Zygmunt Bauman Quotes on Knowledge
Zygmunt Bauman's long sequence of "liquid" books — Liquid Modernity (2000), Liquid Love (2003), Liquid Times (2007), Liquid Surveillance (2012) — develops a corresponding epistemology of the conditions under which contemporary knowledge is produced and consumed. The framework treats the dissolution of the durable cognitive loyalties of the previous generation — to specific intellectual traditions, professional communities, biographical narratives — as the structural feature of late-modern intellectual life, with the consequent diagnosis of the tourist (whose engagement with successive horizons remains structurally provisional) and the vagabond (whose mobility is involuntary) as the alternative cognitive figures of the present.
Quotes
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Attributed to Zygmunt Bauman:
“Strangers are people who do not fit our cognitive maps; that is what makes them strange.”
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“[Referring to his father] In fact, we almost lost our lives because of his honesty. In 1939, we were running away from Posnan as the Germans were invading - the town was almost on the German border. We took the last train east, but we were stopped at a station which was being bombed by the Germans. We should have run away from the station because that was the object of the bombing, but he wanted t”
From an interview, as cited in "Passion and pessimism" , The Guardian (5 April 2003) -
“[After an article by Bogdan Musiał was published in Poland alleging Bauman had worked for the Polish secret service] The fact that I for three years cooperated with intelligence - well, that's the only thing I never said.”
Wikiquote -
“[Asked "Did counter-espionage mean informing on people who were fighting against the communist project?"] That's what would be expected from me, but I don't remember doing [anything like that]. I had nothing to do - I was sitting in my office and writing - it was hardly a field in which you could collect interesting information.”
Wikiquote -
“[G]radually, like so many others in my position, I came to the conclusion that there was a yawning gap between the official word and the practice ... so I became a revisionist, rejecting the official version of Marxism.”
From an interview with Aida Edemariam , as cited in "Professor with a past" , The Guardian (28 April 2007)