Modernity and Ambivalence by Zygmunt Bauman

Author:Zygmunt Bauman
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Wiley

No doubt Cuddihy puts his finger on a real problem: the indelible ‘Jewish signature’ on modern culture, the truly uncanny, unprecedented, massive participation of the assimilating and assimilated Jews in the cultural revolution of modernity; in that revolution which, at the same time, came ‘from the very heart’ of the ‘modernity project’, was the product of pressures and tension that the modern thrust for artificially designed order generated – and decisively influenced that project’s discreditation. In line with a long tradition, Cuddihy attempts, however, to defend the objective against the disruptive tendencies its pursuit brought forth, by dismissing such tendencies as mere emanations of parochial and retrograde Jewish worries; while the truth of the matter was that the assimilatory pressure, that trade mark of modern politics, cast the Jews in social contexts from which contradictions of modernity were most poignantly experienced and hence easier to scan, to comprehend and to theorize. Jewish contributions to modern culture are better understood not as expressions of ‘Jewish struggle with modernity’, but as by-products of ‘modernity’s struggle with itself, side-effects which from that place into which modernity cast the Jews were better visible than from most other vantage points.

Indeed, the assimilatory pressures which – courtesy of the nationalist state and the state-sponsored Kulturträger – descended upon European Jews, did not simply result in torn souls, broken lives, despondency and despair. Neither did they present their victims solely with the choice between a war against a duplicitous society or emulating that duplicity and carrying it away from that society into distant and hopefully secure place where it could be turned from the sign of Jewish weakness into an instrument of Jewish strength. Certainly, the assimilatory episode did all these things. But it accomplished more than that. Without any prior intention, by default rather than by design, assimilatory pressures brought forth a social context of a unique and unprecedented creative potential. With an outcome virtually opposite to that which was intended, the pressures generated by the modern project heavily contributed to the birth and flourishing of modern culture – perhaps that project’s most spectacular and precious, though largely unanticipated, side-product.

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