Culture in a Liquid Modern World

Zygmunt Bauman, Lydia Bauman

• Editorial: Polity
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745637167
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literatur
• Categoría: Theorie der Literaturkritik

In its original formulation, 'culture' was intended to be an agent for change, a mission undertaken with the aim of educating 'the people' by bringing the best of human thought and creativity to them. But in our contemporary liquid-modern world, culture has lost its missionary role and has become a means of seduction: it seeks no longer to enlighten the people but to seduce them. The function of culture today is not to satisfy existing needs but to create new ones, while simultaneously ensuring that existing needs remain permanently unfulfilled. Culture today likens itself to a giant department store where the shelves are overflowing with desirable goods that are changed on a daily basis - just long enough to stimulate desires whose gratification is perpetually postponed.

In this new book, Zygmunt Bauman - one of the most brilliant and influential social thinkers of our time - retraces the peregrinations of the concept of culture and examines its fate in a world marked by the powerful new forces of globalization, migration and the intermingling of populations. He argues that Europe has a particularly important role to play in revitalizing our understanding of culture, precisely because Europe, with its great diversity of peoples, languages and histories, is the space where the Other is always one's neighbour and where each is constantly called upon to learn from everyone else.

1

Some notes on the historical peregrinations of the concept of ‘Culture’

On the basis of findings made in Great Britain, Chile, Hungary, Israel and Holland, a thirteen-strong team led by the highly respected Oxford sociologist John Goldthorpe concluded that a cultural elite can no longer be readily distinguished from those lower in the cultural hierarchy by the old signs: regular attendance at the opera and concerts, an enthusiasm for everything regarded as ‘high art’ at any given moment, and a habit of turning up its nose at ‘all that is common, like a pop song, or mainstream television’. Which is not at all to say that one does not still come across those who are regarded, not least by themselves, as the cultural elite, true art lovers, people better informed than their not quite so cultured peers as to what culture is about, what it consists of and what is deemed Comme il faut or comme il ne faut pas – what is suitable or not suitable – for a man or woman of culture. Except that, unlike those latter-day cultural elites, they are not ‘connoisseurs’ in the strict sense of the word, looking down on the taste of the common man, or the tastelessness of the philistine. Rather, it is more appropriate today to describe them – using the term coined by Richard A Petersen, of Vanderbilt University – as ‘omnivorous’: there is room in their repertory of cultural consumption for both opera and heavy metal or punk, for ‘high art’ and mainstream television, for Samuel Beckett and Terry Pratchett. A bite of this, a morsel of that, this today, tomorrow something else. A mixture … according to Stephen Fry, authority on modish trends and shining light of the most exclusive London society (as well as star of some of the most popular TV shows). He publicly admits:

Well, people can be dippy about all things digital and still read books, they can go to the opera and watch a cricket match and apply for Led Zeppelin tickets without splitting themselves asunder… You like Thai food? But what is wrong with Italian? Woah, there… calm down. I like both. Yes. It can be done. I can like rugby football and the musicals of Stephen Sondheim. High Victorian Gothic and the installations of Damien Hirst. Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass and piano works of Hindemith. English hymns and Richard Dawkins. First editions of Norman Douglas and iPods, snooker, darts, and ballet…

Or, as Petersen put it in 2005, summing up twenty years of inquiry: ‘We see a shift in elite status group politics from those highbrows who snobbishly disdain all base, vulgar, or mass popular culture… to those highbrows who omnivorously consume a wide range of popular as well as highbrow art forms…’¹ In other words no works of culture are alien to me: I don’t identify with any of them a hundred per cent, totally and absolutely, and certainly not at the price of denying myself other pleasures. I feel at home everywhere, despite the fact (or perhaps because of it) that there is no place I can call home. It isn’t so much a confrontation of one (refined) taste against another (vulgar) one, but of omnivorousness against univorousness, a readiness to consume everything against finicky selectiveness. The cultural elite is alive and kicking; it is today more active and eager than ever before – but it is too preoccupied with tracking hits and other celebrated culture-related events to find time for formulating canons of faith, or converting others to them.

Apart from the principle of ‘don’t be fussy, don’t be choosy’ and ‘consume more’, it has nothing to say to the univorous throng at the bottom of the cultural hierarchy.

And yet, as Pierre Bourdieu maintained only a few decades ago, every artistic offering used to be addressed to a specific social class, and to that class alone – and was accepted only, or primarily by that class. The triple effect of those artistic offerings – class definition, class segregation and manifestation of class membership – was, according to Bourdieu, their essential raison d-être, the most important of their social functions, perhaps even their hidden, if not their professed aim.

According to Bourdieu, works of art intended for aesthetic consumption pointed out, signalled and protected class divisions, legibly marking and fortifying interclass boundaries. In order to unequivocally mark boundaries and to protect them effectively, all objets d’art, or at least a significant majority, had to be assigned to mutually exclusive sets; sets whose contents were not to be mixed, or approved of or possessed simultaneously. What counted were not so much their contents or innate qualities as their differences, their mutual intolerance and a ban on their conciliation, erroneously presented as a manifestation of their innate, immanent resistance to morganatic relationships. There were elite tastes, ‘high culture’ by nature, average or ‘philistine’ tastes typical of the middle class, and ‘vulgar’ tastes, worshipped by the lower class – and it was no easier to mix them with than fire and water. It may be that nature abhors a vacuum, but culture definitely does not tolerate a mélange. In Bourdieu’s Distinction, culture manifested itself above all as a useful appliance, consciously intended to mark out class differences and to safeguard them: as a technology invented for the creation and protection of class divisions and social hierarchies.²

Culture, in short, manifested itself in a form similar to that described a century earlier by Oscar Wilde: ‘Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated… They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.’³ ‘The elect’, chosen ones, that is to say those who sing the glory of those values they themselves uphold, at one and the same time ensuring their own victory in the song contest. Inevitably they will find beautiful meanings in beauty, since it is they who decide what beauty is; even before the search for beauty began, who was it, if not the chosen ones, who decided where to look for that beauty (at the opera, not at the music hall or on the market stall; in galleries, not on city walls or in cheap prints gracing working-class or peasant homes; in leather-bound volumes, not in newsprint or cheap penny-publications). The chosen ones are chosen not by virtue of their insight into what is beautiful, but rather by the fact that the statement ‘this is beautiful’ is binding precisely because it was uttered by them and confirmed by their actions…

Sigmund Freud believed that aesthetic knowledge searches in vain for the essence, nature and sources of beauty, its so to speak immanent qualities – and tends to hide its ignorance in a stream of pompous and self-important, and ultimately empty pronouncements. ‘Beauty has no obvious use’, decrees Freud, ‘nor is there any cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it’.⁴

But, on the other hand, as Bourdieu implies, there are benefits from beauty and a need for it. Although the benefits are not ‘disinterested’, as Kant suggested, they are benefits nevertheless, and while the need is not necessarily cultural, it is social; and it is very likely that both the benefits from and the need for telling beauty from ugliness, or subtlety from vulgarity, will last as long as there exists a need and a desire to tell high society from low society, and the connoisseur of refined tastes from the tasteless, vulgar masses, plebs and riff-raff …

Upon careful consideration of these descriptions and interpretations, it becomes clear that ‘culture’ (a set of preferences suggested, recommended and imposed on account of their correctness, goodness or beauty) was regarded by its authors as first and foremost and in the final resort to be a ‘socially conservative’ force. In order to prove itself in this function, culture had to perform, with equal commitment, two apparently contradictory acts of subterfuge. It had to be as emphatic, severe and uncompromising in its endorsements as in its disapprovals, in its granting of entry tickets as its withholding of them, in its authorizing of identity papers as in its denial of citizens’ rights. As well as identifying what was desirable and commendable by virtue of being ‘how it should be’ – familiar and cosy – culture needed signifiers for what was to be mistrusted and avoided on account of its baseness and hidden menace; signs warning, as on the rims of ancient maps, that hic sunt leones, here there be lions. Culture was to behave just like the castaway in the English parable, apparently ironic but moralizing in intent, who had to build three dwellings on the desert island where he had been shipwrecked in order to feel at home, that is to say, to acquire an identity and defend it effectively: the first dwelling was his private quarters, the second was the club he frequented every Saturday, and the third had the sole function of being the place whose threshold the castaway would assiduously avoid crossing in all the long years he would spend on the island.

On its publication over thirty years ago, Bourdieu’s Distinction turned upside down the original concept of ‘culture’ born in the Enlightenment and then passed on from generation to generation. The meaning of culture as it was discovered, defined and documented by Bourdieu was remote from the concept of ‘culture’ hammered out and introduced into common parlance in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, almost simultaneously with the English concept of ‘refinement’ and the German Bildung.

According to its original concept, ‘culture’ was to be an agent for change rather than for preservation of the status quo; or more precisely, it was to be a navigation tool to steer social evolution towards a universal human condition. The initial purpose of the concept of ‘culture’ was not to serve as a register of descriptions, inventories and codifications of the prevailing situation, but rather to appoint a goal and direction for future efforts. The name of ‘culture’ was accorded to a proselytizing mission planned and undertaken in the form of attempts to educate the masses and refine their customs, and through these to improve society and advance ‘the people’, that is to say, those from the ‘depths of society’, to those on its heights. ‘Culture’ was associated with a ‘beam of enlightenment’ reaching ‘under the eaves’ of country and town dwellings and into the dark recesses of prejudice and superstition which, like so many vampires (it was believed), would not survive exposure to the light of day. According to the impassioned pronouncement by Matthew Arnold in his very influential and tellingly named book Culture or Anarchy (1869), ‘culture’ ‘seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought or known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light’; and again, according to an opinion expressed by Arnold in his introduction to Literature and Dogma (1873), culture is the blending of human dreams and desires with the toil of those willing and able to satisfy them: ‘Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion of making them prevail.’

‘Culture’ entered the modern vocabulary as a declaration of intent; the name of a mission yet to be undertaken. The concept of culture alone was a catchword and a call to action. Like the concept which provided the metaphor to describe this intent (that is, the concept of ‘agriculture’, associating farmers with the fields they cultivated), it was a call to the plough-man and the sower to till and sow the barren land and enrich the harvest by cultivation (Cicero even used this metaphor, describing the upbringing of the young by the term cultura animi). The concept assumed a division between the relatively few educators, called to cultivate souls, and those many who were to be the subject of cultivation; the guardians and the guarded, the supervisors and the supervised, the educators and the educated, the producers and their products, subjects and objects – and a meeting to take place between them.

‘Culture’ inferred a planned and expected agreement between those possessing knowledge (or at least confident of being in possession of it) and ignoramuses (or those thus described by the confident aspirants to their education); an agreement furnished, incidentally, with only one signature, unilaterally endorsed, and realized under the exclusive directorship of the newly formed ‘educated class’, seeking the right to fashion the ‘new and improved’ order rising from the ashes of the ancien régime. The declared intention of this class was the education, enlightenment, elevation and ennobling of le peuple, recent recipients of the role of citoyens of the newly formed état-nation: that pairing of a newly formed nation elevating itself to a sovereign state existence, with the new state aspiring to the role of a trustee, defender and guardian of that nation.

The ‘enlightenment project’ gave culture (understood as an activity akin to land cultivation) the status of a basic tool for the building of a nation, a state, and a nation-state – at the same time entrusting that tool to the hands of the educated class. In its perambulations between political ambitions and philosophical deliberations, a twin goal of the enlightenment undertaking had soon crystallized (whether openly announced or tacitly assumed) into the double postulate of the obedience of subjects and solidarity among fellow countrymen.

The growth in the ‘populace’ added self-confidence to the forming nation-state, since it was believed that increases in the numbers of potential worker-soldiers would augment its power and guarantee its security. However, because the joint effort of nation-building and economic growth also resulted in an increasing surplus of individuals (in essence, whole categories of the population needed to be confined to the scrapheap if the desired order was to be born and grow in strength, and wealth creation was to increase its momentum) the newly established nation-state soon faced an urgent need to search for new territory beyond its borders: territory capable of absorbing the excess of population which it was no longer able to accommodate within its own boundaries.

The prospect of colonization of farflung dominions proved a powerful stimulus to culture’s enlightenment idea and gave the proselytizing mission an altogether new, potentially worldwide dimension. In a mirror image of the vision of the ‘enlightenment of the people’, a concept was shaped of the ‘white man’s mission’ and of ‘saving the savage from his barbaric state’. Soon these concepts were to be furnished with a theoretical commentary in the form of an evolutionary cultural theory which promoted the ‘developed’ world to the status of unquestionable perfection, to be imitated and aspired to sooner or later by the rest of the globe. In the pursuit of this goal, the rest of the world was to be actively helped and, in the event of resistance, coerced. The evolutionary cultural theory gave ‘developed’ society the function of converting the rest of the inhabitants of the globe.

All its future initiatives and undertakings were reduced to the role destined to be played out by the educated elite of the colonial metropolis before their own metropolitan ‘populace’.

Bourdieu devised his research and collected and interpreted the data thus discovered at a time when the efforts above were beginning to lose their momentum and their sense of direction, and generally speaking were a spent force – at least within the metropolis, where the visions of the awaited and postulated future were being concocted, though less so on the peripheries of the empire, from which expeditionary forces were compelled to return long before they had succeeded in bringing the realities of the life of the native up to the standards espoused in the metropolis. As for the metropolis, the declaration of intent of two hundred years standing suc-ceeded in establishing there a wide network of executive institutions, founded and administered mainly by the state – already sufficiently vigorous to be reliant upon its own momentum, entrenched routine and bureaucratic inertia. The intended product (a ‘populace’ turned into a ‘civic body’) was formed and the position of the educating classes in the new order was assured – or at least accepted as such. Rather than the daring, venturesome endeavour, crusade or mission of old, culture now likened itself to a homeostatic device: a kind of gyroscope protecting the nation-state from changing winds and cross-currents and helping it, despite tempests and the caprices of changing weather, to ‘steer the ship on its right course’ (or, as Talcott Parsons would have it in his then popular expression: to enable the ‘system’ to ‘regain its own equilibrium’).

In short, ‘culture’ was transformed from a stimulant into a tranquilizer; from the arsenal of a modern revolution into a repository of conservation products. ‘Culture’ became the name for functions ascribed to stabilizers, homeostats or gyroscopes. It was in the midst of these functions (short-lived, it was soon to turn out) that culture was captured and immobilized, registered and analysed, as in a snapshot, in Bourdieu’s Distinction. Bourdieu’s report did not escape the timing of Minerva’s proverbial owl, that goddess of all knowledge: Bourdieu was observing a landscape illuminated by the setting sun, which momentarily sharpened contours which were soon to dissolve in the approaching twilight. He therefore captured culture at its homeostatic stage: culture at the service of the status quo, of the monotonous reproduction of society and maintenance of system equilibrium, just before the inevitable and fast approaching loss of its position.

That loss of position was the result of a number of processes constituting the transformation of modernity from its ‘solid’ to its ‘liquid’ phase. I use the term ‘liquid modernity’ here for the currently existing shape of the modern condition, described by other authors as ‘postmodernity’, ‘late modernity’, ‘second’ or ‘hyper’ modernity. What makes modernity ‘liquid’, and thus justifies the choice of name, is its self-propelling, self-intensifying, compulsive and obsessive ‘modernization’, as a result of which, like liquid, none of the consecutive forms of social life is able to maintain its shape for long. ‘Dissolving everything that is solid’ has been the innate and defining characteristic of the modern form of life from the outset; but today, unlike yesterday, the dissolved forms are not to be replaced, and nor are they replaced, by other solid forms – deemed ‘improved’ in the sense of being even more solid and ‘permanent’ than those that came before them, and so even more resistant to melting. In the place of the melting, and so impermanent, forms come others, no less – if not more – susceptible to melting and therefore equally impermanent.

At least in that part of the planet where appeals for culture are formulated and broadcast, eagerly read and passionately debated, culture (dismissed earlier, let us remind ourselves, from the role of handmaiden to the self-determining and self-confirming nations, states and class hierarchies) quickly loses the function of a servant of the self-reproducing social hierarchy. The tasks culture had been entrusted with until then fell away one by one, were abandoned, or began to be fulfilled by other means, and with different tools. 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.

It can be said that in liquid modern times, culture (and most particularly, though not exclusively, its artistic sphere) is fashioned to fit individual freedom of choice and individual responsibility for that choice; and that its function is to ensure that the choice should be and will always remain a necessity and unavoidable duty of life, while the responsibility for the choice and its consequences remains where it has been placed by the liquid modern human condition – on the shoulders of the in...