Zygmunt Bauman: Adiaphorization in the Holocaust and in the Society of Consumers

Abstrakt

The article aims at drawing parallels between the Holocaust and the consumer society through the phenomenon of adiaphorization. To Bauman, the historical event of the Holocaust is of utmost importance to humanity, especially for tackling the problems of morality, moral indifference – in other words adiaphorization – and society. However, Bauman’s social theory contains distinct elements of Emanuel Levinas’s conception of morality and embraces a notion of adiaphorization as a feature of social organization as such – independently of shifting cultural contents. When analysing the society of consumers that is found in the times of globalization and individualization –i. e., liquid modernity – Bauman finds that its cultural tendencies to efface the face dehumanize and treat other people as means towards ends – in other words, placing the Other outside of one’s moral horizon – are similar to those that were used when extinguishing people’s lives in Nazi concentration camps. Both the Holocaust as an epitome of adiaphorization in solid modernity and consumerism as an epitome of adiaphorization in liquid modernity are treated in Bauman’s works as the most conspicuous cultural cases of adiaphorization. However, a shift in method when theorizing on the consumer society after the liquid turn allows additional aspects in his theory of the Holocaust before the liquid turn to be noticed. Due to that, it is argued in the article that “adiaphorization” might be explained as not only “moral indifference”, but also “epistemic indifference”, and that within conception of the Holocaust Bauman engages in efforts to affect his readers by awakening their morality, as “humanization through metaphors” helps him step over the boundary between theory and practice when he engages in “liquid sociology”.