Page 124 - Cultural Theory

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••• Zygmunt Bauman, Culture and Sociology •••

entirely into the fibres of our souls. What we know about modernity seems even more
acutely evident in postmodern times. Things, people, relationships and institutions
change, contingency rules, all that is solid melts into air. Yet Bauman’s elective affinity
with Weber is clear, especially in the project of Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). This
is, essentially, a Weberian argument or an argument of Weberian sympathy. For here,
to extend Lukács, capitalism may be one formal precondition of fascism, but it is the
logic of rational calculation rather than commodification that holds up the opera-
tions of Auschwitz.
Bauman’s analysis of the Holocaust is necessarily multicausal. The general contro-
versy around Modernity and the Holocaust concerns Bauman’s insistence that the
Holocaust was only possible as a modern phenomenon (see Beilharz, 2002). Industrial
killing on a mass scale was dependent on modern technology and bureaucracy,
though Bauman nowhere identifies modernity and fascism. The point, rather, is that
modernity is a necessary if insufficient context for the Holocaust. Modern bureau-
cracy itself did not cause the Holocaust, either; yet alongside the murderous ideology
of the Final Solution, the bureaucratic mentality was vital to its application.
Bauman’s sociology still travels with the spirit of Weberian sociology, for its curiosity
here is in character, or personality structure. Weber’s famous interest in Puritanism
in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is primarily in its culture, only sec-
ondarily in its institutional forms. Weber’s sociology here again coincides with
Marx’s, for their combined curiosity is in what Bauman follows under the category
second nature. The curiosity we have in capitalism or bureaucracy is in what kinds
of creatures these make us – specialists without spirit, hedonists without heart, indi-
vidual consumers rather than collective producers, or in extreme circumstances
followers of rules who are oblivious to the face of the other.
Bauman’s interest in personality-types reflects his enthusiasm for Simmel as well as
his connection to Weber. Simmel most famously suggested the stranger as a modern
character-type – she who comes and goes and stays, who may be offered the provisional
or probationary belonging of assimilation, as were the Jews in Germany before 1933, that
kind of belonging at the behest of the host which is always tentative, always open to sus-
pension at the will of the host. Bauman’s response to the image of the stranger is indeed
to continue the period identification of the stranger and the Jew, not least in his master-
work, Modernity and Ambivalence (1993b). Bauman’s gift lies in his capacity to connect the
diagnosis of the present with the heritage of critical sociology, so that he proceeds to
invent names for new character-types, most notably the dyad of tourist and vagabond, a
new type of relationship in the image of master and slave, now with mobility rather than
capital or even cultural capital as the source of domination’s divide.

Enter Foucault

The broad sympathy of Bauman’s sociology is German, but with this twist: his is a
specific, East European critical theory. It is Germanic, but it is neither parochial nor

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