Sketches in the Theory of Culture by Zygmunt Bauman

Author:Zygmunt Bauman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2018-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

This sentence contains enough postulates to express a common direction of theoretical pursuits in the area of various subcodes of symbolic culture, thus spurring hope for integration, but there are also sufficiently few of these postulates here to avoid hampering efforts aimed at devising particular methods that are especially suited to the properties of particular subcodes.

Thus, the ‘fundamental principle’ of structuralism leads to the following postulates: (a) we must strive to build a theory for constructing a consistent system of dependencies; (b) the meaning of every element of the system is indicated by the position that it occupies in the system; (c) the fundamental fact that we must begin with is the empirical role that these elements can play in actual events (cooperative acts); but these roles are also indicated by the positions these elements occupy in ‘linear’ and ‘transversal’ cross-sections of these events. Practically, if we want to relate these postulates to non-linguistic forms of transmitting information, the first difficulty to be conquered is solving two problems that are far from clear: (1) what ought to be considered an ‘element’ of the non-linguistic subcode?; or (2) what is the nature of the relationships that comprise the structure of this subcode? These two questions constitute a programme for the initial phase of research, which could eventually lead to a general theory of symbolic cooperation.

One possible answer to these two questions can be found in the work of the aforementioned Kenneth L. Pike. In his research, the appeal of linguistic analogies was quite strong. The author admittedly goes so far in searching for analogues to phonemes or differends in human behaviour that we could say that he does not go below the level of ‘morphemes’ – he remains more on the level of structural semantics than of phonology. He himself asserts that he wishes to bypass, at least in the first phases of developing his theory, the problem presenting the greatest difficulty – namely, deciding on the ‘smallest elementary elements’ of a non-linguistic informational subcode.

Pike takes, as a point of departure for his theory, an observation of great importance: that there exist contradictions between the fact that ‘a behavior event is often a physical continuum with no gaps in which the movement is stopped’ and the fact that ‘human beings react to their own behavior and to that of other individuals as if it were segmented into discrete chunks’.11 From the physical perspective, human behaviours have a ‘wave-like’ nature, but from a semiotic perspective they have a corpuscular nature. From this perspective, non-linguistic acts are not fundamentally different from linguistic acts. Every person knows well from their own experience that, when they want to understand something said in a language they don't know, the greatest difficulty they face is separating an incomprehensible stream of speech into individual words. Pike assumes that these culturally determined meanings of particular, physically inseparable fragments of behaviour allow the receiver to distinguish between them, just as understanding language is the pre-condition of differentiating particular words within a stream of speech.

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