From revisionism to retrotopia: Stability and variability in Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of culture

Constitutive elements of Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of culture

In the conversation that Keith Tester conducted with Bauman at the beginning of the current century, the latter pointed out that theoretical reflections related to culture should correspond to its nature. This nature, in turn, as he argued, remained ‘a permanent revolution’ or a rebellion against any attempts at a permanent ordering of social reality. He noted:

If…we agree to use the concept of culture in the way here suggested, then theory which takes culture seriously, as the specifically human mode of being, cannot but be a ‘critical’ theory…Once you accept culture with its endemic restlessness and its inborn inclination to transcendence as the foundational characteristic of the human mode-of-being, the idea of ‘critical theory’ appears pleonastic, like ‘buttery butter’ or ‘metallic iron’. (Bauman and Tester, 2001: 33)

In 1966, Bauman published the book Culture and Society, in which – alongside the many other threads – he painted a picture of a socially and culturally heterogeneous community (he called it ‘Htht’). He claimed that in the absence of, or as a result of a substantial weakening of other elements holding this society together, market mechanisms were increasingly gaining in importance (Bauman, 1966: 420–50). They played, as he believed, the most significant role in the formation of individual motivations and, what is more, they were reflected in all the dimensions of collective life. Among the exemplifications of this phenomena he listed: the reification of interpersonal relationships, ² the commodification of the axiological sphere, ³ etc. It should be stressed that these analyses were to a large extent compatible with the examinations Bauman carried out several decades later, which were devoted to the role and the meaning of the ‘consumerist syndrome’ ⁴ (Brzeziński, 2018a: 77–94). Both in the 1960s and in the current century, and, in fact, during all the other stages of his academic work (see, e.g. Bauman, 1983: 32–43; 1987: 149–87), he focused exclusively on the negative consequences of the development of consumerism, and in their descriptions he relied on hyperbolization. While this type of sociological discourse may give rise to reasonable doubt (Blackshaw, 2008: 126–30; Kilminster, 2017: 201–23), what is worth noting is the intention underlying such discourse. It was his ambition to break through the commonsensical barrier of thinking and to plant critical thought on the existing conditions (Bauman, 2008: 231–40). Tony Blackshaw (2005: 79) aptly noted in this context:

[Bauman] uses the rage of storm to shout at his readers, as it were: ‘look at the plight of these people and recognize your own conspiracy in their fates!’ In this way, he alerts us to the sickness inherent in our own culture of excessive consumption, which we enjoy at the same time as we are busying ourselves erecting walls to keep out those who are fleeing poverty, war and persecution.

In the late 1980s and in the 1990s, Bauman carried out analyses based on the diachronic model in which he distinguished traditional, modern and postmodern societies (Bauman, 1987). Even though with the passage of time, he devoted increasingly more attention to the condition of culture in postmodern society, in his analyses he almost always referred to earlier centuries. ⁶ In the twenty-first century, the co-existence of the diachronic and synchronic dimensions in Bauman’s studies was, in turn, manifested through the juxtaposition of ‘solid’ and ‘liquid’ modernity (Bauman, 2000a; 2011b). Bauman argued that – despite the two conditions being united by a thirst for ‘creative destruction’ – in each of them this desire was realized differently. In the first case, it was linked to the striving for the formation of structures unaffected by time, while, at present, it takes the form of a never-ending chain of changes subject to constant acceleration. It is worth stressing, however, that some of the processes he described in the context of postmodernity and liquid modernity, were very much in keeping with his reflections dating back to the 1960s and the 1970s. At that time he wrote on the ongoing heterogenization, proliferation of ambivalence, appreciation of individualism, etc. (Bauman, 1966; 2018 [1968]). In Sketches in the Theory of Culture, he noted, for example:

… we live in an age, that seems, for the first time in human history, to acknowledge cultural multiplicity as an innate and fixed feature of the world – one which gives rise to new forms of identity that are at ease with plurality, like a fish in water – and even boasts of the fact that it not only discovered, but even accepted as a truly human state and mode of being both noble and dignified, this indeterminacy of the human condition as humanity’s calling. (Bauman, 2018 [1968]: 117) ⁷

The quote from the very beginning of Culture and Society will serve as a good introduction to the discussion of another constitutive feature of Bauman’s theory of culture:

Human life is happening between two powers. One of them is everything a human being wants – or, to be more precise, what he or she perceives, defines and classifies in his or her vision of life as ‘wanting’ –…The second power is everything a human being must – or, to be more precise, what he or she perceives, defines and classifies in his or her vision of life as ‘necessity’ –…The dissimilarity between the perceptions of the two types of signals are referred to by people as the difference between ‘subject’ and ‘object’. (Bauman, 1966: 7)

Even though, in subsequent years his understanding of the notion of culture differed from the one described above, Bauman invariably referred in his reflections on culture to the social structure (see Kilminster and Varcoe, 1996: 215–47). This is clearly visible in his works related to the strengthening of the existing, and the emergence of, new divisions in the contemporary world. In a manner so typical of him, or – to use Mark Davis’s words describing this method as will to dualism (Davis, 2008: 103–8) – he presented them as binary oppositions. He wrote, inter alia, about ‘tourists’ and ‘vagabonds’ (Bauman, 1997), groups subject to ‘globalisation’ and ‘localisation’ (Bauman, 1998), or the ‘seduced’ and ‘repressed’ consumers (Bauman, 2007). All of these oppositions may be described with the words found in ‘Legislators and Interpreters’: ‘Our society consists again of two nations. Only ours are nations of the seduced and the repressed; of those free to follow their needs and those forced to comply with the norms’ (p. 169). Both in his reflections from the 1960s on socially and culturally heterogeneous community and in the studies on liquid modernity, Bauman argued that the structuration in the contemporary world was chiefly determined by individuals’ ability to pursue specific, socially desirable activities. Richard Kilminster and Ian Varcoe, who scrutinized this aspect of his work, wrote that, in his view: ‘Culture is linked inextricably with power because some people are able to structure the world more than others, and they do so for others’ (1996: 217). At the same time, it should be noted that Bauman did not content himself with a mere description of this phenomenon, but he made attempts at showing the need to implement changes within the existing condition.

Last but not least, it should be made clear that Bauman’s conceptualization of culture as a mechanism affecting human motivations was almost always accompanied by his emphasis on the role of human volition. During his academic work at Warsaw University his theory of culture was, on the one hand, largely consistent with the positivist tradition (Bauman, 1966). On the other hand, however – mainly under the influence of revisionist Marxism (Bauman, 1967: 399–414; see Brzeziński, 2017: 61–80) and the processual reading of structuralism (Bauman, 1968: 19–33) – he started to stress the active role of man in the shaping of reality, arguing, at the same time, that it did have a changeable, dynamic form. Over the next few years – when Bauman was affiliated with the Universities of Tel Aviv and Leeds – he tried to merge these two visions of culture into one complex theory (Bauman, 1973a). In 1973, he wrote: ‘Being structured and being capable of structuring seem to be the twin-kernels of the human way of life, known as culture’ (p. 51). In the subsequent years Bauman continued these theoretical reflections on the nature of culture (Bauman 1976b, 1983). He wrote more and more on the changing balance between structure and agency in his diachronic studies of culture as well. He claimed, for example, that, in modernity, culture had the form of a ‘disciplinary mechanism’, while, in postmoderity, it took on the form of a ‘repertoire’ nature (Bauman, 1991; Swidler, 1986: 273–86). In the twenty-first century, Bauman addressed the issues of proliferation and reduction of ambiguity also in a different sense. On the one hand, he stressed the ‘liquefaction’ of social reality, manifested in individualization and the intensification of global relations (Bauman, 2000a; 2001b). On the other hand, during the last years of his life, he examined the petrification of cultural identities, which became visible, inter alia, in the development of nationalist movements (Bauman, 2016b; 2017).

Although, when theorizing structure and agency in the context of culture, Bauman became gradually inspired by various theories, his thought was always grounded in the two aforementioned frameworks, within which he carried out his analyses in the second part of the 1960s. As regards the influence that the revisionist version of Marxism exerted on Bauman’s oeuvre, he said at the beginning of the twenty-first century:

From Gramsci I learned about culture being a thorn in the side of ‘society’ rather than a handmaiden of its monotonous order-reproducing routine; an adamantly and indefatigably mutinous agent, culture as propulsion to oppose and disrupt, a sharp edge pressed obstinately against what-already-is. (Bauman, cited in Tester and Jacobsen, 2005: 147)

The main trends in the evolution of Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of culture

In the conversation between Zygmunt Bauman and Keith Tester, in which Bauman described culture as a ‘permanent revolution’, he stressed that such an approach clearly differed from classic conceptualizations. He noted:

… all too often ‘culture’ (particularly in its classical anthropological uses) stood for a soi-distant service station of structure, an instrument of continuity, reproduction of sameness and resistance to change…‘Culture’ in that context stood for inertia, not movement and change, and was practically synonymous with ‘habit’, ‘routine’, absence of reflection, bias, prejudice. (Bauman and Tester, 2001: 32)

Bauman’s critique in that area was formed on two planes: the metatheoretical one and the one deriving from the engaged nature of his work. First, he highlighted the reductionist nature of the classical concept of culture (Bauman, 1973a: 157–65). He argued that the emphasis put on the domination of structures over agency resulted in the misconception of culture as ‘second nature’, i.e. space in which human volition becomes appropriated (Bauman, 1976a: 1–42). Likewise, such an approach, in Bauman’s view, gives no sound foundation for the explication of the transformations occurring in the realm of norms and values. As he put it in the afterword to Sketches in the Theory of Culture (2018 [1968]: 252):

The functional cohesion of the system rendered cultural change (it was not possible to ignore that it was taking place, or to deny its banality) a puzzle, demanding to be solved with the help of specific – rare or even unique – circumstances: to put it one way, a remarkable accident.

While in the 1970s, Bauman sought to capture in his theory of culture the relation between structure and agency, in the two subsequent decades, he focused on how each of the two came to dominate the Western civilization at various stages of its development. His diachronic studies into this issue were of a binary nature and they were based on a comparative analysis of modern and post-modern conditions. In agreement with the perspective he adopted – inspired, for instance, by the works of Michel Foucault (1977), Max Weber (1968) as well as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (2002) – he regarded the desire for the subordination of the human world to the primacy of Reason as the constitutive feature of the modern formation (Bauman, 1987; 1991). ¹⁰ He stressed that the blueprints which were then conceived – based on the concept of culture as project (Bauman, 1987) – offered new structural, institutional and normative solutions which were to ensure a stable and harmonious existence of human communities. He wrote:

We can think of modernity as of a time when order – of the world, of the human habitat, of the human self, and of the connection between all three – is reflected upon; a matter of thought, of concern, of a practice that is aware of itself, conscious of being a conscious practice and wary of the void it would leave were it to halt or merely relent. (Bauman, 1991: 5)

The ever more dynamic and multidirectional transformations, taking place in the Western world in the second half of the twentieth century, coupled with the reflection on the often tragic consequences of modern aspirations, were – in Bauman’s view – the foundation for the formation of a then completely new condition. He labelled it from the 1980s onwards – in keeping with the then dominant trend in the humanities and social thought – postmodernity (Bauman, 1987; 1991; 1997). His theory of culture focusing on this formation was taking shape, to a large extent, in opposition to the above-mentioned studies of modernity. First, while previously efforts were made to reduce any ambiguity, nowadays ambiguity has come to be the constitutive feature of cultural reality. Second, disciplinary mechanisms, so typical of modernity, have been replaced by the growing appreciation of human volition. Third, modernity was characterized by teleological thinking with the finalist orientation, whereas in the current formation, the changes are of a rhizomatic nature (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983; 1987). Bauman’s own evaluation of these transformations was marked by ambivalence. On the one hand, he positively assessed the liberation of individuals from structural and normative determinism. Here, he accentuated the opportunities which this situation created for the development of the moral self (Bauman, 1993). On the other hand, he argued that the form of the then current individualism remained at the other end of the continuum with regard to the efforts aimed at the assumption of responsibility for the Other. He called this process ‘postmodern adiaphorisation’, demonstrating at the same time that its consequences may resemble those seen at the time of modernity (Bauman, 2000b: 95).

Many of the theoretical reflections on culture in which Bauman was engaged in the current century were a follow-up to his analyses grounded in postmodern thought. However, in the year 2000, Bauman dissociated himself from this orientation ¹¹ and offered a theory of liquid modernity instead (Bauman, 2000a). At its core was the conviction that the process of modernization constituted, continually for centuries, the signum specificum of the Western world. Its current form differed, however, from the one which took shape during the Enlightenment. It is because transformations are today of an autotelic nature and their driving forces are not the institutions of authority, but concrete individuals. Describing the impact of these transformations on culture, Bauman wrote:

Released from the obligations imposed on it by its creators and operators, obligations consequent upon their initially missionary and later homeostatic role in society, culture is now able to focus on fulfilling individual needs, solving individual problems and struggles with the challenges and troubles of personal lives. (Bauman 2011b: 12)

The evolution of Bauman’s theory of culture in the twenty-first century was also a consequence of his engagement in the debate on globalization (Bauman, 1998; 2011a). His reflections on this issue were confined by the conviction that the process of globalization was unfolding in a disjunctive manner (Appadurai, 1996). Bauman argued that there was no relevance between the intensification of the flow of capital, information and technology, on the one hand, and the abandonment of political institutions and structures within national states, on the other. He described this situation with the term ‘interregnum’, borrowed from Antonio Gramsci, to refer to the cultural disintegration and the sense of insecurity (Bauman, 2010: 200–5; 2016a: 391–402; see Bordoni, 2016). As regards cross-cultural issues in the time of the intensification of global interdependencies, he, in turn, focused on the juxtaposition of two approaches: the ideology of multiculturalism and communitarianism (Bauman, 2011b). He linked the former to the model of culture based on the due appreciation of pluralism. As for the latter, he wrote that it amounted to the ‘smothering of difference and effacing ambivalence of cultural choices in order to create an imagined totality capable of resolving the thorny issues of social identity’ (Bauman, 1999: xli). Neither solution, as Bauman held, was the right one; in fact, he claimed that it was necessary for one to find the right way between Scylla (the apology of diversity) and Charybdis (the manifestation of difference). He advocated politics based on dialogue, as part of which new institutional and normative solutions could be developed, as a response to the global challenges (Bauman, 2011a).

In his last publications, Bauman remained faithful to this approach, although, admittedly, he also noted the fact that its materialization encountered ever more serious obstacles (Bauman, 2017: 153–67). The obstacles, as he believed, resulted from the development of the policy of securitization as well as the strengthening of populist and nationalist movements (Bauman, 2016b; 2017). These processes were interpreted by Bauman as a return to the concept of culture which characterized solid modernity. It was in this context that he wrote about the increasing entanglement of the present in the mythologized picture of the past and he described this trend relying on the notion of ‘retrotopia’ (Bauman, 2017).

Conclusion

To conclude, I will refer to two texts in which Bauman retrospectively assessed his earlier studies of culture. The first of them is a lengthy introduction to the second edition of Culture as Praxis published in 1999. He said there:

When read thirty years after it was written, the book seems to pass well the test of ‘truth’. It fares somewhat less well in the test of ‘nothing but the truth’. And it fails rather abominably the test of ‘the whole truth’. (Bauman, 1999: vii)

Another significant text penned by Bauman, in which he assessed his earlier studies focusing on culture, was the afterword to Sketches in the Theory of Culture, written in the autumn of 2016 (Bauman, 2018 [1968]: 251–5). Bauman demonstrated there that the general framework within which he reflected on culture had already been established in the second half of the 1960s. He acknowledged he was influenced by the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss, whom he – both at that time and in the years to come – regarded as one of the authors who had pioneered a processual understanding of culture (Bauman, 1999: xxvi–xxviii). As I demonstrated in this article, equally relevant to Bauman’s conceptualization of culture was Antonio Gramsci’s thought (see Bauman, 2008: 231–40). Structuralism and Marxist revisionism belong to a very diverse range of analytical paradigms in whose context Bauman continued his reflection on culture for more than six decades. They subsume the theories including: ethnomethodology, phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory, utopian thought, hermeneutics, poststructuralism, postmodernism as well as studies of globalization. Bauman, on the one hand, drew inspiration from these orientations, but on the other, made a substantial contribution to their development.

Finally, his theory of culture always had both a descriptive and conative function (Jakobson, 1960: 350–77). Bauman paid attention to the present and future risks and threats and encouraged one to invent and implement new, alternative solutions. In other words, the idea of utopian thinking permeates his vision of culture as a ‘permanent revolution’. It is clearly visible also in his last book, Retrotopia, in which Bauman tried to make readers aware of the necessity of thinking in terms of responsibility for the condition of the contemporary world. It is worth quoting here his last, testamental statement from this book:

In this one case – in opposition to the cases to which Margaret Thatcher used to impute it – the verdict ‘there is no alternative’ will hold fast, with no likelihood of appeal. More than any other time, we – human inhabitants of the Earth – are in the either/or situation: we face joining either hands, or common graves. (Bauman, 2017: 167)