Collateral damage affects not only individuals or specific collectivities in postmodern societies. It also affects whole impoverished nations, as their denizens are especially subject to “the explosive compound of growing social inequality and the rising volume of human suffering relegated to the status of ‘collaterality’ (marginality, externality, disposability, not a legitimate part of the political agenda)” (Bauman 2011a: 9). Bauman argues that capitalism itself, and especially the cause of this state of affairs, which he deplores, is because of its social consequences of poverty and deprivation. A further unpropitious consequence of contemporary capitalism is its prevailing culture; for it has concurred to the formation of liquid modernity and consumers’ society, and therefore to the current divide between those who benefit from it, and those who do not, and suffer social and economic disadvantage as a consequence (Bauman 2011b: 12–17). This is the culture of an alienated society, in Bauman’s view; it is neither capable nor willing to endow it with any deeper meaning.
Culture, as Bauman conceives of it, should be entirely different; namely, as a set of norms and ideals culture should be able to challenge the present human and social reality, and “ask for […] justice, freedom, and good” (Bauman 1973a: 177). This task implies transcending both private experience and “the project of positive science” (Bauman 1973a: 176), for positivism assumes “a mind molded by the alienated society and trained in the positivist commonsensical ‘self-obviousness’” (Bauman 1973a: 165). Culture should be instead defined as “a perpetual effort” to overcome “the persistent philosophical opposition between the […] body and mind” (Bauman 1973a: 56). To this end, culture should be based on human praxis, which turns “chaos into order, or substituting one order for another,” order being “synonymous with the intelligible and meaningful” (Bauman 1973a: 119). Bauman reaches this conclusion after a detailed and careful examination of the diverse meanings, which the term of culture has taken in the sociological and anthropological literature.
For this term, he remarks, as it has been used by “the currently popular theory of culture,” has an “ideological ambiguity” (Bauman 1968: 25). This ambiguity may be overcome—Bauman contends—primarily through a structural analysis of the symbolic culture system, such as “the Marxian interpretation of the cultural phenomena” (Bauman 1968: 29). Building on the examination of the various meanings of culture, Bauman concludes that culture is “a perpetual effort to overcome” the dichotomy between “spirit and matter, mind and body” (Bauman 1968: 57). Marxist analysis of cultural phenomena can overcome this dichotomy by means of its category of praxis, which if considered as a whole, comprises “both social structure and culture” (Bauman 1968: 29). They are inherently maladjusted in modern capitalist society, since culturally valued goods in this class society are actually available “only to the members of the privileged class” (Bauman 1968: 33). In today’s “liquid modern world” (Bauman 2011b), culture is part and parcel of the society of consumers, presided by the capitalist State. Its function is to make sure that the public be locked in intimate interaction with its cultural choices. It is precisely this encounter between contemporary art and its public that provides with meaning both contemporary art and contemporary life (Bauman 2011b: 114–17).
The notion of structural analysis, which has been here mentioned in connection with Marxism, has called Bauman’s attention as a subject worth investigating per se (cf. Bauman 1973b). Bauman has lingered on this notion with reference to “the non-linguistical subsystems of culture.” They are those subsystems that not only perform an informative function, to the effect that they signal and/or create “the relevant portion of the web of the human interdependencies called ‘social structure’”; but they also shape and order the world of all human beings, as they “must satisfy their irreducible individual needs.” These two aspects of culture are discernible in their way of life and in the objects they use (Bauman 1973b: 74). The distinction between social structure and culture corresponds to what are for Bauman the “two requirements of the specifically human condition,” namely, “ordering and orientation” (Bauman 1973b: 78). The structuralist promise would then be to overcome this dualism by uniting “in one conceptual framework” this “notorious duality of sociological analysis” (Bauman 1973b: 80).1
Gardeners and the Holocaust as Metaphors of Solid Modernity
Solid modernity—as distinguished from the current liquid modernity—was characterized by the utopia of a gardened society, namely, “of a custom-made and purposefully designed world” (Bauman 1991: 33). This was not only a Nazi utopia, Bauman argues, as “the prospect of scientifically managing the presently defective human stock was seriously debated in the most enlightened and distinguished circles” (Bauman 1991: 33). Bauman has famously contrasted the metaphor of the gardened society with those of the gamekeeper and the hunter. The utopia of the gardened society characterizes modernity; while the gamekeeper is a metaphor of premodern times. In contrast, the hunter is a metaphor of contemporary postmodern or liquid society. “The power presiding over modernity (the pastoral power of the state) is modeled on the role of the gardener. The pre-modern ruling class was, in a sense, a collective game-keeper” (Bauman 1987b: 52). As for the hunter metaphor, “hunting is a full-time occupation on the stage of liquid modernity”; one, according to Bauman, which never finds its fulfillment, and never realizes “the impossibility of its completion” (Bauman 2011b: 27).
Bauman has paid less attention to the metaphors of the gamekeeper and hunting societies, and he has dwelt at considerable length on that of the gardening society. Gardeners, in keeping with this metaphor, have “grand social-engineering ambitions” (Bauman 1991: 32). Bauman’s gamekeepers “have confidence in their trustees’ resourcefulness,” and just seek to “secure a share in the wealth of goods these timeless habits reproduce”; whereas his gardeners interfere with their trustees’ life following their own “gardening-breeding-surgical ambitions” (Bauman 1991: 32). The metaphor of gardeners as the symbol of modernity was not, as previously noted, proper for the Nazi’s ideas and policy only. However, Bauman has pointed to Nazism—both its ideology and practices—as the very embodiment of this metaphor. In his own words, “for the Nazi designers of the perfect society, the project they pursued and were determined to implement through social engineering split human life into worthy and unworthy; the first to be lovingly cultivated and given Lebensraum, the other to be distanced and—if the distancing proved unfeasible - exterminated” (Bauman 1989b: 67–68). As Bauman argues, the extermination of Jews at the hands of the Nazi—indeed, its very possibility—has not been a unique historical episode, but one of modernity’s defining features.
The massacres of whole populations, as they have occurred several times in Third World countries, should foster no complacency on modern civilization. In other words, they should