The fractal and aporetic nature of human life

Zygmunt Bauman From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For Bauman the postmodernity has never been seen as in any way teleological, or relativistically, but rather he characterized it as the posthumous form of modernity. That is, for Bauman's modernity, society was seen as a process of ordering and progress to a rationalized society. This however disavowed the fractal and aporetic nature of human life, and thus its teleological illusions came to be, with the collapse of colonial enterprise, deposed. Bauman's idea of the postmodern therefore takes two forms.

• Firstly, as the drive to an ordered goal that is no longer recognizable, set amidst the collapsing of the 'insiders' and the 'outsiders'/'strangers' (a milieu in which the processes of cognitive ordering of the strange and different and the aesthetic appreciation of the strange and different are in continual conflict).
• Secondly, as a way of life in which such inherent human differentiation is accepted and reckoned with. His conception of social life is therefore not one of opposing the modern to the postmodern, but of interpolating two different logics within social life. (Hence, his present characterization of these two logics as being the dualistic 'solid' and 'liquid' modernity.) 1978: Hermeneutics and Social Science: Approaches to Understanding. London: Hutchinson.