Page 129 - Cultural Theory

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••• Peter Beilharz •••

prejudice of the Enlightenment that the world is an essentially human creation;
modernity is by definition future-oriented, henceforth it is no longer good enough
to be creatures of habit (ibid.: xi). Henceforth, culture, or consciousness, must be con-
sciously formed. The central distinction in thinking about culture here, in Bauman’s
30-year revisitation, is twofold. We use culture to refer to creativity or innovation,
but also to normative regulation, or social reproduction. Rather than the sense that
culture is threefold, hierarchical/differential/generic as in the earlier typology of
Culture as Praxis, this dual distinction evokes rather the logic of Towards a Critical
Sociology, where the significant distinction is that between system-maintenance (and
conformism) and critique (or creativity). Parsons’ view of structure is as system, not
tradition, habitus or muddling through. Systems are based on boundaries; their pur-
pose is to assimilate difference, even if they ultimately cannot do so.
At this point in his revisitation Bauman turns directly to Lévi-Strauss, for his own
sense in retrospect is that it is the work of Lévi-Strauss which made Culture as Praxis
possible, or called it into being. Thus, Bauman, in 1999:

The first insight into the futility of the ‘systemic’ conception of culture was the
formidable work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose work inspired most of this
book’s arguments. Rather than as an inventory of a finite number of values over-
seeing the whole field of interaction or a stable code of closely related and com-
plementary behavioural precepts, Lévi-Strauss portrayed culture as a structure
of choices – a matrix of possible, finite in number yet practically unaccountable
permutations.
(ibid.: xxvii)

Lévi-Strauss’s sense of culture crosses all three of the broader fields indicated by
Bauman, if especially the second, differential and third, generic, for the diversity of
permutations goes together with a comparability of purpose; and the sense of choice,
or a repertoire of choices remains central. It is because Lévi-Strauss sees structuring as
an activity that he can push the image of structure from a cage to a catapult; from a
trimming/truncating/cramping/fettering device to a determinant of freedom; from a
weapon of uniformity into the tool of variety; from a protective shield of stability
into the engine of never-ending and forever incomplete change (ibid.: xxvii).
Notwithstanding Lévi-Strauss’s elevation of the value of synchrony over diachrony
or history, his effect on Bauman was liberatory. Thus Bauman chooses, from his own
later intellectual repertoire, to align Lévi-Strauss and Castoriadis. The parallel is
already suggested in the cage to catapult story, for catapults also destroy, and as
Castoriadis insisted, there is nothing irredeemably good or positive about creativity;
the Holocaust and the Gulag were also the results of creativity. Culture is creation, as
well as reproduction; but this claim of itself tells us nothing of the content or value
of culture. Cultures are open to criticism, but in the plural. Cultures travel, or are
constituted in the movement or traffic which is so central to the present.
So distinct a figure is Lévi-Strauss in Bauman’s repertoire that he is the only thinker
about whom Bauman writes a vignette, in the form of an entry in a social theory
text. In his entry on ‘Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Bauman presents Lévi-Strauss’s work as an
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