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Modernity and Ambivalence
Modern civilization, Bauman argues, promised to make our lives understandable and open to our control. This has not happened and today we no longer believe it ever will. In this book, now available in paperback, Bauman argues that our postmodern age is the time for reconciliation with ambivalence, we must learn how to live in an incurably ambiguous world.
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
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About the author
Zygmunt Bauman
285 books2,381 followersZygmunt Bauman was a world-renowned Polish sociologist and philosopher, and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds. He was one of the world's most eminent social theorists, writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity and one of the creators of the concept of “postmodernism”.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
October 22, 2015
My ex-boss introduced me to Bauman. She was particularly interested in his idea of ‘the stranger’, an idea she said that didn’t really come from a single book, but rather had to be pieced together from many of his books. Well, I guess if you wanted to just read one book to see what he was on about when he talks of the stranger, this book is as good as any.
Which is odd, in a way, as I really wasn’t expecting this book to be about that at all, given the title. The idea of ambivalence didn’t really get me thinking about strangers, at least not at first, but the theme of strangers makes up a large part of this book. All the same, the introduction to this really had me going down a completely different path. You see, modernism (as hard to define as such an idea is) could probably best be described as an obsession with order. Modernism is about categorising the universe. Label some boxes, sort the universe into those boxes. The problem is that where modernism and this sorting process is about black and white, the universe itself is about shades of grey. Ambiguity, ambivalence, contingency – but not just that. Sometimes something can fit within a category perfectly at one time, only to not fit at all at another. For categories to always work things would need to stay the same – and if there is one truth about the world, it is that few things ever stay the same. And if change is the only absolute, then the modernist project of seeking to eliminate ambivalence and ambiguity has been doomed from the start.
What has any of this got to do with ‘the stranger’? You see, the problem is that ambivalence doesn’t only exist in trying to decide if a tomato should be considered a vegetable or a fruit, but also applies much more fiercely and forcibly to categories of people.
One of the things that has been virtually concurrent with the whole modernist project was the creation of nation states. A nation is defined, as we Australians are constantly being reminded, by its borders, and so a nation and a nationality have a kind of territoriality. There is an inside and an outside. Those on the inside who ‘belong’ are citizens or fellow nationals – that is, people that can claim a certain affinity with us even if we don’t actually know them. People outside the border are different from us – different to the point of being potentially enemies – always suspect at best. The establishment of a border is already the establishment of an us that is and must be differentiated from a them. And these categories are relatively unambiguous, if you live within the borders of Australia, you are Australian. The categories have more attributes than that, but they remain relatively simple.
Which is where the Jews come into the story. A few years ago I read Mein Kampf and one of the things that interested me about it was Hitler’s justification for why the Jews were to be considered a problem race. You see, they were a people without a homeland, without a nation – they were a nationality without a nation. That is, a people that didn’t fit within the schema, within the order, within the properly defined idea of ‘nations’. This was why they needed to be exterminated, because their very existence meant undermining the order that was nationality based nation states. Such an ambiguous people/nationality had to be dangerous by definition.
Except that modernism is also contemporary with ‘the enlightenment project’, that is, the age of reason. Humans aren’t to be judged by arbitrary differences (race, skin colour, their preference for eating certain foods) but rather by universal qualities, not least reason itself. The age of reason calls for tolerance and assimilation. But what is interesting about both of these words is that they imply something good while they are in fact anything but.
Tolerance is actually about forcing one’s self to put up with that which can barely be put up with. To tolerate something is to recognise it would otherwise (other than through one’s extreme effort) be intolerable. To tolerate a smell is not to welcome the smell, but to be prepared to put up with the discomfort the smell poses. To tolerate a stranger is to do the same. It would be better if they weren’t there, but the right thing to do is to be tolerant. As I said, rather than being an act of acceptance, tolerance is an assertion of perpetual difference. That tolerance can turn to hatred and a desire to eradicate seems hardly surprising.
Assimilation is much the same. When we ask a foreign group of people to assimilate it is really asking them to abandon all of their characteristics and to seek (however imperfectly) to adopt ours. Generally it is impossible for them to be able to achieve this. In this relationship between us as the standard and them as seeking to match the standard we have set, it is the standard group that decides if enough effort has been made, whilst it always being clear that there can never really be enough effort to assure true assimilation.
Assimilation originally came from biology and meant the consumption of something so that it became part of an organism, that is, literally transformed into its flesh. Here the outsider must conform to the standards proposed by the local, including complete rejection of their own identity. And those standards are liable to change, be much more strictly applied to the stranger than to the local – and be impossible to state as they are ‘lived’ rather than ‘understood’. Here the categories are anything but black and white. Often they change so that the outsider will be forced to remain on the outside, not as an act of bastardry, but as an act of the in-group’s self-preservation.
The example given in a large part of this book is the Jews, particularly the Jews that lived in the German speaking parts of Central and Eastern Europe. And this is where the book becomes very interesting. To say that the Jews have played an important part in European culture is a gross understatement. Freud, Marx, Kafka, and a near endless list of others is provided here, and these Jews often did whatever it seemed necessary to do so as to assimilate into the culture of those around them. Except, that such assimilation always proved impossible. The standards always changed, what you did was never enough. You were never allowed to become ‘one of us’. You always remained ambivalent and therefore part of the mess rather than of the order. And there lay your danger.
As Bauman makes clear, ethnic cleansing, the holocaust, genocide – all and each are essentially about hygiene. If we can just clear away some more of ‘them’, then order will be restored, waste will be removed and the ideal state will proceed.
And this is true of left as well as of right. Bauman says that socialism was the fullest manifestation of the ordering principle of modernism. The purges where always to remove deviations and renegades. But the promise always was that once removed the ideal state would appear. Just one more death, just one more purifying act.
The solution modernism provides is always to create categories in the belief that if these categories are fine grained enough they will explain the universe. The problems we face are all problems that can be addressed by new technologies – that is, by doing things differently – smarter, faster, better. Problems, then, are the domain of experts and experts are the keepers and creators of new techniques. This becomes our sole response to the ambiguity of the world. We are always ‘just one more step away’ from having a technique which will solve the problem, any problem, all problems – however, part of us now realises (and this is what could be called post-modernism) that it is our very solutions that have caused the problems, problems even bigger than those they were created to fix, problems too complex for us to understand, never mind control.
The world has gotten out of hand. Soviet Communism attempted to overcome ambiguity – to turn swamps into fertile land, to turn rivers back from the sea – only to face near environmental collapse. And Capitalism? In the advanced countries it has saved itself from this fate only by exporting the most devastating industries to third world countries that are now, themselves, undermining the basis for their own and human survival. The more we seek to simplify the world, the more complex the world becomes – it is like the hydra, where removing one head just grows back two.
Near the end of this he makes the point that while capitalism was being challenged by Soviet communism it needed to show that it was the most reasonable and just of societies. This lead to a time of unprecedented prosperity for a very large section of the otherwise poor and dispossessed in the capitalist world. Now that capitalism is unassailable, it has also become unchallengeable in any way. As such, it no longer needs to prove itself as reasonable or just – these are taken for granted by all of the Dr Pangloss’s of the world as a priori givens. Pangloss doesn’t merely argue that we live in the best of all possible worlds, but now he says that if there is one thing the 20th century proved, it was that any form of interference, any form of social engineering, will inevitably makes things worse. He asks us, “Do you really need to pick your way through all of the bones of the 20th century yet again before you finally believe that the market must be left alone?” The natural order just IS and it must be left as it IS.
But it is no longer all clear how capitalism can survive. Technique and attempts to export problems beyond borders are not the long-term fixes they first appeared or were presented to be. The problems are increasingly beyond the ability of experts to solve. Increasingly, we are seeing that we need more people acting socially so as to address these issues, issues we will need to confront collectively. If we are to have any hope at all we will need to embrace messiness over order, ambiguity over certainty. Whether we can do this or not is another question.
Which is odd, in a way, as I really wasn’t expecting this book to be about that at all, given the title. The idea of ambivalence didn’t really get me thinking about strangers, at least not at first, but the theme of strangers makes up a large part of this book. All the same, the introduction to this really had me going down a completely different path. You see, modernism (as hard to define as such an idea is) could probably best be described as an obsession with order. Modernism is about categorising the universe. Label some boxes, sort the universe into those boxes. The problem is that where modernism and this sorting process is about black and white, the universe itself is about shades of grey. Ambiguity, ambivalence, contingency – but not just that. Sometimes something can fit within a category perfectly at one time, only to not fit at all at another. For categories to always work things would need to stay the same – and if there is one truth about the world, it is that few things ever stay the same. And if change is the only absolute, then the modernist project of seeking to eliminate ambivalence and ambiguity has been doomed from the start.
What has any of this got to do with ‘the stranger’? You see, the problem is that ambivalence doesn’t only exist in trying to decide if a tomato should be considered a vegetable or a fruit, but also applies much more fiercely and forcibly to categories of people.
One of the things that has been virtually concurrent with the whole modernist project was the creation of nation states. A nation is defined, as we Australians are constantly being reminded, by its borders, and so a nation and a nationality have a kind of territoriality. There is an inside and an outside. Those on the inside who ‘belong’ are citizens or fellow nationals – that is, people that can claim a certain affinity with us even if we don’t actually know them. People outside the border are different from us – different to the point of being potentially enemies – always suspect at best. The establishment of a border is already the establishment of an us that is and must be differentiated from a them. And these categories are relatively unambiguous, if you live within the borders of Australia, you are Australian. The categories have more attributes than that, but they remain relatively simple.
Which is where the Jews come into the story. A few years ago I read Mein Kampf and one of the things that interested me about it was Hitler’s justification for why the Jews were to be considered a problem race. You see, they were a people without a homeland, without a nation – they were a nationality without a nation. That is, a people that didn’t fit within the schema, within the order, within the properly defined idea of ‘nations’. This was why they needed to be exterminated, because their very existence meant undermining the order that was nationality based nation states. Such an ambiguous people/nationality had to be dangerous by definition.
Except that modernism is also contemporary with ‘the enlightenment project’, that is, the age of reason. Humans aren’t to be judged by arbitrary differences (race, skin colour, their preference for eating certain foods) but rather by universal qualities, not least reason itself. The age of reason calls for tolerance and assimilation. But what is interesting about both of these words is that they imply something good while they are in fact anything but.
Tolerance is actually about forcing one’s self to put up with that which can barely be put up with. To tolerate something is to recognise it would otherwise (other than through one’s extreme effort) be intolerable. To tolerate a smell is not to welcome the smell, but to be prepared to put up with the discomfort the smell poses. To tolerate a stranger is to do the same. It would be better if they weren’t there, but the right thing to do is to be tolerant. As I said, rather than being an act of acceptance, tolerance is an assertion of perpetual difference. That tolerance can turn to hatred and a desire to eradicate seems hardly surprising.
Assimilation is much the same. When we ask a foreign group of people to assimilate it is really asking them to abandon all of their characteristics and to seek (however imperfectly) to adopt ours. Generally it is impossible for them to be able to achieve this. In this relationship between us as the standard and them as seeking to match the standard we have set, it is the standard group that decides if enough effort has been made, whilst it always being clear that there can never really be enough effort to assure true assimilation.
Assimilation originally came from biology and meant the consumption of something so that it became part of an organism, that is, literally transformed into its flesh. Here the outsider must conform to the standards proposed by the local, including complete rejection of their own identity. And those standards are liable to change, be much more strictly applied to the stranger than to the local – and be impossible to state as they are ‘lived’ rather than ‘understood’. Here the categories are anything but black and white. Often they change so that the outsider will be forced to remain on the outside, not as an act of bastardry, but as an act of the in-group’s self-preservation.
The example given in a large part of this book is the Jews, particularly the Jews that lived in the German speaking parts of Central and Eastern Europe. And this is where the book becomes very interesting. To say that the Jews have played an important part in European culture is a gross understatement. Freud, Marx, Kafka, and a near endless list of others is provided here, and these Jews often did whatever it seemed necessary to do so as to assimilate into the culture of those around them. Except, that such assimilation always proved impossible. The standards always changed, what you did was never enough. You were never allowed to become ‘one of us’. You always remained ambivalent and therefore part of the mess rather than of the order. And there lay your danger.
As Bauman makes clear, ethnic cleansing, the holocaust, genocide – all and each are essentially about hygiene. If we can just clear away some more of ‘them’, then order will be restored, waste will be removed and the ideal state will proceed.
And this is true of left as well as of right. Bauman says that socialism was the fullest manifestation of the ordering principle of modernism. The purges where always to remove deviations and renegades. But the promise always was that once removed the ideal state would appear. Just one more death, just one more purifying act.
The solution modernism provides is always to create categories in the belief that if these categories are fine grained enough they will explain the universe. The problems we face are all problems that can be addressed by new technologies – that is, by doing things differently – smarter, faster, better. Problems, then, are the domain of experts and experts are the keepers and creators of new techniques. This becomes our sole response to the ambiguity of the world. We are always ‘just one more step away’ from having a technique which will solve the problem, any problem, all problems – however, part of us now realises (and this is what could be called post-modernism) that it is our very solutions that have caused the problems, problems even bigger than those they were created to fix, problems too complex for us to understand, never mind control.
The world has gotten out of hand. Soviet Communism attempted to overcome ambiguity – to turn swamps into fertile land, to turn rivers back from the sea – only to face near environmental collapse. And Capitalism? In the advanced countries it has saved itself from this fate only by exporting the most devastating industries to third world countries that are now, themselves, undermining the basis for their own and human survival. The more we seek to simplify the world, the more complex the world becomes – it is like the hydra, where removing one head just grows back two.
Near the end of this he makes the point that while capitalism was being challenged by Soviet communism it needed to show that it was the most reasonable and just of societies. This lead to a time of unprecedented prosperity for a very large section of the otherwise poor and dispossessed in the capitalist world. Now that capitalism is unassailable, it has also become unchallengeable in any way. As such, it no longer needs to prove itself as reasonable or just – these are taken for granted by all of the Dr Pangloss’s of the world as a priori givens. Pangloss doesn’t merely argue that we live in the best of all possible worlds, but now he says that if there is one thing the 20th century proved, it was that any form of interference, any form of social engineering, will inevitably makes things worse. He asks us, “Do you really need to pick your way through all of the bones of the 20th century yet again before you finally believe that the market must be left alone?” The natural order just IS and it must be left as it IS.
But it is no longer all clear how capitalism can survive. Technique and attempts to export problems beyond borders are not the long-term fixes they first appeared or were presented to be. The problems are increasingly beyond the ability of experts to solve. Increasingly, we are seeing that we need more people acting socially so as to address these issues, issues we will need to confront collectively. If we are to have any hope at all we will need to embrace messiness over order, ambiguity over certainty. Whether we can do this or not is another question.
November 20, 2019
Post-Modern filozoflardan biri olan Zygmunt Bauman'nın eserleri içerisinden okuduğum önemli eserlerden biri oldu. Modern ile Modernite ayrımını idrak edebileceğimiz sadelikte ortaya koyup, Müphemlik (açık seçik olmayan, belirsiz.) kavramını etraflıca açıklama adına modern bir yaşam içerisindeki komplike şekilde saçılışımızı ve bizim bunun içinde kayıp oluşlarımızı, hatta bu kaybımız içerisindeki yine dönüp müphemce özümüzü arayış çabamızı ortaya koymuş olan Bauman; göz göre göre asimilasyona maruz kalışımızı Yahudi sorununu etraflıca işleyerek bize örnek bir tarihsel süreci irdeleyerek aktarmıştır.
April 21, 2019
كتاب خطير نيك، أهم الكتب المترجمة اللي صدرت ذلك العام بدون مبالغة، تأثير الكتاب على ذهني كان ثوري وحطيته مع مجموعة الكتب التي تستحق الرجوع لها وقرأة أجزاء منها أو قرأتها كاملة من حين لآخر
July 17, 2021
لابد من تكرار قرائته.. الكتاب به الكثير من الفخاخ.. يحتاج إلى تركيز شديد
March 2, 2022
Take the first two and the last two chapters and you get some really interesting arguments worth thinking about. His concept of modernity and postmodernity is quite interesting (even if the historical argument is not 100% convincing) and Bauman has a lot to say about problems that are very current today. In between it gets a bit lengthy. There are some less convincing things, too (like the essencialization of Jewishness). The essayistic style makes it easy to read, but it makes some arguments lacking some depth. But still a book that felt worth the time.
January 17, 2018
Para aqueles que acreditam que diversidade e a vontade e necessidade de não pertencer a qualquer classificação, quiçá uma binária, seja uma coisa do século XXI, o livro Modernidade e Ambivalência, de Zygmunt Bauman vem provar que não. A binariedade e a classificação são um dos ingredientes da organização da sociedade e que se acentuou com a industrialização e mercantilização da mesma, na chamada modernidade. Bauman apresenta diversos exemplos, como por exemplo o do judeu errante, que não se sente ligado a nenhuma nação, ou dos judeus alemães, que durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial precisaram se decidir entre pátria-mãe e pátria-adotiva-natal. Ele também fala que aquilo que não se encontra na ordem da binariedade e da classificação provoca medo no ser humano, o desconhecido, o estranho, o que vem de não se sabe de onde, e usa exemplos de filmes como A Profecia e O Presságio. Outro exemplo da ambiguidade moderna que Bauman nos apresenta, e que está imiscuído na nossa sociedade moderna são os malls, os shoppings centers, locais onde ninguém se sente preso a uma ou outra caixa-loja à qual precisa prestar devoção ou lealdade. Os shopping centers talvez sejam o melhor exemplo do que as pessoas que defendem a diversidade querem: livre escolha de formar sua identidade (no caso do shopping aquelas relacionadas às escolhas de compra que compõem nossos bens de consumo, moda, conhecimento e gostos), seja ela de gênero, de religiosidade ou ainda nacional. Entretanto a prática da diversidade comercial fragmenta ao invés de unir, uma tolerância enrustida de dominação social, enquanto a tolerância real deve ser atingida a partir da solidariedade, segundo Bauman. Nos tempos de hoje estamos presenciando uma fragmenta social cada vez maior que facilita a dominação social de grandes corporações, cada vez maiores e cada vez mais atuantes sobre uma massa heterogênea abraçada pelas hastes perfuradoras de seu guarda-chuva. Bauman previu isso em 1991, para se entender a genialidade deste popular sociólogo.
November 13, 2018
A staggering achievement. It's sadly too dense and academic to appeal to a mass audience, yet it contains some of the most incisive criticisms of both the historic characteristics of modernity and our own, postmodern condition - for both reasons it is essential. I give just some of the more relevant pieces from the final chapter:
'Thorough, adamant and uncompromising privatization of all concerns has been the main factor that has rendered postmodern society so spectacularly immune to systemic critique and radical social dissent with revolutionary potential'.
'It is not necessarily the case that the denizens of postmodern - privatized and commodified - society enjoy the sum-total of greater happiness (one would still wish to know how to measure happiness objectively and compare it), and that they experience their worries as less serious and painful; what does truly matter is that it would not occur to them to lay the blame for such troubles they may suffer at the door of the state, and even less to expect the remedies to be handed over through that door'.
'It is not the "ownership of the means of production" that has been privatized ... The most seminal of privatizations was that of human problems and of the responsibility for their resolution. The politics that reduced its acknowledged responsibilities to the matters of public safety and otherwise declared its retreat from the tasks of social management, effectively desocialized the ills of society and translated social injustice as individual ineptitude or neglect'.
'Thorough, adamant and uncompromising privatization of all concerns has been the main factor that has rendered postmodern society so spectacularly immune to systemic critique and radical social dissent with revolutionary potential'.
'It is not necessarily the case that the denizens of postmodern - privatized and commodified - society enjoy the sum-total of greater happiness (one would still wish to know how to measure happiness objectively and compare it), and that they experience their worries as less serious and painful; what does truly matter is that it would not occur to them to lay the blame for such troubles they may suffer at the door of the state, and even less to expect the remedies to be handed over through that door'.
'It is not the "ownership of the means of production" that has been privatized ... The most seminal of privatizations was that of human problems and of the responsibility for their resolution. The politics that reduced its acknowledged responsibilities to the matters of public safety and otherwise declared its retreat from the tasks of social management, effectively desocialized the ills of society and translated social injustice as individual ineptitude or neglect'.
April 20, 2019
A very naive work trying to catch the critical hints which lurk in darkness of ambivalence from modernity to nowadays...
August 26, 2020
هذا الكتاب والحداثة السائلة من أفضل أعمال باومان
July 21, 2021
Speak more clearly brother
November 3, 2022
veramente interessante con ottimi spunti di riflessione
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews