Bauman, Elias and Latour on Modernity and Its Alternatives

Bauman, Elias and Latour on Modernity and Its Alternatives
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‘Bauman, Elias and Latour on Modernity and Its Alternatives’ provides a synopsis of and comparison between the conceptions of modernity and its alternatives, as found in the works of Bauman, Elias and Latour. Bauman and Elias share a few relevant features bearing on their conceptions of modernity and its possible alternatives; Latour, on the other hand, when compared to these sociologists, is a maverick thinker. The set of alternatives is as follows: modernity vs. post-modernity (Bauman); civilization vs. barbarity (Elias) and successful vs. unsuccessful hybrids (Latour). Bauman’s and Elias’s conceptions of modernity differ in some important respects. The constitutive elements of modernity are, according to Bauman, cognitive order, regulation, stability of relations and identities, and the role of intellectuals as legislators. In Elias’s view, pacification and civilization are the hallmarks of modernity. Both Bauman and Elias maintain, despite their differences, that a condition of barbarity indicates the absence of civilization, but not of modernity. According to Latour, the scientific usefulness of the concepts of modernity and, by implication, of non-modernity is questionable. If hybrids are defined as heterogeneous associations between humans and non-humans such as instruments and machines, by virtue of their great number they produce a variety of ways in which distinct and incompatible modes of knowledge may be interpreted, defined, and linked. This occurs by means of mediators. A hybrid condition characterizes the modern world; hence, non-humans are relevant for investigating the modern world as they mediate between nature and society. The latter is a contraposition which Latour rejects, along with those between actor vs. system, science vs. society, nature vs. culture, and humans vs. non-humans. As for this last contraposition, Latour argues that this very distinction results from a process of purification, since humans and non-humans may be actors that form an integrated whole. Modernity therefore results from the two related but opposed processes of hybridization and purification. Much as the very concept of modernity is of questionable usefulness, the concept of non-modernity should also be relinquished. The existence of hybrids makes modernity and non-modernity impossible. In this sense, Latour has contended that we have never been modern. The joint product of human and non-human activities, as resulting in hybrids, may be a failure due, according to Latour, to the mismatch between the human and non-human actors.

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Bauman, Elias and Latour on Modernity and Its Alternatives

Three Contemporary Sociological Theorists on Modernity and Other Options

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Only “professional intellectual” can formulate a theory of society and history, as Bauman has argued in a subsequent work (Bauman 1987b: 175). Hence, the intellectuals’ privileged role as interpreters of the proletariat’s historic interest. This role, as intellectuals conceived of it, belongs to the bygone age of modernity, however, as interpretations can no longer in this age impact on social or political reality. As a Bauman’s commentator has stated, however, “what we cannot do, for Bauman, is to translate this interpretation directly into legislation” (Beilharz 2000: 81). Modernity being a failed project (Bauman 1987b: 191), global projects have been abandoned in this postmodern age. Therefore, “no social group or category of the postindustrial world seems to be fit for the role set aside by the history-as-rationalization theory for the ‘agent of Reason’” (Bauman 1987b: 194). Bauman, however, has not relinquished Marxism as a tool for sociological analysis; for a Marxist analysis involves looking for “a class whose sufferings are radical,” whose members are most affected by the “rapidly spreading areas of deprivation” (Bauman 1987a: 9).

As a global society no longer offers stability and security, freedom in today’s world is granted to and enjoyed only by those who possess “skills and resources” (Bauman 1997: 27). These people commit themselves to a lifestyle that is connoted by “looseness of attachment and revocability of engagement” (Bauman 2005:4). They can afford to be the pleasure-seeking and the well-to-do customers of fashionable restaurants and other city amenities. They are the modern-city residents, secure in their fortified and well-policed homes and neighborhoods. Their residential areas are sharply separated from those where the inhabitants of other city areas live, and especially from the poor. Today’s poor are a collateral casualty of our “liquid” times. Bauman finds the “rapidly growing inequality on a global scale replicated “inside virtually every single ‘national society’” (Bauman 1997: 58). “Emerging post-modern circumstances”—signally, “the newly legalized post-modern self-centeredness and indifference”—may be conducive to “new outbursts of savage misanthropy” (Bauman 1991: 260).

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