Culture and Art: Selected Writings, Volume 1 1509545468, 9781509545469

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Culture and Art

Zygmunt Bauman

Culture and Art Selected Writings, Volume 1

Edited and with an Introduction by Dariusz Brzeziński, Mark Davis, Jack Palmer and Tom Campbell Translated by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

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Copyright © Zygmunt Bauman 2021 Editors’ Introduction © Dariusz Brzeziński, Mark Davis, Jack Palmer, Tom Campbell 2021 English translations of pieces translated from Polish © Polity Press 2021 Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 101 Station Landing Suite 300 Medford, MA 02155, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4544-5 – hardback ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4545-2 – paperback A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset in 10.5 on 12 Sabon by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Contents

Series Introduction

page vii

Translator’s Note

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Editors’ Introduction: Culture and Art in the Sociological Imagination of Zygmunt Bauman

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  1 Culture and Society: Semantic and Genetic Connections (1966) 1   2 Notes Beyond Time (1967)

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  3 Marx and the Contemporary Theory of Culture (1968)

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  4 Culture, Values and Science of Society (1972)

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  5 Jorge Luis Borges, or Why Understanding Is Not What It Seems to Be (1976)

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  6 Thinking Photographically (1983–1985)

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  7 Einstein Meets Magritte: Postmodernity Is Born (1995)

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  8 Assimilation into Exile: The Jew as a Polish Writer (1996) 119   9 Beyond the Limits of Interpretive Anarchy (1997)

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10 On Art, Death and Postmodernity – and What They Do To Each Other (1998)

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11 Actors and Spectators (2004)

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vi Contents 12 Listening to the Past, Talking to the Past … (2008)

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13 The Spectre of Barbarism – Then and Now (2008)

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14 A Few (Erratic) Thoughts on the Morganatic Liaison of Theory and Literature (2010)

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15 On Love and Hate … In the Footsteps of Barbara Skarga (2015) 213 Notes

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Acknowledgements

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Index

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Series Introduction Mark Davis, Dariusz Brzeziński, Jack Palmer, Tom Campbell

The author of over seventy books and several hundred articles across a career spanning sixty-three years, Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017) was one of the world’s most original and influential sociologists. In both his native Poland and his adopted home of England, Bauman produced an astonishing body of work that continues to inspire generations of students and scholars, as well as an engaged and global public. Their encounter with Bauman is shaped above all by two books that have acquired the status of modern classics: Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) and Liquid Modernity (2000). While this is understandable, it also means that many readers will be unfamiliar with the great range and diversity of Bauman’s work and with the course of its development over time. Moreover, as Keith Tester argued, an in-depth understanding of Bauman’s contribution must engage seriously with his foundational work of the 1970s, which builds upon his earlier writings in Poland, before his enforced exile in 1968. The importance of this broader and longer-term perspective on Bauman’s work has shaped the thinking behind this series, which makes available for the first time some of Bauman’s previously unpublished or lesser-known papers from the full range of his career. The series has been made possible thanks to the generosity of the Bauman family, especially his three daughters Anna, Irena and Lydia. Following Bauman’s death on 9 January 2017, they kindly donated 156 large boxes of papers and almost 500 digital storage devices as

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a gift to the University of Leeds. Anyone privileged enough to have visited Bauman at his home in Leeds, perhaps arguing with him long into the night whilst surrounded by looming towers of dusty books and folders, will appreciate the magnitude of their task. With the support of the University of Leeds, the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Polity, and the Bauman Estate, we have studied this material and selected texts with a view to making them available to a wide readership through the volumes of this series. In partnership with professional archivists and data management experts, we have read, collated and indexed this vast and unique body of material written in both Polish and English since the 1950s. Through this research, we discovered many unpublished or lesser-known articles and essays, lecture notes and module summaries, contributions to obscure publications no longer in print, and partially completed drafts of papers. It quickly became clear that no commentary on Bauman’s life and work to date has been able to grasp fully the multi-faceted and multi-lingual character of his writings. This series begins to correct that. As well as including many of his lesser-known English-language papers, we have started to tackle the multi-lingual dimension of Bauman’s sociology by working with the translator Katarzyna Bartoszyńska to ensure each of the volumes in this series includes Polish-language material previously unknown to English-speaking readers. This includes more contemporary Polishlanguage material, with a view to emphasizing Bauman’s continued engagement in European intellectual life following exile. Each volume in the series is organized thematically, in order to provide some necessary structure for the reader. In seeking to respect both the form and content of Bauman’s documents, we have kept editorial changes to a minimum, only making grammatical or typographical corrections where necessary to make the meaning of his words clear. A substantial introduction by the editors offers a guide through the material, developing connections to Bauman’s other works, and helping to paint a picture of the entanglement between his biographical and intellectual trajectories. This series will facilitate a far richer understanding of the breadth and depth of Bauman’s legacy and provide a vital reference point for students and scholars across the arts, humanities and social sciences, and for his wider global readership.

Translator’s Note Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

As I have once again found myself translating the work of Zygmunt Bauman, having already translated two shorter works (Of God and Man and Bauman/Bałka) during his lifetime, and one earlier book (Sketches in the Theory of Culture) after his death, I thought I might, at last, allow myself to say something about the way I have approached my task. Translator’s Notes are relatively uncommon in academic writing, and when they do exist, it is usually to clarify a particular term that is not quite translatable – Heidegger’s Dasein, or Freud’s unheimlich – rather than to defend stylistic choices. But, like so many of the great theorists of culture, Zygmunt Bauman cared deeply about the style of his prose. Although a prolific writer, he was also a careful one, who devoted a lot of attention to crafting his sentences in a particular way. Thus, the work of rendering some texts of his into English is an intimidating prospect, no less so because he wrote the majority of his work in English, and had developed his own approach to the language. I have attempted, in my translation, to cleave as closely to this style as possible – even, occasionally, at the cost of clarity, and thus, some explanation is in order (and a big thank-you to Leigh Mueller, our copy-editor, for helping me to find the right balance). One of the curious features of the Polish language is that it is grammatically structured in such a way that word order does not determine meaning. Because nouns and verbs are both marked, you can move the words around without creating confusion: pies zjadł kota, kota zjadł pies, zjadł pies kota, zjadł kota pies, kota pies zjadł, pies kota zjadł – though some of these sentences sound distinctly odd,

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they all clearly state that a dog ate a cat. English is not so permissive, and convention restricts the choices even further, rendering the passive voice, for instance, less common. One of the distinctive features of Bauman’s writing, even in English, is a word order that may seem slightly unfamiliar to English-language readers. Often, this is a consequence of his proclivity for lengthy sentences with multiple subordinate clauses. I have tried to keep these sentences as they are, breaking them into smaller ones only when it seemed absolutely necessary to avoid confusion. I believe that he felt that readers should expend some effort in making their way through longer sentences – that to do so was to participate in a process of unfolding meaning that contributed to understanding it. I have also chosen to make sentences mostly gender-neutral, using ‘they’ instead of the more cumbersome ‘she or he’. In Polish, human, person and similar such words are gendered masculine, which leads to a de facto use of male pronouns. In his later, English-language writings, Bauman tended to use gender-neutral terms, and I believe he would appreciate that I did the same in this translation. Occasionally, however, the sentence was simply too convoluted without a singular pronoun, so I flipped a coin. And I did preserve some moments when he specifically used female pronouns – a sign that gender inclusivity was on his mind even in the 1960s. On a more personal note, I translated these texts while living under quarantine during the beginnings of the COVID-19 outbreak. It was the perfect task for such an occasion, and I appreciated the opportunity to work on something that engaged a very specific part of my brain at a time when certain kinds of focus seemed impossible. But, especially, I relished being able to spend time with Zygmunt during this uncertain moment of history, to witness the brilliant creativity and agility of his thought as he returned to various questions throughout the years, and to observe the shifts in his prose style over time. When I hit upon an English phrase that seemed like an especially felicitous rendering of his words, it gave me pleasure to think how he would have enjoyed it. It is hard to believe that it has been over three years since his passing. I miss him. I am glad that this book will give readers an opportunity to get to know him better.

Editors’ Introduction: Culture and Art in the Sociological Imagination of Zygmunt Bauman Dariusz Brzeziński, Mark Davis, Jack Palmer, Tom Campbell

In Hermeneutics and Social Science, Zygmunt Bauman (1978) illustrated the multitude of factors that affect human understanding by referring to a visualization technique developed by Gustav Ichheiser, the Polish-born Austrian psychologist. Ichheiser drew an illustration of a windowless room with three doors, each equipped with a light switch that illuminated the room with a different colour: green, red or blue. Ichheiser’s point was that, if three different people entered this same room but through three different doors, they would each flick a switch and hold very different convictions as to the colour of the room. ‘All three reason rationally’, Bauman (1978: 70) stressed, ‘and on the ground of reliable empirical evidence. However, as each is spatially situated in his peculiar way, they arrive at irreconcilable conclusions.’ Bauman recalled this simile almost twenty years later when he was invited by the Polish philosopher Adam Chmielewski to reflect upon his sociological investigations. Bauman stated: I try to combine the experiences of all these three people; I try to enter the same room each time through a different door. This room is my current society. I entered it once through the door with the inscription ‘the Holocaust’, the other time through ‘ambivalence’, then through the issue of ‘mortality and immortality’, then through ‘moral issues’. Each time it is the same room, but as the light of a different

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colour turns on each time, its interior changes colour. (Bauman and Chmielewski 1995: 19)

We introduce this volume of selected writings by Bauman on the themes of culture and art – many of which are here published for the first time – by reference to this simile because it illustrates the hermeneutic methodology that sustained his sociological imagination across sixty-three years of writing on almost every aspect of the human condition (Davis 2020; Palmer et al. 2020). Simply put, Bauman steadfastly held to the conviction that ‘Human experience … is richer than any of its interpretations’ (Bauman 2008a: 240). The hermeneutic method seems to be most appropriate when analysing his own work too. His extraordinary productivity, together with the heterogeneous and multi-thematic nature of his writing, means that we each encounter Bauman for the first time by entering through a different door. Like the character Daniel Sempere in Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s Cemetery of Forgotten Books novels, the requirement to choose a single book to take away and cherish forever has led many to select Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) or Liquid Modernity (2000) as the light by which to illuminate the entire room of Bauman’s sociology. Thus, Zygmunt Bauman becomes the theorist of genocidal modernity, the postmodern thinker, the interpreter of liquid societies (see, e.g., Jacobsen 2017; Rattansi 2017; Davis and Tester 2010; Davis 2008; Jacobsen and Poder 2008; Elliott 2007; Blackshaw 2005; Tester 2004; Beilharz 2000; Smith 1999). Each perspective is valid; but each is partial (Campbell et al. 2018). Each cherished book in Bauman’s vast library provides a snapshot of his sociological imagination, but only in combination and constellation with all of the others might we truly engage in the never-ending process of its interpretation. As editors of Bauman’s selected writings, in this volume we have decided to ‘enter’ Bauman’s library through a door marked ‘Culture and Art’, two interrelated issues that were very much present in his analyses throughout his sociological career. Bauman stressed many times their significance to his sociological imagination, stating in conversation with Richard Kilminster and Ian Varcoe that culture (along with human suffering) had been one of the two most important subjects of his research (Bauman 1992a: 206), seen also in his betterknown reflections on the postmodern and liquid modern conditions (Bauman 2011b, 1997b). With respect to art, Bauman stated: I’m interested in art for as long as I remember. I was fascinated primarily by visual art. It is related to music and poetry, which differ



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from visual arts, in my opinion, in the material they process, while the goal is still the same … Art was not a separate field of interest for me, an addition to, or rest from, sociological prose. They were rather two ways of practicing the same profession, differing in the choice of raw material, but not products. (Bauman and Wasilewski 2013: 9)

Bauman’s reflections on culture and art were the inspiration – sometimes the foundation – for his analyses of morality and ethics (Bauman 2009), social and economic challenges (Bauman 2011a) and the condition of social theory (Bauman 2000). In what follows, we survey the selected writings on culture and art contained within this volume in order to reveal how the evolution of Bauman’s theory of culture and his reflections on art informed his sociological imagination. In introducing these unknown, or lesser-known, pieces of his writing – recently discovered as part of the archival Papers of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman project at the University of Leeds – we begin the process of integrating them into his wider sociology, in the hope of both aiding the reader and encouraging others to assist in this task. THEORIZING CULTURE Bauman’s systematic studies on culture began in Poland in the 1960s (Bauman 1965a, 1964), building upon his earliest writings in sociology of politics (Tester and Jacobsen 2005; Bauman 1972a [1960], 1959). Increasingly disillusioned with Soviet-style communism, as well as the politics of the Polish United Workers’ Party and what he lamented as a growing conservative inertia amongst Polish youth (Bauman 1966c; 1965b), Bauman began to play a significant role in the development of ‘humanist’ or ‘revisionist Marxism’ that preoccupied Eastern European intellectuals throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s (Wagner 2020; Brzeziński 2017; Satterwhite 1992; Bauman 1967a). Inspired in particular by the work of Antonio Gramsci (1971), this turn towards the more humanistic elements of the so-called ‘young Marx’ was to have a profound impact upon Bauman’s theory of culture. In rejecting the dogmas that had developed out of the Soviet form of ‘Scientific Marxism’, there began an intellectual search for the truly humanist values of ‘genuine socialism’ which resisted the idea that culture was merely part of wider socio-economic formations. Before his enforced exile from Poland in 1968,1 these developments led Bauman to write two significant books on the theme of culture – namely, Culture and Society: Preliminaries (1966a) and Sketches in the Theory of Culture (2018 [1968]).2 Despite his formal Marxist training, his studies on culture in these two books were

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inspired by many different sociological orientations: functionalism (Parsons 1951; Malinowski 1944), the school of culture and personality (Linton 1945; Benedict 1934), neo-evolutionism (White 1959; Steward 1955) and structuralism (Lévi-Strauss 1963). From this work, two main interpretations of culture were firmly established, and endured to shape his better-known writings throughout his English-language career (Brzeziński 2020a, 2018b). First, Bauman defines culture as the sphere of meanings, goals, values and behavioural patterns that are external to the members of a particular group and that exert a compelling influence upon them.3 This idea is expressed in his Polish paper ‘Culture and Society: Semantic and Genetic Connections’ (Bauman 1966b),4 republished in this volume in English for the first time. Here, Bauman distinguishes between ‘attributive’ and ‘distributive’ understandings of culture. In the former, culture is an attribute of human beings that distinguishes them from other species; and in the latter, Bauman stresses the role of culture in establishing differences between groups of various scales. He writes: ‘Culture is the collection of information that is created or borrowed, but always possessed by a given group of humans, transmitted reciprocally among members by means of symbols with meanings that are fixed for that group’ (p. 31). In this paper, Bauman analyses the roles and functions that culture, in its distributive sense, plays in relation to social structure. In curious sympathy with a more functionalist paradigm (Parsons 1951; Malinowski 1944), considering his own vehement critique of this form of sociology (Bauman 1976c), Bauman pointed out that culture is necessary for the harmonious cooperation of members of each society as it serves to unite them, define their identity, and establish common meanings.5 In a manner more multi-dimensional than the classical functionalist approach, however, Bauman argued that culture may fulfil its integrative role for a society only if that society provides conditions for the possibility of achieving such culturally motivated aspirations. As such, one of his main concerns at this time was the genesis, evolution and consequences of a progressive disjuncture between culture and society. He argued that this process reached its peak in modern industrial societies, in which both spheres become autonomous (Bauman 1966a), and he argued strongly for the need to reunite them both (Bauman 1966a, 1965a, 1964). Second, before his exile in 1968, Bauman also analysed culture in a manner somewhat contrary to the one outlined above. Contra functionalism, Bauman argued that culture is not concerned with the realization of social order, but rather its progressive transformation. In this, we begin to see the significant influence of Gramsci



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(1971) on Bauman’s theory of culture.6 Reflecting on the formative character of this influence, Bauman later remarked: ‘From Gramsci I learned about culture being a thorn in the side of “society” rather than a handmaiden of its monotonous order-reproducing routine; an adamantly and indefatigably mutinous agent, culture as propulsion to oppose and disrupt, a sharp edge pressed obstinately against what-already-is’ (Tester and Jacobsen 2005: 147). Like Gramsci, Bauman began to perceive of cultural emancipation as the foundation for social and political transformation (Bauman 1967a; see also Brzeziński 2017).7 The development of this second vision of culture was also accompanied by a critique of the positivist vision of human personalities and adopted a more humanistic approach, inspired by Abraham Maslow (1962; see also Bauman 1965a). This theme emerges in Bauman’s article ‘Notes Beyond Time’ (Bauman 1967b), first published in the Polish literary journal Twórczość and reproduced here in English translation. Bauman departs from the formal analytical language of mainstream sociology and develops a more literary voice (a stylistic shift more common in his later ‘liquid modern’ writings) in his criticisms of the ‘reductionist’ portrayal of the human individual in mainstream sociological theories, who emerges from their pages somehow devoid of morality, emotions and the ability to make choices. He writes: ‘Today for the majority of academics, academia is a terrain of escape from choice and risk, a protective fortress against human emotions and impulses, the terrain of monastic escapism from the multiplicity of meaning of human existence’ (pp. 38–9). As a result, Bauman not only emphasizes the need to rethink the sociological relationship between culture and personality, but also presents in embryo some of the ideas that would find their fuller expression in his later works on the commodification of human emotions (Bauman 2003), postmodern ethics (Bauman 1993) and the role of ambivalence (Bauman 1991). Bauman made several attempts to reconcile these two competing interpretations of culture in his own work, primarily through his encounter with the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss. The impact of these works upon Bauman’s sociology between his exile in 1968 and his arrival in Leeds in 1971 was so significant that he would later label this period ‘Lévi-Straussian’ (Bauman 2018 [1968]: 251),8 stating: ‘The biggest shock for me was … discovering culture as a process rather than as a body of material that was constant, or a set-up for self-stabilization and permanence … The obsessive, compulsive rush to structurization (organizing, ordering, rendering intelligible) of human ways of being-in-the-world appeared to be, from then on, a way of being for cultural phenomena’ (Bauman 2018 [1968]: 252–3;

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see also Beilharz 2000). Inspired by Lévi-Strauss, Bauman began to theorize culture in the context of the process of ‘structurization’, arguing that culture is a collection of behavioural, axiological and semantic references that provide a certain predictability to human action. He also stressed, however, that these structures do not limit human creativity, but are instead established, modified and shaped by it. Bauman’s dynamic vision of culture as process was thus inspired (and corrected) by Gramsci’s (1971) concept of praxis (Bauman 1973a; see also Kilminster 1979). This relationship between Marxism and structuralism is explored in ‘Marx and the Contemporary Theory of Culture’ (Bauman 1968), also included in this volume. This paper was originally prepared for a Paris symposium taking place on 8–10 May 1968 to consider Marx’s significance for social sciences and the humanities, and which coincided with the first wave of student revolts in the city.9 It is an important piece of writing because the core tension in Bauman’s theory of culture at that time emerges through a criticism of Lévi-Strauss’s conviction that it is the structure of human thinking, rather than the material conditions of human societies, which should provide the basis for the sociological imagination. Remaining true to his Marxist-humanist beliefs, Bauman writes: ‘without renouncing any of Lévi-Strauss’s methodological discoveries, we must try to avoid the blind alley into which he was led by his philosophy. We must designate the reality in relation to which culture – that specifically human aspect of active existence – functions as a sign’ (p. 61). This affinity towards structuralism endured after his arrival in Leeds. For example, in his Inaugural Lecture titled ‘Culture, Values and Science of Society’ (1972b), republished here, Bauman presents structuralism as the promising way between the Scylla of positivism and the Charybdis of ethnomethodology. Bauman argues that a positivist approach failed to reflect the creative capacity of human beings and, in stressing the structural, institutional and axiological conditioning of social life, led only to the further entrenchment and legitimacy of the status quo. Such an approach was contrary to the transformative potential of culture, which Bauman learned from Gramsci. Ethnomethodology, on the other hand, presented for Bauman only the illusory portrait of human beings as somehow free to shape social reality without restraint. Since both approaches concentrated on a value-free analysis of the rules of interaction constituted within a society, Bauman found no fertile soil in which the seeds of social criticism could grow.10 It was in seeking a way forward beyond both approaches that Bauman developed his wellknown theory of culture as praxis (Bauman 1973a). He wrote that human beings ‘overcome their own antinomy only by recreating it .



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and re-building the setting from which it is generated. The agony of culture is therefore doomed to eternal continuation; by the same token, man, since endowed with the capacity of culture, is doomed to explore, to be dissatisfied with his world, to destroy and create’ (Bauman 1973a: 57). Bauman’s approach was highly innovative, pre-figuring the later celebrated work of Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) structural constructivism and Anthony Giddens’s (1984) theory of structuration,11 as well as proving to be significant for the development of critical cultural studies. The theory of culture that Bauman developed in the second half of the 1970s was both a study of social transformations and the method best positioned to shape their direction. Influenced by Ernst Bloch (1986), Karl Mannheim (1991) and Herbert Marcuse (1972), Bauman’s (1976b) study of social transformations led him to develop a vision of socialism as ‘the active utopia’, with ‘aspects of culture’ enabling both a constant relativization of the status quo and critical reflections on its possible alternatives. In this context, he wrote: ‘Utopia shares with the totality of culture the quality – to paraphrase Santayana – of a knife with the edge pressed against the future. They constantly cause the reaction of the future with the present, and thereby produce the compound known as human history’ (Bauman 1976b: 12). His Gramscian view of culture is still further revealed by the idea of an ‘active’ utopia standing in opposition to any ‘blueprint’ of the future (Jacoby 2005).12 An ‘active’ utopia is a continuously moving horizon, which shapes the courses of actions driving social transformation but that is never to be reached (Bauman and Tester 2001: 49).13 This is why Bauman’s theory of culture is best captured by the idea of it as ‘a thorn in the side of society’. As he explains: ‘Culture is a permanent revolution of sorts. To say “culture” is to make another attempt to account for the fact that the human world (the world moulded by the humans and the worlds which mould the humans) is perpetually, unavoidably and unremediably noch nicht geworden (not-yet-accomplished), as Ernst Bloch beautifully put it’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 32). Bauman’s study of the methods best positioned to direct social transformations was undertaken principally via his exploration of different hermeneutic traditions (Bauman 1978). At that time, and in subsequent writings on the matter (Bauman 1997a, 1989, 1987), Bauman argued that the aim of the process of understanding is not to reach an indisputable, invariable truth. Like an ‘active’ utopia, understanding is also a horizon towards which we must continually strive, rather than a final destination to be reached (Davis 2020). In ‘Jorge Luis Borges, or Why Understanding Is Not What It Seems

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to Be’, published here for the first time,14 Bauman deploys Borges’s (2000) story Averroës’s Search to meditate on the problem of understanding. He wrote: However powerful, the intellect enters its task neither innocent nor impartial; it sets about its work loaded with its own past, with some skills sharped [sic] up in the course of its previous jobs, and other faculties dormant or atrophied by the lack of use … Our past – our accumulated tradition – our assimilated experience – is our power and our burden. It must be both at the same time. We can get rid of the constraints it imposes only together with the very capacity of understanding, of acting, of living. (p. 91)

A very important aspect of Bauman’s reflections on hermeneutics was also his conviction that it is not only intellectuals, but all members of any given society, who ought to participate in the process of mutually exploring meaning and understanding. In this context, he praises Jürgen Habermas’s (1987, 1984) theory of communicative action and, partly inspired by the German philosopher, develops his own idea of ‘the culture of dialogue’. For Bauman, this was a general frame through which both communal understanding and patterns of solidarity and collaboration could be achieved. Bauman adhered to this polyvocal vision of culture and language many times throughout his work (Bauman 2016, 2004; see also Brzeziński 2020b; Dawson 2017), ultimately returning to its importance in his final book published shortly after his death (Bauman 2017). From the early 1980s, Bauman’s theory of culture was interpreted through his wider analysis of modernity (Rattansi 2017; Elliott 2007; Beilharz 2000; Smith 1999). Simply put, culture became a prism through which he analysed the genesis and metamorphoses of modern societies. Inspired by Ernest Gellner’s (1983) distinction between ‘wild cultures’ and ‘garden cultures’,15 Bauman argued in Legislators and Interpreters (1987) that the origin of modernity was motivated by a desire to establish a new structural, institutional and axiological ‘will to order’ to meet criteria of rationality (Davis 2008; Beilharz 2000). For both Gellner and Bauman, modernity’s principal strategy for social transformation was to deploy culture for nationstate building. In ‘Assimilation into Exile: The Jew as a Polish Writer’ (Bauman 1996), included in this volume, Bauman describes this strategy as follows: ‘It encompassed a few generations spanning the stormy, short period needed for modern states to entrench themselves in their historically indispensable, yet transitory, nationalist forms’ (p. 120). Here, Bauman analyses the issue of the congruence between



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culture and the state through the prism of the rebirth of the Polish state, and the history of Polish–Jewish relations, in the beginning of the twentieth century (see Wagner 2020; Cheyette 2020; J. Bauman 1988). The issue of nationalism was, however, only one aspect of Bauman’s analysis of the modern desire to order the world according to the imperatives of objective rationality. Drawing variously upon the work of Michel Foucault (1977), Sigmund Freud (1962) and Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (2002 [1944]), Bauman focused on the disciplinary and surveilling practices of modern states aimed at the subordination of individuals to a rational order. In his most well-known books of the period (Bauman 1991, 1989, 1987), described by Dennis Smith (1999) as his ‘modern trilogy’, Bauman argued that the modern interpretation of utopia as a blueprint for a perfectly ordered and rational society provided the ideological foundations for the horrors of totalitarian states. In his analysis of the Holocaust, Bauman (1989) showed how the idea of a ‘garden culture’ was realized in Nazi Germany by interpreting Jewish people, along with many other marginalized groups, as so many ‘weeds’ that needed to be dug out and disposed of in order to realize a vision for a perfectly planned and ordered Aryan society. At the same time as reflecting on the traumas of modernity’s ‘will to order’,16 Bauman (1997b, 1993, 1992a) was ruminating upon the dramatic cultural changes under way in the second half of the twentieth century, which led to the emergence of an entirely new cultural condition: postmodernity.17 Initially enthused by the postmodern promise of transcending modern cultural categories and classifications in a riot of ambivalence and individual choice, over the course of the 1990s Bauman would become gradually disillusioned with a social transformation that seemed to be an apology for moral relativism and hedonistic consumerism. On the one hand, he was hopeful for the new opportunities that emerged for individuals after their (apparent) liberation from the structural and normative determinations of modernity. One of the most significant was a chance to develop autonomous moral responsibility in relation to what he called ‘postmodern ethics’ (Bauman 1995, 1993). On the other hand, he lamented what he saw as a loss of moral engagement with and responsibility for the Other, as postmodern consumerism appeared to be creating a culture of only self-regarding individuals (Bauman 1999c, 1998b, 1997b). In the Polish-language paper ‘Beyond the Limits of Interpretative Anarchy’ (Bauman 1997a), published here in English for the first time, Bauman engages with the fields of hermeneutics and literary theory to demonstrate his view on the postmodern moment: ‘The specifically late modern, or post-modern

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– and probably without precedent – aspect of the pluralism of today’s world lies in the frail and meagre, shallow and brittle institutional roots of differentiation – and thus the resulting blurring, fluidity and relative short-livedness of the identities associated with different ways of life’ (p. 155).18 Given this antinomy, Bauman ceased to identify with postmodernity and questioned its utility for sociological analysis, finally refuting the analytical grasp of any ‘post-X’ conceptualization for social transformations still unfolding (Bauman and Gane 2004).19 In postmodernity’s wake, as is well known, he preferred to describe our contemporary cultural condition by coining the term “liquid modernity” (Bauman 2000). Bauman used this analytical frame as a heuristic device that deployed the metaphor of ‘liquidity’ to develop further his analyses of society as characterized by constantly accelerating cultural change (Bauman 2011b, 2008c, 2005; Bauman and Leoncini 2018). For example, in ‘The Spectre of Barbarism – Then and Now’ (originally published in French (Bauman 2009), but republished here in English for the first time),20 Bauman writes: Liquid modern culture has no ‘people’ to ‘cultivate’. It has instead clients to seduce. And unlike its solid modern predecessor, it no longer wishes to work itself, the sooner the better, out of a job by accomplishing that mission and bringing its task to conclusion. Its job now is to render its own survival permanent and infinite – through temporalizing all aspects of life of its former wards, now reborn as clients, and condemning them to eternal inconclusiveness. (p. 197)21

This quote neatly captures Bauman’s view that culture in liquid modernity is a constantly expanding smorgasbord of different norms, practices and beliefs. Across many publications in this ‘liquid’ period, Bauman analysed the ‘mosaic’ character of contemporary identities, and interpreted today’s world as ‘the archipelago of diasporas’ (Bauman 2011b, 2004; Bauman and Mauro 2016).22 What is often missed by those who encounter Bauman only in this later period of his writing – and what we hope to have signalled for the reader here – is the remarkable consistency that endures in his theory of culture across six decades of sociological thinking. Culture, at the same time both Promethean and reactionary, was capable of driving progressive social transformations and imposing order-building categories of ‘us and them’. It enabled the realization of, and the retreat from, cultural pluralism (Bauman 2017, 2016, 2004). Bauman has shown how such factors as the ‘migration panic’ intensifying from the mid-2010s (Bauman 2016), social



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inequalities (Bauman 2011a) and global economic crises (Bauman and Rovirosa-Madrazo 2010) have each negatively affected attitudes towards ‘cultural diversity’ and ‘cosmopolitan identities’. His last book – posthumously published – was a powerful statement on this very issue, as he described the immanent dangers of a return to the modernist vision of culture in his analysis of ‘retrotopia’ (Bauman 2017). By this, he means to capture the use of nostalgia as a mechanism for coping with the uncertainties of liquid life by seeking refuge in the quest to revive so many ‘imagined communities’ now seen to have been somehow lost along the way. Throughout his career, Bauman returned time and again to the idea of culture as dialogue, even polylogue. He believed ardently that both interpersonal relations and new political instruments – which he always imagined as needing to be supranational entities – should be founded on this open and inclusive concept. His thoughts on this issue are expressed in a Polish-language paper ‘On Love and Hate … In the Footsteps of Barbara Skarga’23 (Bauman 2015,24 available here in English for the first time). Inspired by Boris Akunin’s (2012) novel Аристономия [Aristonomia], Bauman introduced a new concept: the ‘aretonomic personality’. He derives this term from the Greek words arête (meaning ‘moral excellence’) and nomos (meaning ‘law’ or ‘custom’) in order to describe a set of attitudes and dispositions that include: an awareness of the need to act, reliability, balanced self-assessment, honour, responsibility, and empathy for the Other. Bauman stresses, as he did many times in his post-2000 writings (Bauman and Raud 2015; Bauman and Donskis 2013), those factors that significantly hinder the development of such virtues. The more he concentrated on these obstacles, the more he emphasized the need to counteract them. In somewhat utilitarian liberal terms (Davis 2008), he states in that article: ‘A good society has many attributes, but among them I would grant primary place to ensuring that the greatest possible number of human beings that comprise it would want to be virtuous, and that the greatest possible number is given the opportunity to do so’ (p. 221). As we hope to have shown, Bauman’s theory of culture has explored a multifarious range of social and political issues, whilst remaining faithful to core ideas and principles across six decades of sociological analysis.25 The most steadfast principle informing his theory of culture is its Gramscian nature, which – to repeat – he called ‘a sharp edge pressed obstinately against what-already-is’ (Tester and Jacobsen 2005: 147).26

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ARTISTIC IMAGINATION As Wolf Lepenies (1992: 1) put it, from its inception as a selfconscious pursuit in the nineteenth century, sociology constituted a ‘third culture’ that ‘has oscillated between a scientific orientation, which has led it to ape the natural sciences, and a hermeneutic attitude, which has shifted the discipline towards the realm of literature’. The sociological and artistic imaginations have been historically intertwined, at once reciprocal and conflicting, complementary and tensional (Davis 2013; Nisbet 1976). This intertwining is especially apparent in the work of Bauman (Jacobsen and Marshman 2008; Tester 2004), who understood sociology itself as inescapably embedded in the tension-laden process of culture. Sociology is not a neutral pursuit at a remove from its object, but is itself a cultural form in which human experience is interpreted and through which sociality is constituted. As Bauman (1992a: 216) put it, sociology is an expression of ‘the exercise of human spirituality, the constant reinterpreting of human activity in the course of activity itself’. It is in this way that sociology has an elective affinity with art. For our purposes, we identify three principal ways in which Bauman engaged with an artistic imagination. First, he wrote extensively on the relationship between sociology and the arts, especially literature (Bauman and Mazzeo 2016). Second, art and literature serve a heuristic purpose for his sociological imagination, enabling him better to explore and to communicate a range of sociological problems. And third, for Bauman, sociology and art were invaluable in the discovery and opening up of human possibilities for a better life for all. In sum, Bauman shares a great deal with Griselda Pollock’s (2007) view that one cannot conceive of practising art history without the aids of sociology, just as sociology must try to grasp that ungraspable element of the human experience expressed by the objects of art, its affects and imagination. In what follows, we will elaborate upon these three points in reference to those selected writings included in this volume to show the multi-dimensionality of his interest in art, including literature, photography, painting, sculpture, theatre and performance.27 In Culture and Society: Preliminaries, published in Polish, Bauman (1966a: 30) states: ‘a scientist has the best chance to create things that are both essentially new and opening new cognitive perspectives when he/she goes beyond one discipline and thus frees himself from the institutionalized routine of sacrificing invention to methodological conformism’. Bauman was faithful to this approach throughout his career, deriving his ‘way of being’ a sociologist from a conviction that truly understanding the human experience ought not to be



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constrained by artificially erected barriers between academic disciplines. This crucial lesson was learned from his Polish tutors, Julian Hochfeld and Stanisław Ossowski, for whom he frequently expressed his gratitude. Literature, he was fond of saying, provides a useful model for practising sociological reflection (Bauman and Mazzeo 2016; Bauman et al. 2014; Bauman and Tester 2001: 22–4). In ‘A Few (Erratic) Thoughts on the Morganatic Liaison of Theory and Literature’ (Bauman 2010), published here in English for the first time, Bauman makes reference to Milan Kundera (2006, 1988) in pointing out that it is the novel that is able to capture both the irreducible complexity and ambiguity of the human experience. In a novel, depictions of macro social structures and processes may go hand in hand with intimate psychological portraits of individual characters, infused with philosophical and anthropological sensibilities. As Bauman states: ‘Novel-writing unveils before you the multiplicity of meaning of your world and your being-within-it, in order to give meta-freedom a chance, the only one among countless forms of freedom that you cannot surrender without surrendering your humanity: namely, the freedom of choice between self-fulfilment and self-destruction of warnings/prophecies/predictions’ (p. 211). There is no doubt that Bauman’s way of practising sociology as ‘an ongoing dialogue with human experience’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 40) was aimed at achieving all these purposes. It is also worth noting that, when asked which books he wished to be marooned with upon a desert island, Bauman chose no canonical work of sociology, but rather selected novels by Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Robert Musil and Jorge Luis Borges (Bauman and Tester 2001: 23–4). Bauman also drew insightful comparisons between sociology and photography. This was the field of art that crossed into his personal life, and he spent the early 1980s as a semi-professional photographer. His photographic portraits,28 Yorkshire’s landscapes and the ‘palimpsest’ nature of the urban environment29 were exhibited in galleries. Bauman later reflected that his photography had been an artistic anticipation of his subsequent works on postmodernity: ‘Today, years later, I think that in photography I was looking for what was also in my “academic” reflection, not yet able to express it in words’ (Bauman et al. 2009: 91). Our research in the Papers of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman at the University of Leeds discovered scattered notes and short essays devoted to the relationship between photography and his sociological imagination. We have collated and edited these fragments into a single piece that we have called ‘Thinking Photographically’ in deference to one of his books (Bauman and May 2001). In his introductions to exhibitions and his correspondence

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with galleries, Bauman elaborates on the history of his engagement with photography, the way in which he perfected his technical skills, and his reflections on masters of the craft (amongst whom he includes Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész and Bill Brandt). Consistent with his belief in the function of sociology, Bauman notes that photography too ought to ‘defamiliarize the familiar’, seeking to reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary, and vice versa. He writes: ‘In our daily bustle, we have rarely time, or strength, or will to stop, to look around, to think. We pass by things giving them no chance to puzzle, baffle or just amuse. Photography may make up for our daily neglect. It may sharpen our eyesight, bring into focus things previously unnoticed, transform our experiences into our knowledge’ (p. 106). The second way in which the artistic imagination entangles with Bauman’s sociology is that products of the former serve as a heuristic device for the latter. There are numerous examples, especially in his ‘liquid’ writings, where a work of art has inspired a sociological discovery, and where a social process is best described through reference to specific works of art. For example, in a conversation with Izabela Wagner (2020: 341), Bauman offers the following explanation for the genesis of his book Modernity and Ambivalence (Bauman 1991): I did not think about this book at all. I did not plan it at all. I went to a concert at Harrogate … and Yoyo Ma was playing Beethoven sonatas on the cello. Yoyo Ma is a great virtuoso, but what I thought [at that moment] had nothing to do with the sonatas he performed. I came out of this concert with a clear plan for a book about which I never thought deliberately. Of course, the elements were already in my head, but they connected at that concert.

Modernity and Ambivalence contains many examples from art and literature, chiefly the works of Franz Kafka,30 which are called upon to illustrate changing attitudes towards ambiguity. This issue, one of the major components of Bauman’s sociological imagination (Junge 2008), is also apparent in a 1995 essay ‘Einstein Meets Magritte: Postmodernity Is Born’, published here for the first time.31 Bauman has described René Magritte as ‘the greatest philosopher among painters and the greatest painter among philosophers’ (Bauman et al. 2009: 93), an artist whose works anticipated changes in European culture by foregrounding the contingent nature of understanding and reality. Bauman writes of Magritte’s paintings that



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they invite the viewers to question the meaning of any ‘reality’, and force them to see into the precariousness of any existence, normally taken as unproblematic. Each object suggests the possibility of being something else than it is, or finding itself in a different place – and by the same token it reveals the uncertainty, ‘merely possible’ status of all others, even the most familiar and comfortingly ‘natural’ shape or location. (p. 115)

Given what we have learned about Bauman’s theory of culture – that the world we inhabit is but one possibility, and thus (qua Gramsci) can always be other than it is – this affinity with Magritte’s playful undermining of comfortable realities can be seen in a new light. Bauman explored these ideas further in a paper titled ‘On Art, Death and Postmodernity – and What They Do To Each Other’,32 originally published in a book released by the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art (Bauman 1998a). Referring to artworks by Piet Mondrian, Alexander Calder, Damien Hirst and Joanna Przybyła, Bauman analyses the way that twentieth-century art appears to struggle with ideas of death and infinity. Echoing his distinction between modes of intellectuals (Bauman 1987), he notes the significant difference between modern and postmodern artists. With regard to the former, he writes: ‘the modern (and particularly the modernist) artists presumed a demand for association with the extratemporal, and through it – with immortality itself. In this one respect at least their art was not revolutionary at all’ (p. 163). Mondrian’s rectangular compositions, whilst in other respects avant-garde and innovative, are seen by Bauman as an exemplar of this modernist strategy. In postmodern artworks, the idea of immortality is simply replaced with the idea of constant movement, contingency and the inevitable finiteness of life. On the one hand, this is an interesting essay on the evolution of styles in art; and, on the other, it illustrates the profound changes taking place within European culture at least since the early twentieth century, especially as related to the themes of transience and duration (Bauman 2011b, 2005, 1992a). The essay neatly captures, therefore, the entanglement of Bauman’s sociological and artistic imaginations. The third expression of art and sociology in Bauman’s writing is that they both spring from the same well of existential determinants that generate the human-made world. They each relativize the present, pulling apart ‘commonsensical thinking’ (Bauman 1976c) and encouraging the search for alternatives to the status quo in the hope of enriching the world for all. For example, in the Afterword to Liquid Modernity, Bauman (2000: 203) points out what sociologists can learn from poets:

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we need to pierce the walls of the obvious and self-evident, of that prevailing ideological fashion of the day whose commonality is taken for the proof of its sense. Demolishing such walls is as much the sociologist’s as the poet’s calling, and for the same reason: the walling-up of possibilities belies human potential while obstructing the disclosure of its bluff.33

Bauman also assigns a significant role to theatre in strengthening humanity’s self-reflexivity, creativity and agency.34 In ‘Actors and Spectators’, written in 2004 and published here for the first time, Bauman outlines four characteristics of theatre that enable it to fulfil this role. First, the stage is ‘an empty space’ where the process of creatio ex nihilo takes place thanks to the agency of actors. Second, theatrical plays reveal, on the one hand, the contingency of reality, and, on the other, its human origin. Third, theatrical events are watched live in all their immediacy, giving insight into the intense nature of social transformations. And fourth, theatrical plays reveal all of our continuous efforts at each and every moment just to construct (and hopefully reconstruct) the human world. ‘Such qualities’, he writes: make of the theatre a laboratory in which realities of daily life may be scanned and scrutinized at close quarters and in which their inner mechanism may be torn wide open so that the intricate connections nowhere else visible as vividly may be brought into light; and such qualities are special privileges of the theatre nowhere else to be found in such concentration. (pp. 174–5)

In ‘Listening to the Past, Talking to the Past’, first published in a catalogue for the White Cube Gallery in London, Bauman (2008b) again emphasizes the urgent need to go beyond the routines of everyday life in order to question its meaning. He writes: Occasionally … by design or by default, visiting a gallery brings rewards greater than those routinely bargained for: suddenly, we are confronted with a great work of art, the creation of a great artist … The work of an artist who has managed to give visible and tangible shape to our hopes – and to our suspicion of their futility and our fear of their being dashed. (pp. 180–1)

Mirosław Bałka, the internationally celebrated Polish sculptor, is cited by Bauman (2007) as one such artist.35 For his 2003 exhibition ‘Lebensraum’, held at the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw, Bałka presented two objects in the form of gravestones: one protruded from a



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window, intended to evoke associations with a trampoline; the second was turned upside down and placed on the ceiling. The ambiguous meaning of these objects was deepened further by their illumination as sources of light. In this way, Bałka engaged the audience in a dialogue on the relationship between the past and the future, life and death, as well as with everyday life and festivities. Bauman later analysed Bałka’s 2009 exhibition, ‘How It Is’, presented at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London. The famous installation took the form of a 13-metre high and 30-metre long black container, creating total darkness inside. Bauman (2011a: 69) writes of his experience within the installation as follows: ‘When you are sunk in the void of the great unknown, freezing mind and senses, shared humanity is your lifeboat; that warmth of human togetherness is your salvation. This is at any rate what Mirosław Bałka’s oeuvre told me and taught me, and for which I am grateful.’ Bauman not only devoted a great deal of content to his reflections on the mutual dependencies between sociological and artistic imaginations, but also gave many of his writings the form of a ‘blurred genre’ (Geertz 1980) between scientific and artistic discourse.36 On the one hand, the essayistic and conversational style that he developed in his postmodern and liquid modern periods helped to reflect the contingent nature of our contemporary condition. On the other hand, this way of writing also grew out of his literary ambitions, which accompanied him throughout all of his life and are apparent in the selected writings collated here. Bauman’s reflections on art and literature, we might say, are themselves works of art. SUMMARY This introduction has synthesized Bauman’s reflections on culture and art with reference to those unknown or lesser-known papers selected for this volume. Bauman defined culture throughout most of his long sociological career not only as a system, or as a repository of values, norms and symbols that differentiate one society from another, but also as a thorn in the side of society. His theory of culture as praxis, coupled with his advocacy for ‘active’ utopias, stressed the continuous – essentially endless – process of striving to reduce the gap between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ (Bauman 1976b, 1973a). In so striving, Bauman frequently highlighted the invaluable role of art in relativizing present reality in order to open up new spheres of possibility for social transformation. In this, he shared Kundera’s (1988: 160) belief that art is ‘like Penelope, it undoes each night the tapestry that the theologians, philosophers, and learned men have woven the day before’. We hope that readers of this volume of selected writings

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will see how some of his more celebrated concepts and ideas, as well as the stylistic features characteristic of his writing about ‘liquid modernity’, were already pregnant within papers published far earlier, including in his Polish-language writing. With great insight, Bauman wrote for over six decades both on theories of culture and on great works of art across a number of different crafts and disciplines. What is more, he interpreted these artworks in the context of dramatic cultural and social transformations that took place within both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To close, we return to Gustav Ichheiser’s simile with which we opened our Introduction, in order to acknowledge that, if all we have achieved here is to offer another new door, perhaps previously hidden from view, through which to enter the vast library of Bauman’s writing, then we hope at least that the pages which now follow will flick a different switch and shine a new light upon a once familiar room. NOTES 1 For more on this traumatic period for Zygmunt and his family, see J. Bauman (1988) and Wagner (2020). 2 Sketches in the Theory of Culture (2018) was originally to be released in 1968. Its print run was, however, destroyed by Polish authorities as part of a series of repressions against Bauman during the ‘March events’ (Głuchowski and Polonsky 2009). For almost five decades, the book was considered to be irreversibly lost. But, remarkably, one copy survived in the form of an uncorrected set of proofs, which had been secretly hidden in one of Warsaw’s libraries (see Brzeziński 2018a: viii–x). 3 It is worth noting that, in many respects, this particular understanding of culture resembled Émile Durkheim’s concept of ‘social fact’ (Durkheim 1982), which would be strongly criticized by Bauman in subsequent years (Bauman 1976c). 4 This paper is a shorter version of the first chapter of Bauman’s book Kultura i spoleczenstwo: preliminaria [Culture and Society: Preliminaries] (1966a). 5 In Sketches in the Theory of Culture, Bauman (2018 [1968]: 58) wrote: ‘Culture transforms amorphous chaos into a system of probabilities that simultaneously is predictable and can be manipulated – predictable precisely because it can be manipulated. The chaos of experience transforms into a consistent system of meanings, and the collection of individuals into a social system with a stable structure. Culture is the liquidation of the indeterminacy of the human situation (or, at the very least, its reduction) by eliminating some possibilities for the sake of others.’ 6 Bauman stated that it was encountering Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks



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(Gramsci 1971) that enabled him to save the ethical core of Marxism despite the deepening disappointment of the communist regime (Bauman and Tester 2001: 25–6), and that allowed him to change his view on the role of culture too (Tester and Jacobsen 2005: 147–8). Bauman’s essay on Gramsci (Bauman 1963) will appear in English for the first time in a forthcoming volume in this series. 7 Bauman revealed his affinity for Gramsci’s philosophy in an earlier lecture on Camus’s The Rebel (1956). Bauman commented on this issue about fifty years later, stating: ‘I suppose it was from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks which I read a year or two after absorbing Camus’s cogito “I rebel, therefore I am”, that I learned how to rebel armed with sociological tools and how to make sociological vocation into a life of rebellion. Gramsci translated to me Camus’s philosophy of human condition into a philosophy of human practice’ (Bauman 2008a: 233). See also Tester (2002). 8 Bauman pointed out in this text that the traces of the ‘Lévi-Straussian’ period are easily detected even in his most recent writings. One such paper is his article ‘Spectre of Barbarism – Then and Now’, included in this volume. 9 Attendees and contributors at this conference included: Raymond Aron, Charles Frankel, Mihailo Marković, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Abdallah Laroui, Anouar Abdel-Malek, Maxime Rodinson and Eric Hobsbawm. The conference was followed by the publication of a book: Marx and Contemporary Scientific Thought (UNESCO 1969). For more on proceedings of the conference, see Eric Hobsbawm’s paper ‘The Sixties’, published in his Interesting Times (2002: 246–62). 10 Bauman’s fiercely critical view of ethnomethodology was elaborated in his article ‘On the Philosophical Status of Ethnomethodology’, which was published in the Sociological Review (Bauman 1973b: 5–23). Bauman charged ethnomethodology with over-individualization that, in his view, failed to appreciate the power structures restraining men and women from freely defining and redefining the meaning of their situation. See also Tester (2018). For posthumous criticisms of Bauman’s position, see Brooker (2017) and Morriss and Smith (2017). 11 Both Bauman’s theory of ‘culture as praxis’, as well as Bourdieu’s structural constructivism and Giddens’s theory of structuration, were interpreted by Margaret Archer as the exemplifications of ‘central conflation’ (Archer 1988). She appreciated that all these visions are free from reductionism in both an upwards and downwards sense of this category, but she accused them at the same time of assuming the interdependency of agency and structure. In opposition to the concept of ‘duality of structure’, Archer would develop the idea of ‘analytical dualism’. 12 Jacoby (2005) distinguished two types of utopia: ‘blueprint’ and ‘iconoclastic’. The former is characterized by very detailed descriptions of the imagined order, whereas the latter is deprived of any concrete vision of the future. Bauman referred to Jacoby’s reflections on this matter in his

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book Living on Borrowed Time (Bauman and Rovirosa-Madrazo 2010: 51–2). 13 The concept of utopia in Bauman’s writings is analysed inter alia in the following papers: Aidnik and Jacobsen (2017), Featherstone (2010) and Jacobsen (2008). 14 This paper was written in 1976, two years before Bauman’s book Hermeneutics and Social Science was published. Bauman included some fragments of this article in the later book, but most of his analyses presented in this paper have been previously unknown to the reader. 15 Bauman, following Gellner, also claimed that premodern ‘wild cultures’ ‘reproduce themselves from generation to generation without conscious design, supervision, surveillance or special nutrition’ (Gellner 1983: 50). 16 Some aspects of these metamorphoses were analysed much earlier by Bauman during the Polish period of his career. For example, in Sketches in the Theory of Culture (2018 [1968]: 117), he claimed: ‘we live in an age, that seems, for the first time in human history, to acknowledge cultural multiplicity as an innate and fixed feature of the world – one which gives rise to new forms of identity that are at ease with plurality, like a fish in water – and even boasts of the fact that it not only discovered, but even accepted as a truly human state and mode of being both noble and dignified, this indeterminacy of the human condition as humanity’s calling’. 17 Bauman was very quickly ranked among the most outstanding intellectuals identified with this orientation, along with Jean-François Lyotard (1984), Jean Baudrillard (1994), Richard Rorty (1989), Fredric Jameson (1991) and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987, 1983). What is more, Bauman was greatly appreciated as much by intellectuals as by his constantly expanding readership (Smith 1999). 18 Bauman also explored this theme of ambiguity in relation to art in his articles ‘Einstein Meets Magritte: Postmodernity Is Born’ and ‘On Art, Death and Postmodernity – and What They Do To Each Other’, which are both included in this volume and discussed later in this Introduction. 19 Bauman presented the reasons for this shift in his conversation with Keith Tester, as follows: ‘You may lean over backwards to deny it, to pile up reservations, but nothing doing: the word “postmodernity” implies the end of modernity, leaving modernity behind, being on the other shore. But this is blatantly untrue. We are as modern as ever, obsessively “modernizing” everything we can lay our hands on’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 97). 20 The original English version of this paper was found in the Papers of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman at the University of Leeds. The French version was published in 2009 in the journal Les Cahiers Européens de l’Imaginaire. 21 This passage appears verbatim, or in a slightly amended form, in a number of books published during Bauman’s writing on liquid modernity. For an account of why repetition matters in the work of Zygmunt Bauman, see Tester (2018).



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22 Bauman’s thoughts were variously inspired by Paul Virilio’s (1999) vision of ‘the end of geography’, Ulf Hannerz’s (1996) idea of ‘global ecumene’, and Manuel Castells’s (1996) theory of the ‘space of flows’. 23 Barbara Skarga (1919–2009) was one of the most prominent Polish philosophers in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, and a professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Science. She was an expert on Polish and French positivist philosophy, metaphysics, and the history of ideas, as well as socio­ political and ethical thought. 24 This article was published on the basis of Bauman’s lecture delivered in Warsaw at the Royal Baths Park to commemorate the life and legacy of Barbara Skarga (see note 23). 25 Both in the Introduction to the second edition of Culture as Praxis (Bauman 1999a [1973]), and in the Afterword to Sketches in the Theory of Culture (Bauman 2018 [1968]), Bauman emphasized many similarities between the various stages of the development of his theory of culture. 26 Bauman’s theory of culture reflected this. In his conversation with Keith Tester, he stated: ‘If … we agree to use the concept of culture in the way here suggested, then theory which takes culture seriously, as the specifically human mode of being, cannot but be a “critical” theory’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 33). 27 Bauman also referred in his papers to such branches of art as opera (Bauman 2011a), film (Bauman 1988) and music (Bauman 1962). Bauman was engaged as a commentator in two movies: The Trouble with Being Human These Days (2013) by Bartosz Dziadosz, and The Swedish Theory of Love (2015) by Erik Gandini. 28 A small selection of Bauman’s photographs is included in this volume. 29 When working on themes of post-industrialism and the reconstitution of the British class system in the early 1980s (Bauman 1982), Bauman was also documenting photographically the post-industrial landscape of northern England. This is best demonstrated by the photographs that he contributed to Alan Wolinski’s (1984) report on life in a 1980s housing estate in east Leeds. 30 In chapter 5 of Modernity and Ambivalence (Bauman 1991), Franz Kafka is positioned as a key protagonist in the drama of Jewish assimilation. In a similar vein, in his implicitly autobiographical essay ‘Assimilation into Exile’, which is included in this volume, Bauman situates Jewish poets writing in the Polish language – including Julian Tuwim, Adolf Rudnicki and Julian Stryjkowski – in relation to East-Central European Jewry and Polish nationalism. 31 The piece is an essay discovered in the Papers of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman at the University of Leeds. Bauman attached this essay to a letter responding to an invitation to participate in an interdisciplinary conference on Einstein and Magritte. A different article by Bauman (1999b) was included in a book series to commemorate this event, but it bears no resemblance to the essay included in this volume.

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32 Five years before this article was published, Bauman released a separate book on the changing attitude towards death and immortality in the twentieth century (Bauman 1992b). 33 This issue is present in some of the papers intended for future volumes of Bauman’s selected writings. For example, in an unpublished lecture dating from the 1970s called ‘Is the Science of the Possible Possible?’, Bauman writes: ‘rather than being obsessed with its image of science pure and simple, students of the social should not be ashamed of the intimate affinity of their work to that of art: they should summon the courage necessary to experiment, to devise new, unheard-of forms of human life, which may reveal and bring to blossom unsuspected aspects of the rich human personality. Like the artist broadens and enriches our aesthetic sensibility and opens our eyes to the kind of beauty we would otherwise never suspect, the student of the social may open our eyes to the kinds of life we would otherwise hardly suspect, and thanks to that he may widen our horizons in such a way that our “reality”, to which we are routinely exposed, is reduced to its true historical proportions. In other words, the student of the social may enhance our freedom of choice and action, transforming into the objects of our conscious activity even such elements of reality which otherwise would be seen by us as immune to our action or not presenting a “realistic” choice.’ The full text of this lecture is stored in the Papers of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman at the University of Leeds. 34 Bauman claimed that this statement is by no means applicable to the entire history of theatrical art. He begins his article with an analysis of the concept of theatre by Edward Gordon Craig (2009 [1911]), which he suggests contradicts the vision of art as leading to an awakening and strengthening of human self-reflection. 35 A transcript of a series of conversations between Zygmunt Bauman and Mirosław Bałka (2013) that took place in Leeds in 2011 was published in Polish in a book titled Bauman/Bałka. 36 As far as Bauman’s writing style is concerned, see Palmer et al. (2020); Campbell et al. (2018); Davis (2013, 2008); Bauman (2008a); Jacobsen and Marshman (2008); Tester (2004); Beilharz (2000); Nijhoff (1998).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aidnik, M. and Jacobsen, M. H. (2017) ‘Not Yet: Probing the Potentials and Problems in the Utopian Understanding of Ernst Bloch and Zygmunt Bauman’. In Jacobsen (2017: 136–62). Akunin, B. (2012) Аристономия [Aristonomia]. Moscow: Zaharov. Archer, M. (1988) Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory. Cambridge University Press. Baudrillard, J. (1994) Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.



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Bauman, J. (1988) Dream of Belonging: My Years in Postwar Poland. London: Virago. Bauman, Z. (1959) Socjalizm brytyjski: Źródła, filozofia, doktryna polityczna [British Socialism: Origins, Philosophy, Political Doctrine]. Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe. Bauman, Z. (1962) ‘Wariacje na tematy socjologiczne’ [‘Variations on Sociological Themes’], Kultura i Społeczeństwo, 2: 47–64. Bauman, Z. (1963) ‘Antonio Gramsci – czyli socjologia w działaniu’ [‘Antonio Gramsci – Sociology in Action’], Kultura i Społeczeństwo, 1: 19–34. Bauman, Z. (1964) ‘Bieguny analizy kulturowej’ [‘Two Opposite Approaches to Cultural Analysis’], Studia Socjologiczne, 3: 51–91. Bauman, Z. (1965a) ‘Osobowość – kultura – struktura społeczna’ [‘Personality – Culture – Social Structure’], Studia Socjologiczne, 2: 203–33. Bauman, Z. (1965b) ‘Social Structure and Innovational Personality’, Polish Sociological Bulletin, 5, 1: 54–9. Bauman, Z. (1966a) Kultura i Społeczeństwo: Preliminaria [Culture and Society: Preliminaries]. Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe. Bauman, Z. (1966b) ‘Kultura i Społeczeństwo: Związki semantyczne i genetyczne’ [‘Culture and Society: Semantic and Genetic Connections’], Kultura i Społeczeństwo, 1: 71–98. Bauman, Z. (1966c) ‘Three Remarks on Contemporary Educational Problems’, Polish Sociological Bulletin, 6, 1: 77–89. Bauman, Z. (1967a) ‘Modern Times, Modern Marxism’, Social Research, 3: 399–415. Bauman, Z. (1967b) ‘Notatki poza czasem’ [‘Notes Beyond Time’], Twórczość, 10: 77–89. Bauman, Z. (1968) ‘Marx and the Contemporary Theory of Culture’, Social Science Information, 3: 69–80. Bauman, Z. (1972a) [1960] Between Class and Elite – The Evolution of the British Labour Movement: A Sociological Study. Manchester University Press. Bauman, Z. (1972b) ‘Culture, Values and Science of Society’, The University of Leeds Review, 15, 2: 185–203. Bauman, Z. (1973a) Culture as Praxis. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bauman, Z. (1973b) ‘On the Philosophical Status of Ethnomethodology’, Social Review, 1: 5–23. Bauman, Z. (c.1976a) ‘Is the Science of the Possible Possible?’ Unpublished typescript in the Papers of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman, University of Leeds Special Collections. Bauman, Z. (1976b) Socialism: The Active Utopia. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Bauman, Z. (1976c) Towards a Critical Sociology: An Essay on Commonsense and Emancipation. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bauman, Z. (1978) Hermeneutics and Social Science: Approaches to Understanding. London: Hutchinson & Co.

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Bauman, Z. (1982) Memories of Class: The Pre-History and After-Life of Class. London: Routledge. Bauman. Z. (1987) Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Postmodernity and Intellectuals. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z. (1988) ‘On Immoral Reason and Illogical Morality’, Polin, 3: 294–301. Bauman, Z. (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z. (1991) Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z. (1992a) Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge. Bauman, Z. (1992b) Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z. (1993) Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell. Bauman, Z. (1995) Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality. Oxford: Blackwell. Bauman, Z. (1996) ‘Assimilation into Exile: The Jew as a Polish Writer’, Poetics Today, 4: 569–98. Bauman Z. (1997a) ‘Nad granicami anarchizmu interpretacyjnego’ [‘Beyond the Limits of Interpretative Anarchy’], Teksty drugie, 6: 35–49. Bauman, Z. (1997b) Postmodernity and Its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z. (1998a) ‘On Art, Death and Postmodernity – and What They Do To Each Other’. In M. Hannula (ed.), Stopping the Process: Contemporary View on Art and Exhibition. Helsinki: Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art, pp. 21–34. Bauman, Z. (1998b) Work, Consumerism and the New Poor. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Bauman, Z. (1999a) [1973] Culture as Praxis, New Edition. London: Sage. Bauman, Z. (1999b) ‘Immortality, Biology, Computers’. In D. Aerts, J. Broakaert and E. Mathijs (eds.), Einstein Meets Magritte: Interdisciplinary Reflection. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 241–53. Bauman, Z. (1999c) In Search of Politics. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z. (2003) Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z. (2004) Europe: An Unfinished Adventure. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z. (2005) Liquid Life. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z. (2007) ‘Strangers Are Dangers … Are They?’ In H. Sainsbury (ed.), Mirosław Bałka: How It Is. London: Tate Publishing, pp. 14–25. Bauman, Z. (2008a) ‘Bauman on Bauman – Pro Domo Sua’. In Jacobsen and Poder (2008: 231–40). Bauman, Z. (2008b) ‘Listening to the Past, Talking to the Past …’. In M. Archer, M. Bałka and Z. Bauman, 17 x 23.5 x 1.6. London: Jap Joplin / White Cube, pp. 77–80. Bauman, Z. (2008c) The Art of Life. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman. Z. (2009) ‘Le spectre de la barbarie, de la Grèce à nos jours’ [‘The Spectre of Barbarism, from Greece to the Present Day’], Les Cahiers Européens de l’Imaginaire, 1: 40–57. Bauman, Z. (2010). ‘O związku morganatycznym teorii z literaturą myśli



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(roztrzepanych) parę’ [‘A Few (Erratic) Thoughts on the Morganatic Liaison of Theory and Literature’], Teksty Drugie, 1/2: 13–18. Bauman, Z. (2011a) Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z. (2011b) Culture in a Liquid Modern World. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z. (2015) ‘O miłości i nienawiści … tropami Barbary Skargi’ [‘On Love and Hate … in the Footsteps of Barbara Skarga’]. In M. Falkowski and A. Marczyński (eds.), Medytacje Filozoficzne. Warsaw: Muzeum Łazienki Królewskie, pp. 37–51. Bauman, Z. (2016) Strangers at Our Door. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z. (2017) Retrotopia. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z. (2018) [1968] Sketches in the Theory of Culture. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z. and Bałka, M. (2013) Bauman/Bałka. Warsaw: Narodowe Centrum Kultury. Bauman, Z. and Chmielewski, A. (1995) ‘Postmodernizm czyli nowoczesność bez złudzeń’ [‘Postmodernity or Modernity Without Illusions’], Odra, 1: 19–29. Bauman, Z. and Donskis, L. (2013) Moral Blindness. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z. and Gane, N. (2004) ‘Zygmunt Bauman: Liquid Sociality’. In N. Gane (ed.), The Future of Social Theory. London: Continuum, pp. 17–46. Bauman, Z., Jacobsen, M. H. and Tester, K. (2014) What Use Is Sociology? Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z., Kubicki, R. and Zeidler-Janiszewska, A. 2009. Życie w kontekstach: Rozmowy o tym, co za nami i o tym, co przed nami [Life in Contexts: Conversations about What Lies Behind Us and What Lies Ahead of Us]. Warsaw: WAiP. Bauman, Z. and Leoncini, T. (2018) Born Liquid. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z. and Mauro, E. (2016) Babel. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman. Z. and May, T. (2001) Thinking Sociologically, 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell. Bauman, Z. and Mazzeo, R. (2016) In Praise of Literature. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z. and Raud, R. (2015) Practices of Selfhood. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z. and Rovirosa-Madrazo, C. (2010) Living on Borrowed Time. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z. and Tester, K. (2001) Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman. Cambridge: Polity. Bauman, Z. and Wasilewski, M. (2013) ‘Nie miałem nigdy szacunku do sztucznie wytworzonych granic’ [‘I Have Never Had Respect for Artificially Created Borders’], Zeszyty Artystyczne, 23: 7–16. Beilharz P. (2000) Zygmunt Bauman: Dialectic of Modernity. London: Sage. Benedict, R. (1934) Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Blackshaw, T. (2005) Zygmunt Bauman. London and New York: Routledge. Bloch, E. (1986) The Principle of Hope. Oxford: Blackwell. Borges, J. L. (2000) Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. London: Penguin.

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Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brooker, P. (2017) ‘Bauman? On Ethnomethodology?’ The Sociological Review Online: www.thesociologicalreview.com/bauman-on-ethnomethodology. Brzeziński, D. (2017) ‘Human Praxis, Alternative Thinking and Heterogeneous Culture – Zygmunt Bauman’s Revisionist Thought’, Hybris, 2: 61–80. Brzeziński, D. (2018a) ‘A Message in a Bottle: on the Recovered Work of Zygmunt Bauman’. In Z. Bauman, Sketches in the Theory of Culture. Cambridge: Polity, pp. vii–xxv. Brzeziński, D. (2018b) ‘Consumerist Culture in Zygmunt Bauman’s Critical Sociology: A Comparative Analysis of His Polish and English Writings’, Polish Sociological Review, 1: 77–94. Brzeziński, D. (2020a) ‘From Revisionism to Retrotopia: Stability and Variability in Zygmunt Bauman’s Theory of Culture’, European Journal of Social Theory, 23, 4: 459–76. Brzeziński, D. (2020b) ‘The Culture of Dialogue in the Context of the Rise of Nationalism: On the Engaged Nature of Zygmunt Bauman’s Writings’, Kultura i społeczeństwo, 2: 33–50. Campbell, T., Davis, M. and Palmer, J. (2018) ‘Hidden Paths in Zygmunt Bauman’s Sociology: Editorial Introduction’, Theory, Culture and Society, 35, 7–8: 351–74. Camus, A. (1956) The Rebel: An Essay of Man in Revolt. New York: Vintage Books. Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Cheyette, B. (2020) ‘Zygmunt Bauman’s Window: From Jews to Strangers and Back Again’, Thesis Eleven, 156, 1: 67–85. Craig, E. G. (2009) [1911] On the Art of the Theatre. Ithaca: Cornell University Library. Davis, M. (2008) Freedom and Consumerism: A Critique of Zygmunt Bauman’s Sociology. Aldershot: Ashgate. Davis, M. (ed.) (2013) Liquid Sociology: Metaphor in Zygmunt Bauman’s Analysis of Modernity. London: Routledge. Davis, M. (2020) ‘Hermeneutics contra Fundamentalism: Zygmunt Bauman’s Method for Thinking in Dark Times’, Thesis Eleven, 156, 1: 27–44. Davis, M. and Tester, K. (eds.) (2010) Bauman’s Challenge: Sociological Issues for the 21st Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Dawson, M. (2017) ‘Keeping Other Options Alive: Zygmunt Bauman, Hermeneutics and Sociological Alternatives’. In Jacobsen (2017): 224–42. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. I. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. II. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Elliott, A. (2007) The Contemporary Bauman. London and New York: Routledge. Durkheim, É. (1982) The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: The Free Press.



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Featherstone, M. (2010) ‘Event Horizon: Utopia–Dystopia in Bauman’s Thought’. In Davis and Tester (2010: 127–47). Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books. Freud, S. (1962) Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Geertz, C. (1980) ‘Blurred Genres: The Reconfiguration of Social Thought’, The American Scholar, 49, 2: 169–75. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity. Głuchowski, W. and Polonsky A. (eds.) (2009) 1968 – Forty Years After, POLIN: Studies in Polish Jewry, 21. Oxford and Portland: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. Gramsci, A. (1971) Selected from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Habermas, J. (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. I. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1987) The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. II. Boston: Beacon Press. Hannerz, U. (1996) Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge. Hobsbawm, E. (2002) Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life. New York: Pantheon Books. Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. (2002) [1944] Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press. Jacobsen, M. H. (2008) ‘Bauman on Utopia – Welcome to the Hunting Zone’. In Jacobsen and Poder (2008: 209–30). Jacobsen, M. H. (ed.) (2017) Beyond Bauman: Critical Engagement and Creative Excursions. London and New York: Routledge. Jacobsen, M. H. and Marshman, S. (2008) ‘Bauman on Metaphors – A Harbinger of Humanistic Hybrid Sociology’. In Jacobsen and Poder (2008: 19–39). Jacobsen, M. H. and Poder, P. (eds.) (2008) The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman: Challenges and Critique. Aldershot: Ashgate. Jacoby, R. (2005) Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age. New York: Columbia University Press. Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Junge, M. (2008) ‘Bauman on Ambivalence – Fully Acknowledging the Ambiguity of Ambivalence’. In Jacobsen and Poder (2008: 41–56). Kilminster, R. (1979) Praxis and Method: A Sociological Dialogue with Lukács, Gramsci and the Early Frankfurt School. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Kundera, M. (1988) The Art of the Novel. New York: Grove Press. Kundera, M. (2006) The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts. New York: HarperCollins.

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Lepenies, W. (1992) Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology. Cambridge University Press. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963) Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Linton, R. (1945) The Cultural Background of Personality. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester University Press Malinowski, B. (1944) A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Mannheim, K. (1991) Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge. Marcuse, H. (1972) Counterrevolution and Revolt. Boston: Beacon Press. Maslow, A. (1962) Toward a Psychology of Being. Princeton: Van Nostrand. Morriss, L. and Smith, G. (2017) ‘Struggling for the Soul of Sociology: Bauman and Ethnomethodology’, The Sociological Review Online: www. thesociologicalreview.com/struggling-for-the-soul-of-sociology-baumanand-ethnomethodology. Nijhoff, P. (1998) ‘The Right to Inconsistency’, Theory, Culture & Society, 15, 1: 87–112. Nisbet, R. (1976) Sociology as an Art Form. New York: Oxford University Press. Palmer, J., Brzeziński, D. and Campbell, T. (2020) ‘Sixty-Three Years of Thinking Sociologically: Compiling the Bibliography of Zygmunt Bauman’, Thesis Eleven, 156, 1: 118–33. Parsons, T. (1951) The Social System. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Pollock, G. (2007) ‘Thinking Sociologically, Thinking Aesthetically: Between Convergence and Difference with Some Historical Reflections on Sociology and Art History’, History of the Human Sciences, 20, 2: 141–75. Rattansi, A. (2017) Bauman and Contemporary Sociology: A Critical Analysis. Manchester University Press. Rorty, R. (1989) Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. Cambridge University Press. Satterwhite, J. H. (1992) ‘Polish Revisionism: Critical Thinking in Poland from 1953 to 1968’. In J. H. Satterwhite, Varieties of Marxist Humanism: Philosophical Revision in Postwar Eastern Europe. University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 12–70. Smith, D. (1999) Zygmunt Bauman: Prophet of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Polity. Steward, J. (1955) Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Tester, K. (2002) ‘Paths in Zygmunt Bauman’s Social Thought’, Thesis Eleven, 70: 55–71 Tester, K. (2004) The Social Thought of Zygmunt Bauman. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Tester, K. (2018) ‘On Repetition in the Work of Zygmunt Bauman’, Thesis Eleven, 149, 1: 104–18. Tester, K. and Jacobsen M. H. (2005) Bauman Before Postmodernity:



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Invitation, Conversations and Annotated Bibliography, 1953–1989. Aalborg University Press. UNESCO (1969) Marx and Contemporary Scientific Thought: Papers from the Symposium on the Role of Karl Marx in the Development of Contemporary Scientific Thought, Organized by UNESCO. The Hague: Mouton & Co. Virilio, P. (1999) The Information Bomb. London: Verso. Wagner, I. (2020) Bauman: A Biography. Cambridge: Polity. White, L. A. (1959) The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co. Wolinski, A. (1984) Osmondthorpe – The Area that Time Forgot: Study of Community Work on an Inter-War Council Estate. Ilford: Dr Barnardo’s.

1 Culture and Society: Semantic and Genetic Connections (1966) Translated by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

‘CULTURE’ OR ‘CULTURES’ The concept of ‘culture’ is used in the social sciences today in two different contexts. In one context, the word ‘culture’ appears without adjectives, or with adjectives that do not serve as spatio-temporal indicators. In both cases, culture is understood as an attribute of humankind in general, typically an essential one; the kind of attribute that is meant is detailed by numerous definitions currently in circulation, be it White’s ‘ability to use symbols and bestow meaning’,1 ‘an ability to teach and learn’ delineated by Ashley Montagu, or simply the ability people have to create things and ideas that would not exist if humans did not – but this attribute is always thought of as a feature of humans in general, as something that distinguishes ‘humans’ from ‘not-humans’. Adjectives added in this context to the word ‘culture’ are intended to indicate the ingredients of this ubiquitous attribute, which are just as ubiquitous and absolutely human as the attribute itself: culture – be it material, spiritual, artistic, etc. – is the product of a classification of a collection of elements, demarcated as an attribute of humanity through the term ‘culture’; which are also products whose presence can be detected in any arbitrarily chosen portion of the human species, at any time or place. For lack of a better term, we can name the concept of culture that appears in these contexts as the idea of ‘culture in the attributive sense’. There is also another context in which the word ‘culture’ is used.

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This is the use encountered most often in archaeological and ethnographic studies, in the kinds of studies that pertain to an object that is definitively located within time and space – indeed, that may even consider the work of locating it as their primary research objective. In these contexts, the researcher is not interested in culture without adjectives, and it always appears in this research with an adjective that locates it within time or a particular geographic region or society, or in both at once. Archaeologists speak of Zarubinets or Przeworsk culture, a Paleolithic or Neolithic Stone Age culture, a ceramic culture of coil pots or pots thrown on the wheel, a culture of Yamnaya or Funnelbeaker graves. Ethnographers or anthropologists (in Anglo-Saxon countries, the idea of ‘anthropology’ encompasses the elsewhere differentiated ideas of ethnography as a descriptive science, and ethnology as theoretical knowledge) speak of the culture of the Andaman or Navajo, or more broadly of the culture of herders or farmers. Sociologists tend to speak of rural (as opposed to urban) culture, about the medical culture or workers’ culture, decidedly less than archaeologists and ethnographers, who are sensitive to the role of time and space, but even when they do not explicitly say so, they frequently locate phenomena within the rubrics emerging from contemporary, highly developed industrial society, which is the only real object of their inquiries. And in the other contexts, the concept of culture does not indicate what is common to all people and comprises their major attribute, differentiating humans from all that is not human – but what differentiates one group of people from another. We can, then – again, for lack of a better term – describe this as the idea of ‘culture in a distributive sense’. In this way – for example – archeology seeks out traces of bygone human activities that are stable, resistant to the flows of time. Such traces are the product of human labour, artificial creations, not existing in ‘pre-human’ nature – such as tools, weapons, ornaments, houses, vehicles, ditches, canals or abandoned mine shafts – or natural things that indirectly attest to human activity – such as, for instance, shells from the Mediterranean that are found in the campsites of mammoth hunters by the river Don or in primitive farming settlements by the Rhine; or deserts stretching across formerly forested terrains, thanks to the influence of a human who, ‘nurtured in the woodlands, has been of old the enemy of trees. He has exploited them, destroyed them … . In the wood and brush lands in which most of mankind has lived over most of its span, the woody cover was progressively thinned and the ground more fully exposed to sun and air.’2 All of these things and phenomena, archaeologists organize into ‘types’, abstracting from less important or contingent individual



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features of every object taken separately, and attempting to deduce stable associations between them, typical of the archaeological finds of a given time or place. When they are able to accomplish this goal, we can speak of culture. ‘Culture’ is what archaeologists call ‘an assemblage of the same types that recurs at several distinct sites’.3 From the very definition, it emerges that archaeologists are dealing with the plenitude of culture; this plenitude can be organized – and essentially organizes itself – according to chronological and spatial criteria, gaining in the process a spatio-temporal map that visualizes its distribution in time and space. The procedures of ethnographers do not differ logically from those of archaeologists. The difference between the fields of knowledge is more in subject-matter than methodology: where archaeologists examine the fossilized remains of bygone human activities, ethnographers study their activities today. They go on, however, to organize them into ‘types’ – which in ethnography are called ‘cultural models’ – and they determine their stable associations, which they call ‘institutions’, in order to subsequently name the same associations that recur in neighbouring human collectives’ ‘culture’ – obviously, in the distributive sense of the word. We can say that the difference between culture in an attributive and in a distributive sense is like the difference between what is general and what is particular: when we speak of culture in the former sense, we are interested in what is common to all people; when we contemplate culture (or rather cultures) in the latter sense, we accentuate what reciprocally differentiates particular groups of people. The difference between these concepts is thus primarily a distinction between different research perspectives, which we also find in many other cases – for example, when we examine the anatomical differences between humans and primates, or between people of different races. This difference in research perspectives, obvious to anatomists, is unfortunately not always apparent in studies of culture. For this reason, reasonable claims about ‘culture in general’, culture in the attributive sense, become less meaningful when applied to particular cultures, and vice versa. Mixing the two different research perspectives has, in particular, been the source of many misunderstandings in well-known conflicts about the evolution of culture. It would probably be good, then, if we established different names for these two different senses of the term ‘culture’, analogously to the difference between langue and parole established by linguists. Unfortunately, such a pair of terms has not yet been created in the study of culture, and introducing it at this stage would

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require a significant, and socially costly, revision of terminology in the vast body of literature on cultural studies. That which we see today as the difference between two logically valid ways of organizing the same raw materials of experience was, for many years, seen by anthropologists as an unresolvable controversy between truth and falsehood, between science and unscientific fantasy. Since the time that Bronisław Malinowski called for field research and his call was accepted as programmatic for the study of culture – in distinction from ‘armchair philosophy’ – anthropologists have devoted all of their energies to deepening their understanding of individual cultures, in distinction from ‘culture in general’. Researchers were not always conscious of the above juxtaposition. It frequently emerged by happenstance, as an unplanned side effect, from the very method of study: concentrating attention on elements of culture that could be perceived in a relatively small slice of human communities that the researcher was interested in – a slice isolated from other human collectives not so much by geographic or social barriers, but by ignorance or limited interest on the part of researchers. Cut off from its synchronic and diachronic affiliations by the researcher’s own research agenda, the group that the researcher became acquainted with thus appeared before his eyes as a closed set, as a totality that could be understood in isolation. In this way, premises of research were combined with empirical observation, the postulate of studying the culture of every collective as if it were a totality, in the reciprocal interrelationship of its components along with the apparent evidence of its difference and the relative isolation of its culture – what is more, with proof of its internal systematicity and coherence and complementarity. When Malinowski declared his theoretical credo in this matter, he seems to have been convinced that he was formulating ontological claims, and not methodological directives: ‘It [culture – Z. B.] obviously is the integral whole consisting of implements and consumer goods, of constitutional characters for the various social groupings, of human ideas and crafts, beliefs and customs. Whether we consider a very simple or primitive culture or an extremely complex and developed one, we are confronted by a vast apparatus.’4 This way of seeing culture as a collection of cultures was already imposed by the essentially partitive research methods that became obligatory in the anthropological world after Malinowski. Representative of his English environment, E. E. Evans-Pritchard introduced the association of both features – the method of study and the cognitive perspective – into the definition of anthropology: ‘The social anthropologist studies primitive societies directly, living among them for months or years … The social anthropologist studies



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societies as wholes.’5 The extreme position of ontologizing methodological directives ultimately led to the denial of ‘human culture as such’ and to ascribing ‘objective existence’ only to particular cultures. Amid these extreme perspectives ontologizing the conflict, we also find very different perspectives. As Robert Lowie expressed, for instance: ‘a specific culture is an abstraction, an arbitrarily selected fragment … . There is only one cultural reality that is not artificial, to wit: the culture of all humanity at all periods and in all places.’6 There is a concern that, just as the functionalist reaction to the primitive totalism of nineteenth-century evolutionism stoked tendencies to ontologize perspectives of nominalistic types, in the same way the contemporary reaction to the limitations of functionalist horizons, in conjunction with the burning need to theorize the unexamined plethora of material already collected, will further popularize quasi-realist ontologizations. The condition to not so much resolve, as to eliminate, the ostensible contradiction between those who write about ‘culture’ and those who believe in ‘cultures’ seems to be, in the first place, de-ontologizing the problem, bringing it to the level on which it essentially began – namely, to the choice of research perspectives and axes systematizing elementary data. That is why I appreciate the perspective that Lévi-Strauss took on the issue: ‘What is called a “culture” is a fragment of humanity which, from the point of view of the research at hand and of the scale on which the latter is carried out, presents significant discontinuities in relation to the rest of humanity.’7 Or, elsewhere, ‘anthropologists usually reserve the term “culture” to designate a group of discontinuities which is significant on several of these levels at the same time. That it can never be valid for all levels does not prevent the concept of “culture” from being as fundamental for the anthropologist as that of “isolate” for the demographer.’8 The dilemma ‘culture or cultures’ is in some sense analogous to the dilemma ‘species or race’ in biology – and the biological perspective on humans, in particular. The geneticist Dobzhansky described races as ‘populations differing in the incidence of certain genes, but actually exchanging or potentially able to exchange genes across whatever boundaries (usually geographic) separate them’.9 Distinguishing races in the totality of the species is always relative, the act of differentiation always contains a dose of arbitrariness: the population that is considered to be a particular race differs from others only by the degree of probability that, among the individuals comprising it, this or that gene appears, which is taken as distinctive of a specific race. The population distinguished as a race because of the particular

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appearance of Gene A does not have to also be ‘different’ with regards to genes B, C, D, etc. As Dobzhansky and Epling explain, ‘an individual or population might belong to one “race” so far as the gene A is concerned, to a different “race” with respect to the gene B, to a still different “race” with respect to C, etc.’.10 This notorious multi-dimensionality of ‘mutations’ and generally inexact correlation (if not complete autonomy) create gnoseological lessons for many categorizations that would be equally valid, logically, removing from all of them the merit of absolutism. The degree of correlation between these divisions must be left to empirical study, and not determined by accepting a priori premises, even those that are implicit in arbitrarily chosen research methods. We have, then, in the positions of ‘culture in an attributive sense’ and ‘culture in a distributive sense’, two logically valid ways of organizing empirical data that are acquired by researchers of culture. In essence, there are other methods as well; if the degree of generality of the concept of culture in the attributive sense is precisely delineated by the dimensions of the human species, there can be many degrees of generality in cultures perceived distributively, and, moreover, they can be measured on different scales. A precise identification of the degrees and dimensions of generality is a directive that is methodologically of high priority, because very few general assertions can be made that would apply in equal measure to cultures distinguished on the basis of the ecological particularities of their local environments as well as to cultures attached to civilizations of a higher order, or to cultures distinguished on the basis of their ethnic divisions as well to cultures differentiated on the basis of their social/class divisions, etc. These types of cultures, varying in their forms of differentiation, also differ from each other by other features – for example, their degree of proximity to the model of a ‘system’, the array of acceptable forms of logical structure, the scope of sensible explanations for their stability or dynamism, etc. I began my discussion with the problem of ‘culture versus cultures’ precisely because the relationship ‘culture–society’ cannot be untangled in the same way on all levels and degrees of generality. What we have already said about equally valid methods of making sense of empirical givens pertaining to culture, or the spheres in which information circulates, can be applied without modification to what can be said of parallel methods of systematizing information about society, or the sphere of circulating energy. Perspectives from either sphere of knowledge are symmetrical in the sense that they are still relevant if we plug the terms from one sphere into the other, and vice versa. Without further extrapolation, we can accept, then, that,



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analogously to the two meanings of the term ‘culture’, we can speak of ‘society in an attributive sense’ and ‘society (or rather, societies) in a distributive sense’, and that claims about the relativism of both concepts of culture and their methodological genesis can be applied without modification to the two different meanings of ‘society’. The methodological directive that we want to introduce in the above reflections declares that questions about the relationship between culture and society should be investigated differently on each of the dimensions and scales of generality used to distinguish culture and society, and that in all of these studies we should also be pairing the form of society and of culture that is proper to that dimension and level of generality. CULTURE – COLLECTION OR SYSTEM Thus, we have taken, as one of the criteria for distinguishing one ‘culture’ amongst many ‘cultures’, breaks in consistency, ‘mutations’, the thickening of the distribution of elements of culture. If we adapt the principle of the symmetry of culture and society to this convention, we would need to find a corresponding term for ‘element of culture’ whose existence would not undermine the significance of the preceding sentence. It is easy to see that this task is not a simple one. The initial framework that we accepted for defining culture was satisfactory only because we treated culture as a collection, as an accumulation of elements, which was a composition, but without a structure; or, to put it more narrowly, as a collection of elements, in which we are interested only in the features of elements treated in isolation or in their quantity, but which does not interest us from the perspective of the configuration of those elements or the tensions between them – as, ultimately, a collection of elements, which we perceive as unchanging, if the structure of tensions between them is modified, so long as the features assigned to specific elements and their quantities remain the same. This account of culture is fairly widespread in the literature of cultural studies and does not elicit particular resistance – our proceedings thus far have been in accordance with custom and have not run afoul of any deeply rooted intellectual habits. We cannot say the same of our efforts to treat society as a collection. For a pluralistic vision of a concentration of people, we reserve, in sociology, other terms – we speak of collectives, populations, aggregations of people. Adherents of pluralistic exclusivity in methodological directives, proponents of radical reductionism, rejecting the alternative directive of holisticness, have thus

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far been unable to assimilate the term ‘society’ into their framework, and largely tend to avoid using it. The term ‘society’ appears as a rule only in the context of holistic theoretical reflections. In this way, we hit upon another manifestation of the problem of contemporary terms in the humanities. Previously, we asserted that there is a lack of terminological distinctions that would allow us to contend with the kinds of relations in the cultural sphere, and social phenomena, that are analogous to the relationship between langue and parole. Now we are saying that, although sociology has two ways of identifying groups of people – holistic and pluralistic – for which we use two different semantic terms, ‘society’ and ‘collective’, in terminology used for the study of cultural phenomena, one and the same term, ‘culture’, designates the results of using these two complementary – but, after all, different – methodological directives, which cannot avoid leading to semantic misunderstanding. Even the title of this section of our reflections is an example of a pseudoproblem emerging from terminological paucity. The question, ‘collection or system?’, addressed to ‘culture in general’ is meaningless. ‘Culture in general’ can be meaningfully described from the perspective of both its composition and its structure, i.e. the relationship between its elements. The essential question for research emerges only when, considering a group of cultural elements distributed across a given human environment at a specific period of time, we ask whether this group is a system, or whether it merely comprises a collection. In sociology, we would have a symmetrical situation if we were to ask whether a given grouping comprises a society, or merely a grouping. The title of this section is therefore only a question about a convention in language regarding the uses of the term ‘culture’ – a question that only ostensibly offers two alternatives, because custom dictates that the term ‘culture’ would be used for either alternative, complementary methodology. Alongside the distinction between ‘culture in an attributive sense’ and ‘culture in a distributive sense’, we must also introduce one more terminological proposition, again for lack of better terms: ‘culture as a system’ and ‘culture as a collection’. The sense and weight of the question ‘Does this grouping of cultural elements comprise a system, or merely a collection?’ will become even more meaningful for us, if we replace it with a symmetrical question pertaining to society; the meaning of the question will be in this case clearer thanks to the terminological custom of dividing holistic and pluralistic concepts that is accepted in reflections on society. Thus, we are not bothered by the formulation ‘lawyer culture’ or ‘youth culture’, but the terms ‘lawyer society’ or ‘youth society’ will elicit



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protest. The difference in the reactions to our examples emerges from the fact that, without feeling the need for any methodological qualifications, we used the term ‘culture’ in the sense of ‘culture as collection’, which is one of two fully accepted uses of the term, but the use of the term ‘society’ in the sense of ‘society as a collection’ is at odds with linguistic tradition. For the sake of comfort and simplicity, we will begin by identifying cases in which we can apply to some fragment of humanity the term ‘society’ (in a distributive sense, of course, of the word); what conditions must be met by this fragment, in order for the use of this term to be appropriate? We decided that the concept of ‘society’ and all related ideas would be located in the sphere of producing, distributing and exchanging goods, serving to satisfy human needs – in brief, in the sphere of energy circulation. When we talk about society, we thus always have in mind some system of inter-human relationships, indicating paths of energy circulation. Society, in this attributive sense, is a closed system. All inter-human relationships are contained, no doubt, in the human sphere; the entirety of processes of creating, distributing and exchanging goods is contained within this sphere. We can say that society in the attributive sense fulfils in this way one of the conditions that must be fulfilled by all systems (that must be fulfilled by groups of people, in order to call them society) – a negative condition: none of the elements in the collection is in a state of energetic tension with any element that does not belong in the collection; the range of energy emitted by any portion of any element does not go beyond the range of the system of tensions constituting the collection. Every system must also fulfil a second condition – a positive one: the grouping of elements is a system insofar as all of the elements are directly or indirectly connected. We can reformulate this requirement: an element does not belong to the system if it is not connected to any element in this system. It is easy to perceive that humanity as a whole fulfils this positive requirement to an ever greater degree, as there is an increasing international division of labour and exchange of goods amongst all corners of the earth, formerly autarchic. We have, then, two general conditions, which must be fulfilled by a grouping of elements, in order to call them a system. These are also two conditions that must be fulfilled in order for any group of people to be called a ‘society’. a. Negative condition. In reference to society in an attributive sense, the previous formulation of the condition, relying on the idea of ‘tensions in general’, was sufficient; they do not exist outside of humanity: on the strength of the definition of the term ‘humanity’,

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other exchanges of energy outside of inter-personal ones could not take place. It is altogether different in the case of society understood in the distributive sense; every arbitrarily chosen fragment of humanity will always only be a portion of it, and outside of it there will be other people, and unavoidable relationships with them of at least one type: the type of negative relations. If we used the first condition in its strong variant, none of the fragments of humanity could be, even from up close, considered a society in the distributive sense. Thus, there is a need to weaken the condition somewhat. In order for the system of energy tensions of some group of people to be called a society, we will demand that this group as a whole, and every element of this group, be connected to other groups or their elements only in negative terms, or limited ones. In this form, we can characterize the first condition as the postulate of self-sufficiency (autarchism). b. Positive condition. And in this case, in reference to society in the distributive sense, we need to modify the valences of the condition we set in our reflections on society in the attributive sense. This time, the modification will need to be strengthened, rather than weakened. We will demand, before we agree to apply the term ‘society’ to any fragment of humanity, that all elements of that fragment ought to be reciprocally – directly or indirectly – not only in a state of energetic tension, but connected via positive relationships, so, by cooperative and complementary functions in the process of creating, distributing and exchanging goods necessary to satisfy needs. Reformulating the second condition in this way, we will call it the postulate of reciprocal completeness (complementarity). Introducing the concept of ‘society’ with the assistance of such a pair of postulates, we can now use something more than intuition to reject formulations such as ‘lawyer society’ or ‘youth society’. Neither a group of lawyers, nor a group of young people, would fulfil either of these two conditions; even if – in some, quite rare and relatively unimportant, cases – the postulate of complementarity would be met, nowhere will the postulate of self-sufficiency be. Lawyers or young people can exist only as part of a larger society, dependent on goods created by other people. Of course, we rather tendentiously selected obvious examples of groups that are not societies. They can depict the precision of our postulates in a better light than they deserve. In reality, the imperfection of applying these postulates is based on the fact that, however well they serve for making decisions in the negative – for denying a



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given group the label of ‘society’ – to that same degree, they make it rarely possible to come to a positive decision. In reference to our contemporary epoch, with a rigorous use of these terms, it is difficult even to speak of ‘Polish society’, ‘British society’ or ‘European society’. But even in times when an extra-local exchange of goods was amusingly small in comparison to today, and when local groups of people could be, it would seem, treated as self-sufficient, Mediterranean seashells found their way to the banks of the Don and the Rhine, ritual dyes crossed the uncrossable Australian steppes, and – what is most important – stone quarries, producing the raw materials for the creation of the most important tools of the Stone Age, served terrains that encompassed a surface area of thousands of square kilometres, inhabited by tribes that were in other regards completely self-sufficient. ‘The essence of any “Stone Age” economy is that all essential tools can be made from local materials and within the household without further division of labor. But within the Neolithic Age intercommunal specialization appears, represented archaeologically by flint-mine and axe factories.’11 These practical postulates of ours can serve not so much to delimit two divisible classes of collections – the ones that are societies, and the ones that are not – as to establish the position of particular collections of people on a continuum, of which one end is a ‘pure’ collection, amorphous, and the other is the model of an ideally closed system, one that the historical record possesses no examples of, and that the prehistorical period also does not seem particularly rich in. Insofar as it may be difficult to locate such a collection – which from the outside would be characterized by exclusively negative relations, and from the inside by such exclusiveness, and, beyond that, completeness, of positive relations – in practice we will apply the concept of ‘society’ to groups that are differentiated in the following way: that the positive relations are more intense internally than externally, and vice versa for the negative relationships – in relation to elements or groups that are external to our collections, they are more intense than in relation to the reciprocal elements that belong to the collection. What we have said so far about the conditions for treating a collection as a system – as a society – can now be translated into the language of cultural analysis. Our question goes as follows: when can we acknowledge a human group as a system, in the aspect not only of energy, but also of information – that it comprises a cultural system, that its culture can be treated as a system? There is relatively little doubt elicited by the postulate of

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complementarity. It is intuitively obvious that, for two models of behaviour (which are the combined result of cognitive models, models of selection, and models of evaluation) to belong to the same system, they must be reciprocally complementary. This means that Model A, used by individual X, must lead to the creation of a situation in which individual Y can deploy Model B – then and only then are Models A and B complementary, which is, in turn, a necessary condition of their belonging to the same system. Let us observe that the complementary Models A and B can be identical or different – their resemblance is irrelevant to establishing the complementarity of the models. On the other hand, similar models do not necessarily need to be complementary; classes of pairs of models that are similar and models that are complementary are partly overlapping, and partly not. Models of behaviour are reciprocally complementary when the expectation that individual Y will deploy Model B is, for individual X, a constitutive element that defines the situation in which they will make a selection, and leads them to choose Model A – and when the same is true of individual Y. If we now use the results of our analysis of a few patterns of behaviour for the conditions of complementarity, in order to analyse the conditions in which the postulate of complementarity is fulfilled in relation to all models of behaviour that are acknowledged by all the members of a given group of people, we can describe these sought-after behaviours in the following way: the postulate of complementarity is fulfilled in relation to a group of people in which every acceptable model of behaviour corresponds to a model that complements it, and where there are no interactions between elements of the group where the models of behaviour accepted by both individuals would not be complementary. If these conditions are met, we can say that the group of people being analysed forms a system in the cultural aspect, or that its culture is a system. Alongside the postulate of complementarity, we have also introduced the postulate of self-sufficiency. We know what this postulate means in relation to the sphere of energy circulation, to the social aspect of human life. What sense does it take on when we apply it to the cultural aspect of human life? We will accept that a group of people being analysed is culturally self-sufficient (or that the postulate of self-sufficiency is fulfilled in relation to its culture) when the range of the classes of complementary pairs of models of behaviour maps directly, without remainders, onto the range of classes of interactions that every member of the group may enter into – in other words, when none of the members of the group, in the course of their day-to-day life, ever enters into contact with people whose models for behaviour are not complementary



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to their own. The above requirement equates to cultural isolation. It is completely met only in the case of humanity considered as a whole. Everything that finds itself ‘outside’ of humanity is perceived as ‘not-human’, as something in relation to which the normal rules of behaviour that govern interactions between humans do not apply. If some patterns of behaviour regulate the behaviour of humans towards nature, this is not so much because of nature itself as because of other people who wish to make use of this same nature. In the case of any of the cultures understood distributively, the postulate is rarely fulfilled without a remainder, though we can point to numerous cases that approach the ideal model. Many of the names that primitive tribes gave themselves could be translated simply as ‘people’. That is the meaning of the term ‘Inuit’, used by the Eskimos; ‘Evenks’, used by the Tungusi; ‘Yámana’, used by the Yaghan people from the Tierra del Fuego.12 To their neighbours, however, primitive people would refer with terms that emphasized one of their features – incomprehensibility, impossibility of communication, the futility of efforts to achieve complementary meanings – tied to situations emerging from reciprocal contact. This is quite likely the origin of the term ‘Niemcy’ used by Slavs to refer to Germans, or the etymology of the term ‘Cheyenne’ – the words ‘sha hi ye na’ used by the Sioux to describe their indigenous neighbours. Both linguistic customs invite reflection on the restrictions of the concept of ‘human’ – and, along with it, of the range or scope of the rules for behaviour that govern interactions between people – to the borders of one tribe. This would equate to acknowledging the acceptability of non-normal behaviour towards people who do not belong to one’s tribe, treating them as an element of the surroundings, with whom intellectual communication is impossible. The history of the human species is, among other things, a chronicle of the widening of the concept of ‘human’. The rarity of situations in which the postulate of self-sufficiency is fully met is perhaps more obvious, but the requirement of complementarity is also rarely fulfilled. It is difficult to find a human collective, even a relatively well-isolated one, in which there would not exist a collection of models of behaviours that did not fit with others, or that would completely omit certain forms of contact with groups of people who do not use complementary models that would designate their behaviour as reciprocal. That is why the system of culture, similarly to that of society, is a border concept, which can be usefully deployed to indicate the ‘degree of systematicity’ of a given culture, but which does not lend itself to the role of a dichotomous criterion of classification. The cognitive importance of this border concept expresses itself, among other ways, in how it makes visible

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to researchers the unacceptability of blithely treating as a system any set of elements of a culture, identified among any community and distinguished by the researcher by virtue of some, possibly essential, criteria – for example, the criterion of mutual terrain of residence, shared language, or tribal institutions of integration. This kind of blithe behaviour generally characterized the highly influential anthropological school of functionalism, highly merited because of its popularization of a holistic view of culture, but also excessively hasty in its methodologies. The border concept of a system of culture, introduced with the help of postulates formulated as precisely as possible, has this virtue – that it invites a holistic methodology in the analysis of culture, and simultaneously establishes a more or less operative set of criteria that allow for the designation of the range of their operation; it establishes, then, what must be studied and confirmed, for a given collective of cultural elements – regardless of how it is carved out of a larger human culture – to be studied as a system. On this subject, which is particularly important to researchers of culture, Robert Redfield says: Out of that anthropology which rested on studies of isolated primitive or tribal peoples arose the concept, ‘a culture’. The Andamanese had a culture, as did the Trobrianders, the Aranda of Australia, and the Zuni. Each culture came to be conceived as an independent and selfsufficient system. Recently words have been found to make clear this conception of an ‘autonomous cultural system’. It is ‘one which is self-sustaining, that is, it does not need to be maintained by a complementary, reciprocal, subordinate, or other indispensable connection with a second system’. Such units of such cultures as those of the Zuni or the Andamanese ‘are systems because they have their own mutually adjusted and interdependent parts, and they are autonomous because they do not require another system for their continued functioning’ [H.  G. Barnett, Leonard Broom, Bernard J. Siegel, Evon Z. Vogt and James B. Watson, ‘Acculturation: An Exploratory Formulation. The Social Science Research Council Summer Seminar on Acculturation, 1953’, American Anthropologist, 6, December 1954: 974]. The anthropologist may see in such a system evidence of elements of culture communicated to that band or tribe from others, but he understands that the system as it is now keeps going by itself; and in describing its parts and their workings he need not go outside the little group itself. The exceptions, where the band or tribe relies on some other band or tribe for a commodity or service, are small and do not seriously modify the fact that culture is maintained by the communication of a heritage through the generations of just those people who make up the local community.13



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Redfield uses the term ‘culture’ to designate phenomena that we propose to consider separately under the rubrics ‘culture’ and ‘society’ (as we will see later, such proceedings in relation to an idealized ‘primitive’ society are relatively less invalid than they are in relation to more complex societies), and highlights more negative than positive conditions for the ‘systematicity’ of culture – but also formulates propositions similar to the contents of ours, and that, like ours, are dictated by the effort to arrive at a more precise separation between the concept of culture as a collection and culture as a system. Don Martindale organizes the contents of what are not explicitly called postulates of complementarity and self-sufficiency around the requirement of ‘completeness’, which must be, in his opinion, fulfilled by every ‘society’ (a concept that in this context is analogous to what we call society in the distributive sense): ‘A community is a set or system of groups sufficient to solve all the basic problems of ordinary ways of life. As a way of life, a community is complete in two ways: it comprises a set of groups to carry a plurality of people through all routine problems of an ordinary year and through the cycle of an ordinary life from birth to death.’14 And, in this case, the criterion of ‘systematicity’ has been applied simultaneously to the social, energetic, and the cultural, informational, sides of human culture. And, also, as in the case of ‘primitive tribes’, the same synthesis of two problems into one is less unacceptable than in the case of a more heterogeneous society. Don Martindale’s ‘society’ is more narrow than our ‘society in a distributive sense’: his concept of ‘society’ refers only to societies that are small enough for them to be entirely, or almost entirely, encompassed by a system of psychic ties – informational from the perspective of the majority of its members. Society has this in common with ‘primitive’ groups: that the system of relationships of energy and information are generally contained within the sphere of the same group of people. But, also, societies defined in this way are increasingly rare in this day and age, and even in the past they probably appeared only rarely in a pure form. Setting out similar conditions for decisions about the ‘systematicity’ of culture and decisions about the ‘systematicity’ of society for one and the same human society seems to be necessary because, just from the fact that some collection of people is a society (the circulation of goods, essential to satisfying all the needs of all of its members, is contained within it), it does not necessarily follow that it also comprises a cultural system. And vice versa: from the fact that the culture of a group of people comprises a relatively closed system (for example, the culture of nomadic Roma, Jews in medieval ghettos, or the Parsi people in India), it does not follow – nor is it generally

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the case – that they form a society in the sense of a relatively closed system of creating, distributing and exchanging goods necessary for life. The desystematization of culture and splitting up of the energy autonomy of increasingly large and widespread groups of people appeared in human history around the same time, but their fates took various paths, and the heretofore separate paths of develop­ment of culture and society have not yet come together. The relative autonomy of culture and society dictates that thinkers must repeatedly complain both about the ‘backwardness of consciousness with regards to being’, and about a reality that does not correspond to propagated models. GENETIC AND EXISTENTIAL RELATIONS It is only with the differentiation of various meanings of the concepts of ‘culture’ and ‘society’ and socio-cultural variations of totalities of a lower order that we can begin to ask about the reciprocal relationships between society and culture. But the same questions require more precision. The question about the reciprocal relations between phenomenon A and phenomenon B can be understood in three ways: a. In the genetic sense: which of these two phenomena precedes the other? This question about genesis can also be understood, and considered, in two ways: (i) historically – which phenomenon happened first, and which appeared later?; or (ii) logically – which of these phenomena can exist without the other one, or, put differently, the existence of which is not possible without the other? Substantially, the answers to both versions of the genetic question should be identical and the division signalled to above pertains mainly to the methodology that could be used to verify the response. Addressing the relationships of coexistence, or the relations between two things that exist at the same time, we can formulate two questions. In other words, we can ask about the relations of coexistence between phenomena A and B in two ways: b. In a structural sense: to what degree does the structure of phenomenon A depend on the actual structure of phenomenon B, and vice versa? It seems that the other way of formulating the structural question is more useful, limiting its content somewhat: does



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there exist, and how big is, the class of structures of phenomenon B that can coexist with a given structure of phenomenon A – and vice versa? If this class contains only one structure, we can speak of a singular reciprocal subordination of the structure of phenomenon A and the structure of phenomenon B. If this class contains more than one structure, but a finite amount, we can say that the structure of phenomenon A limits the range of structure of phenomenon B, or that the structure of B limits the range of the structure of phenomenon A, or that the structures of A and B reciprocally limit the range of their structures. c. In a functional sense: what needs, whose satisfaction is necessary for the existence of phenomenon A, would satisfy phenomenon B – and vice versa. Or, from the other side, which features of phenomenon A can be ascribed to the fact of its coexistence with phenomenon B, and vice versa. The functional question is thus in some sense an interpretive supplement to the structural question. Thus, the problem of the relationship between culture and society divides into three questions: genetic, structural and functional. We can speak correspondingly of genetic, structural and functional relationships between culture and society. If we take into account the different consequences for research of attributive and distributive uses of our concepts, and the plethora of cultural categories and social units of a lower order that emerged as a result of the intersections of four dichotomies of classification, we must acknowledge that we are dealing with a collection of questions, whose quantity we cannot even entirely identify, and that questions about the relationship between culture and society, formulated without any further specifications, are too ambiguous, and therefore do not contain sufficiently clear indicators as to the type of answer that should be given. Recognizing this state of affairs in many reflections within cultural studies is the source of the notorious generality of answers given, and difficulties met in attempting to refine them. The reflections below, of course, also do not contain the answers sought by sociology and anthropology. I am far from entertaining the ambition of aiming to solve the greatest problem within the humanities; I am merely trying to divide it into separate components that are not always carefully observed, and to draw attention to the differentiations of the research problematics involved, depending on the version of the question that is posed, and the specificities of the objects to which it is addressed. Let us begin with the problem of the genetic relationships between culture and society.

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Many misunderstandings in the work of social theory have emerged from the effort to solve the problem of the genetic relationship between culture and society understood both attributively and distributively. At the same time, as we will see, depending on how the two concepts are grasped – which relations we are studying – the answers will vary accordingly. When we look at culture and society grasped in attributive terms – claims about the primacy of society elicit relatively little doubt. The logical primacy is easy to prove. The circulation of energy in groups of living organisms can happen without culture, i.e., without the circulation of information in symbolic form. We have many empirical examples from the animal world demonstrating the truth of this deduced thesis. There is a rich body of literature describing animal societies and their intricate arrangement of positive and negative relationships. A Polish reader could recently become acquainted with it thanks to a synthetic study by Adolf Remane. In that author’s opinion, we can take as analogous to human society two types of biological groups: the multi-species system of biocenosis, and the single-species functional arrangement. The mechanisms regulating the circulation of energy in biocenosis emerge from the fact that ‘every organism changes its living space through its life activity, thereby making life possible for other species’: Organisms developing on new territory quickly fill it up, and what they need for survival leads them to compete with each other. Many species are pushed out as a result, unable to survive in densely populated areas. In the biocenosis that results from this process, the only species that remain are the ones that are matched to each other in their adaptations and life needs. This reciprocal adaptation of component elements is an important foundation for the existence of biocenosis.

The living space of the group is the terrain for acquiring goods, in whose extent the species remain in a state of relative negative dependence on each other: but, alongside this ‘reciprocal consumption of excesses of production’, there also emerge in the realm of biocenosis positive dependencies: ‘Alongside the relationship between predator and prey and the competition for light, water, or space for a nest, there are also much more complicated dependencies that play a role.’ In certain cases, ‘one species is simply exploited by another for egoistic purposes. But among the variety of other cases there are also situations of mutual benefit’; ‘This produces a circulation of material in the biocenosis, which makes possible the life and growth of more and more new generations of a given species.’ The second type



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of society-like relationships are functional arrangements, the best example of which are so-called ‘insect colonies’: In a functional system the individual is, in the framework of the system, strongly shaped by the system. This shaping is not some arbitrary change, but leads to the transformation of the individual into a specific functional component of the totality. Because of the limitations of their abilities, and often anatomical limitations, the individual is dependent on the entire system for their existence. In this specialized form they cease to be capable of independent existence in isolation.15

Thus, we have in both cases the process of energy circulating with all its complicated dependencies, in which individuals become caught up as a result. We also have relatively isolated systems, in which this process is closed. So we have everything that is necessary to declare the existence of society. But we do not have culture. Because there is no distinct system of information circulation outside the system of energy circulation. In certain situations, specific to insect colonies, there is a phenomenon that we could describe as ‘learning’, which is proper only to culture: workers become soldiers, or egg-bearing females – queens. The analogy is only superficial, however, because the information that led to the change of behaviour in the worker was not produced through the transmission of symbols, but by a change in the external energy situation. For example, because of the death of the queen, the workers ceased to provide her with especially valuable nutrients that would develop her egg sacs, and, because of those same nutrients, they acquired an ability to lay eggs. In non-human societies, we have only one system of inter-individual relations. Informational relations are ‘consumed’ by energy relations, are wholly encompassed by them, so we cannot speak of their relative autonomy. It is only with the appearance of symbols and their institutionalization in the form of speech that such autonomization is made possible, and the differentiation – practically and theoretically – of the sphere of culture and the sphere of society. Summing up, the concept of ‘society’ refers to many, more numerous collections of living organisms than the concept of culture. As Kroeber writes: Animals begin to be genuinely social whenever a mother suckles or feeds her young, or when a pair guards them. This makes nearly all birds and mammals social; but the socialization is of a familial or parent–offspring type. From this there must be distinguished the sociability of gregarious animals like sheep. These feel more comfortable in one another’s company; but they do not feed or aid each other. Also,

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the membership of a herd, not being based on kinship, is likely to be transiently shifting; it is reckoned an aggregation, not a true society. Highly organized animal societies are those which may become large but have a specific structure; which depend on defined interindividual relations.16

In the above category, Kroeber includes societies of insects and humans; both are societies, though one of them lacks a separate cultural sphere or even a discernible cultural aspect. In its historical aspect, the question of the primacy of society and culture grasped attributively leads to similar conclusions. It is true that we cannot, for understandable reasons, recreate the factual turns of events of the formation of the beginnings of human society in its culture-bearing, specifically human, form. We also cannot study the form of those of directly pre-human animals, because they have not been preserved in our times. Thus, to the genetic question in its historical variant, we must answer by deploying a methodology that is only indirectly historical – acknowledging, for instance, groups of contemporary primates as a message from history. Indeed, many researchers expect, from studies of the social life of primates, the material to answer questions about the genesis of humanity. The current state of belief in the field is effectively captured by Bates in the following claim: ‘It seems to me probable that man was a social animal before he became a bearer of culture, since I cannot imagine how the primordial elements of culture could have arisen in a non-social animal.’17 Many efforts to find the form of society among monkeys alive today lead to the conclusion that perhaps not all known species – maybe even not all populations of specific species – create communities that are larger than families, and stable, earning the title of society. Social life is a feature of only some of them. Bouliere’s study of lemurs sums it up this way: ‘The social groupings of the lemuriformes is extremely varied. Some species, it seems, are as little inclined to be sociable as are many insectivores or rodents, whereas others live in lasting (monogamous?) family groups, and still others form large bisexual groups in which the relations between the sexes at different age levels remain to be determined.’18 Chance tries to formulate the logic governing social tendencies of primates and to find an explanation for them: ‘those monkeys that spend a great deal of time in open country seem to form large social groups, whereas those that live in forests tend to have small and loosely co-ordinated groups’. Here is the explanation: ‘when feline predators are about, monkeys are safer in numbers’. And the conclusion: ‘Although the adaptive features of living in groups are



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not exhausted by the protection afforded against predators, particularly in open country, it seems probable that this was the adaptive feature of their behavior that led many species to develop the faculty for forming large groups.’19 Chance analyses the internal structure of these large groups of monkeys, which, it turns out, are completely circumscribed, though it is regulated without the participation of cultural factors: exclusively by ‘subsocial’ determinants, instincts, or by the energy situation. The visible manifestation of this structure is noted for the first time by Carpenter’s ‘spatial equilibration’,20 which is expressed by the fact that members of monkey society, operating constantly under the pressure of threats from multiple directions – from enemies of the species and from dominant monkeys from the group (or, in other words, from the dominant monkey and the simultaneous need for its protection) – maintain in relation to each other a stable geographic distance, whose size stems from the vectors representing both pressures. In the course of life and the demands of the ecological environment, Chance perceives the situation in which social life takes on an adaptive meaning, in the mechanism of ‘spatial equilibrium’ – that non-cultural factor which can guarantee the consistency of social forms prior to the emergence of culture. These somewhat desultory reflections can best be summed up by introducing this rather convincing assessment from Irving Hallowell: But systems of social action are not unique in man. They also occur in infrahuman primates, and, structurally varied as they may be in different species, they constitute, nevertheless, a generic and characteristic mode of adaptation. Consequently, we may infer that social structure long antedated any form of cultural superstructure that, when eventually built into an organized system of social action in the course of hominid evolution, established the foundation of a new level of social living with the inherent potentialities that led to the emergence of various types of sociocultural systems.21

As necessary conditions, which had to be formed prior to the emergence of culture, Hallowell takes: (a) social structure, understood as the division of roles – or, in our terminology, as the system of positive dependencies; and (b) ‘territoriality’, understood as making it impossible for society B to make use of goods that are found on territory occupied by group A – or, in our terminology, the creation of negative relationships on the outside. Both defining features of society are therefore prior to culture, as is society itself. This conclusion, based on studies of the social lives of primates,

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seems logically persuasive even independently of empirical proofs (which can never be complete, in this case), mainly because it is only with the development of animals who create a society that has a social structure and the feature of territoriality that culture can have an adaptive meaning; it makes possible a quicker and more efficient accumulation of experiences than what happens as a result of biology–instinct, and a relatively flexible modelling of social structures corresponding to changing conditions. For this reason, the laconic statement of Hallowell seems very accurate to me: ‘Cultural adaptation, indeed, may be viewed as the culmination of social evolution in the primates.’22 Thus, with the attributive approach to society and culture, the answer to the genetic question is relatively unambiguous: society emerged before culture; society could exist and did exist before culture; culture could not exist and could not emerge in any way other than on the foundations of created and solidified social relations. Matters are completely different when it comes to society and culture understood distributively. From the moment when the stage of evolution is reached where the system of information circulation has distinguished itself from the system of energy circulation and taken on its symbolic form, specific to humans, all transformations of rules governing human coexistence in communities could happen only with the modification of both systems. Every human fact and every change from then on had two aspects – social and cultural. Every society was associated with a culture. The epithet ‘human’ generally refers to such societies – those that possess a cultural aspect. We can, among many known societies, distinguish in theory two types, or rather two situations, that can occur within the relations between culture and society. The first situation occurred perhaps more during the primitive phases of human history, and was characterized by a relatively narrow correlation between the social and cultural aspects of human life. Leslie White even writes, emphatically, ‘the economic organization of primitive society is virtually identical with its kinship organization’,23 having in mind the inseparability, unrecognizability, of social and cultural aspects of human existence, the complete net of human interdependencies and psychic ties in human relations. It is hard to assert today whether there ever existed such a model of complete union between culture and society, but it is certain that such an idea – the vision of a system of human coexistence with only one system of circulation, in which the circulation of goods is simultaneously the circulation of symbolic meaning, and beyond this single system of circulation there are no other goods or symbols – has value for research that is akin to the value proper to good ideal types,



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of which we can be easily convinced, by comparing in this regard the situation of primitive societies with the situation of contemporary industrial society. It is precisely industrial society that invites reflection about the other end of the spectrum of the relationship between culture and society. We have here a highly developed separation between society and culture; we have a consistently large number of meanings that are deprived of correspondents in the system of social relations, and a large number of social phenomena that lack cultural meaning. The system of culture and the system of society of an industrial nation possess separate mechanisms of supply and of external ties that are to a large degree independent of each other. Societies remain subject to the strongest cultural influences not necessarily from that collection of people with whom they trade most frequently, and not necessarily from the one that has the strongest impact on the situation in which its needs are met. In other words, for society of this type, a situation is characteristic in which the system generating human needs is autonomous from the system creating the means of satisfying them, and, between the needs and possibilities of satisfying them, there exists a chronic separation. In the first of the situations described, the questions about primacy cannot be reasonably posed: every cultural change is also a social change, and vice versa. It is not an accident that, for a long time, anthropologists studying small primitive societies contained their descriptions within cultural categories, almost entirely avoiding terms used for the description of social structures (in recent years, this has changed). Indeed, a good description of the culture of primitive societies (before it came under the influence of market economies) could exhaust, almost without remainder, everything that there was to say about society. It was essentially a secondary issue whether we organize knowledge about primitive society into an image of a cultural system, or a social system; what was important was whether it is possible to organize it within a single system at all, and not into two, as in more developed phases of the dichotomy of society and culture. In the second situation however, the genetic question can perhaps be asked, but finding a single answer to it is nearly impossible. If we treat the problem empirically (historically), we will be struck by the large number of ‘proofs’ that we can collect, both for theses about the primacy of society, and for the claims of the primacy of culture. No one has any doubts that, in the many examples of cultures forming into national systems, they were preceded by the formation of societies into nations. Today, we observe the spread of a culture of industrialization that is incomparably faster than the territorial gains

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of the industrialization of social relations. Every epoch can provide many similar examples and, what is more, this fact is compatible with what can be logically deduced from the autonomization of systems of communication of information and energy. There is no other option, then, but to acknowledge the impossibility of untangling the problem of genesis in relation to society and culture understood distributively. Sometimes, society of a certain type is formed, even before a cultural system that would be adequate to it, but sometimes it is the other way around, and neither of these two cases is the rule. In the same forum of inquiry where we asked genetic questions, we also come across the structural question. Indeed, if we look at the problem of primacy in reference to culture and society in a distributive sense, we are essentially asking to what degree it is correct to say that the described social structure creates the conditions for, or requires for its existence, a given cultural structure – and vice versa; or asking how broad the class of cultural systems is that could be associated with a given social system – and vice versa. The collective life of humans can be examined, broadly speaking, on four levels of analysis: a. The level of natural conditions. This pertains to the possibilities of satisfying potential human needs residing in the particularities of our globe, in its now visible and still unknown resources, and even in those portions which we do not yet describe as resources, because we do not yet know how to make use of them. b. The level of technology, the level of creative forces. This is about the totality of ability to utilize natural conditions for human needs, along with the material correlates of this ability – in other words, about the totality of possibilities for relating the natural environment to the needs of humans. c. The level of social structure, or the system of positive and negative inter-human dependencies. d. The level of culture, or the resources of information possessed by people, and the system of its circulation. Every level has this property – that it indicates the ‘range of comfort’ for the subsequent level. In particular natural conditions, only a specific set of technological systems can be used. A heavy plough cannot be used on the loose soil of the Mediterranean, but, on the other hand, the resources proper to the natural conditions of temperate Europe, with its heavy soil and thick forestation, cannot be used without technology based on steel. Arctic territories are amenable to the use of Inuit technology, which uses leather dugout



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canoes and igloos, or to the modern technology of tractors and preserved foods. On the other hand, the state of technology creates the conditions for the degree of complexity of social relations – in this case, it decides the size and possible concentration of excesses of production. Finally, the social structure indicates the array of alternatives for cultural systems with which it can function. It is inconceivable to think of the existence of the English industrial system with the beliefs of the Indian culture of karma and nirvana, or the coexistence of the tribal economy of the Fulani people with English Puritanism. The above reasoning can be conducted in the opposite direction: the state of technology delineates which elements of nature become a component of ‘conditions of human life’ and therefore which terrains can be used for that life; the social structure delineates which technology can be used by a given group of people; and, finally, the state of culture limits the array of possible social structures. So we have structural ties in both directions, and a research directive that is very clear: the analysis of the structural relationships between culture and society can and should be conducted in two ways, and should aim both at categorizing a given social structure within a category of cultural systems, and at categorizing a given culture within a class of social structures. It is probably unnecessary to add that, in the context of structural relations, we have up to this point considered only societies and cultures understood distributively. In distinction to the genetic question, the structural question only makes sense when we adopt a distributive understanding of both terms, noting the negligible cognitive value of the attributive sense. Indeed, if, by natural conditions, we mean the resources of the planet Earth (and maybe the cosmos) manifested in past and future history; and by technology, the set of creative possibilities of humanity; and by facets of the human species, classes of systems of different analytical levels which can be reciprocally connected to each other – these encompass essentially all variants of human structures and cultures and there can be no talk of any kind of limits (aside from, of course, the kinds of limits that all known and conceivable cultures and social structures must contend with). From the perspective of the historical and generally human, the range of comfort of any of the levels is not hampered by the conditions imposed by other levels. If we now translate this logical operation into the language of historical processes, we can arrive at the conclusion that the autonomy of technology from local ecology, social relations from locally utilized technologies, culture from local social structure

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– and vice versa – grew to the degree that the local differentiation of society and culture was overcome, that a general human society began to form and a general human culture to emerge as a result of the extension of paths of energy and information communication. Herskovitz wrote that ‘the available data indicate that the more adequate the technology, the less direct are the demands by the environment on the daily life of a people’.24 In this way, he grasped in local categories the processes whose essence is based precisely on the fact that it explodes local frames of phenomena. People can free themselves of the limitations imposed on them by Environment A thanks to technology, whose creation made possible for them the more comfortable Environment B. The social structure of Group A can become dependent on the limitations imposed by the very technology that it uses, thanks to the fact that part of the needs of Group A are met by an association with the structure of Group B, etc. The more extensive the similar external ties are, the greater the possibility of supplementing the insufficiency of the local terrain from the outside – the greater the independence from the terrain. From this, the conclusion that the structural dependence between societies and cultures is even greater, the more that they are isolated, local cultures – which is to say, the closer to reality is the distributive perspective on them. The dependency is all the less, the more that the societies and cultures that are grasped distributively merge into a broader human culture and society of the human species. Finally, the functional question, which, as we remember, serves an interpretive role in relation to the structural question. Functional analysis is a very trendy method in the social sciences of today. Much has been written on the subject of the concept of function, and much literature has been devoted to both the exposition and the theoretical critique of the extrapolation of the method of functional analysis, which is contemporary sociological functionalism. I am freed from having to provide the broad arguments on the pros and cons of functional analysis – in particular on the subject of the limitations of a reasonable usage of the concept of function in the study of social phenomena – because of the recent publication in Poland of a terrific study by Maria Hirszowicz,25 to which I send my readers. I will only mention this accurate statement by Lévi-Strauss: ‘to say that society functions is a truism; but to say that everything in a society functions is an absurdity’.26 Indeed, accepting a priori that every cultural element, because it is a component of a given culture, must simultaneously serve a particular function in regards to a given society of which that culture is an aspect would equate to accepting: first, that society and culture do not have their own, relatively



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autonomous histories; second, that society and culture are perfectly isolated from their surroundings; third, that the structural correlation between society and culture is total, at least in a negative sense (i.e., that a given social structure radically eliminates cultural elements that do not fit within it, and vice versa). All of these premises are false in reference to all human groups – with the exception, perhaps, of the most basic societies, about which we can say nothing concrete. We thus must accept that not everything in a particular culture must be and is ‘functional’ for a specific society, of which it is an aspect. What can the functionality of culture for a society be based on at all, if it even exists? The most concise answer to this question came from Erich Fromm, who said that the function of education – so, of acculturation, of transmitting to a given culture the sum of paradigms for research, selection, evaluation – is to produce the outcome that ‘people want to act as they have to act’; ‘they must understand childhood training in the context of the social structure, and particularly as one of the key mechanisms of transmission of social necessities into character traits’.27 In other words, to say that a given cultural system is functional with regards to a given society is to say that the distribution of models of behaviour in the frame of a given system of culture is of the kind that would incline all people to the proper form of behaviour that is in accordance with the pressure exerted by the system of reciprocal social dependencies, and could lead to achieving the results that are in keeping with the expectations of those participating. In brief, the functionality of culture in regards to society is essentially superimposing the vector of motivation onto the vector of external pressures in every individual situation – or in a significant majority of those situations. The relative autonomy of culture and society, grounded in the autonomy of the ties of both time and space, means that the ideal functionality of the cultural system as a whole is only rarely, if ever, achieved. In anthropology today, the view is increasingly dominant – under the influence of many critics of primitive functionalism – that, even among the most primitive societies that have survived to modern times and been described by ethnographers, this functionalism was not total. The persistence of cultural models in changed social conditions, the peregrinations of cultural elements, that were not accompanied by a corresponding change in social structure, as well as other factors, meant that every culture, even if it could be reasonably distinguished as a separate whole, is a collection of elements, of which each was no doubt functional with regard to some aspect of social relations in some time and at some place, but whose functionality as regards the actual, existing society cannot be deduced

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without accepting the Hegelian principle that ‘everything that is real, can be comprehended’. Some collection of functional elements must exist in every culture, otherwise society could not exist, but what can be said about particular elements of culture cannot be transferred to the system as a whole. We can assume that the more intense the extra- and intra-societal cultural communication, and the more easily cultural models can circulate, the greater the proportion of non-functional elements in every individually taken culture will be. Of course, all of the above can be reversed, though this rarely happens: society can also be analysed from the point of view of its functionality or non-functionality in regards to a given culture. The system of social dependencies is functional with regards to culture when it makes possible for people the acquisition of goods, which culture causes them to desire. And there are at least as many non-functional societies and aspects of social structures as there are non-functional cultures and cultural elements. Recognizing this means making a singular choice of research perspective, dictated by conditions that lie outside of research. It is better, then, in accordance with the actual symmetry of the cultural and social aspect of human life, to speak of a ‘reciprocal functionalism’ or ‘reciprocal non-functionality’ of culture and society. This second term is simply a different name for the phenomenon of a dissonance between, and relative autonomy of, both aspects, which has attended humanity for the majority of its history. Frustration, anomie, social protest and other ‘dysfunctional’ psychological states and behaviours are as much the result of a non-functional culture as of a non-functional society. THE MECHANISM OF THE AUTONOMIZATION OF CULTURE The separation between culture and society has been threaded through everything I have been saying up to this point, gradually becoming the central problem of the historical process. Thus, it is appropriate, at the conclusion of these reflections that are devoted to determining some initial premises of cultural analysis, to devote some space to explaining the mechanism of this phenomenon. The possibility of decoupling and separating the paths of develop­ ment of culture and society exists already in the specific property of human society – in this, particularly: that it is ‘society and culture’, an assemblage in which the net of informational tensions has become separated from that of energy relations, which means, to speak more precisely (in light of the fact that every transmission of



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information is also a transmission of energy, and vice versa), the kind of assemblage in which certain relations have become specialized as informational, while others have maintained a primarily energetic role. And so the source of the dissonance must be sought from the outset in the particularities of this socio-cultural, specifically human, way of life, which has been shaped as the result of the biological– social evolution of primates. Contemporary perspectives on the evolution of humans hold that, from the evolutionary-biological point of view, the human species is an ‘infantilized’ form, in contrast to its closest animal ancestors. This infantilism is expressed above all in the extreme reduction of the natural, biologically inherited toolkit for obtaining means of livelihood and protection against predators, and especially in the almost complete disappearance of a repertoire of instinctual behaviours adequate to the situations that the lifestyle and biological needs of the organism render likely. Supported by the research findings of those studying the earliest forms of human life, Montagu asserts that: ‘By means of such a selective process the immediate forerunners of man were increasingly freed of their instinctual equipment, so that by the time we reach man, virtually the last vestiges of that equipment have fallen away.’ The process of selection favoured the ‘ambiguity’ of biological species, expanding the range of options for possibilities of behaviour, in the selection of the natural environment and the methods of exploiting it: ‘Natural selection during the evolution of man has probably placed the greatest premium on educability, plasticity or adaptability of behavior to changing conditions … it was this trait rather than the development of special abilities which must have been most highly favored.’28 The above information can be acknowledged as a paradox: the most important feature gained by people as a result of biological evolution is freedom from biological determinism. We exaggerated, of course, as with any paradox: factually speaking, we are not contending with freedom from, but with a significant weakening of, biological determinism, and a serious broadening of the classes of behaviour deemed acceptable by the human’s biological constitution. That behaviour had previously been determined only by way of mutation, and it was unambiguously changed only by that – when this ceases to be the case, models of behaviour emerge. Instinctive relations and models of behaviour are primarily different from each other, in that, with the instinctive mode of behaviour, the individual in a given situation must proceed in one way and not another, whereas, in situations that are regulated by models, they can do this, but do not have to. The model thus immeasurably expands the repertoire

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of possible behaviours in comparison to the instinct, allowing for relatively quick changes in ways of reacting to external stimuli, and thus for ably adapting behaviour to a changing set of stimuli. While the instinct is essentially a defined predisposition of an organism, manifesting in behaviour under the influence of precisely defined signals, the model is information that an organism must initially acquire, in order to link certain forms of behaviour with specific types of signals. It will, furthermore, not be unreasonable to assert that educability – the ability to learn – can be understood as a facility tied to acquiring information; and such forms of information, whose energy properties are unimportant in terms of rendering autonomous the informational functions of transmission, are a feature particular to people, and also the message of the cultural form of the organization of society. Educability in general is not a specifically human characteristic. Animal species – some to a larger degree, some to a smaller – make use of the ability to develop or to change an inherited repertoire of behaviour in the course of their personal lives. Species gifted with the greatest capability of this type are the preferred objects of circus or salon training. For animals, acquiring the ability to learn new forms of behaviour happens precisely via training, which can, it is true – using appropriately general terms – be described similarly to human education, but which, however, differs from this human education in significant ways. Accustoming animals to new modes of behaviour happens through the assistance of signals, in which the most essential function is played by the energy aspect, whose informational function is realized ‘in passing by’, or ‘as an effect of’ energy transmission. ‘Purely informational’ transmission, or transmissions whose layers of energy are unimportant to animals, have no chance of eliciting, creating, new forms of behaviour (though, after new types of behaviour have been created, they may be evoked even without a simultaneous energetic strengthening, through pure ‘information’ – though certainly not forever). ‘The ability to learn’ differs in this way significantly from ‘the ability to be trained’. It is expressed in the fact that, in an individual who has this capability to learn, the ability to behave in a new way can be created under the influence of the kind of transmissions whose energy aspects are irrelevant to the organism. We will call such ‘pure information’ (by ‘pure information’, we also mean transmissions whose influence on the recipient is independent of their energy aspect), a phenomenon specific to humans: ‘symbols’. This way of introducing the idea of ‘symbols’ seems better to me than White’s definition: ‘A Symbol is a thing the value or meaning of which is bestowed upon it by those who use



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it.’29 White’s definition seems to me less well suited because of the following: (a) we can only speak of the ‘value’ or ‘meaning’ of any given thing from the perspective of some individual, for whom this thing is an object, and the feature described in the definition does not distinguish symbols; (b) if treating humans not as a species, but as a collection, then the assertion about symbols in the definition turns out to be simply untrue: it is not the case – or at least it does not have to be the case – that the meaning of symbols is decided by the person who makes use of them (transmits them? – receives them?); quite the opposite: generally, some people establish the meaning of symbols, and others encounter objects endowed with symbolic value that has an already established meaning. That which distinguishes humans from animals is, in the first place, an ability to shape their own behaviour in response to information, which appears without the energy content, with which it remains in a relationship of meaning. A thing that informs the recipient of something more than its own energy aspect is such a sign. We are dealing with symbols and the ability to symbolize only when the informational meaning becomes separated from the thing itself, becomes independent with respect to it, becomes independent of the material aspect of one particular sign, and can be transmitted with the assistance of an arbitrary amount of other signs, linked only by relations of information – though in every concrete case, it can be transmitted with the help of some sign. Meanings, separated from things that they designate, form the material of culture. The process of symbolization, being a sign of the birth of culture, happens along the way to the stabilization of meanings through the association of them, first, with acoustic signs that comprise a spoken language, and then with material ones, which in the final stage produce a written language. The human collective begins to have a culture when, for every member of the group, a certain collection of signs will be comprised of only such elements, which for all members of the group are associated with identical meanings. Human language is an ability to link signs with symbols. Language is a system of signs that are linked in a stable way for a specific group, with particular symbols connected. Culture is the collection of information that is created or borrowed, but always possessed by a given group of humans, transmitted reciprocally among members by means of symbols with meanings that are fixed for that group. If the ability to learn is the specifically human method of using the environment to satisfy their needs, this activity of symbolizing and transmitting symbols is a specifically human way of spreading a social ability to yoke this environment. Hence the sense of magic,

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noted by many researchers, that humans associate with the act of naming and with names themselves. According to Mumford, ‘the act of naming was a godlike process, a second creation: when one had gotten possession of a name, one seemed to exercise command over the object it identified’.30 This faith, not always formulated explicite, is still with people today. It is not only the Jagan Indians and other primitive tribes who forbid with magic curses the use of the ‘private’ name of a member of the tribe. Our contemporaries also have two names: one public one, for everyone, and a second that can only be used by people who, by virtue of their closeness, have been offered a small bit of power over one’s own person … Meanings becoming independent sets into motion a process of accumulating human goods that would be impossible by other means. All generations up to this point transmitted their goods phys­ ically, in dimensions that are comically small in comparison to the potential wealth of information amassed over thousands of years. It was symbolization, and the culture based on it, that made it possible for a human to be, as Korzybski wrote, ‘a time-binder’,31 a creature who is capable of acquiring, synthesizing and constantly shaping anew the experiences of bygone ages, making them not individual, but a resource of the species. People today differ from their ancestors of thousands of years ago not so much in the buildings they have erected, or flying boxes – which they actually possess and their forefathers did not – but in their incomparably richer collection of information and the abilities associated with it. Information, once severed from its energy aspects, began to lead a life of its own, and meanings separated from the things described could become the subject of combinations happening only in the sphere of information, and fundamental in regard to events happening in the energy sphere. This is the possible lesson of the relative autonomy of culture.

2 Notes Beyond Time(1967) Translated by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

I ‘I lie here miserable and broken with desire’, wrote Archilochus. They say that these words heralded the birth of the human individual. The followers of Shiva and Isis, Baal and Yahweh, suffered. Sometimes because an evil neighbour who possessed powers of sorcery cursed them. Sometimes because the actions of their tribe did not find favour in the eyes of the Lord. Sometimes because, simply, the Lord wanted it that way. They suffered, grinding their teeth or weeping, in humility, or with angry words of protest on their lips. Bah! – there even came times when they suffered because of things they had done. Because they had violated the order established by the Lord. They upset the order of Creation. They were face to face with the Law; they alone accounted for their own deeds. So they suffered when the weakness of their own souls did not allow them to meet His demands. But there was still only one Law – clear, lucid, penetrating, not containing surprises. By its singularity, it was as obvious as Polaris the star, pointing to the North. So it happened sometimes that they were guilty towards Him. But they did not yet know what sin was. They learned what sin was when they stood before a Choice. Only then did they discover the suffering that attends the birth of the human individual. This suffering did not end with the restoration of the Order they had disrupted. This suffering was within them. People gave Choice many names. Divine right and human right. Heda and Kalon. Egoism and Altruism. Necessity and Freedom.

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Obligation and Desire. Common interest and individual interest. In these various guises, they sought shelter for their conflicting desires. The heroes of Homer were brought to their knees by the sentences of the Olympians. Tyrtaeus and Callinus spoke in the name of a wisdom beyond all humans of the State. Archilochus spoke in his own name. He was broken with desire. Archilochus was an individual. Archilochus had individuality. As a result, he and his followers had to grapple with a situation that was not to be borne: they were simultaneously on the inside and the outside, subject and object, the source of their desire and its plaything. As bearers of individuality, they were responsible for its perfectability. As individuals, they demanded perfection from the world. If they neglected their responsibility, they sinned. But sin could also be the fault of the world, if the world neglected that which it owed to their individuality. If, as Paul Radin writes, those who invented sin were counting on humbling humans in relation to the world – they were disappointed. They revealed the discrepancy between the world and the human, the irreducibility of the individual to Divine decisions or human ones. They granted humans the power to accuse the world. Poor little life! – not even, so fugitive, fill’d with pleasure! Hateful is death, but life hath a bitterer taste of tears. Behold the groundwork of bones! Exactly drawn to that measure. Do ye exalt your brows, O men, to the cloudy spheres?1

Generation after generation, people dream of restoring ‘primordial unity’. They don’t know that when they had it, it didn’t make them happy, because they weren’t aware of it. They don’t know that if it arrived now, it still wouldn’t make them happy. They have already tasted the bitterness of choice, so they would see it as the end of their humanity. Then they would understand that, only by bearing the suffering of choice – only by fighting with themselves – are they people. They do not know how to be humans in any other way, these inheritors of the Greek curse. A good sociologist will snort if told that people cannot be broken down into basics, that they are not the ‘totality of social determinants’, that their possibilities are not exhausted by the social role they play. The credo of the good sociologist, the legitimation of his belonging to the academic community, is the conviction that human actions, both the most basic and tangible ones and the ones that are only experienced more abstractly (if experiences that are not objectified will be granted a place in our sociologist’s academic sanctuary), are ‘in their essence’ predictable. This means: fully reducible to their



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measurable, graspable, objective determinants. This means: fully exhaustible, without remainder, in their materiality. The path of the human can be predicted just as accurately as that of a cannonball. If we don’t do this, it is because there is no point. There are too many variables to take into account. If there were nonetheless any reason to do so, Skinner assures us, there would be no obstacles. One would only need to know what to measure, and to measure it accurately. Like all expressions of faith, the philosophical premises of a good sociologist are, of course, not subject to empirical verification. The ineptitude of the field and the capriciousness of the object – these are two equally possible, equally philosophical and equally untestable interpretations of the fact that humans are not entirely predictable and not entirely manipulatable. Unless we use an SS whip to tear from them all the successive layers of their human existence – and even then, there may be surprises … Which of the two interpretations is better? The good sociologist will say, as did S.2: for now, let us assume that human actions are fundamentally predictable, because this premise will at least allow for the perfectability of their analytic tools. I understand S. and his good intentions. A good tailor ought to believe in the existence of the perfect shoe. And for whom is the ideal person of sociologists useful, if he is not the ideal person of the people? Indeed, fate was cruel in its placement of ‘academic’ humanities. In pursuit of obedience to the values of its own professional caste, it is constantly in conflict with human values. S. also said – probably so as to avoid coming into conflict with his own conscience – for the hypothesis that people cannot be reduced to their determinants, that they are also spontaneous sources of creation, there will later come a time, once we have exhausted all the possibilities of our discipline. Unfortunately, this is an illusory way to appease the conscience: this field is also the crucible in which human fates are formed. Presupposing an essential predictability of human actions and acting in accordance with this belief, in practice, renders the opposite hypothesis increasingly less probable and necessary. The premises of good sociologists fill J. with fear, but J. wants arguments – certain and incontrovertible proofs. Listening to my claims, she said: ah, so this is the moral postulate. I felt the sadness in her voice. J. has a good heart, a very good heart, and J. would very much like me to convince her – to give her certainty instead of a troubled conscience. Unfortunately, for an academic, a moral argument is neither certain, nor incontrovertible. Bah! it isn’t even an argument. It does not count in discussion, it is the breath of the

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non-academic world, a message from the sphere of ‘social thought’, ‘philosophy’ – the two circles of hell for the academic sociologist. I share J.’s sadness, though for a different reason. I am sad for the discipline in which the epithet ‘moral’ is sufficient to exclude an argument from academic consideration and push it beyond the reach of consciousness. But maybe there really is no place for morality in a space where human objects of academic study are examined in the way one studies a caterpillar: if we poke it on the left side, will it swerve to the right, and if we poke it on the right side, will it swerve to the left? Where we think about people and write about them only as ‘respondents’, or as something that we act upon with stimuli in order to ascertain its reactions? I know one thing for certain: all the worse for humans. When morality and academia cannot agree, humans always lose. Oh gods, protect us from those who wish to free us from suffering. With suffering, Archilochus, we will manage on our own … II A conversation with M. at the Bristol.3 M. is one of the smartest people that I know. Always slightly on the margins of the academic world, he possesses its yearning for honest knowledge without being subject to its obsessions and career anxieties. The freshness of his thought has been preserved, untouched, and even today it is more curious about the information sentences carry than the correctness of their composition. So M. is by no measure representative of academics. But M. says: sociologists stand before a choice – knowledge that is abundant, or certain. It is in such terms and in this form that many academics perceive the eternal conflict between creativity and safety, freedom and calm that arises from the lack of responsibility, the subjectivity of the human individual and the objective situation of humans. We have turned certainty and reliability into the cardinal virtues. Bah, the only virtues! We have named the striving for certainty the small person’s fear of risk, so as to absolve them from accusations of cowardice. When the army of academics numbers in the thousands and millions, there must be space within it for people with small souls and narrow horizons – indeed, there is mainly space for them. This army needs an ideology that would transform the vice of mediocrity into an exalted trait, deserving of praise. That would allow people who are not so much creating science as thrown into it to feel at home. Would free



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them from the scruples and resentments emerging from a competition they had no chance at winning. The young sociologist, making use of arithmetical knowledge acquired in elementary school, calculates the correlation between the number of divorces and the age when people get married. The young sociologist does not take risks: if it turns out that there is a correlation, the research will merit a Ph.D. The young sociologist has gained a feeling of security independently of his contribution to human knowledge. He calls this security certainty. He does not brag: look, I am not taking risks. He gloats, however: look, my results are certain and reliable. The friends of the young sociologist praise him and feel joy in their own hearts. They have gained a work that they understand, that does not disrupt the peace, that does not force them to think, that does not interfere with digestion, does not produce the anxieties that always emerge when a person stands before matters that are unclear, have multiple meanings, transcend the imagination, forcing one to solve problems. They feel joy in their hearts for another reason: another ritual has been conducted in accordance with the laws of tradition, confirming through its repeatability their conviction that the path they have chosen is right, and indeed the only one – that it is the way to go, that it is good, that they have gained a sense not only of order, but of a correct order, whose ubiquity removes from them the responsibility for choosing this way of acting. It is not only the sociologist’s friends who celebrate. It is also the reading public. Because they pay us to provide certainty – for the same thing that they paid priests of the Church in the Middle Ages. The counting machine has replaced the Communion wafer; the microscope, the chalice – but the function remains the same: the feeling of being on permanent and stable ground in the shifting sands of the passing moment, the yearning for an unmoving point of light of reliable knowledge in the deceptive fog of hallucinations and delusions. From anxieties, secrets and struggles, people have a life. They have us for certainty. M. does not rejoice. M. has something to say to people, something personal; there would be space for M. within academia even if the legion of academics was no larger than the average platoon – and maybe precisely then? So certainty does not suffice for M. as the reason for an academic existence. M. wants something more. He wants truth, but in the older sense of the word; by calling out ‘We want the truth’, people gave voice to their craving for knowledge. Today, speaking of the truth, academics mean method. What does M. want? Aha, this is where the tragedy begins. In the all-powerful Catholic Middle Ages, anti-religiosity could exist within religion

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only in a religious form. In the all-powerful scientistic twentieth century, we can rebel against scientific delusion only in the name of scientific slogans. Anti-science takes on the form of seeking a method ‘even more certain’, which would allow us to prove that the current method is ‘worse’ and not sufficiently productive. M. is up to his ears in the unfulfilled promises of something that we can call ‘reductionism’. So he proposes in exchange something that we will call ‘structuralism’. This new thing is tied to the name Lévi-Strauss – a very inventive person, but one who prefers to give as the true author of his discoveries not the intellect, but the method. Lévi-Strauss deceives his readers. There is no method that would allow every interested person to possess his intelligence. And without such intelligence, a new method would be more grist for the mill of thought, accessible to anyone with a healthy hand. Abraham Maslow, one of the few humanists living today who is ready to do battle with the assumptions of thousands, and who feels good only when he is swimming against the current, wrote that the disposition, style, atmosphere, of ‘normal academia’ was formed not by the greats, not by those who pose questions, by the discoverers, revolutionaries – but by that majority of ‘normal academics’ who are more reminiscent of coral reefs than eagles. In this way, academia came to mean in the first place patience, carefulness, abstinence, slowness, the art of avoiding error – instead of courage, daring, risk, a game of fortune … Constructed in this way, it trains its adepts in its own image: young people are rewarded only for being patient, careful, self-controlled, detail-oriented, suspicious, proper, neat. Efforts are exerted, so that they rid themselves of all their ‘untamed’ elements – unconventionality, rebellion, poetic or aesthetic qualities, joy, madness, impulsiveness, ‘female’ qualities, mystical tendencies. Since the moment that it became a mass organization, academia expels extravagance and banishes apostates. Lasciate ogni speranza … Academia has ceased, today, for the vast majority of its followers, to be a space of great intellectual adventure, a virgin forest that can be claimed by the actualization of creative individuals and an unsettled mind. Everything is far too neat and clean, sterile, disinfected. Its terrain has been too scrupulously divided into fenced-in plots; overly detailed road signs have been placed at every crossroads. Defending themselves by all means against the discomfort of a rebellious intellect, soldiers of academia have forgotten about the vanguard: through the unguarded back gates, alienation snuck into the fortress of academe, after fruitlessly laying siege for thousands of years. Today for the majority of academics, academia is a terrain of escape from choice and risk, a



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protective fortress against human emotions and impulses, the terrain of monastic escapism from the multiplicity of meaning of human existence. The legitimation of the scholar was his work. The academic flashes his employee badge. III It has become acceptable to say: Marx did not anticipate this. As if Marx was engaged in predicting the future, instead of creating it. It angers me when they say: Marx did not anticipate that the impoverishment of the proletariat would be stopped. Marx didn’t anticipate it? Marx made it happen! Dreaming of nibbling at a piece of the splendour of Marxist thought, balking at the possibility of shouldering the burden of Marxist action, academic dwarves busily work away at cutting the giant down to their own modest size. Marxism, you understand, is based on the idea that the world objectively exists. In other words, every child can be a Marxist, merrily smashing their childish toys in the process. The world exists; we look at this existing world. If we put on the right glasses, we will see the world properly. Then we will describe it and possess the truth. Unfortunately for the dwarves, descriptions of the world have as much in common with Marxism as masturbation does with sex. The peculiar and unrepeatable greatness of Marxist earth-shattering emerges only when we understand that Marx’s ideas were not so much a programme for acquiring or discovering the truth, as for creating it. Creating it not in the sterile atmosphere of pure thought, on the model of conventionalists, but in the sphere of the world itself, which does not exist only for itself, but for us and by us, and which is only accessible to us in this way, and it is only that very accessibility that renders it our world. Marxism is a programme of eternal remaking of the world, achieved anew by the constant rejuvenation of winning out over the gap between what should be and what is, the norm and the reality. Marxism comprises this kind of particular collection of sentences, each of which is declarative and normative at the same time. Or, better, in which the opposition between these ideas, which are contradictory in ‘normal’ academia, has been transcended. And – what is most important – Marxism achieves a totality only when its sentences, beyond the dimension of thought, also acquire the weight and measure of action. ‘The truth is a process.’ Academic dwarves scrupulously clipped

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the wings of this winged formula. They translated it into their own language: this is like the growth of a tulip from a bulb. First a shoot, then leaves, then a bud, and finally a flower. And, most importantly: we water it with convention, we pluck the weeds. And surround it with a fence and a sign, ‘Beware of the guard dog!’ The dwarves like calm, so they do not like to leave their garden for the busy roads of life. They have thus cleverly translated these winged words in such a way as to be able to avow them from an armchair. So that they can maintain the blissful awareness that they are engaged in the pursuit of truth without missing out on their afternoon nap. But really, ‘the truth is a process’ means: people create ideas through action. The drama of confirming the truth of human life does not happen in any tidy gardens. Every garden setting would prove to be too small. History is the greatest arbiter of truth. The truth comes from the creation of history. Throwing out this challenge to the world, Marx (after all …) did not anticipate … He did not anticipate that, some years later, his descendants, seeking and creating the truth, would set up these tidy little gardens. He did not anticipate that in the year nineteen hundred and sixty-five there would be in Warsaw a World Congress of Limnologists. That they would travel to Warsaw from all over the world, portly well-dressed gentlemen, and after fruitful discussions they would toast each other with glasses of champagne for their inventiveness and the further blossoming of limnology, or the study of lakes and rivers. Marx did not anticipate that fields of study would emerge whose only reason for being is the existence of other fields of study with similar content. The sufficient reason for the existence of a limnologist is the fact that another limnologist exists. A limnologist writes for other limnologists, and becomes a limnologist through a nomination signed by another limnologist. Having established a well-organized supply system, the limnologist can calmly spend his entire existence in blissful ignorance that the human species also contains people who are not limnologists. History and its realization of the truth is howling somewhere far outside the windows of the limnology laboratories. Though the racket of historical events be I-don’t-know-how loud, the limnologist can dwell calmly in his quiet lake. He is selfsufficient in the evaluation of his actions, and in the area of his source of certainty that what he is doing makes sense. The limnologist can separate his small truth from history, because he has separated from history his small existence.



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IV The judges do not expect the accused to challenge their theory, much less to refute the facts. Rather, they require him to validate a system of which they possess only a fragment; he must reconstruct it as a whole in an appropriate way … . By his confession, the defendant is transformed into a witness for the prosecution … Through the defendant, witchcraft and the ideas associated with it cease to exist as a diffuse complex of poorly formulated sentiments and representations and become embodied in real experience. The defendant, who serves as a witness, gives the group the satisfaction of truth, which is infinitely greater and richer than the satisfaction of justice that would have been achieved by his execution … . The youth, who at first was a threat to the physical security of his group, became the guardian of its spiritual coherence.4

This was written by Claude Lévi-Strauss. He wrote this about a boy, whom – according to the testimony of M. C. Stevenson – the Zuni Indians accused of witchcraft. The boy was called before a tribunal, to prove that he was a sorcerer. There were demands for eye-witness testimony – certain, convincing. There was frustration with the boy, when he denied it. But the judges and spectators breathed a sigh of relief when the boy confessed and retrieved from the wall of his home the dried plums that gave power to his curses. The judges were pleased, the spectators rejoiced – here was yet another, publicly confirmed proof that sorcerers exist, that sorcery exists and that a group founded on the faith in their existence is logical, wise and necessary. Delighted, they set the boy free. Now he will be, like many others before him, parading around the tribal territories as a proof visible to all: the embodiment of the truth of tribal beliefs and the wisdom of tribal institutions. A strange verdict. But is it really so strange? Strangely familiar to me seemed the procedure of the Zuni; strangely close their concerns and intentions. An intellectual revolution divides us, Aristotle and Kant, but here and there groups of people worry over the same things, and try in the same way – eternal, we see – to solve their problems. We look for validations for our existence in the sensibleness of our collective beliefs. We are not so certain of them: we constantly demand confirmation; we are greedy for ever more examples, proofs, arguments. The crowning proof for us is the repetition by ever-new groups of people, on ever-new occasions, of pleasing-to-the-ear opinions on the wisdom of these views that we point to, when we seek to explain the logic of our own being.

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Suspiciously and distrustfully, we look at the youth until we are sure that he is willing to play our game and repeat our confessions of faith. Then we calm down immediately, when the youth recites the ritual formula, once again confirming for future generations that sorcerers walk among us. Not sufficiently daring to leave such important matters up to chance, institutions, we have written into law ritual forms that repeat the principles of faith. We academics – owing our existence to the battle with blind faith, as St George owed his existence to the battle with the dragon – we also have our rituals serving to confirm our faith. Every few weeks, we gather the public in our tabernacles, to listen with concentration as yet another boy tells us that it was a mistake, an ignorant mistake, a deceitful and malicious dragon, that he slaughtered with the sword of truth – whose poisonous blood he spilled. One of the monster’s heads has been cut off, thrown with contempt onto the garbage pile of human stupidity, the bloody sword wiped clean with pages of a dissertation, prepared for new battles – but the monster has many heads, so the sword cannot be donated to a museum. The spectre of error is haunting the world, the enemy has many names and shapes; we fight it – we praise brave, determined warriors. Praise be to us and to our swords. The moral? There is no moral. So our little world turns. Or maybe there is a moral. Don’t feel smug about not being Zuni. V ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven’, says the Sacred Word. ‘Knowledge is the power of the powerless’, says Max Weber.5 The sentences differ – as the linguistic customs, and names of the dreams of the epochs in which they were written, differ. But they are identical in the yearnings that they give voice to. Both arise from deprivation; both promise recompense for suffering ‘here and now’ with rewards ‘there and then’. The poor in spirit … Are poor, because there are people swimming in abundance, because there is sumptuousness on display that is obtrusive and that is a guarantee of satisfaction, freedom from hunger, the union of desire and its realization. Poverty is born of comparison, comparison hurts, threatens psychic health, constantly reminds us about the imperfections of our own selves, imposes negative assessments of our selves. The poor in spirit would cease to



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be so if they could stand such comparisons, if the impoverished ‘I’ did not have to see itself through the lens of the hyper-rich ‘not-I’, thereby losing the basis of any unflattering judgements. The Sacred Word suggests a different solution. Not to destroy the object of comparison, but to give up on comparisons. Psychic salvation is not to be found in the elimination of differences, but in assessing them differently. If we deprive the comparisons of value, and their results stop bothering us, they will lose their bitter and poisonous sting. Hunger will seem more pleasant, if we describe it as appetite – and poverty, if we call it nobility. The Kingdom of Heaven is not of this world, and it is the only thing worth caring about for a virtuous person – it is the only thing that counts. It is to the earthly world like infinity to the finite, like eternity to the passing moment, like perfection to our flawed earthly human existence. For one moment, when a person dwells on earth, they have the chance to earn their place to spend eternity in the greatest – because the most godly – bliss. The road to eternal wealth does not pass through temporary wealth. By giving up on transitory goods, a person gains access to eternal goods. And who would put what is temporary above what is eternal? Not having power … People describe themselves as those who lack power, because there are other people who have the right to make decisions about and for them. The feeling of a lack of power is born of comparison, comparison hurts, threatens psychic health, constantly reminds us about the imperfections of our own selves, imposes negative assessments of our selves. We could cope with such comparisons, triumph over the eternal division of people into subjects and objects, though today we do not see a way, just as in the times of St Luke no one could see how to divide human existence into wealth and poverty. Max Weber suggests a different solution. Not to destroy the object of comparison, but to give up on comparisons. Power, and its earthly concerns, is not worth the attention of the true sage. The world of the sage is not this world. His true world is the Kingdom of Truth, and it is the only thing worth caring about for a virtuous person – it is the only thing that counts. It is to the earthly world like infinity to the finite, like eternity to the passing moment, which by being transitory is also unimportant – like necessity and general law to the flawed quasi-existence of contingency. For one moment – passing from birth to decomposition into organic matter – that is called ‘person’, the human individual has the chance to fight for a place in the eternity known as truth. The road to eternal power, the power of truth, does not pass through earthly power. The reward for the lack

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of transitory goods is attaining eternal goods. And who would put what is temporary above what is eternal? Exactly: who? VI People came up with eternity when they realized that they were mortal. It is said that no animal knows that it must die. But if it does not know – then it also does not know that eternity exists. Apparently, the incommensurability of eternity and what is finite, the inexhaustibility of eternity by the small chunks of time that begin and end, is that which makes humans the most anxious and most tragic animals of the world. But that incommensurability and inexhaustibility also constitute eternity. Thinking about infinity could be born only from intellectually experiencing the graspable limits of time. The creative subjectivity is the crucible of experience in which the steel of pure eternity is forged from the ore of concrete deeds. The sufferings of people-objects are a mould in which the pure metal of eternity is moulded back into the form of a finite, unfree life. Knowledge of death is final proof of the mutual inextricability of the two spheres. Thus, knowledge of death is the logical conclusion of human tragedy, and the most unresolvable of puzzles of human thought. We know that death will end our subjective existence. We also know that, after death, that which comprises our existence as an object, thing, will still exist. We experience eternity only as subjects, but we also know that this eternity is an attribute of our objective dimension. We feel our finitude as subjects, but we also know that it is the fate of objects. The ‘nature of the world’ and ‘human nature’ are contradictory, are irreconcilable. The world is organized in opposition to human nature. The world could be made better, but never – good. The contradiction of the two natures demarcates the limits of improvement. The cult of academia and the death of God is thus cruel. When we ceased to believe in the eternity of the soul, we began to believe in the eternity of matter. At the same time, we got stuck on the alienness of the world, on its fundamental non-adaptability to human nature, on the unresolvability of the conflict between what is subject in us and the surroundings that render us objects. We assented to this eternal and never-fulfilled yearning for the lost intimacy of contact with eternity. We sentenced ourselves to the presence of death in our life as subjects as well, and thus to eternal impatience, whose



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rationale we cannot justify – to the frenzy of madmen, which we state from the outset is unreasonable. People discovered infinity when they found out about death. In a natural way, they located their discovery there, where they found it in their experiences. They threw it on their ‘internal’ screen, experienced within and for oneself at the same time; they highlighted it for themselves as thought and will unrestrained by limits, and they called it god. The more they dispersed and rendered independent roads and thoughts, and the world – that which was inside and that which was outside, that which we create and that which creates us – finitude also became the product of will and thought. That was the end of god. This was the beginning of the curse of the humansubject. When that eternity died – which was within us, the eternity called god — an external eternity was born, called the world, matter, reality. Experiencing anew the curse of will in a hopeless war with the unbending material of the world, this time people threw their ancient discoveries onto an external screen, highlighting it as personless and mindless, powerless and deprived of fantasy, an ‘occupied space’, and called it matter. Before, in order to deepen eternity, they sought out lawgivers and norms. Now, with the same goal, they look for categorical laws and probabilistic dependencies. As it was before, so now, they count on the fact that eternity in its new edition will become known to the end – they will exhaust it with their knowledge. But, this time, they do not feel any joy in the process. The new deepening of eternity is sad; even if fulfilled, it will not bring any closer to each other, by one iota, the two contradictory natures of the world and the human. The soundness of existence is given only by the subject; seeking out this soundness in the sphere of things, people say: existence has no purpose. This is the contemporary name of the eternal species malady of the Homo sapiens, sentenced to knowledge of death. VII Love and fear are inseparable. They are two names for the same experience. Or, at most, two ways of living through the same unfulfilled yearning for a wholeness irreversibly lost when a person who climbs to the heights of ‘second-order thought’ – thinks about thinking, on the level of reflection – perceives the irreducibility of the world to their experiences, and their experiences to the world, and in this way distinguishes ‘I’ from ‘not-I’. Since that moment, there is the unbearable awareness of the

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split in existence. The consciousness of being alongside something alien; a dependence on something alien; the possibility of existing only through contact with something alien, by impressing oneself on something alien and being impressed upon by it. And, from this moment, there is the desire to tread between this alien thing and the self, and the delusion that the between will vanish when an absolutization of everyday contact occurs, when the encounter – always partial, suspicious, risky – frees itself from what is particular to it, expands to dimensions so large that they are no longer of time or space, and becomes one of trust instead of suspicion: certain, instead of risky. The myth of a perfect state, in which the difference between desire and being will vanish, between subject and object, between I and not-I. Human loves are explorations in the land of the ideal – tests, of whether the myth can be embodied in life. A person loves the object of their love – this means: a person identifies with the object, strives to make something that is not him into a part of him, tries to embody what is individual and irreducible in himself into something that is not the same substance as he, something that exists independently, represents a more stable and solid existence that is separated from one’s own transitory and already-sentenced-to-death existence. In this identification, the opposition between egoism and altruism vanishes. I can tend to my own benefit only by tending to the benefit of the object of my love. I cannot tend to the benefit of the object of my love without tending to my own. Bah! this kind of thinking is only possible when love is not complete, when the identification is not total. Love is not complete? Love cannot be complete, because total identification is unachievable – union, the mutual annihilation of subject and object. This exploration is constantly conducted anew, so as to continuously bear the tragic news: that this time as well the elements of existence turned out to be mutually irreducible, and this time the tear in existence proved more lasting, stronger than the effort to overcome it. The ‘not-I’ could not be absorbed; some part of it remained beyond the reach of the consuming self – something resistant, existing otherwise than within me, and thus alien, belonging to another, impenetrable, not allowing me into the world. And there is a remainder of my self as well, that may have seemed meagre in the moment of rapture, that waited just beyond the boundaries of the object of my love, did not enter into it, in order to allow me to keep experiencing its separateness. Thus, fear, always accompanying the unsuccessful attempt. Fear growing with every new attempt. From the naïve, trusting, exuberant,



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practically free-from-fear attempts of the child, to the paralysing, embittered fear of mature disappointments. But rarely so great as to replace hope with tragic certainty. In this most important of life’s experiments, the most painful of life’s experiences, induction does not bring certainty until it is complete. And it will never be complete. Death is the only break in the continuous line of new experiences. In love, a person plays out the tissue of their being, learns the flavour of existence. That is why we cannot describe love to another person. Love must be experienced. And no experience of love will exhaust knowledge of it. Loving, and being afraid of our love, deepens for a person the secret of their own being. VIII Love and sex – phenomena of the same category, or opposite ideas? Experiences of love cannot be conveyed in the language of concepts: concepts exteriorize and objectivize their contents; experiences of love are neither exterior, nor objective – they take place as an experience of love only so long as they are not exteriorized and objectivized. The same is true of orgasms and mystic experiences. If love is the manifestation in the world of ideal union, so too is orgasm, and mystic experiences are exercises in the art of reconnaissance. Both are fleeting, quickly passing, but richly saturated states of amorous exploration. They are thus for love what form is for content, but also the essence of a compound. They are both the means of love and its ends. Born of the need for love, they can conceal love and push it into the shadows – frail, brittle, tepid in contrast to its all-consuming flame. Love repeatedly, painfully, runs up against the independent, irreducible existence of its object – orgasm, extinguishing reflection for a moment, gives the illusion that independent existence is gone, that the journey has ended, the world of union is attained. The illusion lasts no longer than a bolt of lightning, but we know it only after the fact, and not in the moment when it happens: when reflection is turned off, there is no time and space, no duration or extension. Humanity was able to pass from the Stone Age to the interplanetary rocket, but it cannot extend orgasm. Here, in this matter that is so important to them, humans are the most constricted by their biological constitution, powerless with regards to their own bodies. For St Augustine, a world without sin was a world in which an erection was subject to the command of the will, like the movement of hands or feet. It was also, as we know, the communion

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of humans with god – participation of humans in god. Both postulates are logically connected, mutually complementary; they are two expressions of the same overwhelming yearning for an existence that has gotten rid of its duality, after repeatedly identifying what ought to be with what is – and thus for a situation in which the differentiation between will and necessity becomes meaningless. We do not yet live, however, in a world without sin. People have not learned to transform the occurrence of orgasm into a state of being. And probably will not learn, because an orgasm in its physiological aspects is not subject to cultural training. But people have learned to produce and consume substitutes. Possession is the substitute for love. Private property is a viciously clever discovery. In its deepest consequences, it deepens, after all – leads to – the final limits of the split between subject and object, the ruling of object over subject, while simultaneously providing the illusion of doing the opposite. Excluding the object from the circulation of goods, making impossible its beingan-object-for-someone-else, rendering it something that is exclusively an object-for-me, my object – I have the impression of a complete, without-remainder, communion with it. I can identify with it at will; I will not run into the remainder of an independent existence, which renders amorous identification incomplete. This object becomes an attribute of my ‘me’, my ‘me’ becomes an attribute of it. Possessed objects define me; they give their quiddity and unrepeatability to my being – they become the beachhead of my being in the world of objects, an anchor, that attaches the shaky canoe of my life to the stable bottom of eternity. But if I define myself by the things I possess, then this possession is my only way of existing in the world, my participation in the body of Christ. My road to the world passes though possession – thus, I need possession like a fish needs water. I possess an object only when no one else can possess it; the object is mine only insofar as it is not someone else’s. My possession indicates the limits of someone else’s possessions. And, because I am not the one and only, then the possessions of those whom I perceive as other, but who perceive themselves as selves, are the limit of my possession. Choosing possession as a way of tying myself to the world, I choose fragmentariness, incompleteness, the exclusivity of connection. That is why possession is by its nature imperfect. It is a substitute for love. It has similar – sometimes deceptively similar – properties of taste (the experience of annihilating the self), but has poisonous properties as well: love makes the opposition between egoism and altruism objectless – possession creates it. Sex is to love: like possession. Sex is a substitute for love. Sex is



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possessing the body of another person, excluding that body from the circulation of objects, an effort to render it an object-for-oneself by making impossible its being-an-object-for-someone-else. Accustomed to the exclusivity of all relationships to the world, I suffer the information about other people’s orgasmic experiences: somehow they narrow my potential state of possession, they tighten its boundaries, make smaller the piece of the world that is mine. When I love, when I have not yet rid myself of fantasies of absolute union, knowledge of the love of others gives me hope: the ideal is attainable, my efforts are meaningful, my yearnings can be fulfilled. My love shines on others; my possession cuts me off from them. Sex can be bought and sold; sex is a way of communion in which the communing people are interchangeable. Love cannot be given up or acquired, love is the communion of people, whose meaning dwells in the very fact of their not being interchangeable, because it does not exist outside these people – it does not objectify, it is not transmittable, not communicable, not expressible in the language of concepts. Here lies the difference perhaps between literature of love and pornography. In the difference between the language of emotion and the language of concepts? Between experiencing together and commodities? Between fulfilling the yearning of existence and its substitute?

3 Marx and the Contemporary Theory of Culture (1968)

Inherent in the concept of culture of the last decades is a troubling ambiguity. In order to comprehend the roots of this ambiguity, we must trace the term through the historic progression of its application. It emerged in the Greece of the sixth and seventh centuries BC at the time when Archilocus, Sappho and Anacreon experienced for the first time ‘the discord between desire and duty, and between duty and necessity’, and transformed their personal experiences through the medium of lyric poetry into a social phenomenon; a time when a human being began to be considered as a ‘personality’ as well as ‘possessing a personality’; when, in harnessing nature, the Greeks developed their ‘techne’, the art of manipulation and transformation, of shaping and framing, which enabled them to manipulate all things, including man’s personality. The ancient Greeks were the first – and if we consider the originality of the discovery, the only – civilization to approach the world, including the world of the spirit, as an object of cultivation. The Greek concept of culture was immortalized by Plutarch in his famous metaphor: the soil produces ripe and sweet fruits only when cultivated by an ingenious and skilful farmer who assiduously and painstakingly selects the seed of top quality. Man likewise requires the best seed and the most meticulous cultivation. By means of cultivation – of both ‘agri’ and ‘animi’ – we can turn wilderness into fertile soil, the primitive into the perfect, and the intractable into the tame. The soil can be developed into an olive grove or a vineyard through cultivation. The human being is turned man by breeding. This latter process in man is achieved by the tutor who moulds man



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from the primitive material supplied by nature. The tutor sows the noble seed of the human way of life and attends to the ripening fruits. It is his endeavours and the seed he uses which are the two elements of the ‘cultura animi’. The semantic tradition, which was consolidated by the Sophists and Plutarch, has persisted in current usage to this day. Thus, we speak of a ‘cultured person’, and appeal for the promotion or dissemination of ‘culture’; we praise persons for their ‘culture’, or deplore them for their ‘lack of culture’. The idea that man acquires culture by breeding is deeply rooted in human thinking, as well as the conviction that culture is good and praiseworthy. The active striving for the perfection of the human being presupposes a ‘breeding ideal’. In this context, culture very clearly becomes a partisan or evaluative category. Not every kind of conduct will be evaluated as ‘cultured’, and man’s way of life may be considered as either ‘cultured’ or ‘uncultured’, or, depending on its closeness to the ideal, ranked anywhere between the two extremes. The transmission of culture is equivalent in this case to the moulding of the human being into something he had not been before. The rational basis of this process is common to all breeding systems, but in each it is filled with different content, according to the ideal pattern of culture of a given system. For centuries it has been class domination which has provided the basic mechanism for the construction of breeding ideals, and hence also the evaluative concept of culture. The economically dominating class has exercised its ideological rule over a nation or group by forcing a universal identification of its way of life with culture. The code of virtue for nobles, or Areta, for example, provided a model for the Greek ideal of culture. Class categories have for centuries coincided with the division between those who must work in order to live and those who live without working. For this reason, culture has come to be associated with the immaterial, the spiritual and the intellectual. With the exception of periods in which warriors occupied the top of the social hierarchy, as in the ‘dark ages’ of Clovis and his Germanic successors, spiritual values have ranked higher than physical values. The principal ideal of culture in these societies has been the spiritually refined human being whose thinking is deeply rooted in the arts and philosophy, and the purpose of breeding has been to make these spheres accessible and comprehensible to man. Cultural differentiation, however, has had a diacritical function in relation to social structure. In the caste or estate societies, in those societies in which separate social ranks have been strictly maintained

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and social mobility is practically nonexistent, intimate contact with ‘culture’ is available to only the ‘upper classes’. Cultural goods are not accessible to everyone and cannot be acquired merely by individual effort. Instead, they are reserved for individuals with a definite social rank. In this context, culture is used in defence of the superiority of the upper class, and also serves as an indispensable and inalienable attribute of that superiority. The same cultural goods may function in these societies over a very long period as diacritical signs. As these goods are resistant to dissemination, they do not become obsolete. They are invariably associated with a particular class and signify one and the same privileged social rank. Thus, the less ‘democratic’ a culture, the more it is stable, immutable and stagnant. Conversely, as soon as an efficient social mechanism for the dissemination of goods associated with the ideal pattern of culture – i.e., a mechanism of democratization of culture – is developed, cultural goods are deprived of their semiotic-structural function. Their diacritical function, on the other hand, calls for ever new signs, this demand being a very effective stimulus for cultural develop­ment. The democratization of culture is thus the best guarantee of its development. Conversely, caste-like tendencies are forebodings of inevitable stagnation. Under these conditions, creativity finds an outlet in endless transformations of an immutable pattern, as, for example, Byzantine painting, the Turkish gazelles, and Arab ornamentation. There is an increasing refinement of form, but rarely new patterns or content. The nineteenth-century socialist movement called for the reformation of the social structure and the abolition of class privileges, and also demanded the vindication of culture. The cultural model which had functioned as the ideal of the European civilization since ancient times, but had been reserved for the chosen ones in the class society, should now become universally accessible. The democratization of culture was a principal element in the European socialist programme, and also the most ‘European’ element of that programme, as it had been conditioned by the peculiar Greek concept of the human being ‘ripening’ through a process of cultivation. The dissemination of education and the arts in the socialist societies indicates that this objective of the socialist movement has been carried into practice. One of the goals of socialism is to abolish the distinction between ‘cultured’ and ‘uncultured’ people, and hence to implement the principle that everybody has equal rights to culture. While completely destroying the diacritical function of the successive layers of culture, the consistent implementation of this principle



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may release a powerful drive towards the development of ever new cultural signs, and hence an unprecedented development of culture. Marx could scarcely have had a different notion of ‘culture’ than the traditional one of Europe. Conforming with the German linguistic tradition, Marx applied the term ‘culture’ to such manifestations of the spirit as scientific thinking, art and moral codes. Such a notion of culture has persisted in popular usage to this date, even though there is another, value-freed notion, which has been gaining ground in the sciences of culture for nearly 100 years. Any interpretation of the term, however, rather than being an indication of the author’s views on the reality he has chosen to describe in a given language, is merely participation in the communication code of the given epoch and is associated with the choice of a language. If we consider the essence of Marx’s views, however, instead of the verbal signs employed in the designation of these views, we cannot fail to notice that in his writing he covered a fair number of the problems which would now be subsumed under the contemporary scientific category of ‘culture’. The value-freed notion of culture, which has been gaining ground in the cultural sciences, grew out of an encounter between Europe and that part of the world which developed in relative isolation from Europe. The old continent ‘discovered’ this other world at a time when the ideological basis of European economic and military supremacy was clearly formed. Initially Europe was bound to view the newly discovered world as ‘primitive’, as traditionally strange customs were interpreted as ‘lack of culture’. European experience in internal class relations, conceived in terms of the value-loaded concept of culture, resulted in a spontaneous hierarchization of the newly discovered customs. Both the American Indians and the African Negroes appeared to the European as savages, i.e., uncultivated human beings who had not been subjected to the longstanding spiritual perfection of the ‘enlightened’ European. This pattern of thinking was common to those persons who projected on the ‘savages’ a mixture of pity, contempt and disdain, as well as those who sought in these ‘savages’ a confirmation of the persistent legend of a past golden age. There were, on the one hand, the wilful as well as unwitting ideologists in favour of colonialism, for example William Strachey and John Wesley, who considered even the most ruthless cruelty of the ‘cultured’ Europeans an undeserved blessing for the savages who had been deprived of the necessary cultivation. There were, on the other, men like Michel de Montaigne, the ideological precursor of romanticism in the Enlightenment, who spoke tenderly and with affection of the virtues preserved by the ‘savages’ in complete purity, and which had been either distorted or expunged in Europeans by

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civilization. The former as well as the latter made unrestricted use of the axiological concept of culture, arranging the explored systems in a similar hierarchy. The difference was merely in the evaluation: what appeared to one as a virtue appeared to the other as a vice. They quarrelled about values, not about the meaning of the term ‘culture’. A new concept of culture, unlike both the colonialist and romantic notions, seems first to have appeared in 1848, in a work by Gustav Klemm. He was the first to apply the term ‘culture’ to everything produced by man, rather than to selected products of the human mind. According to Klemm, culture included all those things that man has added to nature and that would not have existed without him. To bury the dead in earth is just as much an element of culture as to cremate their corpses; egalitarian marriage as much as the purchase or abduction of a woman; magic rites as much as highly sophisticated theologies; the stone axe as much as the steam engine, etc. With the application of this definition, the distinction between ‘cultured’ and ‘uncultured’ people becomes meaningless. Every human being is cultured insofar as being cultured is a specific feature of Homo sapiens. But there are cultural differences between men. The body of the deceased can be disposed of in different ways, and the ratio between marriage partners may likewise assume different magnitudes. Klemm’s contemporaries were not immediately aware of the logical implications of his definitions. The linear schemes of evolution dominated nineteenth-century thought, which imply the grading of culture forms on a scale, their hierarchization. It is a logical construct found in association with the axiological concept of culture. The students of culture of the second half of the nineteenth century – Bachofen, Maine, Morgan, Bastian and Tylor – radically expanded the ancient notion of culture to include new forms. Nevertheless, to these men the concept of culture preserved its hierarchical value, and also its axiological character insofar as axiology is an inherent premise of any hierarchization. Borrowing from Morgan’s image of linear evolution, Engels made use of the most recent advances in contemporary science. It was not his fault that his successors did not also follow closely new developments in science, blindly holding to this image even when it had been discarded by science. At the same time, it appears quite natural that Marx’s contemporaries, including some of his followers, acted in conformity with the spirit of the epoch rather than with Marx’s pioneering ideas, by interpreting his periodic division of the European civilization into socio-economic formations as one more scheme of linear evolution, invoking the classical



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evolutionist conception – which is more Spencerian than Marxian – of ‘progress from lower to higher forms’. The conceptual revolution latent in Klemm’s definition was developed with utmost consistency by Bronisław Malinowski and, independently, by Franz Boas in America. The former was interned by the British on the Trobriand Islands during the First World War and was forced to spend several years with the aborigines. Speaking the native language, the Polish anthropologist was the first European with ethnological training who succeeded in approaching and interpreting the elements of an exotic culture in terms of their interrelations rather than artificially separated, and considering them as components in a whole which serves to meet the people’s needs. Employing Koehler’s allegory, Malinowski refused to put one heart next to another heart, but studied the heart in its functional relationship with the lung, the liver, etc. Rather than giving specific culture elements an ‘historical’ dimension for museum classification purposes, for example, claiming that the iron axe is an ‘offspring‘ of the stone axe in the same way as – writes Lévi-Strauss – Equus caballus is an offspring of Hipparion, Malinowski referred each culture element to a genuine, synchronic system within which the meaning of each element was determined by its place in the co-temporal structure rather than by its individual history. Malinowski’s ahistoricism – so often and correctly criticized – was essentially an unpremeditated side effect of the research framework forced upon him by his condition, but which was later supplemented by a theoretical rationalization. The anthropologists who duplicated his method, however, have persisted for decades in their ahistoricism because of the logic of the method rather than on theoretical grounds. Anglo-American anthropology has been burdened by another aspect of Malinowski’s functionalism: the holism of the postulate which states that each element of culture should be referred to the entire way of life of the given society. It was this holism which precipitated the initial revolution in the concept of culture, whether intended or not. For the first time in the history of the HellenicEuropean oikoumene, ‘our’ culture ceased to function, hypothetically at least, as a frame of reference for the classification and evaluation of ‘alien’ cultures, a function which had been implied in all evolutionary schemes. Even Lubbock had applied as a criterion of evaluation ‘Do they, or do they not, know the genuine, i.e., our, European kinship system?’ for the evolutionary hierarchy of non-European peoples. Malinowski’s work has invalidated this and similar questions. As a result, the term ‘culture’ has lost the remaining evaluative overtones, even in current usage.

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A cognitive method used with consistency yet without sufficient reflection resembles a slot machine which is out of order and which keeps returning the coin dropped into it. The rapidly growing record of field research, organized in line with Malinowski’s directives, has produced, in the same manner, ample ‘evidence’ of the correctness of his theory. The customs of innumerable African, Polynesian and South American peoples have been described in a manner suggesting that they form closed systems, isolated in both space and time, and 1,000 such descriptions have been taken as irrefutable evidence of actual isolation. Out of these developments grew the epistemological premises which would mean a reversal of the evolutionary approach to culture. This was fully accomplished by Ruth Benedict in her Patterns of Culture, which amounts to both an assertion of the independence of culture and a mortal blow at any axiological interpretation of the term ‘culture’. In place of the many parallel development lines converging – at possibly a different rate – upon an identical form of ‘superior culture’, Ruth Benedict displayed a colourful mosaic of highly varied and unrelated forms. Cultures are neither superior nor inferior to one another; instead, they are interchangeable on a single plane and amount to equitable, although alternative, ways of life chosen by the given society from among thousands of theoretical possibilities. It is the job of the student of culture to classify and elaborate typologies, rather than to search for developmental sequences or periodic schemes. From an ideological point of view, the theoretical approach outlined by Ruth Benedict is somewhat ambiguous. It may be taken, on one hand, as a final renunciation of the colonialist Kulturkampf waged by the European civilization which has dominated the world, and hence a belated recognition of the equality of peoples, the equity of their culture assets, and their right to a specific way of life. But at the same time, the theoretical framework underlying Benedict’s work may be and is being used by those who would like to relieve their own and other people’s consciences by stating that the miserable living standards of the ‘primitive’ peoples, when compared with European standards, are outweighed by other values which are rated higher by these peoples than a full stomach and comfortable lodgings. The colonialists of the past era had vain scrupules, they claim, and there is no need to raise the living standards of peoples who are judged on a European scale to be economically backward. On the contrary, according to Margaret Mead, this would amount to the imposition on these people of undesirable values and patterns. By a peculiar



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coincidence, the idea of ‘equity’ and alternativeness of cultures reached the peak of its popularity precisely at that time when the vast majority of the ‘primitive’ peoples accepted the European-like pattern of life, and ceased to be satisfied with their poverty, which followed the final destruction of their traditional social structures by the world market. The European and the non-European worlds have exchanged positions, but are still in opposition. The ideological ambiguity of the currently popular theory of culture is becoming increasingly evident, and efforts are made to overcome it with greater frequency. But there can be no adjustment of this antinomy by a mere reversal to the idea of linear evolution. To consider all non-European cultures as at inferior stages of development which may develop to the level of European culture would be incompatible not only with the knowledge accumulated by man, but also with the ethos of the second half of the twentieth century. The destruction wrought by the contemporaries of Malinowski and Benedict cannot be undone. Any progress in the theory of culture must account for their contributions. The evolutionist idea could be vindicated, in a modified form, only by means of a ‘negation of the negation’, i.e., by assimilating the criticism levelled by the second stage at the first stage and by overcoming the limitations of the second stage, which shares the limitation of the first as the two stages are in diametrical opposition. The most far-reaching and inclusive theoretical proposals have come from Lévi-Strauss. The French anthropologist turned to Marxian dialectics for inspiration. Human culture is to him both a unity and a plurality. The diverse forms of culture are but varieties of essentially one structure, the joint product of neolithic man. The structures developed within the neolithic culture provide the common basis for all subsequent ‘deviation’ from the basic development trend. They further constitute the foundation of all cultures known today, however refined and sophisticated some of the forms may have become. The basic structures also serve the most universal and most essential human needs, in light of the premise of ‘unity in variety’ represented by Homo sapiens. Obviously, this is not a biological foundation since ‘human nature’ has an inherent social component. ‘Natural man’ is at the same time ‘social man’. An outline of Lévi-Strauss’s revolutionary programme is contained in the final paragraphs of his Tristes tropiques, where he suggests that what appear to be marked distinctions between individual societies are reduced to minor variations when a large number of societies are compared. This encouraged him to search for the immutable foundations of human society. The ‘ethnographic’ questionnaire,

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he writes, has a double role in this respect. For one, it shows that European civilization does not provide such a foundation. In fact, of all the societies studied, ours is apparently the least suited. For the other, ‘ethnography’ is instrumental in determining a topology which is never fully represented by a single society but, by means of this science, features common to most societies can be isolated. The type in question is to be found at the level of the neolithic culture. It is at this level, writes Lévi-Strauss in reference to Rousseau, that ‘human nature’ manifests itself more fully than at any other, having not yet undergone degeneration. Contrary to Diderot’s interpretation, ‘human nature’ was to Rousseau by no means a pre-social phenomenon. Rather, it was something that could not exist outside society. He considered man’s capacity for socialization inherent in his nature. According to Lévi-Strauss, man’s potentiality is realized through its objectivization within human society in the forms of the pertinent spheres of human interaction: language, the legal order, etc. Generally speaking, man becomes truly human only when he has become a citizen. To explore human nature implies the study of the most primordial forms of his socialization, at a stage at which the ‘cold’, clock-like, cyclical social mechanism has not yet been transformed into the ‘hot’, unidirectional, entropy-generating steam engine. It is at this stage that human nature manifests itself in human institutions: myths, ceremonies, kinship systems, those symbolic patterns which are built, and destroyed, and rebuilt, in a kaleidoscopic way, from the same fragments of the human spirit. According to Lévi-Strauss, the actual form of the primordial way of life, the essence disguised by the phenomenal sphere, is not available to persons lacking the modern methods of structural analysis. Once in command of these methods, the investigator may transform the unconscious into the conscious, and the sensual into the comprehensible. In Tristes tropiques, Lévi-Strauss discovers in the skewed symmetry of a Kadiueo ornamental tattoo the contradictions of a social structure. In his Structural Anthropology, he offers a functional interpretation of the appositions obsessively emphasized in kinship systems. In La pensée sauvage, he elaborates a theory of totemism in order to explain why one clan has adopted the bear, and another the eagle, as a totem. We need not inquire into the mythical relationships between these clans and between the bear and the eagle. According to Lévi-Strauss, we should rather investigate the isomorphism of the appositions, clan A : clan B = bear : eagle. Beneath the phenomenal sphere, we find structures rather than individual or collective needs. The essence of culture is in the structure. To comprehend culture, it is necessary to uncover the common structure underlying the



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technologically specialized spheres of human activity. Yes, but what structure? The structure of human thinking, states Lévi-Strauss in Le cru et le cuit; the structure of the human spirit, he repeats in Du miel aux cendres. Whereas ethnography is essentially a description of customs and institutions, anthropology is by no means a science of customs and institutions. It is the scientific study of the structure of human thinking as revealed in customs and institutions. The model of society is in every detail a ‘direct manifestation of the structure of thinking, and apart from thinking, possibly also of the brain’, he writes in Le totemisme aujourd’hui. This structure is basically the same for the entire human race. It is the objectified manifestations which differ. Yet each manifestation is a product of a transformation of the basic structure, and it can be traced as such. To trace these transformations is the real mission of the anthropologist. Lévi-Strauss has repeatedly stressed the influence of structural linguistics upon his approach to culture. The ‘most up-to-date method of analysis’ has been developed by linguists, and it should be applied in the analysis of primordial reasoning. It is significant that, during the development of his conception of anthropology and its responsibilities, he was under the strong influence of those structural linguists who have paid little attention to semantic issues, who acted on the assumption that it is possible to analyse the structure of a linguistic system of signs without recourse to semantics. The mounting influence of these linguists on the theories of Lévi-Strauss can be seen by tracing its development from Tristes tropiques to Mythologiques. Ten years ago he maintained that the function of structural appositions, rather than the structures themselves, should be studied by the anthropologist. In Mythologiques, we find little reference to functions. The author concentrates on structures and their transformations. He skirts the question of meaning in structures when he answers evasively: structures mean one another. He does not attach much importance to this question for, to him, the structure of human culture is one of the ‘ultimate facts’ about which we may ask ‘how?’, but not ‘why?’ Such is simply the structure of human thinking. It may be based on the structure of the brain, but this would be outside the realm of the anthropologist. But what has happened to the function of structuralization which was to be studied by the anthropologist in the first place? There is a diminishing attempt to answer this question in Lévi-Strauss’s successive studies. One cannot inquire into the function of an ultimate fact. Moreover, it is impossible to substantiate the existence of an ultimate fact by referring

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to its relationship with any other fact. Its very existence is its only substantiation. Thus, we dare not inquire into either its function or its meaning. If we can speak of a continuation of the age-old dispute over the materialistic versus the idealistic interpretation of man in contemporary social science, it is here that we can look for an example. It would be unjustified, however, to accuse Lévi-Strauss of epistemological idealism. His analyses are always thorough, for example his analysis of the properties of the South American honey bee Melipona and its peculiar honey, produced from all but the nectar of flowers, in order to identify the position and category of this honey in the structure of thinking; or the conscientiousness with which he investigates specific features of various animal species used in totemic systems, with the purpose of discovering their symbolic functions; and elsewhere, his censuring of literary scholars, in his interview for Les lettres françaises, who propose that the ‘pure’ structural method be applied to the analysis of literary works. Whereas the structural analysis of a myth which originated in ‘nonhistoric’ society presupposes a thorough knowledge of ethnographic, biological or botanical, and other data, the analysis of a literary work which was created and has functioned in quite a different society presupposes a knowledge of history, economic conditions and many other ‘traditional’ elements. The hope of literary scholars that structuralism would free them from the tedium of traditional erudition was in vain. From these manifestations of Lévi-Strauss’s epistemological position, we can see the ‘materialistic’ character of his epistemology, in the most current application of this adjective. However, if we approach it on the plane of sociological ontology, it is a different picture: what exactly is the ‘ultimate fact’ in the realm of human affairs? According to Lévi-Strauss, it is the structure of human thinking, the means by which intellectual structures which reproduce or project the alternatives of human existence are constructed. To Marx, on the other hand, it is the existing human being, the active human being who creates and consumes goods and is actively engaged in organizing his world. With such a philosophical approach, questions regarding the functions of intellectual structures become meaningful once again. It is increasingly difficult to pose these questions in the framework of Lévi-Strauss’s philosophy. At the same time, however, it is a fundamental concern in Marxian philosophy. In what way can Lévi-Strauss contribute towards a satisfactory response to these questions? It seems that it is primarily through his structural method of inquiry into the meaning of cultural phenomena,



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i.e., by splitting the cultural phenomenon into appositions whereby the underlying structure can be determined, a procedure he borrowed from structural linguistics and applied to anthropological material. Accordingly, it is simply a question of identifying the structure, after having decided on which plane of man’s existence it is to be sought. In other words, without renouncing any of Lévi-Strauss’s methodological discoveries, we must try to avoid the blind alley into which he was led by his philosophy. We must designate the reality in relation to which culture – that specifically human aspect of active existence – functions as a sign. It is at this point that we can fully appreciate the lasting scientific value of the Marxian image of the world. It is more comprehensive than only those issues discussed by Marx under the heading ‘culture’. What is meant here is the Marxian approach to the extensive sphere of patterns of behaviour: technology, law, theoretical thinking, religion, and all other phenomena designated as cultural elements by contemporary theoreticians of culture. The most striking feature in the Marxian interpretation of cultural phenomena is the continual transformation of both the ‘natural’ and ‘social’ world, the process of constant mutual readjustment between man and the world he lives in. The centre of gravity in Marxian doctrine is in the category of ‘praxis’ and not in ‘economic determinism’, as is falsely assumed by some interpreters of this theory. This human praxis is essentially the introduction of a ‘human’ order into the substantially natural world. It is primarily accomplished through the social process involving the production and distribution of goods, and it is these goods which serve man to satisfy his needs. The function of the sphere of signs and meanings, i.e., the sphere called culture today, in relation to this structure is both creative and reproductive. The sphere of signs and meanings provides human interaction with a form which has been predetermined by that structure and which serves as a means of informing the participants interacting within the form. Thus, human praxis considered as a whole, comprising both social structure and culture, is conceived by Marx as a system in which, as Lucien Goldmann has rightly pointed out,1 some elements become meaningful only in the context of some other elements. Soviet scholars must be credited with the development of concepts and theoretical models for the interpretation of the origins and social functions of culture which combine the advantages of structural analysis and the philosophical premises of Marxist sociology: the psychological research of L. Vygotski; the linguistic and semiotic studies of Apresyan, Zinoviev, Martynov, Boyko and others; the

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application of semiotic methods to the analysis of culture correlates by Ivanov, Toporov, Zalizniak, Bahtin and others, to mention only a few contributors in the development of a truly Marxist and modern theory of culture. It is characteristic of the Soviet school of semiotics to stress the active and directive role of designation and information. Accordingly, the passive with structures are considered as the instruments of an active organization. Soviet semiotics is more concerned with structuralization than with structures, with the process of control than with the structure of information. Derived from cybernetic thinking, this active approach clearly reflects the influence of Marxian tradition, which has been unequalled in its dynamic, subject-oriented interpretation of social phenomena. It is precisely this activism which constitutes the essential characteristic of Soviet semiotics, a characteristic of utmost importance in the development of a theory of culture. If we take for granted that the structured system differs from the amorphous system in that the former has a more consistent internal arrangement and, therefore, is more predictable and ‘manipulatable’, culture can be conceived of as a kind of structurization, or arrangement, of the social environment. It is effectuated through the process of historical praxis by which the environment is made more predictable and, hence, more easily manipulated by man. This process of structurization is comprised of two aspects: the passive, reproductive, orientational one; and the active ordering one, which involves the elimination of some alternatives and making some others more probable. The first aspect pertains to the identification of the ‘natural’ structure of the environment, the potential information contained therein, and to the communication of knowledge about the structure, while the second aspect concerns the ‘introduction’ of a social structure into the environment, which would otherwise be deprived of such structure. The use of a sign system is the specifically cultural method for solving the general tasks of a social organization. The totality of signs is equivalent to the culture system, provided these signs are interpreted in a roughly similar manner by members of a given community. By labelling the material reality with signs and by ensuring, through breeding of the individual human being, an identical identification of these signs, man has been able to establish, or is trying to establish, an ordered coexistence of individuals within society, and to acquire a maximum knowledge of the environment through which he must fulfil his needs. A human community becomes a cultural community by employing a specific sign system and by ascribing to each sign a definite, universally accepted, control function.



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The labelling of reality through the use of signs is particularly important in relation to the social, non-natural, section of that reality. In comparison with the large number of status and role differentiations which emerge out of the structure of society, for example, there are relatively few ‘natural’ signs. These sets of conventional signs facilitate both the control and the orientation of social components in a working situation. Besides the verbal signs, there are a variety of others, such as dress, residence, size of office, quality of the carpet therein, number of telephones on the desk, differentiation in behaviour according to the relative roles of the two partners of an interaction, etc. Each of these signs serves a specific function; each contributes to the differentiation of elements in an homogeneous social reality. And each sign derives its specific, culturally based meaning by its apposition to either another sign or a situation in which it does not appear. Thus, the function of culture is at the same time cognitive and directive. The isolation of a separate conceptual plane which mediates in the relationships between the organism and its environment implies the possibility of a split in these two aspects of the function. A considerable part of the information which may be contained in the structure of the environment usually remains unmarked and unidentified, while at the same time each sign system comprises numerous ‘redundant’ appositions, i.e., signs which have not yet been assigned their meaning. Nevertheless, a smoothly functioning model culture excludes the possibility of such a split and derangement. Any statement about the function of a phenomenon is bound to be elliptic so long as we do not specify the system to which the respective function is related. We may consider the function of culture in relation to the entire community or society which has, in a specific way, restricted the indeterminacy of its world. In such a case, we would be interested in knowing the instruments used in the process of accommodation and assimilation by a given community, the correlation between social structure and the structure of the contingencies contained in the ‘natural’ environment, including the fund of socially available technologies. Also, we would want information about the discriminable and meaningful appositions of the real as well as potential worlds, which should include, among other things, art and ideology. Furthermore, we would be interested in the means by which a section of the natural world, chosen by a given community as its habitat, had been ordered or assimilated: landscape shaping, thermal isolation of the home from outside weather conditions, etc. As soon as we turn to the function of culture in relation to the individual, however, the intra-systemic aspect of culture becomes the

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target of assimilation and, from the viewpoint of the individual, an external aspect. Above all, man’s environment is made up of people: the individual is separated from the goods which serve to meet his needs by other people who either hamper or facilitate his access to these goods. The problem of individual accommodation reduces to an isomorphism involving the structure of individual behaviour and the structure of the community which constitutes the individual’s environment. This task is accomplished through the mechanism of culture appreciation, the communication of knowledge and its internalization. Combining these two viewpoints, the social and the individual, we find that culture is both a way of ordering and structuring the environment of the individual, and a manner of correlating the pattern of the individual’s behaviour with the pattern of this environment. In relation to the individual, culture functions as an extension of a capacity common to all organisms – and therefore important for their adaptation – of associating a given behaviour with a given stimulus. A salient peculiarity of this culture mechanism in human beings is that these stimuli signals are predominantly defined by human behaviour, and are themselves products of culture. The ‘structure’ of the environment and the ‘structure’ of individual behaviour, however, are not, or need not be, autonomous and independently determined systems. Even under the worst of conditions, this is only partially true. These systems are usually realized by a common set of mechanisms. In a sense, the structure of the symbolic culture system is a projection – although always incomplete and inaccurate – of both the personality structure and the social structure. Whereas, for understanding the natural components of human environment, one must concentrate on the ‘identification of signs as such’, this does not apply to the components of the environment which are the result of human activity, and which prevail in the whole structure of the environment. These components may function solely as a result of the ‘marking’ of reality. The distinctions relating to the distribution of goods, for example, are by far the most numerous in human society, but they cannot be correlated with any natural human distinctions. For this reason, a great number of artificial sign appositions must be designed within the social structure, which will enable the former distinctions to become fully effective in their directive function. As the arm is extended by the spear, in a similar manner the semiotic paucity of the human body is supplemented by distinctions in dress and ornaments, demeanour and etiquette, residence and food habits, etc. The semiotic–directive function is the only acceptable explanation



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for the existence of some of these distinctions. In some cases the needsatisfaction function, including both individual and collective needs, interferes with the semiotic function, in which case an unequivocal analysis is rather difficult – for example, the dual functions of eating, dressing and habitation. It is the task of the anthropologist to make an inventory for the diverse functions and to study the psychological, economic and social mechanism which is responsible for their correlation, as well as the mechanisms which interfere with the achievement of a full correlation. Marxist sociology has been very successful in analysing the external and material determinants of social phenomena. Its greatest contribution lies in the discovery and investigation of the role played by social structure, considered as a system of interdependencies between large human groups which were formed in the course of the production, distribution and appropriation of goods required for the satisfaction of human needs, in the determination of social processes. But in the course of concentrating on these external, material determinants of human behaviour, some investigators disregarded the other system of determinants intervening in each social situation, i.e., the system of culture. Human behaviour, whether individual or collective, invariably results from two factors: on one hand, the cognitive systems and the goals and patterns of behaviour as defined by the culture system, and on the other, the system of real contingencies as defined by the social structure. Complete comprehension of social processes can be achieved only when both systems, as well as their interaction, are taken into consideration. Modern society is characterized by a succession of maladjustments in culture and social structure. The constraints to which a human being is subjected appear to him as external and unavoidable; in fact, they are considered to be exempt from the control of culture. In numerous instances, these contingencies and constraints contradict the injunctions which have been internalized through breeding, i.e., culture. These contradictions are experienced by man as a conflict between his ‘duty’ and ‘necessity’, or between his own interests and the opportunities for their realization. He discovers in this situation that there are numerous components which lack cultural meaning, and at the same time he is unable establish the real correlation of numerous meanings which were internalized by the culture. This discrepancy is particularly glaring and painful in a class society, in which we find a conflict between, on the one hand, the egalitarian nature of the cultural training which produces the desire to obtain the same kinds of goods as are acquired by other people, and, on the other, the realities of the social structure in which only the members

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of the privileged class may reach their goals and obtain the culturally valued goods. In such a situation, there is a continuous tension which results from the disparity between the cultural and social structure. Restoration of their coincidence, however, cannot be attained in a class society, and huge amounts of social energy are expended in this struggle. The developing socialist societies are for the first time attempting to solve this problem in a radically different manner, through subordination of the social structure to the cultural system. This is accomplished through a practical arrangement of the social situation so as to correspond with the goals and models set up by the cultural system.

4 Culture, Values and Science of Society (1972)

An inaugural lecture1 is a unique occasion in the life of a scientist; one is not only permitted, but expected to turn his most personal profession of faith into an objectified fact submitted to public scrutiny. What on other occasions would be condemned as indulging in contemplation of one’s own self – is in fact encouraged, since with every new appointment to a chair personal idiosyncrasies become, if only for a moment, a public issue. I hope, therefore, that you will not consider the personal statement which follows as out of place. The more so, because my chair is one of sociology, and in the professional life of a sociologist his most intimate, private biography is inextricably intertangled with the biography of his discipline; one thing the sociologist cannot transcend in his quest for objectivity is his own, intimate and subjective encounter-with-the-world. He cannot transcend it indeed, for a simple reason; true, because of the endemic subjectivity of his personal encounter, some contours of the world he explores probably seem excessively conspicuous to him to the detriment of the others; without it, however, he will hardly know what to see at all. Still, before we learn to be masters of our sight, there are teachers to tell us what merits our scrutiny. I had two teachers with whom I served my apprenticeship to the trade. They were different from each other, my teachers. There was Professor Stanisław Ossowski – priestly, majestic and ascetically austere, detached, a towering figure of a scholar, a step above the earth of human passion, inhabiting the heights of reason in which the grandeur of the powerful and misery of the weak melt into the

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rhythmical pulsation of eternal human drama; in which reason is the supreme morality and human life is moral only if submitted, unswervingly, to the rule of reason. Professor Ossowski believed in man because he believed in reason – and because he believed in an endemic human ability to live up to the demands of reason. His mission – because sociology was the mission of his life – was to hand on the torch of knowledge – pure, intransigent and unblemished – with which to dissipate the gloom of unreason and deceit, ignorance and illusion. And there was Professor Julian Hochfeld. Incisive, at times virulent, always a passionate fighter for what was to him the supreme sense of his being-in-the-world – free, wholesome, multi-faceted, his was the authentic life of struggle in which ideas are constantly put to the test of the possible, and the possible is perpetually checked against the ideal. Astute polemist and pedantic analyst, Hochfeld was a unique blend of seething emotions and cool intellect. Being moral was to him the only way leading to the rule of reason. Professor Hochfeld believed in man – because he believed in morality, and because he believed in an endemic human ability to live up to the demands of ethics. They were different, my teachers. Still they had one thing in common: to both the paradigm of their vocation was patently definite: either sociology will make sense of the human world, thereby giving power to the powerless, or it must admit its own powerlessness to make sense of its own existence. So there were two teachers who made the world I lived in, and with, intelligible to me. And there was the world, which made intelligible to me their teachings. The troublesome world of a country thrown alternately on the crest and in the trough of history, in which dispassionate intellect met with unreasonable passions. In which the wise were seldom understanding and the suffering were not always eager to listen to the whisper of wisdom. In this world I have witnessed the blatant failure of the most cunning and insidious maze to drill and discipline those who found in their own unbowed spirit the pivot on which to buttress their defiance. So I have seen morally inspired, noble and lofty ideals smashed to pieces by the merciless logic of the reality their bearers failed to assess. I was with these who took it upon themselves to re-define the world they lived in, to fill the world with a new, better, more humane meaning, to deny its repulsive reality in the name of the untrammelled human potential. I was with them still when they saw their ambition shattered against the wall of the same stubborn reality they refused to admit, and the same moral squalor sprouting again from below the thin film of ideals. And then, fortunately, I saw the same, always young and vigorous, indomitable



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spirit of exploration and perfection rising again to challenge the ungratifying reality. There seemed, indeed, to be no end to the drama in which the meaning and the reality, the subjective and the objective, the free and the determined merge continuously to mould our present into our future. Such – contradictory and mischievously elusive to all clear-cut, unilateral descriptions – is the shape of the human world (so I learned), my métier – sociology – is about. And the lesson I learned was, I think, congenial to the collective experience from which sociology in its modern form emerged. It was born of the painful realization of the vexing discrepancy between the ends people read into their actions and the consequences these actions bring; between anticipations and results; ideals and reality; the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’. Sociology was conceived as a desperate effort to bridge the gap between the planning, ordering, goal-oriented reason, and apparently chaotic, obstreperous, unruly and intractable human reality. Were there not this gap, there probably would be no sociology. Science seldom stops to reflect upon itself. Or, rather, only those types of intellectual endeavour which do not stop too often are granted unreservedly the status of science. After all, there is an effort of selfannihilation, an ideal of transparency built into the scientific strife of mediating between subjective human eye and objective reality. And there is not much a window-pane can learn from contemplating its own inner side. Besides, a successful science is supposed to have more fascinating business on hand than self-contemplation. Self-reflection is to a scientist what a Tuscany cottage is for a British senior civil servant: a titbit, surreptitiously refrigerated away for the rejuvenating age of memoir-writing and self-indulging gossip. Sociologists, it seems, do not abide by this rule of academic modesty. Again and again, we buttonhole each other in a new fit of narcissistic self-scrutiny. Not only do we pull up for self-reflection much more often than most of our colleagues; there are long periods in the life of our discipline in which we hardly do anything else. When asked for the reason for our aberrant conduct, some of us, by way of self-exculpation, would humbly admit our immaturity; we are young, we came late, that is why we cannot help but make our presence obtrusive. But we will promptly dissolve in the window-pane of our methods; the final refinement is a purely technical matter, to wit: give us more time and, above all, money, and you will see. Others will sound less sanguine. The more we chase the figment of transparency, they will respond – the more opaque becomes our vision; we will never do it; if you cannot get what you like, try to like what you get. Whatever the answer, one thing seems clear: one has to self-reflect to

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give reasons for one’s obsessive self-reflection. Be what may, I am not likely to be the last sociologist who invites you to witness one more spell of exhibitionist self-autopsy. Cognitive dissonance always evokes self-defensive responses, and the drive against existential ambiguity is one of our, the sociologists’, most human attributes. There are, however, contradictions which cannot be reduced away and conflicts which are there to stay; no amount of counter-dissonance, expedients and guile will chase them away. This lecture is an attempt to legitimize inconsistencies which many others wished to invalidate; to come to terms with cognitive oppositions which others are usually unwilling to admit; and, consequently, to face with serenity the peculiarity of sociological paradigm which makes so many others diffident and guilt-ridden. The essential idea of this lecture is that the status of sociology is contradictory and cannot but remain contradictory; and that sociologists, providing they wish to perform their social function, instead of manoeuvring interminably between equally morbid extremisms, would better come to terms with the intricate nature of their activity. Too often are we guilty of worshipping the idol of purity. We loathe the sliminess of ambiguity and thus let the endemic dialectics of human existence go unnoticed. We admire clear-cut, neat, yes-or-no answers to our questions. Either society is a simple aggregate of individuals or it is a supreme reality of which the individual is only a passive product; our discipline is either art, or science; there is purely objective, detachable, inhuman meaning in the human situation, or there are as many human subjective worlds as human beings; our activity is the pursuit of wisdom, or it is a servant of utility; human beings are conditioned, reactive mechanisms, or they are untrammelled, elemental founts of spontaneous creativity. And so on, and so forth – kowtowing before the idol of purity, we translate the dialectical nature of human reality into an endless list of spurious, and so unsolvable, dilemmas. Whatever can be said about idols in general, our reverence towards the idol of purity seems to be particularly dangerous, as the cult inspires us to act against the nature of our discipline and partakes of the responsibility for most fits and starts of its erratic, tortuous path. In 1946 Professor Marshall wrote a small book in which he described the then plight of sociology as ‘being on the crossroads’. We seem since then hardly to have been anywhere else; beyond doubt, we are today on the crossroads again. More than thirty years ago, in his manifesto of positivistic sociology, George Lundberg stated the case for the essential identity of social and natural science: ‘if we follow the method as faithfully



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in the social sciences as we have followed it in physics it may yield us a corresponding rewardin our powers of control’.2 Even Jack Douglas, the spokesman for analytical revival, who excels in exposing the endemic limitations and misunderstandings of the resulting ‘hypothetical–statistical method’3 will remark in passing, as if stating an unproblematic, matter-of-fact platitude, that it is only ‘our ignorance, our relative lack of scientific success so far which has given us more freedom of choice’ than our natural science colleagues enjoy.4 We have indeed internalized, deeply and credulously, the creed of a basic unity of all scientific endeavour regardless of its subject-matter, social context and purpose; and the idea that the extant discrepancies between sciences may be overcome by purely technical means. This view, as scornfully epitomized by the great Ludwig von Bertalanffy,5 holds that ‘our knowledge of the laws of human behaviour and society is still undeveloped. Consequently, human and sociological technology lay behind physical and biological technology. If we had a well-developed science of human behaviour and society and corresponding technology, this would mean the way out of the personal, sociological and political problems of our time.’ The editor of the same volume, Helmuth Schoeck, tried, defiantly, to cross the t’s and dot the i’s of the positivistic concept of sociology by suggesting that this brand of scientism implies a cynical world view in the original meaning of the word: it is a doglike view of man, or shall we say ratlike? Man is but understood, so the scientific expert holds, when seen from a level of a rodent eager to learn the ins and outs of a maze. He can be conditioned to put up with almost anything the few wise designers of the maze have mapped out for him.6

Many uncritical followers of the positivistic concept of sociology, save perhaps the most devout Skinnerians, would plead ‘not guilty’ to this deliberately overstated indictment. There is no denying, however, that Schoeck put his finger on a vital point: the repetitive, regular, predictable, unfree nature of human, individual or collective, behaviour, is an indispensable assumption which must be made by anybody claiming the status of positivist science for his kind of sociology. What this positivist concept of the social science leaves largely unaccounted for is the other, unaccomplished, irregular, open-ended side of the same human existence. The circumstance was pointed out emphatically by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: ‘What defines man is not the capacity to create a second nature – economic, social, or cultural

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– beyond biological nature; it is rather the capacity of growing beyond created structures in order to create others.’7 Questioning this discovery of ‘the possibilities of things behaving differently’ constitutes, according to Erwin W. Strauss, the particularly human ‘mode of finding-himself-in-the-world’.8 By reducing the range of possibilities through his act of choice, a human being precipitates his questioning into accomplished reality. There and then he will be accessible to positivistic science. But only there and then. As an accomplished, conclusive reality. As a causally determined object. As a trace left in the world of fact, by the peculiarly human mode of existence, in the moment of its self-annihilation. The last thirty years or so of sociology were dominated by this tendency to grasp the human being in his capacity of, to paraphrase Hegel’s notorious adage, ‘a corpse which was left behind by its living impulse’.9 To these corpses the recent sociology could and was eager to apply its statistical laws; laws, which – as it was long ago, in the wake of the deterministic craze, aptly pointed to by Antonio Gramsci – hold only as long as their objects, the human masses, remain passive and immobile;10 and which are lacking the most appreciated quality of scientific laws – their predictive power – since human beings singularly elude the stiff confinements of monotony and repetitiousness. The failure of the positivist image of man to account for the creative capacity of human beings continuously invited sharp criticism and stimulated many a sociologist to seek the right model of social science at the opposite pole. The cracking of the foundations of the uniformly deterministic science of social behaviour provided matching accompaniment for the new anti-positivistic tune which is quickly becoming the ‘top hit’ of sociological fashion. It is not the first attempt to put positivism on the defensive – though first indeed in the life span of the present generation of sociologists, and thus marked with the pristine earnestness and proselytizing fervour becoming to pioneers. Thanks to the idol of modernity – the slash and burn method of dealing with its cognitive issues has always loomed large in the biography of social science. We do not usually solve our problems; we get tired of them and leave them to the next generation to revel in their still virginal enigmas. lf it is true in general terms, it is certainly doubly true in the case of the central issue of sociology – the perennial argument between two supposedly incompatible cognitive perspectives. The last major, though abortive, broadside against the fortresses of positivism was launched in the thirties and was associated above all with the names of Znaniecki, Hayek and Sorokin – the three great Europeans, despairing of their total lack of success in transplanting



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the sublime ideas of Geisteswissenschaften to American soil, infested with the larvae of behaviouristic determinism. The main attack was launched against the most vulnerable sector in positivistic lines: against the assumption of Dinglichkeit, determination, reactivity of the human being. Summing up his anti-positivistic credo, Znaniecki declared bluntly that ‘a conscious individual is not a passive object that cannot act unless stimulated by somebody else’; if he does react, he reacts to his own values in which he is ‘positively or negatively interested’; the behaviouristic, ‘reactive’ approach ‘may be adequate in studies of bodily situations of animals’; as far as human behaviour is concerned, ‘every situation must be studied by the investigator as it is experienced by the particular human individual who is conscious of it’.11 The argument against the mischief of Verdinglichung boils down to the postulate of methodological sophrosyne, of shifting the responsibility for the ‘true’ interpretation of social events onto the shoulders of actors; a pseudo-solution in the world bristling with cunning devices conspiring to render the human vision as opaque and misleading as possible; but the solution granted a new lease of life with each consecutive round of anti-positivistic insurrection. Friedrich von Hayek would ridicule the hubris of a sociologist who claims to be ‘endowed with a super-spirit, in a sense omniscient’ – a virtue which alone can justify ‘the tendency to treat the objects of human activity after their “real” attributes instead of considering them solely as they appear to the actors’.12 It may have seemed indeed that adopting a new extremity when wrestling with positivistic extremities was the right way of hitting the nail on its head. It seemed plausible that to crush the positivistic fetters one had only to make the opposite stance as radical as possible. It was, alas, easier thought than done. The major personages in the current production of the old antipositivistic scenario – the advocates of ethnomethodology invented by Harold Garfinkel – elevate to a new sophisticated height Hayek’s old theme. Once again, as for Cooley, ‘nothing is fixed or independent, everything is plastic and takes influence as well as gives it’. The social world’s order is nothing but an ‘ongoing practical achievement’ of ‘members’ (the school’s sign-term for ‘actors’); ‘Members can be said to be programming each other’s actions as the scene unfolds.’13 The world is basically incomplete, e.g. its future is not determined by its past, not restricted by it, it is left instead to the members’ discretion. It is a tender, flexible, docile reality – petrified into tough order only in the submissive consciousness of its actors. All generalization, therefore, tends to abstract, to impoverish the richness of life, to simplify and ossify; thus methodology should replace theory,

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the principle of ‘distinctiveness’ should be substituted for ‘deductive theorizing’.14 And the old idiom of ‘humanistic coefficient’ is resurrected in the form of ‘the emphatic identification with each of the persons in an encounter, in terms of their respective environments’.15 As Reinhard Bendix puts it in another context, for sociologists of this sort: the facts of society involve an infinite manifold so that every concept is artificial and lifeless and imposes ‘mere academic’ distinction. These are typically contrasted with the fluid and fuzzy, but lifelike and hence real ‘definition of the situation’ by the proverbial man in the street. In this view the ideal stance of the sociologist is a kind of academic walkie-talkie after the manner of Studs Terkel.16

To get rid of the embarrassing figment of the ‘finite world’, to regain the pristine freedom of the ‘ongoing accomplishment’, we are invited to go back to the ‘real facts’, e.g. to the ‘everyday life’ of the ‘man in the street’ . ‘The member’s sense that he lives in a real world shared in common with others is the foundation of his being in the world’ – says Thomas P. Wilson.17 To Zimmerman and Pollner our social world is nothing but an ‘occasioned corpus’ – an ad hoc creation of members’ ideas: ‘Texture of the scene, including its appearance as an objective, recalcitrant order of affairs, is the accomplishment of members’ methods for displaying and detecting the setting’s features.’18 As a charmingly gullible verse of the times of la grande illusion of the French Revolution had it, Les grands ne nous paraissent grands, Que parce gue nous sommes a genoux – Levons nous!

The ethnomethodological brand of anti-positivism claims to arise from humanistic motives: from the indignation against degrading, rat-like determinism in depicting human existential status. It is geared to the modish preoccupation with authenticity, self-expression and personality independence. It echoes, even though unintentionally and in much subtler form, the modish manifestos of the old-new irrationalism which swept a couple of years ago through some youth communities, of which the following credo taken from a British underground magazine is a fair sample: ‘New Primitivism is flip dismissal of linear time, of logic, of history … New Primitive lifestyle is surrendered to a never-ending game, a game which must break even the rule that all rules must be broken.’ Understandably,



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it shares all the fallacies and misconceptions of the fashionable mandala. Oblivious of its own intellectual past, frivolously unaware of the tortuous and frustrating path trodden by their forerunners, ethnomethodologists descend right to the remote, pre-critical Sturm und Drang period, as if eager to live through all the gropings in the dark and agonizing disappointments which fell to the lot of their ancestors. Once again they hope to regain the lost human freedom through reforming human minds; they, as well, hope to exercise their humane good will by unmasking the allegedly illusory nature of pressures and limitations which human beings experience as real, tough and stubborn. For many decades humanistically motivated sociologists defined their mission as debunking necessity disguised as freedom; they fought to lay bare the insidious deceits with which slaves are misled into believing that they are free. Ethnomethodologists will rather reach back, over the heads of their immediate predecessors, to the long-abandoned hope that necessity would disappear if unmasked as self-abdicated freedom. This recourse to the pre-critical naiveties is mistaken for a stride forward; though the only intellectual benefit it is likely to produce is inviting a new round of creative critique, in which arguments, already long since considered platitudinal, would re-emerge from disgrace and force their way back to the scholarly debate. Arising from a kind of collective amnesia, the ethnomethodologists’ style of standing up to the challenge of positivism seems to indicate simultaneously another affliction of the school: its notorious proclivity to simplify the task of critique by disregarding the genuine intricacies of the issue involved. Thus, the contention of the supposedly unfinished, incomplete human world waiting to be given a meaning is granted the required coherence through assuming ‘completeness’ of the acting members; the question how human individuals became ‘complete’ in the first place, from where they got their valuemeanings, goals and expectations, is, tactfully, never asked. Were it asked, the endemic artificiality and one-sideness of the ethnomethodologic solution would become immediately apparent. Similarly, while boasting rightly of making the so-called ‘reality basis’ of sociological procedure problematic again, ‘it is the methods and procedures of sociology which create and sustain that world’19 – ethnomethodologists declare in the same breath the unproblematic nature of members in their capacity of unsolicited meaning-producers; and they buttress on this suspicious premise their own right to ‘ethnomethodological indifference’.20 What is important, we are told by Lyman and Scott, is that one should have a perspective, but the particular perspective

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employed is irrelevant to the rectitude of theorizing.21 Again, the task of reducing philosophy to the logic of common sense, and the act of philosophizing to the interaction of everyday life, is achieved through attributing the qualities of a Husserlian philosopher to the man in the street. And so on, and so forth. The precarious coherence of all these simplifications is upheld by careful selection of social situations to which the analyses of the ethnomethodologists are being applied. All of them belong in what George Herbert Mead called ‘manipulatory area’ – objects which we both see and handle, and what Alfred Schutz defined as ‘social reality within reach of direct experience’ – the narrow sphere of intimate ‘living in’, of Du- und Wir-Einstellung.22 The ethnomethodologists’ favourite heroes are people processing the would-be patients in an anteroom of a psychiatric clinic, volunteer social workers conversing with unhappy creatures struggling with a suicidal drive, a fellowacademician coming for a short visit to another college, and, above all – sociologists themselves with their own ways of moulding and shaping and modelling the interview or test situation they call, complacently, ‘the social reality’. All these are ‘face-to-face’ interactions, relatively little patterned in advance, allowing for ample impressioncontests, charm casting and outwitting, seductive dalliance and reconnaissance skirmishes. Almost all the richness of such situations is contained in the detachable and recordable string of utterances, and Garfinkel is right in his own ethnomethodological way when trying to impress on his students the inexhaustible, ineffable cornucopia of meanings and intentions present in a simple face-to-face verbal exchange. As long as he keeps wisely within the confines of small groups and face-to-face contacts, [the] sociologist can well live up to the Fichtean ideal of Nacherfinder des Bewusstseins, explorer and re-builder of consciousness.23 Within these limits the cosy little world of a human individual seems indeed gentle, malleable and tender; the magic triangle of a heterosexual male, heterosexual female and a lesbian – Peter Berger’s modernized Robinsons and Women Fridays – can indeed ‘typify reciprocally their habitualized actions’.24 They may well be able – but in a world which is purified not only of harsh laws, organized violence and other innumerable ‘objectified’ barriers which separate human projects from their fulfilment, but also of rude and unrefined needs like hunger and their ‘objectified’ referents like lack of food. These – as Marx indicated in his German ideology – can make an outside force even of the human stomach. Ethnomethodologists claim to have a particular knack for descending to the level of ‘everyday life’ from the abstract heights of the official sociology inhabited by imaginary homunculi. But it is a



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strange everyday life they descend to: hardly anybody eats there his everyday bread, even less bakes it, let alone earns it – though, as a naive observer would say, eating and baking and earning bread seem to constitute eighty per cent of the everyday life of eighty per cent of everyday people. Anarchism was always a misplaced response to the helplessness resulting from the overwhelming tyranny of reality. The postulate of the meaning-bestowing capacity of the human individual as the ultimate source of his situation-in-the-world is a confused rejoinder to the positivistic ‘rodentization’ of human nature. It cannot humanize our knowledge of the social, as anarchism cannot lay the foundation of human freedom. Ethnomethodology stops short of attacking the very essence of the positivistic paradigm of social knowledge. As a matter of fact, it shares with positivists their allegedly scientific confusion of unbiased research with ethical indifference. It endorses willingly the positivistic rule of phenomenalism and refuses the right of the scientist to go beyond the level of the empirically observable. Yielding meekly to the ‘little reality’ of here-and-now, of the phenomenal and the accidental – it falls victim of a moral and cultural relativism perhaps more acute than the one which became associated with the name of positivism; it is left with no relevant weapon with which to help beings in their perennial effort to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil. Blurring the dividing line between scientific reason and common sense, it in addition leaves its followers confused and disarmed face-to-face with the rising tide of the irrationalist attacks against science and reason. The second major challenge to positivism in current sociology is the outcome of structuralist departures. These have been associated with the name of Claude Lévi-Strauss more than with any other. Lévi-Strauss himself acknowledged his intellectual debt to Marx: ‘The famous statement by Marx, “men make their own history, but they do not know how they are making it” justifies, first, history and, second, anthropology.’25 Structuralism is designed to provide precisely the ‘how’ answer. There are limits to both human freedom of manoeuvre and society’s freedom to choose the patterns it imposes on its members. Both the extreme determinism of positivistic provenance and the gullible voluntarism of their allegedly humanistic critics are wrong. In fact, the opposition itself is wrong and can only lead its adherents astray. The social pressure, experienced as reality, and individual meanings, experienced as will, are two outward manifestations of the same concealed entity, which sets the limits and patterns for human culture and social order, thinking and acting.

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We shall have the hope of overcoming the opposition between the collective nature of culture and its manifestations in the individual, since the so-called ‘collective consciousness’ would in the final analysis, be no more than the expression, on the level of individual thought and behaviour, of certain time and space modalities of the universal laws which make up the unconscious activity of the mind.26

These universal laws are uniformities of the structure of human thinking, isomorphic in principle with the structure of reality itself. Thus order, organization, repetition, predictability are transformed from an opposition to human creativity into – simultaneously – its next-of-kin and its necessary condition. If only we succeed in decoding this one universal ubiquitous structure – we shall be, at last, able to embark on the two perennial and inextricably welded tasks of human knowledge – to grasp the secrets of social order and of the human personality. Being determined and being creative are not two diametrically opposed modes of existence; they are, in fact, two in one, the double face of the same human condition. Science and art finally meet again after many decades of schism. If they did not meet so far, it was because no relevant meeting ground had been found. Now it can be provided by the study of the universal structure of human culture, in which two capacities of humans – objective and subjective – fuse into one. To Lévi-Strauss the ultimate locus of this primordial and perennial unity is to be found in the human mind; everything human, as opposed to natural, signifies ‘l’esprit, qui les élabore au moyen du monde dont il fait lui-même partie’ (the spirit, which elaborates them with the help of the world of which it is a part). And if we penetrate this mind, we shall find ‘une image du monde déjà inscrite dans l’architecture de l’esprit’.27 Unearthing in this way the Kantian legacy must have had the refreshing quality of a spring thunderstorm after many years of sterile, hackneyed pseudo-empirical hair-splitting, comparable to the original impact of Kant himself on his own time, marked by the smugly optimistic sensualism of the French Enlightenment. It would be strange, however, if in its second reincarnation Kantian pure reason emerged free of its notorious maladies. It did not, in fact. It is not only, as Pierre Bourdieu recently indicated, that Lévi-Strauss ‘sacrifices interest in culture as a structuring structure … to interest in culture as structured structure’.28 The root of the trouble penetrates deeper, into the initial decision of locating the problem of the active nature of humans on the plane of thought, pure and clean. The only question which can be sensibly asked concerning the locus of human activity conceived in this purely spiritual way is its own intrinsic



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structure; the one aim a student of the issue so defined may reasonably pursue, is taking stock of the tools and technologies hoarded in the storehouse of the human mind, whatever their possible use and application. Once again the inevitable result is ‘indifference’, this time ‘structuralist indifference’, where there was a chance to discover, at last, the objective basis for human destiny. That is why the modern structuralism remains still only a promise to find the way out from the endless and fruitless argument between those who struggle to destroy the subjective facet of human existence and those who tend to neglect its objective conditions. A promise, still, which is worth exploring. Unless sociology transcends the false dilemma which dominated a century of its history, its future will be marked, as its past was, by further swings of the positivist–analytical pendulum. Each successive generation will seek in the second, forgotten, blind alley the illusory escape from the one recently explored. I have chosen in this lecture deliberately the long, circuitous way instead of the usually used short-cut of the ‘values and facts’ dilemma. The restricted choice the above dilemma offers renders its solution impossible. No doubt Weber was right when reiterating obsessively that values (or, for that matter, their affective component) cannot be ‘empirically proved’. Still the already ritualistic spelling of the magic formula will hardly help us to come to grips with the genuine problems of the heterogeneous status of our discipline. True, values (the much too sketchy shorthand for human dreams, strivings, ideals, hopes) cannot be proved empirically, if by empirical proof we mean what the professional scientist does in his laboratory; they have been and always will be, however, perpetually proved and disproved in and by human creative effort, and this never-ending proving and disproving is very much the content of human history. Now, sociology cannot help but be thrown into the very midst of this history. It can try to abdicate its role, opting unilaterally to the subordinate domain of Zweckrationalität, only to acknowledge the exclusive right of the mighty, the demagogue and the irresponsible to set the Zweck. Even this surrender, however, reveals repeatedly its illusory character. All thinking of social reality cannot help but become inevitably part of this reality, contrary to physics, which will never turn into a component of the atom. The arts, these constant explorations into alternative, but possible worlds, are well aware of their intimate, bilateral affinity with the human world they venture to grasp; they know that creating reality, shaping it and modelling is the only way of grasping its inner meaning, and that once understood and creatively reflected, human existence can never be exactly the same as before. Because

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of their knowledge the arts are bold and daring. For the same reason, however, they are overwhelmed with the feeling of unique responsibility, of the kind long forgotten by an ordinary academic sociologist. Responsibility not toward ‘truth’ sufficiently abstract to be unable to vindicate its rights, but toward human culture, welfare, future. The feeling of responsibility lends bitterness to their critique, and heat to their desires. Not only are they not ashamed of their commitments – they are proud of them, and call them: the creation of culture. Whichever of the many art–science dichotomies we choose to measure the status of sociology, our verdict is likely to be much the same. The situation of sociology, astride the art–science watershed, has not changed significantly since Bennett M. Berger described it, in 1957, as one exposing it to criticism from all sides; sociology today, as it did then, is numbered among the weaker of the social sciences, it is the bastard son of the humanities, from which it gets its subject matter, and of the sciences, from which it gets its methods. Fully acknowledged by neither parent, it finds itself in the role of upstart, now utilizing the existing methods of science, now improvising new scientific methods, in an attempt to make the enchanted data of the humanities yield up their mysteries.29

Sociology is a herculean tour-de-force aimed at submitting an essentially arts subject to the dour discipline of the scientific laboratory. Or, to put it the other way, sociology is a daring attempt to turn the intellectual patterns, devised to impose human meanings on the non-human element of our experience – back on the meanings which they were supposed to serve. ‘We know what we are’, said Ophelia, ‘but we know not what we may be.’ The gentle and naive Ophelia was wrong: we do not know, in fact, what we are, unless we are fully aware of what we may be. Only the beams of the future, when shining through the obfuscate husk of the dull present, can give the lie to its alleged monotonous stability and bring to light its genuine contours, which consist always in part of facts, but in part of potentials. And here lies the role sociology and only sociology can perform. To grasp their factual reality, people must take stock of their potentialities; and that is what makes sociology value-loaded and art-like; it cannot be the fact-and-truth-seeking science of the human condition without transcending this condition and exploring the worlds which are real only as dreams and values.



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Two hundred years ago Condorcet could spell, complacently and self-assuredly, raison, tolerance, humanité in one breath. It seemed obvious that reason and the humane order of life go together. It was manifest to Hegel that all reality, the social included, is basically an expression of reason: ‘Alles vernünftige ist wirklich und alles wirkliche ist vernünftig.’ Those who will endorse today the creed of Condorcet and Hegel are few. The mood of our times has it that the reason is as much the source of the social evil as the remedy against it. The early modern belief in the universal ability of men to think and act wisely and rationally bifurcated into two mutually supplementary idioms: of irrational masses, to whom (according to Tarde), ‘L’état social, comme l’état hypnotique, n’est qu’une forme du rêve’,30 who consist of idiots in the Ancient Greek sense of apolitical beings, and who respond to the primordial drives of their subconsciousness rather than to the arguments of reason; and that of a masterly elite of learned pundits, who handle reason technologically, able to solve any task which happens to be put on their agenda. Reason and unreason reincarnated into the now folkloristic dichotomy of the scientific and the social; the whole dichotomy is crammed into the narrow frame of ways and means, a technology of achieving ends rather than formulating them and measurable solely in terms of costs and effects.31 The realm of ends themselves, of the purpose which all this is meant to serve was left beyond the bi-partite classification. In fact, the modern view is suspicious of any goal-setting and doubtful of reason’s ability to pave the humane way for humanity; as Pareto phrased it half a century ago, ‘the intent of sincere humanitarians is to do good to society, just as the intent of the child who kills a bird by too much fondling is to do good to the bird’.32 Professional scientists are becoming more and more instrumentally rational; irrational masses flounder hopelessly in the treacherous quagmire between pure emotionality and the foolhardy chase of futile mirages, and the devil takes care of the rest, which includes, above all, the direction in which human civilization moves. We have reduced the idea of reason to the notion of a pure instrumentality; it can make, we say, any path smoother and shorter; but it will hardly be of any help on the crossroads. In this critical turning point in the history of civilization, sociology, the one area of human intellectual endeavour which can bridge the gap between cultural and natural, subjective and objective, art and science, has a crucially important function to perform. It must strive to remarry masses and reason, human life and rationality, humanity and efficiency – the couples whom modern civilization separated and whose divorce the learned priests of this civilization have sanctified.

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It must restore to reason its denied right and its lost willingness to discuss not only itineraries, but destinations as well. It must show to the people, in Wright Mills’s famous words, the way in which their most intimately private biographies are woven into the tissue of the history of the species. This programme is easier to formulate than to fulfil. It is a precariously dialectical position which is sought, surrounded by mortal traps on both its flanks. The one is the pure, positivistic scientism implacably resentful of philosophical breadth, historical insight and the exploration of still unreal worlds. The other is the indiscriminate challenge of the sheer possibility of objective truth and meaning leading directly to the distrust of all reason and so playing the tune of irrational forces. As Reinhard Bendix expressed it in his already classic presidential address of a year and a half ago: ‘A sociology that takes the natural sciences as its model also falls heir to a tradition in which qualities of literary distinction and aesthetic sensibility, of moral imagination and the cultivation of judgment are at a discount … [But] a humanistic sociology which takes the distrust of reason as its model thereby undermines its own existence.’33 In the world in which men fear their own society more than anything else, in which even the ancient human terror of nature has been replaced by the nightmare of the damage humans inflict on nature, the reason of sociology may well become a major condition of the human existence. Sociological reason, which shuns the responsibility for the future human beings choose for themselves, will be the first to bear the blame for the wrong choice. Regardless of the form this abdication of its right and duty will take: of a denial of the right of science to be concerned with human values or of refusing to admit that there are any objective values in the human world. Our devotion to reason and our belief in the possibility of a rational, improved, more congenial organization of human life are today put to an increasingly demanding test. The very validity of literacy, knowledge, education are being questioned in some vociferous quarters; the mere discussion of objectivity, of the applicability of science to the management of human destiny on earth, is being looked upon suspiciously as malignant phantasy or a malicious attempt to constrain human freedom. So more than ever we must beware of falling into the traps of fashions which may well prove much more detrimental than the malaise they claim to cure. Well, our vocation, after all these unromantic years, may become again a testfield of courage, consistency, and loyalty to human values. We would be well advised if we carved on the walls of our



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sociological lecture rooms what Max Weber said more than half a century ago: ‘If the professional thinker has an immediate obligation at all, it is to keep a cool head in the face of the idols prevailing at the time, and if necessary to swim against the stream.’34

5 Jorge Luis Borges, or Why Understanding Is Not What It Seems to Be (1976)1

The main theme of Borges’s ‘Labyrinths’ is that the world is not what it seems to be; or, rather, that it takes only a slight switch of mind to make it seem very different; that, however, it does not matter after all which of the many conceivable appearances is true, or ‘truer’ than the others; and that, however intensely we may long for the serene certitude which only full and flawless knowledge could offer – it is only in the world of short-lived truths and the menacing voids revealed by their refutations that our life could acquire that density and significance which makes it such an attractive affair. The theme has many variations. To start with, our world has no intrinsic symmetry in which to anchor our certainty. The world is el jardin de senderos que se bifurcan: it is their tendency to fork which defines its paths. Moved by our desire for order, we choose one sequel and suppress the rest; by so doing we depart from reality which we wished to grasp, as each moment contains diverse futures, ‘diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork’. Ts’ui Pên conceived of a book which would restore the world to its true complexity, which would render the multitude of futures and the essential indeterminacy of each and any point in time; a book which would be ‘an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe’; in which ‘all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings’. Self-defeating as the task may seem, it has been accomplished. A book has been created, which more than anything else ever written approached the ideal of truth. And precisely because of this virtue it proved to be useless: the ‘ultimate truth’ it contained, the faithful reflection of the true nature



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of the world, appeared as incomprehensible and meaningless as the universe it reflected. We descendants of Ts’ui Pên continue to curse the monk. Their (his manuscripts’) publication was senseless. The book is an indeterminate heap of contradictory drafts (The Garden of Forking Paths). In strict compliance with the rules of impassionate scholarship, Ts’ui Pên abandoned all his earthly commitments in order to better penetrate mysteries of the world: he renounced the pleasures of both tyranny and justice, of his populous couch, of his banquets and even of erudition – all to close himself up for thirteen years in the ‘Pavilion of the Limpid Solitude’ – all to produce in this perfect detachment, which befits a true scholar, the ultimate book, which would be a strictly infinite labyrinth, like the universe itself. When he died, his heirs found nothing save chaotic manuscripts.

The truer they were, the more chaotic they become; like their object with which they became identical, they escaped understanding. Fearsome incomprehension lies in wait at the end of the road which, as the travellers suppose, leads to the whole truth. There was a library in Babel, which four centuries ago was proved to be total, to wit containing ‘all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols’, all the books which have been written or could be written. ‘The first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure.’ It was obvious that such a full library had to entail Vindications, ‘books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future’. No wonder that ‘thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication’. Was their intention vain? In a way, it was not: one could be sure that in the complete library Vindications did exist and, therefore, could be found. On the other hand, the hope of finding them was false. Given the natural limits of the searchers’ life, the chance of a man’s finding his Vindication could be computed as zero. Four centuries later, nadie espera descubrir nada – no one expects to discover anything, and the initial ‘inordinate hope was followed by an excessive depression’. Fortunately, the wiser among the disappointed came to realize that a complete library could only be ‘unlimited and cyclical’. Therefore, ‘if an eternal traveller were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder

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(which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order). Mi soledad se alegra con esa elegante esperanza’ (The Library of Babel). One could resolutely object that the ‘elegant hope’ offers little comfort, as it depends on the eternal life of the traveller. Regrettably, we are not immortal. Regrettably? Have you ever thought what the happiness of an immortal would be like? What sort of a bliss the full knowledge, accessible to immortals only, can bring? Joseph Cartaphilus of Smyrna bequeathed us his answer. He found the river whose waters grant immortality. And the City of the Immortals, which rises on its far bank. And the Immortals themselves: ‘In the sand there were shallow pits; from these miserable holes … naked, grey-skinned, scraggly bearded men emerged. I thought I recognized them: they belonged to the bestial breed of the troglodytes, who infest the shores of the Arabian Gulf and the caverns of Ethiopia; I was not amazed that they could not speak and that they devoured serpents’ ‘I remember one – noted Cartaphilus – whom I never saw stand up: a bird has nested on his breast.’ Perfect quietude was the only perfection Immortals could embrace. Their immortality made them invulnerable to pity and indifferent to their own fate. They were not just immortal: ‘what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal’. They knew, and their knowledge was divine; they became like gods. And like gods, invulnerable to pity and indifferent to fate because of their knowledge that in the infinite time ‘wit and stolidity cancel out and correct each other’ – they might create the cosmos but created a chaos. The City they erected on the site of a previous one, built by mortals, testified that order, purposefulness, reason, functionality have no meaning in a world which is both eternal and infinite. The City ‘abounded in dead-end corridors, high unattainable windows, portentous doors which led to a cell or pit, incredible inverted stairways whose steps and balustrades hung downwards’. A life which is commensurate with infinity contains no incentive to the effort which results in order, meaning or rationality; it is precisely the very inaccessibility of the infinite which gives sense to such effort. If ‘nothing can happen only once, nothing is preciously precarious’. It is knowledge of mortality, not of immortality, which ‘makes men precious and pathetic. They are moving because of their phantom condition; every act they execute may be their last; there is not a face that is not on the verge of dissolving like a face in a dream. Everything among the mortals has the value of the irretrievable and the perilous’ (The Immortal). ‘Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality’ (Partial Magic in the Quixote); Joseph



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Cartaphilus decided to put on the record, and thereby immortalize, his experiences only when, in one of his innumerable travels, he came across another river with a mysterious power to undo the spell of the one granting immortality. He avidly drank of its waters. Immortality is not the only entrance to infinity. Having reconciled himself to the brevity of his life, one can still hope to embrace the fullness of the universe by absorbing all the information this universe could offer men with ears to hear and eyes to see … If only one could pay equal attention to every detail of the picture which extends before his eyes. If only nothing was allowed to escape unnoticed. If only one had a memory voluminous and agile enough to imbibe and retain forever every bit of information supplied by the senses … Before that rainy afternoon, when he was thrown by an untamed horse, Ireneo Funes had been what all humans are: ‘blind, deaf, addle-brained, absent-minded.’ When he came to after the accident, ‘the present was almost intolerable in its richness and sharpness, as were his most distant and trivial memories’. We, at one glance, can perceive three glasses on a table; Funes, all the leaves and tendrils and fruit that make up a grape vine. He knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on 30th April 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by the oar in the Rio Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising. He was not blind and deaf the way we all are; he saw everything, he remembered everything. Did he know everything? Well, this is not a question with an easy answer. Funes could reconstruct a whole day without a slightest hesitation; unfortunately, ‘each reconstruction had required a whole day’ … ‘It bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front). His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them.’ With no effort, Ireneo Funes had learned English, French, Portuguese and Latin. But – Borges admits his suspicion – ‘he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.’ Contrary to naive expectations of ordinary mortals who dream of Funes’ extraordinary gifts, his power of communicating with others has not been enhanced. The contrary is true. ‘I thought that each of my words (that each of my movements) would persist in his implacable memory [Borges reports the inhibitions felt during their brief encounter]. I was benumbed by the fear of multiplying useless gestures.’ Not that Funes needed to communicate. Living in a world full to the brim with vivid impressions and without

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the remedy of simplification, abstraction and selective (imperfect?) memory, how could he convey his experience to others? And what could the other offer him? After his accident, Funes learned that he was paralysed; ‘the fact scarcely interested him’. What for he needed to move around? He used to mark his time sitting hours on end in a dark room. What for he needed light? When knowledge reaches its longed-after fulness, communication grinds to a halt; and knowledge itself is worthless. ‘My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap’, Ireneo complains (Funes the Memorious). And so, it is not the end of the road, but the very endlessness of the road which keeps us alive, curious and searching. If we ever reached the end we dream of (which, fortunately, is not possible – we are not immortal like Cartaphilus, nor omniscient like Funes) – our effort which lends meaning to our life would wear off, deprived of illusion which gave it sense. At the end there are only endlessly forking paths, disorder which only by being repeatedly passed through begins to look as an order, and the limitless wealth of a garbage heap. The road of knowledge, which starts with bewilderment, stops at chaos. It is only between these two extremes that orderly, law-abiding structures are precariously erected. It is only on the way that we produce meanings, communicate, come to agreement, gain understanding. The deepest sense of our search of meaning and understanding is to keep us at safe distance from both ends. Our world is meaningful to the extent to which we succeed in doing just that. Meaning is not a starting point; a foundation of our effort to understand meaning is a correlate of this effort. Our knowledge is not limited by our mortality and imperfection of our sensual perception or the capacity to observe and memorize; on the contrary, knowledge is both necessary and possible only thanks to these alleged defects of our existence. Totality, eternity, the absolute, being themselves devoid of meaning, cannot support our understanding; nor can they offer a measure with which to assess its correctness. It is our own activity of separating, connecting, ordering which is perceived as islands of meaning in the sea of chaos. Understanding starts from our activity and returns to it; there is no other destination it could lead us to. As Pascal wrote, ‘Nature is an infinite sphere, whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere’ (‘The Fearful Sphere of Pascal’). This sphère effroyable has its centre everywhere, therefore in each of us. Having deplored, with Pascal, the frightful silence of the firmament, one has to go on spinning the delicate tissue of meanings which makes the centre hospitable and the circumference invisible, or at least unobtrusive. We can move, and act, and live only in the world we understand;



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but we move, act and live the way we understand it. As no absolute standard of understanding exists (the centre is everywhere), understanding means running a risk, as inescapable as the need of understanding itself. Even the most mundane, unimaginative, common-sensical understanding is replete with the risk of mistake; the danger increases as the restless mind abandons simplicity of routine and soars toward ever more nebulous heights of sophistication. It was the ‘reckless discernment’ of Eric Lönnrot, the learned detective-philosopher, which induced him to disdainfully reject the trivial explanation of murder offered by a level-headed professional policeman. This explanation was ‘possible, but not interesting. You’ll reply that reality hasn’t the least obligation to be interesting. And I’ll answer you that reality may avoid that obligation but that hypotheses may not.’ For his hubris Lönnrot paid with his life; following logic and logic alone, he fell into the trap set by Scharlach the gangster, whose logic included the premiss of Lönnrot’s contempt for the obvious and the trivial (Death and the Compass). Minotaur punctuated his otherwise uneventful life in the Labyrinth, killing hapless human sacrifices; the acts which he, condemned to the infinite vegetation in an infinite solitude, understood as delivering his victims ‘from all evil’. Having thus construed the act of murder as the act of deliverance, he eagerly awaited his own redeemer. ‘Would you believe it, Ariadne?’ said Theseus. ‘The Minotaur scarcely defended himself’ (‘The House of Asterion’). Every situation lends itself to diverse, even contradictory interpretations which differ in their degree of credibility much more conspicuously than in their truth, and we choose between them because of credibility rather than because of truth, however we try to justify our choice to ourselves and to others. To avenge disgrace of her father, Emma Zunz took justice in her own hands and killed the father’s tormentor; then she presented her cold-blooded, carefully planned vengeance as an act of self-defence. Her story, however untrue, ‘impressed everyone because substantially it was true. True was Emma Zunz’s tone, true was her shame, true was her hate. True also was the outrage she had suffered: only the circumstances were false, the time and one or two proper names’ (Emma Zunz). Having lived through her act as the act of vicarious self-defence of her dead father, Emma invested the act with meaning so intense that the subtle borderline between credibility and truth melted. The truth of tone, shame, hate asserted itself in its true role of the bearer of meaning. We are not like Ireneo Funes and only puny rivulets of reality trickle into this swimming pool of imagination which is our knowledge. Having looked into Funes’ gruesome world, we no more regret this

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limitation. If we, however, agree with Borges that it is the intrinsic incompleteness of our knowledge which gives meaning to the search of meaning and, indeed, to our life – then we would better reconcile ourselves to the idea that the price to be paid for meaning is uncertainty. The only way of making the scattered odds and bits of our knowledge meaningful is to go beyond what is already known, to imagine the missing links, to fill the gaps between the visible islands of information with the vision of submerged ravines and crests. But there is more than one way through which imagination can travel to intelligibility. And little to guide us in the choice of the way which is not only intellectually satisfying, but true. There was a long and inconclusive argument in Babylon as to the identity and true history of the Company, which administered a secret lottery responsible for uneven distribution of luck and wealth. As only the results, and not the original intentions which guided the Company activity were known, no hypothesis could be borne out, and the dispute led to ever wilder conjectures. Some people surmised that the Company dissolved long ago and tradition is the only foundation of the ‘sacred disorder of our lives’. Others, bolder still, put in doubt the very existence of the Company. But perhaps the vilest view held that ‘it is indifferent to affirm or deny the reality of the shadowy corporation, because Babylon is nothing else than an infinite game of chance’ (‘The Lottery in Babylon’). Not only reality holds no proofs of the veracity of our understanding: it is ultimately irrelevant how we try to construe its ‘true-image’, provided that the image we construe gives us the understanding we need – namely, the art of living in the world. Is our effort to understand free, therefore, of all constraints? Subject to no rules? Is the cogency of our understanding only a function of perspicacity, or obtuseness, of our intellect? No – would be Borges’s emphatic answer. There are constraints and there are rules. They do not lie, though, where we normally expect to find them (or where we imagine them to be); not in the object we try to grasp, not in the reality we try to understand. If we want to discover them, let us better look into ourselves, into the subjects who struggle to apprehend the world they live in. In ‘Averroës’s Search’ Borges deals with an understanding which fails, with an effort to comprehend which is defeated. But the defeat is of a different nature than in the cases we have considered so far. It is neither the inexhaustible richness of a structureless universe, nor its amenability to contradictory interpretations, which defied the power of intellect. This time it is the intrinsic partiality of intellect itself, its in-built propensity to see some things, and to neglect others, which



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set unencroachable limits to understanding. However powerful, the intellect enters its task neither innocent nor impartial; it sets about its work loaded with its own past, with some skills sharped [sic] up in the course of its previous jobs, and other faculties dormant or atrophied by the lack of use. This past is its asset and its liability, its strength and its weakness. Thanks to its past, the intellect is able to see; because of it, it must remain partially blind. Our past – our accumulated tradition – our assimilated experience – is our power and our burden. It must be both at the same time. We can get rid of the constraints it imposes only together with the very capacity of understanding, of acting, of living. And so, this time it is not a story ‘of the archbishop of Canterbury who took it upon himself to prove there is a God; then, of the alchemists who sought the philosopher’s stone; then, of the vain trisectors of the angle and squarers of the circle’. In such stories the heroes would engage in their respective lost battles acting as representatives of the human species as a whole, naively trying to impose too much intelligibility upon too inorderly a universe. Their inevitable defeat will have, so to speak, species-wide meaning; they would explore and finally articulate the rules of the game called understanding, as set by the universe for all people, and – as far as one can see – for all times. Averroës’s story is different: we are told of a ‘case of a man who sets himself a goal which is not forbidden to others, but is to him’. The drama we witness this time is not one of the essentially disorderly world being obsessively, though vainly squeezed into the straitjacket of logical categories, but one of incongruent, divergent traditions, physically so accessible, while intellectually so distant from each other. Averroës’s defeat can in no way be ascribed to his private intellectual frailties; he was one of those few giants who always fought their private battles well ahead of the frontline of the common intellectual development. Averroës, as other giants of the same breed, represented the best history could produce in the conditions circumscribed by its own accumulated achievement; if Averroës failed, so would anybody else in his place. The goal, therefore, was ‘forbidden’ to him not because of his individual, subjective ineffectiveness, but because the tradition which constituted him failed to supply the tools with which to handle an object gestated in a different tradition. However hard Averroës tried to understand what two curious words used by Aristotle could possibly mean – he, ‘closed within the orb of Islam, could never know the meaning of the terms tragedy and comedy’; he could not ‘imagine what a drama is without ever having suspected what a theatre is’. Using the only light he had – this of Islamic cultural experience – to disperse the darkness of an alien

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text, Averroës wrote in his manuscript: ‘Aristu (Aristotle) gives the name of tragedy to panegyrics and that of comedy to satires and anathemas. Admirable tragedies and comedies abound in the pages of the Koran and in the mohalacas of the sanctuary.’ It was not the term, the name, the word which turned up to be an unsurmountable barrier to Averroës’s understanding; it was an alien practice, which the terms articulated. The terms seemed opaque because the only practice inside which they were ‘at home’ and enjoyed this transparency of names which disclose rather than conceal ideas, was impervious to Averroës’s eye. Uprooted from the natural habitat of their native practice, the words dimmed, stood between the eye and the object of its gaze, solidified into objects in their own right, turned into problems to be struggled with and overcome. Once upon a time, over there, in a different practice and a different era, they were handy tools of communication, which drew no more attention than well-functioning tools normally do; now, here, when stood on their own feet, they have suddenly become tough, dense entities, which because of their very opacity and silence suggested a depth to be fathomed, a mystery to be unravelled. Now they drew spotlights on themselves, instead of effortlessly directing them to practices they stood for. Averroës’s trouble was not that of a dictionary. It was not simply the case that he failed to hear the whispered message, the words aimed only at a knowing ear. Words, if understood, tell us how to go on; but Averroës had nowhere to go. There was nothing in his accumulated experience, in his tradition, in his world, to which the words like tragedy or comedy could send him. There is no understanding without experience to which the message can be referred. But the reverse relation holds as well – only together with experience is the message complete and its meaning fulfilled. It is only one little step from here to the realization that with the varying experience, the meaning will also vary. Reconstruction of the ‘original’ meaning of the message, meaning which could be known from within the situation in which the message had been begotten, seems a fairly hopeless task. And if so, is not the meaning we are after subject to a ‘double bind’, constrained simultaneously by the text and by our experience, therefore never conclusive, never final, never ultimately borne out? Pierre Menard, the hero of another Borges story, decided to produce a few pages of Don Quixote – which would coincide, ‘word for word and line for line’ with those of Miguel de Cervantes. The most obvious solution to the task was to ‘know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk, forget the



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history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes’. This solution, however, in addition to being the most obvious and simplest, was as well impossible: ‘It is not in vain that three hundred years have gone by, filled with exceedingly complex events. Among them, to mention only one, is the Quixote itself.’ Last but not least, the solution was the least interesting of all the alternatives. There is nothing much in being Cervantes and producing Quixote. Much more arduous and exciting a task was ‘to go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard’. Menard chose the latter – and succeeded. Incredible and astounding feat, but then Menard was a genius. Since he was a genius, we learn nothing of his methods. His achievement, as any achievement of a genius, was unique and inimitable. Besides, the most interesting story is how to interpret the text which his work produced; and it is normally the case, the methods used to produce the text, the actual circumstances in which the text was gestated and laboriously brought together, recede to a secondary position in the face of their product. Cast in a discourse not of the author’s choice (more often than not, not of the author’s knowledge either) – the text does not depend anymore on its own biography; not for its meaning, at least. Menard did produce a number of fragments identical ‘word for word and line for line’ with those of Miguel de Cervantes. Were the meanings of the two also identical? They could hardly be. After all, the second text has been composed by Menard, through the experience of Menard, 300 years after Cervantes, by a Symbolist from Nîmes, a devotee of Edgar Allan Poe, of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry – and we know all that. Can we, therefore, understand pages of his Quixote the same way we understand Cervantes’? No, we cannot and we do not. Let us follow Borges to see how far the meanings diverge. Menard’s text could not help but be more subtle, richer and more ambiguous than Cervantes. After all, the three centuries which divide Menard from Cervantes were three centuries which followed Don Quixote! The images, the phrases, the words of Don Quixote imbibed and absorbed new emotions, entered new associations, filled thereby with contents which they originally did not have. The same happened to the objects Don Quixote is about. To start with, Cervantes ‘in a clumsy fashion, opposes to the fictions of chivalry the tawdry provincial reality of his country’. Not so Menard, who selects as his ‘reality’ the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope de Vega. His alternatives were different, and so was the meaning of his choice; the choice owes its meaning to the chances it leaves behind.

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When Menard wrote, the sixteenth-century Spain showed many faces Cervantes could not see; and it wore many masks Cervantes could not discard for the simple reason that they have been put on these faces long after his death. If these masks, however, do not appear in Menard’s work, it could be only for the fact that Menard did discard them and thereby opted for subtlety which only naturalness can offer. We see in Menard’s Quixote (though, of course, not in Cervantes’) the absence of ‘gipsy flourishes or conquistadores or mystics or Philip the Seconds or auto-da-fé’. Cervantes’ clumsiness turned into Menard’s subtlety. It has not been the only transformation; Cervantes’ straightforwardness became Menard’s enigmatic equivocality. According to both authors, Don Quixote enters a debate on arms and letters in which he commends the first to the detriment of the latter. There is nothing mysterious about Cervantes: one could hardly expect a different attitude from a former soldier. But Menard, an intellectual naturally suspicious of everything military and coercive, ‘a contemporary of La trahison des clercs and Bertrand Russell’, is an entirely different matter. No wonder his curious attitude has inspired numerous interpretations, but not a single one which could point out a reason – or cause – as simple as that which made Cervantes’ portrayal of Don Quixote’s praise of arms so easily understandable. With Nietzsche and Valéry among Menard’s predecessors, ‘Cervantes’ text and Menard’s are verbally identical, but the second is infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his detractors will say, but ambiguity is richness).’ To emphasize this crucial point of interpretation, let us, following Borges, compare two views of history. The following quotation from Borges is a lengthy one, but one could hardly find another statement which brings into relief the historicity of understanding with similar wit and precision: ‘It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes.’ The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine): ‘… truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counsellor’. Written in the seventeenth century, written by the ‘lay genius’ Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes: ‘… truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counsellor’. History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases



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– ‘exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counsellor’ – are brazenly pragmatic.

Perhaps Menard was an avid reader of James and his ardent follower; perhaps he never came across James’s writings. It is not Menard’s own philosophical vision which has invested his statement about history with its pragmatic message. Even if we seek the meaning of the statement in the author’s intention, we can only read out this intention from what we know about the stage of historical discourse in which the statement was conceived. And this stage was dominated by the powerful figure of James, who has once and for all discredited the naive, reflective view of history, who shifted the location of history as human activity from the recording of facts to their production. Unless engaged in a direct polemic with James, one could not cleanse the words one used of the distinct colouring James’s treatment gave them. The new meaning was there for good, for the duration at least of the current phase of the historical discourse, and a simple statement ‘truth, whose mother is history’ turned from a rhetorical praise into a sophisticated and daring philosophical profession of faith. The old words have become property of a new philosophy, and the author opted for this philosophy by the very act of using them. The sheer presence of James in the discourse, without much further action of Menard, turned Menard into a pragmatist … One would almost say: whoever wrote the same words at the same time, could be, and would have to be, seen as stood in the gigantic shade cast by James – however different from Menard’s his personal intention and even biography could happen to be. The last point has a direct relation to the paradox well known from history of art: however we admire Rembrandt’s masterpieces, an artist of, say, the twentieth century cannot emulate Rembrandt’s style. The contract between Cervantes’ and Menard’s style, Borges tells us, is ‘vivid. The archaic style of Menard – quite foreign, after all – suffers from a certain affectation. Not so his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time’. The very standard, conventional, vernacular language of Cervantes, when flowing from the pen of Menard, became deviously ornamental and suggested affection which one could not read into it before. The whole idea of a Menard writing anew a book extant for centuries seems, to say the least, bizarre. But there is more to it than another feat of imaginative literary fiction which Borges has taught us to expect of him. Menard, of course, is Borges’s invention; but the problem, his imaginary project has revealed, is not. Menard helped Borges to reduce the problem to its laboratory purity; to thoroughly

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cleanse it of all admixtures with which genuine versions of the same problem are normally replete. Because of these ‘impurities’, students of real cases – i.e., cases which they do not fully control – may follow all the steps taken by Borges in his mock analysis of the fanciful Menard’s case, while still believing to be after the one and truly meaning organically present in the text they analyse while convinced that they are obediently following commands of historical facts; while closing their eyes to the prejudice which their own previous knowledge could not help but foist upon their descriptions; while taking for an impassionate and impersonal reconstruction of an object ‘over there’ what is in fact an endless, creative dialogue, of which they are an indispensable part. None of those misconceptions, false pretences and groundless excuses are admissible in the ‘purified’ case of Menard. There, their futility would be immediately exposed. What has been exposed, above all, in the antiseptic laboratory of Menard’s case, is the inescapable fluidity of meaning. Far from having been once and for all riveted into the text by dint of the author’s intentional conception, the meaning cannot but keep changing together with the totality of readers’ world; the totality it is a part of, and inside which (only inside which) it is meaningful. The author has only a limited mastery over the meaning of his text. As in the famous adage about love, ‘he left hostages to the fate’. The text he has produced acquires its own life. From the outset it derives its meaning from the setting in which it has been conceived. In this setting the author’s intentions are no more than one factor of many; one as well; perhaps a minor one as well; and surely the one of which we know least. No less significant are other elements of historically shaped situation which the text has absorbed or – intentionally or unknowingly – reflected; and such elements of the situation as could have been absorbed or reflected but have not been. The absence of historically accessible constituents is as eloquent as their presence. The meaning of the text depends, therefore, not just on such elements of diffuse tradition which the author has incorporated unwittingly or matter-of-factly, but on such elements as well as might have escaped the author’s knowledge or attention, or might have been by the author consciously rejected. This way or the other, the context in which the meaning of the text had been gestated and acquired its shape, was wider than the realm subject to the author’s intention and decision. On the other hand, however, the reader – the person who ‘reads out’ the meaning allegedly ‘written in’ by the author, is no more free in deciding what the text actually means. He knows more about the setting in which the text originated than the author himself;



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he knows about all these things the ‘author could but did not’, which emphasize aspects of meaning not necessarily intended by the author, but no less genuine than other, intentional aspects. His mastery over the original setting, contemporary with the text, can therefore transcend the mastery enjoyed by the author. But then he, too, is a child of his age. His own tradition, this backcloth against which he sees the text, limits his freedom of manoeuvre. He can only understand within this tradition. He cannot discard it. Even if he could, he would not get closer to the ideal, ‘undistorted’ understanding; on the contrary, he would condemn himself to blindness. The text would lie in front of him obscure and impenetrable, as a statement made in an unknown language (when we learn a foreign language, we not only attempt to decode its internal structure; we learn as well how to assimilate this structure into the syntax and semantics of the language we already know, and which defines for us the act of expressing and understanding). And so in the act of understanding two wide settings meet. None of the two persons who bring these settings together – neither the author nor the reader – have the authority to determine their boundaries. It may well seem that at least one of the settings, this of the author’s creation, had been complete and conclusive the moment the text was created. But its conclusiveness quickly becomes an illusion when confronted with ever widening knowledge of aspects invisibly and silently present in the author’s world. Even this setting is therefore bound to remain forever incomplete, with some gaps which demand to be filled and others which are not yet even suspected, which could be only guessed and eventually brought into existence by historical study, and above all by further historical experience which brings their significance into relief. As to the other setting – there can be little doubt, if any, of its never finished changeability, of its full dependence on vicissitudes of history. Its boundaries could be given once and for all only if history came to a halt – which is patently not the case. If the author sends his signals from an island whose interior he could not and had not explored in full, the reader is a passenger who walks the deck of a sailing ship he does not navigate. The meaning is the instant of their encounter. This fluidity of meaning, so shocking in view of the apparent solidity of the text – the meaning’s ‘container’ – has been conspicuously revealed thanks to the artful transparency of the imaginary Menard’s case. Whoever may suspect that the problem revealed is as imaginary as the story in which it has been embroiled – is advised to consider carefully the following reminder of Borges:

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Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution. This technique, whose applications are infinite, prompts us to go through the Odyssey as if it were posterior to the Aeneid and the book Le jardin du Centaure of Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri Bachelier. This technique fills the most placid works with adventure.

Half jokingly, half seriously we are reminded that what makes the reading and the understanding such an exciting adventure of meaningdiscovery is the act of placing the text in a context. Anachronistic attribution, if deliberate, is not, therefore, such a new technique as Borges pretends to believe. It is just an extension of the usual and the only possible technique of understanding; it makes a somewhat more liberal use of the possibilities which every act of understanding potentially contains. Wrongly viewing Homer as a successor to Virgil is not technically different from rightly locating Madame Henri Bachelier. Both must be located somehow in order to be understood; measuring them against various contexts only reveals that which has been already there, in the very project of understanding: the intrinsic variability of possible meanings and their interpretations. Above all, it exposes the intimate bond between the meaning and the reader’s world. Only a joint effort of the two can invest the text with meaning. By itself, the text would remain a dumb object which only the act of interpretation can force to speak. Ts’ui Pên and Lönnrot, Cartaphilus and Funes, Emma Zunz and Minotaur, Averroës and Menard, all guided us into the labyrinth of meaning which we cannot, but ever try to penetrate, and in which we cannot help but be lost. Each time we begin our journey hoping to chart the true, the only, the reliable map of the maze. Each time we find out, at best, that the road we have passed is just one of the many; and that we can never be sure that it has been the best. Our wanderings do not simplify the tangle of contorted roads. If anything, they add new passages and crossroads to the labyrinthine confusion. The characters with which Borges has populated his Labyrinths have made for us, therefore, this discovery which gives birth to hermeneutics – the theory and art of understanding and interpretation. Because our world is a labyrinth, we are bound to try to straighten up its convoluted paths, thereby introducing order, sense, meaning. This task we call understanding. The task arises whenever we confront something whose logic, consistency, meaning is not clear to us, something we do not understand: a circular room with



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too many exits, a twisted passage leading into darkness, a door with an ingenious lock we cannot open. In our effort to understand we attempt to select the right exit, to light up the murky passage, to penetrate the charade of the lock. The more we try, the clearer we see that the doors, the passages, the locks are but toughened up traces of builders’ activity. It occurs to us that we can find out their meaning – their inherent order – if we re-trace this activity and re-discover its logic. It does not matter in the end whether the builders did exist or whether we just imagined them. What matters is that the only way in which we can know how to go on in the maze is to construe its structure of the same stuff of which our logic is made; we understand the labyrinth only if we can see it as subject to the same rules we know from our own thinking, our own acts, our own intentions. When we begin to see our task in this way, the problem of understanding boils down to the question how to understand others, and the problem of knowledge becomes that of communication. Instead of vainly trying to discover the ready-made order in the world, we now try to smooth up our communication, and in order to do that we attempt to spell out principles, rules, practical recipes of reliable, true understanding. Thus we arrive in the field of hermeneutics – the art of finding the right way in the crowd of meaning-seekers; in the labyrinth they left behind and in which we have to move. Our universe is, after all, in Carlyle’s words, an infinite sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which they are also written. Borges shows us why we need hermeneutics. He shows us as well that we will never fully achieve the ends which hermeneutics is expected to serve. But he shows us also that trying to achieve these ends is the only way in which we can live our lives. The need to understand is universal; it is, in a sense, the essential need, the basis and the key to all other needs men can have. The need to understand is the foundation on which all other needs could be articulated; and it is the key without which no need can be fulfilled. The need to understand is so central that we can, in fact, assume its presence in all and any human life activity; it is, in a way, equivalent to the pursuit of sure knowledge and the art of acting effectively. In Wittgenstein’s words, to understand is to know how to go on. The state of true understanding is more fundamental and comprehensive than either the state of knowing truly or the act of behaving rightly: it entails both. In view of the centrality of understanding for human life, we are bound to suppose that most of the time and for most people understanding is accomplished matter-of-factly. This matter-of-factness of understanding is, again, equivalent to common-sensical knowledge,

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ordinary conversation, routine behaviour. These constituting an overwhelming majority of human situations, understanding rarely becomes a problem calling to be reflected upon and requiring special technology which one must consciously learn and master. It does become such a problem only when knowledge people command reveals its unreliability, and when human action goes wrong; it becomes a problem, in other words, when we do not know how to go on. Only then we feel that in order to act effectively we need to understand truly; and that both needs, to be fulfilled, require a special theory and a special art. At this point the universal need to understand gives birth to hermeneutics. The birth of hermeneutics is, simultaneously, an admission of failure and the expression of hope that the failure can be, with due effort, undone. Having once undertaken this effort, we soon discover what Borges’s characters did. Indispensable as our effort is, it confronts us with dilemmas which have no good, or at least satisfactory solutions. Once understanding has become a problem, it reveals its own intrinsic frailty. We begin to realize that the failure which has prompted our effort is more fundamental than we suspected, and that our original hope to undo it completely was, to say the least, somewhat naive. Reflecting upon wisdom we have acquired thanks to our efforts, we substitute determination for the original hope; we no more look forward to the complete and conclusive solution of our problem, to the ‘one and only’ understanding; but we know that we cannot, and that we will never stop trying to achieve such understanding. We exchange the road for its once dreamed of end. More correctly: it is not the endless road we settle for, but a series of forkings, which demarcate the choices we will have to make and will never make to our entire satisfaction. True, we are unlikely to stop trying to choose, at each junction, the good branch and to avoid the wrong one; indeed, such attempts, as we shall see later, occupied most powerful minds for dozens of years. Borges looks beyond those attempts and all their future repetitions. He knows that having gone as far as we can in one direction, we shall sooner or later return to the forking from which we imprudently departed. And that wise after the failure, we shall admit, at least for a short while, the futility of simple and unambiguous selections. There are three dilemmas on the road to certainty which defy neat and tidy solutions; or so, at least, Borges’s characters tell us. The first is the contradiction between our intractable drive to ‘complete’ knowledge and our realization that such knowledge, even if attainable, would not much differ from complete ignorance. We pursue knowledge running away from chaos; but the allegedly



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straight track turns up to be a circle, and the closer we are to the ideal of fullness, the more the emerging picture reminds us of the same chaos we hoped to leave behind (consider again Cartaphilus’ and Funes’ experiences). Understandably, our horror of void prompts us to fill all the remaining gaps. The endless effort fails, however, to bring the expected reward. With our horror unabated, we slowly begin to learn that, such limited certainty as we may enjoy, we acquire thanks to the gaps, rather than in spite of them. We draw the feeling of security from refraining to pry beyond the confines of the tiny islands of order we carve out for ourselves in the endless universe. Complete knowledge is a contradiction in terms. Knowledge brings whatever certainty and security it can thanks to its selectiveness; and selectiveness means incompleteness as much as fullness means ignorance. So we had better resign ourselves to the idea that certainty is a middle stage between two versions of chaos, and settle for something less than completeness. We had better … But could we? The second is the contradiction between our drive to grasp – or to postulate – the exact, true, the only meaning for every text, event, symbol – and those events’ and symbols’ endemic ambiguity. We hope that we would gain secure and reliable understanding if only we could make our symbols unequivocal; we consider their vagueness, their amenability to diverse interpretations, as the major obstacle to their proper use, which consists in facilitating our communication. The hope is vain. True, the polysemic elusiveness of events contains a danger (and Lönnrot and Minotaur learned about it the hardest of ways); but this danger is the price one must pay for using symbols as tools of communication. However slim the chance of agreement the communication may bring – it is due to the ambiguity of symbols, and not to their semantic stiffness. Because symbols are so indefinite, they are flexible enough to be geared to many different experiences, rooted in widely divergent biographies and traditions. They are messages sent above the barricades erected between mutually impenetrable worlds. They can be sent and received as messages, they can evoke appropriate responses on both sides of the barricade, precisely because they are half-filled vessels which can be easily topped up with the contents of so many diverse experiences. Symbols must refrain from taking an unambiguous stance towards everything which in one or the other of communicating worlds is unique or without equivalent on the other side. Only as far as they do refrain from that, they serve communication well. So we had better resign ourselves to the idea that symbols are bound to remain ambiguous as long as they perform

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communicative function, and settle for something less than unequivocality of meanings. We had better … But could we? The third is the contradiction between our drive to cleanse our sight from preconceived images which, as we suppose, becloud and contort our vision, and the fact that we can see only insofar as we have images in which to fit our perceptions. We hope that we would reach true, unpolluted understanding if we could only free ourselves of prejudices, of the unsavoury tendency to foist our previous experience upon any new one; we consider our past involvements and commitments as the major obstacle on the road to the ideal of undistorted, unbiased understanding dictated by its object alone. The hope is misleading. True, the limits of our own past can bar us from penetrating meanings once assigned to objects we try to comprehend (remember Averroës’s lost battle). But leaving such meanings behind is the price we have to pay for our very ability to perceive the world as meaningful, to understand, ‘to know how to go on’. However imperfect our ‘prejudiced’ understanding may be – understanding as such is possible thanks to our preconceived ideas, to the lore of experiences accumulated in the course of our biography and the history of people whose collective tradition (and what is tradition if not a set of prejudices?) we share, not in spite of it. What we see makes sense to us because we have the frames in which to fit it. The choice is not between prejudiced and unprejudiced understanding, but between seeing and blindness. So we had better resign ourselves to the idea that we can approximate the ideal of reliable understanding only when balancing between two versions of blindness, and settle for something less than the inaccessible level of unbiased understanding. We had better ... But could we? These three dilemmas generate the discourse called hermeneutics. Being concerned with these three dilemmas means being engaged in hermeneutical activity.

6 Thinking Photographically (1983–1985)

I I took up photography fairly recently, and virtually by accident. Travelling abroad, I used to make sketches of fine monuments of architecture I wished to remember. But sketching took time. Worse still, looking at the products of my efforts I could not help to wonder what was so fine about my objects to inspire me in the first place. So for a trip to Germany in September 1980 I bought a compact Ricoh to do the sketching for me. Again, contemplating the bleak and dreary output of trade processing and printing, I struggled in vain to re-capture my past ecstasies. And then I saw in the window of a local photo-shop a used Russian enlarger for £15. Perhaps, if I tinkered with the negatives myself, I could in the end get out from the camera exactly what went into it at the beginning. And so, I bought the enlarger. And thus my photographic life began. Four years later, I am not sure anymore that getting out from the camera exactly what went into it is the most exciting adventure photography has to offer. The original motive having been all but forgotten, I see now photography as a technique to create perfect images out of somewhat imperfect reality. Looking through the viewfinder, I am trying to see the final print. I release the shutter only when I know that – through developing and printing – the object in front of me will come to look exactly as I wish the final print to look. Developing and printing is to a photographer what dictionary and syntax is to a poet: they must be mastered in full if there is to be a

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chance of a good poetry, or a good photography. Mastering them is not a sufficient guarantee that the products will be good. Knowing the OED by heart does not make you a great poet. Aptitude in mixing developers, dodging and burning-in does not make you a great photographer. But without knowing well what the developer and the enlarger can do, you have no way of knowing how far your own imagery and the things you want to tell your viewers may take you. I believe that the excellence, the meaning, the significance are all in the print, not in its ostensible object. If this is so, travelling in search of ‘great objects’ does not seem that necessary. Objects of potentially ‘great’ photographs are all around you. Beautiful objects do not necessarily make beautiful photographs. Masterpieces can be made in your backyard as much as they can in distant and exotic places. Most of my photographs have been taken in and around Leeds. Were I to live a hundred years, I would not exhaust the bottomless treasury of images this city contains. Or, I suppose, any other city for this matter … My masters? Cartier-Bresson. And Kertesz. And Brandt. In case this admission is considered immodest for an amateur like me, let me clarify that the three giants draw a distant horizon for me, luminous and alluring, never to be reached but always to be aimed at … II With photography, like with anything else, one must first learn the alphabet. Once the alphabet has been mastered, it is up to you what you will use it for – to write good poetry or to scribble four-letter words on a nearby fence; but the alphabet you must know well, whatever the case. I learned my alphabet at Leeds Camera Club: the rules of composition, the ways of attracting the viewer’s attention to where one wants to attract it to, the ways of achieving clarity of the image, and being sensitive to this elusive, but all-important thing called ‘print-quality’: the idea we well understand until we try to spell it out … But then, sooner or later, everyone is on his/her own. Or, at least, one should be. Rules of the craft tell you how you ought to go about whatever you wish to do – but they cannot tell you what is worth doing. Concern with skilful application of rules alone leaves out what, I believe, is the most crucial vocation of photography: passing important messages in a form which addresses simultaneously reason and feelings. The photographer must explore in full the formidable



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and unique powers of photographic process; but he/she must do so in order to say something important about the world we live in – and say this compellingly. Knowledge of most beautiful words is worth little if one has nothing to say. Mastery of photographic technique is worth no more if it is not used to communicate important ideas, help to think and to understand the world we live in. III Photography is, essentially, a technique of cleansing experience from the decomposing solvent of time. Being such a technique, photography can – and should – be a potent aid to ‘sluggish imagination’. It may challenge inattention and force us to reflect. The extraordinary potential photography has will be revealed in full only if the products of photographic technique reveal how truly extraordinary the ordinary places and events are. In our daily bustle, we have rarely time, or strength, or will to stop, to look around, to think. We pass by things giving them no chance to puzzle, baffle or just amuse. Photography may make up for our daily neglect. It may sharpen our eyesight, bring into focus things previously unnoticed, transform our experiences into our knowledge. Photography may freeze and thus make available to our reflection the apparently trivial happenings, too brief to be noticed as they occur – often even by the actors themselves. Once frozen into a photographic print, they stop being trivial; on the contrary; they acquire, all of a sudden, the significance of an information on the way we live; they expose the unsuspected complexity of the simplest of our relations. The chance to stop and ponder, previously missed, is ours now. Photography may help us to discover how striking and remarkable our humdrum, habitual environment in fact is – though normally we do not bother to notice. Forced out of the flow of impressions in which they are normally dissolved, deformed (or straightened up?) by an uncustomary angle of view, parts of this daily environment are now open to a slow seeing, thoughtful seeing, understanding seeing. IV The theme that unites this portfolio is, so to speak, the very opposite of Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’. The latter formula, I admit, is uniquely well geared to the mood of our age: it celebrates life as a



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collection of unconnected events, it assigns importance and interest to the momentary and bizarre, it portrays the world as a series of ‘news’ – happenings without history and consequence. What either our age or Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ programme – which celebrates life as a collection of unconnected events, assigning importance and interest to the momentary and bizarre – is the lasting, the enduring, the routine and, indeed, the ordinary. Fascinated by the exotics of the new, we seldom have time or will to look closer at the drabness and humdrum of the permanent. The essential things in our daily world remain unnoticed just because we assume we can take their presence for granted (as Heidegger commented, we do not ask what a hammer is until it is broken). Yet precisely because they melt into the background and stay silent and invisible, these ordinary things acquire the power to puzzle and bewilder once brought into focus. V Our activity is, first and foremost, about giving meaning to otherwise indifferent and numb fragments of reality in which we live. In my photography, I am fascinated by the inadvertent or unplanned by-products or side-effects of this busy construction of meanings. Sometimes we are so preoccupied with ordering two adjacent sites, that we fail to notice the yawning gap of meaninglessness we leave between them. Some other time we so excel in employing a site as carrier of messages that the overall result is a paradox, an enigma, an absence of meaning arising from its excesses. In both cases we defy our original purpose: we spawn areas of meaninglessness while trying to make our world meaningful. I was struck by this paradox roughly three years ago when, during one of my Sunday morning photographic hunts, I came across a poster of Leeds Anarchists pasted to a dustbin in front of the window of a high-brow fashion shop. Since then it has been the permanent theme – perhaps an obsession – of my photography. I suddenly saw what I had not seen before: the inhuman voids gaping between houses we try to make into cosy and warm human homes, the oddity of sometime significant implements of our life when abandoned out of their natural place, the uncared-for areas of ugliness which surround the self-enclosed areas we care for, the nonsense of messages when confronted – inevitably – with addressees they had not been meant for, and the general haunting quality of man-made environments when empty of human bustle. I was also deeply impressed by the



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resilience of Nature on which we try to impose our own order: the brittleness of the traces or scars we leave, the stubbornness with which Nature re-imposes its own patterns on the ones meant to replace them. VI Photography is about giving shapes to moods and discovering moods in shapes. In this respect, it is not different from other visual arts or, for that matter, poetry. Like them, it positions itself between thought and feeling, things ‘out there’ and human experience. More than elsewhere, however, the world in which photography operates is one of familiar thoughts and familiar feelings. These shapes and moods photography is capable of bringing together are known shapes and lived-through moods. Hence photography acquires its meaning only in the dialogue with the viewer. The encounter of shapes and moods is not in the photographic image. It is enacted in the recapitulation of the viewer’s experience. Photography, therefore, may only hope to be a window; never an eye.

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7 Einstein Meets Magritte: Postmodernity Is Born (1995)

It was, I think, Suzi Gablik, who arranged the first meeting between Einstein and Magritte. In her penetrating study of the great Belgian painter, published in 1970, she observed the message which Magritte hammered home in most of his paintings, namely the plural significance of experience, in which spatiotemporal measurement is seen as the relation between observer and phenomena, corresponds to Einstein’s theory of relativity in physics … Relativity represented the demise of any view of the universe as static and predictable. It represented the shift from a timeless, Euclidean world in which all is precise, determinate and invariable, to a dynamic universe where everything is relative, changing and in process. Magritte’s paradoxical combination of precision and indefiniteness is perfectly adjusted to the crisis of modern physics, in which the necessity of causal relations has had to be abandoned. (p. 117)

We can go on from here and add a few more points on which Einstein and Magritte, had they met and talked, would surely agree. It may be said of the physicist Einstein and the painter Magritte that they both, though each in his own way, set free that modality of possibility which both the pre-Einstein science and the pre-Magritte art considered a challenge to human wit and a waste product of human ignorance, tried to imprison in elegant theoretical models of things as they are, or bury under the glossy surface of precise, copy-like representations, while swearing to theorize it out of the universe and stamp out from the world of human practice. For that science and that art, possibility was always a ‘mere possibility’, sign



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of a worldly or intellectual disorder, either a mode of being inferior to that of reality, or the superstition’s last line of defence. After Einstein and Magritte, for science and art alike, the world turned into the home of infinite possibility, and each and every fragment of reality became a Prigogine-style whirlpool in the endless flow of the possible. Gablik said of Magritte, that he ‘systematically disrupted any dogmatic view of the physical world’. Unlike many other painters of his time, Magritte did not seek new techniques of expression; but he relentlessly inquired into the nature of the objects of expression, which so many others – even the most radically avant-garde painters – took for granted. Though ‘represented’ with great precision and with enormous care for the overall ‘likeness’ and the faithfulness of the detail which would have satisfied the standards of the most devotedly ‘representative’ among painters – the ‘objects’ of Magritte’s paintings exude the air of uncertain origin and doubtful status; they invite the viewers to question the meaning of any ‘reality’, and force them to see into the precariousness of any existence, normally taken as unproblematic. Each object suggests the possibility of being something else than it is, or finding itself in a different place – and by the same token it reveals the uncertainty, ‘merely possible’ status of all others, even the most familiar and comfortingly ‘natural’ shape or location. Without losing anything of their physical solidity, objects of Magritte’s paintings lay bare the tenuousness of their identity. Female torso, endearingly ‘fleshy’ and alive at one end, merges imperceptibly into its own, stony representation; shoes turn into the foot they are supposed to cover; horse-riders gallop at the tops of trees, rocks hang in the air, apples of natures mortes lie, round and juicy, on top of the framed canvas into which they are to be flatly inscribed. Objects play with their similarities, into which they painlessly blend – a fish into a cigar, bottle into a carrot, female face into a female torso, head into an apple – but they resist allegedly obvious connections with their names, questioning simultaneously the two established, the metonymical and the metaphorical, stratagems of ‘cutting out’ things and their identifications. Nothing is exactly what it seems, but nothing is more than it seems. It may be also said that Einstein and Magritte, though each in his own way, imprisoned the observers in the products of their observation: the model-builders in the models they built, the painters in their paintings. Science before Einstein, arts before Magritte struggled to efface the observer from the observed world, the writer from the verbal description, the brush-holder from the visual representation. Nothing that bore the stamp of the observer’s presence truly belonged

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to the observation; the ideal experiment and ideal representation alike were such as had all trace of the observer wiped out clean. In the world of the observed, the observers were unwelcome guests or embarrassing intruders; the scientific and artistic savoir vivre required that they made themselves as unobtrusive as possible, or better still invisible; ideally, they should turn into a pure gaze, and a nobody’s gaze with that. Einstein and Magritte abruptly halted and reversed the expropriation of the observers. Not only were the observers absolved from the duty of self-effacing, but they have been recognized as the very pillars on which the universe, as we know it, rests. All observation was now seen as incomplete. Deceitful or otherwise faulty if it did not contain an account of the observer’s presence and work – all presence being a working presence, an active presence, a self-engraving and a trace-leaving presence. In the series of paintings called La condition humaine, a hole in the door shaped like a human body reveals pitch darkness of the void outside the inhabited room; bits of broken window-pane on the floor retain the blue sky and the clouds and the sun, but there is but shapeless grey expanse in the holes they left in the window; the landscape painted on canvas blends seamlessly into the part of landscape left outside the frame, but it covers up and bars from view the part now visible solely in its painted representation; window opens on a black nothingness, having sucked the world outside into its allegedly transparent glass. The hallowed hierarchies of being and seeing, of reality and its representation, of truth and its description, are cast back into the melting pot, struggling to mould into new, yet forever uncertain and flexible, relations. And so it may be said of Einstein and Magritte that – prompted by their very modern desire of exactitude and precision – they were fated to sap the ambitions and self-confidence of the modern mind which bore and fed that desire … from under Einstein’s pen and Magritte’s brush, the world emerged softer, less resolute, equivocal and unsure of itself. Enchanting thanks to the possibilities that will never dry up, yet frightening because of so many possibilities never to be fathomed, explored, let alone fixed; encouraging because what the humans do matters, yet off-putting because what the humans do matters so much, more than the actors desire or expect. Einstein and Magritte, each in his own way, cleared the site on which the seeds of postmodern, sober and intoxicated, daring and humble selfawareness could sprout and blossom. And finally: having unmasked reality as an instantaneous condensation of fluid possibilities, and blended the observers into the world they conjure up through the work of observation, Einstein and



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Magritte joined forces in tearing apart the barbed wire and warning signs which used to mark the boundary between science and arts. It was not the method – disciplined and scrupulous in one case, carefree and fanciful in another, that used to keep science and arts apart. Look at the endless series of trials and errors, study sketches, verbal and pictorial analyses which preceded every ‘finished’ painting of Magritte, and try to show how his untiring, Benedictine, stepby-step effort to get down to the ‘heart of the matter’ differed from how one would expect the most diligent of scholars to behave. Something else separated science and the arts: the ways in which the imagery of the ‘external’ and the ‘internal’ experience were construed. As Prigogine and Stengers put it in Order out of Chaos, their eye-opening announcement of the ‘man’s new dialogue with nature’, the ‘external’ experience used to be thought of as coming from an automaton-like world, subjected to deterministic causal laws, while the ‘internal’ experience used to be viewed as the product of spontaneous and untamed forces. But now the two visions blend into one, the two allegedly qualitatively distinct worlds have merged, and the ‘transparent’ thought of that classic era has been replaced by the ‘opaque’ one. The encounter between our imagery of the world around us and of the world inside us – so Prigogine and Stengers propose – constitutes perhaps the most significant feature of the most recent development in science. But this encounter has been pre-figured in the meeting of Einstein and Magritte. And the development that followed has led to the erasure of the once sacrosanct division between science and arts. Science and arts both, and in a remarkably similar way, simultaneously reflect and sustain the changed, postmodern human experience of the world. The world of postmodern experience is a world without certainty, and above all without hope that certainty can ever be obtained. Contemporary living has been aptly described by Georges Balandier, in his recent book Le dédale, as akin to the experience Theseus would have had, were he to chase Minotaur through the labyrinth without the self-awareness offered by Ariadne’s gift. Our new image of the world, says Balandier, C’est l’image d’un espace sans repères visibles, où toute direction se révèle illusoire, où chaque issue se découvre fausse; un espace clos qui ne porte aucune information permettant d’en sortir … Il évoque un monde où le désordre semble dissoudre l’ordre, où la complexité croissante décourage tout recours à une droite logique, où les repères deviennent confus et où l’homme recherche les signes nouveaux qui pourraient éclaircir son parcours.1

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In such a world, both science and art busy themselves constructing little islands of order, logic and meaning, but islands forever buffeted on all sides by the ebb-tide of chaos, and unlikely ever to coalesce into a solid wave-breaker arresting the maelstrom of possibilities. What help, if any, may such science and arts offer Theseus, our contemporary? Of the vocation of critical thought in a world which we know we can only try to make liveable, but not transparent and safe, Michel Foucault wrote: A critique is not a matter of saying things that are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest … Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it; to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult.2

About forty years before these words of Foucault were written, Magritte noted in his autobiographical sketch, published in April 1940 by the Belgian magazine L’Invention collective: This contradictory and disorderly world of ours hangs more or less together by dint of very roundabout explanations, both complex and ingenious by turns, which appear to justify it and excuse those who thrive wretchedly on it … That pictorial experience which puts the real world on trial gives me belief in the infinity of possibilities as yet unknown to life. I know I am not alone in affirming that their conquest is the sole aim and the sole valid reason for the existence of man.

8 Assimilation into Exile: The Jew as a Polish Writer (1996)

To be in exile means to be out of place; also, needing to be rather elsewhere; also, not having that ‘elsewhere’ where one would rather be. Thus, exile is a place of compulsory confinement, but also an unreal place, a place that is itself out of place in the order of things. Anything may happen here, but nothing can be done here. In exile, uncertainty meets freedom. Creation is the issue of that wedlock. What makes the exile an unreal place is the daily effort to make it real, that is, to cleanse it of all things that are out of place. In exile, one is pressed to stop being in exile; either by moving elsewhere, or by dissolving into the place, not being anymore out of it. The latter is the pressure of assimilation. To be like anyone else. Not to be odd anymore – to renounce one’s nonidentity, that is, to renounce one’s identity in the name of a new identity, which would be nonidentity. Not all assimilation is tragic, nor is all culturally creative. As a matter of fact, the opposite seems to be the case – and ever more so, as throughout the Western world the crusading spirit of nationalism dissipates into vague historical memory and do-it-yourself, and shopsupplied and personally assembled identities replace the etiological myths of common fate, blood, soil and collective missions. The daily life of assimilation is dull and uninspiring. It is hardly a source of agony and certainly not a stimulus to iconoclasm and intellectual adventurism. With the exit of the tragedy and cruelty of politically inspired homogenization, the cultural explosiveness of the assimilatory context is all but gone. For the great majority of diasporic Jews, comfortably settled now in the middle classes of their respective countries – local, yet not

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militantly parochial – assimilation means no more than keeping up with the Joneses. Thou shalt not step out of line with thy neighbour is assimilation’s sole commandment – one easy to observe, as Cynthia Ozick caustically commented, by ‘rushing out to buy a flag to even up the street’ (1984: 159). Assimilation has dissipated in a general conformity of public appearances peacefully cohabiting with a variety of privatized contents. Overt conformity is all the easier to maintain, since diversity (particularly as long as it remains unobtrusive) has been recognized as the foremost of personal virtues, a duty and a pride. Amid the cornucopia of class, generational, occupational or just socially unattached, freely wandering lifestyles, it is difficult to set apart, as a special challenge, such forms of life as may be ethnically rooted and thus subject to other, more worrisome rules than the rest of the manifold dimensions of diversity. The memory of past uniqueness survives, if at all, in the older and fast-ageing generation’s occasional hiccups of shame and embarrassment. On the whole, it seems, attention is focused, undramatically, on the efforts of affluent Jewish residents of suburbia to ‘be like’ the rest of the affluent residents of suburbia, the efforts of Jewish youth to absorb and replicate the up-to-date lifestyle of the young, of Jewish professionals to live and dress and decorate their offices in the way right and proper for professionals of their standing, of Jewish academics to act in accordance with the latest campus fashion. The sting has been taken out of assimilation not because the Jews have performed what assimilation ostensibly pressed them to perform, but because the pressure is not there anymore – in this late modern, or postmodern, world of universal particularity; a world integrated through its diversity, a world little worried by difference and resigned to ambiguity. The agony and the splendour of assimilation was a relatively brief, and relatively localized, episode in the history of the modern world. It encompassed a few generations spanning the stormy, short period needed for modern states to entrench themselves in their historically indispensable, yet transitory, nationalist forms. It also encompassed just a few generations thrown into the cauldron of seething nationalist passions; generations already cut off from their roots but yet unabsorbed by the new compound; generations forced to stretch themselves to the utmost, to build from scratch a domicile that others around them thought of as something one normally inherits. It is of such generations that Kafka spoke as four-legged animals (truly, they would not pass muster as humans by the standards then in force), whose hind legs had already lost touch with the ground while the forelegs sought a foothold in vain. The empty, extraterritorial



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space in which these ‘men without qualities’ were suspended felt like an uncanny mixture of paradise and hell: the paradise of infinite chances, the hell of infinite inconclusiveness. For a few generations, the travellers – forced to take off, prohibited from landing – had no other abode. The agony and splendour of assimilation were confined to that brief flight through the world of nonidentity. Enticed, blandished or coerced to take to the air, the flyers – whether keen or reluctant – made easy prey for gamekeepers and poachers alike. But they also enjoyed the brief privilege of that vast and sharp vision called, with a touch of awe and jealousy, the ‘bird’s-eye view’. THE AFTERLIFE OF ASSIMILATION Two events, both closely related to the outbreak, fifty years ago, of World War II, are universally admitted to weigh heavily on contemporary Jewish identity. The Holocaust has never moved far from the centre of contemporary Jewish consciousness. It is as if the collective memory of the wounded nation followed Elie Wiesel’s injunction: ‘Anyone who does not actively engage in remembering is an accomplice of the enemy’ (1977: 16). There is wide (if incomplete) agreement that the Holocaust could not but leave its imprint on the meaning of Judaism. For some contemporary theologians, like Richard Rubenstein (1966), the Holocaust marked the failure of God, of the Jewish exilic tradition, of the centuries-long customary strategies of Jewish survival, and thus opened up an altogether new era in which Jews must learn to exist in the absence of God and without the habitual and trusted grounds of secure identity. For others, like Emil Fackenheim, the Holocaust has proved once and for all that the flight from Jewish destiny is impossible. To embrace that destiny has also become a Jewish moral duty. The Jews ‘are forbidden to despair of the God of Israel, lest Judaism perish … They are commanded to survive as Jews, lest the Jewish people perish’ (1970: 84). However strong their dissent on this and other points, most writers agree that the Holocaust was a watershed not only in Jewish history. If anything, it brought the Jews closer still to the ethical centre of the world at large, as living witnesses to the dark underside of modern civilization. Because of the Holocaust, Jews are people with a new mission: they are the carriers of the truth that humanity would otherwise be liable to forget at its moral and physical peril. Whether praised or censured, revered or berated, the State of Israel and all its works provide the reference point for present-day

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Jewish identity. Zionism ‘has become the underlying ideology of the diaspora Jews – an ironic success, since classical Zionism argues for shlilath agolah’. For most Jews, ‘a sovereign Jewish state is a necessity for the Jewish people as a whole’ – even if not for them personally (Biale 1986: 190, 188). The State of Israel is now that fate to which Jewish identity has given itself (or was given away) as a hostage. Like all fate, it cares little about the feelings of its hostages. The best and most ethically sensitive among the latter, like Gershom Scholem, have been acutely aware of the severe test to which the creation of the state had put Jewish history. Having asked ‘whether or not Jewish history will be able to endure this entry into a concrete realm’, they soon found that the state’s ‘presumptive demand that its mundane interests should be identified with moral precepts’ was ‘manifestly impossible’ (Scholem 1971: 36; 1982 [1976]: 297). And yet like all fates, the State of Israel is unlikely to loosen its grip over the hostages. The hostages would not permit it to be broken, nor would they be allowed to break it if they tried. By comparison with these two events, the consequences of the third – the disappearance of Central European Jewry – are somehow off-centre. More often than not confined to commemorative rituals, memory of Central European Jewish history is seldom contemplated in terms of its cultural significance. And yet it is difficult to overestimate the profundity of change in the meaning of Jewishness, and in the role of Jews in contemporary culture, brought about by the tragic death and dissipation of Central European Jews. It is still to become fully evident and fully fathomed. It is perhaps too early yet for a complete assessment. The best one can do at the moment is to sketch some of the most salient areas in which the disappearance of Central European Jewry changed the context of Jewish existence and the Jewish political and cultural role. Elsewhere (Bauman 1991), I have discussed the role played by, or assigned to, Central European Jewry (under the stereotypical name of the Ostjude) in the assimilatory processes in Western Europe. ‘Though both groups called themselves Jews, they none the less encountered each other within a framework of cultural stereotypes and ideological preconceptions’, wrote Ritchie Robertson, summing up a century of uneasy coexistence (1988: 87). Even such an encounter was, however, limited. During the era of assimilation, Western European Jews – whether calling themselves ‘German’, ‘French’ or ‘English – were preoccupied more with acceptance by their own respective national hosts than with other branches of the diaspora. Loyalties and cultural orientations followed the general European tendency of the nationalist age in enclosing themselves within the boundaries of nation-states. And yet the encounter with Eastern Jews could not



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be avoided altogether, however much their assimilated cousins in the West found it inconvenient and embarrassing. Successive waves of anti-Jewish persecution by the late-arriving and thus particularly virulent East European nationalisms, combined with deepening poverty in the undeveloped region of a rapidly modernizing Europe, lay behind a steady stream of Jewish immigration to more secure and prosperous parts of Europe. In Jack Wertheimer’s apt assessment, ‘The newcomers threatened to revive an image of the Jew that natives had worked so hard to obliterate’ (1987: 160). The reaction of the affluent elites of the West to this threat was swift and often verging on hysterical. In France, for instance, the various strands of the Jewish establishment joined ranks with native anti-immigrationists in an effort to stem the influx (according to an official statement published by the Alliance Israélite Universelle) of ‘these contemptible people’ who, like Bedouins, moved their tents about with complete indifference; while the Paris Comité de Bienfaisance spared no effort to repatriate the orientals back to where they belonged, or pass them over to less inhospitable places, but at any rate out of France (Marrus 1971: 160–70). In England, in March 1871, the Jewish Chronicle noted with satisfaction ‘a very material increase’ in the number of poor Jewish immigrants ‘who have left this country to seek subsistence elsewhere’ (Fishman 1975: 64–5). One of the first steps taken by the newly formed Jewish Board of Guardians was to allocate f50 (a huge sum at the time, and a deep hole in the Board’s meagre budget) to post notices all around the Russian pale discouraging immigration to England. As Eugene C. Black commented in his recent study, ‘After half a century of almost unbroken, if slow, success, Jewish leaders perceived their work endangered’ by these distant cousins of ‘bizarre appearance and bad habits’ (1988: 285). In November 1904, British Jewish leaders convened a European conference dedicated to moving the Jews escaping Russian persecution away from Western Europe. To the great relief of the gathering, a shipping company had been found which not only offered cheap fares and kosher food, but promised to sail directly to America without touching England on the way (ibid.: 292). To Western Jews, it seemed that the final success of their own assimilation, just around the corner, was systematically thwarted if not prevented altogether by the influx of backward and uncivilized Jewish masses virtually untouched by the ‘process of enlightenment’ and still sunk in the ‘superstitions’ whose memory the ‘more advanced’ sections of Jewry tried hard to wash out. Indeed, as David Feldman has recently rediscovered, ‘some of the greatest efforts of Anglo-Jewish institutions were spent in preventing migrants from

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settling in Britain’ (1989: 209). What was true of Britain was equally applicable to France or Germany (though in the last case all efforts were bound to remain inconclusive because of the Drang nach Osten tendency of the expansionist German state). When finally breaking through the barricades erected by state powers with the eager help of their loyal Jewish subjects, the immigrants were subjected to a zealous ‘civilizing’ drill. In practice, that meant a concentrated effort to instruct the newcomers in the ways of their new countries and in how to shed both the spiritual traditions and the visible behavioural symptoms of their past identities – to make them, in other words, English, French or German, just like the elites of the established Jewish communities. It is in the context of that effort that the stereotype of the Ostjude, that virtual inner demon of Jewish assimilation, was born and derived its vitality. The stereotype served as a genuine storehouse for all those ‘shameful and disgracing’ aspects of Jewish identity, all those bestforgotten attributes of the recent past, which the native nationalist elites had stamped as alien and alienating. The assimilation-induced shame of one’s own unreformed identity was displaced as the embarrassment felt at the sight of the close kin’s otherness. Ever-renewed embarrassment did not allow the shame to die out, but it deflected the most painful assimilatory pressures and indefinitely postponed the moment of truth. Despite the facts of the matter, one could go on believing that assimilatory diligence would have been rewarded in full if not for the influx of the ‘aliens’ who put off the moment of completion. One could, in other words, go on trusting the sincerity of assimilatory promise and believing in its ultimate success. The civilizing mission aimed at the East and Central European immigrants, and the phantom of the Ostjude that haunted Western Jewry’s still insecure sense of achievement, were the twin sources of the continuous vigour of assimilatory efforts. The very existence of Central European Jewry added to the inherent inconclusiveness of assimilation, keeping assimilation on the agenda and stimulating the never-ending search for the ‘right strategy’. It had decisively contributed to the emergence of ‘assimilation by other means’ – among which socialism and Zionism enjoyed pride of place. For many an educated and assimilated Jew barred from prestigious positions and rejected by the native elites, joining the socialist movement was the shortest and most realistic way to the status of ‘man as such’; what the ultimate revolutionary goal of socialism promised in the distant future, the spirit and daily practice of the ostensibly non-nationalist and nondenominational movement delivered right away. As for Zionism, it was the improbability of an



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early fulfilment of the assimilatory project, in view of the sheer size of backward East European Jewry, which inspired the idea of a ‘Jewish national home’ where the unassimilated sections of European Jewry could be shuffled away. According to David Biale, for Theodor Herzl the ‘problem’ was the population of poor, mostly East European Jews; in Herzl’s pre-Zionist phase, it was the poor who were expected to emigrate (Biale 1986: 132). With the poor and uneducated Jews out of reach and out of sight, the established West European Jewry (so it was hoped) would be able to enjoy the fruits of its assimilation, while at the same time performing its own civilizing mission among the residents of the distant ‘Jewish national home’. It seems that with the disappearance of a massive, ‘substandard’ East European Jewry, many sources of the past assimilatory zeal, as well as of the urgency with which ‘alternative ways of assimilation’ were sought, have now dried up. There is no reminder of the ‘shameful past’ around, no cause for embarrassment. The fullness of assimilation is not subjected to a permanent and never-conclusive test. There is no reason now to look desperately for solutions to a problem that local, established and orderly national societies cannot accommodate. Weaker than before is the stimulus for the Jewish intelligentsia to seek a revolutionary transformation of society, or to escape from the inhospitable ‘great society’ into the alternatives offered by movements of dissent. And whatever the habitual rhetoric, the Jewish state must claim the attention and interest of diaspora Jewry on other grounds than that of a substitute solution to otherwise insoluble domestic problems. All in all, much of the inner fire of the assimilatory dream and practice has been, for the time being at least, extinguished. Another profound effect of the extinction of East and Central European Jewry is a drastic change in the social structure of diaspora. The East European ghettos were the main – and seemingly inexhaustible – suppliers of the Jewish working class and the Jewish poor in general. Whatever the official versions, the influx of East European paupers confronted affluent West European communities with a class as much as a cultural problem. The established elites had to gain class domination as much as cultural hegemony over the immigrants. And the immigrants were resisted both as conveyors of alien, incomprehensible habits and customs and as class adversaries and exploiters. If, in the view of the elites, class conflict seemed to dissolve in the struggle for cultural domination, from the vantage point of the immigrant poor, cultural resistance was a weapon in the continuing and all-absorbing class resistance. For all practical purposes, the defence of indigenous Jewish tradition and the pursuit

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of class interests looked like two sides of the same coin. Hence the phenomenon of Jewish socialism, not to be confused with the sociologically distinct phenomenon of participation by Jews (mostly Jewish intelligentsia) in the socialist movements of the host nations. In the historical episode of Jewish socialism, loyalty to traditional Jewish culture was a breeding and battleground of class struggle, and class resistance against Jewish capitalists involved a defence of Jewish language, beliefs and customs. There was, we may say, a continuity between the growing rebellion of the poor against the rising class division and exploitation inside the Jewish community of arrival, and the interest of the Jewish poor in socialism, which offered a class-oriented interpretation of their misery, complete with a clear prescription for its relief. In a sense, the socialism of the Jewish poor was a struggle to redefine (not to abandon) the Jewish tradition in terms better attuned to the position of the Jewish masses amid an increasingly capitalist environment. This is how Aaron Lieberman, the first Jewish socialist, who began his lifelong romance with socialism in Lithuania and later brought the good tidings to the Jewish poor of London and New York, defined his credo in 1875: Socialism is not alien to us. The Community is our existence; the revolution our tradition, the commune – the basis of our legislation as quite clearly indicated by the ordinances forbidding the sale of land, by those on the Jubilee and sabbatical years, on equal rights, fraternity, etc. Our ancient Jewish social structure – anarchy; the real link between us across the surface of the globe internationalism. In the spirit of our people, the great prophets of our time, such as Marx and Lassalle, were educated and developed. (Quoted in Frankel 1981: 33)

Similarly, Abraham Rosenberg, the president of the ILGWU, could not find a better way to express his feeling at the sight of the great walkout of the New York cloak makers in 1910 than to recall the scene which ‘must have taken place when the Jews were led out of Egypt’ (quoted in Sorin 1985: 82). Gerald Sorin has recently estimated that over half of American Jewish socialists ‘were consistently, unambiguously, and often assertively identifying as Jews. An additional 16% were imbued with a “dual orientation” – with some degree of Jewish consciousness peacefully coexisting with the belief that Jews will gradually acculturate’ (ibid.: 119). Even when the logic of the socialist project to which they dedicated their lives led them to renounce all particularism and parochialism, including their national varieties, and assert instead the universality



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of human values and the homogeneity of the human species, they tended to construct their new ‘general human’ identities by using thoroughly Jewish symbols, such as displaying the nonobservance of divisive rules as prescribed by Jewish religious authorities. Even in this negative way, their socialism was given shape and expression by the community in which they grew up and with which – if only by opposition – they identified. Thus, paradoxically, Jewish socialism constituted another challenge to the dominant – bourgeois and educated – version of Jewish assimilation; it either rejected assimilation altogether, or promoted an alternative understanding of assimilatory strategy and purpose that was hardly acceptable to the Jewish elite. By the very fact of its opposition, Jewish socialism obliquely kept the assimilation drama on stage. It was another badge of Jewish distinctiveness. It drew even further away the fulfilment of the assimilatory dream and therefore, inadvertently, even further stimulated the assimilatory effort. With the traditional tributaries of Jewish socialism all but dried up, another powerful stimulus of the assimilatory drama ground to a halt. The third and perhaps decisive blow to assimilatory zeal has been delivered by the dissipation of that unique social/political/ cultural Central European setting which originally gave Jewish assimilation its romantic appeal and bore responsibility for its tragic course. East-Central Europe was a cauldron of conflicting nationalist pressures and demands. Facing the tasks typical of the ‘primitive accumulation of legitimacy’, and unsure of their grounding and chance of survival, the old and new nationalisms of the area were particularly vicious and ruthless – all the more so because hardly any of their claims went uncontested. As the mutually contradictory national ambitions could not be placated simultaneously, and surrender to one of the many nationalist calls meant necessarily antagonizing all the others, groups located at the receiving end of conflicting claims (all conflicting claims at once), that is, the groups without prospective homelands of their own, found themselves in an unenviable position: they were doomed no matter what they did. If they tried, obligingly, to uproot themselves, they ended up in the void, as no other soil was willing to accept them. If they stayed rooted in their own tradition, they were classified as weeds overdue for extermination. Since no progress in acculturation was assessed as satisfactory, each generation felt as if it were starting its work from scratch, as if the road covered by its predecessors did not count and no lasting rights were ever to be earned. Above all, since even a tiny step towards an approchement with one of the competing national

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cultures meant antagonizing the rest, assimilation threatened to earn the Jews more enemies than friends. This situation generated a great deal of human misery, yet simultaneously made the assimilatory episode into a period of unprecedented cultural creativity and spiritual discovery. East-Central European Jewry, which bore the brunt of that misery and offered most of that creativity, is no more (though this statement can at any moment be belied; one cannot forget the continuing copresence of great numbers of Jews, and of unsated, yet mutually incompatible nationalisms, frozen in their ‘prehistoric’ stage on the vast expanses of the European part of the former Soviet Union). With the departure of East-Central European Jewry, Jewish assimilation lost much of its animus and drama. In the West, where today most of the Jews live, the era of militant nationalisms, of modern states cultivating and deploying nationalist sentiments as instruments of sociopolitical control and integration, or cultural crusades and state-managed homogenizing pressures, is in all probability over. We are witnessing a double erosion of the powers and ambitions of the national state. There is, first, a pronounced tendency towards the transfer of state sovereignty to poorly coordinated supranational or international agencies, which by no stretch of the imagination can claim national sources of legitimation, and which do not need national loyalty as a guarantor of effective action. There is, second, a tendency to limit and undermine the power of the national state from below, through a growing scope of regional self-management, of ethnic and religious self-determination, and of cultural autonomy. What we are witnessing, in other words, is the progressive separation between nationhood and societal powers: a sort of denationalization of the state. Nationhood is fast shedding much of its past political significance, and is shifting from the area of political rule and control to a predominantly cultural function. As the assimilatory pressures recede, so peters out the urge to assimilate. There are few rewards for the dissolution of communal identity, and too high a price to pay for the loss of an important and generally valued resource of self-construction. Homogeneity and cultural facelessness, as it were, are today decidedly out of fashion. Once particularity (and preferably, uniqueness) has become the only universally praised universal attribute of humans, all serious concern with assimilation acquires a curiously archaic flavour. It seems that, in the postmodern atmosphere of the West, the only place where assimilation can live is in historical memory. As Milton Himmelfarb has observed, Jewish distinctiveness, once disdained as ‘parochial’, may now ‘go from pejorative to honorific. If that happens, it will be



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helped along by the spectacle of Jews who understood all the particularisms – black, Chicano, Welsh, Basque, Breton, Palestinian – except the Jewish’ (1973: 62). The perpetual wanderers can now settle down – in a universal otherhood. THE HAUNTED LANDS Where once the Central European Jews lived, Jewish gravestones slowly disintegrate for lack of grieving descendants to tend them. The corpses beneath the gravestones have not truly been put to rest, however, in the haunted memories of the then-witnesses, now survivors. From time to time, in a desperate yet vain attempt to exorcise the ghosts of murdered neighbours, great hearts repent for the sins of the silent and indifferent ones. Polish poet Jerzy Ficowski confesses that repentance will never be final in the haunted land: I’d wish to be silent But keeping silence, I lie I’d wish to walk But while walking, I trample

Czesław Miłosz bemoans the guilt that, even if not earned, cannot be washed out: What will I tell him, I, a Jew of the New Testament, Waiting two thousand years for the second coming of Jesus? My broken body will deliver me to his sight, And will count me among the helpers of death: The Uncircumcised. (Miłosz 1988: 65)

The crimes could be individual and private, but the guilt is collective and shared. The survivors are guilty, and their guilt is their survival. This is not a guilt that will be recognized in any human court of justice. But then moral conscience cannot be exonerated by human courts. In the words of another Pole, Władysław Bartoszewski, only those who lost their lives can say that they have done everything they could. No evidence of innocence will ever argue a guilty conscience away. The Polish-Jewish scholar Emanuel Ringelblum, writing in hiding shortly before his deportation to a death camp in April 1943, left

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a balanced picture of Polish reactions to the rounding up and mass murder of their Jewish neighbours: The attitudes of the Poles to Jews were not uniform … . Polish fascism, embodied in an excrescent, bestial anti-Semitism, created conditions unfavourable to saving the Jews massively murdered by German, Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Latvian SS men … . Taking into account special conditions in Poland, we must admit that the acts of Polish intelligentsia, workers or peasants who do hide the Jews are exceptionally noble, loyal to the spirit of tolerance which permeated Polish history. (1988: 176–7)1

Each Jew who survived can recite a long list of Poles who helped him, often putting their own lives at risk. And each Jew who survived will never forget those countless unknown enemies whose hatred or greed made an act of heroism out of the helpers’ human impulse. Those who died will never, of course, give us the count of weeping, joyful or cold eyes that watched their last journey. On the other hand, all such counting, even if possible, would not help much. The stubborn fact cannot be wished away: a great nation, which for eight hundred years shared the glory and the misery of Polish history, was rounded up and murdered, and its death was not prevented. This means guilt. One may try to argue the guilt away; rational arguments can be advanced that the potential rescuers stood little chance of success, and stood a huge chance of adding their own lives to the millions that perished. But rational arguments cannot absolve a moral guilt. ‘It is too late; this linen will never be washed clean’, wrote Polish writer Andrzej Kuśniewicz. And because it will never be washed clean, it is unlikely ever to be pulled out from the remote corner of the family wardrobe and aired in public. The suppressed memory of mass murder poisons the consciousness of the nation that witnessed it; the fact that this nation of silent witnesses did not contribute actively to its perpetration does not make the matter much easier. And because the subconscious knows that the guilt is there and will hardly ever go away, the consciousness rebels and vehemently seeks excuses. If only the victim could be blamed ... This seems to be the secret of the most spectacular of Holocaust survivals: anti-Semitism. It now lives, so to speak, without its traditional environment: it is truly out of its element. It has no new nourishment, no living experience to forage and fatten on. It is not alive, as a matter of fact. The hatred that outlived its objects is more like a rock. A solid rock, immovable and resistant to the sharpest of cutters. And suppressed guilt is its foundation. Gravestones remain



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of the Polish Jews; stony, fossilized anti-Semitism remains after eight hundred years of joint Polish–Jewish history. How this joint history is retrospectively read depends on what one wants to find in it. From the perspective of the fossilized hatred, most visible in that history is a long record of Jewish treachery. In filmed interviews with witnesses of the Kielce pogrom, two persons remember the hostel run by the Jewish Committee in which the homeless remnants of the once lively Jewish community were housed. According to one, ‘These people were sad and frightened, somehow out of place, not intending to stay; they did not fit the landscape at all.’ The other saw more: ‘They were well off, well fed, well provided for. They got food parcels and money from America.’ The interviewees were asked to speak of the militiamen and the thousands of ordinary residents of the town who pursued dozens of Jews through the streets and beat them to death; instead, some spoke of the injustices they believed the Jews were guilty of committing: ‘They, the Jews, boasted: the streets belong to you, but the houses are ours … No wonder people did not like them.’ The memory of the millions of men, women and children herded to their deaths under German occupation was not the only guilt that needed to be suppressed. Isaac Deutscher has pointed out more sinister reasons for renewed postwar anti-Semitism: The grave of the Jewish middle class became the cradle of a new gentile middle class in eastern Europe … a lumpenproletariat turned overnight into a lumpenbourgoisie. The death certificates of the murdered Jews were their only valid trade licenses … . The only way in which the new ‘middle class’ can save not so much its newly acquired wealth but its nerves and a pretense of respectability is by smoking out the surviving Jews. (Deutscher 1968: 88–9)

Empty houses, shops and workshops did not stay empty for long. When the few survivors among their past owners emerged from hiding or boarded westward trains from their Russian exile or refuge, they were met with eyes filled with fear and fear-fed hatred, lest they should claim their property and in doing so remind the new owners of moments they would prefer to forget. Twisting history to blame the victim was not a particularly difficult task. Long Polish–Jewish cohabitation was pliable stuff, fit to be moulded to suit many interpretations and to supply telling, cogent, convincing arguments for almost any thesis. The theses themselves changed over time. One that gradually became dominant among Poles in the twentieth century was that the Jews were an alien,

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hostile and poisonous body in the emerging Polish national organism, threatening the health and the very existence of a precarious Polish national identity. This sentiment, however, could hardly appear before ‘Polish national identity’ acquired its modern shape, that is, took on a purpose calling for conscious political administration of social development, cultural crusades and the forceful transformation of chaotic leftovers of past history into a designed order. As Alina Cała, a most perceptive student of Polish–Jewish shared history, points out: The idea of a single nation state, and the programmes associated with it of assimilating national and ethnic minorities, was foreign to premodern Polish thought. If a nineteenth-century peasant were ever asked if Jews should assimilate or emigrate, he would have been surprised and unable to respond. For him they were part of the unchangeable landscape as God had first created it. A demand to change the existing order would have seemed revolutionary to him; that is, contrary to God’s will, a prelude of apocalypse. The Jews with their sidecurls and kaftans were part of life as created by God, testimony to the Passion of Christ, something threatening and strange, but necessary and unalterable. (1986: 148)

It was modern Polish nationalism, with its programme of cultural homogeneity and its struggle for a Polish state which was to become a state of the Poles, that delivered a decisive blow to the habitual and natural, God-ordained order of things and set the world in turmoil. The ambiguity of the new situation and the sudden disappearance of divine sanction was deeply upsetting and frustrating. The frustrations caused by participation in these stormy changes were channelled in the direction of totalitarian utopias. One of them was anti-Semitism … . It is one of the paradoxes of history that antiSemitism strengthened the role of the Jew (or rather his myth) as a determinant of Polish national consciousness. Whole social groups discovered their national allegiance as an offshoot of the feeling of separateness from the Jews. (ibid.: 149)

National identity offered an escape and a shelter against that threatening ambivalence of which the Jews had now become the prime example. Note that Russians or Germans, by far the more threatening enemy by any standard, came second to the Jews as a negative support of the budding Polish national identity. They were enemies all right – but too unambiguously hostile for the purpose. Only the Jews were truly fit to exemplify in a clearly visible form ‘the other’



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of the national identity, that chaos against which national unity promised to defend. In no way were the Jews ambivalent before modernization took off. Jewish ambivalence, destined to serve as a focal point of nation-forming processes, was itself a product of these processes. A crucial part of the Kulturkampf of the rising nation was the achievement of Polish cultural hegemony over the territory of the future nation-state, and thus the cultural conversion of ethnic minorities: this, first and foremost, meant the assimilation of Jews. Yet the assimilatory programme was (and had to be) as ambiguous as the cultural map it aimed to homogenize; in its operation more ambivalence was generated than eliminated. Jews who stuck to their traditional ways were singled out as proof of the essential estrangement of Jews from the Poles and their national ambitions. The real ogres were, however, the Jews attracted by the indubitable splendours of Polish culture, those responding with goodwill and enthusiasm to the invitation to join. It was they who become Kafka’s odradeks – mongrel creatures of unclassifiable identity, neither strangers nor ‘our own’, eluding all straightforward assignment and by the same token discrediting in advance the order yet to be installed. The more successful their Polonization was, the more threatening was the resulting ambivalence. They dressed like Poles, behaved like Poles, spoke like Poles, lived like Poles; for all one knew, they could easily be mistaken for Poles. Hence their ambivalence was of the worst possible kind because it could escape discovery. Such ambivalence calls for constant vigilance. Vigilance against Jewish duplicity and slyness became the major weapon of the border defence of the Polish nation. Though the pool of assimilating Jews keen to embrace Polish culture never dried up, it had become clear well before the Polish nation-state was created that, for the ever more conspicuously resented Jewish masses, assimilation was not a realistic prospect. Already towards the end of the nineteenth century, alternative ways out of the ghetto began to be sought, debated and tried. The distinctly modern forms of Jewish national identity grew out of the most popular of these alternatives: Jewish nationalism in the shape of several varieties of Zionism, and Jewish socialism in the shape of the Bund (with its programme of guarding and developing Jewish cultural uniqueness in the context of a humane, socialist Polish state, tolerant of human differentiation). This political map survived through the 21-year period (1918–39) of Polish independence. During that period, relations between the Polish state and its large Jewish minority were tense and fraught with mutual acrimony. Jewish political elites attracted the suspicions of Polish nationalists

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by siding with other national minorities of the multiethnic state in their shared resistance to the monopolistic aspirations of the ethnically Polish political elite. (Jewish political leaders, in fact, initiated a sort of ‘united front’ with the Ukrainians, Belorussians and other non-Poles, hoping to force the government to observe the rights of minorities.) On the other hand, the rising Polish nationalism and anti-Semitic sentiments, aided and abetted by the authoritative explanations of the persisting economic depression, made it increasingly clear to the Jews that they were unwanted; their right of residence in the land where their ancestors had lived for centuries was now questioned. In the last years of Polish independence, Poles constantly discussed but never introduced anti-Jewish legislation of the Nuremberg type, and the Polish foreign minister urged European governments to ‘solve the Jewish problem’ by providing outlets and resources for a massive Jewish emigration from Poland. The Jew most feted by the Polish government was Zhabotinsky, the leader of the revisionist branch of Zionism, who promised cooperation in organizing the exodus of the Polish Jews. No wonder that, by the time the war broke out, many a Pole was sufficiently primed to think, or at least not to object to his neighbour saying, that ‘after the war we would have to erect Hitler a monument’. Jan Tomasz Gross (1986) has suggested that if the Germans punished all assistance to the Jews in Poland much more severely than in any other occupied country, and if their threat proved effective in preventing massive resistance to the Holocaust, a large part of the explanation resides in the resentment that a majority of Poles felt towards the Jews and the resulting isolation of that resented population. The ‘righteous among the Poles’ often felt as isolated and abandoned by their own society as the hunted Jews they saved. The Germans were not the only invaders of Polish soil. The eastern lands of Poland, where most of the national minorities lived, were occupied in 1939 by Soviet forces. To the Poles, there was little difference between the two enemies. For the Jews, the difference was one between life and death. Horrified, the Poles watched the enthusiasm with which most Jews greeted the Red Army. In his wellbalanced account of Polish–Jewish antagonisms, Aleksander Smolar writes: Very many Jews greeted the Red Army with enthusiasm, because they did not treat Poland as their Fatherland; they were pushed out of it, as the way to get rid of the Jews became the main topic of public debate … . The Jews, communists and non-communists, educated and



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half-educated, as trustworthy people, entered the local administration and helped to organize Soviet power. Worse still, they assisted Soviet authorities in their chase of Polish army officers and members of the prewar Polish administration. (1986: 97)

This treachery was neither forgotten nor forgiven by the Poles. As if a textbook example of the self-fulfilling prophecy, the Jews behaved exactly as the Polish anti-Semites kept saying they would, and by saying it the anti-Semites prompted them to do so. After the war, the same situation repeated itself. Smolar notes: [The Jews], grateful to the USSR for saving their lives, socially isolated, culturally uprooted, aware of the resentment or hostility of their environment but dreaming of equality, fraternity, and of giving a good lesson to the ‘forces of reaction’, made an excellent material for the new power. Not to mention the committed communists of the old guard, among whom the percentage of Jews was very high. (ibid.: 119)

Transformed by assimilatory pressures into the frightening and hateful symbol of ambivalence and threat to national existence, the Jews (and particularly the assimilating Jews, Jews eager to embrace Polish culture and Polish nationhood) were forcefully excluded from membership in the Polish national community and faced with choices that could only deepen their estrangement and erect new obstacles to mutual understanding. Acceptance predicated on assimilation proved contradictory. On both sides, the drama left a pungent aftertaste which made the ‘washing of dirty linen’ all the more difficult. Suppressed and never faced in all their unpleasant truth, the memories fester and poison. There is more than enough food for the unhealed Jewish aggravation against this erstwhile homeland, and for the bizarre phenomenon of Polish anti-Semitism in the absence of Jews. LANGUAGE AS SHELTER Of Julian Tuwim, one of the most influential and innovative Polish poets of the twentieth century, another Polish Jew and formidable literary theorist and critic, Artur Sandauer, wrote: ‘Essentially, assimilation did not succeed; what succeeded was the poetry, born of that failed assimilation and of unhappy love for Poland.... As the other Poland refused to accept him, Polish language remained his true homeland’ (1985a: 467–8).2 The true homeland and the only homeland (as all true homelands are). Also, in no small measure, an unshared homeland, its landscape little known and still less

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understood by those who happened to be born into the ‘other Poland’, closed to Tuwim, or by those who, put off by the locks, never knocked on the door and thus did not need to seek substitute shelters. In an unshared land, Tuwim’s creative force could be let loose. The result was great poetry and a landscape which, though familiar, made many ill at ease. The landscape of Tuwim’s homeland had been carved by assimilation: ‘Their look shapes us from inside, grafts itself upon us as a mistletoe, so that we can only see ourselves through their eyes.’ Together with the culture of the society he enters, an assimilating Jew also absorbs its myths, ‘including such myths as are hostile to him’. So did Tuwim; in his poetic homeland, the war was waged against priggishness, yet the knight-errant was ‘seen through the prigs’ eyes’. (ibid.: 103, 107)

Original and unique as a poet and a stylist, Tuwim was nevertheless a specimen of a type. He was an artist called upon to join a nation fighting for its place in a world filled with nations, and to help develop a culture which could make such a place secure and honourable. He was also a Jew whose place in the nation was put in doubt at the moment when the place of the nation had been made secure by statehood. In the age when modern nations were born, the Poles were not only deprived of the political instruments of national self-constitution but were divided between the realms of three foreign dynasties. However hard the core, the peripheries of such a nation must have been diluted and the boundaries unclear. Polish nationalists had to fight off not only the political pretences of hostile and powerful states but also the cultural claims of rival, strong or weak, militant and ambitious nationalisms. Without a state of its own, Polish nationalism could rely only on the power of cultural proselytism. It needed as many allies as it could muster among the creators and distributors of culture. No one asked too many questions about the birth certificates of the writers and artists who treated the magnificence of Polish culture as their sacred cause. The cultural door of the nation-in-search-of-statehood remained ajar and the newcomers were welcome. (The door would be slammed later, but not before real border guards manned real political entries and exits.) The nation needed cultural strength to compensate for its political weakness. Whatever the cause, the invitation seemed – and was – unconditional. It did attract an uncounted number of Jews seeking escape from the ghetto. Polishness meant to them, as to all others within the orbit of Polish cultural influence, the chance to share in a highly attractive



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culture – but it also meant the liberation from a caste-like (or, rather, outcast) condition. Since, however, membership in Polish culture in the case of refugees from the ghetto was acquired and hence precarious, the Polishness of the Jews was easily distinguished by the exaltation: ‘An exaggerated care for the excellence of language, pedantic observance of all customs considered distinctly Polish, a cult of Polish literature and art, often a truly fanatical nationalism and chauvinism’. This exaggeration followed (almost logically) from a situation in which the examiners’ attentions never relaxed, testing never ceased, and there was no way of guessing whether one’s performance, however spectacular, would be accepted as satisfactory (Hertz 1988: 164–6).3 However understandable, Jewish zeal was nevertheless destined to be sooner or later interpreted as a sign of inborn tactlessness, arrogance and pushiness. Thus, paradoxically, the Polish excellence of the Jews carried the seeds of Polish allo-Semitism: though split into anti- and philoSemite camps, the Poles in their majority agreed on the otherness of Jews. Whether because of their exceptional slyness or exceptional gifts, the Jews were not quite like the Poles and neither could nor should be treated as Poles.4 The less that remained of the once highly visible peculiarity of the Jews, which locked them in their caste-like existence without any need of ideological or scientific formula, the more the repellency had to be theorized and made into the topic of public discourse and political initiative. In the independent Polish state that came into existence after World War I, Polish nationalism lost (or, rather, discarded and disowned) its proselytizing zeal. The project of cultural conversion of non-Polish ethnic groups inhabiting the territory of the Polish state went on unabated, now assisted by administrative manipulation and political coercion – but only in relation to the larger national groupings whose main habitat remained outside the borders of the new Polish state; groupings, in other words, that could raise their own reunification claims against Polish territorial possessions. Since the Jews could not possibly come forward with such a demand, their declarations of Polishness offered little political profit. For the Polish nationalists, and particularly for the rising Polish national intelligentsia, the three million Jews residing inside the Polish state constituted a tangible threat to Polish domination of cultural life: it was in the area of culture, through which the Jews were once called to enter the Polish nation, that a sizeable part of the Jewish minority most spectacularly excelled. The emergent modern culture of Poland was full of converted and unconverted Jews. Coming from urban centres and boasting the best education Poland could offer, they easily

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assumed the role of cultural umpires to whom the native poets and writers, more often than not of rural if not of peasant extraction, looked for guidance and accolades. Expectedly, the growth of their importance in Polish cultural life went hand in hand with the increase in the intensity and spread of Polish anti-Semitism. Hence the ‘unique phenomenon: the most beloved writers became, as persons, the most hated’ (Sandauer 1985a: 460). This incongruity profoundly affected both the Jews and their hosts. Because much of Polish culture was now the product of persons ‘tainted’ with an alien, resented origin, culture and intellectualism as such became suspect; the nation did not trust its own artistic and literary culture, and such suspicion offered fertile soil for all sorts of anti-intellectual, obscurantist and retrograde movements for which interwar Poland became notorious. For the Polish cultural creators of Jewish origin, on the other hand, this duality turned out to be something of an asset, on top of the usual artistic and philosophical stimuli inherent in the contradictions of the assimilatory process. To quote Sandauer again, ‘to assimilate’ means to ‘stay, defenseless, under the gaze of the others’ and to accept without murmur the judgemental canons and the aesthetic criteria of others. In so doing, the ‘assimilating individual’ must also ‘consent to his own ugliness’ (ibid.: 468).5 Jewishness was declared ugly, and so were all the so-called Jewish traits. One could do something (at least in theory) to escape the ugliness of Jewish religion by conversion, or of Jewish habits or manners of speaking by self-drill. There was nothing one could do about one’s looks – and this heinous gift of the genes tended to emerge unscathed from no matter how many bucketsful of baptismal water. The Polish poet Antoni Slonimski, born to an already Christian father, inherited from his ancestors a distinctly Jewish face together with their passionate adoration of Polish culture; the second did not help him against the first. Like the others – the unconverted, those who openly flaunted their Jewish roots and those who tried to hide or deny them – Slonimski was disqualified because he was a Jew. The more racist Polish anti-Semitism became, the more unambiguously it operated. All this left little ground for self-deceit. Anti-Semitism, and particularly the staunch refusal of cultural membership on noncultural grounds, became in effect a powerful antidote to the parochialism that always lurks at the end of the nationalist itinerary. As cultural creators, Jews of all shades of assimilation stood out for their power to see through and beyond parochial constraints. This quality antagonized the nationalists but it also made the cultural creators among



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Polish Jews the carriers of modern experience and the articulators of modern culture. Treated as aliens by the Polish public, Polish-Jewish writers found their retreat and shelter in the Polish language. Here, they felt at home. As the home stood in the midst of a social desert, they lavished on it all their otherwise unspent emotions. The language benefitted, though its benefactors did not. Most of the latter perished as Jews, and were only posthumously upgraded to the rank of Poles – in recognition of their martyrdom rather than of their creative lives. The few who survived easily recognized in postwar Poland the all-too-familiar atmosphere of surveillance and vigilant censorship. Now, to be sure, they were not charged with the crime of Jewishness. The accusation was rephrased and reworded to suit the changing circumstances. Sometimes they were resented simply as the carriers of an unspecified ‘alien spirit’. At other times as ‘cosmopolitans’. Or ‘Zionists’. Or ‘Communists’. Or ‘Russian helpers’ (when it came to the account-settling with the Stalinist episode, the Jewish collaborators, as always, bore the brunt of responsibility shared with countless others, and were expected to engage in much louder breast-beating than anyone else; with much less effect, however, than anyone else). After the last survivors of the Holocaust ran away from the survivals of anti-Semitism, no Jewish community, Jewish culture or Jewish institutions of any importance remained on Polish soil. All the more remarkable is the towering presence of two blatantly and demonstratively Jewish, yet superbly Polish, writers: Adolf Rudnicki and Julian Stryjkowski. Their language, originally a shelter, has become the temple of a nationwide cult. Their books are sold out the day they are published. Readers love them, and critics lavish praise on them. For whom do they write? Who reads them? What for? ADOLF RUDNICKI OR, POLES LIKE JEWS Like so many other survivors, Rudnicki greeted the new socialist Poland with hope. In the mouth of the hero of one of his stories written shortly after the war, he put a bitter reproach addressed to a Jewish mother who complained about her son’s refusal to leave the ‘land of the graveyards’: ‘National, radical differences will find nothing to feed on – and for this reason, young people will not find them in themselves’ (1957). He deleted these words from a later version; wiser by a few years of dashed hopes and frustrated expectations, he wrote instead:

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This new breed was to be made of gold – and yet it is not made of gold. In those ‘first things’ in spiritual matters, nature has the upper hand, and nature derides beautiful words. Nature did not allow itself to be evicted and made fools of those who imagined that she would surrender easily. The new breed was to be antichauvinistic, antiracist, rational, internationalist. It is not.

In view of such an experience, the question of self-identity becomes crucial. At the beginning, the answer is ambivalent, as are the situations of Rudnicki’s literary characters whose conversations only thinly disguise the author’s own agonized soul-searching. (Often several characters are needed to convey the author’s torments in full, as no single character burdened with them all – illogical, perhaps inane, in their coexistence – would seem credible as a sane subject.) One, speaking in the first person, declares bluntly: ‘I always think of myself as a Pole; the rest is my complicated business. If Poland thinks otherwise, it is Her complicated business’ (Rudnicki 1957: 68). When the Warsaw ghetto burned, people in the street told each other: ‘This fire is in the ghetto’, which sounded like ‘somewhere far away’. They said, ‘It is in the ghetto’, and recovered their calm. Detonations shook the earth and the streets, but not the people. These were the years of contempt. Smart and adroit German troops made the residents of Warsaw into hunchbacks – first some of them, the selected ones, the Jews, then a bit later the others. They made sure that turns were properly taken, that the others had had their share of laughs before they were told of their own humps.6 This was a contempt felt by a lackey proud of using a WC, for an ‘Eastern’ creature who uses only a wooden shack, and by a lackey proud of shaving every day, for a creature who did not shave daily … . Since the war, I am in deadly fear of people too well dressed, too well washed, as this very fact cuts them off from the rest, prompts them to look down at the slightly less well dressed. I always see them as they enter their huge offices early in the morning, sit in front of their big diagrams, the products of their cold, dry, orderly nights, containing designs for destruction of millions of lesser humans, like you and me … . I am in deadly fear of excessive order, even of the sportsmen, whose exaggerated smartness – it always seems to me – cannot lead to any good.

The experience of being at the receiving end of contempt was staged, but it was shared. We all know now, or at least we could know if we wished, that for everyone there is an order, a standard of smartness, a measure of dressing that could make him into a hunchback. Is not



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culture about making the humps grow? Is not contempt, that licence to snub and despise and kill, what culture is about? ‘Culture is a narrow, rotten plank thrown over a pool teeming with crocodiles, who will get in the end what they want. True, one always needs a task, one time it could be culture, some other time an anti-culture, but whether it is culture or anti-culture the pride is always the same – the pride, arrogance, conceit.’ What Rudnicki has in mind is a culture arrogant, self-assertive, militant, aggressive and intolerant. A culture sufficiently sure of itself to subordinate or kill; one that uses its splendours as a mask of oppression. Sooner or later, it may become a bait set to attract the crocodiles. Promise of safe passage is loud yet unreliable. The threat of disaster grows in strength alongside trust in the promise. This is the wisdom the Jews learned earlier and more profoundly than their neighbours. They derived it first from the unhealed wound of rejected acculturation. Then, as if to remove the last trace of doubt, the truth of their wisdom was confirmed by the tragedy of the Holocaust – a tragedy that revealed the loneliness that centuries of shared life and suffering had not removed. This is the lesson hammered home by the work of Rudnicki – a legatee, warden and messenger of that wisdom. It is perhaps because they feel that they need this wisdom or may well yet need it in the future, that young and not-so-young Poles avidly grasp each successive Rudnicki story. Or perhaps they do it, at least for the time being, only because they wish to learn more about these strange, incomprehensible people whom they agree to promote only posthumously to the rank of their compatriots. JULIAN STRYJKOWSKI, OR THE DUTY TO REMEMBER At the age of eighty-five, Julian Stryjkowski has no time to waste. He writes avidly, greedily, obsessively. In a span of four years, he recorded the stories of Moses, King David, Judah Maccabbee – in his own words, ‘the greatest prophet, the greatest king, and the greatest hero’ in the tormented history of the Jews, these ‘people with a hump on their backs – not the wings of freedom, as in fairy tales, but rags of slavery’ (1957: 194). By his own admission, this Jewish writer, as a child, took refuge in the Polish language. With that language he fell in love. The depth of feelings did not help the suitor, though. In the new Polish secondary school in the new independent Poland, the headmaster asked children to name their nationality. Little Aaron Stark called himself a Jew. He

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explained his nationality, we imagine, in a pure, precise, and pleasing Polish. Yet he was expelled on the spot. ‘The boy was thrown out from his Paradise.’ The headmaster did not quite succeed, however: ‘The child found his refuge. The Word accepted him. The Word and the child remained faithful to each other forever after’ (Stryjkowski 1987: 188). The Word offered shelter to the homeless. It has also proved his exile. Replying to the inquiry on the ‘Meaning of Polishness’, conducted by the Catholic literary journal Znak, Stryjkowski wrote: ‘When, as a Jewish child who spoke Yiddish only, I heard a Polish word, I was dazzled’ (ibid.). The hero of Voices from Darkness, woven out of the author’s childhood memories, explains what being dazzled meant. His sister Miriam, a teacher in a Polish school, speaks Yiddish with her parents and older brother, but she addresses her kid brother in Polish: ‘Little Aaron smiled and nodded. Did he, or did he not understand? The words sounded beautiful. Those he heard most often the child linked with glittering objects: with mirror, glasses, hanging candlestick’ (1957: 266). When Aaron finally enters – not without a struggle – a Polish primary school, his teacher of Polish is Berta Apfelgrün. ‘One Jew teaches another Jew how to be a Pole’, Aaron’s uncle comments caustically, sadly – and truthfully (ibid.: 269). The shtetl had its own dreams. Like all dreams, they were cut to the dreamer’s measure. On a Saturday evening, in a rapidly darkening synagogue (‘they lit the candles in the synagogue as late as they could; let Saturday last as long as possible amidst the Jews’), little Aaron listens to the quiet, low voice of the Rabbi. He does not understand the complexities, but he knows the Rabbi is telling the story of the Messiah. The Messiah rides into town on a white horse. And after that glorious moment, no one needs to study in the kheder anymore, nor does his mother need to freeze in her market stall. Bread grows on trees. The Sabbath, that most Jewish measure of happiness and beauty, is on the other side of the invisible walls of the ghetto. It moves massively to that side once the walls, poorly guarded on the outside, are repaired and kept solid by those who stay inside them. The Messiah pitches his tents in the priest’s orchard. Melodic sounds of Polish words, those holes in the black fence, allow little Aaron to catch a glimpse of the eternal Sabbath. Julian Stryjkowski did not just look through the hole. Enchanted by what he saw and propelled by the Jewish messianic impatience, he flew over the black fence into the astounding beauty of the Polish language. He has become a venerated master of Polish prose. His novels capture the shine, the clarity, the unique emotional tension, and the human warmth of the language in which he writes. The



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critics report the pleasure which grows and overwhelms them with every page of Stryjkowski’s prose. His language, they say, is ‘pure like spring water’ (1988: 67). Stryjkowski came into the Polish language to celebrate the Jewish Sabbath. The same force brought him into the ranks of the clandestine Polish Communist Party. The messianic urge pointed clearly and unambiguously to the world of tolerance and forgiveness, of light and beauty, of holiness on earth, of the Sabbath seven days a week, which the Communists promised. Disenchantment came fast. At the same time, the news came that the nation that had dreamed of perpetual Sabbath faced the greatest threat of its history. Cast by war into remote places in Soviet Central Asia, Stryjkowski began to write his first great Jewish epic, Voices from Darkness (published twelve years later) – and he has not stopped writing since. Stryjkowski writes of the dead for the sake of the living. The memory of the nation that disappeared must live in the memory of the nation that survived. Let the selfsame Polish language, which lured the dead with its splendour and yet proved a cage for many, become their permanent and secure shelter now that they are no more. Let them enter through this language the enchanted land they once lived in without being a part of. In the shtetl of Voices from Darkness and The Echo (1988), life went in circles with melancholic monotony. It was as cyclical as that of the peasant. Peasant time is kept in motion by the annual rhythm of field work attuned to the succession of the natural seasons. Jewish time was calibrated by the alternation of the holy and the profane, by the repeated order of the Holy Calendar. As if to underline the cyclical nature and completeness of the holy order, each of the two novels confines its action to one year. In Voices from Darkness, it is a year between Aaron’s two successive birthdays. In The Echo, the year runs between the endings of two successive school years. The holy and the secular merge, as the rhythm of human life mirrors the timeless replay of the holy cycle. This applies to the old and ageing as much as to the young and growing. The second year differs from the first by being seen through eyes that have grown one year older. Like the preceding year, it is measured by the passage from New Year to the Day of Atonement, to Sukkoth, to Chanukkah, to Purim, to Passover. And, of course, both years are punctuated by the weekly spots of beauty, tranquillity and serenity: the Sabbaths. The quotidian draws meaning from waiting for the holy days. In the course of both years, the community whose life rests on that timeless repetition fights for its survival. In the first year, the threat comes from Scharie. In the second, from Manes. Scharie is a rich

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property owner who has robbed two impoverished sisters-in-law of their inheritance. Manes is a twelve-year-old boy who, on the Day of Atonement, eats a ham sandwich in public. The community loses its fight against Scharie and rejoices in the defeat. It gains a gruesome victory over Manes (the boy hangs himself to escape the curse) and bewails it. Modche Stark, little Aaron’s older brother, who is with Manes’s brother in Hungary when the disaster happens, leaves the community for good. For Palestine. Aaron will go instead to a Polish school, where at the celebration of his first promotion he will recite the poem: ‘Who are you? A little Pole. What is your sign? The White Eagle.’ The hump made of the rags of serfdom: How to shake it off? As a Jew sharing the land of Poles? As a Jew leaving behind the land of Poles? As a Jew who pretends to be a Pole? Can one do it with the community? Outside the community? Against the community? Visitor from Narbonne (1978) is a novel Stryjkowski dedicated to the fighters of the Warsaw ghetto. In that ghetto, the choices that the resident of Stryj spent two full years pondering without getting wiser were forced upon people in a flash. Instantly, it had become clear who was the enemy and who was the brother. Yet the choices were not clearer than before. Their condensation and urgency made their complexity all the more evident, and conclusions all the more difficult to reach. In the novel, Eli Ibn Gaist arrives from his native Narbonne at a small Spanish town that is writhing in the clutches of the Inquisition. Young, confident and proud of his wealth, ancestry and the public respect in which he has bathed since childhood, Eli is ill prepared for what he finds. Furtive glances, whispers, half-finished sentences, stealthy gaits, faces frozen into masks – all this is difficult enough to comprehend. Something else, however, is yet more bewildering. ‘In Narbonne, everything was clear and simple. Evil was evil, good was good. When touched by suffering, however, evil and goodness mix up, swirl.’ When told that sometimes evil ought to be covered up for the sake of good, Eli feels baffled and confused. ‘So the world is like this? This gives me no peace … . The worst is the first crack in the thought. It is like a blemish on the surface of a fruit which inside is already rotten’ (1978: 279). The cracks are, indeed, many. In the span of the few days which divide Eli’s arrival from his heroic and grotesque, redeeming yet purposeless death, goodness is soiled by evil, evil dressed as mercy, so that in the end one can no longer tell where the boundary between



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them runs. Before he dies, Eli is confused. With his last breath, the meaning of his death escapes. Another visitor, this time to the town of Stryj, the hometown of Aaron Stark, is Martin Heiber: a highly educated, big-town lawyer, spreading the Zionist gospel among the baffled and incredulous residents of the shtetl. Like Eli, he feels humiliated by the confusion and indecision of the ghetto, not very different from that of the barrio. Few listen to his appeals to courage and dignity; fewer still comprehend; no one agrees. We live in fast flowing, but shallow times. In such water only small fish can live. Our Jewish life is like a stagnant puddle. If a carp happens to be there, it must die. It will suffocate … . I searched, tussled like fish on a sandy beach. I found nobody, nobody. Only minnows. On whom could I lean? On whom could I rest my faith? I wandered from town to town, looked people in the eyes. Emptiness everywhere. And I spoke of the Great Renewal! (1957: 399)

What makes the shtetl routine repulsive and unbearable to Heiber is the stench of serfdom and its spiritual sediment: complacency. It is a slavery that has been sucked in, digested, woven into the bodies and souls of people who feel at home only in the ghetto. Consent to such a life is indignity. Nonconformity is the only way to spiritual regeneration. A powerful idea is needed. Yet more than an idea, powerful men are needed, men who can stand up and say no. What they say ‘no’ to is less important. To Heiber, one such man was Herzl. Since Herzl’s death, Heiber has looked for another one capable, as Herzl had been, of waking the sleeping giant of the nation. What the cost of such determination might be, Heiber does not yet know. The century is still young and innocent, and so is Heiber’s Zionism. Old Tag, the hero of another Stryjkowski novel, The Inn, tells the following story which his grandfather allegedly heard from no lesser authority than the Holy Besht. There is a huge mountain, and a big stone on the top of that mountain, and pure water flows from beneath. There is a soul on the other end of the world. That thirsty soul longs all its life for this source with its clean water. But the soul will never reach this source and will never quench its thirst. That will happen only when Messiah comes. The soul must wait till he comes. Then, it will be all the same for everybody. In the meantime, the heart may burst. (1966: 89)

The source has not been reached yet. For all the suffering and its

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tragic end, the source seems not to be nearer now than it was all along. But the effort to reach it can and should be recorded, if only to know where it cannot be found. This, at least, is how Julian Stryjkowski remembers Aaron Stark’s reasons for hiding in the shelter of the Polish Word. Given such reasons, this was not just a hiding, and not merely a shelter. The refugees burdened the Word with all their unfulfilled hopes, promises received but not kept, and first and foremost with their dreams of a world of moral purity. They made the Word grow, expand and rise to seldom-visited moral heights. If it is true that assimilation arrived from outside as a painful pressure, it is true as well that it was filled from inside by the ethical urge. It will thus forever be remembered as a folly, perhaps, but not a sin. The refugees brought a gift to the hosts, and the gift will stay with them even if they are slow to acknowledge its reception. It is Polish science, literature, poetry and art that gained most from the episode of assimilation. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bauman, Zygmunt (1991) Modernity and Ambivalence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Biale, David (1986) Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History. New York: Schocken. Black, Eugene C. (1988) The Social Politics of Anglo-Jewry 1880–1920. Oxford: Blackwell. Cała, Alina (1986) ‘The Question of the Assimilation of Jews in the Polish Kingdom (1864–1897): An Interpretive Essay’, Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, 1, 2004: 130–50. Deutscher, Isaac (1968) The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays. London: Oxford University Press. Fackenheim, Emil (1970) God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections. New York University Press. Feldman, David (1989) ‘Jews in London, 1880–1914’. In Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, vol. II. New York: Routledge, pp. 207–29. Fishman, William J. (1975) East End Jewish Radicals, 1875–1914. London: Duckworth. Frankel, Jonathan, (1981) Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917. Cambridge University Press. Gombrowicz, Witold (1957) Dziennik, 1953–1956. Paris: Instytut Literacki. Gross, Jan Tomasz (1986) ‘Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej … ale go nie lubię’ [‘He Is of My Country … But I Don’t Like Him’], Aneks, 41–2: 13–35. Hertz, Aleksander (1988) Żydzi w kulturze polskiej [Jews in Polish Culture]. Warsaw: Więź.



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Himmelfarb, Milton (1973) The Jews of Modernity. New York: Basic. Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona (1989) Neutralizing Memory: The Jew in Contemporary Poland. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Kaganowski, Efraim (1958) Warszawskie Opowiadania [Warsaw Stories]. Warsaw: Iskry. Marrus, Michael R. (1971) The Politics of Assimilation: A Study of the French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair. Oxford: Clarendon. Miłosz, Czesław (1988) ‘A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto’ [‘Biedny chrzéscijanin patrzy na getto’]. In The Collected Poems: 1931–1987, English trans. Czesław Miłosz. New York: Viking, pp. 64–5. Ozick, Cynthia (1984) Art and Ardor. New York: Dutton. Ringelblum, Emanuel (1988) Stosunki polsko-żydowskie w czasie drugiej wojny światowej [Polish–Jewish Relations during the Second World War]. Warsaw: Czytelnik. Robertson, Ritchie (1988) ‘Western Observers and Eastern Jews: Kafka, Buber, Franzos’, Modern Language Review, 83: 87–105. Rubenstein, Richard (1966) After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism. New York: Bobbs-Merrill. Rudnicki, Adolf (1957) Żywe i martwe morze [Live Sea, Dead Sea]. Warsaw: Czytelnik. (1963) Kupiec Łódźki [Tradesman from Łódź]. Warsaw: Czytelnik. (1967) ‘Regina, Regina Borkowska’. In Wspólne zdjęcie [Joint Picture]. Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, pp. 156–207. (1988) Sto jeden [One Hundred and One], vol. III. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie. Sandauer, Artur (1985a) ‘O sytuacji pisarza polskiego pochodzenia żydowskiego w XX wieku’ [‘On the Situation of the Polish Writer of Jewish Origin in the Twentieth Century]. In Pisma zebrane, vol. III. Warsaw: Czytelnik. (1985b) ‘O człowieku, który był diabłem’ [‘On the Man Who Was a Devil’]. In Pisma Zebrane, vol. I. Warsaw: Czytelnik. Scholem, Gershom (1971) The Messianic Idea in Judaism. London: Allen & Unwin. (1982) [1976] On Jews and Judaism in Crisis. New York: Schocken. Smolar, Aleksander (1986) ‘Tabu i niewinność’ [‘Taboo and Innocence’], Aneks, 41–2: 89–133. Sorin, Gerald (1985) The Prophetic Minority: American Jewish Immigrant Radicals, 1880–1920. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Stryjkowski, Julian (1957) Głosy w ciemności [Voices from Darkness]. Warsaw: Czytelnik. (1966) Austeria [The Inn]. Warsaw: Czytelnik. (1971) Interview with J. Niecikowski, Współczesność, 22: 3. (1972) Interview with Zbigniew Taranienko, Literatura, 35: 3. (1978) Przybysz z Narbony [Visitor from Narbonne]. Warsaw: Czytelnik. (1987) ‘Azyl’, Znak, 390–1. (1988) The Echo. Warsaw: Czytelnik.

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Wertheimer, Jack (1987) Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany. New York: Oxford University Press. Wiesel, Elie (1977) Dimensions of the Holocaust. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

9 Beyond the Limits of Interpretative Anarchy (1997) Translated by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

Andrzej Szahaj’s1 incisive and comprehensive study deserves careful attention from everyone who does the work of interpreting texts. And that is everyone in the humanities: those who experience human experiences, and those who want to account for those experiences. Szahaj forges new, more promising paths forward in the well-trodden fields of certain years-old quarrels, and reveals the penury of others. The critique of Rorty’s attackers that it contains is hard to argue with, the proposition of a liaison with Fish is alluring, and the anxieties and fears of polemicists are well described, and even more effectively derided. And yet … It is missing one final ‘race for the finish’. Szahaj, I think, restrained himself from uttering the next word needed in the never-ending fight over the ‘limits of interpretation’; he stopped at the brink of what I would be inclined to call the essence of the matter (though I admit that, in the opinion of probably more than one reader, hungry for certainty and for the inalienable right to speak in its name, Szahaj moved – quite the contrary – rather too far from what such a reader would consider the essence of the matter: namely, from the signs indicating how to interpret in a way that would be against Nietzsche’s call to ‘join poetry in going to where the frontiers are, and not where man’s future lies’2 – a future, as we know, stubbornly impenetrable and evading all frameworks). But the essence of the matter that I am referring to lies in the fact that from the origins of the art of hermeneutics (in other words,

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since the time of Schleiermacher) it has been accepted as truth, at least in biblio-philological hermeneutics, from which all theory of interpretation began and from which it inherited many of its characteristic features, that the limits of the text are narrowly – irreversibly, indisputably – defined. It was known very exactly, where the text was, where its interpretation, and where the boundaries between the two lay. The obviousness of the boundaries was a result of a metadiscursive and indisputable premise about the incomparability of the status of the text (Holy Writ, God’s word), and the whole, merely human, and fragmentary, rest of the world. In the framework of this premise, there was really no question where the text began and where it ended: the content of canonical writings was authoritatively defined, and demarcating the boundaries was not among the talents of the exegete. People (that is, literate people) were divided into copyists and scribblers – authors were not among them. Only God, as Albert the Great announced in the year 1230, could create – or make something out of nothing. This concept of God’s monopoly was not questioned for the next five centuries (and the concept of an act of creation has not been questioned even today). This assumption did not so much simplify ‘the mystery of context’ as stave off its elevation, and radically so. ‘The outside of the text’ was not something that could be considered an object of study in the act of interpretation – not something that could be ascribed the power of an autonomous source of meaning. The message – the kerygma, the open meaning, as well as the meanings that were hidden to various degrees – all of this was contained inside the text and ought to be read in the text. The sense of the meaning was also given once and for always, eternal and impervious to the teeth of time, independent of the conditions in which the interpretation happened. The idea that the meaning could change based on the conditions in which it was unearthed, or on the people involved in discerning it, was not only preposterous – it was unlikely that it could occur to anyone. There was no space, at the time, for the idea of ‘context’. The idea of context already contains (in the very decision to introduce context as a factor in the pragmatics of interpretation) the attribution of importance to the conditions in which something is read. The problems began (the fear of this ‘interpretive anarchism’ that Szahaj ponders) when ideas about the reception of the text – about its semantic autonomy, its independence from the conditions in which it is read – were taken over by a hermeneutic strategy that ventured beyond seeking out the hidden meanings of texts that were incommensurate with the authorship of commentary on them, and that



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found itself in a world in which the function of copying was taken over by machines, while among people there appeared the distinction between authors – and creators. This premise was silently accepted, the axioms did not require proofs; in this world, they took on the modality of claims – and thus views, which had to be convincing in their soundness, and regarding whose correctness one could contest. Whatever was found, in the text whose interpretation secular hermeneutics were involved in, was ‘put there’ by a person – a being that in its modality, potential and quality of intellectual powers was equal, or maybe even subordinate, to the person doing the interpreting. The singularity of correct interpretations was thus no longer, as in the case of biblical hermeneutics, guaranteed from the outset: what had previously been given was now assigned; what had been present at the beginning could now only appear near the end of the interpretive effort. The force of the intellectual argument had to construct something that, once upon a time, drew its obviousness or indubitability from the fact that it preceded any reasoning – that it was there already, when the reasoning began. On the frail shoulders of the human intellect, it was necessary to haul a load cut to the measure of God’s omnipotence. From this disjunction between the traditionally sacral gaze at the text and its secularism was born not only the possibility, but also the inevitability, of the discovery of ‘context’. The appearance of the idea of ‘context’ signalled the sudden narrowing of the sovereignty of the text: debatability as to the boundaries of this sovereignty, the need to erect clear border posts and build guardhouses, the possibility of border skirmishes and conflicts, and also illegal crossings and contraband. There arose a situation shot through with ambivalence – because the motive of all of these procedures is not so much the desire to protect the integrity of the territory of the text as the privileging of certain border-crossings, or rather the selectivity of accepting certain tourist visas or passports over others. The sovereignty of the text is defended in the name of the rights of its interpreters – the ‘contexts’ that they represent. The sovereignty of the text requires exposing contexts, while the authority of the interpretation over competing accounts requires elevating the virtues of context, which guarantees access to meanings that are authoritatively delineated by the sovereign text. The acknowledgement of the rightness of an interpretation – calling on its accordance with the text – is demanded when the soundness of the interpretations is demonstrated by pointing to the virtues of the context. Fascination with the problem

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of borders is an inevitable result of this ambivalence – but also the reason for its inevitable recurrence. The ambivalence of the situation also has another dimension: the cause of running to context in the process of interpretation is a desire to get to the privileged meaning, among other proposed meanings – but as soon as this concept is introduced into the discussion, all interpretations are subject to relativization. The centre of gravity in the search for privileged interpretations thus moves in practice from the text to the context that interpreters reference. The point ultimately is about the sovereignty of the context, though the debate is seemingly about the sovereignty of the text. The roots of the unresolvability of the conflicts dwell in the multiplicity and historical changeability of contexts (as Jorge Luis Borges so beautifully illustrated with the adventures of Pierre Menard); and if getting to the real meaning of a text by methods accessible to the person interpreting can be conceived, then by no means can we imagine the sovereignty of the context, based only on the arts of hermeneutics – even the finest of them. Wilhelm Dilthey, a robust thinker, well aware of the tricks that history plays, advised that the final understanding of a text would have to wait for the end of history; when, one hundred years later, Jacques Derrida gloomily observed that when there was one single reading of the famous Derridean postcard, the end of history would come to pass … Much effort has been expended on drawing the boundaries between the text and what the text explains, or what ensures the correctness of the explanation, similarly to the basic task – explaining the relation between interpretation and the basis of such an interpretation. In these efforts, what is lost from the field of vision is the circumstance that catalyses these efforts: namely, that ‘interpretation’ and ‘context’ are not phenomena that are mutually independent of each other, and, as a result of this coexistence, the multiplicity of interpretations is both explanandum and explanans, a problem to be explained and the explanation itself. Context elicits interpretation to the same degree that interpretation summons context. Thus, as Jonathan Culler says, there are uncountably many contexts; and there are always more of them than the interpreter will evoke. The coexistence of many interpretations is not a derivative, a function, a dependent variable, etc., of a particular-to-us ‘cultural context’ (such as the postmodern pluralism of research perspectives) – a phenomenon that needs to be explained, indicating features particular to that context: it is the constituent of that context. By the very nature of things, ‘context’ therefore cannot be a ‘border’ of the text – there are no walls between them, there is not even an osmotic membrane; they can only be



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imagined, and this is unfortunate for trying to imagine how reading and interpretation happens. If it is indeed necessary to speak of the determinants of interpretive plenitude (and really, what for?), then the determinant of both phenomena (actually, one phenomenon articulated in two different ways) is a freedom in the sense of being cursed to choose a meaning, without hope that one, unquestionable authority will remove the sting of conflict and anxiety that comes from the uncertainty of the act of choosing. The boundary of interpretation is the boundary of freedom, or the degree of depopulation and the fragmentation of authority. Interpreters fervently mark the borders and clarify the rules of movement across borders when they lack protective forces3 who would guard the borders, and who would only allow those with visas or proper tickets – scrutinized carefully by them – across the wall. Freedom can be the bane of the interpreter, but it is the great opportunity of interpretation – and understanding. I fully agree with Szahaj that the error of ‘over-interpretability’, ‘over-interpretation’, if it can at all be authoritatively adjudicated, can always only be stated in a local and temporary way. I would refine this accurate assessment of Szahaj and say that mutations of interpretation are, at the moment of their origins, what the English writer Nicholas Mosley called (having in mind, at the time, all of those ‘oddities’, those freaks and misfits, that there are so many of in today’s world) hopeful monsters; they appear in the world, admittedly, as monsters, and they seem like monsters when considered alongside the average everyday examples of the species – but these monsters are waiting for the conditions that (who can know in advance?) will make of monsters creatures who are evolutionarily privileged. And I would add that the monsters are in fact working hard to bring those conditions into being; and that to know which of the hopes of the monsters will be met when the verdict that the creatures are awaiting will come to pass, and which will not, we must wait for the results of their work … Let us repeat, too, the sober warning of Dilthey: that, with the final interpretation, we will also have to await the end of history. And let us notice that – as all signs indicate – Fukuyama was premature in writing history’s obituary. Looking for an interpretation that is stable, certain, not temporary – an interpretation that puts an end to the search for interpretations – appears in this light as an impudent effort to seize the secrets of history, to look over its shoulder, to steal the memos from its desk before they are sent out. We can proceed with such intentions only if we believe that history already knows, today, what tomorrow will

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bring – if we deny history its historicity. And only if one is unaware of the warnings of Emanuel Levinas that, in distinction from the ‘future’ that is already imagined today – fit to the measure of today’s day and rooted in today’s day – the future, which is yet to come, is an ‘absolute stranger’, or incommunicado. Searching in the future for this embodied uncertainty, a flight from the uncertainties of today’s choices, is a paradoxical task. The paradoxicality of such efforts is based on the fact that the road to flight from the torments of choice – just like all others – itself leads through choice … The strategy of fighting uncertainty must first be chosen, and none of the strategies among which one must choose can boast of being ‘absolutely grounded’, in such a way as to render the decision a non-choice: a decision made in advance and undoubtable. The road to non-arbitrary rules leads through choice, whose non-arbitrariness is far from obvious to everyone who does not partake in the act of faith that the choice is based on. Szahaj’s chosen title, ‘Interpretive anarchy’ suggests the anxiety that this situation naturally ought to invite, and essentially always elicits. ‘Anarchy’ is a negative concept – in the derivative sense, drawn from the concept that it negates. It is akin to the concept of ‘Chaos’ – just like chaos, it is a negation of order. In a state of anarchy, like in chaos, everything can happen – and already that is enough for fear. But beyond this too, in anarchy, as in chaos, one cannot do anything – and this multiplies fears, because it foreshadows not only the problems, but also the powerlessness to solve them. But the thing is, that this second feature of ‘anarchy’ does not apply to the situations of the undecidability of interpretive conflict. It is not at all given that, with the expansion of interpretive freedom, the opportunities for effective efforts at understanding contract. What is more, we can assume that understanding does not suffer any losses with an increase of possible interpretations, but gains. It better equips us for a reasonable orientation in the world, the movement through which is the goal of this understanding. And that is for the following reasons. Contrary to many descriptions of the bazaar of opinions and styles of late modernity, or ‘postmodernity’, it is not the presence of differences, a stubborn contingent of various and sundry ways of being, that subject the human possibility of understanding the world to a severe test (or, as Wittgenstein described it, ‘certainty, how to proceed’4); it is not they – and certainly not in and of themselves – that give birth to the fears and anxieties specific to today. There is nothing particularly postmodern – and, more generally, nothing new – in the fact that we are standing eye to eye with difference on a daily basis, and we have to reconcile ourselves to its company



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for good. Neither the modern, nor the postmodern, world has been homogeneous; it is hardly certain whether the multiplicity of forms of life that has been recognized or perceived by premodern and modern people, and experienced by them in everyday life, was less drastic, or more restricted in quantity, than the plurality of forms perceived and experienced in the postmodern arena. But the premodern and modern people had their own – different from ours – ways of dealing with the challenge that the presence and abundance of difference posed. The specifically late modern, or postmodern – and probably without precedent – aspect of the pluralism of today’s world lies in the frail and meagre, shallow and brittle institutional roots of differentiation – and thus the resulting blurring, fluidity and relative short-livedness of the identities associated with different ways of life. If, since the times of ‘global unmooring’ and in the period of all of the modern era, ‘life projects’, problems of identity, were based mainly on how to build identity, and build it in such a way as to give it a shape that would be readily socially legible – then, today, the problems of identity are mainly based on how an identity that is scraped together can be preserved for a longer time and how to find an identity that would have at least a minimal chance of a more lasting social acceptance, and the resulting need to avoid identities that are too solidly constructed, that cannot be remade in a moment, when acceptance is withdrawn, and there appear ‘newer and better’ rules for tinkering with identity. The confusion and awkwardness come not so much from the co-presence of many different types of being as from their fluid, hard-to-describe and shocking rate of transformation – which conditions send us stubbornly back to the wellspring of uncertainty and confusion that dwells in the instability of our own place in the world, and not so much the lack, as precisely the excess, of trustworthy (or, rather, trust-demanding) points of orientation which would confer upon our efforts of self-description uncontroversially proper effects. According to Umberto Eco, literature can help a person who finds themselves in a similar condition, insofar as it is, for these or other reasons, something in the form of an effort to build up the abilities of reason to organize the formless mass of experience; an effect of this effort is found in the oases of certainty in the desert wilderness; visits to which restore faith in meaning as the ‘second bottom’ of meaninglessness – the visits teach us how to unearth meaning from that meaninglessness (as if according to this prescription Eco wrote The Name of the Rose, though his last book, The Island of the Day Before, begs, rather, for a Kundera-esque evaluation). But at which

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point in the space stretching between the author, his reader and the world, or worlds, that both – together, or separately – are a part of does this weaving of a sensible pattern, from the raw, amorphous material of experience, take place? Eco proposes that, from the palimpsest of meanings of a literary work, we distinguish the evaluation of intentio auctoris and intentio lectoris (Eco also speaks of intentio operis, but this third element, a tribute to intertextuality, appears in Eco’s thinking as a deus ex machina and does not play a more significant role in his reasoning). In the clash of two meaningcreating intentions, the active and initiating role Eco ascribes to the author’s intention: telling his tale, the author sets up not only dramatis personae, over whose fates he exerts a significant control – but also a future reader unknown to him; he also constructs, as Eco says, an ‘ideal reader’, or one who, in the case of intentio lectoris, would hew faithfully to the meaning that the author wished to give his work. Intentio auctoris thus also contains the intention to limit the freedom of interpretation of a future reader, imposing a way of reading a meaning that the author has already put into the text. Odo Marquard distinguishes between a hermeneutics that widens and one that narrows. The former opens up paths and reveals clues leading from the text to other texts, which the interpreted text has obscured for the sake of the precision of its own meaning, and which it did not include in the route it mapped out for itself; a widening hermeneutics cannot manage without such mappings, but it leaves no doubts as to the fact that the act of cartography can only be stopped at some arbitrary point, but never ended, and that every decision is temporary and can be reversed. This hermeneutics differs from a narrowing one, which dominated in the era of modernity, and whose voice is heard in the alarm over ‘interpretive anarchy’; such a hermeneutics, which is oriented towards a constant and irrefutable delineation of meaning, assigns itself the task of a definitive interpretation, despotically true – one that cannot be improved upon. Personally, in order to illuminate the difference between the two strategies, I prefer to speak of a ‘spray-bottle’ and a ‘funnel’. The former treats the text to be interpreted as a point of departure for diverging paths, the latter – as the destination. The first traces the dispersal of meaning (the further from the point of departure – the more tenuous, the more fuzzy) across terrains ever more distant from the point of departure, where the second tries to cut off everything that suggests the multi-layered and multi-directional nature of interpretation, leaving in the field of vision only that which can be confined in one strand, as narrow as possible. The theses of Eco and Marquard do not contradict each other and



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are not mutually exclusive (under the condition that the description of intentio auctoris is treated as a description of intention, and not as justification for rules of conduct, obligatory for the interpreter of the work). Without regard to whether the image of the ‘ideal reader’ is contained in the author’s design or not, the work can in any case be read using a hermeneutics that widens or narrows. The choice between the two strategies of reading and interpretation is not determined by the character of the work that is being read and interpreted. On what, then, does the choice depend? This is the question asked by Jonathan Culler, who has already been mentioned above, and who locates an answer in the decision as to the horizon of interpretation. When the literary work is taken ‘in and of itself’ – treated as independent, self-contained and finished – coming to an agreement as to the ‘immanent’ meaning is theoretically possible. Culler adds, however, that this possibility is rather unlikely, and, what is more, not especially appealing, because of the richness of content and of the potential uses for our understanding – uses that are revealed only once you go beyond the boundaries of the text. Artworks postulate not so much an obedient reader as a context – or rather contexts (always necessarily local and rooted in a specific time, which Szahaj wisely emphasizes) – into which their reception could be fitted. If something restricts the meaning of the text, it is interpretations that pare down the assortment of contexts. But artworks last longer than the contexts of their interpretation – they are then, one could say, ‘multi-use’: as they outlive their contexts precisely insofar as they do not exclude the possibility of being read in the context of experiences that are different from those in which they were created, including ones that have not yet emerged. The issue is thus, can this consciousness of eternally undefined multiple contexts be built into intentio auctoris, making multiplicity of codes, an openness of meaning, the author’s intention? This is the problem that art is grappling with today – the first one, perhaps, in history, that has turned its fate into a calling.

10 On Art, Death and Postmodernity– and What They Do To Each Other (1998)

In the autumn of 1930 a thirty-year-old mechanical engineer Alexander Calder visited the studio of Piet Mondrian. As he recalled years later in a letter to A. E. Gallatin, a connoisseur and collector of arts, he was enchanted and awestruck by what he saw there; and what he saw was a huge blank wall bearing an artful composition of rectangular cardboards, painted in yellow, red, blue and various shades of grey. He felt, though, that something was missing in that dead, because complete and once for all frozen, perfection of the pattern. He shared his unease with the host. He asked whether it would not be better to set all those glued and nailed elements in motion, or rather many different motions – each one with its own speed and rhythm. Mondrian did not agree, but Calder did not take his ‘no’ for an answer and went on to invent single-handedly what was to be dubbed later as the kinetic art. ‘One can compose movements the same way one composes colours and forms’ – thus Calder defined his artistic intention. ‘What makes a composition here is the interruption of regularity, caused by the artist; it is this gap in regularity which creates and destroys the artwork.’ Calder recognized in Mondrian a kindred soul. Mondrian, like Calder, was bewitched and spellbound by the play of transcience and durability of things. The same fascination inspired, however, two sharply distinct artistic projects. Mondrian sought the ultimate excellence of a perfect pattern in which things could be frozen forever. Calder rebelled against that finality, and wished to compel things to explore ever new possibilities which the mobility of patterns had in store. Marcel Duchamp called Calder the Master of Gravity. But Calder is



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better described as a poet of movement. And mind you – not just any movement! After all, there is nothing particularly novel about forcing inanimate, immobile objects to move; we set in motion daily those piles of metal and plastic called trains or cars. In their case, we are proud that the things we force to move are obedient to the trajectory and the timetable we set for them. We want their movements to be regular and predictable. To be sure, such predictable monotony does not make things alive; one forces things into such movements the same way one condemns other things to immobility, by nailing them to the wall, locking them in the frame or in the box. Calder was after an an entirely dfferent kind of movement, a spontaneous and elemental movement, free of all routine and regularity, changing from one movement to another without warning and constantly surprising the viewers who believed that they cracked its code. Such a movement means something more than mobility in space; it was a sign, perhaps even the essence, of life. Calder wanted nothing less than to make dead matter alive. Damien Hirst, who in the last few years turned from a ‘young, promising artist’ into one of the most notorious and spoken-about hot properties of the contemporary art world, is – like Calder – enthralled and fascinated by the mystery of life. If Calder, however, wished to gain mastery over the law of gravitation – Hirst would wish to rule over the inevitability of death. It is not the animation of dead matter that is the stake in this case – but the arresting of decay of the live one. Fame descended upon Hirst with the installation called The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living: a shark, brought from South Australian seas in a huge box filled with formalin. From the wide open dark emptiness behind the two rows of dagger-like teeth a void gapes, waiting to be filled with meaning. The shark looked alive, and stayed looking alive, yet the box full of formalin reminded obtrusively of its death. ‘I hope at first glance it will look alive. It could have to do with the obsession with trying to make the dead live or the living live forever’ – explained Hirst. And he complained that, in order to understand the world, one needs ‘to take things out of the world … You kill things to look at them …’. ‘[It] came from a fear of everything in life being so fragile, and I wanted to make a sculpture where the fragility was encased … I love the idea of solidity. But to actually find solidity in my body means that I will be a skeleton.’ At the exhibition ‘Kunst und Natur’ in the Warsaw Gallery Zachęta, one can see the Polish artist Joanna Przbyła struggling with the same uncanny dilemma. From the ceiling hang uneven, messy, decaying rotting branches of a dead tree: they still move as if escaping

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the embrace of death – they seem to fly, clinging to the memory of life. All around, screwed tight to the walls, other samples of wood: planks, neatly cut and polished, impregnated with preserving chemicals, meant never to disintegrate, to last forever. Their eternity was bought at the price of irrevocable death … Dead objects refused to live. Calder wanted to force upon them the essence of life – the resistance against the will of their maker, that waywardness and irreverence which are the marks of life. Hirst wants to arrest the beings moving towards death just an inch or two before reaching the finishing line; to stay in a kind of ‘suspended mortality’. Though no more alive, Hirst’s sharks, cows and flies stay wilful and obstreperous in their all-too-visible decay, fragility, disintegration. Formaldehyde gets misty and bars the sight; the sought-after solidity guards stubbornly its mystery. Hirst wishes to force the beings once alive to rest in their movements, to last in their immobility while never stopping to be what their destiny condemned them to become – that is, the being stamped with the memory of life, covered all over with the traces of movement and change. And Przybyła makes a sad yet sober comment on all that: you are alive as long as you are decaying; when preserved for eternity, you may only be dead … As the German poet Lessing pointed out, the Enlightenment of which our modern mentality was born consisted in triple rejection: of the belief in Revelation, belief in Providence and belief in the Eternal Condemnation. Three beliefs – a triple line of trenches behind which the awesome truth about human mortality, and so of the fragility and contingency of human presence-in-the-world, was securely hidden. Religion, which ruled over the premodern mind, was according to the French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis a mask – hiding the chaos at the core of the being. Now the chaos is no more covered up. It is the arts, among other things, that force the eyes wide open. They are, simultaneously, a window opened onto chaos and a form forced upon its shapeless flux. The arts differ from religion in that they do not deny the reality of chaos and do not attempt to mask its presence. It is in the substance of all great art that, from behind every form it conjures up, the boundless chaos of being winks; each form in-forms that it is but a form, a construction, an artifice; it is through this unconcealedness of its nature that the arts ‘question all established meanings, including the sense of human life and all truths deemed to be beyond dispute’. Instrumental reason, that greatest of modern inventions and the most seminal of the Enlightenment’s legacies, was conceived as a tool to serve the liberty of human self-assertion. From the start, however, it was burdened, so Castoriadis warns, with a disposition



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to use freedom of choice to foreclose the chances which freedom ought to keep open. ‘A fatal and perhaps unavoidable inclination to seek absolute foundations, ultimate certainties, exhaustive inventories’ was born. A tendency, in other words, to mask once more that contingency and fluidity of being, whose recognition threw wide open the gates to experiment and free creation. This time, to be sure, the closure has been undertaken from secular positions, and obliquely – through practices, rather than explicit teachings. Through those practices, the in-built and incurable mortality of all things human has not been denied point-blank, but, like all reason-defying aspects of the world, it has been ‘disenchanted’, deleted from the agenda, barred from occupying human attention, dissected and dissolved into a mass of smaller yet absorbing and energy-consuming tasks within reach. Preoccupied as we all are with fighting off innumerable little threats to health and fitness, where would we find the time to muse over the vanity of it all? Once a metaphysical issue towering over the totality of human existence – the endemic vulnerability of human existence has turned now into a technical problem: one problem among many. The task to save humanity from forgetting its own mortality, and thus from forgetting its own nature – from self-forgetting – has fallen now fairly and squarely upon the arts. For the arts death was not a technical problem, and most certainly not one problem among many. Human mortality is the raison d’être of art, its cause and its object. The arts were born and continue to exist out of awareness, unique to the human species: the knowledge that death is given, while immortality has to be made, and once made, defended daily from passing away. The story of arts suggests that they come into the world together with the awareness of mortality and may well die the moment death is forgotten or treated with unconcern. There are two ways in which the intimate link between the arts and the matters of death and immortality have been talked about in the theory of arts. Psychoanalyst Otto Rank attributed the origins and the persistence of arts to the artist’s personal bid for immortality. ‘The creative impulse in the artist [springs] from the tendency to immortalize himself … [from] attempts to turn ephemeral life into personal immortality’ … ‘There appears to be a common impulse in all creative types to replace collective immortality – as it is represented biologically in sexual reproduction – by the individual mortality of deliberate selfperpetuation.’ Rank, in other words, derived the phenomenon of artistic creation from the artist’s conscious or unconscious drive to turn individual transience into durability. The artist creates because

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he/she wishes to elevate himself or herself above the de-personalized immortality of the species (a merely collective, to wit common and vulgar, kind of perpetuity) and to obtain a personal entry into eternal existence – by leaving indelible traces of his sojourn on earth and thus gaining a lasting place in the species’ memory. One may ask, however, whether personal ambition of the artist does explain the stubborn presence of arts in the history of mankind, millennia before the first signature of the painter was put on a painting. Does not this kind of explanation project the peculiar features of the modern artist upon the phenomenon which has not been confined to any particular historical era? Hannah Arendt, for a change, in her conception of art has no room for the artist’s individual ambition. She does not refer the mystery of art to the bid for an individual immortality. The immortality of artwork reveals itself only retrospectively, endorsing not the authors’ intentions, but the quality of their works: namely, the capacity of the artwork to go on arousing aesthetic emotions of intellectual appreciation among the spectators, also the kind of spectators quite different from those among whom the authors sought (if they did) recognition and applause. Immortal is a work that lasts; but – so Hannah Arendt insists – a work may last only if it does not fulfil any mundane, practical function; if it is not a tool or a resource of individual survival and so it is not ‘used up’ in fulfilling that function. That immortality which is the property of art has nothing to offer to the survival-oriented life. To be a work of art means to be something altogether different from useful, ‘functional’ objects; functionality, as it were, makes the objects dissolve and disappear in the phenomenal world in the course of their consumption and use. Works of art ‘come into being not for people, but for the world’, says Arendt. And not she alone: Hans-Georg Gadamer, in Die Aktualität des Schönen [The Relevance of the Beatiful], states that ‘the work of art means certain increase of being’, while Ortega y Gasset, in La deshumanización del arte y otros ensayos [The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays], points out that the poet broadens the world, adding to the existing reality new continents of imagination (the word ‘author’, let us note, derives from auctor – he who increases; Ancient Romans gave that title to the generals who conquered new territories for the Empire). Works of art are not ‘useful’, ‘functional’, they do not serve any purpose significant to the individual survival. On the contrary, their eternity is due to steering clear of that metabolism which is life. Arts transcend human mortality only insofar as they manage to escape the absorptive zeal of the mortals. The work of art, Arendt insists,



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is an apparition, a ‘pure appearance’ – and appearances are judged not by their utility, but by their beauty. The more important the role assigned to that criterion, the more complete is the superiority awarded to it over all other criteria; the more fully the essence of an object is encased in its appearance, the larger is the distance, which its appreciation demands. The distance is acquired through ‘self-forgetfulness, forgetting one’s trouble, interests, life’s demands’ – to the extent that we abandon all desire to catch the object of our admiration, to appropriate, imbibe, assimilate – we want it instead to remain itself, ‘a pure appearance’. It is because they stood above, and at safe distance from, the hurlyburly of the daily fight for survival, that the arts convey the message of whatever is durable in humanity and reaches beyond the brief life-span of any, however high and mighty, human individual. For the same reason they serve as a challenge to conjure up the durable out of the stuff of the transient, and a stubborn reminder that this alchemic miracle (or is it a sleight of hand?) can be done. Arts breathe eternity; through them death is repeatedly reduced to its proper size: that of the end of life, certainly, but not the limit to humanity. Indeed, the modern (and particularly the modernist) artists presumed a demand for association with the extratemporal, and through it – with immortality itself. In this one respect at least their art was not revolutionary at all; it continued to play the role performed by the fine arts in premodern times – when the artists went on retelling over and over again the same, universally recognizable, stories supplied by Christian or Hellenic mythologies: the stories of events which happened each time and at no time, which occurred ever again, as immune to the passage of time as eternity itself. The message of eternity was easily legible through the legibility of the stories told. As the shared tradition lost its grip, however, the stories gradually lost their legibility. Moreover, once historical time replaced the timeless eternity, the mythical subjects began to tell the story of transience rather than eternity. They reminded the viewer of timebound, ancient events which by now belonged to the past, much like the personally experienced one-off events; of dramas which took place once upon a time, never to occur again. The task of tying together the past, the present and the future into extratemporal, and thus eternal, duration fell now on the shoulders of artists deprived of the thematic ‘raw stuff’ which once guaranteed in advance the link between the arts and immortality. Now the question was not how to beautifully re-present the immortal themes, but how to make beauty itself immortal – how

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to raise the artistic form of expression to the rank of immortality. Previously, immortality was the raw material in which the artist was to carve his works; now it was up to the artist to shape up an immortal form in a material as fragile, transient and mortal as everything else in the human world. Immortality was now linked to the artwork itself, not to its subject-matter. With the demise of the sacred lore, all possible objects of representation were mortal and their depiction only kept record of their ephemerality. Even the works of ancient masters spoke now of immortality not because they portrayed supra-temporal objects, but only thanks to the otherwise contingent fact that they themselves, being around for a very long time, emerged victorious from the destructive powers of history; presumably, they must have possessed qualities that resisted the flow of time – since they retained the capacity of emotional arousal in spite of the all-devouring appetite of history. And so the modernist art shifted the focus of eternity. But, as much as its predecessors – the mediaeval or the renaissance arts – it was about immortality. Whether it was Otto Rank or Hannah Arendt who pointed out the true cause of all that – the history of arts looks much like a story of an ever-recurring effort to step beyond the time span determined by the brevity of biological life; to add to the universe of fragile and short-lived beings some other entities, immune to the eroding impact of time, entities which stand a chance of being-in-the-world when everything else is out; and so as a desperate effort to cancel out the most inhuman consequences of human mortality. But if this is what arts have been thus far about, then the ways in which the issue of death and immortality is tackled in contemporary culture confronts the arts with a new and totally unfamiliar challenge. The thought of imminent death is hardly ever pleasurable, now no more than a hundred years ago – but we, men and women who happen to live in the late-modern or postmodern world, tend to fear the duration and sameness no less, if not more, than we fear transience and change; we feel intuitively that in the race towards fulfilment ‘to travel hopefully is better than to arrive’. That fulfilment we covet and seek – the only one which the world we inhabit renders sensible and realistic – consists more often than not in perpetual becoming and permanent readiness for change. We are not today identity-builders – we are, not necessarily by our own choice, the choosers of identities. Of many and varied identities, ever more pleasurable and forever flexible identities. More generally – our, the postmodern men and women’s, lives tend to be organized not so much around making things, as around seeking and collecting sensations. Our desires do not desire satisfaction; our



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desires desire desiring. The greatest threat to a desire is a fixed, steady, final moment of fulfilment: the moment when Faust’s wishes to freeze time come true; a Mondrian composition in which nothing can be changed because any change could only be a change for the worse. The idea of a ‘fixed’, immobilized, ultimate state seems equally uncanny and incongruous as the image of the wind that does not blow, the river that does not flow or the rain that does not fall … In the postmodern variety of happy life each and every one of its momentary incarnations is for a time only and until further notice; no gateway passed should be locked up after the passage. For the experience-seekers and sensation-gatherers sunk in the world of temptations and seductions, the awareness of universal mortality is saddening – but it also inspires hope. True, the thought of freezing time once again tempts the postmodern men and women much as it used to seduce their ancestors; just think of the postmodern ‘instant immortality’ of ecstasy, flow, orgasm and other widely popular and desired kinds of ‘ultimate experiences’. But unlike their modern ancestors, the late-modern men and women would baulk in horror at the prospect of time grinding to a halt once and for all. We may say that eternity has lost much of its old charm and attraction. For the postmodern self, ‘being towards death’ pulsates with life, while eternity has all the attraction of a graveyard. With things immortal one can associate. But the entertaining things, things calculated to supply pleasurable sensations, are there to be consumed. Consumption is the very opposite of immortality. The association does not diminish an immortal being; on the contrary, the supra-temporality feeds on the duration and continuity of temporal contacts – suspension of the latter would presage the death of the work of art, cancelling its assumed immortality. The object of consumption, on the other hand, is used up in the course of its consumption, loses some or all of its substance, shrinks or vanishes altogether. As such, consumption casts arts into a role entirely different from the role once performed, that of the recompensing and balancing out the transience and mortality of things which belong to mundane quotidianity. Resistance to consumption secured the art’s link with perpetual duration. The same resistance, however, would make it useless in a world of cultural products calculated, as George Steiner observed, for ‘maximal impact and instant obsolescence’. Being part of consumption may well trigger a far-reaching transformation in the form of artwork. Let me point out that by ‘using up’ of the object of art in the process of its consumption I do not mean its destruction in the corporeal, physical sense – like in the case of a paperback bestseller

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bought in a railway newsstand at the beginning of the journey and thrown into the railway rubbish after its completion. What is at stake here is something else: the unavoidable fading of interest, loss of the ‘entertaining value’, of the capacity to arouse desire and pleasurable emotions. Works of art approached as the source of entertainment tend to become tediously familiar, losing its original ability to foment strong feelings, to shock and to surprise; it promises the wearisome sentiment of déjà vu instead of adventure. To restore (again, for a brief period only) its lost power of excitement, the artwork must be drawn out of the grey mass of quotidianity as a one-off event – that is, be given the modality of being which is the exact opposite of eternal duration. Consider the recent successive resuscitations of the ‘entertaining value’ of Matisse, Vermeer or Picasso through endowing the exhibitions of their work with the character of highly publicized, carnival-like, festive events – and making them the talk of the town and the target of mass pilgrimages; and compare the interest beefed up by those exhibitions with the lukewarm interest of ‘normal’ visitors to the museums where master works can be daily seen and admired. To become an object of desire, a source of sensation – in other words, to be of value to the denizens of the postmodern society of consumers – the phenomenon of art is re-centred around the event of the exhibition. The ‘artistic experience’ is generated primarily by the temporal event, only secondarily, if at all, by the extemporal value of the work of art itself. It is mostly the work of art exhibited in a widely publicized event that meets the standards set for the proper object of consumption, and which stands the chance of maximizing the shock while avoiding the risk of boredom or ennui which would strip it of its desire-arousing, entertaining value. It is the modality of a one-off event, a sensation by definition short-lived and until-further-notice, into which the life-strategy of the postmodern collectors of sensations casts all the objects which come within their field of attention. Everything in the lived world is now a potential source of emotion, and everything is evaluated and mapped inside that world according to the volume of that potential. Postmodernity is the time of the deconstruction of immortality; the time of eternity decomposed into a string of episodes that admit of no other yardsticks of purpose than those of the instant satisfaction; the time of replacing the gold standard of fame with the paper money of notoriety. There is nothing peculiar about the treatment awarded to the works of art; they share in the fate of all other ingredients of the Lebenswelt. And yet this postmodern attitudinal upheaval exerts on the condition of arts a more decisive, deeper and further-reaching influence, than on any other object of experience.



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The endemic propensity of the sensation-gatherer to avidly consume (use up, exhaust) the sensation-arousing qualities of things and events causes an accelerated devaluation of the objects of sensations and yet faster ageing of all novelty. That propensity would not find an adequate outlet in the realm of extra-temporal objects, unchangeable as the very eternity which such objects evoke. Feeding on change and movement, it seeks rather objects cut to the measure of its own attributes: like itself impatient, ever changing, chameleon-like. The question is, whether the arts which accommodate to that kind of demand, which satisfy the needs of the sensation-gatherer, can still remain loyal to the art’s traditional, both premodern and modern, function – that of opening up the transcendental dimension of human being-in-the-world, of bringing into the world of transience and temporality elements which withstand the passage of time and defy the universal rule of ageing, oblivion and disappearance? Or is it rather the opposite that is the case? Perhaps the postmodern version of ‘instant immortality’, immortality lived through as a momentary sensation, immortality with an in-built gene of passing away, immortality temporary and mortal like everything else in the human world, forebodes the decline and even demise of that traditional function of the arts? Installations, put together for the duration of an exhibition only, and taken apart again on the day of its closure; ‘happenings’, lasting no longer than the hold of the passer-by’s attention; wrapping the Brooklyn Bridge in sheets of plastic for as long as the through traffic is stopped … Artworks of this type are born, like everything else in the postmodern world, with a stamp of imminent death. They are collected by the gatherer of sensations thanks to the cosy and familiar story of transience and inconsequentiality, not thanks to the disturbing reminder of something higher and longer lasting than daily concerns. Is it possible to carve eternal values in the clay of transient emotions? Is it possible to make transience itself into subject-matter of arts that can hope for eternal value? It is out of such questions, I guess, that Damien Hirst’s experiments derive: how to force the flesh, that incarnation of mortality itself, out of the vicious sequence of senility, disintegration and disappearance. Malcom Morley, for a change, wants to transform the destruction itself into a creative act, thereby pulling out its sinister sting which is its monopoly of irrevocability; Morley’s ‘Disaster’ depicts destruction joined in an intimate embrace with creation – it contains an artwork partly destroyed yet reconstructed in part after the destruction, and put together after all that in such a way that it is no more possible to tell what is the original work, what is its wreck, what is the reconstruction from the ruin and what is the effacement of the

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reconstructing feat. Braco Dimitrijevic’s ‘Passant que j’ai rencontré à 11h09, Paris 1971’ shows huge portraits of an accidentally met passer-by hung by the author on the streets of Paris; the accident of hanging up the portraits pulls out the accidental passer-by and the accident of meeting him out of the sea of anonymous, faceless pedestrians and unnoted or forgotten, inconsequential events; but it lifts them, programmatically, only for a fleeting moment, to cast it a moment later back into the abyss of non-being. Towards the end of the 1960s Sol Lewitt introduced into the common vocabulary the name of the ‘conceptual art’, referring to successive attempts to salvage the extra-temporality of arts from the whirlwind of brief and ephemeric episodes. ‘Conceptual art’, according to the sense given to it by Lewitt, is to accomplish this miracle by thoroughly separating and isolating what is in the arts potentially eternal, since immune to the flow of time and exempt from the laws of physics or biology, from all material, and therefore perishable, forms of its expression; from everything, in other words, which can be perceived with the senses and therefore must be from the start contaminated by their contingency, fragility and transience. The essence of art is in the idea, not in its implementations, which could be many and different, but equally inconclusive and mortal. The inevitability of death is vested with the material, tangible, sensual realizations of the idea – but not in the idea itself. Lawrence Wiener drew from Lewitt’s ruminations the logical conclusion, that the art is confined to the verbal record of thought – while its physical replicas or incarnations must be abandoned to the mercy of the recipients, to whom the eternal contents of art serve as guidelines or stimuli for many different, yet always momentary experiences. What follows from all this? Something does, for sure, but I find it difficult to say. Will the arts manage to be the last rampart of immortality, deconstructed with zeal and relish by the joint forces of the consumer market and the postmodern gatherers of sensations? And if they do not manage to fulfil that role, will this be the end of the long romance of humankind with the supra-human, the extra-temporal, the immortal? And if the latter would indeed happen, what would be the lot of culture, which was born of that romance and grew in its shade and under its protection? I cannot give answers to these questions with any degree of certainty. But I am quite sure that asking these questions is for the arts, and not only for them, the same thing as the issue to which these questions refer: asking them, indeed, is for the arts the question of life and death.

11 Actors and Spectators(2004)

Remarkable: Edward Gordon Craig, the High Priest of the modernist theatre,1 had no room for the viewers. He would probably prefer a theatre without an auditorium: whoever sits on the spectators’ benches or chairs, is an unnecessary, indeed a damaging distraction. Spectators are notoriously unruly and unpredictable: an element of disorder in the perfect order for which a modernist theatrical production should struggle; so many unknown variables in the equation meant to allow one, just one, solution named perfection (that is, a state which can not be bettered and in which any change could be only a change to the worse). There was no room for the audience, and particularly for an active, participating, involved and engaged audience, among the conditions set by Craig for the ‘dignity’ of the theatre. Order, that strugglingfor-perfection order which the modern managerial mind resolved to construct, was to be a serious business – stern, strict and rigorous. It could not and would not be a hostage to capricious licences and wanton antics of the obstreperous, refractory crowds. As a matter of fact, actors did not score much better in Craig’s modernist theatre; how wonderful it would be to make them redundant having replaced the whimsical, obstreperous, incurably idiosyncratic humans with an Übermarionette2 – the ‘inanimate figure’ ‘subordinate to the total design’, a figure that ‘will not compete with life’, but above all be drilled in unquestionable obedience to the instruction given by the Director who determines it all.3 In Craig’s theatre, the Director figures larger than life; his is a commanding presence that should reduce everyone else – the spectators, the actors,

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the playwrights – to the role of so many varieties of the raw stuff in which the Director’s design are to be carved or moulded. We may best grasp the essence of Craig’s theatre thinking of it as of a holy mass officiated in the temple of the Managerial Cult. Like in other churches, the congregation had to be seen, but on no account heard – unless ordered to say ‘amen’ at the end of a homily or join in the choral hymn singing. And like in all other instances of modern order-building – the accidental, the contingent, the unplanned, the not-fully-controlled, the getting-out-of-hand was the main threat to the success of the project, and its main adversary. The viewers were an epitome of both. In Craig’s vision of a fully and meticulously designed, managed and monitored theatre where nothing was left to chance, the Apollonian idea of art has been resurrected after more than two millennia of a side-burner existence – founding in its modern incarnation its most complete fulfilment yet. That vision crowned the slow yet resolute and relentless, as well as steadily power-assisted, retreat of the theatre from the street, the town square and the village common, those unconquerable Dionysian kingdoms, into the interiors of the custommade buildings cut off from the unmanaged and unmanageable chaos of daily life by several walls with but a few, all closely guarded, entrances. Inside the buildings, the spectators, divided between the stalls, balconies, galleries and ‘the gods’ as the strict class divisions of the new world order demanded to observe, and wrapped in darkness to reduce or better yet to exclude all visual communication and so all interaction between them, were positioned away and at a safe distance from the brightly lit stage, where the action was. All that could be done to stifle, and better yet to nip in the bud, the slightest stirrings of a Dionysian impulse, had been done. Theatre followed, or earnestly tried to follow, rules of the modern, closely managed bureaucracy, where (as Max Weber demostrated in great detail) nothing should and nothing was left to chance or to the caprices of annoyingly unmanageable emotions. Few people, like Nietzsche or Artaud, bewailed the already impassable and yet still widening gap between the artifice of theatrical stage and the full-blooded and colourful, if irreverent and vexingly haphazard, life outside. Most modern critics and theorists were concerned however about the opposite threat: that not enough had been done and would be done to achieve the intended effect. Many of them doubted whether the ultimate emancipation of the theatre from the street could be attained at all. Theatre was after all about performance, and a performance without witnesses is very



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nearly a contradiction in terms. However hard they tried, theatre managers would not get rid of the audience altogether. Other works of art you may put in a museum and lock the door; the treasures will still be there, ready to deliver an artistic experience whenever the door is open again to let in a coach-load of tourists or occasional paying visitors. They won’t change depending on whether anyone or no one is inside and however many people pass by. That quality of objets d’art was relished by their collectors; the fact that they could be hidden from view of all but their sole owners added to their ennobling potency; exclusion added to their value. For that reason, art objects may claim to exist for their own sake. Their authors may credibly declare their independence from their current or prospective ‘users’ and even recast the emptiness of the gallery into the mark of distinction and a matter of pride. Avant-garde modernist painters did this indeed – presenting the absence of viewers as the clinching proof, if a proof was needed, of the sublimity of their works as distinct from and militating against the coarseness and/or vulgarity of the common taste that rules the world on the other side of walls. Theatre managers could hardly do the same. A theatrical objet d’art comes into being only when the actors and the spectators meet face to face. This is why at the height of the modernist avant-garde (and just as its terminal decline set in) its spokesmen declared the theatre and ‘theatricality’ as the arts’ public enemy number one. As Michael Fried put it in 1968,4 theatre and theatricality are in sharp conflict not just with the spirit of modern painting and sculpture, but with the arts in general and with modern artistic sensitivity. Directors and producers may lean over backward to submit les pièces de théàtre to their own vision and their vision alone, and to achieve full control of their implementation – but in this battle they are doomed to fail. They are, indeed, in a ‘heads you win, tails I lose’ situation. Without spectators, their work will remain unfinished; with spectators, they won’t be fully in charge of it. Unlike in painting or sculpture or even music, spectators are a necessary ingredient and inseparable part of theatre as a work of art. In order to do their job properly, theatre creators have to share their authority – o horror of horrors – with the viewers: the profane, the hoi polloi, the philistine, the vulgar. It did not take history much time to prove just how short-sighted the detractors of the theatrical practice were, when scanning the future of arts from the peak of the modernist era and extrapolating from the transient moods of the moment the future shapes of arts and of the society that shapes them. The trends which the modernists believed to be irreversible were to take soon a sudden U-turn; the arrangements trusted to be rock-solid and the assumptions viewed

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as canonical were to be thrown back into the melting pot. The era of ‘liquid modernity’ started – when nothing could hold its shape for long, all settlements openly admitted to be but temporary and ‘until further notice’ – whereas contingency, instead of being dismissed as a temporary ailment crying for cure and soon to be repaired, rose to the rank of the sole permanent feature of the human condition. Thinking people awoke from the dream of the ultimate perfect order, while acting people braced themselves for life lived forever amidst constant change, fragile frames and drifting targets. Under the new circumstances, so different from those hoped for during the modernism’s Sturm und Drang Periode, managers – including the managers of theatre – lost enthusiasm for managing and shifted their sympathy to deregulation, subsidiarizing and hiving off responsibilities. Their sympathies and predilections shifted: they now wished to experiment instead of following the routine, and preferred quick results to long-term designs. Having lost their belief in a risk-free action, they settled for a disorderly environment promising to multiply the opportunities instead of closely supervised routine that might prevent them from catching the chances as they come. Flexibility and improvisation, blazing such trails as no one yet suspected let alone followed, became the axioms of the new managerial creed. And so it soon transpired that of all the arts it was precisely the theatre that had been, from the start, made to the measure of the new liquid modern era’s mentality and demands. The endemic and perennial qualities of the theatre that Craig and others like him tried to extirpate, emerged now as the patterns to which all other branches of art were to adjust and to follow. The features for which Fried and others like him castigated theatre a generation or two earlier were to be recognized now as its major strength. Liquid modern transformations in the human condition played havoc with philosophers’ pursuit of pure art forms while ridiculing the ambitions and dashing the hopes of the preachers of modernist virtues. What we are realizing now, after numerous detours and blind alleys, is that more than any other genre of art the theatre has been naturally, organically, ‘matter of factly’ a liquid modern art – and that this was the case regardless of the kind of play performed, the way the director staged it and the mode of the actor’s behaviour on stage. There were indeed a number of essential, defining features of theatre that distinguished it for centuries from all other forms of art – features which anticipated liquid modern realities and made the theatre, one may say, a prototypically ‘liquid modern’ art avant la lettre. If, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, medium is the message



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– then whatever drama is currently billed, whoever is the dramatist and whatever is the director’s design, the message conveyed over and over again and since time immemorial by the medium called theatre is the aspects of human life that only the realities of liquid modernity were to reveal, put on public display and render, so to speak, ‘selfevident’ as they seem to be to us now. To start with: Peter Brook called his book on theatre – simultaneously a study and a manifesto, published first in 1968 but re-published in 1990 to a general acclaim – The Empty Space. The stage, the centrepoint of the theatre, of that place where actors and spectators meet in the shared effort of unpacking and reprocessing the meanings of things human, is an ‘empty space’: always ready for another event, the space of permanent beginning, or perpetual miracle of creation ab nihilo, as no event is bound, let alone pre-empted, by the event before – nor really pre-designed by the event yet to come. And so whatever play is staged, it is the drama of continuing human creativity, human unboundedness, human under-definition, human compulsive transcendence that is evening by evening put on public display and publicly rehearsed. However long the run of a play, no evening is exactly like another, each being an event in its own right. Each ‘repetition’ is simultaneously an innovation, a new happening. This feature of the theatre – of all and any theatre, of each theatrical event – makes it into a perpetual rehearsal and an ever repeated insight into the arcane mysteries of human life where continuity and discontinuity, tradition and breakthrough meet, clash and merge. Secondly: with each theatrical event the ‘reality’ – that tough, stifling, overpowering and coercive, indomitable and for that reason seemingly ‘super-human’ force ‘out there’, beyond the reach of human understanding and effective action – is revealed as an artful but frail web intermittently woven and ripped open by men and women attracted and repelled by each other; with each theatrical event, that reality appears naked in its contingency, its haphazardness, its ‘it could have happened differently’ or ‘it could have not happened at all’ mode. Its impenetrable and thus incapacitating mystery is cracked and so it frightens no longer; its carefully hidden human origin and provenance are put instead on public display, its meticulously guarded secret of human, all-too-human potency and limitation, is once again broken. Thirdly: theatrical events are live and watched at close quarters as they ‘become’. Much of the way they grow and develop might have been determined in advance by the playwright and the director; most spectators, and certainly the mature and seasoned spectators, are

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aware that this is the case, and yet the labour that went into keeping the action on track is hidden from their view. Spectators watch the action ‘live’, as it emerges ab nihilo, composed step by step by the actors’ lines, moves, gestures. If anything, the autonomy, spontaneity, freedom of acting characters looms on the stage larger than in life; it is well nigh impossible to overlook it. ‘Reality’ as presented in the theatre reveals what the monotonous routine and dull pressures of life outside the theatre walls all too often conceal and sometimes suceed in making all but unthinkable. The ‘reality’ of theatre tells thereby the truth of human existence which the residents of the liquid modern world badly need to know in order to take stock of such responsibilities (for the others as much as for their own fate) as come in a package deal with liberty, and so to live up to the challenges, rich gifts and stern demands of their now inalienable and worrisome freedom. Fourthly: theatrical events are self-enclosed and self-sustained. Even if a play stays on the stage for years on end, each performance may rely solely on the actors’ talents, skills and moods available and deployed on the night. There are ‘good nights’ and ‘bad nights’, and the difference between them has nothing to stand on except the actions taken by the actors, actions that night after night must be taken anew and conducted as if nothing had happened on the previous night – and everyone on the stage and in the auditorium is acutely aware that this is the case: all sorts of things may yet happen, and till the final curtain the prospects of success and failure are in the balance. During the performance, there is a suspension in the air of an altogether different (and ultimately much more enlightening) kind from that known to the spectators of even the most blood-curdling chillers. Each performance is another public exercise and a public lesson in the awesome weight of the word spoken or failed to be spoken, of a gesture made or missed, of a look cast or refused; in the redemption or doom which all of them and each one of them may bring or deny to the deliberate or unwitting partners to human interactions. In the theatre the lines are not dead (and so inconsequential) letters. They breathe, live and act, create or destroy. Theatre is a public display of responsibility rooted in the very circumstance of coming together and staying together in one shared space – that previously ‘empty space’ which waited to be shared through its occupiers’ recognizing each other’s presence and the impact of those presences on each other, talking to each other, and all in all making their life in each other’s company. Such qualities make of the theatre a laboratory in which realities of



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daily life may be scanned and scrutinized at close quarters and in which their inner mechanism may be torn wide open so that the intricate connections nowhere else visible as vividly may be brought into light; and such qualities are special privileges of the theatre nowhere else to be found in such concentration. Having such privileges brings the theatre particularly close to the heart of liquid modern experience and the needs that such experience breeds or invokes. In a world in which there is no one towering vantage point from which all human experience may be surveilled, a world in which all grasped or offered meanings are but suggestions and standing invitations to discussion, argument, re-interpretation and revision, a world in which signs float in the desperate search for meanings while meanings drift in a neverending search for signs – the distinctive marks of the theatre acquire an unprecedented gravity. Whereas all arts are, under liquid modern conditions, bestowed with a crucial role to play, the special features of theatrical art put the theatre among the advance troops of the arts’ collectively carried missionary expedition. This circumstance could not but be duly noted by other arts, as the modernist voyage to the ultimate truth and perfection and the campaigns against the philistine tastelessness of the bourgeois or the vulgarity of ‘mass culture’ that accompanied it ran out of steam, and as the nature and the challenges of living in a liquid modern world became evident. Visual artists – painters and sculptors – turned to happenings, performances and installations, forms of artistic expression that all but blurred the once sacrosant boundary between the theatre bent on ‘events’ that exist solely through a fleeting encounter with the spectators, and other arts – focused as they were throughout their modernist phase on solemnly solid and durable ‘objets d’art’ and waging a continuous war of independence from the volatile, incompetent and unreliable judgement of a fickle public. While never fully admitting that their past resentment of theatre and theatricality was a mistake, visual artists reached for means that heretofore were an exclusive domain of the theatre. Reluctant to renounce their recent enmity, the spokesmen for the new trend (for instance, Richard Kostelanetz or John Cage5) sought other reasons that would explain and justify the turn. They stressed the differences rather than the affinities with the orthodox theatrical modes of expression. First, the motives: what the ‘happenings’ and ‘performances’ strove to achieve was not to graft the theatrical modes of expression onto other visual arts, but to respond to the progressive ‘theatricality’, spectacle-like mode of daily life and contemporary culture in general, in the vein of Guy Debord’s characterization of the emergent ‘society of the spectacle’. Second, the modalities: unlike

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the pre-scripted and meticulously pre-arranged theatrical performances, happenings (as the name shows) are ‘just happening’; they are not designed beforehand and they proceed haphazardly, by their own logic and momentum and in an essentially spontaneous and unpredictable way. In the course of the happening, many different sequences may occur and the organizers neither can nor wish to determine which one of the many possibilities will be chosen.6 Such differences between the theatre and the rest of visual arts, genuine or putative, notwithstanding, the case against the patternsetting role of the theatre does not carry much conviction even for its most keen advocates. The similarities rather than differences between the new forms of artistic expression and the traditional theatre are the most obvious and striking features of the new trends. Most importantly, the advent of happenings and performances (and to a somewhat lesser, yet significant extent also of the installations) signals the shift of the focus from the ‘art object’ to ‘artistic event’, and the bid to involve the public into the process of artistic creation – the two eminently theatrical specialities and the two intentions thus far alien to the practice of visual arts and explicitly rejected in theory by the mainstream visual artists. The stylistic convergence between theatre and other visual arts was in addition spurred by movements on both sides of the division. As ‘happenings’ brought the painters’ and sculptors’ practices closer to those of the theatre actors, the foremost figures in the art of theatre struggled to bring their productions closer to the indeterminacy and contingency characteristic of the happenings. Efforts multiplied to efface the sacrosant boundary between the stage and the auditorium, and between the wings and the scene – the two undertakings meant and hoped to cancel or at least to mitigate the separation between the production and the consumption of an artistic event – and most seminally between the ‘performers’ and the ‘spectators’.7 All too often, performance is moved away from the orthodox specialized buildings and into ‘non-theatrical spaces’, like old warehouses or factories, that are free from the inherited structural constraints and inscribed memories of past segregations and division of roles – allowing instead to bring the actors, technicians and spectators in a close (preferably disorderly and mobile) proximity that prompts all participants to forget the differences of functions assigned in the past to performers and viewers in the development of the event. The next step is yet more radical in its intentions and consequences: moving theatre into the street. In fact, moving the theatre into a foreign land – a move guided not by a desire to conquer



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it, to appropriate, control and administer it, but by the contrary wish to surrender to an alien element and so to expose itself to close encounter with the unknown and to bear the consequences. In the street, the ‘people’ are ‘chez soi’, in their natural habitat – it is the actors and those who guide them or service them who find themselves in an unfamiliar territory and must try hard to fit their actions into the environment commonly used to accommodate an altogether different kind of conduct. The street walkers did not choose the theatre. Their confrontation with the actors and their actions occurs entirely on the theatre’s initiative. The composition of the auditorium, random and accidental from the start, is certain to keep changing all along before the spectacle draws to its end. There is no knowing how the spectators will react as they are not bound by the unspoken rules of decent demeanour that bind those inside the theatre walls as long as they stay inside, and as there are no bouncers at hand to intimidate prospective objectors or remove the troublemakers. Stepping out into the street, the actors consent to be hostages to a fate which they wish only partly, and not at all confidently, to control. They do it in order to lift the passers-by from the rank of mere flâneurs – the passive witnesses and collectors of sensations – up to the dignity of active participants of the performance; indeed, to encourage the spectators to take action, to share responsibility for the flow of events, and perhaps to learn while doing it that their decision to involve or abstention from involvement does make a difference – counts, matters. A theatre play is always a form of discourse. When played in the street where the speakers and the listeners meet on equal footing and no one has the authority to monitor the exchange, that discourse would draw in people who otherwise could remain voiceless. This fateful change may be the outcome of the theatre’s voyage to ‘non-theatrical spaces’. This may also be its new mission, replacing (or perhaps added to) the old ones which theatres since the beginning attempted, sometimes whole- and sometimes half-heartedly, to pursue. Not to teach the spectators morals, but to train them in the difficult, but indispensable art of creating them. To give voice to the numb or forcibly silenced – though not the ventriloquist’s way, by usurping or stealing their speech rights, but through provoking their courage, instilling the will and helping the ability to speak.

12 Listening to the Past, Talking to the Past …(2008)

In 1953, English writer Leslie Poles Hartley published under the title The Go-Between a novel destined to be instantly acclaimed, and to remain exceedingly popular to this very day, thanks partly to Joseph Losey’s widely watched and universally appraised 1970 film adaptation of the same name. One sentence in Hartley’s book has gained particular popularity, reaching the minds and thoughts of many more people yet than the thousands of the book’s readers and the millions who watched the film: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ Whether it was or was not Hartley’s intention, the figure and the task of the ‘go-between’ have since the novel was written been associated with the excruciatingly complex challenge of carrying messages to and fro between the present and the past, between now and then, from things done then to things done now. In 1985, geographer and historian David Lowenthal published a book using the first half of Hartley’s famous sentence, The Past Is a Foreign Country, for the title. In this book he wrote: ‘The miracle of life is cruelly circumscribed by birth and death; of the immensity of time before and after our own lives we experience nothing.’ The past, just like the future, are ‘foreign countries’, terra incognita (though the past, unlike the future, will remain so to us forever). Obviously, we can’t experience or have already experienced the time that will follow after our death. But also of the time preceding our death, the time of which we know for sure that it did happen, ‘we experience nothing’. And yet we feel, deeply and painfully, that we need to; we can’t reach that ‘foreign country’, yet we know we



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can stop trying to reach it only at our peril. We feel that the past, though by now voiceless, has something important to tell us. And we realize, shivering and trembling, frightened and exasperated, that of the content and meaning of whatever response may arrive from that infinitely remote and inaccessible land in answer to our desperate, endlessly repeated questions, we won’t be sure; and that the authority and veracity of that response will forever remain in question. The past may be a foreign country, but this is the one and only foreign country that we certainly won’t ever visit. The boundary between being and non-being, the most haunting, seductive and repelling of all boundaries we know and may know of, is one between seeing and visualizing, experiencing and dreaming, knowing and imagining – or fantasizing … On the origins of one of his remarkable short stories, ‘Averroës’s Search’, the great Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges said that he had tried to narrate the process of ‘failure’, of ‘defeat’ – like the defeat of a theologian seeking final proof of God’s existence, of an alchemist seeking the philosopher’s stone, of a technology buff seeking a perpetuum mobile, or of a mathematician seeking the method of squaring the circle. But then Borges decided that ‘a more poetic case’ would be one ‘of a man who sets himself a goal that is not forbidden to others, but is to him’. So he chose the case of Averroës, the great Muslim philosopher, who set out to translate Aristotle’s Poetics but, ‘closed within the orb of Islam, could never know the meaning of the terms tragedy and comedy’. Indeed, ‘without ever having suspected what a theatre is’, Averroës would have to fail when trying ‘to imagine what a drama is’. But a moment later came a reflection, an awakening, sobering thought: ‘I felt’, wrote Borges, ‘that Averroës, trying to imagine what a play is without ever having suspected what a theatre is, was no more absurd than I, trying to imagine Averroës yet with no more material than a few snatches from Renan, Lane and Asin Palacios’. Knowingly or not, Averroës and Borges found themselves in pretty much the same quandary. Not knowing what theatre is, Averroës could only surmise what a tragedy or a comedy is like; but knowing what theatre is, Borges could only surmise the impossibility of imagining what a play is – knowledge and ignorance brought similarly frail, elusive and unreliable offerings. There was no solution to that quandary, no exit from the mess in sight. Attempts to attain knowledge of things unexperienced and no longer available to be experienced were obviously doomed to fail. The alternative to stopping our search of knowledge was, however, yet more awesome. Because, as Borges’s sad afterthought on all those musings suggests: ‘just when I stop believing in him, “Averroës” disappears’.

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As a topic for a wonderful story told by a great writer, the case of Averroës selected by Borges proved indeed ‘more poetic’. But looked at from the less sublime and inspired, more mundane and humdrum perspective of us – the ‘ordinary’ men and women – it also proves, ironically, more prosaic: indeed, all too familiar and ordinary (‘banal’, one is tempted to opine). Only few intrepid souls try to construct a perpetuum mobile or find a philosopher’s stone, but trying in vain to understand what others have no difficulty in understanding is an experience we all know only too well from our own experience, and learn daily anew. The story of the adventure shared by Averroës and Borges was an artistic recycling of the all too familiar experience; of a plight we all know from our own experience. I just said ‘we all know’. Correction is, however, called for: we all could know – were we to pause for a moment or two in order to soberly calculate the chances and limits of our understanding. But this we seldom do, immersed as we all tend to be in the timeand energy-consuming need of facing up to our daily challenges, troubles and tasks. If we want to know what we could know but have neglected to learn, we need some time off from all that. Reading Lowenthal or Borges is such ‘time off’. In ‘real time’, that daily and mundane time from which ‘time off’ is a temporary leave of absence, we manage not to be bothered by the limits of our understanding, or by the exact layout of the border that separates reality from imagination. In that ‘real’, ordinary and routine time, a settlement (always renegotiable) between knowledge and ignorance, between reality and fantasy – shaky, fragile and transient as they might be – must suffice. And it does suffice – up to the moment of crude awakening, that is. When that moment arrives, we need help. A ‘great artist’ is an artist who is able to offer that help. There are artists of words and artists of images. Similarly to reading Borges, a visit to an art gallery is ‘time off’. Though such a visit is not always taken in order to reflect. More often than not, we go to the art gallery for fun and relaxation – ‘pure’ fun and ‘pure’ relaxation: for a splash of bright colour amidst the dull and sombre greyness of quotidianity. Or we go there just following the crowd and feeling good for the fact of being in the crowd: itself a relief from the solitude of daily struggles and pursuit. Occasionally, however, by design or by default, visiting a gallery brings rewards greater than those routinely bargained for: suddenly, we are confronted with a great work of art, the creation of a great artist. With an artwork that makes us aware of the concerns that haunt us without being aware of where they come from and why they have chosen us to haunt. With a work that asks us to see what we normally fail to notice, that



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which we gloss over, or which we try hard to overlook. The work of an artist who has managed to give visible and tangible shape to our hopes – and to our suspicion of their futility and our fear of their being dashed. Mirosław Bałka is one such artist. And the concerns he distils, purifies and lays bare for us to notice, to contemplate, to reflect upon, grasp and comprehend, are fundamental to our being-in-the-world: concerns with that cruelty, with which, to quote Lowenthal again, our life is ‘circumscribed by life and death’. And with another cruelty, that with which our comprehension of the reason of our being-inthe-world (and of what has made us such as we are and/or caused us to wish to become) has been circumscribed by the limits imposed by the intractable foreignness of the past. Bałka is one of those great artists who, fully armed with astounding artistic vision, in our name and for our benefit confronts those cruelties point-blank. And who brings from that confrontation legible lessons for the use of all others who would wish and dare to follow suit. Lessons in resuscitating the past’s power to speak; and lessons in listening to the past speaking. Lessons for all those among us who crave for coming to terms with their – our – past. And those who are ready to learn that their craving to satisfy that craving is unlikely to be satisfied, ever. In the centre of Warsaw, a city burnt to the ground and raised from the ground again, all in the living memory of its inhabitants, Foksal is one of the few streets that managed to escape. From among the noisy and incoherent mixture of past times and their relics that make up contemporary Warsaw, Foksal stands out (one is tempted to say serenely, majestically) by its apparent immunity or indifference to the twists and turns of history. In the mist of our own, madly accelerating time, sliced ever more thinly into ever shorter episodes, Foksal is one of the few Warsaw streets that stands for continuity, timelessness and cohesion, the daughter of all. The past seems closer here, all around and within reach, just as God seems to be from the top of a mountain range. It was a few hundred yards away from Foksal Street, but in a gallery with the same heavily symbolic name, that during Mirosław Bałka’s exhibition the eyes of passers-by (once the evening dusk descended, covering up thoroughly the wounds and scars of the walls that in daylight testify to the passing of time), were drawn to a subtly glowing gravestone that hung high above their heads – one of its halves protruding into the street from a window of the upper-floor gallery, the other hiding inside. The gravestone was turned upside down, with the cross pointing towards the sidewalk. To make the puzzle yet more bewildering, a plastic frog was perched on what would ordinarily be the underside of the stone, now recast

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as its top. A graveyard is the epitome of the bygone past. And like the past, we see only the top of it, that top following stubbornly our moves and equally stubbornly covering up all things underneath – no wonder that Bałka’s grave was upside down, seen as it was, by only one half of the surface. To see the other, they would need to enter another space, which (just like the gallery after dusk) was closed to them. It would be easier, perhaps (but also pointless), to defy all those odds, were one a happy-go-lucky frog rather than a worrying human). There are three kinds of stuff that appear most often in Mirosław Bałka’s compositions: ashes, salt and soap. Ashes, of course, are what are left of us humans once we die. Salt is what is left in the form of sediment from tears and sweat, the two substances which we, humans, exude in profusion when we are still alive. And soap is the thing that we, humans, use daily in the hope of prolonging life and thus postponing death. Between the three stuffs, the ‘cruel circumscription’ of our being-in-the-world is ensconced. And so is the work of Mirosław Bałka, the great artist who wants us to recognize, acknowledge and accept our unchosen yet daily-recreated human mode of being – though not to reconcile that with that mode’s non-negotiability.

13 The Spectre of Barbarism– Then and Now (2008)

Ancient Greeks coined the word ‘barbaros’ as a wholesale name for peoples inhabiting the lands around them who did not speak Greek. People named ‘barbaric’ were not necessarily worse and inferior or for that matter ‘less human’ than the Greeks who gave them this name. They were just different. They were non-Greeks. Not like ‘us’, the Hellenes. And how did we, the Hellenes, know that they were unlike ‘us’? Because we were not sure that they would understand what we wished to tell them, just as we were not – could not be – sure what, if anything, they tried to tell us. To cut the long story short – we, the Greeks, and they, the barbarians, could not communicate; this it is at least what we’ve suspected, and this is why we were not particularly eager to talk to them. Once set, that suspicion proved self-perpetuating: not trusting barbarians enough to feel at ease in their company, we’ve had little or no chance to put our suspicion to a test – let alone to refute it … In the absence of communication people confronting each other can’t be sure that they understand what the moves and gestures of others mean: what the others’ intentions are, what the others are likely to do next. Or at least they are afraid that they would not understand the message in case they addressed them or were by them addressed. Perhaps the barbaric (incomprehensible) people had, just like we did, their norms and rules of conduct, principles how to proceed, logics, ethical commandments – but even if they did, all those things vital to making their conduct ‘understandable’, that is regular and predictable, would have remained to us obscure and misty, a mystery that needs yet to be cracked or worse yet – can’t be

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cracked at all. For that reason, it is better to reduce mutual contacts to a bare minimum and to keep one’s distance. The mistrust and the distance tend to be self-propelling and self-reinvigorating, while their justifications tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Purely and simply, barbarians were strangers. When one meets a friend or an enemy, one knows right away where one is, what to expect and what to do. But meeting a stranger means feeling ill at ease: baffled, confused and unsure what to expect and what to do. And when people feel unsure, they tend to be anxious, apprehensive – afraid. Fears born of uncertainty are, as the strangers themselves, vague and unfocused – un-specific. They are like the fears felt by someone walking across a vast field on a moonless night, or driving a car through a heavy fog – for a simple reason that hints and clues, orientation points and familiar landmarks that serve us normally to find our way, are nowhere to be seen. Indeed, when confronting strangers and unsure of their intentions, we tend to say that we are ‘in the dark’ or ‘in the fog’. We say that because finding oneself in the dark or in a fog, just as finding oneself in the presence of strangers, is an uncomfortable and unnerving situation since, in the dark or in a fog, everything may happen, while there is no knowing what will. And if everything may happen with equal yet undefined probability, nothing can be stopped or averted. Darkness is pregnant with dangers. Dangers, and yet more the invisible, unspecified and unpredictable dangers, awake fears. This is not the sole reason for the ‘barbaros’ (and all other strangers for that matter) to be resented and kept at a distance. Another reason to feel uncomfortable in their presence is that they demonstrate vividly the possibility of an alternative mode of life; the awareness that there are alternative modes of life is discomforting, since it represents a challenge to the mode accepted and practised routinely, no-questions-asked and no-doubts-voiced. The sight of strangers questions the tacitly assumed wisdom and propriety, but above all the ‘self-evidence’, the ‘naturalness’ of our own mode of life; as Martin Heidegger would have said, the sight of strangers casts the ‘normal’ way of life from the category of zuhanden (of things we easily handle but do not think about) into that of vorhanden (of things we can’t tackle without thinking first). It forces thereby reflection and doubts. It exposes and obtrusively displays the alternative possibilities that need to be repressed for the sake of tranquillity, balance of mind, clear conscience and self-confidence. It unmasks one’s own way of life as but one of many ways of life possible – a choice among choices; and choices, as everybody knows only too well, may be right or wrong. It prompts therefore self-scrutiny and calls for



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self-justification – perhaps even for self-apology. What in the absence of strangers used to come and stay matter-of-factly, in their presence needs to be argued into existence and daily defended to survive. In Tristes tropiques Claude Lévi-Strauss suggested that throughout ages two essential strategies were adopted by tribes or nations, intermittently, to deal with the obnoxious and irritating presence of ‘strangers’ in their neighbourhood or in their midst. He called those strategies, respectively, anthropophagic and anthropoemic. The first strategy, he proposed, consisted in ‘devouring’ the strangers – bodily or spiritually: by literally eating them up in the case of cannibalism, or through enforced or power-assisted cultural assimilation in the modern times of nation-building. In the first instance, the noxious ‘problem’ of strangers was ‘resolved’ by ending strangers’ lives and so making them disappear; in the second, by strangers losing their different identity and ceasing to be strangers; in both instances however the strangers tended to be ‘swallowed’ and ‘devoured’ – absorbed, digested and used to enrich and reinforce the body or spirit of their devourers. The second strategy consisted on the contrary in ‘vomiting’ the strangers: isolating them from the ‘natives’, exterminating or forcing to leave. The ‘problem’ of strangers was in this case ‘resolved’ through annihilation, physical separation or termination of contact. There was however a third way in which the resolution of the ‘problem of strangers’ was pursued – and the historical twists and turns of the idea of ‘barbarism’ offer its perhaps most salient example. As offence was believed by many to be the most effective form of defence, the term ‘barbaros’ lost its original value-neutrality shortly after having been coined; from a term of description, it turned into a judgemental sentence. As soon as the Greeks, particularly after beating off the Persian invaders, began to look at surrounding lands as the site for prospective expansion, conquest, annexation and colonization, the ‘barbaros’, in addition to being different and strange, were proclaimed inferior. Assignment to ‘barbarity’ began to equal the verdict of primitivism, coarseness, savagery, immaturity or retardation; the charge of the refusal, insufficient zeal or downright incapacity to reach the standards of excellence set by the people self-defining as ‘superior’ (who happened also to be sitting on the examining board). Since they ignored or explicitly rejected those standards, or showed to be unable to meet them, ‘barbarians’ could not but be viewed as ‘less human’, ‘not fully human’ or ‘subhuman’ – and treated accordingly: patronizingly or punitively, gently or cruelly, but in each case with contempt yet without much scruples. It was in that new, value-laden sense, that the terms ‘barbarians’

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and ‘barbarism’ were inherited by the modern era, appropriated and adopted to serve (to promote and justify) the modernizing Europe’s bid to a world-wide superiority and the planet-wide rule. The notion of ‘barbarians’ became a synonym of having been stopped and held at the lower stage of the historic progress, which was believed to lead towards an orderly, policée, civilized and refined society: stuck at a stage which the advanced European nations have already left behind, never to return. To lift the barbarians, with or against their own will, from their stagnation and backwardness, became the ‘white man’s mission’ and ‘white man’s burden’; but the proof that they are fit to be raised to the level of civilization was to be provided by the barbarians themselves (though the acceptance or rejection of that proof was the exclusive prerogative of their civilized judges). Until that happens, ‘barbarians’ were to be treated as their status demanded and justified: as creatures to whom the inborn liberty of ‘man and citizen’ do not apply (and in the vocabulary later conceived by the Nazis, as ‘unwertes Leben’). Civilized norms stopped at the outer frontiers of civilization. With the advent of civilization, being a barbarian meant being pronounced guilty and duly convicted on the ground of the accusation alone. ‘No-appeal-allowed’ death verdict having been already issued by the indomitable laws of history, it was left to the white man to take up the burdensome task of its execution. Barbarism was to be extirpated, and in case it couldn’t be destroyed separately from its carriers, the barbarians themselves had to be removed from the world, carrying barbarism with them to their graves. Not that the Spanish conquistadores (or any other conquerors for that matter) felt much need for a ‘verdict of history’ when they used their swords or guns to murder millions of Indians who stood in the way to Inca or Maya gold; as the Spanish priest Bartholomé de las Casas observed already in 1552, ‘the reason for killing and destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the Christians have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold, and to swell themselves with riches in a very brief time’.1 Nor was such need felt by the millions of Europeans shooting out, decimating with imported diseases and addictions or starving to death the natives standing in the way to the land they coveted (as David Stannard recently noted, ‘the destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world’).2 Denigration and condemnation of ‘barbarism’ was needed by political philosophers and the holders, spokesmen and court poets of the powers-that-be who struggled to re-present the acts of deva­station and destruction as the creation of order and civilized



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harmony, and mass murder as the inescapable price of progress and ‘a price most certainly worth paying’ (as Madeleine Albright would repeat a couple of centuries later, referring to the death by malnutrition of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children as the result of the sanctions imposed on Iraq by the ‘community of civilized nations’). It was needed by ethical philosophers struggling to save the ‘Whig image of history’ as the record of a triumphant, unstoppable march of reason towards ultimate victory over passions, over the havoc which passions play with the human condition and over the resulting chaos – and so to add the jewel of superior morality to the white man’s royal crown, and (obliquely) dignity to the white man’s compulsive order-building (i.e. differentiating, segregating, categorizing, filing, tagging) obsession. To cut the long story short: for several centuries of modern history the concept of ‘barbarism’ served the cause of world conquest. It provided the fig leaf hoped to hide the ugly and shameful atrocities of imperialism and colonialism. It allowed to ‘reverse the charges’: to shift the ethical opprobrium and moral condemnation from the murderers onto their victims. This shift served as perhaps the most clever of contraptions invented and deployed in the long history of the ‘blaming the victims’ stratagem; but it was not the only semantic sleight-of-hand in the chronicles of the ‘barbarism’ idea. When the word ‘barbaric’ is heard today, it is cruelty, mercilessness, atrocity, brutality, viciousness, ruthlessness and heartlessness that jump first to mind, topped by the harming of the innocent and by random murder. And above all, by violence: forcing others, through physical pain or under threat of its infliction, to do things they would not otherwise do, or forcing them to desist from doing things they would. Originally, all those denotations of the term ‘barbaric’ were attributed to people classified as ‘barbarians’, that is to the victims of the punitive exploits undertaken by those responsible for the attribution; exploits that could escape the name of ‘barbaric’ only if presumed to serve a noble purpose, and only if it was assumed that that preciousness of purpose justifies the baseness of the means. Deux poids, deux mesures: barbarism was their cruelty – our cruelty was civilization (in its original meaning referring to the proselytizing, uplifting activity of ‘civilizing’ and not to an already-achievedand-stable condition, as it tends to refer today). There was a tacit assumption in all acts of attribution: even if they carry all the features presumed in the definition of barbarism, activities can be only denominated ‘barbaric’ if they serve an odious or otherwise contemptible cause. And by axiomatic, though seldom explicitly spelled out, rule, odious and contemptible were causes that were not ours.

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Semantic contortions of the ‘civilization vs barbarism’ opposition are derivatives of the notorious ambivalence that haunts the idea of ‘violence’. It is common knowledge that application of force to sustain social order is well-nigh universal and perhaps unavoidable; no kind of rule and no power regime is known to have managed without. It is, however, equally common to set apart two quite differently evaluated kinds of enforcement – ‘violence’ being one of them, and ‘coercion’ another; and clearly it is not the empirically describable features of the forces applied, indistinguishable as they tend to be, that provide the basis for the distinction. The true criterion by which ‘violence’ and ‘coercion’ tend to be set apart is that of legitimacy: violence is, in the last account, an illegitimate coercion, whereas coercion is a legitimate violence … And the quality of ‘legitimacy’ is not a descriptive term, but a matter of evaluation – power-assisted both in thought and in deed. As all evaluative terms, it is ‘essentially contested’, and that contest is arguably the hard core of all and any power struggle. The right to set apart the legitimate and illegitimate applications of force, the right to draw the line separating them from each other and keeping them separate, and so the right to set them apart authoritatively and effectively, is the principal stake of all and any power struggle. Thanks to that power struggle the idea of ‘barbarism’ is set to imitate a ping-pong ball, and indeed to play the role which the ball performs in that other, sporting contest: defeated is the player on whose half of the ping-pong table the ball has landed and stayed, and the art of winning consists in getting rid of the ball, promptly, by returning it to the other part of the table … ‘Barbarism’ is a denomination everyone wishes to disown and all gladly concede to those whom they dislike or hate; and once conceded, all want it to stay where it landed – insisting in case of un-clarity that, nonetheless, all proofs to the contrary, it does. Up to this point the similarity between the fate of a ping-pong ball and that of the charge of barbarism is complete. There is also, however, a seminal difference between the two. In ping-pong matches umpires are employed to approve one of the contradictory contentions as correct, thereby refuting the other. They can do so, since the statute book which all contenders have been obliged and have promised to obey equips the umpire with powers supreme to that of the players, and with the right to take unchallengeable, no-appeal-allowed decisions. In the power struggle between states, nations, cultures, faiths and classes, no such statute



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books have, however, been written, and no umpires are present with powers remotely reminiscent of that enjoyed by an average football or tennis judge. Antagonists in the power struggle are therefore free to use the term ‘barbarism’ to condemn the enemy and so to claim high moral ground for themselves and for the cause they claim to defend and promote – however cruel and outrageous might be the means deployed for the sake of that cause and however severe the pain they inflict on their enemy. As the late American presidential candidate and life-long senator Barry Goldwater suggested, ‘extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice … moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue’, meaning that in the struggle against the enemies of ‘civilized values’ and of the ‘civilized way of life’ one is justified to use any means – also the ‘extreme’ means which if deployed by those on their receiving side would be most certainly censured as barbaric. And he was far from alone in making such a suggestion. As Philip Zimbardo abundantly demonstrated in his most recent study3 – the war-time practices of the US, a country widely praised as the pinnacle and standard-bearer of the ‘civilized values’, appeared to take many or most of their leaves from Goldwater’s teachings. For instance, in the prison fortress Abu Ghraib (in which, according to General Janis Karpinski’s testimony, 80–85% of the more than a thousand imprisoned men, women and children were locked for no better reason than ‘being in the wrong place at a wrong time’), the soldiers of the 372 Military Police Corps, guided by private investigators hired by the American administration, subjected prisoners to systematic spiritual and bodily torture as if following, item by item, the methods of ‘de-individualization’ and ‘dehumanization’ listed by Philip Zimbardo as routinely associated with barbarism. But yet more telling than the acts of inhuman cruelty perpetrated by the soldiers ordered to be prison guards was the way in which the American establishment reacted to the publication of incriminating evidence in the press (treatment of prisoners in Guantánamo, another prison widely suspected of similar practices, was never publicly investigated – because unlike in Abu Ghraib, there was no local whistle-blower of the Joseph Danby kind, daring to deliver the photographs where they should have been delivered). Under the pressure of world opinion, a hunt of culprits began, a search of ‘rotten apples’ – but never (as Zimbardo suggested it should) of the ‘rotten barrel’ that caused or allowed the healthy apples to rot. Soldiers who photographed the scenes of torture were brought to trial and sentenced – but not those in command who pushed them to ‘obtain results’ at all costs, and approved of their practices, probably convinced that ‘extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice’.

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This is not a one-off case that can be explained or argued away by pointing to some specific, abnormal, exceptional circumstances unlikely to be repeated, and liable to be prevented from repeating by more energetic monitoring of subordinates by their superiors, the self-appointed guardians of the civilized order. Everywhere, and at all times, the regimes presiding over ‘civilized orders’ exercised their sovereign entitlement to make exceptions. Rules of civilized conduct always had their limits, as some people, presumed to be undeserving of a civilized treatment, were a priori excluded: stripped of the ‘human rights’ which the civilized order was meant to guarantee and protect. They were excluded on the same ground which Goldwater invoked to justify the exception he advocated: because they were described as unable or unwilling to follow the rules of civilized life, because they lacked the qualities one needs to possess to follow such rules, because they were flawed humans, subhuman, not really human in ‘your and mine understanding of the word’. Each civilized order surrounds itself with a sort of frontier-land ‘cordon sanitaire’, and uses rich repertory of barbaric expedients to keep that cordon impassable. Civilization uses barbarism as its weapon: sometimes openly, though most of the time clandestinely and surreptitiously. As Diane Abbott recently pointed out,4 “How much easier it is on the conscience to pocket the profits from your slave plantation, or put in your shift as a concentration camp guard, if you are able to console yourself with the notion that these people are not human’ (emphasis added). Quite recently Italy’s highest appeal court ruled that it was acceptable to discriminate against Roma on the grounds that ‘all Gypsies were thieves’.5 And when the thugs of Naples, wielding iron bars and arson devices, descended on Roma and Sinti camps around the town because of the rumours that a baby girl had been abducted by a Gypsy woman, the reaction of Roberto Maroni, the interior minister of Berlusconi’s democratically elected government, was that ‘this is what happens when Gypsies steal babies’, while his Northern League party boss and also a minister in the same cabinet, Umberto Bossi, declared (with a blessing for ‘the people’ and cen­sorious sarcasm for the ‘political class’) that ‘the people do what the political class isn’t able to do’. The Guardian columnist Seumas Milne muses that, given the climate in Europe with its present state of acute uncertainty and high anxiety, the resurgence of barbarism now reached in Italy can happen anywhere. As if to confirm that dark premonition, Martin Kettle, another columnist of the same paper, refers to the practices already operated in most European countries with the unanimous endorsement, and encouragement, of the highest



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EU authorities and in a stark contradiction to the defining traits of the ‘civilized order’. Civilization, he suggests, is about the individual’s right not to be stopped and searched without reasonable specific suspicion, not to be detained without knowing why or without consulting a lawyer, not to be questioned in unreasonable ways, not to be charged without prima facie evidence, not to be imprisoned without trial and above all to be regarded as innocent until found guilty by a court of law under due process.

In his profound and seminal study La Violence nazie: une généalogie européenne,6 Enzo Traverso demonstrates that ‘the idea that civilization implies the conquest and extermination of “inferior” or “harmful” races’ has been a notion ‘familiar in Europe ever since the nineteenth century and the advent of industrial society’. The paragon of the barbaric potency of modern civilization, the Nazi Holocaust, was a unique event only in its synthesizing ‘of a vast range of modes of domination and extermination already tried separately in the course of Western history’. Traverso sums up: ‘The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki show that anti-Enlightenment feeling is not a necessary premise for technological massacres. Both the atomic bomb and the Nazi camps were part of the “civilizing process”, and within it they constituted an expression of one of its potentialities, one of its faces, one of its possible offshoots.’ He ends, rightly, with a warning: ‘There are no grounds for ruling out the possibility that in the future, other syntheses equally if not more destructive might again crystallize.’ The liberal, civilized Europe has been ‘the laboratory of the violences of the twentieth century’, Traverso reminds. We may add: There are no grounds to believe that the laboratory has been closed, and its works discontinued, at the threshold of the twenty-first. * Under the present condition, neither the so-called ‘Whig version of history’, nor the evolutionary theory of culture, both presenting history as a gradual yet relentless progress from barbarism to civilization, provide a sustainable discursive formation (to use Michel Foucault’s memorable concept) in which the meaning of ‘barbarism’ is given shape. One of the reasons is that the presently dominant ideology as well as the scattered and variegated practices of ‘multiculturalism’ have sapped and dismantled the foundations on which the idea of ‘cultural evolution’ and the associated idea of ‘cultural hierarchy’, that is of

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‘higher’ and ‘lower’ cultures, had been founded. Another, that in the part of the world where pleas on behalf of civilization are composed, voiced, widely read, pondered and hotly debated, culture is no longer cast or perceived as a contraption serving the reproduction of social order. This profound change seems to be intimately connected to the dissociation of culture (both in concept and in practice) from its original function of the handmaiden of emergent nations, states and class hierarchies. One by one, all tasks entailed by that function have either lost their application and topicality, or came to be performed by other means and use different instruments. Emancipated from the obligations imposed on the culture-creators and culture-operators by a missionary/proselityzing zeal at first, and later the homeostatic functions of their labours, culture is now free to serve the individual concerns over self-identification and selfassertion. The issue of ‘belonging’ has been shifted from the ‘before’ to the ‘after’ of individually made choices. We may say that culture in its liquid modern phase is made to the measure of individual freedom of choice – either willingly and joyously pursued, or endured/ suffered as obligatory and inescapable. Presently, culture is meant to service such freedom, and meant to assure that the choice remains unavoidable – a life necessity, and a duty. We may also say that in its present rendition culture is meant to assure that responsibility, the inalienable companion of free choice, stays where the liquid modern condition forced it: on the shoulders of the individual, now appointed the sole manager (legislator, executor and judge) of ‘life politics’. This is not a mere paradigm shift, one might say; we could speak instead of a ‘paradigm earthquake’. More exactly, we could so speak if the concept of the ‘paradigm’ had retained its sense in the present liquid modern conditions; but having moved to the liquid modern setting together with the realities to which it used to refer in the ‘solid modern’ past, the term ‘paradigm’ has joined the fast-growing family of (as Ulrich Beck would have said) ‘zombie concepts’, or (as Jacques Derrida would have preferred) concepts which need to be used, if at all, sous rature – or better yet not used at all. Liquid modernity is a condition of a permanent war of attrition waged against any sort of paradigms and any homeostatic, conformity-and-routine-promoting contraptions aimed to sustain repetitiveness of events and monotonous reproduction of patterns. The paradigmatic (bequeathed by solid modernity) concept of culture, as much as the culture itself (the sum total of human-made, intentional artifices), which that concept intended to grasp and render intelligible, are among the most prominent targets and (principal or collateral) casualties of that war. Let’s recall that the current shift is not the first in the short yet



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stormy history of the idea of ‘culture’ and the practices it spawned once named. When it was published almost forty years ago, Bourdieu’s Distinction turned upside down the original, Enlightenment-born and bequeathed idea of ‘culture’. The cultural practice which Bourdieu discovered, revealed and put on record, was a far cry from the inherited model of ‘culture’ construed at the time when the concept was coined and ushered into public vocabulary in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, almost simultaneously with the English concept of ‘refinement’ and the German of ‘Bildung’. At its birth, the idea of ‘culture’ was intended to stand for an instrument of the (power-assisted) progress towards a universal human condition. ‘Culture’ denoted then a proselytizing mission, intended to be undertaken and adumbrated in the form of a resolute and sustained effort of universal cultivation and enlightenment, of social amelioration and spiritual uplifting and the lifting/promotion of the ‘lowly’ to the level of those ‘on top’. Or, in Matthew Arnold’s inspired and widely echoed phrase from the book under the tellingit-all title Culture or Anarchy (1869), it stood for a labour that ‘seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light’ – unpacked in the preface to his Literature and Dogma (1873) as the job awaiting its voluntary keen seekers: ‘Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion of making them prevail’ (emphases added). ‘Culture’ entered modern vocabulary as a declaration of intent – as a name of an intended mission yet-to-be-undertaken. Similarly to the idea from which the intended action drew its metaphorical name – that of agri-culture, which juxtaposed the farmers and the field full of plants they farmed – it served a writ on prospective missionaries, designating in one go the relatively few called to convert and cultivate, and those many who awaited to be the objects of conversion and cultivation: wardens and their wards, teachers and the taught, producers and their products. ‘Culture’ stood for the planned and/or hoped-for compact between those in the know (and above all for those confident to be in the know) and the ignorant (or defined as ignorant by those confident to be knowledgeable). That compact was signed unilaterally and put into operation by the emergent ‘knowledge class’ claiming the setting-the-tune role and pleading for that role to be duly respected in the emergent new order, about to be built on the ruins of the ancien régime. Its declared intent was to educate, enlighten, improve and ennoble le peuple freshly re-cast as les citoyens of the newly established état-nation (the marriage of the emergent nation self-elevating

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into a sovereign state, with the emergent state claiming the role of the nation’s guardian). ‘The project of Enlightenment’ allocated to culture (understood as the labour of cultivation) the status of a principal tool of nation, state and nation-state building; simul­ taneously, it appointed the knowledge-class that tool’s principal operator. In its travels from political ambition to philosophical ruminations and back, the two-pronged objective of the enlightenment venture (whether explicitly proclaimed or tacitly presumed) had promptly crystallized as the discipline of state-subjects and the solidarity of nationals. The ultimate result of the ‘civilizing process’ to be accomplished by the emergent nation-state, through demanding unswerving loyalty to its rules of cohabitation and discipline to its demands and commandments, was to be the liberation of the individual from morbid and potentially disastrous passions that would overwhelm him if not tamed and repressed by the coercive powers of society. As Émile Durkheim was to sum up its major intentions retrospectively, looking back at the story of modern nation-building, the individual submits to society and this submission is the condition of his liberation. For man freedom consists in deliverance from blind, unthinking physical forces; he achieves this by opposing against them the great and intelligent force of society, under whose protection he shelters. By putting himself under the wing of society, he makes himself also, to a certain extent, dependent upon it. But this is a liberating dependence.7

The alternative to the ‘great and intelligent’ coercive powers of society (as represented, for all practical intents and purposes, by the authority of the modern nation-state) is not, so Durkheim repeatedly insists, individual freedom – but slavery: slavery to the passions of destruction rebounding in the end as the drive to self-destruction. The alternative to civilization is barbarism with all its banes: chaos, randomness, unpredictability, Hobbes’s bellum omnium contra omnes resulting in a life ‘nasty, brutish and short’ … The emergent nation-state felt emboldened by the fast-swelling numbers of ‘the people’ awaiting the civilizing treatment – since the rising number of potential workers–soldiers was believed to enhance its power differential. As the nation-building efforts, conjointly with the economic progress, sedimented, however, a fast-growing number of ‘redundant’ individuals (indeed, entire categories of population that urgently needed to be disposed of, lest the sought-after order fail to come up, or its growth be severely disturbed8), the newly



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established nation-state was also soon pressed to start looking for spaces outside its borders, fit to accommodate the excess of the products – and of people which it could not absorb itself. The resulting empire-building and colonizing efforts gave a powerful boost to the Enlightenment-born idea of ‘culture’, and an altogether new dimension to the proselytizing mission which that idea implied. In the likeness of the ‘enlightening the people’ vision, its extensions – the concepts of the ‘white man’s burden’ and ‘lifting the savages out of their savagery’ – were shaped. The new concepts were soon to be given a theoretical gloss in the form of the ‘cultural evolution theory’, which assigned to the ‘developed’ part of the globe the status of the most advanced life pattern to which the rest of the planet was destined sooner or later to rise (or be risen) and which that rest ought to be actively helped (or coerced) to follow; the theory of ‘cultural evolution’ cast the ‘developed societies’ as the planetary centre with a missionary role towards the rest of humanity: as the principal force in the war declared on barbarism. The future role of that centre was conceived after the pattern of the function claimed by and/or assigned to the knowledge elite in its relation with ‘the people’ inside the colonial metropoly. * Today culture has turned from a missionary centre into a playground. It consists of offers, not norms; tempting offers, not coercive norms. As already noted by Bourdieu, culture lives by seduction, not normative regulation; by PR, not policing; by creating new needs, desires and wants – not by enforcement. Such culture has not much room for reason, with its pedantry, humourlessness, distaste and enmity to notoriously haphazard and unpredictable passions; with its addiction to norm-setting and the habit of norm-obeying. Such culture sets free the passions which the culture adumbrated by the ‘project of Enlightenment’ was set to tame or repress, evict to the banlieues and confine in the ghettoes of the civilized polity. Present-day culture sets to re-enchant what the young and hot-headed modern spirit, in its reckless ambitions, dreamed of disenchanting and in its reckless determination promised to strip of aura and mystery. It reconciles itself to the effacement, or at least a blurring, of the boundary separating order from disorder, rule of norm from normlessness. Instead of eyeing emotions, spontaneity and idiosyncrasy with suspicion, the creators, distributors and managers of culture count on them when struggling to make their

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offerings appealing and to beef up the demand (the market demand, of course) for their services. This society of ours is a society of consumers, and just as the rest of the world as-seen-and-lived by consumers, culture turns into a warehouse of meant-for-consumption products – each vying for the shifting/drifting attention of prospective consumers in the hope to attract it and hold it for a little longer than a fleeting moment. Abandoning stiff standards, indulging indiscrimination and perpetual experimentation, serving all tastes while privileging none, encouraging fitfulness, restlessness and ‘flexibility’ (the politically correct name currently given to spinelessness – to the lack of firm convictions and unswerving loyalties) and romanticizing unsteadiness and inconsistency, combine therefore in the proper (the only reasonable?) strategy to follow – whereas fastidiousness, raising brows and stiffening the upper lips are not recommended. The TV reviewer/critic writing for a distinguished British pattern- and style-setting organ praised the New Year’s Eve 2007/8 broadcast for promising ‘to provide an array of musical entertainment guaranteed to sate everyone’s appetite’. ‘The good thing’ about it, he explained, ‘is that its universal appeal means you can dip in and out of the show depending on your preferences’.9 Presumably, a commendable and indeed seemly quality in a society in which networks replace structures, whereas the attachment/detachment game and an unending procession of connections and disconnections replace ‘determining’ and ‘fixing’. The current phase of the graduated transformation of the idea of ‘culture’ from its original Enlightenment-inspired form to its liquid modern reincarnation is prompted and operated by the same forces that promote emancipation of the markets from the remaining limitations of non-economic nature – the social, political and ethical constraints among them. In pursuing its own emancipation, liquid modern consumer-focused economy relies on the excess of offers, their accelerated ageing and quick dissipation of their seductive power – which, by the way, makes it an economy of profligacy and waste. Since there is no knowing in advance which of the offers may prove tempting enough to stimulate sufficiently consuming desire, the only way to find out leads through trials and (costly) errors. Continuous supply of new offers, and a constantly growing volume of goods on offer, are also necessary to keep circulation of goods rapid, and the desire to replace them with ‘new and improved’ goods constantly refreshed – as well as to prevent the consumer dissatisfaction with individual products from condensing into the general disaffection with the consumerist mode of life – with ‘consumerist culture’ as such.



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Culture is turning now into one of the departments in the ‘all you need and dream of’ department store into which the world inhabited by consumers has turned. Like in other departments of that store, the shelves are tightly packed with daily replaced commodities, while the counters are adorned with the commercials of the latest offers destined to disappear soon together with the attractions they advertise. Commodities and commercials alike are meant to arouse desires and trigger wishes; as George Steiner famously put it – they are calculated for ‘maximum impact and instant obsolescence’. Their merchants and copywriters count on the wedding of the seductive power of offers to the competitive and self-aggrandizing ‘one-upmanship’ urges of the prospective customers. Liquid modern culture has no ‘people’ to ‘cultivate’. It has instead clients to seduce. And unlike its solid modern predecessor, it no longer wishes to work itself, the sooner the better, out of a job by accomplishing that mission and bringing its task to conclusion. Its job now is to render its own survival permanent and infinite – through temporalizing all aspects of life of its former wards, now reborn as clients, and condemning them to eternal inconclusiveness. The currently common practice of living daily in a (cultural, ethnic, religious, linguistic) diaspora amidst other (cultural, ethnic, religious, linguistic) diasporas has for the first time forced on the intellectual agenda the issue of the ‘art of living with difference’; an issue that may appear on the agenda only once the difference is no longer perceived as merely temporary – as an eminently transient stage in the relentless progress/unification/universalization of culture. The idea of ‘human rights’ does not translate today as the right ‘to live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light’, now enjoyed by but a few yet bound to be coveted by and accessible to all – but as the right to remain different. The new rendition of the human-rights idea disassembles hierarchies and tears apart the imagery of upward (‘progressive’) evolution. Various forms of life flow, meet, clash, crash, catch hold of each other, merge, hive off and continue to float with (to recall Simmel’s metaphor) ‘equal specific gravity’. Steady, stiff and stolid hierarchies and evolutionary lines are replaced with endemically inconclusive reconnaissance battles of the interminable war for recognition; at the utmost, with temporary and eminently re-negotiable pecking orders likely to provoke and trigger another round of contest. Imitating Archimedes, reputed to insist (probably with a kind of desperation which only the utter nebulousness of a project might cause) that he would turn the world upside down if only given a fulcrum, we may say that we would tell who is to assimilate to whom, who will be managing the choices and

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whose choices will be managed, whose dissimilarity/idiosyncrasy is destined for a chop and whose is to emerge on top – were we only given a hierarchy of cultures, clearly defined and power-assisted criteria of superiority and inferiority of cultural choices. Well, we are not given them, and – in view of the vexing/confusing fluidity of the planetary balance of power – we are unlikely to be given them any time soon. * Managing, in its original sense bequeathed from the times when profitable industrial process had been conceived after the model of a homeostatic machine kept on a steady, immutable course and going through pre-designed repetitive motions, was a chore. It required meticulous regimentation and close ‘panoptical’ supervision. It needed imposition of a monotonous routine bound to stultify creative impulses of both the managed and the managers. It generated boredom and a constantly seething resentment threatening to selfcombust into an open conflict. It was also a rather costly way of ‘getting things done’: instead of enlisting the non-regimented potentials of hired labour (human emotions, passions, irrational impulses) in the service of the job, it used precious resources to stifle them, excise and altogether keep out of mischief. All in all, the day-to-day management was not a kind of task which resourceful people, people in power, were likely to relish and cherish: they would not perform it a moment longer than they had to, and given the power resources at their disposal they could not be expected to put off that moment for long. And they did not. The current ‘great transformation mark two’ (to update Karl Polanyi’s memorable phrase), the emergence of a widely welcome and lauded ‘experience economy’ (that is an economy that in stark opposition to its ‘managed’ predecessor casts emotions, passions, feverish pursuits of pleasurable sensation and amour de soi, the drives to self-assertion, pugnacity of the identity-and-recognition battles, competitiveness, jealousy, ressentiment and one-upmanship instincts among the major factors of effectiveness and profitability), signals that this moment of emancipation of the managers from the burden of managing has arrived. Using an almost century-old term of James Burnham, we could describe it as ‘The Managerial Revolution Mark Two’. Though this time there has been no change of power holders. What is currently happening is more a coup d’état than a revolution: proclamation from the top that the old game is abandoned and new rules of the game are in force. People who prompted the revolution



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remain at the helm, if anything settled more securely than before; revolution has been initiated and conducted in the name of adding to their power, of further strengthening of their grip and immunizing their domination against resentment and rebellion that it used, before the revolution, to generate. After the second managerial revolution, power of the managers has been reinforced and made well-nigh invulnerable through cutting off most of the restraining and otherwise inconvenient strings previously attached to it and cramping the managerial freedom to move. During that second revolution, the managers (of all varieties – managers of political life, of economy, of culture) banished the routine, heretofore considered the epitome of ‘order’, and invited spontaneity (previously denigrated as tantamount to chaos) to occupy the vacant rooms. They have refused to carry responsibilities attached to the intentions and practices of ‘order building’ – they have refused to manage; instead, they demanded from the residents, on the threat of eviction, to self-manage. The right to extend the stay in the perpetually updated rendition of order has been made the main subject of continuous competition: after each round, the most playful and the best-performing competitors win the next-term residential lease, though not a guarantee, nor even an increased likelihood, of emerging unscathed from the next test. On the walls of the ‘experience economy’ banquet-suite, the reminder that ‘you are as good as your last success’ (but not as your last but one) is scribbled. Favouring subjectivity, playfulness and ‘performativity’ of their subjects, the present-day organizations (political, economic, social, cultural) have to, wish to and manage to escape the horrors (and futility) of long-term planning and cancel the tradition of the cumulativeness of merits. This change of tack keeps their subjects in a state of constant emergency, and so constantly on the move in the feverish search of ever new evidence that they are still welcome, that the sentence of exclusion has been temporarily suspended, and that the recognition of their residence rights is likely (even if not certain) to be prolonged (for a time, of course, until further notice …). In the result of the second managerial revolution, the functions hitherto jealously guarded as the managers’ sole and indivisible prerogative have been ‘contracted out’ to the ‘co-operators’ and thereby replaced by market-type relations (of the ‘if not fully satisfied, return the commodity to the shop’ kind),10 or ‘subsidiarized’ to each subject individually, shifting thereby the responsibility for the performance, and the obligation to bear its consequences, from the managers’ to their subjects’ shoulders. The sign of genuine domination is nowadays the facility with which the performance

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of the orthodox managerial tasks is avoided, having been moved sideways or down the power ladder; whereas the inability to drop the awkward managerial routines on other people’s shoulders may be taken as an unmistakable sign of inferiority and failure of duty. The Managerial Revolution Mark Two does not make a context in which the terms like ‘barbarism’ or ‘barbarians’ are likely to be widely used in the vocabulary of inter-ethnic, inter-faith or crosscultural relations – except in pugnacious and blimpish political speeches calculated (though all too often failing) to arouse public support for another risky military adventure. More often than not, charging the disliked and unwelcome ‘Other’, even an apparently hostile ‘Other’, with the indignity of ‘barbarism’ would share the fate of other terms of contempt and abuse now condemned and punished as ‘politically incorrect’. Using that term of abuse risks causing a widespread indignation and public outcry, rather than the intended effect of mobilizing support ‘for the cause’. In the present round of the terminological ping-pong game, the charge of ‘barbarism’ more often than not tends to land on the ‘civilized’ half of the table – the ball being hit by those discriminated against and downtrodden; which in the present time means people who, having been already offered ‘human rights’, find the tolerance, hospitality and solidarity promised to follow that offering (not to mention the levelling up of life prospects) abominably sluggish in arrival. Having tested the ‘civilized conduct’ by the civilization against their own self-proclaimed and allegedly practised values and standards, they would not need to look hard to arrive at the verdict of ‘barbarism’ and all its companions: the ‘war of all against all’, ‘free for all’, ‘might is right’, ‘catch as catch can’ and ‘each one for himself, and devil takes the hindmost’. More often than not, the concept of ‘barbarism’ returns nowadays to the vernacular as the signifier of the civilization’s triple retreat: retreat from the standards it itself set, retreat from its commitments, and retreat from its (genuine or putative) achievements. * Numerous computer games owe their popularity to the fun they offer, but also to the relief they bring. They are, after all, safe and freely chosen rehearsals of the practice of passionate one-upmanship which in the real world is as risky and dangerous as it is obligatory and unavoidable. Those games allow you to do what you have been pushed or nudged or even perhaps might have been wishing to do, but were prevented from doing because of the fear of getting wounded, or because of your conscientious objections to wounding



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others. Of one of such games, recommended as ‘ultimate carnage’ and a ‘last man standing’ ‘demolition derby’, the enthusiastically sounding and not particularly ironic reviewer writes: The most fun […] are the events that demand you crash with the timing and precision to hurl your rag doll of a driver through the windscreen and high into the air in one of many arena events. From firing your hapless protagonist down enormous bowling alleys to skimming him like a smooth pebble across vast expanses of water, each is in equal measure ridiculous, violent and hilarious to play.

Juxtaposing your dexterity (your timing and precision in delivering blows) against your protagonist’s ‘haplessness’ (read: his inability or his lesser-than-yours ability to repay you in kind) is what makes one-upmanship such fun and so ‘hilarious to play’. The self-esteem, your ego-boost derived from the display of your supreme skills, have been obtained at the expense of the protagonist’s humiliation. Your dexterity in no way lessened, it would still be half as gratifying and feel only half as much fun (or less?), were it not for your antagonist in the rag-doll effigy having been hurled through the windscreen whilst you stayed safely in the driver’s seat … In the last account, the game, just like the rest of life-pursuit, is an encounter between your dexterity and his agility. And so if the lot of being hurled through a windscreen is a fate that only supreme cunning and nimbleness may (at this moment, here and now) repel (or rather postpone), you are not safe. Not now, not ever. Not here, not there. Stay vigilant, and constantly – or else … A moment of inattention may reverse the result of that battle that never stops; just as in the Big Brother ‘reality TV’ shows, where one of the team must be kicked out of the house week in, week out, and the sole uncertainty is whose turn to be evicted comes first … This is, we may argue, the diffuse and ubiquitous, though now individualized and privatized, liquid modern avatar (resurrection?) of the premodern violence, whose social/ psychological consequences have been described by a most insightful social historian, Lucien Febvre, as ‘peur toujours, peur partout’,11 and which was viewed with disgust and repulsion, as the lingering relic of the barbaric past, by the prophets of modern progress. You may dismiss the evidential value of the game-console ‘demolition derby’ as ‘just a game’, a part of the entertainment department of life, a sort of a Disneyland holiday, a fantasy world not to be confused (and indeed hardly ever confused) with ‘life for real’. But such reservations would not find much support in the fast-growing volume of research findings. What has been amply

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demonstrated by research, is that it is the offline world (known previously under the name of ‘reality’) that is now forced onto the defendant’s bench and pressed to apologize and reform – trying to reach the pattern of its better-equipped and more user-friendly online competitor. It has been noted that in the worldview of the growing generations the lines separating virtual worlds, games and social networking tend to be blurred.12 A problem not necessarily caused by the arrival of electronics. In Jeux d’enfants, a 2005 Yann Samuell’s film, no laptops nor cellular ’phones are in sight – the plot would stay unaltered whether they would be present or absent. The problem, however, is already there, nonetheless: Julien and Sophie, major protagonists of the story, come step by step to be no longer able, nor particularly eager, to make sure whether what happens around them and what they themselves are doing is ‘just a game’, or ‘for real’ – theirs is a trained inability which the advent of electronics has rendered only easier to achieve. The ‘real’ is the universe of boring rules and routines, and the ‘play’ is the universe of breaking the rules for fun and for the hilarity of shocking and infuriating the ‘ordinary’ decent dwellers of the ‘real’. That much is clear. The difference, however infinitely more difficult to note, between the two universes, and yet more difficult to apply consistently, is that the things done ‘for real’ have consequences which the actors may not dismiss with a thin excuse and a smile. In ‘real life’, each step ‘makes a difference’, a lasting difference; having suffered defeat or caused harm, one can’t start another game ‘from the zero point’, as if nothing happened in the previous round and no lasting traces remain. As the story extends from childhood into an advanced adult life, noting that crucial difference, and that difference itself, seem to be also a part of the game, something ‘not for real’, easily effaced and forgotten. No longer are the players able to set apart one universe from the other, even when what they themselves are doing – and feeling – is in question. What is that ‘difference’ anyway? The ‘others’, the guardians and the victims alike, insist that the crucial difference is that for pranks committed in a game, unlike for the damage made in ‘real life’, one bears and feels no responsibility. But with no inhibition and feeling no remorse Julien and Sophie ruin their own lives with the same equanimity with which they destroy real, all too real lives of others whose fate intertwines with theirs. Julien does not react when in one of the successive ‘games’ the approaching train is about to reduce Sophie to a pulp. Julien and Sophie – do they love each other, or hate? An interesting question, but does one need and should one care to decide what is



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what and what is the case? Why bother to resolve which of the two endings of the film is the ‘true’ ending of the story – death at the bottom of a deep shaft under tons of liquid concrete, or a playful and carefree old age spent together in the residential home? This is, after all, ‘just a game’ … Or, as Liza Minelli sang, ‘life is a cabaret, old chum; come to the cabaret’. As everyone who watched the film surely remembers, it was great fun to hear her singing. Such fun, that one could easily overlook the tears in the singer’s eyes and forget that the song was a farewell to a deceased friend. However profound they might look from the vantage point of the task-oriented techno-designers and marketing experts, the differences between ostensibly distant spheres such as ‘games’ and ‘online socializing’ are dwarfed into insignificance when they are confronted with ‘reality’ – the offline, not-electronically-mediated world lacking the protection of ‘stop’, ‘cancel’, ‘delete’ or ‘back to homesite’ keys. To people who tasted the comforts of online world, the absence of delete-keys makes the offline life feel inferior, wanting, perhaps even intolerable. Since the offline world happens also to be a world of perpetual emergency, it renders its commands vexingly ambiguous and ultimately impossible to fulfil. That world prompts/counsels/ commands to be constantly on the move; such pressures would be, however, to no avail, were it not for the electronically based capacity of multiplying inter-individual encounters by making them brief, shallow and disposable. It is the quantity of connections rather than their quality that makes the difference between chances of success or failure. In Vibike Wara’s words,13 ‘in the virtual world, the person with the most contacts is the most influential person’. For the generations growing up in the electronics-saturated world, the main attraction of the online world derives from the absence of contradictions and cross-purposes that haunt the offline life. The virtual world offers a purpose together with the means to seek its fulfilment – while in the ‘real’ world the recommended ends and the supplied means to pursue them appear to be at odds. Unlike its offline alternative, the online world renders the infinite multiplication of contacts, that condition sine qua non of life success, conceivable – both plausible and feasible. It does it through the weakening of bonds by shortening and emaciating the commitments – in a stark opposition to its offline counterpart known to find its bearings in the continuous effort to strengthen the bonds by severely limiting the number of contacts while deepening each one of them. The ‘virtual’ world promises an improvement on the ‘real’ world, resented for the harrowing unreality of its stipulations and/or inadequacy of the means to meet them. The virtual world seems to

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point the way to the (different and better, more enjoyable) future. It also shapes the prism through which the experiences derived from the rest of the Lebenswelt, and above all from the part lived in the ‘real world’ (or the world as seen on ‘reality TV’), are perceived, interpreted and evaluated. When looked at through this prism, that ‘rest’ is found wanting and in urgent need of correction: that is, in need of being lifted to the level of convenience and comfort which the online world has already managed to reach. One can’t help recalling Chance (a character played by Peter Sellers in the 1979 Hal Ashby’s film Being There), who having emerged into the busy town street from his protracted tête à tête with the world-as-seen-on-TV, tries (though in his case in vain) to remove a discomforting and displeasing sight of a bevy of nuns with the help of his hand-held TV device … Well, the purposes to follow, complete with the ways to proceed in order to reach them, precepts we can learn daily from the televised public rituals of voting out, evicting and banishing the undesirables, the irrelevant, the sans-papiers or simply those asking for trouble by being weak and defenceless – may yet prove in 2009 more effective and handy in the offline life than the 1979 primitive hand-held device. Giorgio Agamben has recently pointed out14 that though the capacity to command, allow or forbid and punish, and so efficacy and the capacity to bind, was the meaning of the ideas of the ‘force of law’ or the ‘rule of law’ since the crystallization of the Ancient Roman juridical canon, ‘only in the modern epoch, in the context of the French Revolution, does it begin to indicate the supreme value of those state acts’; only since then, at the threshold of the condition self-defined as the ‘state of civilization’, force de loi came to mean the ‘untouchability of the law, which even the sovereign himself can neither abrogate nor modify’. We may say that the concept of force de loi in its modern version, coined simultaneously with the repos­itioning of the old idea of ‘barbarism’ in the opposition with the newly invented idea of ‘civilization’, was deployed as the rampart separating the emergent civilized (policé) order from its premodern elemental past. The emphases in the definition of the state of barbarism were on that occasion shifted. ‘Barbarism’ became another name for the state of lawlessness, absence of binding norms, inefficacy of law and its ‘incapacity to bind’. ‘Barbarism’, we may say, came to represent not the preliminary stage preceding the advance of civilization, but the outcome of a retreat of the civilization ostensiblyalready-triumphant. It came to mean a denial or a withdrawal, and altogether a failure, of the civilized order. In the same study Agamben traces the modern institutions of the



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‘state of exception’, ‘state of emergency’ or ‘martial law’, viewed as the acts of a dictatorial sharpening and stiffening of the rule of law in order to repel the extraordinary dangers threatening ‘normality’, to the ancient institution of ‘iusticium’: a state proclaimed occasionally in the ancient Rome – mostly to mark and to celebrate particularly happy events in the life of the city of the Empire. He finds out, however, that contrary to both the popular and the learned opinions about the nature of the ‘state of exception’, iusticium was rather, selfconsciously, a state of juridical void: ‘the acts committed during the iusticium are radically removed from any juridical determination’. A magistrate or private citizen who acts during iusticium in an unusual manner ‘neither executes nor transgresses a law, and even less does he create law’. States of exception, Agamben suggests, create therefore a space devoid of law, a space without law, a space from which law makes itself absent by having been willingly suspended or forced into a standstill.15 True sovereignty, it follows, consists not so much in the authority to create laws and make them obligatory and efficacious, but in the power to suspend the law or put it in abeyance. Following the semantic usages common in modern storytelling, one may say that sovereignty consists in the capacity to revert from the civilized state to the state of barbarism … Or at least in the effective right to designate the areas, periods and categories of objects in which, or in relation to which, the barbarism (as lawlessness) is allowed. In various degrees, at varying levels of ruthlessness and with varyingly horrifying results, that right has been exercised in Kolyma and Auschwitz, as it is exercised now in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and countless camps of detention scattered around the globe in order to accommodate the displaced persons, whom law was unable or refused to accommodate – and who found themselves, in Michel Agier’s expression,16 hors de loi. * As fomenting and redeploying the uncertainty-generated public anxiety and individual fears becomes today one of the most favoured and most frequently resorted-to mechanisms of domination, the discovery that the right to reintroduce, wholesale or selectively, the state of barbarism is the defining trait of modern political sovereignty should be assigned the gravity it most certainly has, and treated with the seriousness it most certainly deserves. Whether the ‘state of exception’, ever more popular weapon of crisis-management in the practice of contemporary governments, goes or does not go back to the ancient institution of iusticium (or, if

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one is to believe Mikhail Bakhtin, to the strikingly similar mediaeval institution of the carnival), it is not now confined to the extraordinary episodes of emergency. It shows all the signs of being on the road to becoming the new quotidianity, a ‘normal state of affairs’. At the present stage in the history of civilization, the total or partial absence, suspension, sluggishness, indifference or willing inefficacy of law, practised, intended or threatened, are becoming the law’s most common modes of presence.

14 A Few (Erratic) Thoughtson the Morganatic Liaison of Theory and Literature (2010) Translated by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

For Milan Kundera, with gratitude Milan Kundera begins his thoughts on the art of the novel with the warning that he is not a theorist, but (merely?) a practitioner. Needless to say, I, the undersigned, am clearly neither one nor the other. I am (barely!) a reader of fiction. And in my layman’s, incompetent way, I strive to be a user of it. By what rights did I dare to accept Ryszard Nycz’s invitation to join in the efforts of a group of literature scholars, theorists and practitioners of literature, undertaken on the occasion of the anniversary of Teksty drugie,1 to reflect on the state, perspectives and tasks of the contemporary study of literature; to consider what its subject is today, and what is (should be?) its primary subject, and to ponder what theory and what method should be used to most effectively plumb the depths of this subject? Probably from the (mere?) right of presumption that literature, and especially the novel, are not, for the practitioner of the humanities in academia (and sociology is part of the humanities, or it is not sociology), an activity reserved for ‘free time outside of work’, private pleasures or hobby horses; they are her companions-in-arms. Bah! they seem to be the vanguard of the army of the humanities – the division behind which countless platoons, companies, battalions, regiments and divisions of this army strive, usually with limited success, to keep up … Today’s world of academia is eerily reminiscent of the checkerboard of Galician fields of a hundred years ago, known and remembered for the fact that, from year to year, the squares grew

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smaller, but more densely packed; and also for the fact that, from year to year, this checkerboard acquired more and more fences, as well as neighbourly squabbles and conflicts over them. The subjects of all manner of academic studies can come to harm as a result of the world of academia adopting a similar modus vivendi and the customs associated with it – but the harms will be truly catastrophic and especially difficult to remedy if the object of study is the human, as is the case in sociology, philosophy, psychology, economics, etc., etc. The world of people, similarly to the being-in-the-world of humans, and in distinction from being-in-universities – this Lebenswelt, a world that is lived and experienced, is not divided into sociological, philosophical, economic and pedagogical squares. If one yearns – as I did, and attempted, though with only meagre results – to recreate this world of the creature called ‘homo sapiens’, and its being-withinit, in its indivisible totality – one must arduously join, and strive to reconcile, just as arduously, homini that are from the outset separate and in conflict: sociologicus, economicus, psychologicus, pedagogicus, philosophicus, and how many other homunculi cultivated in bubbles of academic organizations … And to whom, if not to novelists, should we turn for help in this undertaking? From whom shall we seek comfort and inspiration? Unlike their colleagues in academia, novelists have not been sentenced to cultivate the fences and borders, to guard their shoehorns, and to chase away those who have not passed the highest level of exams on the tailor’s craft and keep them at an appropriate distance – novelists can allow themselves to remember that it is not the homunculi who will be seeking wisdom in their books; and also that, for the full-blooded beings not mired in test-tubes and ripostes who can be tempted into seeking out life lessons in novels, testimonies from research expeditions to exotic countries inhabited by equally strange homunculi will not be sources of much intelligence. Just as Kundera, referring to Ernesto Sabato, informs us, in a tone that brooks no disagreement:2 in the modern world, abandoned by philosophy and divided into hundreds of academic specializations, the novel is for us the final observatory, from which we can perceive human life in its wholeness; the last one, from whose interior we can safely declare: ecce homo. The last one – and thus a lonely one on the battlefield. Because, as Hermann Broch expressed it, the one raison d’être of the novel is the discovery of that which only novels can discover.3 On the foundations of this claim, Kundera builds his thesis, and all that is left for me, a sociologist observing humans from within the thicket of homunculi, to do, is applaud: ‘the precious essence of the European



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spirit is being held safe as in a treasure chest inside the history of the novel, the wisdom of the novel’.4 This is a powerful claim for the novel to boast of – but far from the only one. In order to retrieve from the thicket of homunculi into which it was shoved, and bring back to the light of day, the human in all its ragged, undefinable, inexhaustible, multiplicity, in the state in which the ‘European spirit’ created it, the novel, as Kundera explains, is ‘like Penelope, it undoes each night the tapestry that the theologians, philosophers, and learned men have woven the day before’.5 This fabric, which fell to novel-writers as their lot to unstitch, and which obscures the gaze, or forbids the eyes to linger over all that has been condemned to invisibility by being passed over and left unnamed, is woven from the raw material of pre-judgements, pre-interpretations, biases, calcified stereotypes and trained reflexes. This fabric is what Kundera will call a ‘curtain’ ten years later, and he will say that, since the times of Cervantes, penetrating the curtain of ‘pre-interpretation’ (premature or not, but always simplifying human existence, whose value and charm lie in the very lack of simplicity) became the daily bread of the novel-writer, and the torn curtain became ‘the identifying sign of the art of the novel’.6 Taking on this challenge, in some ways as part of a profession, but more from a sense of calling, tearing the curtain, novel-writing enacts what Fielding defines as ‘a quick and sagacious penetration into the true essence of all the objects of our contemplation’, that ‘peculiar creature’ called the human.7 Calling on Husserl and Heidegger, Kundera accuses ‘specialist tunnels’ of narrowing the human field of vision to shreds torn from the experiences of the world from the perspective of on-going, and generally surface-level and passing, interests – more often interests directed from a distance than chosen by a self-determined and selfgoverned Cartesian subject. Experience, once transported through these tunnels, would suggest that the world is comprised of however many problems to be solved; every problem has its solutions, and every solution demands that the memory of other problems, at least temporarily, be suspended – so that one set of dilemmas would not crash into another, cancelling or reciprocally sharpening each other, and would not ruin the blissful conviction that the only cause of unbearable stubbornness of the problem is not the lack of a solution, but delays in finding it. If we go with this suggestion, the world does not become more orderly or clear, or more friendly and gentle for travellers lost within it, or easier to be-within; except that the confusion and chaos, the flurry and dullness of the world disappear from view; and chased away without the right to return again from

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exile, they may perhaps cease to torment … This is the covering that must be torn away, in order to find oneself eye-to-eye with Fielding’s ‘real being’. And how exactly is this being expressed? Aha, well, in the fact as Kundera stubbornly, almost obsessively, reminds us, that the world is ‘ambiguity’,8 that instead of one absolute truth there is a swarm of relative truths that mutually contradict each other, that the one certainty is the wisdom of uncertainty … ‘The novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel says to the reader: “Things are not as simple, as you think”.’9 In a novel, ‘a satanic ambiguity turns every certainty into enigma’.10 The novel reveals that ‘Beyond the slender margin of the incontestable (there is no doubt that Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo) stretches an infinite realm: the realm of the approximate, the invented, the deformed, the simplistic, the exaggerated, the miscontrued, an infinite realm of nontruths that copulate, multiply like rats, and become immortal.’11 The raison d’être of the novel is to throw light on the ‘world of everyday life’ and to ward off Heidegger’s ‘forgetting about being’. That is why proclamations of the death of the novel, constantly being announced, with mind-numbing monotony, with every new trend, are the products of fantasy or ignorance, and Kundera’s question – ‘is it not more than ever necessary today that the novel should exist?’12 – can be understood as rhetorical in intention. With an awe-inspiring ease that takes your breath away, ranging across the centuries of the novel’s history, and across the furthest corners of the continent of its birth and its overseas offshoots, Kundera does not lack for proof of the fact that (as well as examples of how) the novel demonstrates that the only certainty is uncertainty, which oozes without stopping from ever more numerous and plentiful sources: from the incurable multiplicity of meanings, goals, paths, choices, emotions, objects of desire and ways to satisfy them. This is one of these proofs/examples, the first from the top, chosen at random from many possible: Sexual freedom, which David Herbert Lawrence sees as the mother of tragedy and drama, and Henry Miller as an invitation to lyrical euphoria, in The Professor of Desire by Phillip Roth (‘a great historian of American eroticism’ as Kundera calls him) is not ‘dramatic, or tragic, or lyrical’.13 I would add: it is not even really freedom, ultimately, because the opposition that formerly equated freedom with sexual freedom – the draconian laws, interfering parents, stifling conventions – is not to be found in Roth’s novel. And maybe it is still freedom only in the unextinguished memory, sous rature, as Jacques Derrida would say, or as a ‘Zombie Category’, as



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Ulrich Beck expressed it, roaming the world, though already dead – being already in essence, from testimony that is undigested as of yet, a new experience, unfreedom tout court – because, as Kundera says, the freedom of sex is ‘something given, acquired, universal, banal, codified’?14 Coercion disguised in a costume of freedom and hidden under the mask of free choice … One thing only is for certain: that the sexual freedom of Roth’s time has not lost any of its multiplicity of meaning. A ‘memory that lives on’ turns out to be the testimony of experience despite an innate selectivity of memory, multiple in meaning – even more emphatically and annoyingly ambivalent than it was in its previous incarnation. The heroes of The Professor of Desire cannot help but ‘remember clearly that earlier time, the era of our parents who lived their lives more in the era of Tolstoy than of Roth’.15 Sex freed not only from intrusive oversight, censorship and the spectre of condemnation and exile, but also from love … And then love, orphaned, banished to the outskirts, futilely searching the wilderness for shelter. There is a craving for love, ‘love itself, for that moving and old-fashioned love of which the modern world has been deprived’.16 In the triumphant procession of liberated sex, here and there you will see a banner rebelliously calling for the freedom to love. Do not be surprised, if they will come to multiply in time. Do not try to talk your way out of it by pretending to be surprised, and do not make excuses of a lack of warning. That is what novels are for, after all, and that is what novel-writers are for, so that we will never want for warnings. Novelwriting unveils before you the multiplicity of meaning of your world and your being-within-it, in order to give meta-freedom a chance, the only one among countless forms of freedom that you cannot surrender without surrendering your humanity: namely, the freedom of choice between self-fulfilment and self-destruction of warnings/ prophecies/predictions. The spirit of the novel, let us remember, is the spirit of complexity. The spirit of theory is the spirit of simplification. The spirit of theory loves clarity of image, harmony of shapes, transparency of composition – beautifully grasped and cleaning up everything that threatens such clarity. Theory, not without reason, boasts of the ability to clarify things. Reality – aggravating as this aspect is, its habit of being intricate, blurred, chaotic and capricious – emerges from its processing by theory clear and fully visible, predictable, patted into place … The multiplicity of meaning replaced as much as possible by singularity of meaning, and this unequivocality is bolstered by being tightly locked into the statistical cage of probability. The spirit of the theory and the spirit of the novel can live together

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in greater harmony than cats and dogs. Or water and fire (allow water to flow, woe betide the fire; pour it into a kettle, woe to the water). Theory chases after literature, headstrong and always running ahead (in fact, it is precisely through these escapes that it decides, in a given moment, what is ahead and what is behind), in order to catch it – and when it catches it, tries to tame it, groom it, make it into Mickiewicz’s watchdog, neatly groomed … But as long as the novel is a novel, it will evade its captors. And thank God, and good for us – because the one that would not succeed in escaping would be something entirely other than a novel; just like a fish, which once caught in a net will not swim again. In one of his many aphorisms, Franz Kafka wrote about a swarm of squawking crows that looked as if they were ready to peck heaven to pieces. But, he reminded us, heaven is the impossibility of crows (probably also thinking, thank God, and good for us). I do not make predictions here, do not advise, do not call for. I am conscious that both the spirit of the novel, and the spirit of theory, are, certainly, as spirits are, immortal (or at the very least less mortal than those who write about them, whether in appreciation or admonition). And I am aware that the desire for adventure or the craving for order, like the interest in what is unknown and the fear of it, the drive to transgression and to barricade oneself, all of these contradictory impulses are like the crows and the sky, always and forever cohabiting in this ‘peculiar being’ that is considered peculiar precisely because of this cohabitation, and called ‘human’. Like the majority of marriages, the spirit of theory and the spirit of adventure cannot live together in harmony, but they cannot live apart. Well, and good. The end of ends, il faut cultiver notre jardin … Chacun le sien, bien sûr.17

15 On Love and Hate… In the Footsteps of Barbara Skarga (2015) Translated by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

For the years of the avant-garde (now long passed, unfortunately), which were perhaps the greatest in the history of art, we can be grateful to the strict academic standards and intolerance of the Parisian art salon, its distaste for everything that diverged from its norms even by a centimetre. Precisely because the art world seemed to be divided up into parcels once and for all, there was something to rebel against. And precisely because the salon of Impressionists acted on the artistic circles of the French capital like an earthquake, and the walls, unaccustomed to shocks, cracked and disintegrated into powder – not when they grew old, but when a seismic shift revealed their age; or, rather, reclassified the ossification of the concrete into age. As Milan Kundera wrote in Testaments Betrayed, ‘While freedom of thought – freedom of words, of attitudes, of jokes, of reflection, of dangerous ideas, of intellectual provocations – shrinks, under surveillance as it is by the vigilance of the tribunal of general conformism, the freedom of drives grows ever greater.’1 I will add that all conformism gives an outlet to desires. But each one to different ones. For some desires, conformism gives an outlet for conformisms. But for a different one, conformism gives an outlet to nonconformism … That history is linear, and that the line was drawn before history started down it, and will carry on down it until its end, is the delusion of the Panglosses and Fukuyamas of all eras – a delusion doomed to falling into a coma (but not clinical death) at history’s

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nearest turn, only to awaken when it’s back on a straight path. Seen from the perspective that we have chosen for the purposes of this conversation, history follows a path that is not linear, but a pendulum. From conformism to conformism, to the conformism of nonconformism – and back again. From building walls to destroying them – and back again. Within the walls – it is cramped and hard to breathe the musty air. Without walls – hurricanes and downpours, scorching heat giving way to icy frosts, and no one can afford a proper coat or umbrella. Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz – known as Witkacy – Witold Gombrowicz, Tadeusz Różewicz, Czesław Miłosz and Sławomir Mrożek, similarly to their master Stanisław Vincenz – who were surrounded by people accustomed to breathing in mustiness and reconciled to their place within the walls, klein aber mein, maybe uncomfortable, but warm enough and homey – were bursting to escape the walls. Stanisław Ossowski, right before his death, confessed to me that he fell into a great depression in August 1939, when the news arrived at the fortress of Modlin, where he awaited his deployment, that Beck was in talks with Ribbentrop, there would be no war, and everything would stay the way it was. It is our lot to live among people for whom hurricanes, winds and downpours are a daily pain, and there is no one to decide who should occupy which place, so places are not allotted, but have to be fought for – and so they work to build walls that would serve to protect them from cataclysms, and within which a place would be found for them, however humble, maybe without a balcony, but certain … Come back, walls, your old sins forgotten, and new ones forgiven! The one group does not understand the other. How could they come to a mutual understanding – they see each other through a fog. Kundera asks: ‘who is more blind? Mayakovsky, who as he wrote his poem on Lenin did not know where Leninism would lead? Or we, who judge him decades later and do not see the fog that enveloped him?’2 I answer: similarly to the one, that surrounds us now … Nonconformism is the antidote to the toxins of conformism, but what is the antidote to the toxins of freedom?! Because we must acknowledge that freedom has its toxins, and they are various, and not evenly divided amongst people. Tumultuous and foaming waves are, for surfers with the proper equipment, or people with motorboats, an occasion for a rare treat (that they would not trade for a small pond with space to wade in), but a terror for those condemned to face them under their own powers, or on a raft made from lashedtogether pieces of driftwood. And the unprecedented freedom of producing and distributing information, ‘ease of access to the media’ – has led to a situation where, as Stanisław Obirek so penetratingly



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observed, ‘anyone can not only publish newspapers and books, but also deride and ridicule others who think differently, lynch them in broad daylight to the delight of the mob’.3 Again, what is a pleasure for some is a worry for others. Some (countless) can write and publish even without computers, but for others it is the only opportunity to express themselves, to escape (but for a moment) the accumulated bile, to be (even for a moment) someone who speaks and who is listened to. They can stand on the square and yell words, which until then they had only heard in movies, but which the powers who ‘write and publish’ would not accept for publication. And above all, they can do so without consequences, invent calumny after calumny and not even care about spelling, typing out on their keyboards whatever the spit brings to their tongues. You can’t pour salt on their tails, you can’t haul them before a judge, and the weak-spirited intelligentsia, whom they emulate, are unable to answer in a similar style, even if they wanted to (and they don’t) … It just so happened, that, as I was writing these words, I hit upon – without looking for it – an issue of Osservatore Romano, and in it the words from a sermon of Pope Francis about slander. I cite from the newspaper, in my clumsy translation: Calumny, or slander [calunnia] is as old as the world, and discussed already in the Old Testament. It is enough to refer to the episode of Queen Jezebel and Naboth’s vineyard, or Susanna and the Elders. If something cannot be acquired ‘the right way, the holy way’, people resort to slander, which destroys. ‘This reminds us’ – comments the Pope – ‘that we are sinners, all. We all have sins. But calumny is something different.’ It is a shame, but it is also something more, because ‘it strives to destroy God’s creation, and is born from a very bad thing: from hate. And a person, who produces hate, is Satan.’ Falsehood and slander go hand in hand – in order to move forward, they need each other. And there is no doubt, the Pope added, that ‘where there is slander, there is also Satan, Satan himself’. And adds: in our times, there are ‘more martyrs than there were in the first ages. These are the people plagued by hate: it is the devil that sows hate, and those who persecute others.’4

Near the end of September, Stanisław Obirek was in Assisi. He described his impressions to me in the following way: ‘Already then, preparations were being made for the visit of Pope Francis. And he came. This was not the symbolic gesture of his predecessors, who did say that we should be led by the spirit of the Poor Man from Assisi, but never went beyond proclamations. This Pope both proclaims, and also, at least somewhat, acts. As a beginning, it is quite a lot.

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What he said probably did not make all of the Franciscans happy. But it was enough to make many of the bishops and cardinals sitting next to the Pope quite uncomfortable. I find myself in this, though many deny me the right to call myself a Christian and demand a more precise definition. Maybe like Francis I will improvise more and will depart from texts prepared earlier, and it will be easier for me. Well, at least that. The Church must ‘disavow any action, which is not for God and is not of God; fear from opening the door and stepping out among all those, especially the most impoverished, the most needy, the most distant, and to do so immediately’. I was not in Assisi at the time, so the words Francis said about opening the door and greeting everyone did not reach me, but his words about how conversation is intended not to convert, but to promote understanding, shook me to the core. Especially because they were uttered in a conversation with an agnostic, the editor of a highly influential anticlerical newspaper, on whose pages there regularly appeared views that were unacceptable to the clergy. They shook me, because it is so rare – if it actually ever takes place in those serial monologues presented as dialogues, accepted in theory, and all the more in practice – that a dialogue worthy of the name, one of the hardest parenthetically speaking, and hic et nunc the most necessary to the world of all the human arts, demands a willingness for conversation with antagonists, and not only with those who are inclined to agree from the outset: not only those who hold the beliefs that you do, but also those who espouse views that you despise. Francis is not talking about the everyday forms of pseudo-dialogue, or about the kinds of dialogues that he is a part of, or the theory of dialogues that he has been stubbornly offering for years. In an article published first in 1991, then reprinted in 2005 with only minimal changes,5 he describes pseudo-dialogues as a symptom of rottenness – and rottenness, as he says, in differentiation from vice, ‘needs to be cured rather than forgiven’.6 The marker of a corrupted person is, in the opinion of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, that: when confronted by the truth … they can never allow themselves to be called into question. At the first sign of criticism they react angrily, deny the right of the person or institution to pass judgment on them, or try to refute any moral authority that dares to question them; they have recourse to sophistries and semantic equivocations, belittle others, and hurl insults at anyone who thinks differently from them … They persecute others by imposing a rule of terror on all those who oppose them … and get their revenge by expelling them from society.7



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Corrupt people know nothing of fraternity or friendship, only complicity. Loving one’s enemies, or even the distinction between friends and enemies that was at the basis of the Old Law, are meaningless to corrupt people. Their parameters are different: for them, you are either an accomplice or an enemy. For example, when a corrupt person is in power, he will always implicate others in his own corruption, bring them down to his measure, and make them accomplices of his chosen way of doing things.8

And ‘corrupt people do not notice their own corruption. It is the same as when people have bad breath: they seldom realize it themselves. Other people can smell it and need to tell them.’9 ‘At the very heart of the judgment made by a corrupt person, there is set up a lie’; corrupt people see themselves as having good judgement, and they ‘[project] their evil onto others’.10 One feeling, summing up, indicates the behaviour of a corrupted person: hatred, that opposite of love that Henryk Elzenberg described as ‘joy at someone else’s existence’. The corrupt person hates those who are not accomplices, and especially those who think differently and are resistant to corruption. ‘Even in that which others find valuable, important’, the hating person, as Barbara Skarga observes,11 ‘perceives only treacherous behavior, ruin, deceit, because that is the natural state of the human condition for them’. ‘I hate’, Barbara Skarga says, reminding us of Brückner’s definition, means ‘I do not want to see.’ And I do not want to see, because I do not want to know. I close my eyes, I shut my ears … I hurriedly push the ‘delete’ key, when something appears on the computer screen that I do not agree with; but this happens rarely, because I only log on to ‘our’ portals – I do not seek windows on the internet, but mirrors. A reflection in a mirror, which is a reflection of myself. Hic, in front of my laptop, iPad or iPhone screen, and nunc, in the more than seven hours a day that the average person among us spends staring at them. Hic et nunc, we have received, as a gift from the digital age, a ‘comfort zone’: a space free of controversy, from the burdensome need to argue, to prove our truths and risk defeat in conflict. We gather there to protect ourselves from the tumult and clamour of the ‘real’, full of dissenters, strangers or simply ‘others’ – non-accomplices. I would like to draw attention to an odd novel published last year (with a plot that is interwoven with a philosophical essay) devoted to a phenomenon intimately related to virtue; Boris Akunin, the author of this novel–essay that is currently unfortunately only available in its original Russian-language version, calls this phenomenon aristonomia – and this is the title of his work devoted to a cinematic and

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philosophical portrayal of this phenomenon. I was struck by the close relationship between Akunin’s aristonomia and virtue in the sense that I mean it – and that is because of two of the traits that the author describes. The possibility that is available to all human beings, but not achieved by all of them. This attribute, that is not given to a person, but assigned – this assignment requiring from those aspiring to aristonomia or dignity the fulfilment of conditions, which can be achieved, but only at the cost of a great effort, and often also require self-sacrifice (aristonomers are not well suited to a fight for being, Darwin would say; aristonomers die like flies – wryly and bitterly observed Akunin). But we can also observe yet another kinship between Akunin’s aristonomia and virtue in the sense proposed by me: neither the one nor the other is a recipe for a happy life. Quite the opposite: in a world, like our present one, which is decidedly inhospitable and unfavourable to ‘aristonomers’ and virtuous people who assiduously and tenaciously guard their virtue, the ‘aristonomic’ character, similarly to the virtuous life, does not bode for a happy life. Rather, they lead to a happy life, but in a sense totally different from that which the world we know calls happiness, the one that it propagates and demands be favoured. In this I am reminded of an answer ascribed to Goethe (a person whom Akunin would doubtless describe as the personification of aristonomia), that was given when asked, in his old age, how he would assess the life he had lived. ‘I had a happy life’, he said – but added: ‘but I cannot remember a single happy week’. I hope that my readers will perceive in this answer a message similar to the one I did: happiness does not lie in a lack of problems, but in dealing with them and winning out over them. How this message differs from the cult of physical and spiritual ease that is so widespread among us, the lack of worries or the needlessness of effort (and especially persistent effort) as synonyms of a happy life. Or from the belief similarly widespread today, that all roads to happiness pass through stores … I am bothered by the name that Akunin chose to give the type of character he proposed, however. He created this name by combining the ancient Greek idea of arête – spiritual and physical excellence (that was instilled into the young during paideia, the ancient model of enlightenment and education) – and nomos, or law; ‘aristonom’ is the kind of person, says Akunin, who, summa summarum, makes striving for excellence the highest law of their life … He warns that the unavoidable association of the name with the ‘aristocracy’ should only refer to the idea of the aristocracy contained in the idea of the ‘aristocracy of the soul’, and not to the aristocratic class of flesh and



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blood, famous for its clannish egoism, conceit and moral unfeeling, but I hardly think that this warning will produce the desired result. Either way, the word aristonomia threatens a repeat appropriation of the ideal by the elite (the fundamental etymological association of ‘arête’ and ‘aristos’; in the Polish democracy of the nobility, it was replaced by the association between szlachta and szlachetność, nobleman and nobility) and its legitimization – just as much cultural, as natural – a superiority stamped by social and financial privilege. If I was Akunin, I would for this reason stick to the fundamental derivation, in the form that would be free from the traces of its later annexation in the name of class interest, and would instead pick the name ‘aretonomy’. But I am not Akunin, and he himself would probably not accept my proposition: he has too much sympathy for the nobility of the soul, seeing in it – despite all the weaknesses that he critiques in it – the one chance for improving the human species, stopping its bloodthirsty appetites, taming its brutal customs, extinguishing its tendencies to stupid cruelty. In Russia, in any case, the one alternative to the rule of the aristocracy, wanting to raise the oppressed masses to its own level, was in Akunin’s view an ‘arrestocracy’ – a mob rule that tried to pull everything and everyone who was not it down to its level. Please forgive me for this tangential digression, but it touches on matters close to my heart, and also resonant in consequences for our shared existence. In order to bring this strand to some kind of conclusion, even a provisional one, I will allow myself to name a few of the positions and traits of character, that in my opinion comprise an ‘aretonomic’ character, or – more simply – a good one, and by that right, worthy of respect. I admit that I am not sure that I am naming them in the proper order. Unfortunately, we do not have Barbara Skarga here with us to look over my account with a critical, morally sharpened eye, and to fill in what I have missed. The first, maybe the primary, characteristic, a kind of ‘metatrait’, because it serves in the role of the axle upon which all of the remaining elements of the personality are centred, which its rotations send into motion and keep there, is in my opinion the feeling of a task to accomplish, a task that goes beyond the everyday concern about survival; such a task, which is capable of constituting the individual as an individual, or the link in the necessary order of things, unrepeatable and unexchangeable – without giving in to it completely, and without a strenuous effort, this task is not to be accomplished. Another trait is the attitude indicated by what Thorstein Veblen called one hundred years ago the ‘workmanship instinct’, which

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conditions what Tadeusz Kotarbiński, trying to find a Polish corollary to the term ‘reliability’, called ‘spolegliwość’ in his Treatise on Good Work. A reliable person is one on whom you can depend, knowing that they will contribute to all efforts, that assignments placed on them and accepted by them will be fulfilled, and they will fulfil the promises they make to themselves and to others – a person worthy of trust, and thus a person of whom it is known that she will do everything in her power to avoid letting down the people who trust in her. Virtue also requires avoiding the extremes of self-assessment: both the dogmatic conviction of one’s own superiority (which produces a disregard for others, and eventually a contemptuous attitude towards them), and the trivialization of one’s own potential (because this leads to minimizing one’s responsibility for the state of things, and in the end to avoiding bearing it). Another feature is honour. This trait is full of content and it is difficult to provide an inventory of this content – but into the foreground moves faithfulness to one’s word, a consistency in action, and readiness to take on responsibility for its consequences for oneself and others. This requires decisiveness and, not infrequently, real courage. Honour demands sticking to one’s decisions and to the principles that were chosen of one’s own free will and in full awareness, even when powerful forces align against them – and it also forbids disavowing and abandoning comrades-in-arms at the moment of an attack. Hypocrisy and two-facedness are the antonyms of honour: an honourable person strives alone, without swerving, on a path that she or he illuminates for others, and advises them to follow. But to persist in their own opinion for the sole reason that the opinion is theirs is also an antinomy of honour. Honour demands acknowledging one’s errors, if they are made. In the view of honour, l’amour-propre takes its places on the bench of defendants – because honour is the defendant in the tribunal of truth. Amicus ego, sed magis amica veritas … Responsibility: not less important than honour, and, if it comes to conflict between them – which can of course happen, and happens often – it demands and deserves to play the main role. Individual responsibility for the collective good, always one step, at least, ahead of responsibility for the Other and Others – and the unending awareness that this is how things are and how they ought to be. Finally, empathy for the Other and Others. This is a difficult art, one of the most difficult, that virtue demands – but there is no virtue without the endless effort to master it; and this effort is always renewed: at each meeting, it elicits and returns recognition and respect of the virtuous person, the aretonom, for the subjectivity of



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the Other and Others. But the empathy being described should not be confused with tolerance in blanco or with patching up differences for the sake of peace or the right to be indifferent to the errors of others. What is being discussed here is the kind that drives the slogan sapere aude, etiam curare aude … A few more words, with the goal of contemplating the point to which the ideas presented so far have brought us and what roads lead away from it. To strive for virtue, in the sense that I have tried to give it here, is something that every person may long for. But how many people will yearn for it, and how many among those who desire it will be able to accomplish this desire, depends not on them (or at least not only on them), but also on what we can call ‘society’. A good society has many attributes, but among them I would grant primary place to ensuring that the greatest possible number of human beings that comprise it would want to be virtuous, and that the greatest possible number is given the opportunity to do so. Belief in the virtue of the human is a faith. The truth of faith cannot be proved in the sense that science today gives to the meaning of ‘proof’ – but what can (and should be!) said about faith, supplementing Lutz’s claim about the impossibility of emasculating it, is also that by no iron, flaming pyre or threat of flood can it be imposed. And it is fitting to also add the entirely trivial observation that intellectual arguments, both as to its destruction and as to its confirmation, are in the final reckoning useless. Again, this nagging unde – this time, unde fides? I confessed my lack of success in finding answers to these questions to Urszula Kozioł, a person endowed with a first-rate moral intuition and ethical imagination – one who is more willing than the average person to come to the assistance of those who are blundering. She answered me with a question: ‘Is it not the case that we received as a gift this extract, distillation, essence of truth, condensed into four lines (do not do unto others what you would not have them do to you, and love your neighbour as if he were you)? And these phrases contain everything, do they not? Thus, decency, and virtue, and forms of altruism, and the feeling of responsibility. Do they not?’ The vice (and maybe virtue) of questions that are well posed, and get right to the heart of the issue, is that they give way to other, countless questions – and the questions asked by Ms Urszula are distinguished by their fruitfulness. Because, in the first place: we received as a gift – but from whom? We were not present at the delivery of this gift, and the eye-witnesses have not survived, so we are doomed to have different stories about this event. We will never resolve the conflict over which of these stories is the truth, and which is an absorbing but

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invented myth; and this conflict will continue, always ready to burst into flames anew, even if its continuation is banned by orders from above (for some time only, for some time). In order to not lose time on a conflict that is doomed to futility, let us make use of a popular evasion: this gift fell from the sky, whose meaning, comprehensible for all (such that I have no idea, really, where it came from), allows us to suspend our little banter with an agreement on both sides, and in a way that is far more civilized and dignified than censorship and terrible threats (even a genius like Kant could not decipher the secret of the ‘moral law within me’ and was forced to resort to assuming an unknowable realm of noumena). And already the next question is refusing to be put on the shelf: how does it happen that the gift of this essence of truth condensed into four lines that we received – we, people – in some remote past, lost in the mists, so that practically speaking it is as if we have had it ‘since always’ – but despite this, almost all of us, for a significant part of our time, did not love our neighbours as if they were ourselves, and did unto our fellows what we would not like done to ourselves? This is the question that has mainly and most painfully bothered me, because of its practical importance. ‘The essence of the truth’ must have powerful enemies with powerful voices, given that the noise they make has so effectively drowned it out for the last hundred, or even thousand, years … Who are they, these powerful – all-powerful – opponents? The paradox is based on the fact that it is the very people who are deprived and robbed of virtue, and thus the people in whose name (but maybe without their consent?) the embers of revolution are fired, though they do not clamour for this virtue in the slightest … History is packed with examples of this, but I will limit myself to the most blatant, and the freshest in my memory. The two most awful forms of totalitarianism in history were born, nurtured and grown from a fervent, enthusiastic labour of the oppressed and humbled to get rid of the miserable remnants of their own subjugation. That it happened this way in the case of German totalitarianism is not surprising and does not contest the vision dear to the heart of the aretonomic character; but it also refers to the Russian revolution, undertaken by aretonomists of the intelligentsia under the slogan of liberation and ‘emancipating’ the masses (both of these goals were proclaimed in one breath), or to restore virtue to the oppressed and humble. In one of our conversations collected in the volume On the World and Ourselves, Stanisław Obirek asked, just as I am asking: Who will want to want to hear the good news about ubiquitous virtue? And he speculated that:



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those pushed to the margins, the excluded, the indignant … are the target of this new all-embracing dignity. If we accept that there are many of those and that their circle is continually expanding, then maybe the news of dignity for all will fall on fertile and proper ground. Besides, it may well be that this ever-growing group stripped of all dignity (the unemployed, the homeless, immigrants, victims of violence, etc.) might listen attentively to what you have to say.12

Bah, if I could agree with this assessment of the situation, and share such hopes … . But the facts, unfortunately, conspire against such hopes. In his studies of Stalinism in Poland, published a few years ago by the Towarzystwo Wydawnicze i Literackie [the Collective of Publishing and Literature], Andrzej Werblan comments in the following way on the statements of Stanisław Kozyr-Kowalski, who examined this issue in great detail: At conferences organized by the Party, taking place at a time when the atmosphere was still comparatively relaxed, it was in the presentations by delegates from lower orders, from officers and army units, from the provinces, that there appear elements of a revolutionary personality cult, impatience with in-fighting and discussion, expectations of unambiguous solutions. Stalin, with his tendency towards simplification and voluntarism, with his oafish brutality and self-confidence, could better and more easily win over common men than his rivals among the intelligentsia, who were caught up in their own struggles or lost in the intricacies of economics and politics.13

Werblan approvingly cites Wacław Mejbaum’s generalization that ‘the revolution liberated the people of Russia, but it did not make them free … the post-revolutionary multitudes were more unfree than free … they easily transformed into the masses in the eyes of those who were newly in power’. ‘Among the oldest and most deeply rooted myths of the plebian masses’ – Werblan reminds us – ‘belonged, as we know, this myth of the noble criminal who would take from those who had more, to divide it amongst those who had less, or the myth of the good, protective and powerful ruler’ (the Russian narodniks who were ‘going to the people’, as we know, were constantly being reported by peasants to the Tsar’s police, who were searching for ‘rebels’). ‘There thus arose groups that were uncommonly susceptible to the temptations of a simplified utopian vision of society, to their own programmes of total social engineering’, or, in plainer terms, to the temptations of shortcuts, or total power. In this kind of vision, there is no room for the subtle scruples of the aretonomers …

Notes

CULTURE AND SOCIETY  1 1 Leslie A. White, ‘The Symbol: The Origin and Basis of Human Behaviour’. In E. A. Adamson Hoebel, Jesse D. Jennings and Elmer R. Smith (eds.), Readings in Anthropology. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955, pp. 290, 292. 2 Carl O. Sauer, Agricultural Origins and Dispersals. New York: American Geographical Society, 1952, p. 18. 3 Vere Gordon Childe, A Short Introduction to Archaeology. New York: Collier Books, 1962, p. 17. 4 Bronisław Malinowski, Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960, p. 36. 5 E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Social Anthropology. London: Cohen & West, 1951, p. 11. 6 Robert H. Lowie, ‘Cultural Anthropology: A Science’, American Journal of Sociology, 1936: 305. 7 Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘Social Structure’. In Sol Tax (ed.), Anthropology Today: Selections. University of Chicago Press, 1962, p. 333. 8 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 1963, p. 295. 9 Theodosius Dobzhansky, ‘On Species and Races of Living and Fossil Man’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 2, 3, 1944: 251–65, p. 252. 10 Cited in Ashley Montagu, Anthropology and Human Nature, 1957, pp. 74–5. 11 Vere Gordon Childe, Social Evolution. London: Watts & Co., 1952, p. 108. 12 See Elman R. Service, Profiles in Ethnology: A Revision of A Profile of Primitive Culture. New York: Harper & Row, 1963, pp. 28, 63, 93.

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13 Robert Redfield, Peasant Society and Culture: An Anthropological Approach to Civilization. University of Chicago Press, 1956, pp. 67–8. 14 Don Martindale, ‘The Formation and Destruction of Communities’. In George K. Zollschan and Walter Hirsch (eds.), Explorations in Social Change. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964, p. 69. 15 Adolf Remane, Życie społeczne zwierzqt. Warsaw: PWN, 1965, pp. 200, 201, 202, 204. [I have been unable to find an English edition of this text; this translation is my own – translator’s note.] 16 Alfred Louis Kroeber, Anthropology: Race, Language, Culture, Psychology, Prehistory. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1948, p. 33. 17 Marston Bates, ‘Human Ecology’. In Alfred L. Kroeber, Anthropology Today: An Encyclopedic Inventory. University of Chicago Press, 1953, p. 708. 18 François Bourlière, ‘Patterns of Social Groupings among Wild Primates’. In S.  L. Washburn (ed.), Social Life of Early Man. London: Methuen, 1962, p. 5. 19 M. R. A. Chance, ‘The Nature and Special Features of the Instinctive Social Bonds of Primates’. In Washburn (ed.), Social Life of Early Man, p. 19. 20 Clarence Ray Carpenter, ‘Societies of Monkeys and Apes’, Biological Symposia, 8, 1942: 177–204. 21 Alfred Irving Hallowell, ‘The Protocultural Foundations of Human Adaptation’. In Washburn (ed.), Social Life of Early Man, pp. 237–8. 22 Ibid., p. 240. 23 Leslie A. White, The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959, p. 247. 24 Mellville J. Herskovitz, Economic Anthropology: A Study in Comparative Economics. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1952, p. 73. 25 See Maria Hirszowicz, Kilka uwag ogólnych na temat funkjonalizmu w socjologii. In Maria Hirszowicz, Konfrontacje Socjologiczne. Marksizm i socjologia współczesna. Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1964. 26 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, p. 13. 27 Erich Fromm, ‘Psychoanalytic Characterology and Its Application to the Understanding of Culture’. In S. S. Sargent and N. W. Smith (eds.), Culture and Personality. New York: Viking Fund, 1949, p. 10. 28 Montagu, Anthropology and Human Nature, pp. 16, 105. 29 White, ‘The Symbol’, pp. 287–93, 288. 30 Lewis Mumford, The Transformations of Man. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1957, p. 17. 31 Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity: The Science and Art of Human Engineering. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1921.

NOTES BEYOND TIME  2 1 Poem by Leonidas of Tarentum, translated by Edvin Bevan. In F. A.

226 Notes Wright (ed.), A History of Later Greek Literature from the Death of Alexander in 323 B.C. to the Death of Justinian in 565 A.D. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1932, p. 73 [editors’note]. 2 In this article, we have retained ‘S.’, ‘J.’ and ‘M.’ in their anonymity, to respect Professor Bauman’s wishes [editors’ note]. 3 The Bristol is a historic luxury hotel in the centre of Warsaw [editors’ note]. 4 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 1963, pp. 173, 174. 5 I have been unable to find an English edition of this text; this translation is my own [translator’s note].

MARX AND THE CONTEMPORARY THEORY OF CULTURE 3 1 Lucien Goldmann, ‘Is There a Marxist Sociology?’ International Socialism (1st series), 34, Autumn 1968: 13–21 [editors’ note].

CULTURE, VALUES AND SCIENCE OF SOCIETY  4 1 An Inaugural Lecture delivered on 7 February 1972. Professor Bauman was appointed to the Chair of Sociology in 1971. 2 George Lundberg, Foundations of Sociology. New York: Macmillan, 1939, p. vii. 3 Jack D. Douglas, ‘The Rhetoric of Science and the Origins of Statistical Social Thought’. In Edward A. Tiryakian (ed.), The Phenomenon of Sociology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1971, p. 46. 4 Ibid. 5 Ludwig von Bertalanffy, ‘Psychopathology of Scientism’. In Helmuth Schoeck and James W. Wiggins (eds.), Scientism and Values. Princeton University Press, 1960, p. 207. 6 Helmut Schoeck, ‘Introduction’. In Schoeck and Wiggins (eds.), Scientism and Values, p. x. 7 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behaviour, English trans. Alden L. Fisher. London: Methuen, 1963 (orig. 1942), p. 175. 8 Henry Levin, ‘Semantics of Culture’. In Gerald Holton (ed.), Science and Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1965, p. 11; Phenomenological Psychology. London: Tavistock Publications, 1966, pp. 169, 173. 9 ‘A corpse which had left behind its living impulse’ – Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, English trans. J. B. Baillie, 2nd edition, revised and corrected. London, G. Allen and Erwin, 1964, p. 69. 10 Cf. Antonio Gramsci, Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce. Turin: Einaudi, 1949; Aaron V. Cicourel, ‘The Acquisition of Social Structure’. In John D. Douglas, Understanding Everyday

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Life: Toward the Reconstruction of Sociological Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971, p. 152. 11 Florian Znaniecki, Cultural Sciences: Their Origin and Development. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963, pp. 231–2, 242. 12 Friedrich von Hayek, Scientisme et sciences sociales: essai sur le mauvais usage de la raison. Paris: Plon, 1953, p. 53. 13 Harold Garfinkel and Harry Sacks, ‘On Formal Structures of Practical Actions’. In John C. McKinney and Edward A. Tiryakian (eds.), Theoretical Sociology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970, p. 341. 14 Alan F. Blum, ‘Theorizing’. In McKinney and Tiryakian (eds.), Theoretical Sociology, p. 310. 15 Slanford M. Lyman and Marvin B. Scott, A Sociology of the Absurd. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970, p. 15. 16 Reinhard Bendix, ‘Sociology and Ideology’. In Tiryakian (ed.), The Phenomenon of Sociology, p. 181. 17 Thomas P. Wilson, ‘Normative and Interpretive Paradigms in Sociology’. In Douglas, Understanding, p. 79. 18 Zimmerman and Pollner, ‘The Everyday World as a Phenomenon’. In Douglas, Understanding, p. 195. 19 Alan F. Blum, ‘The Corpus of Knowledge as Normative Order’. In McKinney and Tiryakian (eds.), Theoretical Sociology, p. 336. 20 Garfinkel and Sacks, ‘On Formal Structures of Practical Actions’, p. 345. 21 Lyman and Scott, A Sociology of the Absurd, p. 16. 22 George Herbert Mead, The Dimensions of the Social World (orig. 1932), Collected Papers, 2. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967, pp. 27–31. 23 Cf. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Werke. Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1912, vol. III, p. 582. 24 Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Penguin, 1966, pp. 72, 75. 25 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale, English trans. Claire Jacobson and Brook Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Anchor Books, 1967, p. 24. In fact the quoted idea was formulated by Engels, in his essay on Louis Feuerbach. 26 Ibid., p. 64. 27 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le cru et le cuit. Paris: Plon, 1964, p. 34G. 28 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Thinkable and Unthinkable’, Times Literary Supplement, 15 October 1971. 29 Bennett M. Berger, ‘Sociology and the Intellectuals: Analysis of a Stereotype’, Antioch Review, 17: 289–90. 30 Tarde, Les lois de l’imitation. Paris, 1895, p. 83. 31 The distinction between ‘ends’ and ‘means’ is a crucial one in Weber’s methodology. He repeats emphatically that ‘it can never be the task of an empirical science to provide binding norms and ideals from which directives for immediate practical activity can be derived’; and that, on the contrary, ‘the question of the appropriateness of the means for achieving a given end is undoubtedly accessible to scientific analysis’ (Max Weber,

228 Notes The Methodology of the Social Sciences, English trans. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1949, p. 52). It could not escape Weber’s inquisitive and sharp sight that, first, the whole distinction between ends and means is relative to the extreme; and second, the ways this distinction is actually made on different occasions is always a by-product of the contemporaneous distribution of power. Since he did not reflect on either of the two issues, a case may be made that the use of the above dichotomy was deliberate and well considered, as a way of expressing the option for the role of experts, assisting the goal-assigning rulers. 32 Vilfredo Pareto, Trattato di Sociologia Generale, English trans. Arthur Livingston. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Co., 1935, p. 1293. 33 Reinhard Bendix, ‘Sociology and the Distrust of Reason’. In Reinhard Bendix and Guenther Roth, Scholarship and Partisanship. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971, p. 104. 34 Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, p. 47.

JORGE LUIS BORGES  5 1 Excerpt from the article ‘Jorge Luis Borges, or Why Understanding Is Not What It Seems to Be’ reproduced from Hermeneutic Soc Sci (Rev) RPD, 1st edition by Zygmunt Bauman, published by Routledge. © Zygmunt Bauman, 1978.

EINSTEIN MEETS MAGRITTE  7 1 Georges Balandier, Le dédale. Pour en finir avec le XXe siècle. Paris: Fayard, 1994, pp. 32–3: ‘It is the image of a space without visible cues, where all horizons are revealed to be illusory, where every exit turns out to be false; a closed space which betrays no possible means of escape … It evokes a world in which disorder appears to dissolve order, where growing complexity discourages all appeal to straightforward logic, where all points of identification are obfuscated and where one seeks out novel signs to illuminate her journey’ [editors’ note]. 2 Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. Abingdon: Routledge, 1988, p. 154.

ASSIMILATION INTO EXILE  8 1 In a thorough, insightful and carefully balanced analysis of the survival and transformation of ‘Jewish memory’ in contemporary Poland, Iwona Irwin-Zarecka (1989: 166) admits the crucial role of the suppressed

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memory of Holocaust horrors: ‘The problem here might be that Poles were such close witnesses that they automatically interpret any general questions about the Holocaust as a challenge.’ All translations from the Polish [in this chapter] are Bauman’s own. 2 Of himself, Sandauer writes (1985a): ‘Sandauer’s life is a history of a Jew persecuted for his origin. As a writer, however, he is someone very (perhaps excessively?) Polish on accountof his language. His purism betrays a neophyte.’ One can discern a self-portrait in Sandauer’s fictional hero Mieczysław (an ultra-Polish Christian name) Rosenzweig – ‘a hero built of two halves hating each other’. Caught between the equally unprepossessing alternatives (an inauthentic and bleached identity, or a self-hating and demonizing personality), Sandauer admits to being suspended in a state of ‘unstable balance’, in which he ‘sees any choice as naiveté’ (1985b: 526–9). At no stage of the chequered political history of postwar Poland did Sandauer quite fit the prevailing mood. Always an outsider, a debunker by nature, a pedantic, pungent, sullen and quarrelsome critic, he succeeded in antagonizing all the otherwise warring camps of the Polish literary world in more or less equal measure. 3 Aleksander Hertz remembers a letter he received from a friend, decorated with the highest Polish distinction awarded for supreme military gallantry. The friend wrote: ‘I had to be courageous. Did I falter, it would be said that the Jew was a coward’ (Hertz 1988: 166). 4 A striking example of the allo-Semitic view can be found in the Diaries of Witold Gombrowicz, hardly an anti-Semite: ‘When I hear from those people that the Jewish nation is like other nations, I feel like listening to Michelangelo insisting that he does not differ from the others.’ ‘Those who received the right to superiority have no right to equality.’ ‘History of that nation is a secret provocation, similar to the biography of all great men – a provocation of fate, inviting disasters that can help fulfill the mission of the chosen nation’ (1957: 121). 5 Of the interwar life of the Jews assimilated into Polish culture, Efraim Kaganowski, a Jewish writer from Warsaw, left a few shuddering, perceptive sketches: ‘café Ziemiańska, where the avant-garde of the Polish-Jewish congregate. Writers, poets, artists come here – a curious family, which on every opportunity complains of the “Jewish gathering”. They are not yet sure of their Polishness and suddenly notice that they are surrounded only by other Jews. This is why they feel so well here … . It is hopeless in the narrow Jewish streets. But it is also gloomy in the affluent Jewish flats. And only late at night in a large Jewish bourgeois restaurant … can you meet creatures from another world, whom you have never seen so far in any Jewish place … But this Jewish nightlife does not intoxicate. On their way back home the night guests do not feel drunk. The Jewish eyes are fearful and vigilant. These men want to be crushed in the crowd so that they can stop feeling how lonely they are’ (1958: 174–5). 6 The hump is a well-established trope in Polish-Jewish literature. Perhaps

230 Notes the most famous example of its use is Julian Tuwim’s poem of a hunchback imagining his suicide; he would buy a most beautiful necktie and hang himself with it. To no avail, though: ‘No one will say “what a wondrous necktie” / Everybody’ll comment “what an awful hump”.’

BEYOND THE BORDERS OF INTERPRETIVE ANARCHISM  9 1 Bauman refers in this paper to an article written by Andrzej Szahaj, one of the most renowned Polish philosophers. This text is entitled ‘The Limits of Interpretative Anarchy’ (Granice Anarchizmu Interpretacyjnego) and was published in 1997 in the Polish literary journal Teksty drugie, 6, 48: 5–33. This article sparked a heated debate among Polish humanists at the end of the twentieth century [editors’ note]. 2 Bauman did not provide a citation for this quote – it is probably a paraphrase. I have been unable to find the source, hence the translation is my own [translator’s note]. 3 In the original, WOP and KOP, acronyms for Wojska Ochrona Pogranicza and Korpus Ochrony Pogranicza, the Polish Border Protection Corps and Border Protection Troops [translator’s note]. 4 This is also my translation, citation unknown [translator’s note].

ACTORS AND SPECTATORS  11 1 See, particularly, Edward Gordon Craig’s On the Art of the Theatre (1905), and ‘The Artist of the Theatre of the Future’, Mask, 1, 1, March 1908: 3–5. 2 Craig, ‘The Actor and the Über-Marionette’, Mask, 1, 2, May 1908: 3–15. 3 Marvin Carlson (ed.), Theories of the Theatre. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993, ch. 17. 4 See Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’. In G. Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968, p. 139. 5 Richard Kostelanetz, ‘Conversation with John Cage’. In The Theatre of Mixed Means: An Introduction to Happening, Kinetic Experiments and Other Mixed Media Presentations. New York: Dial Press, 1980. 6 See an excellent summary of the argument in Grzegorz Dziamski’s ‘Happening, Performance’. In Grzegorz Dziamski (ed.), Od awangardy do postmodernizmu. Warsaw: Instytut Kultury, 1996. 7 See Juliusz Tyszka’s profound analysis of those trends in his introduction to Juliusz Tyszka (ed.), Teatr w miejscach nieteatralnych. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Fundacji Humaniora, 1998.

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THE SPECTRE OF BARBARISM  13 1 Bartholomé de las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992, p. 31. 2 David Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World. Oxford University Press, 1992, p. X. 3 See Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House, 2007. 4 Diane Abbott, ‘Freedom Is Recognizing Our Essential Humanity’, The Guardian, 10 July 2008. 5 See Seumas Milne, ‘This Persecution of Gypsies Is Now the Shame of Europe’, The Guardian, 10 July 2008. 6 Here quoted after Enzo Traverso, The Origin of Nazi Violence, English trans. Janet Lloyd. New York and London: The New Press, 2003. 7 Émile Durkheim, Sociologie et philosophie [Sociology and Philosophy]. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1924, p. 106. 8 See Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. 9 See Philip French, ‘A Hootenanny New Year to All’, The Observer Television, 30 December 2007 – 5 January 2008: 6. 10 For a latest high-level example, see ‘La France appelle à l’union contre l’immigration illégale’, Le Monde, 7 July 2008. According to the proposal submitted to the nations of the European Union by President Sarkozy, common European policy should be ‘d’immigration choisie’ – ‘en fonction de tous les besoins du marché du travail’. Anticipating the demands of the marché du travail, ‘le Pacte appelle les Vingt-Sept à développer l’immigration professionnelle, et à renforcer l’attractivité de l’UE pour les travailleurs très qualifiés et les étudiants’. 11 Lucien Febvre, Le problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle. Paris: A. Michel, 1942, p. 380. 12 www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/04/report-100-yout.html. 13 See Vibike Wara, ‘Mobile Learning for the On Generation’, fo: futureorientation, January 2008: 47. 14 In Giorgio Agamben, Lo stato di eccezione. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri editore, 2003, ch. 2. 15 Ibid., ch. 3. 16 See his Aux bords du monde, les réfugiés. Paris: Flammarion, 2002.

A FEW (ERRATIC) THOUGHTS ON THE MORGANATIC LIAISON OF THEORY AND LITERATURE  14 1 Teksty drugie: Teoria literatury, krytyka, interpretacja [Second Texts: Literary Theory, Criticism and Interpretation] is a Polish journal of literary scholarship published since 1990 at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The editor-in-chief of this

232 Notes journal is Ryszard Nycz. This and subsequent notes for this article are editors’ notes. 2 Milan Kundera, The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. 3 Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel. New York: Grove Press, 1988. 4 Ibid., p. 165. 5 Ibid., p. 160. 6 Kundera, The Curtain, p. 92. 7 Ibid., p. 8. 8 Kundera, Art of the Novel, p. 6. 9 Ibid., p. 18. 10 Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, New York: HarperCollins, 1995, p. 26. 11 Kundera, The Curtain, pp. 148, 149. 12 Kundera, Art of the Novel, p. 17. 13 Milan Kundera, ‘Some Notes on Roth’s “My Life as a Man” and “The Professor of Desire”’. In Z. Milbauer and D. G. Watson (eds.), Reading Philip Roth. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988, p. 165. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 ‘We must take care of our garden … Each his own, of course.’ Bauman refers here to Voltaire’s Candide [editors’ note].

ON LOVE AND HATE …  15 1 M. Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts. London, 1996, p. 237. This and subsequent notes for this article are editors’ notes. 2 Ibid., p. 240. 3 Z. Bauman and S. Obirek, On the World and Ourselves. Cambridge: Polity, 2015, p. 82. 4 Translation by K. Bartoszyńska. Below is the original Italian quote: La calunnia è antica quanto il mondo e se ne trovano riferimenti già nell’Antico Testamento. Basti pensare all’episodio della regina Jezabel con la vigna di Naabot, o a quello di Susanna con i due giudici. Quando non si poteva ottenere qualcosa ‘per una strada giusta, una strada santa’, si utilizzava la calunnia, che distrugge. E ‘questo – ha commentato il Papa – ci fa pensare: noi tutti siamo peccatori, tutti. Abbiamo peccati. Ma la calunnia è un’altra cosa.’ È un peccato, ma è anche qualcosa di più, perché ‘vuole distruggere l’opera di Dio e nasce da una cosa molto cattiva: nasce dall’odio. E chi fa l’odio è Satana.’ Menzogna e calunnia vanno di pari passo, perché hanno bisogno l’una dell’altra per andare avanti. E senza dubbio, ha aggiunto il Pontefice, ‘dove c’è calunnia c’è Satana,

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proprio lui’ … Il Pontefice ha poi fatto notare che la nostra epoca è caratterizzata da ‘più martiri che non quella dei primi secoli. Perseguitati per l’odio: è proprio il demonio che semina l’odio in quelli che compiono le persecuzioni.’ (L’Osservatore Romano, 153, 88, 15–16 April 2013; www.vatican. va/content/francesco/it/cotidie/2013/documents/papa-francescocotidie_20130415_calunnia.html). 5 Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis, Corrupción y pecado. Buenos Aires: Editorial Claretiana, 2005. 6 Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis, The Way of Humility: Corruption and Sin; On Self-Accusation, English trans. Helena Scott. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2014, pp. 25–9. 7 Ibid., pp. 13, 14. 8 Ibid., p. 38. 9 Ibid., p. 25. 10 Ibid., p. 34. 11 Barbara Skarga, ‘Przeciw nienawisci’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 66, 2005. Translation by K. Bartoszyńska. 12 Z. Bauman and S. Obirek, On the World and Ourselves. Cambridge: Polity, 2015, p. 25. 13 Andrzej Werblan, Stalinizm w Polsce [Stalinism in Poland]. Translation by K. Bartoszyńska. Publishing and Literary Society, 2009 (1991).

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: ‘Culture and Society: Semantic and Genetic Connections’ (1966) was originally published in Polish as ‘Kultura i Społeczeństwo: Związki semantyczne i genetyczne’, Kultura i Społeczeństwo, 1, 1966: 71–98. Chapter 2: ‘Notes Beyond Time’ (1967) was originally published in Polish as ‘Notatki poza czasem’, Twórczość, 10, 1967: 77–89. Chapter 3: ‘Marx and the Contemporary Theory of Culture’ (1968) was originally published as ‘Marx and the Contemporary Theory of Culture’, Social Science Information, 3, 1968: 69–80. Chapter 4: ‘Culture, Values and Science of Society’ (1972) was originally published as ‘Culture, Values and Science of Society’, The University of Leeds Review, 15, 2, 1972: 185–203. Copyright © The University of Leeds, 1972. Included by kind permission of The University of Leeds. Chapter 5: ‘Jorge Louis Borges, or Why Understanding Is Not What It Seems to Be’ (1976). An excerpt from this paper was published in the chapter ‘Consensus and Truth’ in Zygmunt Bauman, Hermeneutics and Social Sciences: Approaches to Understanding’ London: Routledge, 2010. The full paper, ‘Jorge-Luis Borges: On Understanding and What Understanding Is Not’, pp. 1–19, was found in the Papers of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman at the University of Leeds.

Acknowledgements

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Chapter 6: ‘Thinking Photographically’ (1983–1985) is a combination of the excerpts from Zygmunt Bauman’s texts on photography that were found in the Papers of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman at the University of Leeds. The subsequent parts of the piece are derived from the following items: (I) a letter to the editors of the journal Amateur Eve, no date on the letter, c.1985; (II) and (III) the exhibition brochures for ‘Photographs 1983–1984’, at Playhouse Gallery, Leeds, 27 October – 1 December 1984; (IV) a letter to the Impression Gallery in York, 27 March 1985; (V) a letter to Creative Photography, dated 4 August 1985; (VI) an exhibition brochure for ‘Moods and Shapes, Photographs by Zygmunt Bauman 1981–1983’, University Gallery Leeds, 7–28 March 1984. All photographs © Zygmunt Bauman. Chapter 7: ‘Einstein Meets Magritte: Postmodernity Is Born’ (1995) was found in the Papers of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman at the University of Leeds. Chapter 8: ‘Assimilation into Exile: The Jew as a Polish Writer’ (1996) was originally published as ‘Assimilation into Exile: The Jew as a Polish Writer’, Poetics Today, 17, 4: 569–98. Copyright © 1996, the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyrightholder, and the present publisher, Duke University Press. www.dukeupress. edu. Chapter 9: ‘Beyond the Limits of Interpretative Anarchy’ (1997) was originally published in Polish as ‘Nad granicami anarchizmu interpretacyjnego’, Teksty drugie [Second Texts], 6, 1997: 35–49. Chapter 10: ‘On Art, Death and Postmodernity – And What They Do To Each Other’ (1998) was originally published as ‘On Art, Death and Postmodernity – And What They Do to Each Other’ in M. Hannula (ed.) Stopping the Process: Contemporary View on Art and Exhibition. Helsinki: Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art, 1998, pp. 21–34. Included by kind permission of NIFCA / Nordic Culture Point. Chapter 11: ‘Actors and Spectators’ (2004) was found in the Papers of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman at the University of Leeds. Chapter 12: ‘Listening to the Past, Talking to the Past …’ (2008) was originally published as ‘Listening to the Past, Talking to the Past …’.

236 Acknowledgements In M. Archer, M. Bałka and Z. Bauman, 17 x 23.5 x 1.6, London: Jap Joplin / White Cube, 2008, pp. 77–80. Chapter 13: ‘The Spectre of Barbarism – Then and Now’ (2008) was originally published in French translation as ‘Le spectre de la barbarie, de la Grèce à nos jours’, Les Cahiers Européens de l’Imaginaire, 1, 2008: 40–57. The original English version of this article was found in the Papers of Janina and Zygmunt Bauman at the University of Leeds. Chapter 14: ‘A Few (Erratic) Thoughts on the Morganatic Liaison of Theory and Literature’ (2010) was originally published in Polish as ‘O związku morganatycznym teorii z literaturą myśli (roztrzepanych) parę’, Teksty drugie, 1/2, 2010: 13–18. Chapter 15: ‘On Love and Hate … In the Footsteps of Barbara Skarga’ (2015) was originally published in Polish as ‘O miłości i nienawiści … tropami Barbary Skargi’. In M. Falkowski and A. Marczyński (eds.), Medytacje Filozoficzne. Warsaw: Muzeum Łazienki Królewskie, 2015, pp. 37–51.

Index

Abbott, Diane 190 Abdel-Malek, Anouar 225n9 Abu Ghraib 189, 205 academia 38–40, 42, 44, 208 acculturation see assimilation ‘Actors and Spectators’ xxvi, 169–77 Adorno, Theodor xix Agamben, Giorgio 204–5 agency xxvi, 225n11 Agier, Michel 205 Akunin, Boris 217–18 Aristonomia xxi, 217–19 Albert the Great 150 Albright, Madeleine 187 allo-Semitism 137, 233n 4 ambiguity xxiii, xxiv, xxvii, 29, 50, 57, 70, 93, 94, 101–2, 120, 132, 203, 210, 226n 18 ambivalence xi, xv, xix, xxiv, 70, 132, 133, 135, 151–2, 188 analytical dualism 225n11 anarchism 77 interpretive see ‘Beyond the Borders of Interpretive Anarchism’ animal societies 19–22

educability 30 positive dependencies 21 spatial equilibrium 21 territoriality 21, 22 anthropology 2, 4–5, 14, 23, 27, 55, 59, 65, 77 anti-positivism 72–3, 74, 75 anti-religiosity 37–8 anti-science 38 anti-Semitism xix, 130–2, 133–5, 137, 138–9, 140–1, 142 Apollonian idea of art 170 archaeology 2–3 Archer, Margaret 225n11 Archilochus 33, 34, 50 Archimedes 197 Arendt, Hannah 162–3, 164 aretonomic personality xxi, 219–21, 222, 223 aristonomia 217–19 Aristotle 91, 92 Arnold, Matthew Culture and Anarchy 193 Literature and Dogma 193 Aron, Raymond 225n9 art xii–xiii, xxii–xxvii Apollonian idea of 170

238 Index art (cont.) arts–science division 117 avant-garde modernist art 171 conceptual art 168 destruction and reconstruction 167–8 as entertainment 166 galleries, visiting xxvi, 180–1 heuristic purpose xxii and immortality 161–8 kinetic art 158–9 mythical subjects 163 as one-off event 166, 167 reality, questioning 115 sociology’s affinity with xxii, xxvii see also ‘Einstein Meets Magritte: Postmodernity Is Born’; ‘Listening to the Past, Talking to the Past’; literature; ‘On Art, Death and Postmodernity – and What They Do To Each Other’; photography; poetry; theatre Artaud, Antonin 170 assimilation 63, 64, 119–28, 133, 135, 136, 138, 185 accumulation of legitimacy 127 bourgeois 119–20, 127, 133 civilizing mission 124, 125 cultural explosiveness 119, 128, 135–6, 137–8, 139–46 diminishing urge for 128 memory of past uniqueness 120, 124 overt conformity 120, 133 strategies 124 ‘Assimilation into Exile: The Jew as a Polish Writer’ xviii, 119–48 attributive understandings of culture and society xiv, 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 17, 18, 20, 22 Augustine, St. 48 autarchism 10 autonomization of culture 14, 19, 24, 27, 28–32

autonomy 6, 16, 19, 27, 28, 128, 174 Averroës 179 ‘Averroës’s Search’ (Borges) xviii, 90–2, 102, 179–80 axiological concept of culture 54, 56 Bakhtin, Mikhail 206 Balandier, Georges 117, 232n1 Bałka, Mirosław xxvi–xxvii, 181–2, 228n35 barbarians, barbarism 53–4, 183–92, 194, 195, 200 alternative modes of life 184–5 ‘barbaros’ 183, 185 and the cause of world conquest 186–7, 189, 191 ‘civilizing mission’ and 53, 185, 186, 187, 195 dehumanization 189, 190 exclusion from civilized treatment 190 judgemental epithet 185, 186, 187, 189 as lawlessness 204, 205 as primitivism 185–6 resurgence of barbarism 190, 205 victim-blaming strategies and 187 violence against and coercion of 186–7, 188, 189 see also ‘The Spectre of Barbarism – Then and Now’; strangers Bartoszewski, Władysław 129 Bates, Marston 20 Baudrillard, Jean 226n17 Beck, Józef 214 Beck, Ulrich 192, 211 Being There (film) 204 being-in-the-world xv, xxiii, 68, 74, 77, 164, 167, 181, 182, 211 Bendix, Reinhard 74, 82 Benedict, Ruth 56, 57 Berger, Bennett M. 80

Index Berger, Peter 76 Bergoglio, Jorge Mario 216–17 Bertalanffy, Ludwig von 71 ‘Beyond the Borders of Interpretive Anarchism’ xix–xx, 149–57 Biale, David 125 Big Brother (reality TV) 201 biocenosis 18 biological determinism 29 biological evolution 29 Black, Eugene C. 123 Bloch, Ernst xvii Boas, Franz 55 Borges, Jorge Luis xxiii ‘Averroës’s Search’ xviii, 90–2, 102, 179–80 ‘Death and the Compass’ 89 ‘Emma Zunz’ 89 ‘The Fearful Sphere of Pascal’ 88 ‘Funes the Memorious’ 87–8, 89 ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ 84–5 ‘The House of Asterion’ 89 ‘The Immortal’ 86 Labyrinths 84 ‘The Library of Babel’ 85–6 ‘The Lottery in Babylon’ 90 ‘Partial Magic in the Quixote’ 86 ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ 92–8, 152 see also ‘Jorge Luis Borges, or Why Understanding Is Not What It Seems to Be’ Bossi, Umberto 190 Bourdieu, Pierre xvii, 78, 193, 195, 225n11 Distinction 193 Brandt, Bill xxiv, 104 breeding ideals 51 Broch, Hermann 208 Brook, Peter 173 Bund 133 Burnham, James 198 Cage, John 175

239

Cała, Alina 132 Calder, Alexander xxv, 158–9, 160 Calvino, Italo xxiii Camus, Albert, The Rebel 225n7 Carlyle, Thomas 99 Carpenter, Clarence Ray 21 Cartier-Bresson, Henri xxiv, 104, 106, 108 caste and estate societies 51–2 Castells, Manuel 227n22 Castoriadis, Cornelius 160 Cervantes, Miguel de 92–3, 94, 95 Chance, M. R. A. 20–1 Chmielewski, Adam xi class domination 51, 52, 65–6, 125–6 coercion 194, 211 legitimacy 188 cognitive dissonance 70 collective consciousness 78 colonialism 53, 56, 186–7, 195 communicative action theory xviii comparison, giving up on 43 computer games 200–1, 202, 203 conceptual art 168 Condorcet, Marquis de 81 conquistadores 186 consumerist culture xix, 196–7 consumption 165 corrupted person, marker of 216–17 cosmopolitan identities xxi, 139 Craig, Edward Gordon 169–70, 172, 228n 34 creativity xvi, xxvi critical cultural studies xvii Culler, Jonathan 152, 157 cultural adaptation 22 cultural assimilation see assimilation cultural differentiation 51–2 cultural diversity xxi cultural emancipation xv cultural evolution xiv, 55, 56, 57, 191, 195

240 Index cultural hierarchy 191–2, 198 cultural isolation 13 cultural multiplicity 226n16 cultural pluralism xx, 7 cultural relativism 7, 77 culture xiii–xxi attributive understandings of xiv, 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 17, 18, 20, 22 axiological concept of 54, 56 Bauman’s definition of xiv, xxvii border concept 13–14 collection or system 7–16 ‘culture or cultures’ dilemma 4, 5, 6 as dialogue xviii, xxi distributive understandings of xiv, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 10, 17, 22, 25 Enlightenment project 193, 194, 195 evolutionist concept of xiv, 55, 56, 57, 191, 195 Greek concept of 50–1, 52 holistic view of 8, 14 liquid modern culture 192, 196–7 and personality xiv, xv as praxis xvi–xvii, xxvii, 225n11 as process xv–xvi proselytizing mission 193–4, 195 reciprocal relations between society and 16–28 transformative potential of xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xx value-freed notion of 53 ‘Culture, Values and Science of Society’ xvi, 67–83 Culture and Society: Preliminaries xiii, xxii ‘Culture and Society: Semantic and Genetic Connections’ xiv, 1–32 Danby, Joseph 189 Darwin, Charles 218 death art and 160, 161, 163

awareness of 44, 45, 164, 165 see also immortality Debord, Guy 175 Deleuze, Gilles 226n17 democratization of culture 52 Derrida, Jacques 152, 192, 210 determinism 29, 61, 72, 73, 74, 77 Deutscher, Isaac 131 Dilthey, Wilhelm 152, 153 Dimitrijevic, Braco 168 dissemination of cultural goods 52 distributive understandings of culture and society xiv, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 10, 17, 22, 25 Dobzhansky, Theodosius 5, 6 Douglas, Jack 71 Duchamp, Marcel 158 Durkheim, Émile 194, 224n3 Dziadosz, Bartosz 227n27 Eco, Umberto 155–6 The Island of the Day Before 155 The Name of the Rose 155 economic determinism 61 educability 30 egoism/altruism opposition 46, 49 ‘Einstein Meets Magritte: Postmodernity Is Born’ xxiv, 114–18 Elzenberg, Henryk 217 empathy 220–1 empiricism 6, 18, 22, 23, 35, 77, 79, 232n31 end of history thesis 153 ends and means distinction 232n31 Engels, Friedrich 54 Enlightenment 78, 160, 193, 194, 195 eternity 44, 45, 164, 165, 166 see also immortality ethics xiii, 68 postmodern xv, xix ethnography 2, 3, 27, 55, 58, 59 cultural models 3

Index ethnomethodology xvi, 73, 74, 75–7, 225n10 European cultural model 52, 55, 56, 57 Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 4 evolutionism 5 evolutionist conception of culture xiv, 55, 56, 57, 191, 195 exile 119 see also assimilation experience economy 198, 199 experience-seekers 164–5 Fackenheim, Emil 121 Febvre, Lucien 201 Feldman, David 123–4 ‘A Few (Erratic) Thoughts on the Morganatic Liaison of Theory and Literature’ xxiii, 207–12 Ficowski, Jerzy 129 flâneurs 177 force de loi 204 Foucault, Michel xix, 118, 191 Francis, Pope 215–16 Frankel, Charles 225n9 freedom sexual 210–11 of thought 213 toxins of 214–15 Freud, Sigmund xix Fried, Michael 171, 172 Fromm, Erich 27, 225n9 Fukuyama, Francis 153 functional analysis 26 functionalism xiv, 5, 14, 27, 55, 162 functionality of culture 17, 18, 19, 26–8 primitive 27 reciprocal 28 Gablik, Suzi 114, 115 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 162 Gandini, Erik 227n27 Garfinkel, Harold 73, 76

241

Gellner, Ernest xviii genetic relationship between culture and society 16, 17–18 Giddens, Anthony xvii, 225n11 global economic crises xxi Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 218 Goldmann, Lucien 61 Goldwater, Barry 189 Gombrowicz, Witold 214, 233n4 Gramsci, Antonio xiii, xv, xvi, 72 Prison Notebooks 224n6, 225n7 Greek concept of culture 50–1, 52 Gross, Jan Tomasz 134 Guantánamo 189, 205 Guattari, Félix 226n17 Habermas, Jürgen xviii Hallowell, Alfred Irving 21, 22 Hannerz, Ulf 227n22 ‘happenings’ 167, 175, 176 happy life 218 Hartley, L. P., The Go-Between 178 Hayek, Friedrich von 72–3 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 72, 81 Heidegger, Martin 108, 184, 209, 210 hermeneutics xii, xvii, xviii, xix, 98, 99, 100, 102, 149–57 see also interpretation Hermeneutics and Social Science xi Herskovitz, Mellville J. 26 Hertz, Aleksander 137, 233n3 Herzl, Theodor 125 hierarchization of cultural forms 54 Himmelfarb, Milton 128–9 Hiroshima and Nagasaki 191 Hirst, Damien xxv, 159, 160, 167 The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living 159 Hirszowicz, Maria 26 Hobbes, Thomas 194 Hobsbawm, Eric 225n9 Hochfeld, Julian xxiii, 68

242 Index Holocaust xix, 121, 129–31, 134, 139, 141, 191, 233n1 honour 220 Horkheimer, Max xix ‘human’, widening of the concept of 13 human rights 190, 197, 200 humanistic sociology xiii, xv, 38, 74, 75, 77, 82 humanity 10, 13 Husserl, Edmund 209 Ichheiser, Gustav xi, xxviii identity xiv, 119, 140, 164, 185, 198, 226n16, 233n2 communal 128 national see nationalism problems of 155 self-identity 140, 192 imagined communities xxi immortality 86, 87, 88 art and xxv, 161–8 deconstruction of 166 postmodern ‘instant immortality’ 165, 167 Impressionists 213 indeterminacy of the human situation 224n5, 226n16 industrial society 23–4 infantilism 29 infinity 44, 45, 86, 87, 89 insect colonies 19 installations, art 167, 175, 176 instinctive models of behaviour 29–30 instrumental reason 81, 160–1 interpretation 149–57 boundaries 151, 152, 153 context and 150, 151, 152 horizon of 157 intentio auctoris 156, 157 intentio lectoris 156 interpretive anarchy 150–2, 154, 156 ‘over-interpretation’ 153

relativization 152 sovereignty of the text and 151, 152 irrationalism 74, 77, 82 Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona 233n1 ‘Is the Science of the Possible Possible?’ 228n33 Israel 121–2 iusticium 205–6 Jacoby, R. 225n12 James, William 94, 95 Jameson, Fredric 226n17 Jeux d’enfants (film) 202–3 Jewish Board of Guardians 123 Jewish distinctiveness 127, 128–9, 133, 138 Jewish nationalism 133 Jewish socialism 124, 126–7, 133 Jewry, Central European allo-Semitism 137, 233n4 ambivalence 133, 135 anti-Semitism xix, 130–2, 133–5, 137, 138–9, 140–1, 142 assimilation see assimilation class conflict 125–6 diasporic Jews 119–20, 122, 125, 134 dissipation of 122, 125, 129, 139 ‘garden culture’ and xviii, xix, 127 Holocaust xix, 121, 129–31, 134, 139, 141, 191, 233n1 hostile to Eastern Jewish immigration 122–5 identity 121, 122, 124, 133 Ostjude 122, 124 otherness 132–3, 137 Polish Jews 129–46 ‘Jorge Luis Borges, or Why Understanding Is Not What It Seems to Be’ xviii, 84–102 Joseph Cartaphilus 86–7

Index

243

Kafka, Franz xxiv, 120, 133, 212, 227n30 Kaganowski, Efraim 233n5 Kant, Immanuel 78, 222 Karpinski, General Janis 189 Kertész, André xxiv, 104 Kettle, Martin 190–1 Kielce pogrom 131 Kilminster, Richard xii kinetic art 158–9 kinship systems 22, 58 Klemm, Gustav 54, 55 knowledge, incompleteness of 90, 100–1 Korzybski, Alfred 32 Kostelanetz, Richard 175 Kotarbiński, Tadeusz 220 Kozioł, Urszula 221 Kozyr-Kowalski, Stanisław 223 Kroeber, Alfred Louis 19–20 Kulturkampf 56, 133 Kundera, Milan xxiii, xxvii–xxviii, 207, 208–9, 210, 211, 213, 214 Kuśniewicz, Andrzej 130

Lieberman, Aaron 126 limnology 40 liquid modernity xv, xx, xxviii, xxi, 172–3, 175, 192, 196–7, 201 Liquid Modernity vii, xii, xxv–xxvi ‘Listening to the Past, Talking to the Past’ xxvi, 178–82 literature heuristic purpose of xxii, xxiii, 155–6 see also ‘A Few (Erratic) Thoughts on the Morganatic Liaison of Theory and Literature’; novel(s) and novel writing; poetry Living on Borrowed Time 225n12 Losey, Joseph 178 love and fear 45–7 and sex 47–9 Lowenthal, David 178, 181 Lowie, Robert 5 Lundberg, George 70–1 Lyman, Slanford M. 75 Lyotard, Jean-François 226n17

Laroui, Abdallah 225n9 Las Casas, Bartholomé de 186 Lawrence, D. H. 210 Leeds Camera Club 104 Legislators and Interpreters xviii Lenin, Vladimir 214 Lepenies, Wolf xxii Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 160 Lévi-Strauss, Claude xv, xvi, 5, 26, 38, 41, 55, 57–61, 77–8 Du miel aux cendres 59 La pensée sauvage 58 Le cru et le cuit 59 Le totemisme aujourd’hui 59 Mythologiques 59 Structural Anthropology 58 Tristes tropiques 57, 58, 59, 185 Levinas, Emanuel 154 Lewitt, Sol 168

Ma, Yo-Yo xxiv McLuhan, Marshall 172 Magritte, René xxiv, xxv ‘Einstein Meets Magritte: Postmodernity Is Born’ 114–18 La condition humaine 116 Malinowski, Bronisław 4, 55, 56, 57 managerial cult 169, 170, 172, 198 managerial revolution 198–200 Mannheim, Karl xvii Marcuse, Herbert xvii, 225n9 Marković, Mihailo 225n9 Maroni, Roberto 190 Marquard, Odo 156 Martindale, Don 15 Marx, Karl 39, 40, 76, 77

244 Index ‘Marx and the Contemporary Theory of Culture’ xvi, 50–66 Marxism creation of truth 39 eternal remaking of the world 39 revisionist Marxism xiii Scientific Marxism xiii structuralism and xvi, 59–62, 64, 66 Maslow, Abraham xv, 38 mass culture 175 Matisse, Henri 166 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 214 Mead, George Herbert 76 Mead, Margaret 56 meaning fluidity of 96, 97 labyrinth of 98–9 production of 88, 108, 111 search of 88, 90, 98, 99 see also understanding meanings independence of 32 stabilization of 31 Mejbaum, Wacław 223 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 71–2 migration panic xx–xxi Miller, Henry 210 Mills, C. Wright 82 Milne, Seumas 190 Miłosz, Czesław 129, 214 Minelli, Liza 203 modernity xviii, 72 liquid modernity xv, xx, xxviii, xxi, 172–3, 175, 192, 196–7, 201 ‘will to order’ xviii, xix Modernity and Ambivalence xxiv Modernity and the Holocaust vii, xii Mondrian, Piet xxv, 158, 165 Montagu, Ashley 1, 29 Montaigne, Michel de 53–4 moral relativism xix, 77 morality xiii, x, 36, 68, 187

Morley, Malcolm 167–8 Mosley, Nicholas 153 Mrożek, Sławomir 214 multiculturalism 191 Mumford, Lewis 32 Musil, Robert xxiii naming, act of 32 nationalism xix, 119, 120, 123, 127, 128, 132–3, 134, 136, 137 nation-state building xviii–xix, 133, 194–5 ‘civilizing process’ 194 cultural function 128 denationalization of 128 erosion of powers and ambitions 128 natural selection 29 neo-evolutionism xiv neolithic culture 2, 11, 57, 58 New Primitivism 74 Nietzsche, Friedrich 94, 149, 170 nonconformism 214 nonidentity 119, 121 ‘Notes Beyond Time’ xv, 33–49 novel(s) and novel writing 207–12 complexity and ambiguity of the human experience xxiii, 208, 210, 211 novelists 208 Nycz, Ryszard 207 Obirek, Stanisław 214–16, 222–3 ‘On Art, Death and Postmodernity – and What They Do To Each Other’ xxv, 158–68 ‘On Love and Hate … In the Footsteps of Barbara Skarga’ xxi, 213–23 ‘On the Philosophical Status of Ethnomethodology’ 225n10 online and offline worlds 200–4 order-building practices xx, 170, 187, 199

Index Ortega y Gasset, José 162 Ossowski, Stanisław xxiii, 67–8, 214 Other, Otherness xix, xxi, 132–3, 137, 138, 200, 220, 221 empathy for the Other 220–1 see also barbarians, barbarism; strangers Ozick, Cynthia 120 Pareto, Vilfredo 81 Perec, Georges xxiii phenomenalism 77 photography 103–13 aid to imagination and reflection 106 construction of meaning 108, 111 ‘decisive moment’ 106, 108 defamiliarizing the familiar xxiv developing and printing 103–4 mastering the basics 104 sociological imagination and xxiii–xxiv, 106, 108, 111 see also ‘Thinking Photographically’ Picasso, Pablo 166 Plutarch 50, 51 poetry xxv–xxvi, 129, 135–6, 162 Poland anti-intellectual movements 138 anti-Semitism xix, 130–2, 133–5, 137, 138–9, 140–1, 142 and the Holocaust 129–30, 134, 139, 141, 233n 1 Jewish Polonization 133, 135, 136–7 nationalism xix, 132–3, 134, 136, 137 Polish Jews 129–46 rebirth of the nation state 133 Soviet-style communism xiii surveillance practices 133, 139 Polanyi, Karl 198 Polish Communist Party 143 Polish United Workers’ Party xiii

245

Pollner, Melvin 74 Pollock, Griselda xxii positivism xv, xvi, 72, 77, 82 anti-positivism 72–3, 74, 75 positivistic sociology 70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 79, 82 possession 48–9 postmodern artists xxv postmodern ethics xix postmodernity xix–xx, 154, 155, 226n 19 see also ‘Beyond the Borders of Interpretive Anarchism’; ‘Einstein Meets Magritte: Postmodernity Is Born’; ‘On Art, Death and Postmodernity – and What They Do To Each Other’ poverty 43 power struggles 188–9 powerlessness 43, 68 praxis xvi, 61, 62 culture as praxis xvi–xvii, xxvii, 225n 11 primitive societies 2–3, 4, 13, 14, 15, 22–3, 27, 32, 56, 57 primordial unity 34, 78 private property 48 proselytizing mission of culture 193–4, 195 Przybyła, Joanna xxv, 159–60 pseudo-dialogues 216 Radin, Paul 34 Rank, Otto 161, 164 reality TV 201, 204 reciprocal relations between society and culture 16–28 biocenosis 18 functional 17, 18, 19, 26–8 genetic 16, 17–18, 20, 22, 23, 24 informational 19 structural 17, 24–6 Redfield, Robert 14–15 reductionism xv, 34–5, 38

246 Index religion 160 anti-religiosity 37–8 Remane, Adolf 18 Rembrandt van Rijn 95 responsibility 220 retrotopia xxi Ribbentrop, Joachim von 214 Ringelblum, Emanuel 129–30 Robertson, Ritchie 122 Rodinson, Maxime 225n9 Roma 190 romantic notion of culture 53–4 Rorty, Richard 226n17 Rosenberg, Abraham 126 Roth, Philip 210, 211 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 58 Różewicz, Tadeusz 214 Rubenstein, Richard 121 Rudnicki, Adolf 139–41, 227n30 Ruiz Zafón, Carlos xii Russell, Bertrand 94 Russian revolution 222, 223 Sabato, Ernesto 208 Samuell, Yann 202 Sandauer, Artur 135, 138, 233n2 Santayana, George xvii ‘savages’ see barbarism Schoeck, Helmuth 71 Scholem, Gershom 122 Schutz, Alfred 76 scientific–social dichotomy 81, 82 scientism 71, 82 Scott, Marvin B. 75 self-assessment 220 self-identity 140, 192 self-reflection 69–70 self-reflexivity xxvi self-regarding individuals xix semiotic–directive function 64–5 semiotics 31, 61–3, 64 sensation-gatherers 164–5, 166, 167 sex 47, 48, 49 sexual freedom 210–11

Simmel, Georg 197 Skarga, Barbara 217, 219, 227n23 Sketches in the Theory of Culture xiii, 224nn2,5, 226n16 slander 215 Slonimski, Antoni 138 Smith, Dennis xix Smolar, Aleksander 134–5 social dependencies 27, 28 social inequalities xxi, 51–2, 65–6 socialism xiii ‘active’ utopia xvii, xxvii goals 52 Jewish 124, 126–7, 133 society animal societies 19–22 attributive understandings 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 17, 18, 20, 22 distributive understandings of xiv, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 10, 17, 22, 25 energy circulation 9, 10, 12, 18, 22, 28–9 negative condition 9–10 positive condition 10 postulate of complementarity 10, 11–12, 13, 15 postulate of self-sufficiency 10, 12–13, 15 primitive societies 2–3, 4, 13, 14, 15, 23, 32, 56, 57 reciprocal relations between culture and 16–28 see also ‘Culture and Society: Semantic and Genetic Connections’ society of the spectacle 175 sociological reason 82 sociology 69 contradictory status of 70 critical function 81–2 cultural form xxii deterministic 72, 73, 74 face-to-face interactions 76 humanistic xiii, xv, 38, 74, 75, 77, 82

Index positivistic 70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 79, 82 scientific–social dichotomy 81, 82 structuralism and xvi, 77, 78–9 value-loaded and art-like 80 see also ‘Culture, Values and Science of Society’ Sophists 51 Sorin, Gerald 126 Sorokin, Pitirim 72–3 sovereignty 205 Soviet semiotics 61–2 Soviet Union 132, 134, 135, 223 ‘species or race’ dilemma 5–6 ‘The Spectre of Barbarism – Then and Now’ xx, 183–206, 225n8 spiritual values 51 Stalin, Joseph 223 Stannard, David 186 states of exception 205 Steiner, George 165, 197 Stone Age economy 11 Strachey, William 53 strangers anthropophagic/anthropoemic strategies for dealing with 185 barbarians 184 display of alternative possibilities 184–5 ‘problem’ of strangers 184–5 unnerving and discomfiting 184 see also assimilation Strauss, Erwin W. 72 structural constructivism xvii, 225n11 structural linguistics 59, 61 structuralism xiv, xvi, xvii, 38, 77, 78–9 Marxism and xvi, 59–62, 64, 66 structurization of the social environment xv–xvi, 62, 64, 66 Stryjowski, Julian 139, 141–6, 227n30 The Echo 143 The Inn 145

247

Visitor from Narbonne 144–5 Voices from Darkness 142, 143 student revolts, Paris 1968 xvi Sturm und Drang 75, 172 ‘superior culture’ 56 surveillance practices xix, 133, 139 The Swedish Theory of Love (film) 227n27 symbols 30–1, 32 ambiguity of 101–2 communicative function 102 institutionalization as speech 19, 31 see also semiotics systematicity of culture and society 7–16, 23 Szahaj, Andrzej 149, 150, 153, 154, 157, 234n1 Tarde, Gabriel 81 technological systems 24–5 territoriality 21, 22 Tester, Keith vii, 226n 19, 227n 26 theatre xxvi construction of the world xxvi convergence with other visual arts 175–6 as discourse 177 ‘empty space’ xxvi, 173, 174 liquid modern art 172–3, 175 modernist 169–77 non-theatrical spaces 176–7 ‘reality’ xxvi, 173, 174–5 self-enclosed and self-sustained events 173, 174 social transformations xxvi spectators 169, 170, 171, 173–7 in the street 176–7 theatrical objets d’art 171, 175 see also ‘Actors and Spectators’ theatricality 171, 175 ‘Thinking Photographically’ xxiii– xxiv, 103–13 time freezing 165

248 Index time (cont.) ‘time off’ 180 see also eternity; immortality totalitarianism xix, 222 totemism 58, 60 transience 163, 164, 165, 167 transmission of culture 51 Traverso, Enzo 191 The Trouble with Being Human These Days (film) 227n27 truth essence of truth 221, 222 ‘truth is a process’ 39–40 Tuwim, Julian 135, 136, 227n30, 234n6 understanding centrality for human life 99 historicity of 94–5 matter-of-factness 99–100 problem of xvii–xviii, 97–9, 100, 102 see also ‘Jorge Luis Borges, or Why Understanding Is Not What It Seems to Be’ utopia xvii, xix, xxvii, 225n 12, 226n13 value-freed notion of culture 53 Varcoe, Ian xii Veblen, Thorstein 219 Verdinglichung 73 Vermeer, Johannes 166

Vincenz, Stanisław 214 violence against ‘barbarians’ 186–7, 188 legitimacy 188 Virilio, Paul 226n22 virtue 217, 218, 220, 221, 222 Vygotski, L. 61 Wagner, Izabela xxiv Wara, Vibike 203 Warsaw Foksal 181 ghetto 140, 144 Weber, Max 42, 43, 79, 83, 170 Werblan, Andrzej 223 Wertheimer, Jack 123 Wesley, John 53 Whig version of history 187, 191 White, Leslie 22, 30–1 Wiener, Lawrence 168 Wiesel, Elie 121 Wilson, Thomas P. 74 Witkiewicz, Stanisław Ignacy 214 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 99, 154 Wolinski, Alan 227n29 workmanship instinct 219–20 Zhabotinsky, Ze’ev 134 Zimbardo, Philip 189 Zimmerman, Don H. 74 Zionism 122, 124–5, 133, 134 Znaniecki, Florian 72–3 Zuni Indians 14, 41

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