Wagner: Bauman

Book review of: Wagner, Izabela (2020) Bauman: A Biography. Cambridge: Polity Press 510 pp.ISBN: 978-1-5095-2686-4Price: £25,0

Voice and the Generalised Other in the Ethical Writings of Zygmunt Bauman.

According to Zygmunt Bauman most sociological narratives tend to ignore moral and ethical issues in relation to issues of cultural belonging and mechanisms of cultural exclusion. In contrast, in Bauman’s work ethical and moral problems have been recurrent concerns, and can be found in every aspect of his writing from his understanding of the Holocaust to later concerns about the transition of a solid to a liquid form of modernity, consumption, the Other and ambivalence. In his conversations with Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Keith Tester, Bauman explains that the ‘moral law inside me’ as identified by Immanuel Kant ‘is to me an axis around which all other secrets of the human condition rotate’ (Bauman, Jacobsen and Tester 2014:68). Bauman’s ethical concerns are Other directed in that whatever constitutes ethics should be beyond ourselves and our own desires and self-interest. Bauman’s ethical stance was most clearly outlined initially in Postmodern Ethics (1993) and Life in Fragments (1995) in which he identifies the place of contemporary of morality within what appears to be the post ethical, post-legislative postmodern/liquid modern condition. The chapter explores how, what Bauman identifies as the ‘moral law inside me’ and how this shapes our relationship with the Other. Bauman goes on to draw upon Emmanuel Lévinas’s opinion that the ‘primal scene’ of morality is sphere of the ‘face to face’ and that being with the Other and for the Other should form the basis of contemporary ethics. The chapter will explore how Bauman’s underpinning acceptance of Kant, which manifests itself most forcefully in Bauman’s underpinning anthropological conception of culture that leads to a misunderstanding of Lévinas within Bauman’s ethical writing. For Bauman the moral capacity of people that allows them to form communities is established via a cultural link between self and Other in which the moral self becomes its own interpreter of the needs of the Other. The Other is not unknown to us as a specific human individual Other, rather we come to understand the Other as type of person or set of characteristics, not a unique individual. The chapter examines the possible negative consequence s of conceiving the Other as a generalised Other; Bauman’s account of the adiaphorizing effects of social processes that encourage moral irrelevance and dehumanization of the Other and the possibilities of a renewal of an ethical life via the creation of a new public sphere

Agency and structure in Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust.

The article explores how in Modernity and the Holocaust to his liquid turn\ud writings Zygmunt Bauman’s work assumes that people live in a deterministic\ud world. Bauman fails to distinguish agency as an analytical category in its own\ud right and as such fails to capture self-determination, agential control and moral\ud responsibility. All of Bauman’s work is based upon the assumption that the\ud individual loses their autonomy and the ability to judge the moral content of their\ud actions because of adiaphortic processes external to themselves as individuals\ud giving rise to agentic state in which the individual is unable to exercise their\ud agency. In contrast to the argument in Modernity and the Holocaust this article\ud suggests that the Nazis developed a distinct communitarian ethical code rooted\ud in self-control that encouraged individuals to overcome their personal feeling\ud states, enabling them to engage in acts of cruelty to people defined as outside\ud of the community. In his post-2000 work where the emphasis is on the process\ud of liquefaction there is the same undervaluing of human agency in the face of\ud external forces reflected in Bauman’s concepts of ambivalence, fate and swarm

Education in the interregnum: an evaluation of Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid-turn writing on education

In his liquid-turn writings, Zygmunt Bauman has come to identify liquid\ud modernity as a period of interregnum. Education has a central role to\ud play within the contemporary interregnum by opening up a new public\ud sphere for dialogue. However, the processes of liquefaction manifest\ud themselves in conditions that severely limit a person’s ability to exercise\ud their human agency. Bauman provides no indication of how the\ud educators can escape the processes that limit agency, nor does he\ud explain how educators can combat the seductive consumerism that\ud students need to overcome before they can engage in a reconstruction of\ud the public sphere

Zygmunt Bauman: What it means to be included.

Although Zygmunt Bauman has written very little directly about education, his underpinning ideas\ud on the transition from solid to liquid modernity, the mechanisms of social exclusion, the Other\ud and the stranger have had a significant impact on education research. Taking his starting point\ud from a questionable secular reading of Emmanuel Levinas’s contribution to ethics, Bauman’s\ud account of social exclusion has become well respected. The social forces described by Bauman\ud are always external to the individual in Bauman’s social analysis of suffering in that it places no\ud emphasis on the culpability of other human agents as the cause of the Other’s suffering. This\ud article identifies this underemphasis on human agency as a flaw in Bauman’s analysis and evaluates\ud Bauman’s largely ignored and problematic understanding of inclusion, in which social inclusion and\ud exclusion are based on the same mechanisms and identified as two sides of the same coin central\ud for maintaining social solidarity

A multicenter assessment of interreader reliability of LI-RADS version 2018 for MRI and CT

Background: Various limitations have impacted research evaluating reader agreement for Liver Imaging-Reporting and Data System (LI-RADS). Purpose: To assess reader agreement of LI-RADS in an international multi-center, multireader setting using scrollable images. Materials and Methods: This retrospective study used de-identified clinical multiphase CT and MRI examinations and reports with at least one untreated observation from six institutions and three countries; only qualifying examinations were submitted. Examination dates were October 2017 – August 2018 at the coordinating center. One untreated observation per examination was randomly selected using observation identifiers, and its clinically assigned features were extracted from the report. The corresponding LI-RADS v2018 category was computed as a re-scored clinical read. Each examination was randomly assigned to two of 43 research readers who independently scored the observation. Agreement for an ordinal modified four-category LI-RADS scale (LR-1/2, LR-3, LR-4, LR-5/M/tumor in vein) was computed using intra-class correlation coefficients (ICC). Agreement was also computed for dichotomized malignancy (LR-4/LR5/LR-M/LR-tumor in vein), LR-5, and LR-M. Agreement was compared between researchversus-research reads and research-versus-clinical reads. Results: 484 patients (mean age, 62 years ±10 [SD]; 156 women; 93 CT, 391 MRI) were included. ICCs for ordinal LI-RADS, dichotomized malignancy, LR-5, and LR-M were 0.68 (95% CI: 0.62, 0.74), 0.63 (95% CI: 0.56, 0.71), 0.58 (95% CI: 0.50, 0.66), and 0.46 (95% CI: 0.31, 0.61) respectively. Research-versus-research reader agreement was higher than research-versus-clinical agreement for modified four-category LI-RADS (ICC, 0.68 vs. 0.62, P = .03) and for dichotomized malignancy (ICC, 0.63 vs. 0.53, P = .005), but not for LR-5 (P = .14) or LR-M (P = .94). Conclusion: There was moderate agreement for Liver Imaging-Reporting and Data System v2018 overall. For some comparisons, research-versus-research reader agreement was higher than research-versus-clinical reader agreement, indicating differences between the clinical and research environments that warrant further study

Habitat Associations of Juvenile Fish at Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia: The Importance of Coral and Algae

Habitat specificity plays a pivotal role in forming community patterns in coral reef fishes, yet considerable uncertainty remains as to the extent of this selectivity, particularly among newly settled recruits. Here we quantified habitat specificity of juvenile coral reef fish at three ecological levels; algal meadows vs. coral reefs, live vs. dead coral and among different coral morphologies. In total, 6979 individuals from 11 families and 56 species were censused along Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia. Juvenile fishes exhibited divergence in habitat use and specialization among species and at all study scales. Despite the close proximity of coral reef and algal meadows (10's of metres) 25 species were unique to coral reef habitats, and seven to algal meadows. Of the seven unique to algal meadows, several species are known to occupy coral reef habitat as adults, suggesting possible ontogenetic shifts in habitat use. Selectivity between live and dead coral was found to be species-specific. In particular, juvenile scarids were found predominantly on the skeletons of dead coral whereas many damsel and butterfly fishes were closely associated with live coral habitat. Among the coral dependent species, coral morphology played a key role in juvenile distribution. Corymbose corals supported a disproportionate number of coral species and individuals relative to their availability, whereas less complex shapes (i.e. massive & encrusting) were rarely used by juvenile fish. Habitat specialisation by juvenile species of ecological and fisheries importance, for a variety of habitat types, argues strongly for the careful conservation and management of multiple habitat types within marine parks, and indicates that the current emphasis on planning conservation using representative habitat areas is warranted. Furthermore, the close association of many juvenile fish with corals susceptible to climate change related disturbances suggests that identifying and protecting reefs resilient to this should be a conservation priority