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Zygmunt Bauman's Thesis
Essay Instructions:
need to make a substantial reference to at least four texts. At least half of the texts to which you make reference must be those listed in the course syllabus or given at the end of each lecture unit.
1.Zygmunt Bauman 1992 Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chapter 2.
2.Clifford Geertz 1973 The Interpretations of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Chapter .
3.Norman O. Brown 1985 (1959) Life Against Death. The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. 2nd Edition. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. Chapter 8.
4.Clifford Geertz, 1983 Local Knowledge. Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Chapter 6: Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power.
Here is some of them. You must use at least two of them from 4 sources.
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Understanding of Zygmunt Bauman’s thesis that postmodern culture is based on deconstruction of immortality
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Abstract
This essay provides my understanding of Zygmunt Bauman’s thesis that the culture of the postmodern world is based upon the deconstruction of immortality. Immortality implies to survive beyond mortality and deny the moment of death its ultimate say thereby taking off some of death’s dreadful and threatening implication. In the postmodern society, death is no longer a single incident that has everlasting outcomes. It does not have the sting of finality; things will only vanish from view for a time but would reappear again some other time. In the postmodern world, everyday life has become an eternal rehearsal of death as people rehearse the evanescence and ephemerality of things that they may obtain and the bonds they may weave. Nothing seems to last forever in the postmodern society. For instance, marital partners, residences, careers, occupation and skills usually come and go, and they become off-putting or boring when they remain for a long time. Nothing in the postmodern society is truly irreplaceable. People in postmodern society have played and rehearsed the drama of mortality severally and it is not easy to tell between the rehearsals and the real performance.
Keywords: immortality, transience, death, deconstruction, eternal, rehearsal, postmodern society
Understanding of Zygmunt Bauman’s thesis that postmodern culture is based on deconstruction of immortality
In his book, Zygmunt Bauman formulates a new theory of how human mortality is reacted to and dealt with in both culture and social institutions. Bauman explores the hypothesis that people’s necessity to live with the invariable awareness of death explains the critical facets of the social organization of every known society. The postmodern strategy deconstructs immortality; this means that life is transformed into an incessant rehearsal of reversible demise, a substitution of impermanent disappearance for the irreversible death (Bauman, 1992, p. 10). In this paper, my understanding of Zygmunt Bauman’s thesis that postmodern culture is based on deconstruction of immortality is discussed. Zygmunt’s analysis of postmodernity as a life strategy that involves the deconstruction of immortality is examined exhaustively in this paper.
Deconstructing immortality implies the alteration of life into a repeated rehearsal of the death and transience of everything, the celebration of instances or moments of short-lived notoriety or fame, and effacement of the opposition between the durable and the transient. This notion – with its indication that everything, even life itself, loses significance and meaning, and that the striving for durable effects becomes outdated – is found to be morally and logically incoherent. Death is something that cannot be perceived; it is an absolute nothing and the cessation of the very acting subject, and with it, the ending of all perception (Brown, 1985, p. 19). Immortality, as Bauman pointed out, is essentially to survive beyond mortality and deny the instant of death its ultimate say thereby taking off some of death’s horrific and ominous connotation.
In the postmodern world, the present does not really bind its future more than it itself is bound by its past; the future will be just another current state unbound by our current which would have turned out to be its past (Bauman, 1992, p. 169). Life is essentially a series of self-cancelling determinations. Given that our present, which is actually the past of our future, would be in due course negated and its hold on how things are would be broken, it is really a waste of time to consider the distant, not-immediately-experienced end results of our current actions. No matter what the present may offer, it offers now and the offer would be forgotten or annulled as soon as the present is replaced – meaning made obsolete or pushed aside – by some other, tomorrow’s present (Bauman, 1992, p. 169). As such, nothing should be done everlastingly; nothing can be done everlastingly. For instance, the skills that a person learned today would not carry him or her far in the brave new world of tomorrow’s expertise and technology; the knowledge mastered today would become very insufficient, or even a downright ignorance tomorrow. The job one secured yesterday in an intense competition would not be there tomorrow; the marriage that one vowed to preserve and cherish would disintegrate and be dissolved tomorrow at the first sign of one of the partner’s dissatisfaction. With perpetuity decomposed into a movement of short-lived, ephemeral moments, not anything appears to be immortal and everlasting any longer.
Becoming immortal, as Bauman (1992, p. 170) stated, implies making history. To make history entails being made eternal by being recorded and the records preserved for eternity, indestructible, going back to the agenda of present living. In the world where lives are lived as episodes, every actor and every event could be made history and immortalized. During the pre-modern world, Bauman (1992, p. 170) stated that only the leaders, popes, and warlords were made immortal; only they had the right to be recorded. Nevertheless, following the dawn of modernity all the way through to postmodernity, the monopoly of history-making had been broken and not only popes, leaders, and warlords were made immortal, but other groups of people as well such as assemblies of legislators; office-holders and their well-liked challengers; speakers, programme-makers and the crowds of their followers. The right of actors and events to be recognized as immortal in the modern world became a subject that was contested fiercely in the struggle for historicity (Bauman, 1992, p. 170).
The democratization of becoming immortal – history-making – largely implied loosening up the constraints which limited the opportunities for personal immortality. In the postmodern world, a public spectacle of universal and recoverability of past happenings, of the public ritual by which the being itself is turned into the state of everlasting rebirth, is actually the most postmodern game (Bauman, 1992, p. 171). The democratization of immortality is apparent in the retrospective leveling of the value of events as well as the performers of these events. Similar score is given to recovery of any past occasion; a beginning of a new political universe, for instance, has the same score as running a race during an Olympics tournament or as the initial performance of a hit song. As such, a range of immortality is retrospectively given an equivalent status (Bauman, 1992, p. 171). Everybody is openly encouraged to participate in do-it-yourself resurrection rituals, motivated by the status and esteem associated with successful performance and as a result drawn to aid the resulting mundanization of immortality; making it a commonplace, ordinary thing. Similar to other aspects of equality, this new equality of immortality is in actual fact equality of opportunity and not of the distribution of the good itself. Moreover, similar to other aspects of equality, allocation is managed given that there are professions of immortality-brokers with proper skills focused on new, mundane type of immortality that supervise the distribution (Bauman, 1992, p. 172).
Now, with immortality deconstructed into prominence, and immortality-earning virtue deconstructed into the quantity of tied public attention, the Madison Avenue, for instance, has taken the place of the Papal See (Bauman, 1992, p. 172). Image-grooming and publicity-promoting companies, advertisers, gallery owners, editors of the press, critics, as well as programmers of television companies are most important of the new professions whose significance, esteem and function comprise the brokerage of immortality. It is worth mentioning that their customers might be assigned to different functions and given different names – terrorists, politicians, criminals, magnates, pop-singers, or writers. However, they all need their immortality brokers and eventually, it is in fact the dexterity and ability of the immortality-brokers who makes the distinction between fame and obscurity, the opposition which in the postmodern vanity fair has actually replaced that between immortality and mortality (Bauman, 1992, p. 172). It is in fact not the great feats that are made immortal; the feats become great the moment they are made immortal by having been forced – for a short, elusive, though never completely erasable moment – into the center of public attention. Nothing in the postmodern world appears to disappear everlastingly so that it cannot appear once more; objects remain around, ...
Student:
Professor:
Course title:
Date:
Abstract
This essay provides my understanding of Zygmunt Bauman’s thesis that the culture of the postmodern world is based upon the deconstruction of immortality. Immortality implies to survive beyond mortality and deny the moment of death its ultimate say thereby taking off some of death’s dreadful and threatening implication. In the postmodern society, death is no longer a single incident that has everlasting outcomes. It does not have the sting of finality; things will only vanish from view for a time but would reappear again some other time. In the postmodern world, everyday life has become an eternal rehearsal of death as people rehearse the evanescence and ephemerality of things that they may obtain and the bonds they may weave. Nothing seems to last forever in the postmodern society. For instance, marital partners, residences, careers, occupation and skills usually come and go, and they become off-putting or boring when they remain for a long time. Nothing in the postmodern society is truly irreplaceable. People in postmodern society have played and rehearsed the drama of mortality severally and it is not easy to tell between the rehearsals and the real performance.
Keywords: immortality, transience, death, deconstruction, eternal, rehearsal, postmodern society
Understanding of Zygmunt Bauman’s thesis that postmodern culture is based on deconstruction of immortality
In his book, Zygmunt Bauman formulates a new theory of how human mortality is reacted to and dealt with in both culture and social institutions. Bauman explores the hypothesis that people’s necessity to live with the invariable awareness of death explains the critical facets of the social organization of every known society. The postmodern strategy deconstructs immortality; this means that life is transformed into an incessant rehearsal of reversible demise, a substitution of impermanent disappearance for the irreversible death (Bauman, 1992, p. 10). In this paper, my understanding of Zygmunt Bauman’s thesis that postmodern culture is based on deconstruction of immortality is discussed. Zygmunt’s analysis of postmodernity as a life strategy that involves the deconstruction of immortality is examined exhaustively in this paper.
Deconstructing immortality implies the alteration of life into a repeated rehearsal of the death and transience of everything, the celebration of instances or moments of short-lived notoriety or fame, and effacement of the opposition between the durable and the transient. This notion – with its indication that everything, even life itself, loses significance and meaning, and that the striving for durable effects becomes outdated – is found to be morally and logically incoherent. Death is something that cannot be perceived; it is an absolute nothing and the cessation of the very acting subject, and with it, the ending of all perception (Brown, 1985, p. 19). Immortality, as Bauman pointed out, is essentially to survive beyond mortality and deny the instant of death its ultimate say thereby taking off some of death’s horrific and ominous connotation.
In the postmodern world, the present does not really bind its future more than it itself is bound by its past; the future will be just another current state unbound by our current which would have turned out to be its past (Bauman, 1992, p. 169). Life is essentially a series of self-cancelling determinations. Given that our present, which is actually the past of our future, would be in due course negated and its hold on how things are would be broken, it is really a waste of time to consider the distant, not-immediately-experienced end results of our current actions. No matter what the present may offer, it offers now and the offer would be forgotten or annulled as soon as the present is replaced – meaning made obsolete or pushed aside – by some other, tomorrow’s present (Bauman, 1992, p. 169). As such, nothing should be done everlastingly; nothing can be done everlastingly. For instance, the skills that a person learned today would not carry him or her far in the brave new world of tomorrow’s expertise and technology; the knowledge mastered today would become very insufficient, or even a downright ignorance tomorrow. The job one secured yesterday in an intense competition would not be there tomorrow; the marriage that one vowed to preserve and cherish would disintegrate and be dissolved tomorrow at the first sign of one of the partner’s dissatisfaction. With perpetuity decomposed into a movement of short-lived, ephemeral moments, not anything appears to be immortal and everlasting any longer.
Becoming immortal, as Bauman (1992, p. 170) stated, implies making history. To make history entails being made eternal by being recorded and the records preserved for eternity, indestructible, going back to the agenda of present living. In the world where lives are lived as episodes, every actor and every event could be made history and immortalized. During the pre-modern world, Bauman (1992, p. 170) stated that only the leaders, popes, and warlords were made immortal; only they had the right to be recorded. Nevertheless, following the dawn of modernity all the way through to postmodernity, the monopoly of history-making had been broken and not only popes, leaders, and warlords were made immortal, but other groups of people as well such as assemblies of legislators; office-holders and their well-liked challengers; speakers, programme-makers and the crowds of their followers. The right of actors and events to be recognized as immortal in the modern world became a subject that was contested fiercely in the struggle for historicity (Bauman, 1992, p. 170).
The democratization of becoming immortal – history-making – largely implied loosening up the constraints which limited the opportunities for personal immortality. In the postmodern world, a public spectacle of universal and recoverability of past happenings, of the public ritual by which the being itself is turned into the state of everlasting rebirth, is actually the most postmodern game (Bauman, 1992, p. 171). The democratization of immortality is apparent in the retrospective leveling of the value of events as well as the performers of these events. Similar score is given to recovery of any past occasion; a beginning of a new political universe, for instance, has the same score as running a race during an Olympics tournament or as the initial performance of a hit song. As such, a range of immortality is retrospectively given an equivalent status (Bauman, 1992, p. 171). Everybody is openly encouraged to participate in do-it-yourself resurrection rituals, motivated by the status and esteem associated with successful performance and as a result drawn to aid the resulting mundanization of immortality; making it a commonplace, ordinary thing. Similar to other aspects of equality, this new equality of immortality is in actual fact equality of opportunity and not of the distribution of the good itself. Moreover, similar to other aspects of equality, allocation is managed given that there are professions of immortality-brokers with proper skills focused on new, mundane type of immortality that supervise the distribution (Bauman, 1992, p. 172).
Now, with immortality deconstructed into prominence, and immortality-earning virtue deconstructed into the quantity of tied public attention, the Madison Avenue, for instance, has taken the place of the Papal See (Bauman, 1992, p. 172). Image-grooming and publicity-promoting companies, advertisers, gallery owners, editors of the press, critics, as well as programmers of television companies are most important of the new professions whose significance, esteem and function comprise the brokerage of immortality. It is worth mentioning that their customers might be assigned to different functions and given different names – terrorists, politicians, criminals, magnates, pop-singers, or writers. However, they all need their immortality brokers and eventually, it is in fact the dexterity and ability of the immortality-brokers who makes the distinction between fame and obscurity, the opposition which in the postmodern vanity fair has actually replaced that between immortality and mortality (Bauman, 1992, p. 172). It is in fact not the great feats that are made immortal; the feats become great the moment they are made immortal by having been forced – for a short, elusive, though never completely erasable moment – into the center of public attention. Nothing in the postmodern world appears to disappear everlastingly so that it cannot appear once more; objects remain around, ...
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