Reflections on Zygmunt Bauman: Visibility,privacy and prepositional sociology

Abstract

This paper offers a critical reflection on Zygmunt Bauman's diagnosis of digital modernity, particularly his concern with the erosion of privacy in an era of confessional culture and performative self-disclosure. Engaging Bauman's work alongside thinkers such as Blumenberg, Honneth, Arendt and Thompson, it explores visibility as an anthropological and political condition. The paper fields the notion of ‘prepositional sociology’, inspired by Maria Markus, as a mode of analysis that foregrounds the creative capacities of individuals to construct meaningful lives despite the pressures of a commodified, surveillant world. In this context, friendship is discussed as a form of non-instrumental intimacy that resists the logic of economic rationality. The paper seeks to contribute to a critical sociology that recognises both the dehumanising dynamics of modernity and the ordinary practices that exceed them.