The tension between the concepts of modern and postmodern in Zygmunt Bauman

The concepts of "modern" and "postmodern" of the famous social scientist Zygmunt Bauman and the analyzes of the social processes indicated by these concepts were argued with their theoretical aspects in this study. For this reason, the modern thought which started to develop in Northern Europe in 17. century and the social, political and economic structure the modern thought assumed was analyzed from Bauman's perspective. Bauman's book, articles, interviews and the second sources relevant with subject were handled with an interpretative and analytical perspective. It was tried to reveal how modernity starts out as a project which has a holistic and internal consistency and how it used instrumental reason to achieve the aims of this project. It has been observed that modernity to realize the idea of order which it envisages benefited from panoptic durveillance mechanisms and turned into an elite intellectual movement. The social imaginations such as utopias and "postponement of pleasure" have became the other points of this project. However, the steps taken by modern discourse have unpredictably produced negative results such as destruction and assimilation rather than human creativity. In this regard, Bauman has considered "postmodernty" as the process of modernity which knows itself. Bauman thinks that postmodern (or liquied modern) discourse, besides confronting the pluralist social elements that modernity ignores or suppresses, has based on a unique lifestyle such as consumption, individualism and flexibility. One of the focal points of the study is that Bauman has developed a critical attitude postmodernity, like modernity, exhibit the limited and incompleted properties of it. Finally, in the conclusion part, it has been tried to present the suggestions and contributions on the importance of social analyzes that Bauman has attempted, which bases on the concepts of modern and postmodern and how they should be interpreted.