Review: Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Culture and Art: Selected Writings, Vol. 1’
Review of Zygmunt Bauman’s Culture and Art: Selected Writings, Volume 1. Edited by Dariusz Brzeziński, Mark Davis, Jack Palmer and Tom Campbell. Translated by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska (Polity, 2021), 248 pages.
Abstract
In my review of Zygmunt Bauman’s selected writings about Culture and Art, I stress the value of editing process. The editors have run a complex work of compilation and translation of ancient or unpublished relevant works of the Polish sociologist, otherwise difficult to reach for Western researchers. With this, they provide a remarkable tool for understanding the nuances of an extensive and nuanced corpus of writings. Focusing on the most ancient texts, I try to rebuild the theoretical frame from which Bauman advocates for sociology as part of the Humanities, intrinsically related to hermeneutics, literature and art.
Reviewed by Elena Álvarez-Álvarez
Bauman’s career in sociology has been broad in time and deep in insight. His thought is complex and nuanced, with a particular ability to connect sociology with other human sciences, specially to philosophy and literature. Bauman also developed through his long life an intense habit of writing which runs through all its stages. As a result, he left a broad corpus of writings in different genres and styles: academic studies, essays, interviews, correspondence, notes, and unpublished articles (even a yet-unpublished autobiography). He gave in legacy the major part of this material to the Bauman Institute at the University of Leeds, whose members are working to organise this documentation and make it available to researchers (see Palmer et al. 2020).
To interpret properly each thinker, it is necessary to know the whole of his or her public work. In Bauman’s case, this means to know his three decades of academic work before he would get well known for the “modern liquidity” metaphor (see Tester 2018). All the corpus of his former publications provide his interpreters with the conceptual frame with which trying to understand the meaning and the sense of that last stage which was very productive, yet less creative, too (see Beilharz 2020). The production of those last years puts into practice the sociology, which Bauman defined as an engaged conversation with common people, about daily issues of social life. But the theoretical support for this kind of analysis was defined much before, in Bauman’s former works.
Giving sense to Bauman’s writings - as Bauman himself understood the art of interpretation - is a complex task. I would argue two reasons. The first one is intrinsic to Bauman’s thought, which is eclectic in its sources, independent in its views, and interested towards a wide range of themes (see Kilminster and Varcoe, 1996, 1-2). It is also quite nuanced and sophisticated in the treatment of concepts and the way of contrasting them. The second reason is extrinsic but adds complexity to the task: Bauman wrote and published his early writings in Polish. The control of the Soviet censorship constrained some of them, but some others contain ideas and concerns which, with time and freedom, will prove fruitful for interpretation (see Tester & Jacobsen, 2005). This corpus is difficult for Western researchers to attain, and more to assess the relevance of each text.
With the former reflections, I would like to stress as the first value of the volume I’m presenting the selection and translation of fifteen writings of Bauman, from different stages of his career, reunited under the broad argument of culture and art. In its whole, the selection provides access to some of those works otherwise difficult to attain. The editors compile the writings around one of the primary concerns of Bauman throughout his entire career, culture and art. Bauman himself insisted repeatedly we must account Sociology among the Human Sciences, with a particular relationship with Arts, based on the common attention to human spirituality expressed in daily experience, the constant need for reinterpretation, and the disclosure of new ways for human development (see Bauman 1992a, 216; Pollock 2007).
The editors present two original Polish articles, translated for this edition: “Culture and Society: Semantic and Genetic Connections” (1966) and “Notes Beyond Time” (1967). Both of them are remarkable to understand the roots of Bauman’s thought about culture and its relationship to society. They bear witness, too, to a stage in the long road which Bauman made to find an adequate method for the analysis of society. He was particularly interested in ethnomethodology although, after a few years, he was to get distance from this current of thought.
The first text is quite sophisticated in the exploration of the approaches to the relationship between culture and society. It presents two basic models, attributive and distributive, which focus on the general or the particular aspects of the relationship. Each model includes three approaches inside - genetic, structuralist and functionalist. More than the exploration of combinations, there are two aspects relevant in this text: first, Bauman’s vehement opposition to functionalism - almost dominant at the time - arguing it entails an instrumentalization of culture to other system or reality. As an alternative, Bauman proposes a definition of culture as an interchange of symbolic information, distinct from society, which is an interchange of goods and energies. He advocates for the independence of culture from society, according to its transcendence over immediate needs. This is an argument which is going to have further developments in other major works by Bauman, such as Culture as Praxis (1972) or Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (1992b).
These reflections lead to a concept of culture as transgression, because it seeks for permanence, which has acknowledged affinities with Adorno, Arendt, and Castoriadis. Bauman well reflected this impulse in “Notes Beyond Time” (pp. 33-49), which is a composition of eight brief reflections about several issues. One of them is the critic of academicism for its self-referentiality, mainly in its Marxist version, and the demand for a knowledge close to the daily experience of ordinary people. But the major arguments are the claim for including morality among academic argument, contesting the positivistic tendency to entrust moral and social order to the systems. Two notes seem to follow from this: the relevance of the conscience of mortality to see present issues in perspective, and love as longing for unity and completion, which differs from its reductionism to sex, which also instrumentalizes the other person. These issues, once more, anticipate some of Bauman’s concerns in his moral works, such as Postmodern Ethics (1993), Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (1992b) and Liquid Love (2003).
Bauman published originally the following texts in English, in journals that are today very difficult to access. “Marx and the Contemporary Theory of Culture”, from 1968 (pp. 50-66) contests, once again, the functionalist approach to culture. Bauman refuses its consideration of needs alone, and its categorisation of cultures as “superior” or “inferior”. To Bauman’s view, human action has a double source, and the other side of needs is the approach to culture as a provider of frames for human cognition and behaviour, which was included in the traditional concept, inherited, among others, by Marx. Bauman criticises social Marxist traditional doctrine for focusing in the social systems, which try to give response to needs, over the cultural systems, contributing to the gap between two systems that he contends need to be equilibrated in order to provide a complete vision of human agency. This is one of his last writings in Poland in which Bauman manifests his distance from the communist version of Marxism.
If the last work commented was critical, the next is programmatic and, to my view, the most outstanding among the writings of this collection to understand Bauman’s theory. “Culture, Values and Science of Society” (pp. 67-83) is Bauman’s discourse of acceptance of the chair of sociology at the University of Leeds in 1972. It contains his proposal to understand Bauman’s approach to sociology as part of the Human Sciences, next to art and morality. After reviewing the history of sociology, with his critics to its positivist origins, and criticising the ethnomethodology’s and the structuralist’s approaches, Bauman advocates for a sociology which contributes to the building of the human world inasmuch it is human-made, and a sociology understood as a vocation in the strict sense, as a commitment to understanding among different fields of knowledge and to human values. Bauman’s last words are worth quoting here:
In this critical turning point in the history of civilization, sociology, the one area of human intellectual endeavour which can bridge the gap between cultural and natural, subjective and objective, art and science, has a crucially important function to perform. It must strive to re-marry masses and reason, human life and rationality, humanity and efficiency - the couples whom modern civilization separated and whose divorce the learned priests of this civilization have sanctified. It must restore to reason its denied right and its lost willingness to discuss not only itineraries, but destinations as well. It must show to the people, in Wright Mills' famous words, the way in which their most intimately private biographies are woven into the tissue of the history of the species (81-82).
In fulfilling this cultural task, Sociology has not neatly defined borders, and is close to Arts and to literature in particular. Among his many sources, Bauman preferred Borges. This is the argument of “Jorge Luis Borges, or Why Understanding is not what it Seems to Be” (84-102) which is the unpublished version of a paper released in 1976. Reviewing the characters of Labyrinths, Bauman makes an approach to interpretation as a definition of provisional frames of mind, required for understanding, but provisional and changeable, too, as changeable are the experiences lying as the source to each understanding. So comprehension is similar to the departure of many ways, and the “hermeneutical circle” is impossible to close. To this regard, this piece of Bauman’s work can be related to his former reflections about truth and significance in social sciences, mainly in Hermeneutics and Social Sciences (1982) and Thinking Sociologically (1990), with the approach and difference of sociology to common sense.
Other than a renowned sociologist, Bauman was a keen photographer, and the unpublished text “Thinking Photographically” (103-113) is a good sample. I would suggest that these two aspects of his personality converge in the relevance of framing to provide a vision, whether it consists in an object or in an intellectual map of how society is. In Bauman’s, too, they both converge in interest towards daily life as experienced by common people, as the theme of observation and analysis. With my remarks in the previous paragraphs, I expect to provide elements enough to invite to continue reading, connecting these writings with Bauman’s major works. From the frame of sociology as art, and art as an expression of society and culture, Bauman continues in more recent writings to provide us with his always insightful views about the avant-gardes, the relationship between art, death and post-modernity, or the dissolution of borders between actors and spectators, as expressions of the general dissolution of human bonds in postmodern, or liquid-modern, culture.
References
Bauman, Z. (1973). Culture as Praxis. London: Sage [reprinted 1998].
Bauman, Z. (1978). Hermeneutics and Social Sciences. Approaches to Understanding. London: Routledge [reprinted 2010].
Bauman, Z. (1990). Thinking Sociologically. Oxford: Blackwell.
Bauman, Z. (1992a). Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge.
Bauman, Z. (1992b). Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bauman, Z. (1993). Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Bauman, Z. (2003). Liquid Love. On the frailty of human bonds. Cambridge: Polity.
Beilharz, P. (2020). Intimacy in postmodern times. A friendship with Zygmunt Bauman. Cambridge: Polity.
Kilminster, R. and Varcoe, I. (eds.), Culture, Modernity and Revolution. Essays in Honour of Zygmunt Bauman. Abingdon: Routledge.
Palmer, J.; Brzeziński, D.; Campbell, T. (2020). Sixty-three years of thinking sociologically: compiling the bibliography of Zygmunt Bauman. Thesis Eleven 156(1) 118-133.
Pollock, G. (2007). Thinking Sociologically, Thinking Aesthetically: Between Convergence and Difference with Some Historical Reflections on Sociology and Art History, History of the Human Sciences, 20(2), 141-175.
Tester, K. (2018). On repetition in the work of Zygmunt Bauman. Thesis Eleven 149(1), 104-118.
Tester, K.; Jacobsen, M. H. (2005). Bauman before Postmodernity. Invitation, Conversations and Annotated Bibliography, 1953-1989. Aalborg: Aalborg University Press.
Elena Álvarez-Álvarez obtained her PhD at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, with a dissertation about the relationships between Eastern and Western frames of thought in Late Antiquity. From then, her research project has moved to the understanding of different keys for interpretation and understanding between different frames of mind in our plural world. As part of this project, she is analysing the work of Zygmunt Bauman from the prospective of the moral concepts. She is Teacher of Contemporary Philosophy at the International University of La Rioja (Spain).
