Jamie McCartney & Chris Kast
Modernity and Ambivalence
Zygmunt Bauman
Why-question: Why has post modernity not fulfilled the promises contained within the
perspective?
Motivational mechanism: The motivational mechanism has shifted from a drive toward
inclusion on the part of the stranger during modernity to one of a self orientation consumer
during post modernity.
The stranger vs. the Native: The “out group member” versus the “in-group member”. Someone
who is not supplied with guaranteed objective criteria of relevance versus someone who is. p. 75
2 reasons the stranger can’t assimilate are because they threaten the security and assurance p. 76
of the natives.
 Tuning: Since being tuned in is a natural state self tuning by definition is impossible as it
reveals tuning as being manipulatable as an object. p. 77
 Revision of precepts: In order to enter the stranger must disrupt the secure shelter of the
natives into one that is contested and problematic. p. 78
Objectivistic stranger…. Freedom as loneliness p. 79: The lack of ability to distinguish between
the stations of his unstoppable pilgrimage.
Real obstacles of entry are revealed to be the economic political and above all social not the
cultural. p. 80
Only the stranger may find a non counterfeit universality which is searched for by the natives…
stranger is now the sign of distinction. p. 82
The nomadic intellectual has found a home in the university. p. 91
The estranged intellectual stands in contrast to the knowledge class which is parochial. p. 93
Restricted areas of study soothe the horrors of relativism and the drive toward universalism. p.
94
Universal strangerhood: A person is only partially subsumed by each subsystem. This creates a
person who is always a partial stranger to each system, and fully at home only within himself. p.
95
Stranger in a well settled world versus one in a world on the move. p. 97
 Well settled strangers possess misery with promise, hope and progamme for its termination.
 Strangers in a world on the move now have no natives as a contrast and as such their remains
no guilt associative with being different.
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Strangerhood has become a universal. pp. 97-98
Post modernity is modernity reconciled to its own impossibility. p. 98
Cognitive versus post cognitive questions p. 100
 Cognitive (Modernist) : How can I interpret this world of which I am a part.
 Post cognitive (Post modernist): Which world is it, what is to be done in it, and which of my
selves is to do it.
History occurs twice first as tragedy then as farce, but Marx may have mixed up the order p. 101
Social science has succeeded at doing something they did not intend. They have succeeded in
delivering a reasonable product under false pretences. p. 231
The self deception of modernity was pregnant with its own self disclosure. p. 233
Modernity presented hope for the removal of uncertainty that isn’t presented in post modernity.
p. 237
Transformation of tolerance to solidarity: The movement from being merely tolerant of the
others difference to battling for the sake of the others difference. p. 256
The postmodern condition differs only by its knowledge of living without guarantee p. 257
It is only too easy for postmodern tolerance to degenerate into the selfishness of the rich and
resourceful p. 259
The most seminal of privatizations was that of human problems and of the responsibility for their
resolution p. 261
There is no solidarity without the tolerance for the otherness of the other, but tolerance is not
solidarity’s sufficient condition. Nor is solidarity tolerance’s predetermined consequence. p. 262
Once declared a mortal danger to all social and political order, ambivalence is not an ‘enemy at
the gate’ anymore. On the contrary; like everything else it has been made into one of the stage
prop in the play called post modernity. p. 279
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Modernity = Us/Them
Native =
relativism;
“truth”
Stranger =
Universality;
“unmasker”
Postmodernity
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Ego
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Only fully @ home with self
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“Community” found in
imagination
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Subsystems of
social world
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Universality of strangerhood w/ contemporary society due to extreme division of labor and
separation of functionally separated spheres.
Individual is a unit of many: Partial stranger at all times.
“If everyone is a stranger, no one is.” (p. 97)
Market Driven Postmodernism:
Privatization of Concerns  Sense of Uniqueness  Selfishness  Massive Withdrawal
of Would-be Citizenry from Politics
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