ESSAY CEMETERY

  In his article Postmodernity, or Living with Ambivalence , Zygmunt Bauman characterizes Modernism as an era of certainty. In Modernity, Western civilization "was bent on dominating the rest of the world by dissolving its alterity" and conforming it to its own Western values. In this way, the difference was seemingly done away with, creating an all-encompassing universal truth. Modernity proposed one single mode in which to perceive and experience life. Along with difference, contingency was abolished, creating ostensible destiny, born of the sense that the fate of the individual is part of that universal truth. In Bauman's contemporary era, however, there came "the realization that … the hope [of destiny] will not come true and hence one needs to learn to live without the hope that supplied the meaning – the only meaning – to life." The postmodern subject, then, experiences "that state of discomfort and anxiety" from which the modern subject had be...

Zygmunt Bauman. Image by  Grzegorz Lepiarz Summary In modernism what was considered absolute truth was simply the principles of Western civilization. Propagators of it were intent on converting the rest of the world and abolishing "alterity", and so this "crusading spirit" and absolute knowledge merged. There was a crusade for universality which resulted in only more difference. This masked contingency, or free will and uncertainty, which the modern subject would otherwise have felt. In postmodernism, that is in the present, we are unhappy because we realize that there is uncertainty, that the hope of unification of modernity will not come true and we need to learn to live with this ambivalence. Then Bauman cites Heller who suggests that we can transform the ambiguity into destiny, by embracing our free will, making a decision and sticking by it. Response The title already betrays a lack of absolutes and bottom lines. Nothing striking or polemic, just ambivalence. T...