Bowman: Rational spirit makes killing Jews an industrial assembly line.
Among the exiled intellectuals in the 20th century, zygmunt bauman is undoubtedly a typical one. He was born into a Jewish family in Poznan, Poland in 1925 and died on January 9, 2017. In his 91-year-old life, he escaped the Nazi massacre, experienced the Soviet Union in Stalin’s era, participated in the war and fought against the Nazis, returned to Poland after the war, and was expelled during the socialist construction. During this period, he wanted to move to Israel or Australia, and finally settled down at the University of Leeds in England until his death.

Zygmunt Bauman
Bowman’s life has experienced many disasters in the 20th century, and the cruel reality we read through textbooks is exactly what he experienced. As he said in an interview with Al Jazeera before his death, "Young people like you have forgotten what totalitarianism is. You know it by reading textbooks, but you haven’t experienced it. I have experienced such a regime twice. "
In the face of Bowman’s life, there will inevitably be a romantic association, attributing his original ideas about the Holocaust, violence, ethics, socialism, modernity and post-modernity to his personal life story. Tester reminds us that Bowman’s life is of course very unique in detail, but from a more macro perspective, his experience is not unique. Bowman is like a "storyteller". Through the narration of his personal life story, he conveyed the ambiguous entanglement that "a generation" encountered in the 20th century, and personal narration became a structural fate. "People are placed in awkward situations out of their own will. The ambiguity of human situation bred by the contradictory but often self-defeating process of modernity, its sharp pain and its vivid vitality are fully displayed in this situation."
Exile is a common experience.
In Bowman’s view, the ambiguity of human situation is a common experience faced by all men and women, which is embodied in you and me as an exile mentality and a displacement experience. "Kolakowski" is a familiar aspiration in the 20th century. Bowman further pointed out that exile is not only held by intellectuals. In the modern state of existence, we are exiled from ourselves, others and even the environment, and everyone has become a rootless wanderer. Different from pre-modern homelessness, modern exiles have more choices.
Bowman distinguished two types of exile, one with the color of fatalism and the other with the color of vocation. The former is blind and casual, while the latter must always be cautious. The problem we have to face is how to turn the helpless fate into our duty and responsibility.
Bowman advocates making choices, accepting challenges, and experiencing mature "exile" in the process of transforming fate into vocation. Fate is a limitation, a boundary created by social structure, system and arrangement, and becoming a human means going beyond these boundaries. His task for sociology is to study these boundaries, explore how personal life stories are shaped and restricted by structural social factors, see through the boundaries set by experience, understand the familiarity of life from a novel and different perspective, and pay attention to the world that you and I really experience, rather than abstract people or humanity. Only in this way can we really take care of those who are suffering from ambiguous situations.

Zygmunt bauman: Fear of Flowing, Jiangsu People’s Publishing House, June 2012.
Bowman’s works describe the living conditions of such people, Jews in the Holocaust, intellectuals who changed from legislators to interpreters, strangers at home, immigrants, new poor people and abandoned lives, and even men and women in love. They all fell into a common fate because of displacement. Between freedom and security, between proximity and alienation, between love and hate, the ego also flows into a fragmented state.
Ordering and ambiguity
Modern society is trying to create a rational order, but individuals are gradually dissolving and fragmenting in the order. When individuals become more and more obsessed with the small world that creates themselves in the debris, it is easier for power to construct its own project according to its own will and create the rigidity of human society step by step. In Modernity and the Holocaust, Bowman’s analysis of the Holocaust is chilling. The Holocaust lies in the modern civilized society, which itself is the product of the latter. Without modern industrial technology and bureaucratic organizational structure, the Holocaust is unimaginable. It can even be said that "it started with a real rational concern and was created by a bureaucratic system that was faithful to its form and purpose."

Zygmunt bauman: Modernity and the Holocaust, Yilin Press, January 2002.
The "gardening project" in modern society is obsessed with order. In order to ensure the perfection of the garden, pests and weeds must be strictly distinguished and removed. The Nazi massacre of Jews is like the gardener’s attitude towards weeds. The rational spirit of science and technology and bureaucracy makes the cleaning of the Jewish nation an industrial assembly line, and finally completes the rational design of human beings. As a rational way of governance, the Holocaust means the elimination of ambiguity and possibility. Strangers must be isolated or exiled, and all possibilities are stifled by classified violence. Survival began to be influenced and maintained by design, manipulation, management and engineering, giving the world structure in a classified way. It assumes that all the unique and even unconnected entities in the world have a group of similar or similar entities to which they belong, and then connects them to control the randomness and probability of individuals by category, so that they can move towards a goal and an orderly world.

Zygmunt bauman: Modernity and Contradiction, Commercial Press, October 2013.
In Bowman’s view, the gardening project of order is undoubtedly a failure, and the classification has not reduced the existence of ambiguity. No matter how big and aggressive the efforts of order are, ambiguity will never disappear. It is the classification itself that creates more ambiguity, because there will always be entities that are not fully defined or over-defined, and insufficient or excessive meaning will create more confusing symbols, and further classification will be accompanied by further ambiguity.
It is at this point that Bowman saw the possibility of saving ambiguity from power and fought for it. "We must be as close as possible to the possibility of people who are still concealed so far, like real poets. So we need to break through those self-evident barriers. Within the barriers, the current ideological fashion prevails, and its significance is proved by its commonness itself. "
The Recovery and Creation of Possibility
In the struggle between order and ambiguity, Bowman believes that only ambiguity can guarantee the possibility of human beings, which makes him believe that sociology and literature have the same purpose. In fact, Bowman’s sociology benefited more from literature, and he himself said that writers had a far greater influence on him than sociologists. In his voluminous works, we see more names such as Kundera, Kafka, Georges Perec Muzil, Peric and Italo Calvino.

Borges: Garden with Crossing Paths, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, July 2015.
In an interview with him, tester asked, "If you were stranded on a desert island one day, which book would you choose to bring with you?" The answer given by Bowman is Borges’s Garden with Crossing Paths. In the process of reinterpreting the world that human beings can’t reach, these writers created an unimaginable world, full of meaning and possibility. They turned decay into magic and opened up infinite possibilities. Bowman hoped that his sociology, like these works, would point to infinite possibilities.
Sociology and literature face the same problem here in Bowman, that is, the rigidity of human society, or Lukacs’ "reification". They deal with the same problem: the major changes in the structure of social life brought about by economic development. Sociology and literature should discuss how to deal with these "changes" from the level of "heart-individual-object-society" and think about how to face the problem of "individual resolution" under the background of the emergence of an object world, or how to show how structural facts limit the possibility of human beings.

Milan Kundera
On the road of saving ambiguity and possibility, Bowman stood with Kundera, and in fact Kundera often appeared in Bowman’s works. Kundera described a kind of "fuzzy world" in The Art of Fiction, which is the world Don Quixote faced when he left home. "Cervantes made us understand the world as a kind of fuzzy, and people are not faced with an absolute truth, but with a bunch of opposite truths, so the only assurance is uncertain wisdom, which is also a great force."
The spirit of the novel is that it has no absolute single truth, and it creates an ambiguous world. It is precisely because of its ambiguity that it gives us the opportunity to regain the possibility from inevitability. For Kundera, "it is immoral not to find a part of the novel that has never been known in the past," while for Bowman, "it is unethical not to find the sociology of possibility."
Sociology resists alienation
Therefore, we can compare Baumann’s sociology with Kundera’s novels, face up to the modern technology, science and culture with the art of reflection and the maintenance of possibility, and resist the passion of order, neat division and tight discipline culture. By explaining the existing forms of social and cultural categories, we can break the myth that reality is self-evident, and then promote the transformation between forms, making seemingly self-evident things appear ambiguous. This is the reply and creation of possibility. It is not only the hope to restore the past, so as to make the hidden voice speak, but also the hope to find obstacles or help in the process of pursuing possibility in the future by examining the past, because "only by looking back can we understand life, but if we want to live well, we must look forward."
Sociology’s concern for possibility means not only recovery, but also creation. It is not retrospective, but focuses on the creation of possibilities. It is this part of the task that makes Bowman’s sociology strongly critical. Possibility means something that hasn’t happened yet, and its occurrence in the future is not based on factual data, but on transcending the boundaries of facts, and endowing it with human will in transcendence, rejecting the limitation of existence threshold.

Robert musil: A Man Without Personality, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, April 2015.
Bowman thinks that the image of human in traditional social science is mechanical, just a reactor of external stimuli, rather than a real actor. He quoted Muzil’s novel A Man without Personality, implying that such science and reason can’t grasp the essence of human beings. Science not only reflects the human situation, but also closes the possibility of human beings, thus creating a world without personality and a world without experience. Muzil hopes to save people in the process of forgetting through his novels, which is precisely the particularity of human beings that Bowman insists on constantly. It must be remembered that human beings are free and independent, and at the same time they are faced with ethical choices. If sociology wants to jump out of such a cognitive model, it must transform itself into a possible practice and become a form of practice. Only practice can restore human action and dignity.

Zygmunt Bauman
Such a sociological idea is quite idealistic. Levine believes that Bowman represents the humanistic tradition in sociology, and he insists on the difference between critical sociology and scientific sociology. The latter represents the rule of instrumental rationality, while the former liberates rationality in practice. Secondly, Baumann’s sociological concepts such as "flowing modernity" and "post-modernity" should be attributed to an artist’s sensitivity, more to delicate experience and explanation of the current human situation than to constructing his own theory. For him, any work that turns wisdom and inspiration into procedure is doubtful, and it will shrink our experience field. Sociology should reject such an empty abstraction and pay attention to real and concrete people. "Sociology should understand the human world by either giving strength to the powerless or allowing itself to remain powerless to understand its own existence."
