The New Bauman Reader: Thinking Sociologically in Liquid Modern Times by Tony Blackshaw

Author:Tony Blackshaw [Blackshaw, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784994037
Google: T_H0jgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 28634825
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2016-01-15T11:28:44+00:00

11 Culture

(1999)

Zygmunt Bauman

The process of revisiting is fundamental to Bauman’s sociology. He constantly revises his work; he reconfigures his subject matter with the utmost attention; and his new publications compulsively return to earlier topics. Partly it is his exceptionally thorough and dedicated mining of the same ingredients, which endlessly come up rich and fresh, seem never to be used up and, however artfully shaped, always have their critical eye on the key social, cultural, economic and political changes that accompany liquid modern life. Partly it is his curious interest in applying new ideas from new sources.

In Culture as Praxis1 Bauman offered his readers three discourses, each giving related, but also distinctive, meanings to the idea of culture: culture as structure, culture as concept and culture as praxis. The following abridged chapter, originally published in 1999 as a new introduction for the second edition of this book2, remedies a lack of consideration of the ‘contested’ nature of culture both in his own and the work of other sociologists. It does this in two ways. First, by stressing that culture has by now ceased to be a tool utilized for the purposes of civilizing, cultivating or controlling people in particular national settings. Second, by garnering insights from post-structuralist or social constructionist forms of research which in the late 1970s and early 1980s distanced themselves in no uncertain terms from the ‘essentializing’ concepts used to define culture, and in so doing provided a radical challenge to the practices, approaches and epistemology of sociology. After re-interrogating this key unit-idea Bauman concludes that ‘culture, as it tends to be seen now, is as much an agent of disorder as it is the tool of order; a factor of ageing and obsolescence as much as of timelessness. The work of culture does not consist so much in its self-perpetuation as in securing the conditions for further experimentation and change.’

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