Titles in this series
Akbar Ahmed, Islam under Siege
Zygmunt Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World
Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences
Zygmunt Bauman, Identity: Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi
Norberto Bobbio, Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction
Alex Callinicos, Equality
Diane Coyle, Governing the World Economy
David Crystal, The Language Revolution
Andrew Gamble, Politics and Fate
Paul Hirst, War and Power in the 21st Century
Bill Jordan and Franck Düvell, Migration: The Boundaries of Equality and Justice
David Lyon, Surveillance after September 11
James Mayall, World Politics: Progress and its Limits
Ray Pahl, On Friendship
Christian Reus-Smith, American Power and World Order
Shaun Riordan, The New Diplomacy
Copyright © Zygmunt Bauman and Benedetto Vecchi 2004
The right of Zygmunt Bauman and Benedetto Vecchi to be identified as
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First published in 2004 by Polity Press.
Reprinted in 2008.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bauman, Zygmunt.
Identity: conversations with Benedetto Vecchi / Zygmunt Bauman.
p. cm. – (Themes for the 21st century)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7456-3308-4 (alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7456-3309-1(pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Identity. I. Vecchi, Benedetto. II. Title. III. Series.
BD236 .B39 2004
302.5–4-dc22
2003020403
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Introduction by Benedetto Vecchi
Identity
Notes
Index
In all his writings Zygmunt Bauman manages to unsettle our fundamental beliefs, and this book of interviews on the question of identity is no exception. The interviews were somewhat out of the ordinary in that they were not conducted with a tape recorder, and interviewer and interviewee never came face to face. E-mail was the chosen instrument for our dialogue, and it imposed a somewhat fragmentary rhythm to our exchange of questions and answers. In the absence of the time pressure associated with a head-to-head, our long-distance dialogue was marked by many pauses for reflection, requests for clarification, and minor deviations into matters we had not originally intended to explore. Every reply from Bauman only served to increase my sense of bewilderment. As the material he provided began to build up, I became increasingly aware that I had entered a much larger continent than I had previously expected and one whose maps were almost useless when it came to finding directions. This should come as no surprise, because Zygmunt Bauman is not like other sociologists or ‘social scientists’. His reflections are work-in-progress, and he is never content with defining or ‘conceptualizing’ an event, but rather aims to establish connections with social phenomena or manifestations of the public ethos that seem far removed from the initial object of the investigation, and to comment on those phenomena and manifestations. The following pages will be more than sufficient to demonstrate this roving nature of his reflections, which makes it impossible to establish his intellectual influences or his membership of any particular school of thought.
Zygmunt Bauman has often been defined as an eclectic sociologist, and he would certainly take no offence at such a definition. Nevertheless the methodology he brings to bear on a subject aims above all to ‘reveal’ the myriad connections between the object under investigation and other manifestations of life in human society. Indeed, this sociologist of Polish origin finds it essential to gather the ‘truth’ of every feeling, lifestyle and collective behaviour. This is only possible if you analyse the social, cultural and political context in which a particular phenomenon exists as well as the phenomenon itself. Hence the roving nature of his thoughts throughout his works which study subjects ranging from the crisis in public debate in In Search of Politics (1999) to the changing role of intellectuals in a society based on attention-seeking in Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Postmodernity and Intellectuals (1987). His intellect is, in fact, both restive and rigorous; it is true to the present, but careful to acknowledge its genealogy, or rather genealogies.
On this occasion, the subject was identity, a subject that is by its very nature elusive and ambivalent. Bauman faced up to the challenge and performed a double somersault: he reread the history of modern sociology in the light of the obsession and importance with which current public debate treats identity, and reached the conclusion that it is better not to look for reassuring responses in the ‘established texts’ of critical thought. Liquid Modernity (2000) projects us into a world in which everything is elusive, where the anguish, pain and insecurity caused by ‘living in society’ require a patient and ongoing examination of reality and how individuals are ‘placed’ within it. Any attempt to placate the inconstancy and precariousness of the plans men and women make for their lives and thus explain this sense of disorientation by parading past certainties and established texts would be as futile as attempting to empty the ocean with a bucket.
We have here an intellectual who considers the principle of responsibility to be the first act of any involvement in public life. For a sociologist this means perceiving sociology not as a discipline ‘separate’ from other fields of knowledge, but as providing the analytical tool to establish a lively interaction between it and philosophy, social psychology and narrative. We should not, therefore, find it strange if the documents on which he tests his penchant for ‘shortcircuiting’ mass culture and high culture include articles from leading newspapers, advertising slogans and Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophical reflections on Don Giovanni.
Although he is not keen to speak about his own life, it needs to be said that Zygmunt Bauman was born in 1925 into a Jewish family in Poland. Having escaped to the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Second World War, he joined the Polish army allied to the Red Army, and in it he fought Nazism. In his book Conversations with Bauman (2001) he tells us that he commenced his studies and degree in sociology on his return to Warsaw, and that his first teachers were Stanislaw Ossowski and Julian Hochfeld, two Polish intellectuals little known outside Poland but fundamental to his intellectual formation. Above all they gave him the ability ‘to look the world in the face’ without recourse to preconceived ideologies. If you ask Bauman, who became a leading figure in the Warsaw ‘school of sociology’, to describe the difficulties experienced during the 1950s and 1960s, he does so without any hostility to those who opposed his work. Indeed, he uses his subtle irony to compare the arduous academic freedom in Poland with European and American academic conformism. He is equally discreet about his role in the ‘Polish October’ of 1956, when he took part in the powerful reform movement that challenged the leading role of Polish United Workers’ Party and the country’s subjugation to Moscow’s will. This experience marked Bauman and prepared him for his showdown with the official ideology of Soviet Marxism in which the works of Antonio Gramsci were to play their part. He started to make frequent trips abroad. He took a year’s sabbatical at the London School of Economics, and attended many conferences in almost all Europe’s great universities. Then came 1968, which was to prove a turning-point in his life. Bauman, who supported the fledgling Polish students’ movement, had his works banned by the Communist Party when anti-Semitism was used to repress students and university teachers who demanded an end to singleparty rule in the name of ‘liberty, justice and equality’.
After he had been prevented from teaching, Zygmunt Bauman moved to England, where he still lives. In almost all his books, and particularly in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), he expresses his enormous gratitude to Janina, his wife and life companion, to whom he is very close both emotionally and intellectually. She is perhaps one of the most important intellectual figures in Bauman’s reflections first on ‘solid modernity’ and later on ‘liquid modernity’.
His intellectual life in England, where he teaches at Leeds University, has been intensely productive. I have already referred to some of the works, but taken as a whole it is quite clear that with the publication of Postmodern Ethics (1993), Bauman started to concentrate on globalization, examining it not only from an economic point of view but also and primarily for its effects on daily life. Bauman, doyen of European sociology, took this as the starting point for his exploration of the ‘new world’ that has been created by the increasing interdependence on planet earth. This period produced such books as Globalization: The Human Consequences (1998), Community (2000), The Individualized Society (2001), Liquid Modernity (2000) and Society under Siege (2002) which constitute Bauman’s great tableau on globalization as a radical and irreversible change. He perceives it as a ‘great transformation’ that has affected state structures, working conditions, interstate relations, collective subjectivity, cultural production, daily life and relations between the self and the other. This book of interviews on identity could be considered a small addition to this tableau. To paraphrase one of his replies on identity, we can confidently assert that globalization, or rather ‘liquid modernity’, is not a puzzle that can be put together on the basis of a pre-established model. If anything, it should be seen as a process, as should its understanding and analysis; as should identity that asserts itself in the crisis of multiculturalism, or in Islamic fundamentalism, or when the internet facilitates the expression of off-the-peg identities.
The question of identity is associated too with the breakdown of the welfare state and the subsequent growth in a sense of insecurity, with the ‘corrosion of character’ that insecurity and flexibility in the workplace have produced in society. The conditions are created for a hollowing out of democratic institutions and a privatization of the public sphere, which increasingly resembles a talk show where everyone shouts out their own justifications without ever managing to affect the injustice and lack of freedom existing in the modern world.
However the ‘corrosion of character’ that figures so prominently in Bauman’s most recent works is simply the most striking manifestation of the profound anxiety that typifies the behaviour, decision-making and life projects of men and women in Western society. As an intellectual who experienced the horrors of the twentieth century – war, the persecution of Jews and exile from ‘his’ country so as to remain loyal to himself – Bauman knows very well the difference between long-term phenomena and contingent expressions of a ‘long transformation’, which globalization clearly is. It is essential to understand the prominent features of a ‘long transition’ in order to identify social trends, but it is equally necessary to contextualize manifestations of social existence within the long period. This is perhaps why Bauman on several occasions gently mocks those who attempt to conceptualize definitively the political relevance of identity. In a society that has made social, cultural and sexual identities uncertain and transient, any attempt to ‘firm up’ that which has become liquid through a politics of identity would inevitably lead critical thought up a blind alley. His is therefore an invitation to exercise a little wisdom, but this will inevitably be disrupted by unexpected guests, namely those strategies for adaptation to ‘liquid modernity’ that we see at work in late capitalist societies. Discussion on identity is therefore a socially necessary convention that is used with extreme nonchalance to mould and give substance to off-the-peg biographies. We talk of identity because of the collapse of those institutions that, to use one of Georg Simmel’s famous expressions, constituted for many years the premises upon which modern society was built.
In Community Zygmunt Bauman investigated the ambivalence required by the new social ties that are brought about in late capitalist society. They can give rise to demands for protection and a return to a familiar and restricted world that creates boundaries and barriers that hold the ‘outsider’ at bay, whoever he or she might be. At the same time, however, the community represents a shelter in relation to the planet-wide effects of globalization, as we can clearly see from the crisis that the melting pot is currently undergoing in the United States. It is as dangerous to ignore this as it is to appease it. It seems to me that the same is true of the politics of identity. It is well known that Bauman has often drawn attention to the gilded cosmopolitanism and seductive mobility of the global elites and how these contrast with the misery of those who cannot escape the local dimension. The politics of identity therefore speaks the language of those who have been marginalized by globalization. Yet many of those involved in postcolonial studies emphasize that recourse to identity should be considered an ongoing process of redefining oneself and of the invention and reinvention of one’s own history. This is where we find the ambivalence of identity: nostalgia for the past together with complete accordance with ‘liquid modernity’. It is this that creates the possibility of overturning the planetary effects of globalization and using them in a positive manner. Those who would define this operation as ‘optimism of thought and pessimism of the will’ would not in fact be mistaken. Through the breakdown in the social bonds of ‘solid modernity’ it is possible to glimpse a scenario leading towards social liberation.
True to his roots in the great European tradition of sociology, Bauman underscores the risks involved in this kind of discourse. Nevertheless it is a risk that has to be run, precisely because the question of identity needs to concern itself once again with what it really is: a socially necessary convention. If not, it is certain that the politics of identity will dominate the world stage, a danger of which we have already had plenty of warning signs. Ultimately, the various religious fundamentalisms are nothing more than the transposition of identity on to politics by cynical apprentice magicians. The deception behind this transposition can only be uncovered if you reconstruct the crossover from the individual dimension, which identity always has, to its codification as a social convention. This, I believe, is the central question.
Whatever the field of investigation in which the ambivalence of identity is tested, it is always essential to perceive the twin poles that it imposes on social existence: oppression and liberation. This mysterious circle needs to be broken. Bauman is rightly convinced that the truth can only be stated in the agora, thus removing the veil of obscurantism that prevents this same ambivalence from becoming the place where it is possible to experience one’s own principle of responsibility. It might seem contradictory that this mild man, who is so keen to protect his privacy, should constantly entreat everyone to speak up, but it is an invitation that must be accepted even when public discussion will trigger bitter disagreements. This would be the exact opposite of the public prattling of endless and unchanging TV talk shows to which we have become so accustomed. The agora is the favoured space in which to speak out on such issues as the now unrestrained privatization of the public sphere, and it is this centrality that he assigns to it that makes Bauman one of the most lucid and sceptical critics of the prevailing zeitgeist during this period of liquid ‘modernity’.