Bauman Postmodern Ethics Pdf To Jpg
Introduction: Morality in Modern and Postmodern Perspective Shattered beings are best represented by bits and pieces. Rainer Maria Rilke As signalled in its.Missing.
This section needs additional citations for. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2017) In the late 1980s and early 1990s Bauman published a number of books that dealt with the relationship between modernity, bureaucracy, rationality and social exclusion. Bauman, following, came to view European modernity as a trade off: European society, he argued, had agreed to forego a level of freedom to receive the benefits of increased individual security. Bauman argued that modernity, in what he later came to term its 'solid' form, involved removing unknowns and uncertainties. It involved control over nature, hierarchical bureaucracy, rules and regulations, control and categorisation — all of which attempted to remove gradually personal insecurities, making the chaotic aspects of human life appear well-ordered and familiar.
Alone again: ethics after uncertainty “Throughout Demos’work, a continuing theme has been that as old ideologies wane, ethics necessarily become more important. But whereas in the past we could rest our ethics on solid foundations – such as the Church, tradition or faith in a utopia – today ethics have become far less certain and far more complex. Zygmunt Bauman has now written for us a compelling account both of why the old arguments won’t do and of how we should think about the new ethical landscape in which we live.
Part of his argument concerns the changing nature of modern life: the spread of instrumental organisations, and the fragmentary and episodic character of the times. Its most notable feature, he argues, is that life has become privatised in far-reaching ways. For him privatisation is not primarily about the sale of old state industries. Instead he means a much more sweeping shift in the character of everyday lives and concerns that has made people more concerned with their own space and less willing to make commitments.”.
Re-thinking Global Society The Bauman Institute International Launch Conference School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds UK Monday 6th – Tuesday 7th September 2010 We are delighted to announce that the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds will formally launch the Bauman Institute in September 2010, established in honour of Leeds’s Emeritus Professor of Sociology Zygmunt Bauman. In recognition of the launch, we are holding an International Conference here at the University of Leeds on Monday 6th and Tuesday 7th September 2010. The Conference aims to bring together international expertise amongst scholars, researchers, practitioners, and postgraduate students, working in a variety of fields across the arts, humanities and social sciences.
In response to a number of articles in the Times Higher Education Supplement earlier this year and reports coming from the Governement and other institutions querying the contribution that publically funded research makes to public knowledge and debates, the School of Sociology and Social Policy at Leeds University decided to go ahead with an intiative that has been discussed over a period of several months already, to start a public sociology blog. The general idea is to engage more with the general public and bring our various expertises and research to bear on issues and events of the day. The blog will have a variety of posts made by a group of authors with different research areas and expertises.
Some posts will be reports of research being undertaken and research findings. Others will be commentary on issues and topics of public interest, perhaps in response to media reports or government announcements. Yet others will be opinion pieces on some subject of particular interest to the writer.
All posts will be open to public comment so there will be opportunities to ask questions and discuss the issues with the authors and others. The blog will be an opportunity for staff and, particularly, early career researchers and postgraduates to begin to develop and on-line presence and reputation and to build networks of contacts across the global sociological community.
It will also be an opportunity to develop a style of writing and discussion that is sueful and accessible to a wider non-technical audience. The blog can be viewed. If you see any posts there that interest you it would be great if you could comment on them. Today sees the launch of a new politics e-journal – at Leeds University.
A team of 3rd year undergraduate students have led the editorial process and the first edition showcases nine articles from recent graduates examining the ‘applied turn’ in Critical Theory along with an editorial statement of principles. The journal has been discursively edited, peer reviewed and developed by Critical Theory students from the Politics and International Studies Department at the University of Leeds.
Postmodern Ethics Definition
According to their launch announcement: “Roundhouse’s main directives are student inherited research and horizontal learning. It aims to spread communicative practices in higher education, create a more flexible style of learning and directly challenge the image of undergraduate students as ‘passive consumers'”.
I was invited to attend the Council of Europe in Strasbourg on April 23-34 as part of a consultative group to identify and assess the best ways in which to respond to the challenges of globalization, the economic crisis and climate change, guided by the need to create a ‘Europe of Shared Responsibility’ (the title of the meeting). Amongst other contributors were Claus Offe, Anna Coote, Sabine Urban and Jean-Claude Barbier. My own particular involvement was in the area of consumerism, specifically the need to conceptualise new forms of ‘responsible consumption’ that would include both a renewal of ideas of citizenship at a time when there is an identified crisis of confidence in models of representative democracy, as well as the need collectively to renegotiate what I referred to as ‘one-dimensional’ understandings of well-being. My contribution was informed by a guiding question that has been preoccupying my thoughts for a little while now; namely, how is it possible to reconcile the rights to individual free (consumer) choice with the urgent need to create fairer, more stable, and more sustainable global societies?
That is, if Bauman is correct in stating that we are no longer able or willing (unwilling because unable?) to imagine what the ‘good society’ looks like and would be like to experience, and so remain preoccupied with securing the ‘good life’ only for ourselves, understood solely in terms of the acquisition of more and more capital and consumer goods, then how is it possible to meet the twin challenges that we face today – the global economic crisis and climate change? This was something that struck me in the weeks before arriving in Strasbourg, when I heard President Obama’s address to European students in a sports stadium in the same city. He remarked that it was his firm belief that a life lived purely for individual gain – that is, solely to consume more and more goods – was not only boring but also meaningless and unfulfilling. He called for a greater sense of public duty, of caring for others, and not for the first time echoed JFK’s famous declaration of what we could do for our country. In short, at the very beginning of this project and with all possibilities still open, it would seem that there is perhaps now a geuine opportunity to begin to explore new models of the ‘good life’ that not only look beyond the ‘consuming life’ but that also always already include a sense of personal responsibility for starting to create the collective ‘good society’.
I return to Strasbourg in mid-June to present a paper to the Council on ‘responsible consumption’. I’ll post on this issue again when I return.
I am aware of two writings by Zygmunt Bauman on education. I will be writing a short paper that summarises the main points made in these as I see them. I’ll post the paper here for comment and discussion if anyone is interested. The two readings are: Educational Challenges of the Liquid-Modern Era in Diogenes 2003; 50; 15 Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? 2008 Harvard. Chapter 4 ‘Hurried Life, or Liquid-Modern Challenges to Education’.
Liquid Life 2005 Polity. Chapter 6 ‘Learning to Walk on Quicksand’. Some of chapter 6 in Liquid Life was reproduced at The School of Sociology and Social Policy Alumni Event held on May 6th 2006 where Prof. Zygmunt Bauman gave a talk on Liquid Modern Challenges to Education. There is an audio file of the talk and the following discussion that will be linked to from here in due course.
If you are aware of any other writings by Bauman on this topic, or references to education in any of his other books and articles please post them here as replies to this discussion. I have just received a copy of Zygmunt’s 2008 book ‘Does ethics have a chance in world of consumers?’ The image on the cover is quite optimistic I think as it is an oyster shell with a pearl in it. Does the grit of a consumer life produce a pearl of wisdom perhaps?
Chapter 4 of the book is titled ‘Hurried Life, or Liquid Modern Challenges to Education’. I will be reading this chapter first given my position and interest in education. Several years ago on some anniversary of other, Zygmunt gave a talk to the assembled alumni of the Leeds University Sociology Department on liquid education. For many of us this was a bittersweet day and brought back many happy memories of our time at Leeds with Zygmunt as our professor. These where the days when you had one professor as, if you were lucky as we were, the intellectual and ‘spiritual’ centre of your academic universe. Zygmunt allowed us to record his talk and I still have the audio files somewhere. Leon posted a link to a fascinating interview with Zygmunt Bauman in a resources blog post.
A couple of things struck me about the interview. It reminded me of an earlier book by Zygmunt –. I read this shortly after it was published and had just finished reading Ursula Le Guin’s (1974). At the time I felt that Zygmunt’s book read like a study guide to Le Guin’s story! Looking back from today’s vantage the question remains “what is the normative basis for a utopia, or any other political system or ism”?
The interview coincidently also touched on the distinction between security and freedom that I am currently reading in the introduction to Postmodernity and its Discontents. My feeling is that the contrast these days is more between control and freedom. The pair of terms is redolent of structure and agency as well of course. The emphasis can be on institutional arrangments, ideological incorporation, Althusser’s ‘interpellation’ and probably all of these. And is it a conflict or contradiction anyway?
Doesn’t actually existing and occuring freedom depend upon structures, rules, the closure, one way or another, of indeterminacy, chaos and meaninglessness? Isn’t the notion of “individual freedom” internally contradictory?
I have just started reading John Gray’s, an amusing but also rather depressing read. I fear his diagnosis of late capitalism, globalisation and the human condition may be right. The introduction to the book will probably tell you all you want to know.
In it Gray pronounces Sigmund Freud to be the greatest Enlightenment thinker of the 20th century. Who is the greatest post Enlightenment thinker of the 20th century? I have recently got involved in helping with a politics module on Critical Theory and was delighted to see William Outhwaite featured in the reading list. William was my external examiner in 1989 for my PhD and I have very fond memories of the viva, his support, encouragement and the interest he showed for my work.
What my thesis was about will be another story for a long winter’s night. Also on the reading list, along with the usual suspects, is Zygmunt Bauman and David Held.
I thought you might be interested in this recent nterview with David in which he gives Zygmunt and honourable mention. “Zygmunt Bauman, the sociologist, writes brilliantly about the way in which the concept of Utopia has increasingly lost its historical meaning. Utopia was a concept which, in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries, was evoked to help imagine a different kind of collective governance – a progressive ideal, which could be applied to the world we lived in and to inspire people to perhaps change the nature of their material social circumstances. But, whereas once Utopia was a notion which inspired collective solutions, Bauman says that increasingly today, Utopia means an individual option, an individual exit strategy from the world in which we live”., The Open University, Scotland, and author of the Models of Democracy study guide. 19th May, 2006. I thought I would post here about Mark Davis’ recently published book, Freedom and Consumerism: A Critique of Zygmunt Bauman’s Sociology, Ashgate 2008.
Mark is the Director of the Bauman Institute and ‘creator’ of this community. He’s probably too modest to post this himself! I haven’t had a chance to look at the book so far but it has received a very favourable on January 29th by Prof Fred Inglis of Sheffield University. There are or course one or two minor critical points, as you would expect.
This is compulsory in any review. It will be interesting to hear any comments Mark has to make.