Page 125 - Cultural Theory

Edwards-3516-Ch-06.qxd 5/9/2007 5:56 PM Page 114

••• Peter Beilharz •••

nationalist. It crosses borders, as does world history. Its broad orientation is
European, this more than British or American. And it is open to the French, not least
in sociology and anthropology. Here there are two striking presences – those of
Michel Foucault and Claude Lévi-Strauss, the latter even more powerful than the for-
mer. Foucault’s significance in recent intellectual history remains open to debate.
Foucault’s project is both brilliant and fascinating, yet its reception is often acontex-
tual, minimizing the significance of other key French thinkers from the Annales
School to Canguilhem who were crucial to his cultural formation and to that of mod-
ern French critique. Its reception also avoids Foucault’s debt to the Frankfurt School
and to Weber, the logic of whose work his own project follows and extends. In its
Anglo reception, especially, and given the extraordinary influence of Althusserian
Structuralist Marxism into the 1980s, Foucault often became viewed as the new
Marx. Whether this enthusiastic reception reflects the precise nature of Foucault’s
contribution remains to be established. What is clear is the extent to which, having
spurned Weber and Lukács, those parts of the Left intelligentsia who became Foucault’s
champions often responded to the kindred themes of power and rationality in his
work. Foucault was available to those moving out of Althusser in ways that Weber,
Gramsci and Lukács were not. Bauman was not part of this Anglo trend; the ethics
of his Marxism were humanist, rather than structuralist or scientific in their claims.
The Renaissance Marxism of Czech, Hungarian and Polish intellectuals in the 1960s
connected to the early Marx, to the Paris Manuscripts rather than to the claims of
Capital. Bauman’s use of Foucault, then, is more selective, even if powerful. The key
text here is Memories of Class, its title as evocative of Freud, again, as of Marx.
Memories of Class marks the beginning of Bauman’s adieu to Marx, at least in the
formal sense, for otherwise the broader motif for radical intellectuals would be once
a Marxist, always a postMarxist (Bauman, 1982). The use of the idea of memory to
distance the concept of class cuts both ways. The centrality of class, not least for cul-
ture, is something Bauman wants to distance himself from. In the British tradition,
especially, class has always been caught up with status; thus the centrality of
T.H. Marshall’s conjunction of citizenship and class. Memories of Class indicates both
their pertinence or presence, and the sense that these are memories that weigh on us,
like the past. Bauman remains much taken by this sense, which we associate with
Marx’s historical writing, that we are haunted by the ghosts of the past. Indeed, these
ghosts also hold up our culture, whether they call us back to the foundational class
struggles of the nineteenth century or the life of the Holocaust as a ghost. The more
general issue is the anthropological sense that we are creatures who work out of
memory, out of culture, out of the invention of tradition. This means that we engage
in different patterns of recognition and misrecognition. The particular connection
with Foucault here is in Bauman’s use of Discipline and Punish as a way to think not
about institutions of incarceration but the factory, which is indeed from one perspec-
tive an institution of confinement and discipline itself. The result, in Bauman’s
hands, is, so to speak, a Foucauldian curiosity with a Marxian inflection, for this
approach takes us back to Marx’s Capital as a sociology of the factory and its disci-
pline of the proletarian subject, body and soul. The object of capitalist culture is to
• 114 •