Custom essays, dissertations, coursework & essay help from the UK's original custom essay writing services provider
Free Essays - Sociology Essays
Of Straw Dogs and Straw Men - Contrast, compare and evaluate the arguments Zygmunt Bauman and Ulrich Beck make about 'individualisation' and 'community'
I. Introduction
Lao Tse compared humans to straw dogs (Gray: 2004:3), emphasising the insignificance of the human animal. Such a view would come as a shock to the two authors in question in this essay. Both Beck and Bauman make the mistake of placing man at the centre of the world, as the sole self-constituting agent for his actions: in doing so they replicate the binaries of modernity that they wish to escape. In order to feign this escape from modernism, they construct a structural homology. Just as the industrial society disembedded man from his links in the Feudal system, so our second modernity is now disembedding us from family, gender and class based links. In order for this to be convincing, both Beck and Bauman construct a series of straw men that they move through in order to arrive at the post-modern (or liquid modern, or second modern, depending on your choice of theorist) man. This essay's central contention will be that the central arguments of Bauman and Beck regarding the new forms of individualisation and community rely on a series of category mistakes. The primary mistake both theorists make is that they confuse discourse for experience in the world's history: a mistake with a great many repercussions.
Both theorists talk a lot about sociology's purpose: which, according to Bauman, is to give people tools with which to think (1993:6). Both scholars attempt to do this by addressing the central concern of sociology: the relationship between society and the individual. This concern cuts to the heart of what sociology is concerned with: it addresses the tension between the one and the many. How does the one (the sociologist) speak about the many (the object of study); what is the relationship between the one (acting subject) and the many (collective body); how does one get from the one (the particular, a person, or a culture) to the many (the universal, or a larger culture of group). In addressing these questions, both theorists trace a path from the pre-modern man to the emergence of post-modern man. This essay will first examine the pre-modern man upon which their schemes rest, before considering, comparing, and evaluating their arguments on the emergence of individualisation and the current possibility of community.
II. The First Straw Man: Premodern Man.
The author would be interested to meet premodern man as he is constructed in the work of Bauman and Beck. Bauman argues that premodern man had no uncertainty in his life: his life was dictated entirely by the broader social and religious categories into which he was born. Bauman asserts that the major uncertainty in premodern man's life is the uncertainty over his own death. It is not simply that this depiction is simplistic and ahistorical: for such a depiction of premodern man contains some major flaws of argument that imperil the possibility of the rest of Bauman's argument.
The first can be put simply: is it not the case that it is from the uncertainty of death that we derive all other uncertainty. What is the pressing ontological reason for action if it is not an awareness of our own finitude? If one were to take Dewey's' (1929:45) notion of how one manages risk: it is precisely physical direct risk, such as death, that provokes such great need for the myth and large social structures Bauman and Beck claim are at the centre of premodern life. Bauman asserts, like Beck, that today we live in a risk society. Yet, in this light the collapse of grand narratives of social structure onto which we can attach our identities (identity in Bauman functions rather like a coat one can attach to coat hangers) seems more indicative of the absence of risk. Here one could be tempted to reverse the old Marxist argument. Rather than superstructural religion providing the opium for infrastructural economic inequality, is it not contentedness and material opulence that today provides a satisfaction for a lack of aim and direction. What we see in premodern society, if we accept the simplifications of Beck and Bauman, is a great deal of risk.
To develop this argument, it is wise to look at words of Benjamin (1999:248), who argues: The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. The state of emergency also refers to (as well as sovereignty), how transitory meanings are: how clearly one can see through the discursive order of a sovereign power to the founding violence (Agamben: 1995:17) that lies beyond it. In every system of organisation where there is hierarchical power there will be the uncertainty of the violence (that which, as Agamben notes, does not need law to create law) that lies concealed as the basis of sovereignty. It is precisely from this sense of uncertainty that one derives risk: the risk of being both simultaneously inside and outside a juridical order. Here one feels the 'state of emergency', and to quote another Benjamin (1999:86) essay, it is from this frailty of existence that one derives the possibility of myth.
Bauman would no doubt reply to this argument that while premodern man had a great deal of uncertainty in his life, it could be dealt with by being placed into social categories and so it would not have the same power as the risk that today we see as being inherent to our own existence. Yet, this assumes that for the premodern, the famine would be attributed to the unknown, or to the Gods. Yet, if we look to Evans-Pritchard's work on the Azande (1977:42), we see that most disasters or problems are located in the socially relevant sources. All problems that can be are blamed on witchcraft: thus, it would be apparent that uncertainty is also bound up in the way the Zande understand the cosmos, much like us secondary moderns. Thus, already we see the simple dichotomisation made by Beck and Bauman, that today risk is internal, while before it was a property of the unknown, can simply not stand up to the evidence.
There are further problems with Bauman's analysis. He frequently confuses two points. It is one thing to say that premodern man had more solid social structures than our liquid modernity; it is another to say that he did not deal with risk and uncertainty because these categories were placed within social structures. The root of this problem is that in claiming modern man makes himself, Bauman forgets the great lesson of Heidegger (1962:148), that being is a dwelling. Because Bauman argues that liquid modern man is rootless and borderless, he is forced into reversing the polarity in premodern man. Yet, in making this juxtaposition he forgets the great similarity of premodern thought to liquid modern thought. Furthermore, he neglects, as the essay will develop later, that being of any sort is necessarily being in time and space, which, as Heidegger, notes, is the precondition for language.
All three 'men' we will look at place doubt and uncertainty simultaneously within categories internal to him and yet constructed by the society as a whole in which he is always already a member. The Zande who blames his neighbour for bewitching the tree stump on which he stubbed his toe, is not so different from the man reaching out for scientific explanations of how trains become derailed, and blaming decades of under investment: both construct, from social constituted categories, explanations relevant to social action.
Finally, the fixity of category that Beck and Bauman assign to premodern man is simply not tenable. It is one thing to say that a society assigns someone rigid positions. It is another to say that they do not experience identarian crises over these positions. The placing of cosmologies and social hierarchies as blueprints for action in the world always creates puzzles and anomalies, especially as the lived world changes. Furthermore, to take the foremost interpreter of Lacan, Laplanche, one can see that this uncertainty about identity is property of the relationship between a subject and hegemony on a broader level. As Laplanche (1989:130) notes:
[It] is an encounter between an individual whose psycho-somatic structures are
situated predominantly at the level of need, and signifiers emanating from an
adult. Those signifiers pertain to the satisfaction of the child's needs, but they also
convey the purely interrogative potential of other messagesand those other
messages are sexual. These enigmatic messages set the child the difficult, or even
impossible, task of mastery and symbolization and the attempt to perform it
inevitably leaves behind unconscious residues. I refer to them as the sourceobjects
of the drives.
These arguments are not as marginal to understanding how Beck and Bauman construct the modern world as they might appear. For if it is the case that premodern man, in all his diverse forms, is much closer than we think to post-modern man, then many of the shifts that are posited by Beck and Bauman either must be illusory or merely shifts of degree. Further, in some of the comparisons given here, the author hopes to show that the great problem with both theorists in question is that they forget the importance of place. They accept tacitly two discourses that should be critically examined. They accept that postmodern man is rootless and makes his own history, which, as the next two sections show, is not the case, and they accept the discourse of modernity that ascribes fixity to premodern man. It should be noted that the latter discourse was the very same discourse used to justify the modernist political project, and in light of this, it seems even more surprising they have accepted it so uncritically. Given these arguments have little basis, it becomes apparent that our current notions of individualisation and community do not adhere to phenomenon as they appear in the real world.
III. The Second Straw Man: Modern man
In contrast to our premodern friend, rooted in his absolute structures of social hierarchy and religion, our modern man is rooted in grand sets of ideas and ideologies. These are what Lyotard (1995:23) calls grand narratives. These are those larger narratives against which one can anchor one's being to give it tone and definition. These very same narratives are those that Lyotard contends are no longer possible today. The modernist project was a project of grand transition. Beck (1998:10) comments that just as modernisation dissolved the structures of feudal society in the 19C and produced the industrial society, modernity today is dissolving industrial society and another modernity is coming into being. We can see the principle leitmotif in both authors at work here: as feudal society is to industrialisation, industrialisation is to second modernity.
The grand narrative emerged with the rise of the nation-state. For Bauman, identity emerges totally dominated by nationalism. The nation state erases difference between individuals through planned activity. Such a social order makes government intervention appear as natural; modernity, as Bauman (1999:15) notes, being an ordered totality. Both authors here owe a lot to the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault (1979, 1980) elaborates a change in the order of authority, an epistemic break, whereby sovereign power begins to act directly on the body of citizens. Rather than simply deciding over death, sovereign power begins to constitute what is life, and as such constructs the notion of the individual and of the community. Foucault shares with Beck and Baumann the notion of modernism as ordered totality. The problems that emerge in Foucault's work, however, are far greater when brought into the work of Beck and Bauman. For while Foucault is practicing discursive analysis, Beck and Bauman claim to be practicing sociology.
As such, there are a number of questions they leave unanswered. It is not enough to describe an ordered totality in discourse to prove it exists in reality. If, in two hundred years time, sociologists were to read Bauman (1988:807), would they be content to believe that: in the present day society, consumer conduct (consumer freedom geared to a consumer market) moves steadily into a position of simultaneously, the cognitive and moral focus of life, integrative bond of society, and the focus of systemic management. Not only would such an assumption be untrue, it would be an error of analysis. To account for the homogeneity of discourse is never to understand whether procedures mirror the coherency of such a discourse. To begin to understand such a question, it would be necessary to answer the following questions, which Foucault, Beck and Bauman fail to do
- Given the apparent emergence of an 'ordered totality', it is evident that it could also have been possible that other epistemes could have emerged. How are we to explain the privileged development of the episteme we call modernity?
- What then, is the status of all the other series of discourses that constitute a society without being their paradigmatic episteme? It is not enough to assume societies homogeneity without looking at the massed ranks of series that are not used: that constitute the first principle for the possibility of their heterogeneity. As a relevant modern example: what place does the Christian legacy have in secular Europe today?
- It may well be the case that certain of these other, silent, epistemes, survive silently in practices that are not foregrounded by a hegemonic discourse. It is simply arrogant, for instance, to argue that feudalism simply vanished.
- Both Beck and Bauman also fail to address the point made by Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1979), that the practices instigated by the discursive procedures of modernity actually displace the ordered totality of discourse.
Through these questions, the author hopes to indicate that the notion of modern man that Beck and Bauman have set up is a straw man, against which they wish to place their new second modern man with greater resolution. Given that modernity had far greater heterogeneity than we would like to believe, it become apparent that the notions that Beck and Bauman claim to emerge simply do not exist as suddenly emergent. Thus, their project needs to be completely reconceptualised.
IV. The Third Straw Man: Postmodern man, hypermodern man, liquid modern man, second modernity man or the simulacrum.
As we have noted above, in the schemes of Bauman and Beck, modern man existed in ordered totality, his identity deriving from the structure of the state and the ideologies attached to the mode of production in industrialisation. Evidently, something happened recently. For now, Bauman states, postmodern man has a
'painful and sickening feeling of perpetual uncertainty in everything regarding the future' (1997:192). Bauman asserts this is because now nothing is certain anymore: all the grand narratives have collapsed, and we have nothing in which to believe. Postmodern man then, is not in a feeling of uncertainty because he is placed within a system of capitalist extraction that increases and perpetuates a systematic hierarchical inequality. He is not uncertain but he is hungry, or because he feels oppressed at work, or because his children go to school where only 30% of people pass their GCSE's. No. He is uncertain of his identity. His identity is uncertain because he no longer knows anything apart from consumerism; there are no longer any alternate poles onto which to base existence. This uncertainty resembles nothing if not Sartrean nausea. Though the author does not have time to develop the notion here, it could indeed be suggested that no only do the authors in question unquestioningly take the legacy of modernism, their anxiety over their postmodern existence structurally mirrors Sartrean (1989:361) nausea over bourgeois existence. Beck mirrors Bauman in his description of the uncertainty of our disembedded identity. This section will set out to answer an important question: does postmodern man exist? If he does exist, where can I find him?
Bauman notes (1988:807) in the present day society, consumer conduct (consumer freedom geared to a consumer market) moves steadily into a position of simultaneously, the cognitive and moral focus of life, integrative bond of society, and the focus of systemic management. Because of this dominance of the consumer society, a strong process of individualising occurs. Given there is no longer any notion of community upon which to base one's action, people increasingly treat their identity like a set of consumer goods: picking and choosing what one wishes. It is in consumerism that one finds the moral focus of life that in modernism was provided by ideology and in the premodern world by religion. Indeed, Baumann asserts that in the present day the peak experience (the experience which binds people together in a community) has ceased to be religious service but can now be found in consumerism.
This thesis is not tenable. Religious experience provides an orientation into something that is constructed as outside oneself (I live for God), whereas consumerism provides a fortification of the self (now I can be a new person with my new shoes: I live for me). Religion provides one with a community into which one is orientated as an integer: consumerism, while one might share a moment of joy with a friend over a new bra, asserts that one is self-created and thus not integral to something outside of oneself. This is not to suggest that today we have no peak experiences create a sense of community. Rather, it is to suggest that Bauman is looking in the wrong place to find them and in doing so has fundamentally misunderstood the process of individualisation today.
Furthermore, for someone who has supposedly emerged from out of the essentialist assumptions of the discourse of modernity, Bauman has amazingly essentialist views of consumerism. In formulating such views, he forms straw men out of the stuff of the present age. To read Bauman on consumerism is to think that we sit in front of adverts and say 'now I must buy that' and that we go to the mall and revel in our newfound consumerism and the ease with which we can find new identities. Contrary to the notion that the dominant leitmotif in society is consumerism, a number of points can be raised.
- A system of signs never totalises the meanings that can be made from it. It is not the case that people accept the meanings of consumerism uncritically. They form their own meanings out of them. Goods such as trainers, food and hair clips are formed into personal stories and broader narratives that far exceed their meaning as consumables. This emphasises Appadurai's (1986:15) points that commodification is not an essentialist property of an object but rather a stage in its life trajectory: likewise, people are consumers for only a period of their life, and use consumer goods in all sorts of ways outside of the way the system constrained them.
- Bauman states that market dependency has replaced articulated legitimacy. The state, it seems, no longer exists as an effective force because, in Foucauldian fashion, people are self-governed into accepting market dependency and their identity as uncertain, risky consumers. Yet, it is the articulated legitimacy of the state that makes market dependency possible. As Hardt and Negri (1999:112) note, the market has always been reliant on the state for support.
- Not only is the market dependent on state violence for its continued functioning, and as such is still necessary, but people do not self-govern themselves into perfect consumers. As De Certeau (1999:23) notes, in society there are all sorts of example of the way people distort and manipulate the system: silent ways of resisting market mentality. He gives the example of la perroque: the way in which people will steal items from their work place or use work time as their own time. In fact, the perspective of the timeless space less individual that is apparently postmodern seems to emerge from the same notion as Sartre: a bourgeois individual who does not encounter the direct violence of articulated legitimacy nor indulges in the tactics of resistance the oppressed (who we should note, are always told they have a place) are forced to use.
Yet, according to Bauman, in this new society (2001:98) all limits are off limits. We resemble the perfect decontextualised, unembedded consumer, unencumbered by history or restriction and free to indulge in maximum consumerism. While the author might concur with Bauman that this is suggested by the discourse of postmodernity, the author would argue that it is precisely at the meeting point between this discourse and lived reality that the signifying stress of postmodern man occurs. He soon realises that there are limits (it is just they are off - hidden - limits). Limits to the amount of beneficial existence virtual reality can give him. Limits to consumerism; posed, in the end by death. It is in this signifying stress between our role as free consumers and the limits we place, and the hidden limits we find, that mean the possibility of breaking out of this discourse is imaginable, and indeed, frequent.
Bauman asserts with Beck that we have moved from social individuals determined by modernism to individualised individuals. This move explains why (2001:12) the stories told today do not reach beyond the narrow and painstakingly fenced off enclosure of the private and subjective self. One could add: it is amazing we can still talk to each other. This individualisation is not a choice (ibid), but a biographical solution to systemic contradictions. Bauman asserts that this individual self-definition is the only possible solution to the systemic pressures of liquid modernity. In the state of fragmentation, Bauman claims, religion can simply not provide a satisfactory explanation that encompasses the liquid modern condition. This will come as news to many Americans, who use a religious framework (often, if one listens to George W. Bush's pronouncements, in a very totalising fashion) as a guide to modern life. The problems of Bauman's hypothesis are greater however, than simply the empirical reality of the world. Bauman leaves us no room in which to form communities: and yet, astonishingly, communities exist. Not virtual communities, not communities on the internet: but communities centred in place. In these communities, stories reach beyond the private self. They do so because they are drawn, as Benjamin (1999:84) notes of the story, from experience. Were Bauman to look at the world we live in, rather than discourse, he would realise that, as De Certeau (1999:118) notes, amid the murmurings of the system, people produce their own meanings.
So while Bauman is correct to note that individualisation as a discourse has led to a discursive contraction of public life, a tapering the art of public life down to a public display of private affairs and public confessions of private sentiment, it is simply an error of analysis to understand this contraction of the public sphere as it was understood in the 19C as the contraction of the public sphere as a whole. In classical political theory, the political emerges in the city. Public institutions are designed to moderate the demands of private individuals (this is not a problem in agrarian society where private interests are bound up together). Thus, the emergence of the public sphere is bound up to the possibility of transcending private interest. Rather than being a qualititive space, this relationship became quantified: this retraction of the public space is actually what we find in the liberal discourse of the postmodern individual. However, in the singularities of the city we find public spaces emerging. In the cries of the sans papier; which is not a claim for inclusion within the postmodern discourse but a universalist claim, that, as Rancière (2003:40) notes: is not a group that 'becomes aware' of itself, finds its voice, imposes its weight on society. It is an operator that connects and disconnected different areas, regions, identities, functions and capacities. In much less prosaic ways this public space occurs: it occurs because the totalising discourse of mobility that is the leitmotif of modernity since Machiavelli (and is not at all postmodern as Bauman supposes) is just that: discourse. Meanwhile people live in place and space, and in such spaces, private interests are always transcended.
Bauman's most important mistake then, is an ontological one. He claims (1991:255)
individuals are self-constituting within their habitat (complex system): there is no goal setting by institutions. What is important to note here is that individuals are not self-constituting: they are thrown (gewortenheit), as Heidegger (1962:45) would have it, into their social world and given roles before they are even self-conscious. The institution of the social world one is in dictates one before one is conscious. Indeed, one can say that Bauman's analysis stems from the possibility of viewing the world as self-created. But of course it must appear so within the terms of any discourse, because the background practices that construct the self are necessarily left in the background.
Bauman (2001:48) finally claims with relish: we must learn to live with ambivalence. Here the author must admit some confusion: did we not live with ambivalence before? Was it misplaced in earlier times, or forgotten, or is it a recent invention? As stated in the previous two sections, the inability of Bauman, and, as we shall soon see, Beck, to draw historical continuities into modern experience leaves their analysis as shallow and overstated.
Sadly, Beck repeats all of Bauman's errors. While for Bauman we must learn to live with ambivalence, Beck claims we must learn to live with risk. Now, Beck asserts, that we have been disembedded from the certainties of family, gender and sex; we must invent our own certainties and become individualised individuals. This (1997:94) he terms subpolitics. This individualising process is structurally parallel to Bauman's individualisation. In both, the previously rich institutions of modernism are mysteriously emptied of content and we inhabit a double world between these institutions which no longer control any aspect of identity, and our new reflexively modern (for Beck, second modernity is equivalent to Bauman's Liquid Modernity) selves. For Beck, this is the reverse of the industrial revolutions, where strong institutions dictated to people (also mysteriously emptied of content).
Like Bauman's forced individualisation, now for Beck, every decision is a personal one. Notions of community for Beck emerge from the bottom up, from freely chosen links between people, rather than the top down total ordering that he finds in modernity. We have already noted for Bauman that modernity was not totalising, and that the idea of community being born of free individuals ignores the fact one is always already within a community. For Beck, these new communities challenge the idea of a community linked to a single locality. He then gives many examples, like the Hmong community outside of Vietnam. What is noticeable for the author about the Hmong community is the extent to which despite the global separation of its members it necessarily connects to a place. As Heidegger (1962:120) notes, all being, indeed all language, is connected to place and how one inhabits it.
Hmong members, like the rest of the second modern world, determine themselves in terms of risk. Rather than the notion of risk being an unknown, as apparently it was for the moderns, risk becomes a property of ourselves: we become risky. For instance, Beck gives the example of nuclear waste as an example of a recent phenomenon that is a property of our action itself. He notes (1998:53): in class position being determines consciousness, while in risk positions, conversely, consciousness (knowledge) determines being. Which is to say: we determine our being through our knowledge. What this ignores, as Bauman also ignores, is that we are never fully the masters of our own acts. Man is found in a world that exceeds him. The possibility of the signifying stress laid out above is because man is acted on by forces of his own creation, and these forces are never conterminous with the sphere of lived experience. Beck claims that today (ibid: 183):
The sources of danger are no longer ignorance, but knowledge; not a deficient but perfect mastery over nature; not what eludes the human grasp but the systems of norms and objective constraints established with the industrial epoch. Given what is argued above: it should be apparent that the norms and objective constraints of the industrial epoch are precisely what elude the human grasp.
V: Many Straw Men form small Straw Dogs: the coming community.
Both Bauman and Beck are positive political thinkers. While they chronicle the apparent demise of previous notions of community, and chart the rise of individualisation, they are also hopeful for new forms of community to emerge; what Beck calls a re-embedding. Yet, for the thinkers of postmodernity, the answers to what form community will take are surprisingly old. Bauman, who we shall analyse first, gives what we will call the premodern answer, while Beck, the modernist reply.
Bauman, evidently worried about all this unrestrained individualism, calls up a new weapon: morality. For Bauman (1993:13): moral responsibility is a mystery contrary to reason. Bauman uses a train of thought that has its origins in Aristotle, but is then used by both Arendt, and more latterly, Levinas. With Levinas, Bauman argues (ibid) awakening to being for the other is the awakening the self, which is the rebirth of the self. This is remarkably similar to Arendt (1964:256) when she notes:
It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for others to treat him as a fellow man.
The argument would run here that the very possibility of humanity is given by the recognition of the other within you: that your concurrent existence is the basis for being. Yet, Levinas (1999) and Arendt are using a legacy here completely incompatible with Bauman and his notion that we are either tourists or vagabonds (condemned to move around, some with pleasure some with pain). He claims this place (or accepting the other) can be called communtarianism and is (1997:189) a point from which all things can be seen in true proportions. In this schema, community precedes choice: a community is formed and then we come to a decision. I will not repeat arguments made elsewhere in the essay, but merely note that the ontological base for the argument of Levinas can be found in Jewish thought which requires precisely the silence of a commitment to something outside of yourself: precisely not that given by postmodern discourse.
While Bauman takes Levinas and uses him in an incoherent way, perhaps reflecting the inability of postmodern discourse to find good frameworks for coming communities, Beck utilises modernism in an amazingly unchanged way. In a recent essay (2004), Beck attacks universalism as making all cultures equivalent and attacks relativism as ignoring the interconnection of cultures and leading to mutual ignorance as neither side admits the possibility of knowing the others truth. After attacking these straw men, he proposes his solution: realistic cosmopolitan realism. What would such long words mean? It would necessarily (ibid: 430) embrace universalist standards 'in order to protect one's basic principles', and realistically accept that 'it may in some circumstances be necessary to violate them. Beck's sociology here runs aground on several counts. He assumes that there are basic principles without proving it, and uses the example of the debate de la Casas had on whether the Amerindians had souls. What is interesting here, is that at the same time, as Levi-Strauss (1955:84) notes, the indians were having a conference on whether the Spanish had bodies, and subjecting them to rigorous testing by drowning.
The point to derive from this story is that such standards of basic principle assume the world La Casas had assumed: a single cosmos with a single notion of the body and of the world. In this sense, the modernist thinkers had made the globe a discursive unity. Now the globe seems like a pressing unconceptualised reality, and within this reality cries for pragmatism mixed with basic standards fail to answer any of the pressing problems of the world today. Beck notes (ibid: 438): cosmopolitanism, again, means a recognition of otherness, both external and internal to any society: in a cosmopolitan ordering of society difference are neither ranged in a hierarchy nor dissolved into universality but are accepted. The pressing questions of how they are accepted, or why, or which differences, are all left unanswered.
VI. Conclusion
This essay has analysed the way in which the two authors in question have made use of a common mythico-history of the world. This mythico-history is a legacy of a modernist project that wanted to place the premodern man in the realm of myth and fantasy, and place the modern man at the height of rationality. In some senses, Beck and Bauman continue the critique of modernity that began in Adorno (1972). They criticise reason and the enlightenment project: but they do so from within reason. The real task that is necessary in order to assess what it means today to be an individual, and what it means to be within a community, is to understand the ways in which modernism was not an ordered totality but a heterogeneous array of procedures and practices. Once this task is achieved then we can start to think about the liquid modern individual. Sadly, neither of the authors in question have begun that task.
VII. Bibliography:
Adorno, T. & Horkheimer, M. 1972: Dialectic of enlightenment. Allen Lane: London.
Agamben, G. 1995: Homo Sacer: Sovreign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press: Stanford.
Appadurai, A. 1986: Introduction: commodities and the politics of value. In The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Bauman, Z. 2001: The Individualized Society. Polity Press: Cambridge.
Bauman, Z. 1999: In Search of Politics. Polity Press: Cambridge.
Bauman, Z. 1997: Postmodernity and Its Discontents. Polity Press: Cambridge.
Bauman, Z. 1993: Postmodern Ethics. Blackwell: Oxford.
Bauman, Z. 1991: Modernity and Ambivalence. Polity Press: Cambridge.
Bauman, Z. 1988: Sociology and Postmodernity. The Sociological Review. vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 790-813.
Bauman, Z. 1973: The Structuralist Promise. British Journal of Sociology. Vol. 24. No. 1. pp. 67-83.
Beck, U. 2004: The Truth of Others: A cosmopolitan approach. Common Knowledge. Volume 10, Issue 3, pp. 430-449.
Beck, U. 1998: Democracy without Enemies. Polity Press: Cambridge.
Beck, U. 1997: The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order. Polity Press: Cambridge.
Benjamin, W. 1999: Reflections. Pimlico: London.
De Certeau, M. 1999: The Practice of Everyday life. Columbia University Press: New York.
Dewey, J. 1929: Experience and Nature. Allen and Unwin: London.
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1977: Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Foucault, M. 1979. Discipline and Punish. Vintage Publishing: London.
Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge. Brighton: Harvester.
Grey, J. 2004: Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. Penguin: London.
Hardt, M. & Negri, T. 1999: Empire. Harvard University Press: Harvard.
Heidegger, M. 1962: Being and Time. Blackwells Publishers: Oxford.
Laplanche, J. 1989: New Foundations for Psychoanalysis. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Levinas, E. 1999: Totality and Infinity. Duquesne University Press: New York.
Levis-Strauss, C. 1955: Tristes tropiques. Plon: Paris.
Lyotard, J.F. 1995: The Postmodern Condition: A report on Knowledge. SUNY University Press: Buffalo.
Rancière, J. 2001: 'Ten Theses on Politics' in Theory and Event, Vol. 5, No. 3.
Sartre, J-P. 1989: Being and Nothingness: An essay in phenomenological ontology. Methuen: London.
Sociology Essays - Find your free sociology essays...
We have a large assortment of free essays available to use as research material. Visit our sociology essays from our free essays section.
All of the essays in the "Free Essays" section were written by students and then submitted to us to display and help others. Thanks to all the students who have submitted their essays to us. You should not hand in our essays as your own. We do not condone plagiarism!
UK Essays Sitemaps
UKEssays.com RSS Feed
