5 Horowitz, Irving Louis, 125, 203n73

fascism: and imperialism, 82; and modernity, 45, 65, 67 Featherstone, Mike, 116 fragment, 66, 68 Frankfurt School, 11, 67 Freud, Sigmund, 126–7, 171–2

identity: Bauman on, 119–20; Bauman’s, 55–6, 133; European, 25, 179; Jewish, 84, 114 imaginary: global, 20–2; 142; significations, 20; social, 67 inter-imperiality, 25, 85–6 International Sociological Association, 46, 88 Israel, Bauman in, 49–51, 121, 148–50, 173–4

gardening, modern culture as, 99–103, 131, 182–3 gender: absence of in Bauman, 11, 108; and experience of exile, 31 generation, 37–41 genocide, 83–4, 111; Bauman on,

Jewish modernity: Bauman’s interpretation of, 114, 129–32; end of, 137–8 Judaism, 124–9; decoloniality and, 134–8 Judeo-Bolshevism, 8

Index Kafka, Franz, 14–15, 126–7, 148 Kołakowski, Leszek, 5, 45 Koselleck, Reinhart, 63 Kundera, Milan, 8, 85, 180 Lanzmann, Claude, Shoah, 122 “late style,” 167–71 Lemkin, Raphael, 83, 85 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 112, 119, 129 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 47, 90–1 liberalism, 21–2 liquid modernity, 57; and colonialimperialism, 105–8; and “late style,” 169–71; and postcommunism, 158–63 literature: influence on Bauman, 61–2, 74; and sociology, 64 Lukács, György, 11; on the essay, 69 Luxemburg, Rosa, 83–5; influence on Bauman, 106–7, 174 managerial sociology, Bauman’s critique of, 75, 89, 146–7 Manchester School (anthropology), 91 Mannheim, Karl, 37–40, 70–1 Márkus, Maria, 37 Marxism, 65; Bauman and, 45–7, 94, 145–8; Marxist-humanism, 88 melancholia, 171–3 memory: in Bauman, 54, 184; of colonial-imperialism, 172; of communism, 163, 172; Europe, 181–2; of the Holocaust, 42, 55, 82, 116, 121–3, 134; “memory wars,” 8–9; multidirectional memory, 113, 137, 186–7 metaphor, 20; in Bauman’s sociology, 61, 74, 77–8, 126 Miliband, Ralph, 6, 46, 51, 53, 115 Mills, C.W., 6, 46, 52 modernity: Bauman on, 114, 118– 19; and colonial-imperialism, 98–105; and communism, 150– 6, 163–4; modernization theory, 21–2; “multiple modernities,” 87,

255

96, 140–1, 152–3; multiplicity of, 26, 67–8; and Stalinism, 156–8 Musil, Robert, 69–70 nationalism: anticolonial, 111, 172; contemporary, 9, 22; in interwar Europe, 33, 58; Israeli, 50–1, 121, 173; “methodological nationalism,” 121 Nazism, 26, 67; Bauman on, 103–4, 131; and imperialism, 82–4 novel-essay, 61, 69 Occidentalism, 21 order-building, 109; modernity as, 99, 107, 118, 150, 156, 176, Orientalism, 23 Ossowski, Stanisław, 88 Paris, 1968 protests, 48 Parsons, Talcott, 89, 92, 146 perestroika, 133, 160 photography, 61, 210n14 Poland: Bauman and, 6–9, 26, 41–7, 53–4, 85; and colonialism, 140, 142–5, 159; and communism, 145–8; March 1968 events, 133, 148–50; Marxist revisionism in, 45–6; Polish-Jewish relations, 55–6, 114, 121, 133–4; and postcommunism, 158–63; sociology in, 46–7, 52, 88–9 Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 181–2 possibilitarianism, and essayism, 69, 74 possibility, 94, 104; Bauman as sociologist of, 74–7, 92; Holocaust as possibility of modernity, 131, 134 postcolonialism, 85–8, 107–8, 180; in Poland, 142–5; postcolonial theory, 23–5, 85, 134, 137–8, 139–41; and sociology, 98 post-communism, 140–2, 158–65; and Holocaust memory, 55

256

Index

postmodernism, 114, 116, 118 postmodernity: and decolonization, 96–9; end of communism, 161–5; and Jewish history (see Jewish modernity); sociology of, 114–21 racism, 184; Bauman on, 103–5, 130–1 Rattansi, Ali, 11 reading, 12–13, 60 refugees, 16, 30–1, 38, 58, 107, 180 revisionism (Marxism), 50, 88–9, 145–6 revolution, Bauman on, 151–2, 156–8, 160–1 Rojek, Chris, 116 Rose, Gillian, 124–6, 128–9 Russia: anti-Semitism in, 133; Bauman in, 43; Pale of Settlement, 85 Said, Edward, 29–30, 167, 169 self-plagiarism, 246n1 semiotics, 91–4 Simmel, Georg, 69, 127–8 Slabodsky, Santiago, 134 socialism, 84, 88, 114, 175; as “active utopia,” 174–5; Bauman and, 44–5, 50, 53, 150–6, 171, 174 sociology: and colonialism, 18–19, 98; of culture, 53, 86, 90, 92–5, 104–5; decolonizing, 19, 77, 86, 135, 186; essayism in, 69, 70, 76; of intellectuals, 33–7, 53–4, 60–1; international, 46–7; Jewish, 124–9; of knowledge, 38; of politics, 13, 47, 150; public sociology, 61. See also Britain; Poland; postmodernity Solidarność, 158–60, 164 Sonderweg thesis, 178 Soviet empire, 97–8, 140–5, 159 Sovietology, 52, 147, 156 Soviet-type societies, 150–6

Spengler, Oswald, 176–8 Stalinism, 156–8 standpoint, 37–8; of exile, 26, 59 state-formation, 110–12 stranger, 104, 118, 128, 130–1; Baumans as “unwelcome strangers,” 6; the exile as, 59, 169–70 structuralism, 47, 89–91 students, in Poland, 48, 50, 149 Tester, Keith, 167 Thompson, E.P., 4–5 totalitarianism, 72, 83, 144–5 Traverso, Enzo, 137–8, 172, 186 unesco, 87–8 universalism, 186; Bauman on, 92, 99, 107, 132, 135; and essayism, 80–1; and Eurocentrism, 23–4, 59, 94–5, 138, 144; and exile, 56–9; and intellectuals, 33–4 University of Leeds, 15, 51, 53, 87, 95, 154, 183 University of Warsaw, 45, 54 utopia, 38, 69; “active utopia,” 43, 174–5, 178, 184; Bauman on, 75–6, 102, 151, 173 war: Bauman and Second World War, 41–5; Cold War, 46, 111, 140–1, 174; First World War, 85, 140, 182; Israel-Palestine, 50–1, 173; Second World War, 111, 124; and social thought, 65–6, 202–3n65 waste, 106–8 Weber, Max, 20, 153–4 West, concept of the, 18–26 Westphalia, 110–14 Worsley, Peter, 46, 91 youth, 148–50, 241n44 Yugoslavia, 162–3