Culture as Praxis

Zygmunt Bauman

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1998
• Print ISBN: 9780761959892, 9780761959885
• eBook ISBN: 9781446225899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this major work, Zygmunt Bauman seeks to classify the meanings of culture. He distinguishes between culture as a concept, culture as a structure and culture as praxis and analyzes the different ways in which culture has been used in each of these settings. For Bauman, culture is a living, changing aspect of human interaction which must be understood and studied as a universal of human life. At the heart of his approach is the proposition that culture is inherently ambivalent.

With a major new introduction to this new edition, this classic work emerges as a crucial link in the development of Bauman?s thought. By his own admission, it was the first of his books to grope towards a new kind of social theory, in contrast to the false certainties and gross theorems that dominated much of the post-war period. This is Bauman at his best, at his most subtle and his most searching.

1

CULTURE AS CONCEPT

The unyielding ambiguity of the concept of culture is notorious. Much less so is the idea that this ambiguity follows not so much from the way people define culture, as from the incompatibility of numerous lines of thought, which have come together historically in the same term. Scholars are usually sophisticated enough to realize that similarity of terms is a poor guide when identity or diversity of concepts is to be established. Still, methodological self-consciousness is one thing, the magic of words is another. Only too many people too often find themselves misled by a rash though commonsensical inclination into imposing a frail conceptual unity on similar terms. The effort, which can be of some profit in the case of the artificial languages of science, would hardly have borne fruit if the terms at stake, like the term of culture, had had a long pre-scientific and cosmopolitan history of their own. Terms of this kind would almost certainly have been adopted by different scholarly communities to answer diverse problems rooted in divergent interests. As a rule, the inherent qualities of the term do not constrain too tightly its eventual conceptual usage. Neither is there a ‘natural’ necessity for a free-floating term to be adopted each time a particular conceptual demand is felt.

Few people know this last rule better than Anglo-Saxon anthropologists on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Though driven by the same overpowering urge ‘to put on record’ the alien ways of life on the verge of extinction, they faced two very different situations. As W J. M. Mackenzie has recently pointed out, ‘the Americans had to work principally with languages, artefacts, individual survivors; the British could sit and watch quietly, in the midst of social systems which were superficially untouched by British rule’.¹ By dint of their own (though not voluntarily chosen) procedure, what they extracted orally from isolated survivors of the débâcle appeared to the Americans as a cobweb of mental ‘oughts’. They called what they saw (or, more exactly, what they imagined they saw), ‘culture’. At the same time, their British counterparts – since the oral information they obtained seemed to be backed by the reality of living communities – were inclined to organize basically similar data into a network of ‘ises’. They called it ‘social structure’. In the last analysis, both sides were after the same thing: to what extent and in what respect the behaviour of people X differs from the behaviour of peoples Y and Z. More than that: both sides did realize that to achieve this aim they should discover and/or reconstruct repeatable patterns of human behaviour in which communities differ from each other. Both sides, therefore, pursued the same aim and sought the same kinds of primary data. The theoretical concepts they riveted onto their explanatory and ordering models were, however, different. The whole, into which individual conduct was expected to fit, meant to the British a group of interlocking individuals; for the Americans it meant a system of interlocking norms. The British wanted to know in the first instance why and how people integrate; the Americans were curious how norms and principles collaborate or clash. Both groups were fond of the concept of role, and both considered it the indispensable and crucial analytical tool in making the dispersed empirical data intelligible. Still the British would see the role as the intermediate link integrating individual behaviour with the exigencies of the social structure, while the Americans would have chosen rather to put it in the position intermediate between individual conduct and the intricate web of norms and moral imperatives. Of much greater importance still was the fact that the two divergent theoretical inclinations had been eventually crowned with two contrasting names. Long after both sides had accepted the legitimacy of each other’s approach and had ceased to comprehend the fury of their past methodological crusades, the belief that one can deal with ‘social relations rather than culture’² remained the main, if not the only, relic of the otherwise forgotten controversies.

The above is a conspicuous example of a situation in which acceptance of the term by some and rejection of it by others can inspire both sides to exaggerate whatever conceptual peculiarities happen to separate them. Conversely, much deeper conceptual rifts tend to be overlooked or underestimated if they happen to be concealed behind kindred terms.

Symptomatic of this tendency is the fact that the majority of scholars who try to introduce some order into the vast spectrum of contexts in which the term ‘culture’ appears approach their task as, in the first instance, the need ‘to classify the accepted definitions’. In most cases the overlapping, if not identity, of semantic fields is tacitly, if not explicitly, assumed. What is allegedly left to be reconciled are divergent preoccupations of schools or single authors with one or another aspect of the field. Thus A. Kroeber and C. Kluckhohn,³ having divided carefully collected definitions of culture into six groups, remained convinced that what made each group different from the others was the diversity of aspects the authors had chosen as the defining features of an otherwise common semantic field (the terminological essence of acknowledged divergences was appropriately stressed by the choice of classificatory entries; there were descriptive, historical, normative, psychological, structural and genetical definitions in Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s taxonomy). A decade later Albert Carl Cafagna⁴ set out on the same exploratory trip to produce divisions only nominally different (definitions stressing social heritage, or learned behaviour, or ideas, or standardized behaviour). It did not occur to him either that domains having the fullest phenomenal resemblance may still acquire quite contradictory meanings if placed in disparate semantic frameworks.

Closest to this discovery were those sociologists and anthropologists who pushed forward the famed distinction between the value-bound and the value-neutral understandings of culture, though the belief that the most important dividing line between social theories runs along the value-committed-value-free axis seems to have appeared, fortunately, to be a passing fad. The distinction sanctioned, even if only implicitly, the inevitable contention that the concepts opposed to a term in a particular context have more to say on its meaning than the most meticulously phrased definition derived analytically from the same term taken in isolation. In Sapir’s famous distinction between a culture which embodies ‘any socially inherited element in the life of man’ and one which ‘refers to a rather conventional ideal of individual refinement’⁵ the same term appears in two obviously distinct semantic fields: in the first case it is opposed to a ‘state of nature’, e.g. lack of a socially inheritable lore, while in the second it is contrasted with a roughness determined by slackness or failure ofthe refining (educational) processes. It is not that the concept has been defined in two different ways in turn; the same term stands, as a matter of fact, for two different theoretical concepts. It would be a vain effort to try to bridge the semantic gap between them and to encompass both concepts by a single definition.

In fact the conceptually institutionalized cognitive interests lurking behind the single term of ‘culture’ are more numerous than one can learn from Sapir’s dichotomy. Each is located in a substantially different semantic field, surrounded by a specific set of paradigmatically and syntagmatically linked notions and deriving/manifesting its meaning in a distinct series of cognitive contexts. This circumstance seems to be decisive for the choice of taxonomical strategy in the domain of theoretical concepts. The alternative strategy, the one applied in fact in most popular classifications, would consist in sorting out the attributes used by various authors to describe an ‘objectively’ separated class of substantial phenomena. We would have to assume that there is some objective way of defining a peculiar class of cultural phenomena; that the task of a scholar wishing to define it consists in picking up or discovering a number of features which are present in each member of the class; and that the task of a scholar wishing to classify the proposed definitions consists in splitting them in the most convenient and parsimonious way into a limited number of divisions, each of them possessing its own common denominator. The philosophy behind this strategy assumes an unquestionable priority of the phenomenal universe, objectively and in itself determined and ordered, and a merely subordinate, derivative role for human discourse.

This brings us into the midst of a controversial philosophical problem of the nature of meaning – something however we cannot elaborate here at any length proportionate to its significance and the sophistication granted to it by the experts. However important the problem is in itself, it plays a mere auxiliary role in our consideration. I hope I may simply declare that from among many current theories of meaning I opt for the use theory, i.e. the one which tries to elucidate the meaning of semantically-loaded linguistic elements through study of the locations in which they appear in both paradigmatical and syntagmatical dimensions.⁶ As J. N. Findlay says,⁷

What is implicit in the slogan ‘Don’t ask for the meaning: ask for the use’ is not that use covers much more than the connotative and denotative functions of language, but that it somehow resumes and completely explains the latter, that we can completely see around and see through talk about the reference and connotation of expressions by taking note of the way people operate with such expressions, how they combine them with other expressions to form sentences, and the varying circumstances in which producing such sentences is reckoned appropriate or fully justifiable.

I would not certainly go all the way with the most pragmatically-minded spokesmen for the use theory, who deny the significance of ‘pre-existent meanings’, i.e. pre-existent in relation to the actual utterance.⁸ But I shall insist on the intimate connexion and inter-dependence (in opposition to a one-way dependence only) between the contextual plane and the plane of meaning. The two planes are inseparable and constitute each other by the force of ‘a correlation between the contextual variation on the one hand and the variations of content on the other’.⁹ Each term usable in meaningful communication is an index in the semiological sense of the word, to wit, it reduces the previous incertitude of the perceived universe, brings some order into the hitherto amorphic domain. But this index is related not only to the class of phenomena it ‘names’; the index-term organizes the whole universe and so is related to the universe as a whole and can be understood in its total framework only. The act of indication (the activity which constitutes the index) ‘inevitably presents a negative aspect beside its positive one’. The class indicated by the index ‘is not an absolute entity; what it is, it is only due to its relationship to another, complementary class…. To determine a class, one has to start from "un univers du discours"; the complement of the class may be defined as a class formed by the objects belonging to the "univers du discours" but not embraced by the class in question’.¹⁰ Now neither the index and the class positively denoted by it, nor the univers du discours in which alone it is meaningful, leads an independent existence. A more or less constant bond between a particular index-term and a particular class of objects may be, and indeed quite often is, established in a given community, to the extent of foisting itself, with the force of an external inevitability, on each particular member of the community and on each particular communication-event. Viewed historically, however, it obviously exists no longer, but not less long either, than the univers du discours it not only orders but also brings into existence.

Because of historical circumstances not exceedingly relevant to our subject, the term ‘culture’ has been incorporated into three separate univers du discours. In each of the three contexts the term orders a different semantic field, singles out and denotes different classes of objects, brings into relief different aspects of the members of these classes, suggests different sets of cognitive questions and research strategies. Which means that in each case the term, though keeping its form intact, connotes a different concept. There is one term, but three separate concepts. One can obviously point to numerous tangential points common to the three fields. One can perhaps try to belittle the most protruding and apparently irremovable discrepancies as marginal and temporary controversies which would have been better eliminated for the sake of’ conceptual clarity’ or ‘terminological unambiguity’. But before doing this, one should be sure that the game is indeed worth the candle. In fact it most probably is not.

One of the assumptions of the present study is that what is different between three co-existing concepts of culture (and what is determined by the by no means contingent and secondary divergencies between their respective semantic fields) is exactly the most cognitively rich, fruitful, and thus academically exciting part of their content. Three questions which shape their subordinate univers du discours are equally legitimate and significant. We had better exploit the immense cognitive opportunities seminal in their specificity than strain ourselves in a much less rewarding effort to achieve a one-to-one symmetry between a single concept and a single term. I will try to show in this study that the price would have been too high to be easily justified by a predominantly aesthetic satisfaction. The decisive point is not so much whether the three notions can or cannot be reduced to a common denominator, but whether this reduction is indeed desirable.

Culture as hierarchical concept

This usage of the term ‘culture’ is so deeply ingrained in the common pre-scientific layer of the Western mentality, that everybody knows it well, though sometimes unreflectively, from his own everyday experience. We admonish a person, who has failed to live up to the group standards, for his ‘lack of culture’. We repeatedly stress the ‘transmitting of culture’ as the leading function of educational institutions. We are prone to grade the persons with whom we come in touch according to the level of their culture. If we mark somebody as a ‘cultured person’, we mean usually that he is well-educated, polished, urbane, enriched above his ‘natural’ state, ennobled. We tacitly assume that there are others who do not possess any of these attributes. The ‘cultured person’ is an antonym of an ‘uncultured’ one.

Several assumptions were necessary to make sense of the hierarchical notion of culture.

(1) Whether inherited or acquired, culture is a detachable part of a human being, a possession. It is a very peculiar kind of possession, to be sure: it shares with the personality the unique quality of being simultaneously the defining ‘essence’ and the descriptive ‘existential feature’ of the human creature. Since the lyric poets of seventh-century Greece discovered the discord between desire and duty, between duty and necessity, Western man has been condemned to the agonizing precariousness of a dual, Janus-faced identity: he is a personality, but he also has a personality, he is an actor, but also an object of his own action, created and creating at the same time. What he is, is determined by his essence; but he is insistently made responsible for this essence and required to shape it through his existential performance. Culture in its hierarchical meaning leads the same frustrating and awesome life of an object being its own subject. ‘What Socrates tried to get the Athenians to understand was the duty of "caring for their souls"…. To an Athenian of the fifth century BC … it must have seemed very strange indeed.”¹¹ To an Athenian of the fifth century the soul (Ψυχή) was the seed and the bearer of life which disappears together with the conscious existence of the human being. An idea that one can – much more, should – try to act on something which was the fountainhead of all action was at...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Culture as concept
• 2 Culture as structure
• 3 Culture as praxis
• Subjectindex
• Nameindex