Zygmunt Bauman: biography, theory, concepts, works

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ZygmuntBauman was a Polish philosopher, sociologist, professor and writer. Her work influences studies in sociology, philosophy and psychology. É one of the greatest intellectuals of the 21st century. When studying human interactions in late Modernity, also called Post-Modernity, he he realized that "the relationships flow through the space between the fingers".

These are less lasting relationships, there is a pervasive fear that makes individuals insecure and self-centered, so security is sought in pleasure immediate that consumption can offer, in voluntary isolation, in distancing from the different and in the fleeting of relationships that do not support mistakes or adversities.

In these phenomena, Bauman found a common point: the liquidity. Based on his acumen and genius, he scrupulously analyzed what he conceptualized as liquid modernity, liquid love and liquid fear.

Read too: Karl Marx – great influencer of Bauman's thought

Biography of Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman was born on November 19, 1925, in Poznan, Poland

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. Of Jewish descent, he fled with his family after the invasion of troops Nazis in your country. In 1939, his family took refuge in Soviet Union. Bauman joined the First Polish Army, serving in the Soviet-controlled grouping as a political instructor. In 1940, he joined the Unified Workers' Party, the Communist Party of Poland. In 1945, he joined the Military Intelligence Service, in which he stayed for three years.

Zygmunt Bauman in the uniform of a Major in the Internal Security Corps, Polish Special Military Unit (1953).

After the end of Second World War, Bauman returned to Warsaw and he combined his military career with academic studies and political militancy in the Workers' Party. Studied sociology at the Academy of Politics and Social Sciences in Warsaw and continued his studies with a master's degree at the University of Warsaw. In 1950 he left the Workers' Party, and in 1953 he was expelled from the Polish army.

He completed his master's degree in 1954 and became an assistant professor of sociology at the university he attended. Although close to Marxist orthodoxy, influenced by Antonio Gramsci and Georg Simmel, his criticisms of the Polish government, which at the time was communist, earned him persecutions for 15 years, to the point that, in 1968, he was fired, lost his Polish citizenship and, along with his wife, as well as other Poles of Jewish origin, was expelled from poland.

Although critical of the communist government of his country, Bauman was active in a humanist perspective of the Marxism and declared himself a socialist to the end of his life. They were initially exiled to Israel, where he taught at Tel-Aviv University.

In 1971, he was invited to teach sociology at University of Leeds, at England. He worked there until his retirement in 1990. In addition to being a professor, he was director of the department of Sociology at that institution. Since he moved to England and his publications became mostly in English, his notoriety has reached the world. He was one of the greatest intellectuals to lecture on the so-called Post-Modernity.

He married the also Jewish writer Janina Bauman, whom she met in her youth, when she served in the war, and with whom she lived until her death in 2009, having together three daughters: Irena, Lydia and Anna. Bauman died on January 9, 2017, aged 91.

In all, he published 50 works, of which the most prominent were: the malaise of Pyou-Morderliness (1997), Modernity thereliquid (2000), liquid love (2003) and liquid fear (2006). Your latest work, strangers at our door (2016), spoke about the crisis of refugees who migrated to Europe at that time.

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Theories of Zygmunt Bauman

Bauman, although a professor of classical sociological training, after retiring, he turned his attention to the analysis of the new times that pointed to the horizon of late Modernity. The sharp and distant look of a man who lived the most profound experiences that marked the 20th century allowed him to assess with the necessary estrangement the changes that were to come.

His analysis focused especially on the fluidity of human relationships and the widespread feeling of fear.

Bauman, one of the most important intellectual voices of this century, coined new concepts: liquid modernity, liquid love, liquid fear. Why the insistence on derivatives of the word liquidity? Because its basic characteristics — malleability, fluidity and diffusion — are easily identified in the way people they relate to each other, to time, to themselves, in short, to the way of life that developed in late or Post-Modernity.

Zygmunt Bauman remained in intellectual activity throughout his life.[1]

Bauman puts the individualization as a trademark of modern society, and shows its ambivalence towards giving autonomy to individuals and, at the same time, insecurity by making them responsible for the future and the meaning of their lives without a determination external social. In this process, individualization is configured as an exchange of freedom and security values.

Fear is defined by Bauman as ignorance of the threat and what must be done. It develops the concept of secondary fear, a fear, always socially and culturally updated, which guides the individual's behavior whether or not there is a direct threat. This feeling, also called derivative, causes the feeling of vulnerability to danger and insecurity and is easily detached from the threats that initially caused it, that is, it is a fear detached from reality, which generates insecurity and anxiety even when dealing with hypothetical situations.

There is, in liquid and modern society, the fragmentation of primary fear — fear of death — in countless concerns and its incorporation into the flow of everyday life, since the idea of death was detached from its religious sense of passage to another life and eternity. This insertion of primary fear in everyday concern makes it totalizing and primordial in the choices to be made and in the very constitution of behavior.

Bauman emphasizes the fact that protection against individual misfortunes, previously delegated to the State (of social welfare) or communities, become the responsibility of individuals, which consequence to weakening of human bonds, the inconstancy of communal loyalties and the revocability of commitments. Individuals seek isolated solutions to socially produced problems and are encouraged to prioritize their personal safety. The individual search for any goals and not belonging to a group lead to distrust of the possible solidarity of others and even to the belief that maleficence is part of the intention of others.

Derived fear, as a behavior guide, leads individuals to be always alert to risks, and because fear is pervasive, it can be found anywhere, even in the behavior of others. people. Everyone becomes potential strangers, as it is never possible to fully predict the intention of others. Safety is identified in the self-insulation, and the supply of the need for social relations is mediated, in part, by technology that allows a contact not necessarily delimited in a common physical space.

Bauman puts human relationships as fickle. There is a distrust in the fidelity of the other and a unwillingness to build-if durable and solid partnerships. The breakup of relationships (in love or not) is defined as metaphorical death or death of the third degree.

Relationships are based on fear of exclusion. You never know where the blow will come from, who will first tire of uncomfortable and difficult commitments, or who will find more promising relationships. Both before and after this metaphorical death, time is fragmented and discontinuous, the break does not slow down the flow of life, nor does it stop it. The fragility of human bonds allows them not to be feared or difficult to maintain and that their detachment is not so painful, but they also bring the insecurity of the possibility of exclusion.

Happiness and security are pursued individually. Pragmatism also penetrates social relationships. Loneliness, defined as a insight hidden from the fear of death, it is expelled by the search for the other in a utilitarian and punctual way.

THE freedom granted in exchange for security becomes sensation through consumption. The search for protection is materialized in commodities by manipulating the fear of death as a profit generator. The amount of entertainment services and the imitation of a city within a closed condominium can be seen as ways to forge the freedom lost with spatial isolation. The consumption itself can provoke a feeling of freedom, since the possession of money allows several choices of transportation and acquisition of goods.

Communities are also consumed and do not perpetuate themselves beyond their usefulness. They are flexible, their creation and dismantling are based on choices, and these must not hinder or prevent other decisions from being taken. They are turned into protective consumer items.

In this sense, Bauman cites the aesthetic community, created by the entertainment industry. She is oriented by appearance and uses seduction as a tool. The reference is some celebrity, someone who has a lot of followers. The broadcast of news about experiences, tastes, in short, everything that involves the life of this celebrity, makes fans feel part of it without making uncomfortable commitments. There is a union lived as if it were real that does not harm the preservation and execution of individual desires.

Another example of a community is the closed condominiums, called by Bauman closed communities, places of voluntary exile — which implies an absence of long-term commitments — in which mental and moral detachment is practiced and the escape of feeling and the construction of intimacy is practiced. All other people, with their different ways of life, are shunned and seen as intruders. there is the reduction of possibilities of meeting the difference, facing a cultural challenge. In this context, the self is constructed based on preferences and consumption possibilities: you are what you like and are able to buy.

Increasing inequality is not an accidental and overlooked side effect, it is rather an integral part of a conception of human happiness and comfortable life, as well as the strategy dictated by this conception. These conceptions and strategies can be contemplated and enjoyed only as privileges, and it is practically impossible to extend their reach. The obsession with security itself is shared with greater intensity by the privileged group that has more ways to ensure protection, and the dreaded human violence is fueled by established inequalities and growing.

Derived fear, as a stable mental structure, becomes a determinant of behavior, and, by decoupling fear from direct threat, adding to the fact from the fear of death being secularized and diluted in everyday concerns, it becomes totalizing, which reflects in the behavior of individuals as a constant a state of alert in relation to the most diverse circumstances and also in relation to people who become strangers insofar as they do not know their intentions.

The communities created and consumed become the place to expel the difference and escape from strangers while they are guided by pragmatic social relations and non-possessive, simultaneously intense and fleeting, delimited by specific needs and doomed to rupture as soon as those needs are satisfied. Pervasive fear is personified in strangers, and these become combatable as specific categories or simply as difference.

Life in its totality and in the specificity of human relationships is illustrated by Bauman as a succession of episodes and a series of new beginnings.

See more: Structuralism - method of human and social sciences developed at the end of the 19th century