Bauman - Modernity and Ambivalence

Ambivalence, the possibility of assigning an object or an event to more than one category, is a language-specific disorder: a failure of the naming (segregating) function that language is meant to perform. The main symptom of disorder is the acute discomfort we feel when we are unable to read the situation properly and to choose between alternative actions.

It is because of the anxiety that accompanies it and the indecision which follows that we experience ambivalence as a disorder and either blame language for lack of precision or ourselves for linguistic misuse. And yet ambivalence is not the product of the pathology of language or speech. It is, rather, a normal aspect of linguistic practice. It arises from one of the main functions of language: that of naming and classifying. Its volume grows depending on the effectivity with which that function is performed. Ambivalence is therefore the alter ego of language, and its permanent companion indeed, its normal condition.

To classify means to set apart, to segregate. It means first to postulate that the world consists of discrete and distinctive entities; then to postulate that each entity has a group of similar or adjacent entities with which it belongs, and with which together it is opposed to some other entities; and then to make the postulated real by linking differential patterns of action to different classes of entities (the evocation of a specific behavioural pattern becoming the operative definition of the class). To classify, in other words, is to give the world a structure: to manipulate its probabilities; to make some events more likely than some others; to behave as if events were not random, or to limit or eliminate randomness of events.

Through its naming/classifying function, language posits itself between a solidly founded, orderly world fit for human habitation, and a contingent world of randomness, in which human survival weapons memory, the capacity for learning would be useless, if not downright suicidal. Language strives to sustain the order and to deny or suppress randomness and contingency. An orderly world is a world in which one knows how to go on (or, what amounts to the same, one knows how to find out and find out for sure how to go on), in which one knows how to calculate the probability of an event and how to increase or decrease that probability; a world in which links between certain situations and the effectivity of certain actions remain by and large constant, so that one can rely on past successes as guides for future ones. Because of our learning/memorizing ability we have vested interests in maintaining the orderliness of the world. For the same reason, we experience ambivalence as discomfort and a threat. Ambivalence confounds calculation of events and confuses the relevance of memorized action patterns.

The situation turns ambivalent if the linguistic tools of structuration prove inadequate; either the situation belongs to none of the linguistically distinguished classes, or it falls into several classes at the same time. None of the learned patterns could be proper in an ambivalent situation or more than one of the learned patterns could be applied; whatever is the case, the outcome is the feeling of indecision, undecidability, and hence loss of control. The consequences of action become unpredictable, while randomness, allegedly done away with by the structuring effort, seems to make an unsolicited come-back.

Ostensibly, the naming/classifying function of language has the prevention of ambivalence as its purpose. Performance is measured by the neatness of the divisions between classes, the precision of their definitional boundaries, and the unambiguity with which objects may be allocated to classes. And yet the application of such criteria, and the very activity whose progress they are to monitor, are the ultimate sources of ambivalence and the reasons why ambivalence is unlikely ever to become truly extinct, whatever the amount and the ardour of the structuring/ordering effort.

The ideal that the naming/classifying function strives to achieve is a sort of commodious filing cabinet that contains all the files that contain all the items that the world contains but confines each file and each item within a separate place of its own (with remaining doubts solved by a cross-reference index). It is the non-viability of such a filing cabinet that makes ambivalence unavoidable. And it is the perseverance with which construction of such a cabinet is pursued that brings forth ever new supplies of ambivalence.

Classifying consists in the acts of inclusion and exclusion. Each act of naming splits the world into two: entities that answer to the name; all the rest that do not. Certain entities may be included into a class made a class only in as far as other entities are excluded, left outside. Invariably, such operation of inclusion/exclusion is an act of violence perpetrated upon the world, and requires the support of a certain amount of coercion. It can hold as long as the volume of applied coercion remains adequate to the task of outbalancing the extent of created discrepancy. Insufficiency of coercion shows itself in the manifest reluctance of entities postulated by the act of classification to fit into assigned classes, and in the appearance of entities under- or over-defined, with insufficient or excessive meaning sending no readable signals for action, or sending signals that confuse the recipients for being mutually contradictory.