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| When the kids had killed the man,
I had to break up the band.
David Bowie Ziggy Stardust
No area of either academic life or popular culture is untouched by the influence of postmodern ideas and yet at the same time there is confusion as to the nature of postmodernism. What is it? For many people, Zygmunt Bauman is the person who has provided the most effective response to this question. Taking my starting point with Baumans postmodern ethics, the opinion developed in this paper is rather different. In other words, Bauman speaks from a moral position that he cannot acknowledge.
In Alone Again: Ethics After Certainty (1994) Bauman opens his discussion by contrasting the views and life experience of Leon Shestov who believed that: In each of our neighbours we fear a wolf (Bauman 1994 page 1) with Knud Logstrup who believed that: It is a characteristic of human life that we mutually trust each other... (Bauman 1994 page 1). Bauman accounts for the difference in views between the two philosophers by comparing their very different life experiences in two very different societies. As Bauman explains: Their generalizations contradicted each other, but so did the lives they generalized from. And this seems to apply to all of us. (Bauman 1994 page 2)
This comment, on the surface, is a rather obvious statement; however, it contains within it Baumans notion of the social (first developed in his PhD. thesis) and an inclination of how the social operates on the individual human agent.
From this point Bauman goes on to outline his theory of morality:
.. morality means being-for (not merely being-aside or even being-with) the Other. To take a moral stance means to assume responsibility for the Other; to act on the assumption that the well-being of the Other is a precious thing calling for my effort to preserve and enhance it, that whatever I do or do not do affects it, and that if I have not done it, it might not have been done at all, and that even if others do or can do it this does not cancel my responsibility for doing it myself... And this being-for is unconditional. (Bauman 1994 pages 18 - 19).
These ideas are more fully developed in his text Life in Fragments (1995) in which Bauman repeats the above comment:
We are, so to speak, ineluctably - existentially -moral beings: that is, we are faced with the challenge of the Other, which is the challenge of responsibility for the Other, a condition of being-for. (Bauman 1995 page 1)
The difference between being - with and beings - for the Other is about the level of commitment that we have for the Other, about having an emotional engagement with the Other. This involves regarding the Other not as a type or a category but as a unique person. This involves:
· Rejecting indifference towards the Other
rejecting stereotyped certainty towards the Other
viewing the Other in a fashion that is free from sentiment.
It is in relation to the Other that we make our choice between good and evil. Moreover, as Bauman clearly explains being-for the Other is in the last analysis a power relationship because it involves being responsible for the Other:
I am responsible for defining the needs of the Other, for what is good, and what is evil for the Other. If I love her and thus desire her happiness, it is my responsibility to decide what would make her truly happy. If I admire her and wish her perfection, it is my responsibility to decide what her perfect form would be like. If I respect her and want to preserve and enhance her freedom, it is again my responsibility to spell out what her genuine autonomy would consist of. (Bauman 1995 page 65)
Baumans work on morality is yet another illustration of the agency - structure debate which is thoroughly modern in nature, and which has dominated sociological theorising throughout the twentieth century. What Bauman is doing has a great deal in common with the approach of Durkheim and Giddens, in that Bauman attempts to locate and describe the relationship between the external relations in the world (the structure, or the social) and the internal condition of the person (the nature of agency). Far from being a postmodernist, this represents a thoroughly modern set of problems and solutions. Bauman claims to have found a natural moral faculty within the human being. But how are such moral judgements possible? The answer is by our human faculty - our human agency. The problem with the natural moral faculty is that when the agent is faced with the dilemma of it wishes but I wish it is agency that exercises choice. Moreover, it is questionable if nature has any morality. It is when Bauman talks about the source of morality that his convictions appear on the scene. Bauman attempts to give morality a basis, but morality itself is regarded as something universal and given. Morality is treated as that which has always been, which justifies the actions of a person in the eyes of the other. Suffering is something that must be done away with. What is the aim of Baumans conception of morality? To shame the person into obedience? To believe in our own virtue? To discover our conscience? To find our soul? At the same time Bauman attempts to cast the postmodern self as the wicked but happy other As we shall see in our discussion of Baumans postmodern ethics, for Bauman morality is a mode of biological fact. In the last analysis, Bauman provides what he calls a natural and hence, beyond critique or emancipation, discussion of what causes us to desire our own domination.
One of the many problems with Baumans theory of morality is that what is fair to one may not be fair to another. There is always the risk that morality can be little more than an apology for cruelty. Whenever a person raises the issue of morality, they have the other in mind and the idea in their head of the other behaving in a way that is unacceptable. The appeal to morality allow one to impose ones will on the other with justification. In this sense Bauman is no different from the Nazis he so fully condemns in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989)
What ever postmodernism is about, it is about saying goodbye to morality and about losing the ability to be appalled by acts of cruelty. In contrast, Baumans postmodern ethics is about providing a justification for action against the behaviour of others. We do not like the behaviour of the other; it breaks out moral code, take action. To act is to impose our will on the other and this may involve acting in a way which makes use of the methods that cruel people use. Moral codes not only harbour their own kind of purity they necessarily provide justifications for cruelty.
The Creation of a Postmodernist.
In his contribution to the Theory, Culture & Society Festschift of Baumans work, Stefan Morawski commented:
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