Page 121 - Cultural Theory

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••• Peter Beilharz •••

to rationalization. Bauman follows the classical tradition in discerning patterns or trends
of culture, mediated by power or domination. Like the process he seeks to interpret,
Bauman innovates by mediating between the cultural signs of the times and the sense
that there are larger social dynamics or logics behind them. To innovate is to work
within and out of tradition. Culture emerges out of traditions, however invented.
Bauman’s traditions are many, strong and varied, as are his innovations (Beilharz, 2000).

Marx’s Shadow

Critical theory takes its stand against traditional theory: both of these traditions had
first to be invented. Critical theory begins with Marx. Bauman is always in Marx’s
shadow. This is apparent not only in the heavier contours of capitalism, alienation
and verification, but also in more suggestive moments or clues, as in the case of the
idea of second nature. Marx’s lifelong project in the critique of political economy is
itself a critique of a culture of production. The great power of capital lies in its pro-
tean capacity of creative destruction, and in its ability to naturalize this form of pro-
duction and the forms of life that correspond with it. Marx’s curiosity about ideology
persists across his life’s work, even if it were an exaggeration to say that he develops
a robust theory of ideology or culture. Instead we encounter a series of hints from the
German Ideology through to the image of commodity fetishism in Capital. Culture
becomes more fully central for Marxism with the emergence of Western Marxism, in
response to the cultural specificity of the Russian Revolution, and the critical theory
of the Frankfurt School, which can be seen as a response to fascism. If the Bolsheviks
seek, among other things, to generate a modernist, or Taylorist industrial culture, the
Nazi hope of a Thousand Year Reich is also a pre-eminently cultural project. Social
engineering is also a cultural project. The signal figure in Western Marxism here
becomes Gramsci, whose critical purposes are stretched across these utopias and their
specifically Italian variants.
The greater thinker of culture, connecting Marx’s critique of political economy to
the work of the Frankfurt School, is the Hungarian Georg Lukács. Lukács’ History and
Class Consciousness (1971) goes further than any other period text in the direction of
problematizing the themes of reification, alienation and objectification. Lukács is
also the pivotal connection between Marx’s critique of culture and Weber’s: the idea
of the rationalization of the world from this point is equally enmeshed with the
problems of commodification and rational calculation. As Karl Löwith was to explain
the parallel in his remarkable 1932 study, Max Weber and Karl Marx, (1982) the two
greats of German sociology could best be aligned as philosophers of history with an
eye to the diagnosis of the situation of the times, characterized in the logic of alien-
ation for Marx and the logic of rationalization for Weber. What Lukács had accom-
plished in History and Class Consciousness was to fuse the two perspectives. Lukács’s
emphasis on the more Marxian theme, of commodification, nevertheless located this
process within the horizon of world rationalization. Lukács reinforced the centrality
of capitalism to modernity at the same time as he expanded the optic of modernity
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