Page 132 - Cultural Theory

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

If it is intellectually fruitful here to cast an eye back over Bauman’s earlier English-
language work, it is also culturally advantageous, in order to contemplate his own
means of creation and repetition or revisiting. For Bauman flags the significance of
these ideas as far back as his Leeds Inaugural Lecture of 1972. There Bauman indi-
cated project, rather than prospectus:

Lévi-Strauss himself acknowledged his intellectual debt to Marx: ‘The famous
statement by Marx, “men make their own history, but they do not know how
they are making it” justifies, first, history and, second, anthropology.’
Structuralism is designed to provide precisely the ‘how’ answer. There are lim-
its to both human freedom of manoeuvre and society’s freedom to choose the
patterns it imposes on its members.
Being determined and being creative are not two diametrically opposed modes
of existence; they are, in fact, two in one, the double face of the same human con-
dition. Science and art finally meet again after many decades of schism. If they
did not meet so far, it was because no relevant meeting ground had been found.
Now it can be provided by the study of the universal structure of human culture,
in which two capacities of humans – objective and subjective – fuse into one.

(Bauman, 1972: 197–8)

This is not the language that Bauman would employ today, but the ideas are roughly
continuous. Neither sign nor language, but repertoire rules.
Zygmunt Bauman’s work begins with culture, travels through socialism and ends
with the critique of modernity as order, which generates excess. We suffer our excess
of material life or things – we in the West inhabit a world infinitely more reified than
Lukács’s Budapest – but we also suffer moral excess, the inability to know limits, to
know when to desist. The excess results in waste, in human waste, wasted lives, in a
culture of extremes. Ordering can be as benign and contingent or conditional as it
can be triumphalist, progressive or destructive. In Legislators and Interpreters, Bauman
juxtaposes what he calls the gardening strategy of modernism with the gamekeeping
ethic which precedes it. Bauman had his turn at gardening, or at least at attempting
to help rebuild, reorder a local, Polish world in ruins after the Second World War.
Today Bauman is a gamekeeper; this is his personal ethic, a way of thinking where
nature and culture are not too far separated, where creative destruction might also be
distanced, as in an anthropology of modernity.

References

Bauman, Z. (1972) ‘Culture, values and science of society’, University of Leeds Review, 15(2):
185–203.
Bauman, Z. (1973a) ‘The structuralist promise’, British Journal of Sociology, 24: 67–83.
Bauman, Z. ([1973b] 1999) Culture as Praxis, 2nd edn. London: Sage.
Bauman, Z. (1976) Toward a Critical Sociology. London: Routledge.

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