Abstract
Zygmunt Bauman, who died in 2017, is regarded by many as one of the world’s most innovative and important public intellectuals who produced an extraordinary body of work that addresses a wide range of issues, and his ideas continue to inspire academics across almost every field of the humanities and social sciences. However, Bauman was very careful not to provide his reader with detail of his long and eventful life that included many dramatic events, two periods of exile, including forced migration from Poland and voluntary exile from Israel, wartime military service fighting fascism and expelled from the University of Warsaw in 1968. Peter Beilharz (2023: 9) described how Bauman ‘chastised’ him for sharing details of his private life in print in 2007. Moreover, Bauman’s grandson Karl Dudman (2023) describes Bauman in the following terms:
This was not just a man who cared about demarcating his public and private life, but one who skilfully cultivated and managed a play of hypervisibility and solitude as discrete as night and day. (p. 131)
In Poland Bauman did not openly criticise the party even in 1955, he remained a committed communism and unlike Leszek Kołakowski and Ryszard Kapuściński Bauman only slowly became disillusioned with the reality of the socialist state and only slowly abandoned orthodox Marxism. Bauman’s life cries out for biographical interpretation; however, his silence about his complicated biography makes the task a difficult one. However, since 2020 there have been several books published in English that provide the reader with an insight into Bauman’s extraordinary life. Two biographies by Izabela Wagner (2020, 2023), a personal account of Peter Beilharz’s (2020) friendship with Zygmunt Bauman, Jack Palmer’s (2023) exploration of Bauman’s personal and intellectual relationship with the West, and Peter Beilharz and Janet Wolff’s (2023) exploration of Bauman’s photography.
Throughout the different phases of his intellectual journey Bauman focused on identifying forces external to the individual such as bureaucratic rationalisation, individualisation, consumption and liquefaction, and the different forms of adiaphorisation (moral indifference) associated with solid modernity, postmodernity and liquid modernity pressing individuals to conform. As Bauman explained: ‘Society is like a billiard table and humans are like billiard balls, they move where they are pushed’ (Bauman in Tester and Jacobsen, 2005: 89).
Zygmunt Bauman and the theory of culture
For Dariusz Brzeziński (2022), reflection on culture was a constant theme in Zygmunt Bauman’s contribution to sociology. Starting with Bauman’s Polish-language papers and books from the 1950s, this book is an attempt to map the changes and continuities in Bauman’s understanding of culture over six decades. In the 1950s, Bauman’s work was firmly rooted in a Marxist-Leninist vision of society with culture regarded as external to the individual acting as a mechanism for the transmission of norms, values and goals from one generation to the next, providing people with a sense of community and a clearly defined identity. In the 1960s Bauman viewed the role of culture as reducing ambivalence by providing a set of norms that made the actions of people predictable. One of the themes that Brzeziński explores is the emerging role of human agency in Bauman’s account of culture as Bauman came to lose faith in actually existing socialism in Eastern Europe and came to view socialism as an active utopia. For Brzeziński (2022), Bauman drew upon Gramsci’s understanding of praxis to develop an ‘innovative, complex, and non-reductionist theory of culture’ (p. 19) to view culture as increasingly autonomous from the economic and political system: ‘Bauman attempted to transcend the binary opposition of determinism and voluntarism’ (p. 57). In a very skilful manner, Brzeziński draws upon Margaret Archer’s understanding of ‘conflation’, the duality of structure and analytical dualism to discuss Bauman’s claim in the 1970s that culture was: ‘simultaneously, the objective foundation of the subjectively meaningful experience and the subjective “appropriation” of the otherwise inhumanly alien world’ (Bauman, 1973: 117 cited in Brzeziński, 2022: 61). Culture for Bauman at this time was then both intersubjective and objective at the same time.
By the mid-1960s, Bauman became interested in the conditions that need to be present for categories of human understanding to emerge. Bauman identified the ‘structure of culture’ as a ‘system’ or ‘cultural field’. The cultural field includes circles of people, and the system of dependencies that they experience brought about by the production, distribution and consumption of commodities.
As with several other Bauman scholars, Brzeziński regards Bauman’s ‘lost’ Polish text Sketches in the Theory of Culture (2018), a collection of essays that were originally due to be published in 1968 but was confiscated as Bauman left Poland for exile, as important in terms of making sense of Bauman’s intellectual development. The manuscript was later found and published in 2018. However, many of the essays in Sketches were published separately before and after their due publication date.
In Sketches (2018) Bauman takes his starting point from Simmel’s understanding of the relationship between ‘form’ and ‘content’ and identifies ‘innate drives’ that underpin the ‘cultural mechanisms for organizing the world’ into categories that usually take the form of ‘either or’. These ‘cultural mechanisms’ suppress ambiguity to allow the person to select material that provides clear meaning or ‘semantic unequivocality’ with any ‘cultural field’. The larger the group of people that the individual must contend within everyday life, the greater the number of semes that a person needs to orient themselves meaningfully to eliminate indeterminacy. A seme is the minimum unit of significance that a person can draw upon in transmitting their intended sense of meaning.
Brzeziński (2022) briefly mentions Bauman’s attempt to construct a structuration theory. Brzeziński is keen to argue that: ‘Bauman wanted to transcend the binary opposition of determinism and voluntarism’ (p. 57), drawing parallels between the early work of Bauman on culture with Bourdieu on ‘structural constructivism’ and Giddens on ‘structuration’ (p. 18) and attempting to identify that Bauman was interested in giving human agency a central and active role in shaping culture. It is a shame that Brzezunski chose not to explore this more fully in the text. Taking his starting point from Gramsci and to a lesser extent the popular 1960s ‘Soviet semiotics’ of Popovich and the work of Abramian, for Bauman individuals think using categories of thought and the content of those categories of thought is derived from the culture of the society in which we live. Bauman identifies the ideological aspect of culture in modernity as the state aiming to replace ‘folk’ or ‘wild’ cultures that are assumed by the state to lack logic and coherence; the modern state attempts to replace folk or wild cultures with state-approved ways of thinking and relating to the world.
Praxis, which for Bauman is the ability to transform both the physical and social worlds became central to Bauman’s understanding of a Humanistic Marxian conception of culture. Bauman’s structuration theory could be viewed as central to his understanding of a Humanistic Marxist approach to sociology. Bauman’s Marxism drew upon Berger and Luckman’s (1966) concept of habit leading to habitualisation and the social construction of reality. People are ‘epistemological entities’ thinking beings with individual self-interests who form habits when they successfully repeat a social action that has a successful outcome for them. These repetitions become routinised social actions and people come to live with each other in a habituated way.
The culture system is identified by Bauman as a projection of the personality structure and the social structure. Culture is the sum-total of signs shared and commonly interpreted within a community, culture is then understood as having a control function that defines the person’s cognitive abilities, goals and patterns of behaviour. Culture is both a way of ordering and structuring the surroundings of the individual and a way of connecting the repetitions of peoples’ behaviour. For a more detailed account see Best (2020).
As the book unfolds, Brzeziński outlines the more familiar analysis of the relationship between culture and society found in Bauman’s (1989) best known and critically acclaimed book Modernity and the Holocaust, and Bauman’s later sociology of postmodernity and liquid modern turn writing. Bauman (1989) describes modern culture as a garden culture. Underpinning modernity is the state’s understanding and desire for a form of social order based upon a design for an ideal life and the perfect arrangement of human conditions. Categories of person such as the conceptual Jew that Bauman (1973) had initially explored in Culture as Praxis were viewed as visqueux (Sartre) and slimy (Douglas), construed as outside of the order of things, characterised by boundary transgression and nonconformity. Bauman (1989) rejects the monster hypothesis that the Holocaust was brought about by evil people fulfilling their evil intent. The Holocaust was not a product of modernity going wrong but rather was a product of bureaucratic rationality and a form of state planning that permitted the: ‘neutralization of the moral constraints of action, and its “gardening posture” – the pursuit of artificial, rationally designed order’ (Bauman, 1989: 144). The role of the modern state was to act like a gardener, maintaining the borders and paths, protecting, watering, and feeding the plants and looking out for weeds, the uninvited guests that seed themselves and damage the design of the garden come to be seen as a problem. The conceptual Jew and others who do not fit the design for an ideal life and the perfect arrangement of human conditions are characterised by boundary transgression and nonconformity and because they are unable to be included in the garden design are subjected to exclusion and in the case of the Holocaust physically destroyed.
The division of labour within the bureaucracy allowed genocide to be broken down into acts that could be carried out by normal, law-abiding people who could say to themselves that they were not responsible for killing a Jew, appealing to defences like ‘I simply mined coal, drove trains, supplied raw materials, designed buildings etc.’, and complete all the other individual tasks that come together to make genocide possible:
Men and women have been given the opportunity to commit inhuman deeds without in the least feeling inhuman themselves. Modernity did not make people more cruel; it only invented a way in which cruel things can be done by non-cruel people. (Bauman, 1989: 46)
As Bauman (1989) explains, ‘The determination and the freedom to go “all the way” and reach the ultimate was Hitler’s, yet the logic was construed, legitimized, and supplied by the spirit and practice of modernity’ (p. 150). The gardening logic in which the modern state maintained the borders and kept the weeds that could not be assimilated into the garden design outside of the garden allowed: ‘mass murder committed in the name of perfection of the world’ (Bauman, 1989: 151).
In an interview published in 2005 (Tester and Jacobsen, 2005), Bauman explains that the arguments he presented in his Polish language publications from the 1950s and 1960s derived their inspiration and whatever meaning and significance they had from trials and tribulations that were internal and specific to Poland. In the first part of the book Brzeziński skilfully guides the reader through much material not published in English, together with some unpublished and difficult-to-obtain material. This is the strength of the book. As a theoretical text, it is unlikely to appeal to a general audience given its narrow scope, but it should be of great interest to Bauman scholars.
In Bauman’s later postmodern and liquid turn writings, the general dissolution of human bonds and culture is presented as a random collection of connections and disconnections, shaped by negative globalisation, deregulation, consumption, and unpredictable market forces, with individual lives taking the form of short-term projects and episodes. Although modernity has undergone a transition from a solid to a liquid form of modernity, Bauman does not identify one event or date as the moment marking the transition from solid to liquid modernity. This transition is reflected in a dissolution of ‘the social’; there has been a rejection of long-term state planning and investment. The structures that were designed to provide security and stability are becoming progressively more deregulated, individualised, and privatised, ideas reflected in Thatcher’s views that: ‘There is no alternative’ and that ‘there is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families’. Individuals are now solely responsible for dealing with the hardships and uncertainties they face; as a result, personal problems are no longer seen as public issues. In addition, there has been a separation of power from politics, which means that politicians are less able to protect people from the (increasingly international or global) problems that face us. Liquid modernity is characterised by a decline in ideas about a ‘common good’ and social justice.
In contrast to ‘order-obsessed’ solid modernity, that Bauman describes as a ‘society of all-embracing, compulsory and enforced homogeneity’ (Bauman, 2000: 25), liquid modernity is defined as a ‘phase in the history of modernity’ that is ‘in many ways novel’ (Bauman, 2000: 2), characterised by ‘the dissolution of forces which could keep the question of order and system on the political agenda’(Bauman, 2000: 6).
In Izabela Wagner’s (2020) book Bauman: A Biography, the author tells Bauman’s story, starting from his childhood by selectively drawing upon the historical record to present a positive evaluation of Zygmunt Bauman’s biography. The later book, My Life in Fragments (Bauman, 2023), is a biography brought together by Izabela Wagner from Zygmunt Bauman’s unpublished materials about his life, including a 54-page autobiographical text ‘The Poles, The Jews and I’, detailed diary entries and letters to his daughters and grandchildren. In both books the key events in Bauman’s eventful life are described, including the experience of Anti-Semitism in his hometown of Poznan; his personal reflection on the Jewish identity, the hostility, prejudice and discrimination he faced at school, his experience of fleeing the Nazi invasion of Poland, his life in the Soviet Union, joining the Polish Army during the war and his continuing life in the military from 1945 onwards; his forced emigration from Poland to Israel in 1968, the evolution of his understanding of and relationship to socialism and his life in the United Kingdom, following his appointment at the University of Leeds.
Wagner (2020) explains that her approach in the initial book was to ‘defend [Bauman] from misunderstandings and erroneous accusations, and to expose the impact of xenophobia, nationalism and anti-Semitism’ (p. 404) – prejudicial ideas and practices that helped to shape Bauman’s life course. My Life in Fragments consists of an introduction by Wagner and seven chapters opening with Bauman reflecting on the role and purpose of autobiographical writing and the subjectivity of memory. In the introduction Wagner explains that Bauman’s motivation to write about himself was to preserve his life stories from oblivion but also his motives were intergenerational, to explain to his family how his life was intertwined with the changing political context in Europe to help them understand the situations he found himself in and the choices he made.
Wagner’s approach to biography takes its starting point from Everett Hughes and focuses on the individual’s feeling of identity (Who am I?) and master status (How do others see me?). This was highlighted by Hughes in the perception and status of Black American doctors in the United States in 1950s. In the 1950s race was defined by Hughes as a master status-determining trait. The quandary, for white Americans who encountered a Black doctor, was do they choose to treat the Black doctor as a member of a professional group and accord them the status as such or view the doctor as member of a racial group and deny them the status of a doctor. To avoid this dilemma, it was not uncommon for White Americans to avoid contact with Black professionals.
The most contentious phase of Bauman’s life is his involvement with the KBW (Korpusu Bezpiecze ństwa Wewnętrznego), the Polish secret service from 1945 to 1953. This phase of Bauman’s life is discussed in chapter five of Wagner’s (2020) biography and is mentioned in all the published accounts of Bauman’s life. Bauman (2004: 17) explains, at the outbreak of the Second World War Poland was a multi-ethnic society containing a mixture of religious faiths, languages, and customs. At the end of the war, the Polish government attempted to unify the nation through a process of Polinisation, the forced assimilation and conversion of non-Poles into the Polish language, customs, and traditions. Those people who were deemed unsuitable for assimilation and conversion were forced out of the country.
The process of assimilation and forced migration was not unanimously accepted by the Polish population. After the war, the Home Army remained loyal to the Polish Government-in-Exile and refused to hand over their weapons to the newly formed Communist regime. Stalin viewed the Polish Home Army as terrorists and an obstacle to the successful Soviet takeover of Poland. According to Dudek and Paczkowski (2005), 32,477 people were arrested for ‘crimes against the state’ between 1946 and 1948, and 8000 death sentences were passed in 1945–1946.
As Best (2013) points out, the KBW was part of the Ministry of Public Security, and its central task was to suppress anti-communist resistance in Poland, including seeking out the remaining members of the Armia Krajowa (Polish Home Army) who were the main armed resistance to the occupying Nazi forces during the war. The Polish Home Army had organised the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and other attacks against German forces, sabotaging German road and rail transport, assassinated well-known Nazi collaborators and Gestapo officials, and supplied intelligence to the Allies.
The KBW’s roles also included managing internal and foreign intelligence, engaging in counterintelligence, monitoring governmental and civilian communications, and keeping in check anti-state activity. The KBW also had a role to play in border control and the management of prisons and concentration camps for political prisoners and opponents of the state. Following the collapse of the Stalinist regime in Poland, the Polish people began the process of truth and reconciliation in Poland following the end of Communist rule (1944–1990). In an effort to undo the heritage of totalitarian structures and systems acquired from the Communist regime. Central to this course of action was the process of Lustration. Many Polish people shared a concern that in the immediate post-communist period, former Communists attempted to claim a share of the responsibility for bringing about democracy in Poland by reinventing themselves as democrats.
Lustration is the process of assembling and publishing formerly secret archives from the post-war period in Poland, making the names and records of agents and collaborators available to the public, and investigating ‘crimes against the Polish nation’ conducted by former wartime Nazi collaborators and Communists during the post-war Stalinist period. The lustration process impacted Bauman both professionally and personally following the release of official state documents about his career in the military from 1945 to 1953. Consequently, Bauman’s involvement with the KBW became known.
The Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), a founding member of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience, a European Union educational project that is focused on raising awareness and promoting educational initiatives about the crimes of totalitarian regimes, is a governmental organisation that has been responsible for, among other things, the process of lustration since 2007. In 2006 Piotr Gontarczyk published an account in the Polish magazine Biuletyn of Bauman’s activities from the end of the Second World War until his removal from the army in 1953. In 2007 the story was further explored by Polish historian Bogdan Musial, who also published an account of Bauman’s activities from the end of the Second World War until he departed from the army in 1953. Drawing upon released secret files, Gontarczyk described Bauman’s successful career in the KBW.
Wagner (2020) describes Bauman’s passage from his military life to the secret service as smooth, but that the change was imposed upon Bauman and the soldiers under his command. Bauman was recruited into the KBW by Anatol Fejgin, who in 1945 became the commander of the secret police in the Polish Ministry of Public Security. Like Bauman, Fejgin had escaped the Nazi invasion of Poland by fleeing to the Soviet Union in May 1943. At the end of the Stalinist period, Fejgin was sent to prison for 12 years for human rights abuses.
Wagner (2020) dismisses Bauman’s critics as right-wing anti-Semites and the role of lustration as propaganda, Wagner concludes that: ‘In short, there is nothing in the available documents that indicates Zygmunt Bauman was a communist criminal’ (p. 132). She draws upon the historical record to criticise the IPN as a body ‘essentially geared to distributing pro-government, nationalist propaganda’. She also accuses the IPN of a ‘smear campaign’ against Bauman by selectively releasing documents about his past, which led to ‘the construction of an erroneous picture of Bauman’s complicity in the construction of communism in Poland’ (Wagner, 2020: 113). She is critical of the process of lustration as having an underpinning logic that is the same as 1968: to purge society (p.378–379). She also accepts the legitimate role of the KBW as ‘protecting the peace in the liberated territories’ by tracing ‘anyone opposed to the revolutionary changes’ (Wagner, 2020: 118) and Bauman’s account of their activities as ‘a necessary step in the construction of the new Poland’ (p. 19). For Wagner (2020), Bauman’s engagement in the KBW gave him ‘agency’ or the aspiration to build a political system that would bring about social justice: ‘He was among those who thought they would change the country with a new system that supported a society not divided into religious or ethnic groups’. Although Wagner (2020) presents a selective reading on events that ‘lends credence to the records of the security services’ (p. 121) and Bauman’s role in how the events unfolded, there are many interesting insights that she presents. She gives a detailed account of why the Red Army, including the 4th Polish Division in which Bauman was an officer, did not cross the Vistula River and support the Polish Home Army and other Poles involved in the Warsaw Rising. As Wagner (2020) explains:
The advance stopped on the east bank of the Vistula River. The armies merely looked on while as many as 200,000 Polish fighters and civilians were crushed by the Germans on the other side of the river . . . Polish soldiers, immobilized by Stalin ’s decision, passively watched the massacre of the Warsaw population. (pp. 96–97)
Wagner (2020) explains that the 4th Polish Division used their time on the riverbank ‘cooking and enjoying meals’, studying rules and manuals, and doing cleaning work (pp. 90–91).
The Polish Home Army refused to accept Stalinist rule post-1945, an act which was identified by Stalin as terrorism. Drawing on the language of Emmanuel Levinas who Bauman draws upon in his postmodern ethics, when Bauman spoke about his time in the KBW he ‘defaces’ the Home Army as terrorists and does so without any attempt at re-humanising the victims of the Stalinist terror in Poland. At best, Bauman is presented by Wagner as the indifferent, unthinking spectator who viewed the persecution of others with indifference and obedience. Bauman simply did not question how or why the KBW defined an issue as a security issue; the act of defining becomes in itself the act of allocating guilt. This provides the moral justification for acts of organised aggression against the Other who is defined by the Stalinist state as a threat to the community. From Hannah Arendt’s perspective, Bauman was ‘thoughtless’: his lack of thinking, doubting, and questioning was what underpinned his actions rather than wickedness at heart. Arendt would no doubt suggest that Bauman’s immoral motivation is found in habit rather than passion.
Wagner does little more than present an account of what Bauman preferred to say about himself. Chapter four of My Life in Fragments on ‘Maturation’ is a good example. The chapter is Bauman’s reflection account of his activities in the immediate post war period, including the period of Bauman’s life from 1946 to 1953 and his work in the KBW. Bauman explains that what happened during this period was a ‘string of events’: ‘it was not possible to distinguish “what happened to me” from “what I did myself”’ (p. 125). According to Wagner, the chapter is a response to those people who have criticised Bauman for his silence about this period. Bauman explains that he remained silent about joining the KBW: ‘simply because signing up included a promise to keep it secret. I was not allowed to break this promise’ (p. 127). Bauman describes joining the KBW as ‘a consequential “blind chance”’ (p. 126).
Bauman again describes the role of the KBW was to protect Poland and disarm ‘armed’ bands. However, he was only sent out into the field to seek out armed bands once as his role was to work as an instructor, sitting at a desk in the political and education department and later in the KBW’s Division of Propaganda. There is much more to the work of the KBW than Bauman describes in this chapter. The KBW engaged in stopping all anti-state activity, ethnic cleansing, vote rigging and other violent and unpleasant activities. As Davis et al. (2023) argue the KBW had a vital role to play in the Stalinisation of post-war Poland: ‘Poland was vital geo-politically for Stalin’s ambitions, and so was controlled from Moscow via a complex network of security institutions, such as the KBW’ (xxi).
One of the central themes of Wagner’s argument in both books is that Bauman’s life was overshadowed by the tensions between his Polishness and his Jewishness. However, as Wagner (2020) used the same source material in her biography of Bauman and consequently for people who have read Wagner’s (2020) biography of Bauman, My Life in Fragments, contains very little new material and no surprises.
A very different approach to understanding Bauman is presents in Peter Beilharz’s (2020) unconventional memoir, Intimacy in Post-Modern Times: A Friendship with Zygmunt Bauman in which Beilharz records the friendship that he had with Zygmunt Bauman over several decades. The book is Beilharz’s personal attempt to narrate their relationship following Bauman’s death and the ‘almost unbearable loss’ (Beilharz, 2020: x) that he felt following the death of his dear friend and teacher. Beilharz’s first contact with Bauman was in 1988 when he sent him a photocopy of the review of Bauman’s book Legislators and Interpreters that he had written for the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, thinking that Bauman would not have the opportunity to otherwise read it. Beilharz never expected Bauman to reply to his letter and copy of the review. But he did and so the friendship began with Bauman becoming a ‘perennial presence’ in Beilharz life. Beilharz describes his friendship with Bauman as not confessional in nature, and that he was unsure if it was a ‘special relationship’. The book contains much self-clarification and self-disclosure on Beilharz’s part. Beilharz shares the correspondence and his reflection on their exchanges he had with Bauman and his recollections of his visits to the Bauman’s family home in Leeds. There was clearly great warmth and openness between the two men, and both describe love as central to their relationship.
There is also reflection on Bauman’s understanding of and approach to sociology, with Bauman described as eclectic and intellectually promiscuous, sceptical of fads and fashions but with a: ‘lifelong affinity with critical theory’ (122).
There is some of Bauman’s personal history presented but not in detail, rather Beilharz directs his reader to Izabel Wagner’s (2020) biography of Bauman. Although he does dismiss the: ‘Allusions to the dirty hands of [Bauman’s] communist past’ on the grounds that: ‘the only evidence seems to be that there is no evidence’ (Wagner, 2020: 197). The tensions between the Eastern and Western Left are mentioned including E.P. Thompson’s dismissive review of Bauman’s Between Class and Elite (1972) and Keith Tester’s (2006) analysis of the episode, in which he links to Ali Rattansi’s evaluation of Bauman’s work, with Rattansi described as acting like: ‘Inspector Clouseau; he is the officer of the flaw’ (Beilharz, 2020: 171). It is a great shame that someone as knowledgeable of Bauman’s life and work as Beilharz and Tester did not engage directly with people who have investigated Bauman’s communist activities and the Stalinisation of post-war Poland or with Rattansi’s informed critique of Bauman’s contribution to sociology. Beilharz is critical of people such as Dennis Smith who described Bauman as ‘careerist’, again without outlining Smith’s argument or presenting a line of reasoning against his view.
In addition, Beilharz lists his global travels over the decades of his friendship with Bauman, the people he met on these journeys, invitations to speak and write that he received over the same period and the books and papers he published. Beilharz (2020: 21) reflects negatively on the ‘cultural and structural transformations of the university’, and he is clearly bitter about the manner of his early retirement from La Trobe University in Melbourne.
There is much evidence to support Beilharz view on the changing nature of the university. At the time of writing this review, Cambridge University issued a statement outlining the economic impact of the University on the UK economy. The University website reported that Cambridge University contributes nearly £30 billion to the UK economy and supports more than 86,000 jobs across the United Kingdom (Cambridge University, 2023: accessed 20 March 2023).
Bauman as photographer
Zygmunt Bauman was an enthusiastic amateur photographer for most of the 1980s at a time when Peter Beilharz and Janet Wolff (2023) the editors of a volume on Bauman’s contribution to photography, describe Bauman’s sociology as being ‘in some kind of hiatus’ (p. 5). During this period, Bauman (1989) was becoming disillusioned with his attempts to forward Marxism as a project and had yet to become the critic of modernity following the publication of Modernity and the Holocaust. The chapter by Jack Palmer, for example, suggests that photography may have filled the gap left by his disillusionment with sociology in the 1980s. Although Bauman never argued that there were links between his intellectual work and his photography, many of the photographs in the volume reflect life in Thatcher’s Britain and in particular the impact Thatcherism had on the lives of people living in the most deprived areas of Leeds. For Palmer, Bauman’s sociological imagination ‘had a sensitising effect’ on his photography. The volume contains chapters written by friends and colleagues that Bauman worked with during this period, many of whom were also subjects of Bauman’s photographic work. There is a chapter by Izabela Wagner on Janina Bauman’s career in Polish film before 1968 and a chapter by Keith Tester on Zygmunt Bauman’s love of film. Between the chapters written by Bauman’s fellow academics there are shorter more personal ‘photographic essays’ written by the Bauman’s children, grandchildren and close friends reflecting on their relationships with Janina and Zygmunt and the role of photography in those relationships.
There is little by way of critique or negative comment in the book. However, Griselda Pollock explains that Bauman developed his skills in photography through his involvement in the Leeds Camera Club, described as a male dominated institution. On page 106, Peter Beilharz and Janet Wolff reproduced a photograph of Bauman with a young female model. Griselda Pollock (Bryant and Pollock, 2023: 27) reflects on the masculine/erotic gaze in several of Bauman’s photographs of young women and asks why Bauman chose not to photograph young men? There is a link here between Pollock’s observations and Rattansi’s (2017) reflection that Bauman ignored the role of gender in making ‘consumerism’ the dominant ideology of modern capitalism.
As Griselda Pollock (2020) points out: ‘Gender was not a topic for Bauman. Feminist theory remained an impenetrable territory’ (p. 10) and ‘My feminist work as an art historian and cultural theorist was, it seems, forever a closed book to Zygmunt Bauman’ (p. 22).
Wagner (2020: 357) mentions in passing that Bauman hired some female models and did a series of nude photographs. According to Beilharz, these photographs were in the style of Man Ray. Wagner does not explain that Bauman had an exhibition of his work in the gallery space of Brotherton Library in Leeds. The series of nudes was not well received by visitors, and many described the images as soft porn, especially one photograph with the title ‘Woman making an exhibition of herself’. Several of the photographs were vandalised by visitors. The Bauman Institute did have a photomontage video of Bauman’s photography, including some nude models; however, the Institute has since taken the montage off their website.
Zygmunt Bauman and the west
Jack Palmer (2023) explains that his intention in writing the book Zygmunt Bauman and the West: A Sociology of Intellectual Exile, was not to present an uncritical biography, or an exegesis of Zygmunt Bauman’s work, rather Palmer describes the book as an ‘essayistic’ attempt to provide a contextualised frame for interpreting and disentangling the paths of Zygmunt Bauman’s contribution to sociology including Bauman’s reflections on colonialism and decolonialism; his engagement with Jewish history and culture in relation to Europe and the West; his work on communism, post-communism and Easter Europe and Bauman’s ‘late style’ with its focus on the crisis facing humanity. Palmer’s book is then an intellectual biography focused on the factors shaping and underpinning Bauman’s arguments. The book lives up to Palmer’s claim. Palmer’s intention is to demonstrate that Bauman’s work contains an erudite problematisation of global modernity that strives to demonstrate that there are many ways of being and of being together. While there is some of Bauman’s personal history presented in the book, it is not particularly detailed, rather, Palmer directs the reader to Izabel Wagner’s (2020) biography of Bauman. Like Wagner, Palmer does not look in detail at the period of Bauman’s life from 1946 to 1953 and his work in the KBW.
The ambivalence of Bauman’s social position as an exile with a fragmented life trajectory positioned him as a stranger with a distinct perspective and sepulchral or melancholic voice that he used to reflect on the Western experience. The book makes extensive use of the personal papers and other unpublished materials donated by the Bauman family to the University of Leeds.
The book explores the ‘elective affinity’ between Bauman’s ‘exilic position’ and the ‘essayistic orientation’ of his work. The essay is defined by Palmer as a form of non-fiction prose, which is open-ended, exploratory and a form of intellectual storytelling. The essay form is temporary, subject to revision and escapes classification and typification. The essay makes no claim to provide a complete picture; it is always inconclusive. Concepts are deployed in an experimental way with metaphors used to scaffold the imagination and reveal the working of social processes. Driven beyond the border and placed on the margins by the condition of exile can generate a distinct exilic position, cognitive standpoint and unique interpretive advantage. For Bauman, this advantage argues Palmer is found underpinning his contribution to a critical sociology.
Although there is no detailed examination of colonialism or imperialism in Bauman’s work and that Bauman does not engage with postcolonial critics as Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak or Homi Bhabha, Palmer is keen to reject Ali Rattansi’s argument that Bauman spoke from the perspective of the ‘white male gaze’, limited by Eurocentrism, gender blindness and lack of awareness of racism. For Palmer (pp. 98–103), Bauman’s contribution to sociology converges with the recent engagement of sociology with postcolonialism. For Bauman Eastern Europe experienced colonisation by the Soviet Union, and the imposition of a distinct form of totalising and universalising form of Eurocentrism. For Palmer, the ‘postcolonial turn’ in sociology is a product of the uncertainty generated by Bauman’s engagement with a sociology of postmodernity. Bauman’s understanding of the order imposed by the gardening state as explored in Modernity and the Holocaust made people question modern universalism in all its forms including the imposition of ethnic and regional order by colonial powers. As Palmer makes clear: ‘There is an elective affinity, furthermore, between the metaphor of gardening and the establishment of colonial states’ (p 100).
Moreover, Palmer argues that the term Eurocentric is often used as a term of abuse, based upon the assumption of Europe as homogeneous, without thought to Europe’s internal peripheries and internal Others, most notably the Jewish experience of the ‘drama of assimilation’. As reflected in Bauman’s interpretative charting of his own exilic experience. Here Palmer follows the argument presented by Matt Dawson (2021) in his exchange with Ali Rattansi (2017). Palmer argues that Bauman engaged in a ‘hypothetical dialogue’ with postcolonial commentators notably because from an East European perspective the Soviet empire was equivalent to the British and other European empires.
Palmer’s assertion that post-communism has a direct parallel with post colonialism and that the experience of Polish people under Communism had much in common with subaltern, marginalised position of people in, for example, Africa ignores the debates about the contentious parallels between ‘postmodernism’ and ‘postcolonialism’. Also, Palmer ignores the fact that Bauman presents a positive view of the Soviet Russian colonisation of Poland as a progressive development. In addition, the Polish colonial experience did not have the important ingredient of race. Moreover, as Bauman’s experience shows his Jewish/Polish background was not an impediment to his upwards mobility in Stalinist Poland until the events of 1968. Even during the thaw of the late 1950s and the events of 1968 Bauman never denounced Soviet imperialism and did not conceive of pre-Soviet/pre-colonial Poland as a Utopian ideal.
Bauman’s work remained abstract and at a general level and there is little critique of the issues concerning Poland and Central and Eastern Europe in liquid modernity particularly in terms of the negative effects of European Union membership on the periphery of the EU, and particularly on Poland.
Taking a starting point from Leela Gandhi’s argument (2019: 4) that: postcolonialism can be seen as a theoretical resistance to the mystifying amnesia of the colonial aftermath. It is a disciplinary project devoted to the academic task of revisiting, remembering and, crucially, interrogating the colonial past. The process of returning to the colonial scene discloses a relationship of reciprocal antagonism and desire between colonizer and colonized.
One area that Palmer could have explored in terms of a parallel between post-communism, post colonialism and that the experience of Polish people under Communism is in terms of truth and reconciliation. As a process of truth and reconciliation, lustration can be viewed as a key aspect of postcolonialism. As Gandhi (2019: 7–8) goes on to explain,
if postcoloniality can be described as a condition troubled by the consequences of a self-willed historical amnesia, then the theoretical value of postcolonialism inheres, in part, in its ability to elaborate the forgotten memories of this condition. In other words, the colonial aftermath calls for an ameliorative and therapeutic theory which is responsive to the task of remembering and recalling the colonial past.
Palmer does not explore this issue, but rather ends the book with a discussion of Bauman’s late style that is focused on the contemporary world as an ‘active dystopia’ reflected in the experiences of people fleeing conflicts that are not of their own making, left to drown at sea with their children or detained indefinitely in remote camps, while seeking an escape from violence and poverty.
Palmer’s book is not solely about a sociologist writing about his favourite sociologist’s work within the context of the history of sociology. However, the materials drawn from the unpublished Bauman archive do provide some interesting and informative new information for Bauman scholars. There are some interesting and informed arguments presented on the ‘exilic position’ of Adorno, Mannheim, Arendt and others and the impact this had on their contribution to social thought. In addition, there is some interesting and informed argument presented on the essay as a vehicle for presenting sociological insight.
Conclusion
The biographical texts published since 2020 reflect that Zygmunt Bauman was well respected and admired both personally and professionally. After spending the early years of his academic life writing about orthodox Marxism and actually existing socialism in Eastern Europe. Following his exile in 1968 Bauman turned his attention to looking at socialism as an active utopia. During this period Bauman was of the view that although state socialism was often oppressive, the socialist project was still in the last analysis based upon the pursuit of social justice and greater inclusion. With the publication of Modernity and the Holocaust (Bauman, 1989) there is a distinct shift in Bauman’s thought, he becomes one of the foremost critics of all forms of modernity including socialism. All forms of modernity involve an idea of the perfect way of living and the imposition of some form of rational societal design upon the population to achieve that end. Rational bureaucratic modernity generates an agentic state, reduces the ability of the individual to exercise their human agency and, consequently, generates forms of adiaphora in which people judge their actions not by the moral content but by their ability to achieve a bureaucratic objective. With his retirement, his emerging critique of modernity and his greater understanding of the world shaped by his experience of exile, Bauman appears to take stock of his life reflected in the 54-page autobiographical text ‘The Poles, The Jews and I’, and other documents not intended for publication but only to be read by his close family. What comes across from reading these diverse biographical texts is that Bauman came to view his own past actions through his critique of modernity. He himself had worked within a bureaucratic organisation the KBW, which was part of the mechanism for the imposition of a societal design to bring about what he assumed at the time to be a more equitable and inclusive form of society. Looking back at his life from the perspective of his older self, having had lost faith in modernity in general and socialism in particular. Bauman may well have come to judge the actions of his younger self as thoughtless, following Brzeziński’s (2022) argument that Bauman found himself in a culture with a distinct control function that shaped his cognitive abilities, goals and patterns of behaviour. In other words, Bauman came to view his actions were rooted in an agentic state, guided by bureaucratic rationality of his actions and his ability to achieve bureaucratic objectives and not guided by the moral content of what he did.
