Zygmunt Bauman

They restructure the political economy, ethical foundations, and epistemological status of the language professions themselves.

Bauman, 2000.

Translation is no longer a matter of lexical equivalence or stylistic fidelity alone.

It has become a central mechanism through which social reality, institutional authority, and vulnerability are mediated.

Translation, in this sense, is simultaneously epistemic labor and ethical labor, inseparable from the governance of meaning itself.

From institutional stability to liquid professional conditions.

Zygmunt Bauman's concept of liquid modernity offers a productive framework for understanding the contemporary condition of translation and interpreting.

Liquid modernity describes social arrangements characterized by volatility, acceleration, and continuous reconfiguration, in contrast to earlier periods marked by institutional continuity and relatively durable professional identities.

[laughs] It's not a, a, you know, a really serious, you know, scholar could sit down and write a big book about the disintegration of...

I mean, Zygmunt Bauman coined the term liquid modernity.

So a lot of sociologists and social theorists have seen and tried to talk about this phenomenon.

Uh, I wanted to draw it in more into the vocabulary we use in our, in the political realm.

But do we just presume that that would be the course of our life? And so that paradoxically, that gave us more freedom because we were able to take certain things for granted and then have adventures of our own with our own lives, not feeling like everything was always at stake.

So the cultural element, the political element, the technological element.

There was a, I think it was, uh, Zygmunt Bauman, uh, said about wh- where the problem is not people in Budapest marching in the streets seeking a final solution.

They're in the streets looking for the final sale.

So to come back to your actual question, the reason why perhaps we don't live in an age of intellectuals of the kind that Weber and others might have envisaged or that Sartre embodied is partly by design, that actually there has been a wholesale critique and deconstruction of the figure of the intellectual.

I suppose one of the analyses that captures this best is is Zygmunt Bauman, the sociologist's analysis of the transition from intellectuals as legislators to intellectuals as translators.

And this is a symptom of the rise of what sociologists have called post-modernity, perhaps expressed most clearly in the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition, published in 1979, which basically says that...

We live in an age where knowledge is no longer sitting outside of society on the economy, offering a kind of a sort of picture of how society works.

And only then can we genuinely choose the life we want instead of semi-automatically or fully automatically leave one we were assigned.

I recently came across an interview with the fantastic novelist Elif Shafak, and she spoke about Zygmunt Bauman's idea of inner democracy.

Zygmunt Bauman suggested that while we understand political democracy, Many of us still live under what he calls an inner dictatorship, right? We tend to silence the parts of ourselves because they don't fit the identity that we've constructed for ourselves or that others have constructed for ourselves.

And this, again, resonated with me because during my recovery, Jung's idea of shadow work made me realize that healing wasn't about becoming someone new, right? But it was about allowing more parts of myself to have a voice.

And so I think that the job to be done is to establish this inner democracy.

Every form of social order produces waste.

You cite a sociologist named Zygmunt Bauman.

There's always a boundary between clean and dirty, pure and impure.

But in a world like ours, shaped by an obsession with progress, we have one particular feature.

Is it our job to police the actions of others rather than to do what each of us can do to the point that we can do it?

The phrase that kept occurring to me, there's, you know, regular listeners of this program will wonder why I've brought up many times, Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish philosopher, who has this amazing line about our times, you know, that anything can happen, but nothing can be done.

And that's sort of the state of power in the world, what he calls liquid modernity.

And that really, that line resonated throughout this book for me, the sense of that.