legislative reason. Contrary to legislative reason, interpretive intellectual
work implies both a commitment and an attachment of the subject in the
object, made manifest by what Charles Taylor calls a perspicuous
articulation ,42 rather than a relation of correspondence between the object
and some outside account. For Taylor, perspicuous articulation can only
be achieved through a form of knowing that relates to that of a hermeneutic
conversation there is no epistemological split in the interpretive scheme
of things which is invariably locally situated.
For Bauman, legislative reason objectifies, not only rationally but also
ontologically and ethically. However, in the point of view of interpretive
intellectual work there is the recognition that no object is simply an object
of knowledge. Where the legislator gazes at his object as something that
cannot return his look, the interpreter recognizes that the fusion between
himself and the thing that he is surveying is everything. With interpretive
work the thing which seduces the intellectual does so through its look,
by suggesting it might just be interesting if he is prepared to develop a
deeper understanding of its special ontological power. In fact, to fulfil
his interpretive role of facilitating difference by extending communica-
tion between autonomous communities the interpreter must develop a
deep understanding in order to maintain the delicate balance between
& conversing traditions & for the message to be undistorted (regarding
the meaning of the sender) and understood (by the recipient) .43
In Rorty s meaning, interpretive intellectual work aims to deconstruct
the privileged position of legislative reason to change the subject to
an alternative vocabulary, that is an abnormal discourse , which does
not oblige the interpreter to have to make her work take on the normal
discourse of legislative reason, which tends to preclude alternative ways
of social inquiry. Interpretive intellectual work not only translates ideas
between different interpretive communities, then, it makes meaning.
However, as Bauman44 points out, the interpreter does not attempt to
justify that meaning in the rationalist, legislative sense, by spelling out
beforehand the criteria or methodology by which her work should be
assessed. The interpreter reasons that her work will have to succeed on
the basis of its own merits; it will have to have relevance for other
interpreters. It will work for different people and in different ways.
Bauman s understanding of hermeneutics also deconstructs the false
dichotomy between subject and object,45 between surface and depth in
social inquiry with its insistence on undecidability. For Bauman,46
concepts are like human beings; they are not simply good or bad but hold
both and other possibilities. This is why he can bracket together theorists
The Ways and Means of the Dragoman 71
as diverse as Hans Gadamer and Richard Rorty as hermeneutic
interpreters, because each of these theorists grasps what is required of an
adequate mode of intellectual inquiry for liquid modern times. The fact
that Gadamer organizes his hermeneutic intellectual work in a deep sense,
while Rorty, in company with Foucault, subordinates deep hermeneutics
to surface hermeneutics, is neither here nor there. For Bauman, these
alternative positions are commensurable in the sense that each offers a
kind of post-scientific way of understanding the world best understood
as a hermeneutics of cultural orientation which has established its
superiority over legislating modes of inquiry.
MAKING HERMENEUTICS SOCIOLOGICAL
Above, I suggested that Bauman is a dragoman and that what he does in
his sociology is set himself the task of establishing conversing traditions
between different hermeneutic conventions. That hermeneutics has its
own literary basis in that it derives from the interpretation of texts is not
lost on Bauman, but what he tries to do in his work is make hermeneutics
more sociological and so doing he suggests that there are two kinds of
hermeneutics available to sociologists in the pursuit of their vocation:
hermeneutic sociology and sociological hermeneutics. In a recent
interview with Bauman,47 I asked him to differentiate between the two.
As he put it:
hermeneutic sociology seems to me but one way among many good
ways of doing a sociological job, while sociological hermeneutics
(i.e. decoding the meaning of human actions in reference to social
conditions) seems to be the job all sociology true to its vocation is
bound to perform. This is at any rate what I try, however ineptly, to
do all along. I attempt to make trends in human conduct and beliefs
intelligible as collective results of the lay efforts to make sense of
the socially produced conditions and to devise appropriate life
strategies. You may say that making hermeneutics sociological is
one more name for sociological imagination . In my view, the
two concepts should become in sociological practice coextensive.
In Bauman s sense, to interpret is in effect an attempt to paraphrase
the already existing reality, in order to make something corresponding to
it, but something that does not claim to be the definitive truth in the
essentialist meaning. As the above quote from Bauman implies, her-
meneutic sociology attempts to understand life and in so doing it tries to
elucidate not only the consciousness and unconsciousness of individual
social actors, but the quotidian as it is experienced, just then, at that
72 Zygmunt Bauman
moment, as and when it occurs, before the corrections and distortions
that sociology inevitably imposes. As Bauman himself puts it, the
hermeneutic sociologist
is one who, securely embedded in his own, native tradition,
penetrates deeply into successive layers of meanings upheld by the
relatively alien tradition to be investigated. The process of
penetration is simultaneously that of translation. In the person of
the sociologist, two or more traditions are brought into
communicative contact and thus open up to each other their
respective contents which otherwise would remain opaque. The
[hermeneutic] sociologist aims at giving voice to cultures which
without his help would remain numb or stay inaudible to the partner
in communication. [The hermeneutic] sociologist operates at the
interface between language games or forms of life . His mediating
activity is hoped to enrich both sides of the interface.48
The hermeneutic sociologist communicates the culture of the form of
life in a way that allows it to reveal itself to the reader, to represent the
self-evidential reality of the world it reflects. Essentially, the way
hermeneutic sociology is written can be seen as an attempt to extend the
reach of the form of life in question to readers who are not familiar
with such a world in order to illuminate that world for them in all its
ambivalent complexity.
Hermeneutic sociology [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]