Postmodernity and its Discontents E-Book

Zygmunt Bauman

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 493

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

When Freud wrote his classic Civilization and its Discontents, he was concerned with repression. Modern civilization depends upon the constraint of impulse, the limiting of self expression. Today, in the time of modernity, Bauman argues, Freud's analysis no longer holds good, if it ever did. The regulation of desire turns from an irritating necessity into an assault against individual freedom. In the postmodern era, the liberty of the individual is the overriding value, the criterion in terms of which all social rules and regulations are assessed. Postmodernity is governed by the 'will to happiness': the result, however, is a sacrificing of security. The most prominent anxieties in our society today, Bauman shows, derive from the removal of security. The world is experienced as overwhelmingly uncertain, uncontrollable and frightening. Totalitarian politics frightened by its awesome power; the new social disorder frightens by its lack of consistency and direction. The very pursuit of individual happiness corrupts and undermines those systems of authority needed for a stable life. This book builds imaginatively upon Bauman's earlier contributions to social theory. It consolidates his reputation as the interpreter of postmodernity. The book will appeal to second-year undergraduates and above in sociology, cultural studies, philosophy and anthropology.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Introduction: Discontents – Modern and Postmodern

1 The Dream of Purity

2 The Making and Unmaking of Strangers

From disembedding to setting afloat

Dimensions of the present uncertainty

Freedom, uncertainty, and freedom from uncertainty

Theorizing the difference, or the twisted road to shared humanity

3 The Strangers of the Consumer Era: from the Welfare State to Prison

4 Morality Begins at Home: or the Rocky Road to Justice

5 Parvenu and Pariah: the Heroes and Victims of Modernity

6 Tourists and Vagabonds: the Heroes and Victims of Postmodernity

7 Postmodern Art, or the Impossibility of the Avant-garde

8 The Meaning of Art and the Art of Meaning

9 On Truth, Fiction and Uncertainty

10 Culture as Consumer Co-operative

11 On the Postmodern Redeployment of Sex: Foucault’s History of Sexuality Revisited

12 Immortality, Postmodern Version

Death, modern and postmodern

Immortality, modern and postmodern

13 Postmodern Religion?

Define, and perish

God, or insufficiency of self-sufficiency

Modernity, or doing without God

Anti-eschatological revolution

Uncertainty, non-ontological

This-worldly transcendence

Back to the future

14 On Communitarianism and Human Freedom, or How to Square the Circle

Afterword: The Last Word – and it Belongs to Freedom

Index

Copyright © Zygmunt Bauman 1997

The right of Zygmunt Bauman to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1997 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-1790-9

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5685-4(Multi-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5687-8(Single-user ebook)

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Introduction: Discontents – Modern and Postmodern

In 1930 a book called first Das Unglück in der Kultur, and later renamed Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, appeared in Vienna. Its author was Sigmund Freud. Almost simultaneously, the English translation appeared – for which Freud suggested a title Man’s Discomfort in Civilization. As Freud’s English editor James Strachey informs us, Joan Riviere, the book’s English translator, played instead for a time with the concept of malaise, but chose finally the title Civilization and its Discontents. It is under this title that Freud’s provocative challenge to the folklore of modernity entered our collective consciousness and in the end framed our thinking about the consequences – both intended and unintended – of the modern adventure. (We know now that it was the story of modernity which the book told, even if its author preferred to speak of Kultur or civilization; only modern society thought of itself as of an activity of ‘culture’ or ‘civilization’, and acted on such self-knowledge, with the results Freud set out to explore; the phrase ‘modern civilization’ is, for this reason, a pleonasm.)

You gain something, but usually you lose something in exchange: so went Freud’s message. As ‘culture’ or ‘civilization’, modernity is about beauty (‘this useless thing which we expect civilization to value’), cleanliness (‘dirtiness of any kind seems to us incompatible with civilization’) and order (‘Order is a kind of compulsion to repeat which, when a regulation has been laid down once and for all, decides when, where and how a thing shall be done, so that in every similar circumstance one is spared hesitation and indecision’). Beauty (that is, whatever gives the sublime pleasure of harmony and perfection of form), purity and order are gains not to be played down and certainly not likely to be given up without an outcry, breast-beating and remorse. But neither are they to be had without paying a heavy price. Nothing predisposes humans ‘naturally’ to seek or preserve beauty, to keep clean and to observe the routine called order. (If they seem here and there to display such an ‘instinct’, it must be a contrived and acquired, trained inclination, the surest sign of a civilization at work.) Humans need be forced to respect and appreciate harmony, cleanliness and order. Their freedom to act on their own impulses must be trimmed. Constraint is painful: defence against suffering generates sufferings of its own.

‘Civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.’ In particular – so Freud tells us – civilization (read: modernity) ‘imposes great sacrifices’ on man’s sexuality and aggressivity. ‘The urge for freedom, therefore, is directed against particular forms and demands of civilization or against civilization altogether.’ And it cannot be otherwise. The pleasures of civilized life come in a package deal, so Freud insists, with sufferings, satisfaction with discontents, submission with rebellion. Civilization – the order imposed upon naturally disorderly humanity – is a compromise, a trade-off, continually challenged and forever nudged to be renegotiated. The pleasure principle is here cut down to the measure of the reality principle and the rules spell out that reality which is the measure of the realistic. ‘Civilized man has exchanged a portion of his possibilities of happiness for a portion of security.’ However well justified and realistic may be our attempts to improve on specific flaws of the present-day solutions, ‘perhaps we may also familiarize ourselves with the idea that there are difficulties attaching to the nature of civilization which will not yield to any attempt at reform’.

Of that order which was the pride of modernity and the cornerstone of all its other accomplishments (whether appearing under the same rubric of order or hiding under the code-names of beauty and cleanliness), Freud spoke in terms of ‘compulsion’, ‘regulation’, ‘suppression’ or ‘forced renunciation’. Those discontents which were the trade-mark of modernity arose from the ‘excess of order’ and its inseparable companion – the dearth of freedom. Security from the triple threat hidden in the frail body, the untamed world and the aggressive neighbours called for the sacrifice of freedom; first and foremost, the individual’s freedom to seek pleasure. Within the framework of a civilization bent on security, more freedom meant less discontent. Within the framework of a civilization that chose to limit freedom in the name of security, more order meant more discontent.

Ours, however, is the time of deregulation. The reality principle has today to defend itself in the court of justice in which the pleasure principle is the presiding judge. ‘The idea that there are difficulties attaching to the nature of civilization which will not yield to any attempt at reform’ seems to have lost its pristine obviousness. Compulsion and forced renunciation has turned from an irritating necessity into an unwarranted assault launched against individual freedom.

Sixty-five years after Civilization and its Discontents was written and published, individual freedom rules supreme; it is the value by which all other values came to be evaluated, and the benchmark against which the wisdom of all supra-individual rules and resolutions are to be measured. This does not mean, though, that the ideals of beauty, purity and order which sent men and women on their modern voyage of discovery have been forsaken, or lost any of their original lustre. Now, however, they are to be pursued – and fulfilled – through individual spontaneity, will and effort. In its present, postmodern version, modernity seems to have found the philosophers’ stone which Freud dismissed as a naive and harmful fantasy: it set out to smelt the precious metals of clean order and orderly cleanliness straight from the ore of the human, all-too-human bid for pleasure, ever more pleasure and ever more pleasurable pleasure – a bid once decried as base and condemned as self-destructive. As if unscathed, perhaps even strengthened, by two centuries of concentrated efforts to keep it in the iron glove of reason-dictated rules and regulations, the ‘invisible hand’ regained trust and is once more in favour. Individual freedom, once a liability and a problem (perhaps the problem) for all order-builders, became the major asset and resource in the perpetual self-creation of the human universe.

You gain something, you lose something else in exchange: the old rule holds as true today as it was true then. Only the gains and the losses have changed places: postmodern men and women exchanged a portion of their possibilities of security for a portion of happiness. The discontents of modernity arose from a kind of security which tolerated too little freedom in the pursuit of individual happiness. The discontents of postmodernity arise from a kind of freedom of pleasure-seeking which tolerates too little individual security.

Any value is a value (as Georg Simmel long ago observed) only thanks to the loss of other values one must suffer in order to obtain it. But you need most what you lack most. The splendours of freedom are at their brightest when freedom is sacrificed at the altar of security. When it is the turn of security to be sacrificed in the temple of individual freedom, it steals much of the shine of its former victim. If dull and humdrum days haunted the seekers of security, sleepless nights are the curse of the free. In both cases, happiness goes by the board. Listen to Freud again: ‘We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.’ Why? Because ‘what we call happiness … comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree, and it is from its nature only possible as an episodic phenomenon’. And so: freedom without security assures no more steady a supply of happiness than security without freedom. A different arrangement of human affairs is not necessarily a step forward on the road to greater happiness – it only seems to be such at the moment it is being made. Re-evaluation of all values is a happy, exhilarating moment, but the re-evaluated values do not necessarily guarantee a state of bliss.

There are no gains without losses, and the hope of a wondrous purification of gains from losses is as futile as the proverbial dream of a free lunch – but the gains and losses specific to any arrangement of human cohabitation need to be carefully counted, so that the optimal balance between the two can be sought even if (or rather because) the hard-won sobriety and wisdom prevents us, postmodern men and women, from indulging in a daydream about a balance sheet that has only a credit side.

This book is intended as a collection of small, and partial, contributions to this task.

This book has a special significance for me, since for the first time in the last quarter of a century some of its chapters were originally written in Polish, my native language, and presented to, as well as discussed with, Polish academics and students. My links with my Alma Mater, the University of Warsaw, have been restored. And so too has been the enlightening and stimulating exchange with my friends and colleagues, Polish sociologists and philosophers, all insightful and perceptive, sharp and challenging, too numerous to be mentioned by name, to whom I am in debt for clarifying and polishing many of the ideas this book contains.

My special thanks go to Anthony Giddens: without his continuous interest in my work, his gentle yet relentless, friendly yet determined pressure, this book would never have been put together.

And, as with each successive work of mine for ten years now, I wish to thank my editor, David Roberts. I guess no author could wish for a better understanding with his editor; we both struggle for the same purpose – which, as Roberts himself put it, is to produce a text ‘demanding that the reader should look at things s/he would rather leave unexamined’, the role of the editor being ‘to remove unnecessary impediments to the reader’s understanding without depriving the author of his individual voice’. And no one I know makes these words into flesh more capably than David Roberts.

1

The Dream of Purity

Great crimes often start from great ideas. Few great ideas prove completely innocent when their inspired followers try to make the word flesh – but some can hardly ever be embraced without the teeth being bared and daggers sharpened. Among this class of ideas, pride of place belongs to the vision of purity.

‘The German Final Solution’, observed the American writer Cynthia Ozick, ‘was an aesthetic solution; it was a job of editing, it was the artist’s finger removing a smudge; it simply annihilated what was considered not harmonious.’1 The German psychologist Klaus Dörner calls his readers ‘die Nazis auch als Bürger zu sehen, die genauso wie die Bürger vor und nach, ihre Antwort auf die Soziale Frage gesucht haben’2 – the ‘social question’ to which they sought the answer being the question of ‘pollution’, of the stubborn presence of people who ‘did not fit’, who were ‘out of place’, who ‘spoiled the picture’ – and otherwise offended the aesthetically gratifying and morally reassuring sense of harmony. In the early years of the modern era, as Michel Foucault reminded us, madmen were rounded up by the city authorities, loaded into Narrenschiffen and sent to sea; madmen stood for ‘a dark disorder, a moving chaos … which opposes the mind’s luminous and adult stability’; and the sea stood for water, which ‘carries off, but does more: it purifies’.3

Purity is an ideal; a vision of the condition which needs yet to be created, or such as needs to be diligently protected against the genuine or imagined odds. Without such a vision, neither the concept of purity makes sense, nor the distinction between purity and impurity can be sensibly drawn. A forest, a mountain range, a meadow, an ocean (‘nature’ in general, as distinguished from culture, the human product) is neither pure nor impure – that is, until it is spattered with the leftovers of a Sunday picnic or infused with the waste of chemical factories. Human intervention does not just soil nature and make it filthy; it introduces into nature the very distinction between purity and filth, it creates the very possibility of a given part of the natural world being ‘clean’ or ‘dirty’.

Purity is a vision of things put in places different from those they would occupy if not prompted to move elsewhere, pushed, pulled or goaded; and it is a vision of order – that is, of a situation in which each thing is in its rightful place and nowhere else. There is no way of thinking about purity without having an image of ‘order’, without assigning to things their ‘rightful’, ‘proper’ places – which happen to be such places as they would not fill ‘naturally’, of their own accord. The opposite of ‘purity’ – the dirt, the filth, ‘polluting agents’ – are things ‘out of place’. It is not the intrinsic quality of things which makes them into ‘dirt’, but solely their location; more precisely, their location in the order of things envisaged by the purity-seekers. Things which are ‘dirt’ in one context may become pure just by being put in another place – and vice versa. Beautifully polished, shining shoes become dirt when put on the dining table; returned to the shoe-stack, they recover their pristine purity. An omelette, a mouth-watering work of culinary art when on the dinner plate, becomes a nasty stain when dropped on the pillow.