Sketches in the Theory of Culture

Abstract

Dariusz Brzeziński opens and closes his introduction to Zygmunt Bauman's Sketches in the Theory of Culture by comparing this long-lost book to a message in a bottle, borrowing Bauman's own definition of the metaphor from Liquid Life (2005) as implying “a message fit to be written down” and “still worthy of the finder's effort to unpack it and study it” (p. vii). The comparison is imprecise. Bauman's recovered text, which first appeared in Polish in 2016, a year before its author's death, is not a message deliberately set on its own haphazard journey in the hope that a future better positioned to appreciate it would someday have the opportunity to do so. Bauman had prepared the book for publication in 1968, when its steady progress through the publication process was abruptly halted by the political unrest that gripped Poland in March. Like so many prominent intellectuals, and especially those who, like Bauman, were of Jewish extraction, Bauman quickly found himself without a publishing contract, his academic position, or his Polish citizenship. Bauman continued his career elsewhere, first in Israel, then at the University of Leeds, where he flourished intellectually into the incisive thinker about culture familiar to us today. All copies of Sketches in the Theory of Culture were believed to have been destroyed until an incomplete galley was recently discovered among old papers that were being cleaned out of a Warsaw office. Furnished with an afterword from Bauman, in which the author contextualizes the work within his near obsession with Claude Lévi-Strauss in the late 1960s, the book can now be added to this theorist's extensive bibliography.Rather than a message in a bottle, then, in Sketches in the Theory of Culture we are dealing with a time capsule, something that was buried away, forgotten, and unearthed not as a message to the future, but as a relic of the past. In it, Bauman lays out a semiotic theory of culture that conforms to a narrow Marxist materialism and an equally narrow understanding of structural anthropology, two positions that would gradually fade in the work Bauman produced after his exile from Poland, and that would all but disappear from his later formulation of “liquid modernity.” In contrast to the cultural semiotics most familiar to us today through the writings of such thinkers as Roland Barthes and Yuri Lotman, who would become occasional reference points in Bauman's later works but remain absent here, Bauman's thinking in Sketches in the Theory of Culture is remarkably schematic. It is the author's avowed intention to present culture as a system of identifiable behaviors that respond to and condition each other's evolution, which is itself largely predictable once the behaviors and the models of their interactions are robustly understood: The anthropologist becomes a researcher of culture only when they progress to the level of constructing models that reproduce the internal structure of the system—which is not straightforwardly given, or accessible to sensory experience—thanks to which the behaviour of A becomes that which evokes the behaviour of B, and the behaviour of B, that which is evoked. She or he thus models the system of meanings and the mechanism of meaning-making, and, by doing so, constructs the system of culture. This system is to individual interactions as language is to individual speech acts, and the tonal structure to individual melodies. (pp. 122–123)If this sounds simultaneously abstract and familiar, that is because it is both. While the text is peppered with images, anecdotes, and cultural artefacts reflecting Bauman's wide-ranging erudition, these play a noticeably smaller role here than they do in his later work. Those texts that Bauman composed in English are marked by the often moving elegance of his phrasing and his willingness to dwell in a curious fact, revealing how the most trivial-seeming detail is anything but, and while there are glints of the direction his prose would soon adopt, this text is primarily invested in arguing for the need to view culture as a system (in the first half) and sketching a very general and partial methodology for doing so (in the second).There is little to object to in Bauman's book, which may be its greatest weakness: the broad field of cultural studies absorbed these ideas, developed them in new directions, and moved on decades ago. Does Sketches in the Theory of Culture feature insights elaborated here differently than how one might find them in Bauman's other works? Certainly. But, when the day is done, this book will be more valuable to the study of Bauman than to the study of those questions that Bauman himself studied.