Zygmunt Bauman (born in1925) is a Polish sociologist. He has resided in England since 1971 after leaving Poland. Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Leeds, Bauman is one of the world's most eminent social theorists writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity.This is a lecture given in 2004. The context is a conference about supervision of students, but this essay gives an interesting and succinct summary summary of Bauman's understanding of modernity and liquid modernity.
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Liquid Modernity by Zygmunt Bauman
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Standing in front of you, I am humbled by your presence. You are the people who are actually making things happen, and I am the person who is talking about things happening. So I recognise your superiority as far as the ability to do things in practice is concerned, and I am not quite sure how much I can help you with my kind of expertise.
A nightmare
In fact I’d like to confess to you that another day I had a nightmare. I woke up covered with sweat. My nightmare was that I was a supervisor. And I was confronted with an incredible contradiction between intentions and the actual situation, an ambivalence which I couldn’t easily resolve. A situation not very different from the one which I confronted several times when I was teaching students at Leeds University and before that at Warsaw University. I was facing a dilemma because, like you, I had a vision of an ideal personality, the ideal to which my students should correspond.
I wanted them to be inspired, to be creative and to stand on their own feet rather than to follow the dead letter of instructions. On the other hand I knew very well that if they really became as I told them they should be, they would probably fail their doctorate’s examination, because there would be someone sitting on the committee who would think that they were too original, too creative and too abnormal...
So it was a contradiction, quite a genuine contradiction. You have this idea of the ideal person. You would like to cultivate such an ideal person, but it might very well happen that the world in which these people will need to work and function is not hospitable for originality, boldness, courageousness, and irreverence with authorities.
You will probably still remember the name of Karl Marx. As he observed almost 200 years ago – and in this case, I think he was right – “people make history but not under conditions of their choice”. This means that you haven’t selected the world in which you work. And quite often there is actually a clash between what you want to achieve and what is possible.
