Modern order-making denies anything the right to exist without utility.
Evidence
What may lift that possibility to the level of reality is, however, the characteristically modern zeal for order-making; the kind of posture which casts the extant human reality as a perpetually unfinished project, in need of critical scrutiny, constant revision and improvement. When confronted with that stance, nothing has a right to exist just because of the fact that it happens to be around. To be granted the right of survival, every element of reality must justify itself in terms of its utility for the kind of order envisaged in the project. This is, as I suggested elsewhere, an ambition which can best be grasped with the help of a ‘gardening’ metaphor (uprooting the weeds to enable useful plants to grow and preserve the elegance of overall design). Medicine (cutting out the diseased parts to secure the health of the organism) and architecture (eliminating from the design every out-of-place and redundant element) offer equally useful metaphors. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 649
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines the modern ‘gardening’ posture that sees reality as an unfinished project where everything must justify its utility.
- XREF: The gardening metaphor connects to biopolitics/necropolitics concepts in the reader’s module vocabulary.