Page 127 - Cultural Theory

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••• Peter Beilharz •••

superstructure, Lévi-Strauss sought otherwise to ponder the possibility that all
humans were combined by a universal mental structure which meant that they all
told similar stories in different ways. Culture-making was universal, but the creation
of cultures was relative.
The idea of structure was a familiar one, back through Freud to Marx. If for the fol-
lowers of Freud the unconscious was structured like a language, langue behind parole,
for the followers of Marx, the capitalist structure of wage – labour relations held up
the phenomenal world of commodities which presented itself to us in everyday life
as prior. Bauman’s attraction, here, was more to the idea of structuring as an activity.
Structuralism, for Bauman, was an interesting if unconvincing project. For meaning
was contextual, rather than semantic; think only of a word like ‘fuck’, whose mean-
ing might vary from ecstatic to insulting, depending entirely on context. Humans
have great potential, for Bauman, even when they create sameness, conformism,
boredom or cruelty. But meaning is ambivalent; ambivalence becomes a motif of our
times, and is characteristic of our meaning-giving capacities. The issue, for Bauman
even in 1973, is that the empirical reality of each culture can be said to be full of
‘floating’ signs (Bauman, (1973b) 1999: 75). The idea of communication presumes
stability or order, which is one thing we do not find here. The purpose of culture,
therefore, is less communication than ‘ordering’; only ordering is highly variable and
fraught. Just as the pursuit of recognition generates misrecognition, so does the
ordering activity fail, generate disorder, even chaos.
There is no such thing as order, only orders, resulting from different kinds of will-
to-order. Order is a graded notion; the level of orderliness is measured by the degree
of predictability. Ordering reduces chaos, but does not dispel it (ibid.: 79). Here it is
system, not language (as the structuralist followers of Saussure would insist) which
is conceptually prior, with the proviso that ‘system’ represents the will-to-system.
Language, in any case, cannot be the master metaphor for social sciences. Social
structure, contingent in turn, needs then to be understood as activity, as the result
of human praxis. Bauman retains the animating interest of the young Marx in the
idea that humans are sensual, suffering creatures whose understanding is best to be
located in the pattern of their activities, whether good, evil or just pedestrian.
Bauman’s interest here is persistently anthropological, and it is this which in turn
connects him to Lévi-Strauss. For he maintains the Marxian focus on anthropology
in its dual sense – in the cultural anthropology of how humans manifest their spirit
through creation and destruction (and in modernity, in creative destruction), as well
as in the philosophical anthropology which seeks to puzzle over human capacity,
character, autonomy and dependence.
This old word, praxis, is now as rarely encountered as its Marxian mate, dialectic.
If the second was misused as a kind of interpretative magic, the first, praxis, had its
own halo in the 1960s, and it was this which the scientific socialism of Althusser
sought to dispel. For Althusserians it was structure, or the level of truth behind prac-
tical experience, which offered real insight. Bauman’s historic connection to human-
ist Marxism suggested otherwise; at least, it insisted that one important purpose of a
critical sociology is to observe and interpret the manifest contents of common
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