State of Crisis by Bauman Zygmunt; Bordoni Carlo; & Carlo Bordoni

Author:Bauman, Zygmunt; Bordoni, Carlo; & Carlo Bordoni
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

Zygmunt Bauman You classify the decade or two during which postmodernist fashions in arts, through mimicry or shifts in mental attitude, spilt over into ever wider areas of human thought and practices, as a ‘rite of passage’. You have a point here. Victor Turner, who elaborated that term borrowed from Arnold van Gennep's 1909 study with the same title, argued that there is no direct, instant passage from one form of life or one socially defined identity to the next; when one form or identity in the socially set life itinerary follows another, the two are, as a rule − and perhaps must be for the passage to become recognized and acknowledged − separated from each other by an intermediary, ‘between and betwixt’ period of, so to speak, ‘social nakedness’, in which individuals are stripped of the paraphernalia of their previous, now abandoned role and status before they are allocated, supplied with and don the new paraphernalia ascribed to the status and role they are about to assume and play. Using the ‘rites of passage’ in the individual life-story as an allegory, we may visualize the interval between two distinct social arrangements as a time of dismantling the old material and mental structures before the new structures are designed, put together and in place. Personally, I prefer to call that ‘between and betwixt’ period in socio-political history an ‘interregnum’ (in a form recently updated by Keith Tester, that concept denotes a time when the old ways of having things done no longer work properly, but new and more effective ways have not yet been made available).

The trouble, though, with both concepts – the ‘rite of passage’ when applied to social history, instead of to the socially fixed sequence of an individual journey through life, as much as with ‘interregnum’ – is that, when viewed from inside, things and their relations are continually in statu nascendi: it is not known where they are heading or what the dismantled and melted structures will eventually be replaced with. When we think of a ‘passage’, we have in mind a stretch of road or a time-span leading from a ‘here’ to a ‘there’. As you know, however, for ‘postmodernists’, a ‘there’ was as much unknown as it was deemed irrelevant and unworthy of serious concern. By and large, most, if not all, the concerns of postmodernist artists were focused on the ‘dismantling’, ‘deconstructing’, and, all in all, destructing jobs. And it was not at all insignificant that the postmodernist movement started from architecture, the area of human activity from which the very idea of ‘order’ (ordo) was drawn at the threshold of the modern era to be metaphorically applied to the totality of human activity in the world, including society, now considered the most remarkable among human constructions. The ‘postmodern’ architects described and analysed by Charles Jencks assaulted the very archetype of ‘order’ inherited from Vitruvius when his ancient tract De architectura was re-discovered by builders in fifteenth-century Europe, and so also, by proxy, its derivatives, such as system-ness, harmony, structure, pattern, fit.

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