Bauman and Hamlet’s dilemma

Uncertainty and fundamentalism

Abstract

What’s Hamlet’s dilemma, the prince who on stage represents our consciousness as individuals, and through it our uncertainties in societal scenes? “To be or not to be”, he says, a famous expression later set forth in other terms by Theodor Adorno as “to croak or not to croak”, to depict one’s need to be heard, eventually to challenge the authority of established practices on how, when, if, and what to do in increasingly disorderly circumstances. Thence, ‘Bauman’s dilemma’, the committed actor’s duty to contrive an “art of living permanently with uncertainty”, freed from the airs of unbiased ‘reformer’, source of probity and veracity. A craft of interpreters qualified to be determinant factors of “human self-reflexive and self-monitored action” in swiftly changing contexts of short-term “free choices” conditioned by market and consumer technologies. Action that reproduces itself and the system, still dependent on power and politics – increasingly less relevant to each other – and on communities in which solidarity and organizational capacity no longer are priorities. In the guise of demonstrating the fruitfulness of Bauman’s proposed model the essay closes showing specific applications in concrete cases.