Page 122 - Cultural Theory

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••• Zygmunt Bauman, Culture and Sociology •••

to include capitalism, rather than the other way around. Culture hence rests on
reification, or the re-enchantment as well as disenchantment of the world. The magic
of commodities, for Marx, works like the magic of religion for Feuerbach, with the
difference that the god of the commodity is unrelenting; we have no alternative but
to work, consume and die.
Yet there are alternatives, and this is one persistent motif across Bauman’s work; if
we did this, we could still do other. And if we cannot find fulfilment in the public
life of capitalism or bureaucracy, we can seek out objectification, or non-alienated
relationships at home, or in the private sphere. This is the context in which Bauman
picks up the idea of second nature, in Towards a Critical Sociology (1976). Hegel sug-
gests the idea, which Marx plays with and implies is a core theme for sociology. To
say that we naturalize a commodified world is also to say that we make second nature
of it. Capitalism becomes imprinted within our culture and internalized within the
psyche, to the extent that we cannot imagine (or we believe we cannot imagine) that
there was ever any other way to live. For Bauman, then, both ‘nature’ and ‘culture’
are by-products of human practice. Culture is the level of reality between us and
nature. The problem in sociology, for Bauman, arrives at the point at which ‘culture’
or ‘society’ is turned into a god no less demanding than the magic of commodity
fetishism. Durkheim, in turn, for his part deifies society, confirming the status of
sociology as the science of this dubious object. Bauman’s scepticism at Durkheim’s
achievement goes right through to Society Under Siege (2002b), where society is
viewed as an hypostatization of a kind which culture can never be. Where the idea
of society fetishises, that of culture pluralizes. Into the twentieth century, for Bauman,
we witness a bifurcation between two streams of scientific and critical sociology. The
stream of critical sociology parallels that of critical theory and Western Marxism.

From Freud to Weber

If Lukács posited the necessary synthesis of Marx and Weber, it was critical theory that
turned to Freud. Freud is a significant presence in Bauman’s sociology, along with all
these others, but at the level of culture rather than subject. This is not only because of
the centrality of the psyche, or the unconscious, matters themselves which Bauman
does not dwell upon until later, when he turns to the face of the other and the problem
of ethics in Postmodern Ethics (1992). Bauman’s use of Freud takes on the broader, civi-
lizational horizons rather than the more closely psychoanalytical dimensions of his pro-
ject. Freud’s famous book, known to us as Civilization and its Discontents originally used
the word Kultur as its subject, and while there is a long controversy, itself cultural, over
the relationship between the idea of civilization and that of culture, the elision here is
significant. Civilization, in Freud’s English-language title, could be read as referring to a
surplus of culture. Progress rests on the suppression of instincts; human civilization
needs a second nature, a new condition which denies animal nature. We are bound to
our misery, as moderns. The background images of the Greeks never leave us. In Marx,
it may be the figure of Prometheus, in Weber, Sisyphus, in Freud, Oedipus who stalks us.

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