Page 126 - Cultural Theory

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

generate output, results, by the routinization of labour, the body and its skills and
the internalization of this process as second nature.
This is why the most intriguing of interim categories in this field remains the idea
not of capital, on the most abstract level, or labour process, on the most concrete,
but of Fordism, which connects us back to Gramsci. Fordism is the culture of mod-
ernizing capitalism, par excellence, precisely because it combines a culture of produc-
tion with a culture of capacity to consume, both of which depend on the
naturalization of this way of being in the world. The limit of Fordism is its national
frame, in its presupposition that the local producers are also the consumers of the
goods that they produce, though Fordism of course also always had a global reach,
not least through South America. In the period of post-war boom, however, the point
is that class struggle becomes internalized by the distributive logic of capitalism itself.
Labour is integrated into the capitalist system, and becomes legitimate as a systemic
actor. This does not, however, make a proletariat of happy robots, as C. Wright Mills
sarcastically suggested. In Bauman’s view, we could neither be happy – for we are
bound by our discontents – nor robotic, as we could at most mimic the motions of
obedience, while our minds wander off elsewhere. Nevertheless, the point remains
that the modernist factory, like the institutions of schooling or incarceration, relied
on strategies like those anticipated in Bentham’s imaginary Panopticon, and while
post-Fordist production might rely more on flexibility and the cultivation of some
working autonomy, the possibilities of electronic surveillance, say, in telephone call
centres are expanding. While there may be an apparent shift of the dominant form
of culture from the Voice to the Eye, older patterns of domination persist, not least
across the global system. Bauman connects these images back again to the dialectics
of master and slave and to the centrality of movement; his most powerful critique of
the process we call globalization is less to do with the fear of cultural homogeniza-
tion than with the ethics of asymmetrical distribution of life-chances. As Bauman
puts it, glocalization involves globalization for some people, localization for some
others. The participants in this dyad, still, are held together not only by difference
but more directly by dependence and exploitation.

The Structuralist Promise

Structuralism was, and remains, an extraordinary phenomenon in recent intellectual
history. Its influence was compulsive for 20 years; and now its presence is an absence.
Louis Althusser, the most famous of Marxist structuralists, insisted that he was never
a structuralist. The three kings of structuralism were thought to be Foucault in
history of the sciences, Jacques Lacan in psychoanalysis and Claude Lévi-Strauss in
anthropology. Althusser’s credentials, in comparison to these thinkers, were always
Marxist. Bauman’s opening to structuralism, however, was cultural rather than
political. Where Althusser and his followers claimed that capitalism was maintained
by a determinate mode of production and its cultural, ideological and political
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