Page 123 - Cultural Theory

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••• Peter Beilharz •••

More generally, our misery will with good fortune be less that of material deprivation,
and more that of self-incurred tutelage. Human creatures are equally capable of self-
constitution and self-destruction, even if the manifestations of this process or condition
vary. Bauman chases this theme into the essays gathered in Postmodernity and its
Discontents, where the sense is that today we reverse or modify the deal which Freud
observed in 1930 (Bauman, 1997). Bauman’s fear is that, where we in the West perhaps
traded freedom against security in the years of the post-war welfare state, today’s citizens
happily trade security (often that of others) against the illusory hope of individual free-
dom. Ours is the age of the new individualism, which means that ours is a new cultural
moment, or else that of the return of an older personal liberalism in newly technolo-
gized and valorized forms.
Bauman’s twist on Freud, here on the themes of changing forms of humanly-
created discontents, is less imposing than his dialogue with the ghost of Freud in
Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (1993a). Now culture figures, as in
Freud, as a prosthetic against death. Death is the vital, absent presence in sociology;
it is the very reason for being of culture. We create in the face of death; it is the
prospect of death which motivates us to seek immortality, to build, to create and pro-
create, to preserve and extend the traditions which we inherit. Culture begins as sur-
vival, and becomes a process of constitution. As Bauman puts it:

Human culture is, on the one hand, a gigantic (and spectacularly successful)
ongoing effort to give meaning to human life; on the other hand, it is an obsti-
nate (and somewhat less successful) effort to suppress the awareness of the
irreparably surrogate, and brittle character of such meaning.
(ibid.: 8)

If our image of classical culture is shadowed by the figures of Sisyphus, Prometheus
and Oedipus, modern Western culture’s striking figures are the images of Faust and
Frankenstein. Humanism’s desperate attempt to make gods of men stumbles at the
very point of mortality; gods do not die. Nationalism becomes the ersatz solution,
offering group immortality where there is no immortality for individuals.
Some nationalisms may be less poisonous than others; radicals for long have liked
to think that the nationalism of the oppressed is more legitimate than the nation-
alisms of the victors. In Bauman’s way of thinking, this kind of distinction is difficult
to sustain, for the first turns too easily into the second. The revolutionary mentality
seeks to reverse the dialectic of master and slave rather than to transcend it. All forms
of nationalism, progressive or not, rest on the postulation of an other, an enemy to
be destroyed. History here is less immediately the history of class struggles, and more
directly the ongoing overthrow and renewal of masters and slaves. Certainly this is
the image of history we associate with Max Weber: domination will never end; poli-
tics, ethics and aesthetics increasingly become marginal to the instrumental rational-
ities of markets and states. Bauman shares Weber’s diagnosis, but not necessarily his
prognosis. Bauman retains an anthropological optimism within a historical pes-
simism regarding the human condition in modern times. Second nature never seeps

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