Governing Subjects by Isaac D. Balbus

Author:Isaac D. Balbus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

19

MODERNITY

The goal of this chapter is to introduce you to, and help you make sense of, two very different contemporary accounts of the distinctively modern culture that we all inhabit. These accounts of modernity are difficult to comprehend not merely or mainly because of the perhaps unfamiliar language they employ, but also, more importantly, because it is always difficult for people who are inside a culture to see it, as it were, from the outside, that is, to understand one’s own culture as an anthropologist attempts to understand a more obviously alien culture. Getting sufficient distance from our way of life in order to understand it merely as one way of life rather than the way life is, in other words, is no easy task, but it is just this task that you are asked to perform when you read and think about Anthony Giddens’s and Zygmunt Bauman’s interpretations of modernity.

Bauman’s account of modernity is far bleaker than Giddens’s. For Bauman “modernity is drive to mastery; a mode of being shot through with hope, ambition and confidence—a behavioral-attitudinal complex correlated with [the] subordination and appropriation of nature.”1 This “behavioral-attitudinal” commitment to subdue nature is the outcome of a process that the great early twentieth-century sociologist Max Weber called the “disenchantment of the world.”2 By the “disenchantment of the world” Weber meant the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Western European overthrow of the teleological conception of nature that prevailed in that part of the world prior to that time (and that is still dominant in non-modernized parts of the world today). The root Greek word of the adjective “teleological” is telos, which means end, goal, or purpose. So to speak of a teleological conception of nature is to speak of a nature that is understood to be informed by or tend toward an end or a purpose, an end or purpose in the light of which humans are expected to live their lives. Within the context of a teleological world-view, in other words, people find meaning in their lives in their participation in what they take to be a meaningful world. The “disenchantment of the world” refers to the conceptual (and emotional) process of stripping nature of meaning or purpose and transforming it into a purposeless object that exists for the sake of the human subject, that is raw material for human production, a pure means for uniquely human ends. In short, once nature is deprived of subjectivity the only possible human relationship with it is an objectifying one: under these conditions the effort of humans to achieve meaning in their lives necessarily takes the form of the effort to make nature useful, to achieve the maximum possible mastery over nature.

“Mastery over nature,” Bauman informs us, “could mean nothing else but emancipation from necessity.”3 By “necessity,” Bauman means anything on which human beings are dependent, any natural contingency that resists human control. To say that modernity is dedicated to emancipation from necessity is thus to say that, in Bauman’s words, modernity “suffers resistance

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