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action over inadequate knowledge or misinformation. Thirdly, and related
to the above, there would develop a correspondence between the represen-
tations of what constitutes social reality with science. In a nutshell, science
would eventually not only help society to better manage its social affairs,
but it would also leave it better equipped to uncover and demystify the
truths about social reality.
As I have suggested already, classification was a modern outlook which
appealed to Enlightenment standards of universal reason. And with its
42 Zygmunt Bauman
passion for taxonomy, modernity was typically corrective and exacting,
revising and adjusting particular phenomena to its relentless normalizing
discourse. As Bauman argues, once forged, modernity s coin quickly
became the common currency and all aspects of life had to get their
required doses of its classifying zeal in order to guarantee their legitimacy.
In the event, public life and private life came to be understood as distinct
spheres of social life and the knowledge process was likewise separated
into specialized realms.
As Bauman s theory of solid modernity implies, there was no necessary
reason why modernity should have taken the normalizing course that it
did, because although Enlightenment thinking appealed to standards of
universal reason it also signified a resistance to absolutism. But as he
suggests, the solid modernist version of modernity as it was discursively
constituted in actually existing nation-states tended to be underpinned
by a system of social control that not only classified but also understood
any form of deviation from its norms of classification as a thorn in its
flesh. As Bauman points out:
Modern society differs from its predecessors by its gardener-like,
rather than gamekeeper-like, attitude to itself. It views the main-
tenance of social order (i.e. the containment of human conduct
within certain parameters, and the predictability of human
behaviour within these parameters) as an issue : something to be
kept on the agenda, considered, discussed, taken care of, dealt with,
resolved.55
In the event, modern societies found that an effective way of
maintaining social order was to compare human conduct with certain
regularities from the past, which allowed them to establish systems of
social control whereby they could identify different behaviours from a
particular point of view in order to predict the future. In this way the
modern outlook on the one hand implied historical awareness, a
consciousness of historical continuity and the ways the past continues to
live in the present .56 (As Agnes Heller points out, modern people are the
first people to understand what history is really about, because it is science
which enables them to understand the puzzles of the past.) On the other
hand, it was science which also enabled them to predict the future, as
Bauman suggests, to predict human behaviour within certain parameters .
It was imagined that the power of this kind of reasoning that allowed
modern man to make a world of his own design and liking , would be
assuaged by the disciplinary rules of empirical experience which would
provide the separation between the form and the content of knowledge.
Science, whose central appeal and strength was based on the positivistic
His Theory of Modernity 43
observation of the world out there , was seen as ideal for making this
linkage. However, if this meant that the rules of perfect reason would be
tempered by the rules of empirical experience developed through scientific
experimentation, it did not stop the attitude to certainty associated with
the old way of life being made compatible with the new one.
Freud suggested as much in the first section of his famous essay
Civilisation and Its Discontents, when he took Rome to be a useful
metaphor for the processes of modern civilization. Like Rome, Freud
suggested, modernity might be evolving towards a newer and better
society but it could not entirely shake off its past. Modernity carries with
it, beneath its modern foundations, the ambivalence of its own historicity.
As Freud put it, nothing which has once been formed can perish that
everything is somehow preserved and that in suitable circumstances
(when, for instance, regression goes back far enough) it can once more
be brought to light .57 What Freud s analysis suggests is that at one level
there was with solid modernity the progressive affirmation of beauty,
cleanliness and order; but at another it had buried in the soil of its city or
beneath its modern buildings 58 the regressive means of power and social
control for their implementation.
Modernity and the Holocaust: the solid modern way of dealing
with contingency and ambivalence
In Modernity and the Holocaust, Bauman demonstrates that this tyranny
associated with this dark side of modern culture was inextricably linked
to the modern obsession with cleanliness and order, particularly when
cultural ambivalence became a problem and its elimination turned into a
mission.59 As Bauman suggests in Postmodern Ethics, making sure there
is a distance rather than proximity & between the perpetrator of an action
and those who suffer its consequences 60 is of utmost importance here
since it allows the perpetrator to construct the sufferers as the objective
of aesthetic, not moral evaluation; as a matter of taste, not responsibility ;61
and their exemption from the class of individuals worthy of moral respect;
[while] dissembling & human beings [in this case the Jews] into
functionally specific traits, each of which has a discreet technical utility
that precludes any moral response to the individual as an expressive and
vulnerable alterity .62
As Bauman shows in Modernity and the Holocaust, this denial of
proximity was most acutely represented in the Holocaust. Contrary to
many other critics, Bauman understands the Holocaust as a solidly
modern project , essentially a Fordist63 mass-production genocide which
was the fait accompli of the solid modern imagination, the style and the
44 Zygmunt Bauman
substance of which could only have been realized in modernity. If its
style of execution was technological, the substance of the final solution
was to once and for all rid the world of those aliens distorting its reality
in order to uncover the true nature of humankind. As Bauman points
out, the state of affairs the Nazis wished to create was one of total
Entfernung an effective removal of the Jews from the life-world of the
German race .64 Be that as it may, as David Macey has suggested, Bauman
insists that the Holocaust was
neither a Jewish problem nor a German problem , nor, contra
Adorno, the expression of an authoritarian personality & [but] it
was a project born of and implemented in a modern rational society.
Modern civilization was not the Holocaust s sufficient cause, but it
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