18,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
In this new book Zygmunt Bauman and Riccardo Mazzeo examine the contentious issue of the relation between literature (and the arts in general) and sociology (or, more generally, a branch of the humanities claiming scientific status). While many commentators see literature and sociology as radically different vocations, Bauman and Mazzeo argue that they are bound together by a common purpose and a shared subject matter. Despite the many differences in terms of their methods and their ways of presenting their findings, novels and sociological texts are not at cross-purposes. Indeed, it is precisely their differences that make them at once indispensable to each other and mutually complementary. The writers of novels and of sociological texts may explore their world from different perspectives, seeking and producing different types of 'data', but their products bear the unmistakable marks of their shared origin. They feed each other and depend on each other in terms of their agenda, their discoveries and the contents of their messages. In a world characterized by the continuous search for new sensations and the fetishism of consumption, they bring fundamental existential questions back to the public agenda. Literature and sociology reveal the truth of the human condition only when they stay in one another's company, remaining attentive to each other's findings and engaged in a continuous dialogue. For only together can they rise to the challenging task of untangling and laying bare the complex intertwining of biography and history as well as of individual and society that totality we are constantly shaping while being shaped by it.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 220
Ähnliche
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Notes
1 The Two Sisters
Notes
2 Salvation through Literature
Notes
3 The Pendulum and Calvino’s Empty Centre
Notes
4 The Father Problem
Notes
5 Literature and the Interregnum
Notes
6 The Blog and the Disappearance of Mediators
Notes
7 Are We All Becoming Autistic?
Notes
8 Metaphors of the Twenty-first Century
Notes
9 Risking Twitterature
Notes
10 Dry and Damp
Notes
11 The Retrenchment Within ‘Oneness’
Notes
12 Education, Literature, Sociology
Notes
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Pages
iii
iv
vi
vii
viii
ix
x
xi
xii
xiii
xiv
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
In Praise of Literature
Zygmunt Bauman and Riccardo Mazzeo
polity
Copyright © Zygmunt Bauman, Riccardo Mazzeo 2016
The right of Zygmunt Bauman, Riccardo Mazzeo to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0272-1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.Names: Bauman, Zygmunt, 1925- author. | Mazzeo, Riccardo.Title: In praise of literature / Zygmunt Bauman, Riccardo Mazzeo.Description: Cambridge, U.K. ; Malden, MA : Polity, 2015. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2015025860| ISBN 9781509502684 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509502691 (paperback)Subjects: LCSH: Literature and society. | Literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory. Classification: LCC PN51 B325 2016 | DDC 809/.933552--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015025860
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all.
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, trans.Anson G. Rabinbach, in The Culture Industry, Routledge 1991, p.89
The official practise of humanism is completed by accusing everything truly human and in no way official of inhumanity. For criticism takes from man his meagre spiritual possessions, removing the veil which he himself looks upon as benevolent. The anger aroused in him by the unveiled image is diverted to those who tear the veil, in keeping with the hypothesis of Helvetius that truth never damages anyone except him who utters it.
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Culture and Administration’, trans. Wes Blomster, Telos 37, 1978, p. 106
The simple fact must be recognized that that which is specifically cultural is that which is removed from the naked necessity of life. [...] Culture – that which goes beyond the system of self-preservation of the species. [...] The sacrosanct irrationality of culture.
Ibid., p. 94, 100, 97
(M)aterial reality is called the world of exchange value [whereas culture] refuses to accept the domination of that world.
Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott, Verso 1974, p. 44
Preface
The subject-matter of our conversation-in-letters, reproduced below, is the notoriously (and according to some people ‘essentially’) contested issue: the relation between literature (and arts in general) and sociology (or, more generally, a branch of the humanities that claim a scientific status).
Both literature, together with the rest of the arts, and sociology are part and parcel of culture; the above-quoted Theodor W. Adorno’s statements and assessments of the nature and role of culture – as ‘going beyond the system of self-preservation’ by ‘tearing the veil’ that culture’s prospective beneficiaries may self-deceive into looking upon as benevolent – apply to both in equal measure. All the same, it is our view that literature and sociology are linked to each other more intimately and cooperate with each other more closely than is common among the various types of cultural products, and certainly much more than their administratively motivated and imposed separation would suggest.
We attempt to argue and to demonstrate that literature and sociology share the field they explore, their subject-matter and topics – as well as (at least to a substantive degree) their vocation and social impact. As one of us said, in trying to spell out the nature of their kinship and cooperation, literature and sociology are ‘complementary, supplementary to each other and reciprocally enriching. They are by no means in competition […] – let alone at loggerheads or cross-purposes. Knowingly or not, deliberately or matter-of-factly, they pursue the same purpose; one could say “they belong to the same business”.’1 This is why, if you are a sociologist trying to crack the mystery of the human condition and so to tear the veil woven of pre-judgements and insinuated or selfconcocted misconceptions, ‘if you are after the “real life” rather than “truth” overloaded with the doubtful and presumptuous “knowledge” of homunculi born and bred in test-tubes, then you can hardly choose better than to take a hint from the likes of Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Georges Perec, Milan Kundera or Michel Houllebecq’. Literature and sociology feed each other. They also cooperate in drawing each other’s cognitive horizons and help to correct each other’s occasional blunders.
What we had in mind, however, when conducting our exchange was neither to compose another reconstruction of the long chronicle of changing scholarly views on the multi-faceted relationship between arts and human/ social sciences, nor to take a snapshot of its present stage. Conducted and recorded from the perspective of mainly sociological interests and concerns, our conversations are not an exercise in the theory of literature – let alone a reconstruction of its long and rich history. We’ve tried instead to present that relation in action: to trace, note and document the shared aspirations, mutual inspirations and interchange of these two kinds of inquiry into the human condition – human ways of being-in-the-world complete with their joys and sorrows, deployed as well as neglected or wasted human potentials, prospects and hopes, expectations and frustrations. Both literature and sociology do all that (at least attempt to do it and most surely are called to go on attempting) – while deploying distinct, albeit mutually complementary, strategies, tools and methods.
Classifying and filing literature among the arts, while sociology struggles earnestly – though with mixed success – for being classified and filed among the sciences, cannot but leave a deep imprint on common views of their mutual relationship – as well as on the priorities of their practitioners. For that reason, drawing boundaries has been attracting more attention on both sides of the assumed division than building bridges and facilitating cross-border traffic (bringing to both sides as the result, in our view, incomparably more harm than profit), while the job of checking obligatory identity cards commanded on the whole incomparably more attention and dedication than issuing (few and far between) travel documents – as if to confirm Frederick Barth’s observation that, rather than borders being drawn because of the presence of differences, differences are avidly sought and invented because borders have been drawn.2 Each of the two juxtaposed classes of cultural products sets stern demands for all applicants for inclusion; rigorous, stringent and onerous prescriptions and proscriptions are codified in order to guard the unique identity and territorial sovereignty of each entity. On the scale of conformity to the rules, the crossbars tend to be set discouragingly high to keep away insufficiently disciplined applicants who threaten to wash away the class privilege together with borderline stockades.
Differences in ‘methods’ of proceeding, just like the points at which literatures and social-scientific research feel allowed to announce arrival at their respective destinations, are indeed multiple and variegated.3 Two of the differences, however, are, as far as we are concerned, central to the distinction between the two ways of investigating the human condition – while, simultaneously, to their complementarity. This duality was splendidly caught by Georgy Lukács already in his 1914 study: ‘Art always says “And yet!” to life. The creation of forms is the most profound confirmation of the existence of a dissonance […] [T]he novel, in contrast to other genres whose existence resides within the finished form, appears as something in process of becoming’.4 Let’s add that a great part of – perhaps most – sociological study belongs to the family of those ‘other genres’: it aims towards completeness, conclusiveness and closure. Committed to this task, it is willing to skip, relegate to the margin, or efface from the picture as irrelevant idiosyncratic anomaly, everything uniquely personal – subjective – as quirky, offbeat and aberrant. It strives to unravel the uniform and general while eliminating the peculiar and distinct as quaint and anomalous. As Lukács insists, however, it could not be otherwise than ‘that the outward form of the novel’ is ‘essentially biographical’. He warns right away that ‘the fluctuation between a conceptual system which can never completely capture life and a life complex which can never attain completeness is immanently utopian’.
And so we confront on the one hand the organically heteronomic and endemically dissonant social setting of individual life, and on the other the earnest if doomed effort of the individual to conjure up a cohesive totality out of fragmented life, and a steadfast trajectory out of a series of biographic twists and swivels weather-cockstyle. The first induces the fallacy of imputing logic and rationality to an illogical and irrational condition; the other incites the error of spying a self-propelled and selfguided exploit in a tangle of disparate and inconsistent pulls and pushes. One danger is endemic to sociological undertakings; the other to novel-writing. Neither sociology, nor literature, can conquer their respective menaces on their own. They can, however, circumvent or vanquish both, if – and only if – they join forces. And it is precisely their difference that gives them the chance of victory under the sign of complementarity. To quote Milan Kundera’s – as concise as it is cogent – way of putting it: ‘the founder of the modern era is not only Descartes but also Cervantes […] If it is true that philosophy and science have forgotten about man’s being, it emerges all the more plainly that with Cervantes a great European art took shape that is nothing other than the investigation of this forgotten being.’5 And to quote also his wholehearted endorsement of Hermann Broch’s assertion that ‘the sole raison d’être of a novel is to discover what only a novel can discover’. We would add: without that discovery, sociology would risk becoming a one-legged walker.
We believe that the relationship in question bears all the marks of a ‘sibling rivalry’: a mixture of cooperation and competition, only to be expected among beings who are bound to engage in the pursuit of similar objectives while being judged, evaluated and recognized or denied recognition on the ground of distinct, though comparable, types of results. Novels and sociological studies arise from the same curiosity and have similar cognitive purposes; sharing parenthood and bearing indisputable, palpable family resemblance, they watch each other’s advances with a blend of admiration and comradely jealousy. Novel-writers and the writers of sociological texts in the last account explore the same ground: the vast human experience of being-in-the-world that (to quote José Saramago) ‘bear[s] witness to the passage through this world of men and women who for good or bad reasons have not only lived but also left a mark, a presence, an influence, which, having survived to this day, will continue to affect generations to come’.6 Novel-writers and the writers of sociological texts dwell in the shared household: in what the Germans call die Lebenswelt, the ‘lived world’, the world perceived and recycled by its residents (its ‘auctors’ – that is, simultaneously its actors and authors) into the wisdom of ‘common sense’, re-moulded into the art of life reflected in their life practices. Knowingly or not, purposefully or just matter-of-factly, they are both engaged in a sort of ‘secondary (or derivative) hermeneutics’: a continuous reinterpretation of entities that are outcomes of preceding interpretations – realities formed by interpretative exertions of the hoi polloi and stored in their doxa (common sense: ideas one thinks with, but little – if at all – about).
On numerous past occasions, novel-writers (like other visionary artists) were first to note and scrutinize the incipient changes of track or new trends in the challenges that their contemporaries faced and struggled to tackle; novelists managed to spot and catch new departures at a stage in which, for most sociologists, they would remain unnoticed, or dismissed and unattended on account of their marginality and apparently irrevocable assignment to minority status. We are currently witnessing another such occasion. Once more in the history of modern times, novel-writers join filmmakers and visual artists in the avant-garde of public reflection, debate and awareness. They are pioneering insight into the novel condition of men and women in our ever more deregulated, atomized, privatized society of consumers: people smarting under the tyranny of the moment, doomed to lead a hurried life and to join in the cult of novelty. They explore and portray transient joys and lasting depressions, fears, indignation, dissent and half- or whole-hearted inchoate attempts at resistance – ending in partial victories or ostensible (though hopefully temporary) defeats. Awakened, inspired and boosted by them, sociology tries hard to recycle their insights into authoritative statements grounded in systematic sine ira et studio (‘with neither hate nor zeal’) research. The career study of that process serves us as a key to unpacking the pattern of the relation and mutual interdependence between two, artistic and scientific, cultures – as well as to estimating the degree to which each of the two business associates owes its progress to the incentive, enlightenment, spur and animus received from the other.
To conclude the message which we conversationalists attempt to convey: novel-writers and the writers of sociological texts may explore this world from different perspectives, seeking and producing different types of ‘data’ – and yet their products bear unmistakable marks of shared origin. They feed each other, and depend on each other in their agenda, discoveries and the contents of their messages; they reveal the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth of the human condition only when staying in each other’s company, remaining attentive to each other’s findings, and engaged in a continuous dialogue. Only together can they rise up to the challenging task of untangling and laying bare the complex entwining of biography and history, as well as of individual and society: that totality we are daily shaping while being shaped by it.
Z. B. and R. M.
Notes
1.
Zygmunt Bauman, Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Keith Tester,
What Use Is Sociology? Conversations with Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Keith Tester
(Polity, 2014), pp. 14–17.
2.
See Frederick Barth,
Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference
(Universitetsforlaget, 1969).
3.
On the pedigree and current phase of the ‘two [opposite] cultures in one’ issue, read Stefan Collini’s highly informative and insightful article ‘Leavis v. Snow: The “two cultures” bust-up 50 years on’, published in the
Guardian
on 16 August 2013.
4.
Here quoted from Georg Lukács,
The Theory of the Novel
, trans. Anna Bostook (The Merlin Press, 1971), pp. 72–3, 77.
5.
Milan Kundera,
L’art du roman
(Gallimard, 1968); here quoted from
The Art of the Novel
, trans. Linda Asher (Faber & Faber, 2005), pp. 4–5.
6.
José Saramago,
The Notebook
, trans. Amanda Hopkinson and Daniel Hahn (Verso, 2010), p. 13.
1The Two Sisters
Riccardo Mazzeo You have clearly articulated the reasons why literature is so important for sociology, to the point of considering the two disciplines as ‘sisters’: both are indeed disposed to constantly shredding the veil of pre-interpretation1 – as Milan Kundera puts it – as seen in the work Don Quixote by Cervantes.
To heed the complexity and the infinite variety of human experience as it is intimately perceived and lived, individuals cannot be reduced to homunculi, identified and described as models and statistics, as data and objective facts. The nature of literature itself is ambivalent, metaphoric and metonymic. It is able to express solidity and fluidity as well as homogeneousness and plurality, the smoothness and even the ‘acrid, rough and crunchy’2 nature of our existences. We not only lack the words to say who we are and what we want, but we are also spoon-fed, gorged and saturated by words which are as empty and lifeless as they are glitteringly attractive and seductive – the ubiquitous words that are repeated by the sirens of celebrity, used for amazing, new hi-tech devices and the latest irresistible must-have products which allow us to take our place in society in the way we are expected to.
And so, ‘if you wish to cooperate with your readers in their urge (conscious or not) to find the truth of their own way of being-in-the-world and learn about the alternatives which lie unexplored, overlooked, neglected or hidden’,3 it is essential that sociology and literature work together to increase our capacity to judge and reveal the authenticity which is obscured by the veils that surround us, and to provide the freedom to follow our needs.
I had been thinking of calling this new series of conversations Sister Literature (even if the title will be In Praise of Literature – all things considered, not so different from my original idea) in recognition of the considerations in your last book, whose aim is summarized above and at the heart of all your sociological work, which has always been nurtured by literature. It is also a title partly inspired by two books written by friends of mine who tried, in different ways, to demonstrate how literature is extraordinary in making sense of our existences and the events of our time that we experience together.4
Naturally, the idea of the original title is also partly due to my own inclination, since I graduated a long time ago with a thesis on Oedipus by Marcel Proust and I had wanted to go to Paris to study with Lacan. It took getting to know and love your work in the early 1990s for me to enhance my awareness and my view of society without losing sight of the individuals who form it.
I would like you therefore to pursue your enlightened sociological reflections primarily as a narrative author, of course, but also using psychoanalysis or other human sciences because the partitions which divide these disciplines are anything but impervious.
In your latest book, What Use Is Sociology?,5 you take pains to underline from the first chapter the primary importance of using the right words to describe reality. For example, you note that, in your distinct way of looking at sociology as a conversation with human experience, the English language is an obstacle because it does not have two separate words to describe ‘experience’. These do exist in German: Erfahrung, meaning objective aspects of experience, and Erlebnis, meaning subjective aspects of experience.
The task of a sociologist with the necessary imagination to fulfil it is to expand the reach of the Erlebnisse and bring people out of their shells (‘like ships in their bowls / they’re in their melody’, to use Mario Luzi’s words)6 to realize that many of the experiences they live individually, as if they were unique, are actually generated socially and can be manipulated (replacing ‘with the aim of’ with ‘because of’). The sociologist has to expand his/her scope by submitting the Erfahrungen to a similar assessment. These objective experiences are like the market which, as Coetzee clarifies, was not made by God or the Spirit of History but rather by us human beings and therefore it is possible to ‘unmake and remake it in a more acceptable way’.7 These experiences can themselves be changed by taking a more critical and active role. Sometimes everything can take a lead from an authentic understanding of the words we use to describe our life and the world which surrounds us.
I have the impression that words in our liquid-modern world are under increasing pressure. As you point out, not only is their number falling but the words are also being shortened and reduced to a series of consonants in electronic messages which are now the increasingly dominant vehicle of communication. But even the words which continue to be pronounced fully are tending to be merged into a smaller area and chosen for emotionalhedonistic reasons. Clicking through the channels aimed at young people on television, such as MTV, M20 and DJ Television, the most striking visual aspects are the images of half-naked bodies, male and female, scrupulously representing a variety of ethnic groups to ensure the fig leaf of political correctness is preserved. But the ear is struck by the incessant repetition of a few key words: party, dance, sex, drink, night, fun. Pop music has always revolved around descriptions of love, predominantly the unhappy kind, so that ordinary people can easily identify with the ordinary lyrics. Any aliens watching ‘youth’ TV today and observing the scenes would think earthlings do nothing other than dance, get drunk and have sex, mostly at night, in an unrestrained and flamboyant frenzy. Obviously, if you consider the precarious nature of, and dearth of opportunity in, the lives of our children, the evidence provided by television is worse than antiphrasis, it is completely misleading.
The vocabulary of youth has been impregnated with an equally dangerous disease: the relentless spread of phrases that are simplified to the bone, ready-made so that everyone can sing them or decipher them even when their knowledge of English is very modest. It would certainly be a positive development if all non-Anglophones were able to master the basic vocabulary of what has become the ‘language of communication’, but the terminology in the lyrics of these songs is more than just basic, it is so skimpy and shrivelled as to become a sort of zero-grade verbalization, which is as monotonous as it is compartmentalized with words designed to penetrate the mental fabric of the kids, to invade their imagination, colonize their tastes and preferences, and dictate the direction of their enjoyment. For some months now, whenever a new song is released – such as ‘Roar’ by Katy Perry or ‘Bonfire Heart’ by James Blunt – for several weeks the video shows only the words of the song instead of images. This is to ensure a karaokelike experience to ensure everyone can learn them quickly and easily. Only once they have been learned can the cheerful verbal barrage of banality give way to the images, which contain varying degrees of salaciousness, comical adventurousness in Katy Perry’s ‘Roar’, and star a well-meaning motorcyclist in ‘Bonfire Heart’. Apart from the subdued and saccharine tone of the messages in these songs – or, as happens in other cases, the energetic and unrestrained erotic charge – what is most striking is the erosion, withdrawal and dilution of the language.
The oversimplification of language echoes the oversimplification of music, as Milan Kundera poetically complained in a book translated from Czech in 1978, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.8 The writer had been excited by the twelve-tone innovations of Schoenberg, who managed to rethink music in an audacious way, but it has been followed by a creative wasteland which, rather than being silent, pours out endlessly cheesy music everywhere:
