Last Bauman/lost Bauman: Fifty years on - Sketches in the Theory of Culture (1968) – The suppressed and now final book of Zygmunt Bauman (2018)

Zygmunt Bauman died 9 January 2017. His legacy to us included 58 books, first in Polish, then since 1972 in English. His last book, at the point of his death, was Retrotopia (2016). Now there is a final last book; and who knows, there may yet still be more (Beilharz, 2020; Wagner, 2020).

Sketches in the Theory of Culture, my subject for this paper, was lost, suppressed, and finally rediscovered, published now at last. Delivered for March 1968, it was suppressed by its publishers, the contract dissolved for political reasons on 13 April 1968. As Bauman was given to observe, 1968 was not only the carnival that its Western radical enthusiasts took it for. What might have looked like a new beginning in Paris looked more like an ending in Warsaw. He was soon to be forced into exile. The witch-hunt against the Jewish Marxist professors had begun.

Dariusz Brzezinski, the messenger with this bottle, came indirectly upon the remaining galley proofs which a sympathizer had concealed in the bottom of a filing cabinet in the Library of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Warsaw. Bauman had been Director of the Department of General Sociology in the Division of Philosophy at Warsaw University; he ran the Office of Polish People’s Anthropology for 12 months. The period of his influence ended badly. But this text had remained intact, hidden for nearly five decades. Bauman’s own remaining copy of the manuscript had been confiscated on exit, by police dressed as customs officers at the border. It would have been his fifteenth book, following the charming echo of his Culture and Society, published eight years after its namesake by Raymond Williams in 1966. Imagine Bauman’s own surprise when Brzezinski found, translated and set out to publish this text, arriving 50 years later.

What is this book, Sketches in the Theory of Culture? Brzezinski and his publishers claim that it anticipates some of the key themes which were to come much later, by 2000 with the publication of Liquid Modernity and the subsequent wave of writing on liquid modernity. There is something in these claims, though they may also be overstated. This is an issue to which we shall return. To begin with, what is its manifest content? I offer you, in turn, a sketch.

Across the path of his career Bauman developed a reputation as an essayist, in the sense of Montaigne. This was a deliberate epistemological choice, knowledge as the attempt, rather than as the pursuit of certainty. It was also the example of one of his heroes, Simmel, described much later by David Frisby as the sociological impressionist. Bauman describes Sketches in the Theory of Culture as a volume of collected essays. This is indicative of his purpose: they are, indeed, sketches. The essays are divided into two parts. The first part is entitled ‘Culture and Sign’. Its four essays cover origins of the semiotic theory of culture; towards a semiotic theory of culture; universals and semiotics; and research problems in the semiotic theory of culture. Part two’s essays cover ‘Culture and Social Structure’. Its five essays address cultural and extracultural organization of society; economy, culture and typologies of societies; cultural determinants of research; observations on contemporary education; and masses, classes, elite. There are two supplementary papers added, Brzezinski’s introduction and Bauman’s afterword, 50 years on.

As in Bauman’s later works, these ruminations include a wide cast of interlocutors, as we will see, Lévi-Strauss foremost among them. Gramsci is also a clear presence. Bauman had already written on Gramsci in 1963; The Prison Notebooks had been translated into Polish in 1950. Culturalism rules, here, in the sense that nothing can be conceived outside, or before, culture. Economy matters, but especially as a culture; Bauman is already thinking outside of the orthodoxy of Diamat. Base and superstructure suggest a distinction that is arbitrary, and which dissolves upon inspection.

1965–70 is Bauman’s structuralist, or Lévi-Strauss period. Lévi Strauss figures here as the exemplar of ‘structural sociology’ or semiotics. Culture is understood as motion, or process. Following Lévi-Strauss, following Saussure, culture is seen to develop by integration and separation, connection and disconnection, pairing and juxtaposition. Culture works through manoeuvres. Is a market, for example, an economy, or a culture? Both. This is an anticipation of Bauman’s later critique of classificatory reason in Modernity and Ambivalence (1991), where the point precisely is that A is B; for the fetishism of analytical categories in sociology depends on the hypostatization of meaning or naming. Analytical reason is a kind of police work. Bauman here quotes Lévi-Strauss: ‘All classification is a victory over chaos’ (p. 148); yet socially, chaos persists, like wild nature.

After Lévi-Strauss, culture is defined in contact, not immanently. This means that Europe needs to be problematised, as savage and other. Many of the keywords of later thinking are active here: civilization and difference, fields and margins, hybridity and ambivalence, fluidity and stability. Triste Tropiques is one favoured text. The echoes of Rousseau in Bauman have long been remarked upon, as we can now also see raw and cooked, cold and hot, as solid and liquid. Bauman is interested in the image that myths think us, but apprehensive about the claim that the code represents the structure of the human mind. He refers to the four volumes of Mythologiques, but also to Leach, Douglas, Sahlins; Hjelmslev, Greimas, Jakobson; to animals, ethnology, experiments, psychology, Piaget and Chomsky, tools and evolution, human and non-human. Bauman displays an incredible breadth of reading in anthropology, including the Australians Reay and Hogbin (and Nadel). He refers extensively to Soviet semiotics, to the North American literature; even to Lefebvre’s Language and Society (1966).

Bauman puzzles over structuralization and individualization, or the formation of subjects. He observes that democratic codes are open, and notes the immense proliferation of codes. The discussion is perhaps reminiscent of Barthes, or Lefebvre, neither of whom are directly summoned here as reporters of the quotidian; especially in the second part, everyday life stories become more prominent. These revolve around the radical effect of urbanization, which Bauman wants to emphasize rather as a challenge of industrialization and modernization. As he puts it in this book, the radicalization of values ‘follow the path blazed through society by the tread of the industrial tractor’ (p. 207). His claim is that all social relations in socialist Poland are modernized, not just those in the country. Nor, therefore, can these new problems be seen only as problems of socialism or of the transition to socialism. More generally they need to be considered as problems of industrialization, under which he includes commodification and the extension of wage labour; marketization of social relations, and homogenization of consumerism. These are problems of modernity. This is the world portrayed in literary form in the journalism of Ryszard Kapuscinski, where toothpaste and Brylcreem invade the world not of the tractor but of the horse and cart.

These reflections refer to Bauman’s studies of youth in and after school, and the absence of sufficient transition between them, leaving young folk stranded and alienated, longing for escape and escapism, but lacking the solidarity forced upon their forebears by world history since Hitler. Bauman’s generation was compelled to grow up quickly, taking up arms, falling into line, just surviving, looking after their others. Then, from 1939, ideology ruled. Now, in 1968, technology rules. Today’s youth inhabit another world. Already, evidently, this is a vastly different world and culture to that of the war or the early days of reconstruction. It is this sense of social turbulence which suggests the anticipation here of the motifs of liquid modernity, but the social patterns and problems alluded to cannot be the same as those of the West in 2000, the high consumerist proper subject of Liquid Modernity. At this point, in 1968, Bauman invokes the failure of pedagogy as the issue, not any social crisis of youth, though the lateral influence of the mass media is also involved; we are of course well before social media. At this point, his sociology is practically oriented, towards social policy, and not only given to critique. Bauman was not a legislator, but his Party was actively legislating. He describes the role of cultural brokers, though he is not quite one himself, and in any case the party promptly put an end to any such possibilities.

What are we to make of all this? Does it really add up to a lost masterwork? As we might reasonably expect, there are signs of both continuity and change. With reference to approach, Bauman is heavily inductive of other work across several fields and disciplines. Anthropology is foremost among them. As I have argued elsewhere, there is Another Bauman, for whom it is the Anthropological Imagination which is vital (in Davis and Tester, Challenging Bauman, 2010). In this context, Bauman’s project might even be seen as what Joel Kahn called for as an anthropology of modernity. As I anticipated in my own book on Bauman almost 20 years ago, thinkers like Lévi-Strauss are central to his way of thinking, and structuralism/humanism is an A/B in the terms indicated above. Structuralism is a promise; structuring is an activity; praxis is to be valued but is always historical and situational. Culture is praxis, as Bauman argued in detail in his book of the same title in 1973, just into his English exile.

While his thinking on praxis was heavily influenced by the open Marxism of Gramsci, however, his structuralism as we have seen came from anthropology rather than Marxism. Althusser, in this context, must have seemed closer to Parsons, for Bauman, where it was stability rather than change that was presented as the norm. This takes us back, with Bauman, in turn, to Vico, but also, again, to Montaigne. We may claim best to know by approximation; this may well result in knowledge claims that look, as Bauman’s title has it, like sketches, or outlines, indicating the endless beginnings of our needs to know. Turbulence is the norm, during the Second World War, and after, and now with us and our children again. Nothing remains the same. It may be no accident that Umberto Eco opens his own, last book, Chronicles of a Liquid Society, with an essay for Bauman. We are still reading the signs in the streets, looking still to decipher the sketches that have been left for us, the graffiti of creativity and the detritus of our everyday lives. Sketches in the Theory of Culture may not quite anticipate liquid modernity, but it is a work in progress, and in process. With Bauman, with Montaigne, could we expect any more? With Bauman, after Bauman, alongside Bauman, the effort to understand remains a series of attempts or successive approximations. After 1968, we know better what limits there might be to our dreams. Our dreams nevertheless persist; they outlive us.