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Culture & Society

The Role of the Intellectual in Liquid Modernity: An Interview with Zygmunt

Bauman
Simon Dawes
Theory Culture Society 2011 28: 130
DOI: 10.1177/0263276411398922

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The Role of the Intellectual in
Liquid Modernity: An Interview
with Zygmunt Bauman
Simon Dawes

Abstract
The 85th birthday of Zygmunt Bauman in November 2010 presented the occa-
sion for TCS to publish a special section of commissioned commentary pieces
on a number of central themes in his work. The section, edited and introduced
by editorial board member Roy Boyne, featured articles by Martin Jay, John
Milbank and Julia Hell, and concentrated respectively upon the themes of
modernity, the role of the intellectual, and the gaze of/at the other, highlight-
ing the dependence on metaphor and the significance of ‘looking’ in his writ-
ing. This interview takes that special section as its starting point, and asks
Bauman to respond to some of the claims and suggestions made in those
articles. In doing so, he argues for the continuing salience of the ‘liquid moder-
nity’ concept for understanding the ‘purpose behind the effort’ , and explains
in detail his view of the intellectual (and, specifically, the sociologist) and the
role such an intellectual should play in the context of liquid modernity.

Key words
Zygmunt Bauman j inequality j intellectual j liquid modernity j sociology

Simon Dawes: To begin with, I’d like to ask you to what extent you think the
liquidity of your own life experiences has influenced your interpretation of
(liquid) modernity? Do you recognize yourself, for example, as an ‘ambiva-
lent outsider’ who has ‘learned to walk on quicksand’?

Zygmunt Bauman: An answer to this question I’d gladly (and, I presume,

prudently) leave to psychoanalysts, who specialize in tracing these sort of
links or just coincidences and re-presenting them as causal connections.
Having been in that story a bird rather than ornithologist (with birds, as
we all know, being not particularly prominent in the annals of ornithology),
I am perhaps the last person to be asked this question in search of an

j Theory, Culture & Society 2011 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 28(3): 130^148
DOI: 10.1177/0263276411398922

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 Dawes ^ An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman 131

authoritative answer. Beyond a rather banal observation that the experience

of frailty of the settings in and through which I found myself moving in
the course of my uncannily long life itinerary must have (mustn’t it?) influ-
enced what I have seen and how, I really don’t feel entitled to go . . .And,
to be sure, the art of walking on quicksand is still beyond me. What I’ve
learned is only how difficult this art is to master and how hard people
need to struggle to learn it.
As to describing me as an outsider throughout, and an outsider
through and through (I owe this discovery to Dennis Smith, 1998) ^ I
have no reason to disagree. Indeed, I did not truly ‘belong’ to any school,
order, intellectual camaraderie or clique; I did not apply for admission to
any of them, let alone did much to deserve an invitation; nor would I be
listed by any of them ^ at least listed unquali¢edly ^ as ‘one of us’. I guess
my claustrophobia is incurable ^ feeling, as I tend to, ill at ease in any
closed room, and always tempted to ¢nd out what is on the other side of
the door. I guess I am doomed to remain an outsider to the end, lacking as
I am the indispensable qualities of an academic insider: school loyalty, con-
formity to the procedure, and readiness to obey by the school-endorsed cri-
teria of cohesion and consistency. And, frankly, I don’t mind . . . .

Simon Dawes: In her article in the TCS special section, Julia Hell identifies
a frequent emphasis on acts of looking in your writing. What is the link,
for you, between looking and ‘the other’, or how significant for you is the
gaze of/at ‘the other’?

Zygmunt Bauman: I guess Julia Hell is right, the visual does seem to me
the most thoroughly grasped and recorded among my impressions; sight
seems to be my principal sense organ, and ‘seeing’ supplies the key meta-
phors for reporting the perception. No different seems to be the constitution
of Levinas’s, my ethics teacher’s, perception/imagination: it is the sight of
l’Autre that triggers the moral impulse and recasts me as a moral subject
through exposing me and surrendering/subordinating to the object of my
responsibility (this happens already before l’Autre has a chance to open her/
his mouth, and so before any demands or requests could be heard by
me . . . ) ^ even if the tactile, the caress, is a better metaphor for Levinas’s
model of what follows the awakening of the moral self.
What is in my view unmentioned and missing, however, in Julia’s
awesomely insightful vivisection of the ‘gaze’ is another variety of gaze ^ tre-
mendously important in the unpacking of the complex eyes-and-ethics rela-
tion. The gaze which she so perceptively and inspiringly focuses on, the
Orphic gaze, is so to speak a ‘killing-through-love’ or ‘murder by love’ gaze
(though also, potentially, saving/liberating): the archetype of the double-
edged sword of love, inherently ambivalent in its content ^ but in particular
a generic symbol for the always present, endemic and irremovable element
of incapacitating power in every love, coercion in every caress. There is
also, however, a ‘Panwitz gaze’ as experienced, spotted and vividly

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132 Theory, Culture & Society 28(3)

reconstructed by Primo Levi: a ‘killing-through-unconcern’ or, more ade-

quately, ‘murder-by-indifference’ gaze, a gaze immune to the bacillus of
morality, inoculated against the responsibility-awakening impact of meet-
ing-an-Other (Panwitz, by the way, wouldn’t probably turn his eyes around
to make sure that Eurydice follows; but then he did not descend into hell
with the intention to salvage, redeem, resurrect and make live). I believe
that tracing the societal ways and means of replacing Orpheus’ gaze with
Panwitz’s, of stripping the gaze of its inborn ethical power (the process I
dub ‘adiaphorization’), is quite crucial to any serious attempt to map the con-
voluted and contorted itinerary of moral self inside the liquid-modern
world . . .

Simon Dawes: You rely on the dichotomous metaphor of solid/liquid in your

accounts of modernity, but to what extent are these terms mutually exclu-
sive? Could this relation be seen as a dialectic? And where does ‘viscosity’
stand in relation to this dichotomy/dialectic?

Zygmunt Bauman: I did not and do not think of the solidity-liquidity conun-
drum as a dichotomy; I view those two conditions as a couple locked, insep-
arably, in a dialectical bond (something like what probably Franc ois
Lyotard had in mind when observing that one can’t be modern without
being post-modern first . . . ). After all, it was the quest for the solidity of
things and states that most of the time triggered, kept in motion and
guided those things’ and states’ liquefaction; liquidity was not an adversary,
but an effect of that quest for solidity, having no other parenthood, even
when (or if) the parent would deny the legitimacy of the offspring.
In turn, it was the formlessness of the oozing/leaking/flowing liquid that
prompted the efforts of cooling/damping/moulding. If there is something
to permit the distinction between ‘solid’ and ‘liquid’ phases of modernity
(that is, arranging them in an order of succession), it is the change in both
the manifest and latent purpose behind the effort.
Originally, solids were melted not because of a distaste for solidity, but
because of dissatisfaction with the degree of solidity of the extant/inherited
solids: purely and simply, the bequeathed solids were found to be not solid
enough (insufficiently resistant/immunized to change) by the standards of
the order-obsessed and compulsively order-building modern powers.
Subsequently (in our part of the world, to this day) solids are but admit-
tedly transient, ‘until further notice’ condensations of liquid magma. They
are temporary settlements rather than ultimate solutions ^ where flexibility
replaces solidity as the ideal condition to be pursued. Even when desired,
solids are tolerated only in as far as they promise to remain easily and obedi-
ently fusible on demand; before the effort of putting together, firming up
and solidifying a structure is undertaken, an adequate technology of melting
again must be already in hand. A reliable assurance of the right and ability
to dismantle the constructed structure must be offered, before the job of
construction starts in earnest. Fully ‘biodegradable’ structures are nowadays

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 Dawes ^ An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman 133

the ideal and the standards to which most, if not all structures, struggle to
measure up.
To cut the long story short: if in its ‘solid’ phase the heart of modernity
was in controlling/fixing the future, the ‘liquid’ phase’s prime concern is
with the avoidance of mortgaging it and in any other way pre-empting the
use of as yet undisclosed, unknown and unknowable opportunities the
future is sure to bring. . . . Nietzsche’s spokesman, Zarathustra, in anticipa-
tion of such a human condition, bewailed in its name ‘the loitering of the
present moment’ that is bound to make the Will, burdened with the thick
and heavy deposits of its past accomplishments and misdeeds, to ‘gnash its
teeth’, to groan and sag, crushed by their weight . . . Fear of things fixed too
firmly to permit dismantling, of things overstaying their welcome, tying
hands and shackling the legs, or of following Faustus to hell because of a
similar blunder of wishing, in a moment of weakness, to arrest a beautiful
moment and to make it stay forever, Sartre represented as a constant and
prolific source of resentment to ‘viscosity’; yet, symptomatically, that fear
was discovered/imputed to be a prime mover of human history only at the
threshold of the liquid-modern era. That fear, in fact, signalled its imminent
arrival. And we may view its appearance as fully and truly a paradigmatic
watershed in history . . .

Simon Dawes: One more question on liquid modernity: have the events of
the first decade of the 21st century confirmed the intuitions you had at the
end of the 20th century? Is ‘liquid modernity’ a universal enough concept
to be applied to mainland China, for example, where producers are still
more important than consumers? And, to the extent that we can talk of
solid and liquid phases of modernity, what do you make of Martin Jay’s
claim that the ‘gaseous/vaporous modernity’, hinted at by Flaubert,
Baudelaire and Marx, suggests that the de-solidification of modernity had
already passed through the liquid stage back in the 19th century?

Zygmunt Bauman: Of course, as I’ve stated so many times, the whole of

modernity stands out from preceding epochs by its compulsive/obsessive
modernizing ^ and modernizing means liquefaction, melting and
smelting . . . But ^ but! Initially, the major preoccupation of the modern
mind was not so much the technology of smelting as the design of the
moulds into which the molten metal is to be poured and the technology of
keeping it there. Modern mind was after perfection ^ and the state of perfec-
tion, hoped to be reached, meant in the last account the end to drudgery,
as all further change could only be a change for the worse. Initially, change
was viewed as a preliminary and interim measure, leading into the age of
stability and tranquillity; an attribute of the time of transition ^ from old,
rusty, partly rotten, crumbling and fissiparous, and otherwise unreliable
and altogether inferior structures, frames and arrangements, to their
made-to-order, ultimate because perfect, replacements ^ windproof, water-
proof, and indeed history-proof . . . Change had then a horizon: an order, or

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134 Theory, Culture & Society 28(3)

(to recall Talcott Parsons’s crowning synthesis of modern pursuits) a

‘self-equilibrating system’, emerging victorious from every imaginable dis-
turbance and, stubbornly and irrevocably, returning back to its state ^ a
product of thorough, binding and irreversible manipulation of probabilities
(maximizing the probability of some events, minimizing the likelihood of
others). Together with accident, contingency, melting pots, ambiguity,
ambivalence, fluidity and other banes/nightmares of the order-builders, of
which the moderns were first and last, change was seen (and tackled) as a
temporary irritant ^ and most certainly not undertaken for its own sake (it
is the other way round nowadays: as Richard Sennett observed, perfectly
viable organizations are gutted just to prove their ongoing viability).
The most respected and influential minds among the 19th-century
economists expected economic growth to go on ‘until all human needs are
met’ and no longer ^ and then to be replaced with a ‘stable economy’, repro-
ducing itself year by year in the same volume and contents. The problem
of ‘living with differences’ was also viewed as transient: the confusingly var-
iegated world, continually thrown out of joint by the clashes of differences
and battles between irreconcilable oppositions, was to end up in the peace-
ful, uniform tranquillity of classlessness thoroughly cleansed of conflicts
and antagonisms ^ with the help of a (revolutionary) ‘battle to end all
wars’, or of the (evolutionary) adaptation and assimilation. The two hot-
headed youngsters from Rheinland, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
watched with admiration the capitalist furnace doing the melting job
which needed to be performed to usher us into just this kind of stable, trou-
ble-free society. Baudelaire praised his favourite ‘modern painter’,
Constantin Guys, for espying eternity in a fleeting moment. In short: mod-
ernization was then a road with a preordained finishing line; a movement
destined to work itself out of its job.
It took some time yet to discover or to decree that modernity without
compulsive/obsessive modernization is no less an oxymoron than a wind
that does not blow, or a river that does not flow . . . From the job of melting
those (inferior) solids, the modern form of life moved to the job of melting
solids (as such). Perhaps it performed this kind of job from the start (wise
after the fact, we are now convinced that it did) ^ but its spokesmen would
have hotly protested had it been suggested to them at the times of James
Mill, Baudelaire or, for that matter, the authors of the Communist
Manifesto. Still at the threshold of the 20th century, Eduard Bernstein
was shouted down by the social-democracy Establishment Chorus, and
angrily excommunicated by the Socialist Establishment’s Areopagus, when
daring to suggest that ‘the goal is nothing, the movement is everything’.
There was an essential axiological difference between Baudelaire and
Marinetti, separated by a few decades ^ despite their apparently shared
topic. And this precisely was the difference that made difference, wasn’t it?
Modernity had been triggered by horrifying signs and prospects of
things durable falling apart, and of the whirlwind of transient ephemera fill-
ing the vacancy. But two centuries or even less later, the relation of

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 Dawes ^ An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman 135

superiority/inferiority between the values of durability and transience has

been reversed. In a drastic turn-around, it is now the facility with which
things can be turned upside down, disposed of and abandoned, that is
valued most ^ alongside the bonds easy to untie, obligations easy to
revoke, and rules of the game lasting no longer, if not shorter, than the
game currently played.
Martin Jay (whose work, by the way, I deeply respect and owe a lot!) is
of course right. The advent of ‘liquid modernity’ is anything but globally
synchronized. Passage to the ‘liquid stage’, like any other passages in his-
tory, happens in different parts of the planet on different dates and pro-
ceeds at a different pace. Also, what is crucially important, it takes place
each time in a different setting ^ since the sheer presence on the global
scene of players who have already completed the passage excludes the possi-
bility of their itineraries being copied and reiterated (I’d suggest that the
‘latecomers’ tend on the whole to telescope, condense trajectories of the pat-
tern-setters, with sometimes disastrous and gory results). China is currently
preoccupied with the challenges and tasks of the ‘primitive accumulation’,
which are known to generate an enormous volume of social dislocations, tur-
bulence, and discontent ^ as well as to result in extreme social polarization.
Primitive accumulation is not a setting hospitable to any kind of freedom
^ whether of the producer, or of consumer variety. The course things are
taking cannot but shock its victims and collateral casualties, and produce
potentially explosive social tensions, which the up-and-coming entrepre-
neurs and merchants need to suppress with the help of a powerful and mer-
ciless, coercive state dictatorship. Pinochet in Chile, Syngman Rhee in
South Korea, Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, Chiang Kai-Shek in Taiwan, or
present rulers of China, were or are dictators (Aristotle would call them ‘tyr-
ants’) in everything but their offices’ self-adopted names; but they presided
or preside over outstanding expansion and the fast-rising power of markets.
All named countries would not be today acclaimed as epitomes of ‘eco-
nomic miracles’, if not for the protracted dictatorship of the state. And,
we may add, it’s not just a coincidence that they have turned into such epit-
omes, and that by now they are head over heels engrossed in the
chase after an exquisitely ‘liquid modern’, consumerist form of life. Let
me add that the earlier ‘economic miracles’ in postwar Japan and
Germany could be to a considerable extent explained by the presence
of foreign occupation forces that took over from the native political institu-
tions the coercive/oppressive functions of state powers, while effectively
evading all and any control by the democratic institutions of the occupied
countries.

Simon Dawes: Could you explain how the real freedom and genuine auton-
omy of the Enlightenment differs from the (false, liquid, consumerist) free-
dom of the market? And what do you make of John Milbank’s claim that
you lack a metaphysical basis for speaking of such freedom?

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136 Theory, Culture & Society 28(3)

Zygmunt Bauman: In a nutshell: if freedom visualized by the

Enlightenment and demanded/promised by Marx was made to the measure
of the ideal producer, the market-promoted freedom is designed with the
ideal consumer in mind; neither of the two is ‘more genuine’ than the other
^ they are but different, focusing attentions on different factors of (to
recall Isaiah Berlin) the ‘negative’ (‘freedom from’) and ‘positive’ (‘freedom
to’); the selection of ‘positive’ factors tends to determine/influence the selec-
tion of the ‘negative’ ones. Both visions present freedom as an ‘enabling’ con-
dition, a condition enhancing the subject’s capacity ^ but enabling to do
what, and stretching which capacity? Once you attempt in earnest to lay
those questions open to empirical scrutiny, you’ll inevitably discover sooner
or later that both visions ^ the producer-oriented and consumer-oriented ^
presage powerful odds standing in the way of their implementation in prac-
tice, and that the odds in question are in no way external to the programme
that the visions imply: on the contrary, they are, those ‘disabling’ factors,
bewilderingly, the very conditions considered indispensable for setting the
programme of ‘enabling’ in operation; and so having one without the other
I believe to be an idle dream and a doomed effort . . .
This is, though, in my view, a socio-political problem, not a metaphys-
ical issue. I was, and remain, and in all probability will stay interested in
the socio-political mechanisms that generate the ‘enabling’ and ‘disabling’
pressures in tandem, tie them together and intertwine, and all in all render
them virtually inseparable, after the pattern of Siamese twins sharing their
pulmonary and digestive systems . . . An ideal and flawless freedom, ‘com-
plete freedom’, enabling without disabling, is I believe an oxymoron in
metaphysics as much as it is an unreachable goal in social life; if not for
any other reason, then for the fact that ^ being an inherently and inescap-
ably social relation ^ the thrust for freedom cannot but be a divisive force
and any of its concrete applications cannot but be essentially contested.
Like so many ideals/values, freedom is perpetually in statu nascendi, never
achieved but (or rather for that very reason) constantly aimed at and
fought for, and so an immense driving force in the never-ending experimen-
tation called history. Freedom, so to speak, is endemically self-transcending
^ and precisely because of the impossibility of self-fulfilment.

Simon Dawes: Despite your move away from Marxism in the 1950s/1960s,
and the subsequent shift of focus away from class in your later work,
Antonio Gramsci has remained a strong and visible influence on you. Can
you explain the enduring impression he has had on your thinking?

Zygmunt Bauman: I believe I ‘moved away’ from the institutionalized

Marxism (as Herbert Marcuse famously dubbed the Soviet-codified and
Soviet-promoted version of Marx’s legacy), that move having been helped
enormously by my coming across another reading of Marx’s message:
Antonio Gramsci’s ‘philosophy of praxis’. At least this is how I saw the
move at the time it happened, and frankly I see no reason to revise its

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 Dawes ^ An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman 137

assessment in the light of later experience. The ‘institutionalized’ Marxism

was mostly preoccupied with fortifying its frame and rendering it imperme-
able; Gramsci broke the carapace, unlocked its contents and opened Marx’s
principal insights to the world a-changing. In my view, he almost single-
handedly saved Marx’s legacy from ossifying into a historical curiosity and
museum piece. Most importantly for the evolution of my own cognitive
frame and exploration strategy, Gramsci put paid to the deterministic bias
endemic to Marxist (and especially Soviet) orthodoxy, and above all to the
Thanatos-guided search for historical closure and belief in the laws of his-
tory, in historical necessity, and all in all in history’s pre-determined, pre-
empted course.

Simon Dawes: Your contemplation on the role of the intellectual is almost as

integral to your oeuvre as that on modernity. But to what extent do you
accept Milbank’s claim that you oscillate between a rejection of anyone
‘knowing any better’ and an embrace of that very idea?

Zygmunt Bauman: The poles of the axis along which the stances and perfor-
mances of the ‘intellectuals’ are plotted are genuine, all-too-real ^ neither fig-
ments of their analyst’s imagination nor regrettable by-products of this or
that intellectual’s indecision. Theodor Adorno warned repeatedly against
imputing to the far-from-rational world more rationality than it possesses
and indeed is able to absorb and assimilate ^ a sort of temptation to which
many a theorist willingly or inadvertently surrenders, whenever pursuing
cohesion and consistency in his or her theoretical models. Contradictions,
ambiguities and ambivalences are features of the ‘world out there’; they
need to be unpacked and unravelled, recognized for what they are, and con-
fronted in all their complexity ^ and indeed in their un-removability. . . .
Perhaps the intellectuals could stop veering between opposite poles
(indicated, respectively, by the ideas of ‘legislators’ and ‘interpreters’, or
‘soliloquists’ and ‘conversationalists’); perhaps the social location of the intel-
lectuals could determine their position unambiguously and so free them in
one go from the unprepossessing necessity of making choices and bearing
responsibility for their consequences. This is not, however, what happens
in real life. The status of an intellectual is torn by inner contradiction ^
not unlike the notorious quandary of lovers: the more dedicated to the
well-being of the beloveds they are, the greater is the chance that they
would compose and meticulously elaborate an ideal image of ‘what is good
for the beloved’ ^ and then earnestly, in good faith, try to impose it by
hook or by crook on the objects of their love, while staying deaf to all
protestations. . . .We are not talking here of blunders of the ignorant, or
symptoms of a flawed character. We are talking of a predicament which
even the greatest among the great could not escape nor are guaranteed to
escape in the future. . . . Let me supply an example of that rule by sketching
briefly the story of sociology. . . .

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138 Theory, Culture & Society 28(3)

As newcomers applying for the entry permit to the land of Academia

quite a few centuries after laws of that land had been written up, sociologists
needed to demonstrate their willingness and ability to behave as the laws
of the land demanded: to play the game which the laws of the land pre-
scribed and to play it by the rules which they set. The game to be played
was called ‘science’.
Different as the two most famous among the applicants were from each
other in virtually every detail of their applications (indeed as different as to
fail to recognize and acknowledge being partners/collaborators in the same
metier), Max Weber and E¤mile Durkheim agreed on one point: the upstart,
the arriviste discipline they advocated had firm intentions to play the only
game in the land. That game being science, sociology was and intended to
remain a scientific endeavour. Durkheim, inspired by Auguste Comte’s
vision of the universal, the one-for-all code of scientific procedure, set to
prove that the sociological sector of science wouldn’t be different in its purpose
and its behavioural code from the established segments; that is, the segments
whose scientific credentials were no longer questioned (be it biology, physics
or demography), segments trying in unison to pierce through the mystery of
reality and to register the laws that the genuine, tough and indomitable reali-
ties, the unshakeable ‘facts of the matter’, obeyed.
On his part, Weber, grown and groomed for a change inside the
German tradition of Geistes- or Kultur-wissenschaften, admitted that the
sociological variety of science would be different from the elsewhere prac-
tised ways of doing science; yet he insisted that this does not testify to its
inferiority, but on the contrary to yet greater scientific potential, as much
as the understanding that sociology was after was bound to stay staunchly
beyond the reach of such sciences as have been barred from using words
like ‘intention’, ‘purpose’ or ‘goals’, and have been thereby compelled to stop
short of understanding and settle for mere explanation: for composing
inventories of causes. But neither of the two pioneers allowed any doubt as
to the scientific status of sociology, let alone any questioning of the iron
rule of scientific status being a sine qua non, legitimate and fully justified
as well as praiseworthy condition of naturalization in the land of Academia.
So what did this mean in practice?
Since its birth (that unsurprisingly coincided with the absconding of
Europe’s monotheistic God), science’s self-portrait was painted using the
monotheistic palette. Memorably, Jahve ^ that archetype of absolute author-
ity by which all later aspirers to all and any variety of commanding stature
measured their ambitions ^ ‘answered Job out of the tempest’ (note that
while speaking, unlike Job, ‘out of the tempest’, Jahve pre-empted Job’s
chance to respond with a comparable degree of authority):

Who is this whose ignorant words

Cloud my design in darkness?
Brace yourself and stand up like a man;
I will ask questions, and you shall answer . . . ( Job, 38:2^3)

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 Dawes ^ An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman 139

only to ask in turn:

Should he who argues with God answer back? ( Job, 40:2)

Having been asked ‘out of the tempest’ made of course that last ques-
tion purely rhetorical: Jahve left Job in no doubt about its status, when sum-
marizing his lengthy lecture by reminding Job that he, Jahve, and he only
‘looks down to all creatures, even the highest’ ( Job, 41:34). To which Job,
so voluble and outspoken on other occasions, found no answer except ‘there-
fore I melt away; I repent in dust and ashes’ ( Job, 42:6).
Well ^ hier, as the Germans would say, liegt der Hund begraben. The
principal stake in the war waged by monotheists against their polytheistic
adversaries is the entitlement to soliloquy. Monotheism equals monologue.
Ascendancy of the monologue and disqualification of its opposite and
declared enemy, the dialogue (or more to the point the poly-logue), means
strict and irreversible division and hierarchy of status between ‘subject’ and
‘object’, or ‘doing’ and ‘suffering’; it means therefore legitimacy of but one
voice, coupled with the disqualification of all the rest of the voices as illegit-
imate; it means the right to stifle, silence, declare out of court all but one
voice ^ or to ignore those other voices in case silencing them has proved
not entirely successful. Ideally, it means achieving by that one voice the pre-
rogative to render all ‘other voices’ inadmissible in the court of law, and so
purely and simply inaudible ^ this being sufficient to make all further argu-
mentation redundant, if not an act of profanation and sin of blasphemy.
Nuclear physicists, biologists, geologists or astronomers have no diffi-
culty with obtaining such prerogative, and thereby such a monotheistic
status. They need do nothing at all to assure it; the un-contestable authority
of their pronouncements on the conduct of electrons, organic cells, mineral
deposits and distant galaxies is a priori assured by the sheer impossibility
of their objects voicing their disagreement in the language in which the sci-
entists’ judgements have been made. And if the wordless conduct of the
objects of their study belies the expectations which their judgements imply,
it is again up to them, the scientists, and to them only, to recycle what they
have seen into the ‘facts of the matter’ as seen by and in science.
The sociologists’ bid for scientific status inevitably calls for construct-
ing, by their own effort and with the help of instruments (stratagems, con-
traptions, expedients) of their own invention and design, a state of affairs
which nuclear physicists have the luxury of taking for granted. Our, the soci-
ologists’, objects of study are not numb by their nature. For us to retain
our monotheistic/monologist status and to secure the sovereign authority of
our pronouncements, the objects to which our pronouncements refer need
to be first numbed (as Gaston Bachelard, the great historian of science,
observed: the first truly scientific book was one that did not start with ref-
erence to a mundane and universally shared human experience, like a lid
jumping on the pot with boiling water or air easier to breathe after
a storm, but with a quotation from a study of another scientist).

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140 Theory, Culture & Society 28(3)

The numbness of our objects, which happen to be fellow human beings

armed with their mundane wisdom called ‘doxa’ or ‘common sense’, needs
to be our accomplishment. It needs to be achieved. But how?
Essentially, by one of the two conceivable strategies: through limiting
our pronouncements on the (human, all too human) objects of our study
to things or events which the objects themselves, having no personal experi-
ence of them and so no chance of scrutinizing their veracity, are obliged to
take on faith (as, for instance, huge volumes of ‘data’ that would not be
brought into being unless lavishly financed by research grants and founda-
tion stipends); and/or through wrapping our judgements in a language
which the objects of our study would not comprehend, and in which they
wouldn’t be therefore able to respond, even in the unlikely case of caring
and wishing and daring to do so. The two strategies have a common denom-
inator: they both aim at preventing, in our relations with the objects of our
study, that ‘fusion of horizons’ which Hans-Georg Gadamer viewed as the
necessary condition of all meaningful, undisturbed and effective two-sided
communication.
Unlike electrons or positrons, humans are not the Descartes-style pas-
sive objects of cognition, the subject’s constructs, owing to the cognizing
subject all the sense they may acquire or be assigned; but our bid for a sci-
entific status cannot but be in the last account an intention to render them
precisely such passive objects, or at least to treat them as if they were. Our
bid for a scientific status presupposes a unilateral break of communication.
In practice, such a bid equals willingness to voluntarily forfeit the cognitive
chance offered by our shared humanity, in exchange for the scientific, that
is monologist, status for our narratives: to obtain by hook and by crook
and by our own ingenuity what nature offered our neighbours from ‘natural’
sciences on a plate, ready for consumption and enjoyment.
Expropriation being the other side of appropriation, Weber and
Durkheim had to do, and did, their best to denigrate and devalue avant la
lettre whatever other humans, recast for that purpose as ‘non-professionals’,
might say to make sense of their own deeds. Durkheim’s blunt verdict (in
Les re'gles de la me¤thode sociologique) was that the representations of facts
‘which we have been able to make in the course of our life, have been
made uncritically and un-methodically’ (that is, not in the way we would
proceed qua sociologists) and for that reason ‘are devoid of scientific value
and must be discarded’. Short of the scientifically endorsed method,
humans are capable solely of ‘confused, fleeting, subjective’ impressions.
With the possible exception of mathematics, Durkheim reminds us, ‘every
object of science is a thing’. What follows is that, in order to be admitted
into a scientific observatory or laboratory, humans need first to be trun-
cated/curtailed/reduced to the modality of things. B.F. Skinner would later
draw the proper conclusion from Durkheim’s recommendation and declare
everything that goes on inside human heads to be shut forever inside
‘black boxes’, impenetrable for scientific eyes and so of no relevance or inter-
est to science.

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 Dawes ^ An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman 141

Paul Lazarsfeld would apologize for sociology’s sloth and ineptitude:

Sociology is not yet at the stage where it can provide a safe basis for social
engineering. . . . It took the natural sciences 250 years between Galileo and
the beginning of industrial revolution before they had a major effect upon
the history of the world. Empirical social research has a history of three or
four decades.

While, in the view of Otto Neurath, hugely influential in his time and
a most radical advocate of ‘here as there, in Kulturwissenschaften as in
Naturwissenschaften’,

sociology ought to rest on a materialist basis, and that means to treat men
just like other sciences treat animals, plants, or stones. Sociology is eine
Realwissenschaft just as, say, astronomy. Populations are like galaxies of
stars more closely linked to each other than to other stars.

Weber would not go with Durkheim, let alone Skinner or Neurath, the
whole hog; he would not wish the objects of sociological science to be so
reduced as they intended. Weber’s ambitions reached further: having
refused to dismiss the sentient, self-guided (even if testifying to self-
deception and/or being duped) aspect of human beings, he wished to
secure for the sociologists the entitlement to soliloquy not only in relation
to the behavioural aspects of human actions, but also in relation to their
admittedly subjective (i.e. locked inside the black box) aspects like motives,
reasons, purposes ^ pointing out that ‘in the great majority of cases actual
action goes on in a state of inarticulate half-consciousness or actual uncon-
sciousness of its subjective meaning’:

The ‘conscious motives’ may well, even to the actor himself, conceal the var-
ious ‘motives’ and ‘repressions’ which constitute the real driving forces of
the action. Thus, even subjectively honest self-analysis has only a relative
value. Then it is the task of the sociologist to be aware of this motivational
situation and to describe and analyse it, even though it has not actually
been concretely part of the conscious ‘intention’ of the actor.

In other words: humans can be admitted into the field of scientific

scrutiny also in their capacity of intentional, motivated beings ^ though on
condition of renouncing, or being deprived of, their right to judge what
their intentions and motives really and truly are. One thing which Weber
could not forgive Georg Simmel (his contemporary, refused an academic
office for all but the last three years of his life, and even then thanks only
to the conscription of a good deal of teaching staff to the killing fields of
the Great War) was his original sin of putting the inferior ‘conscious
motives’ of the actors at one level with the superior renderings of their inten-
tions by their scientific analysts ^ if not confusing their distinct modalities

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142 Theory, Culture & Society 28(3)

altogether, instead of keeping them, emphatically, in an uncompromising

opposition to each other.
For more than half a century of its recent history, and because seeking
to be of service to the managerial reason, sociology struggled to establish
itself as a science/technology of un-freedom: as a design workshop for the
social settings meant to resolve in theory, but most importantly in practice,
what Talcott Parsons memorably articulated as ‘the Hobbesian question’:
how to induce/force/indoctrinate human beings, blessed/cursed with the
ambiguous gift of free will, to be normatively guided and to follow routinely
a manipulable yet predictable course of action; or how to reconcile free will
with the willingness to submit to other people’s will, lifting thereby the ten-
dency to ‘voluntary servitude’, noted/anticipated by E¤tienne la Boe'tie at the
threshold of the modern era, to the rank of the supreme principle of social
organization. In short: how to make people will doing what doing they
must while stripping the rest of the will of relevancy.
In our relentlessly individualized society, sociology faces the exciting
and exhilarating chance of turning for a change into a science/technology of
freedom: of the ways and means through which the individuals-by-decree
and de jure of the liquid-modern times may be lifted to the rank of individ-
uals-by-choice and de facto. Or to take a leaf from Jeffrey Alexander’s call
to arms: sociology’s future, at least its immediate future, lies in an effort to
reincarnate and to re-establish itself as cultural politics in the service of
human freedom.
I’d suggest that sociology has little choice but to follow now as ever the
track of the changing world; the alternative would be nothing less than loss
of its relevance. But I’d suggest as well that the particular ‘no-choice’ quan-
dary that we face today should be anything but a cause for despair. Quite
the contrary.
One seminal function/duty that in the course of the recent liquid
modern individualization had been dropped from the heights of ‘imagined
totality’ into the cauldron of individually conducted ‘life politics’ (to
borrow Anthony Giddens’s term) has been, for all practical intents and pur-
poses, the task of truth-validation and meaning-production. This does not
mean, of course, that the truths for individual validation and the raw stuff
of which individuals would mould their meanings have stopped being
socially supplied; but it does mean that they tend to be now media-
and-shops supplied, rather than being imposed through communal com-
mand; and that they are calculated for seducing clients rather than compel-
ling the subordinates. The task of choice-making, complete with the
responsibility for the consequences of choice, falls now and needs to be car-
ried on the individual’s shoulders.
This is a totally new ball game, as Americans used to say. It has its
promises ^ not least the chance of shifting morality from conformity to eth-
ical command to the unconditionally individual responsibility for the well-
being of others. But it is also filled with dangers, and augurs a risk-full
life. It casts the individuals (and it means all of us) in the state of acute,

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 Dawes ^ An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman 143

and in all probability incurable, under-determination and uncertainty.

As the views memorized and skills acquired are poor and all too often mis-
leading or even treacherous guides to action, and as the available knowledge
transcends the individual capacity to assimilate, whereas its assimilated
fraction falls as a rule far short of what the understanding of the situation
(the knowledge of how to go on, that is) would require ^ the condition of
frailty, transience and contingency has become for the duration, and perhaps
for a very long time to come, the natural human habitat. And so it is with
this sort of human experience that sociology needs to engage in a continuous
dialogue.
I’d say that the twin roles which we, sociologists, are called to perform
in that dialogue are those of de-familiarizing the familiar and familiarizing
(taming, domesticating) the unfamiliar. Both roles demand skilfulness in
the opening to scrutiny of the net of links, influences and dependencies too
vast to be thoroughly surveyed, fully scanned and grasped with resources
supplied by individual experience. They also demand the kind of skills best
caught in the English novelist E.M. Forster’s phrase ‘only connect’: the skil-
fulness in reconnecting and making whole again the notoriously fragmented
and disconnected images of the Lebenswelt ^ the world lived in our times
from episode to episode, and lived-through individually, at individual risk
and with individual benefit in mind. Last though not least, they call for
skills in uncovering the ‘doxa’ (the knowledge we think with but not
about), pulling it out of the murky depths of the subconscious, and so
enabling and setting in motion a process of perpetual critical scrutiny, and
perhaps even conscious control over its contents, by their thus far unaware
possessors and unwitting employers. In other words, they call for the art of
the dialogue.
To be sure, dialogue (not to mention the polylogue) is a difficult art.
It means engaging conversationalists with an intention to jointly clarify the
issues, rather than to have them one’s own way; to multiply voices, rather
than reducing their number; to widen the set of possibilities, rather than
aiming at a wholesale consensus (that relic of monotheistic dreams stripped
of the politically incorrect coercion); to jointly pursue understanding,
instead of aiming at the others’ defeat; and all in all being animated by the
wish to keep the conversation going, rather than by the desire to grind it
to a halt. Mastering that art is terribly time-consuming, though far less
time-intensive as practising it. Neither of the two undertakings, nor the
mastering and practising together, promise to make our life easier. But
they do promise to make our lives more exciting and rewarding to us, as
well as more useful to our fellow humans ^ and to transform our profes-
sional chores into a continuous and never ending voyage of discovery.

Simon Dawes: What about your own current work ^ could you tell us about
your forthcoming book, Collateral Casualties of Inequality? What’s it
about, and how does it connect with your other writings?

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144 Theory, Culture & Society 28(3)

Zygmunt Bauman: In a nutshell again, and again risking the regrettable

oversimplification of the argument:
The foremost strategy of all and any power struggle consists now as
before in the ‘structuring’ of the counterpart’s condition, while ‘un-structur-
ing’, that is deregulating, one’s own condition was and remains a permanent
feature of modern power strategies; however, in the society of producers,
the solid-modern settlement as represented by the ‘Fordist factory’ cum
‘social state’ paradigm, both sides of the conflict had vested interests in pre-
venting inequality running out of control ^ whereas this is no longer the
case. In the result of liquid-modern transformation the institutional barriers
capable of stopping the inequality-promoting forces short of breaking the
‘natural’ limits to inequality, with all its disastrous, indeed suicidal conse-
quences, are no longer, at least at the moment, in place. Even if they
haven’t been as yet dismantled, the barriers erected for that purpose in the
past have proved singularly inadequate to the new task. At the time of
their designing, they had not been meant to confront the present-day
volume of uncertainty, fed from the apparently inexhaustibly prolific
global sources no easier to tame with the available political instruments
than the fountain of crude oil contaminating the Gulf of Mexico and its sur-
roundings was with the heretofore available technology.
As a result, the odds in favour of those ‘close to the sources of uncer-
tainty’ and against those others, fixed at the uncertainty’s receiving end,
have been radically multiplied. It is the efforts to narrow the hiatus, to mit-
igate the polarization of chances and the resulting discriminations that
have been, for a change, made marginal and transient: they are now specta-
cularly ineffective, indeed impotent, in stopping the runaway rise of for-
tunes and miseries at the two poles of the present-day power axis. They are
afflicted by the chronic deficit of power to act and to get things done,
while power continues to be amassed and stocked on the side of forces press-
ing in the opposite direction. State governments seek local remedies for
the globally fabricated deprivations and miseries in vain ^ just as the indivi-
duals-by-the-decree-of-fate (read: by the impact of deregulation) seek in
vain the individual solutions to the socially fabricated life problems.
‘The inequality between the world’s individuals is staggering’, says
Branko Milanovic, the top economist in the research department of the
World Bank. ‘At the turn of the twenty-first century, the richest 5 percent
of people received one-third of total global income, as much as the poorest
80 percent’ (2005: 231). While a few poor countries are catching up with
the rich world, the differences between the richest and poorest individuals
around the globe are huge and likely growing. . . .
In 2008, Glenn Firebaugh pointed out that ‘we have a reversal of a
longstanding trend, from rising inequality across nations and constant or
declining inequality within nations, to declining inequality across nations
and rising inequality within them’. That’s the message of my 2003 book,
The New Geography of Global Income Inequality ^ a message since then
confirmed. Firebaugh’s findings chime well with the framework sketched

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 Dawes ^ An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman 145

here for grasping and explaining the contemporary trends and prospects of
social inequality. Capitals, free-floating in the ‘politics free’ global ‘space of
flows’ (as Manuel Castells aptly and famously called it), are keen to search
for the low-living-standard areas of the globe amenable to ‘virgin land’ treat-
ment ^ cashing in on the (temporary and self-destructive) profit-generating
differential between the lands of low wages but without institutions of self-
defence and state protection of the poor, and the long-exploited lands
afflicted by the impact of the ‘law of diminishing returns’. The immediate
consequence of that ‘free-floating’ of capitals emancipated from political con-
trol would most probably lead to the shrinking of that differential which
set in motion the current tendency of the inter-state ‘levelling up’ of living
standards. The countries that released capitals into the ‘space of flows’ find
themselves, however, in a situation in which they themselves turn into the
objects of uncertainties generated by global finances, and in which their
ability to act falls victim to the new power deficit ^ obliging them, in the
absence of global regulation, to retreat step by step from the protection
which in the times preceding the power-politics divorce and privatization of
uncertainty they used to promise (and most of the time deliver) to their
own native poor.
This could be the explanation for the U-turn of trends noted by
Firebaugh. Relieved of their local checks and balances and released into
the no-man’s land of the global ‘politics-free’ zone, capitals accumulated in
the ‘developed’ parts of the world are free to re-create in distant places the
conditions that ruled in their countries of origin at the times of ‘primitive
accumulation’; with a proviso, however, that this time round the bosses are
‘absentee landlords’, thousands of miles apart from the labour they hire.
The bosses have unilaterally broken the mutuality of dependence while mul-
tiplying freely the numbers of those exposed to the consequences of the
bosses’ own new freedoms, and even more the number of those who crave
for being so exposed . . .
This in its turn cannot but rebound on the conditions of the metropol-
itan labour left behind by the capitals’ secession: that labour is now con-
strained not only by the added uncertainty caused by the vastly expanded
range of options open to their bosses, but also by the awesomely low prices
of labour in the countries in which the free-to-move capitals chose to tempo-
rarily settle. As a result, as Firebaugh observed, the distance between ‘devel-
oped’ and ‘poor’ countries tends to shrink, whereas in the countries that
until not long ago seemed to have got rid of jarring social inequalities once
and for all, the sky-is-the-limit growth of the distance between the ‘haves’
and the ‘have-nots’, known in Europe in the early 19th century, is coming
back with a vengeance.

Simon Dawes: And what do you make of the recent surge in interest in
inequality, and the economic and environmental crises, that proposes
de-growth, sustainable economies, post-capitalism or the continuing
salience of communism as solutions to these problems?

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146 Theory, Culture & Society 28(3)

Zygmunt Bauman: Poignantly and succinctly, the great Jose¤ Saramago has
already answered your question, pointing out that ‘people do not choose a
government that will bring the market within their control; instead, the
market in every way conditions governments to bring the people within its
control’ (2010). Several decades ago, in Legitimation Crisis, Jˇrgen
Habermas spelled out the function of capitalist states as assuring that the
meeting between capital and labour takes place, and that both sides come
to the meeting place fit and willing for transaction. As the run-by-capital
society of producers turned since into the run-by-capital society of con-
sumers, I would say that the main, indeed ‘meta’, function of the govern-
ments has become now to assure that it is the meetings between
commodities and the consumer, and credit issuers and the borrowers, that
regularly take place (as with the governments known to fight tooth and
nail over every penny which the ‘underclass’, that is the ‘flawed (useless) con-
sumers’, need to keep their bodies alive, but that now miraculously find
hundreds of billions of pounds or dollars to ‘re-capitalize the banks’, have
recently proved; if proof were needed . . . ). Obviously for everyone, even for
those who would rather be looking the other way, performance of this new
function boils down to buying (more exactly: borrowing) more time and
pushing back the implosion that is bound sooner or later to occur ^ as
more capitals fight for the fast shrinking volume of resources, as whatever
has remained of the ‘virgin lands’ of yore nears exhaustion and death-
by-overexploitation, and as the supply of heretofore unexplored ‘virgin
lands’ comes closer to nil.
I have pointed out recently, following Keith Tester’s hint, that we have
found ourselves in the period of ‘interregnum’: the old works no more, the
new is not yet born. But the awareness that without it being born we are
all marked for demise is already much alive, as is the awareness that the
hard nut we must urgently crack is not the presence of ‘too many poor’,
but ‘too many rich’. Let me quote Saramago once more: ‘I would ask the
political economists, the moralists, if they have already calculated the
number of individuals who must be condemned to wretchedness, to over-
work, to demoralization, to infantilization, to despicable ignorance, to insur-
mountable misfortune, to utter penury, in order to produce one rich
person?’ I suppose that such and similar calls will in the coming years
gather in pitch ^ and in audience . . .

Simon Dawes: Could you say a little about what you’re reading at the
moment, or what you’ve read recently that you’ve been impressed by?

Zygmunt Bauman: For me, the last couple of years discouraged voyages of
discovery. . . . Not many attempted, even fewer seen through.
But as you can gather from our chat thus far, Saramago was one
(regrettably, late) discovery. I am sad that just a couple of his oeuvres, yet
unread, wait for me to be savoured ^ as he won’t write more of them. . . .

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 Dawes ^ An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman 147

Another discovery was the first dystopias composed for the liquid-
modern world, codifying and extrapolating and bringing to their logical
(that is, if our collective art of the illogical and the unexpected won’t inter-
fere in time) conclusion. In film, Michael Haneke. In literature, Michel
Houellebecq. Bound to do for the 21st century what Zamiatin, Orwell and
Aldous Huxley did for the 20th.
The latest discovery, not in the same class, yet great all the same:
Sarah Bakewell’s study of Montaigne under the enigmatic title How to Live
(mind you, emphatically not ‘How Should One Live’ . . . ).
I am fascinated by the already published and the forthcoming Keith
Tester studies in film art. They open quite new vistas where one would
think everything that could has been already said. I am still trying to
come to grips with their import.

Simon Dawes: One final question: TCS is committed to the process of peer-
review, and many of our (both rejected and accepted) contributors are grate-
ful for the feedback given by our editors and anonymous reviewers, and
for the subsequent strengthening of their articles, but you are critical of
peer-review and no longer act as a referee for us. Could you tell us why?

Zygmunt Bauman: There are, by the most conservative counting, two grave
and deeply regrettable collateral victims of the peer-review gruesome strata-
gem: one is the daring of thought (wished-washed to the lowest common
denominator), and the other is the individuality, as well as the responsibility,
of editors (those seeking shelter behind the anonymity of ‘peers’, but in
fact dissolved in it, in many cases without a trace). There are of course
many more harms done: like the deceptive safety which the ‘committee res-
olution’ suggests, dampening thereby the readers’ critical impulse, or the
temperance and sometimes also honesty of the ‘peers’ provoked by the assur-
ances of anonymity into actions they otherwise would desist from. The over-
all result is the reinstating of the state of affairs bluntly described by
Hannah Arendt as one of ‘floating responsibility’ or ‘responsibility of
nobody’.
Last but not least, I would single out yet another collateral damage:
the multitude of the trails blazed and heterogeneity of inspirations. I suspect
that the peer-review system carries a good part of blame for the fact that
something like 60 percent or more of journal articles are never quoted
(which means leaving no trace on our joint scholarly pursuits), and (in my
reception at any rate) the ‘learned journals’ (with a few miraculous excep-
tions that entail, prominently, TCS) ooze monumental boredom. To find a
new enlightening and inspiring idea (as distinct from finding a recipe for
getting safely through the peer-built barricade), browsing through thou-
sands of journal pages is all too often called for. With my tongue in one
cheek only, I’d suggest that were our Palaeolithic ancestors to discover the
peer-review dredger, we would still be sitting in caves . . .

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148 Theory, Culture & Society 28(3)

So perhaps the stratagem under discussion is in addition guilty of

massive time-and-intellectual-power waste. . . . In short, not the sort of
game of which I’d be inclined willingly to partake . . .

Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank Zygmunt not only for having been ‘inclined willingly to partake’ in this
interview, but for the quality of his responses and the speed with which he returned them
to me, for his willingness to answer yet more questions when asked, and for the warmth
and humour of his emails, which treated this faceless stranger as a ‘dearest’ friend.

Note
This interview was conducted by email between 6 September 2010 and
27 September 2010. An abridged version was previously published on the TCS
Website on 22 December 2010.
References
Bauman, Z. (forthcoming) Collateral Casualties of Inequality. Cambridge: Polity.
Firebaugh, G. (2008) ‘Comment on ‘‘Debate about Income Inequality’’’, UC Atlas
of Global Inequality, http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/blog/?p¼55 (accessed 27 September
2010).
Hell, J. (2010) ‘Modernity and the Holocaust, or, Listening to Eurydice’, Theory,
Culture & Society 27(6): 125^54.
Jay, M. (2010) ‘Liquidity Crisis: Zygmunt Bauman and the Incredible Lightness of
Modernity’, Theory, Culture & Society 27(6): 95^106.
Milanovic, B. (2005) Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global
Inequality. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Milbank, J. (2010) ‘Culture and Justice’, Theory, Culture & Society 27(6): 107^24.
Saramago, J. (2010) The Notebook. New York: Verso.
Smith, D. (1998) ‘Zygmunt Bauman: How to be a Successful Outsider’, Theory,
Culture & Society 15(1): 39^45.

Zygmunt Bauman is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of

Leeds. His most recent publications are Has Ethics a Chance in the
Society of Consumers? (Harvard University Press, 2008), The Art of Life
(Polity, 2008), and Living on Borrowed Time: Conversations with Citlali
Rovirosa-Madrazo (Polity, 2009). Collateral Casualties of Inequality
(Polity) is forthcoming.

Simon Dawes is the Editor of the TCS Website (http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/)

and TCS Blog (http://theoryculturesocietyblogspot.com/), and Editorial
Assistant of Theory, Culture & Society and Body & Society. He has taught
at the University of Leicester, Derby University and Nottingham Trent
University, where his doctoral research explores the genealogical relations
between public and private theory, and citizenship and consumerism, in
the context of broadcasting policy. [email: simon.dawes@ntu.ac.uk]

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