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Theor Soc (2012) 41:635640
DOI 10.1007/s11186-012-9182-8
BOOK REVIEW
Jensen Sass
Published online: 21 September 2012# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012
Theda Skocpol once wrote that it is only the truly blessed among sociologists who can publish their reading notes as books (Skocpol 1978, p. 415). Among the truly blessed we might include the Zygmunt Bauman of Culture in a Liquid Modern World. This book comprises a collection of impressionistic sketchesand I do not mean this pejorativelyof the present status and permeations of a concept central to theory and the discipline at large. In contrast to Skocpols target, Bauman acknowledges the preliminary character of his work, the first chapter of which is titled Some Notes on the Historical Peregrinations of the Concept of Culture. But this acknowledgment renders the book difficult to evaluate, as does the fact that the genre of theory Bauman produces is received so differently on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and again across the Pacific.
The opening chapter of Culture in a Liquid Modern World locates the concept of culture historically, tracing its emergence in France as the yardstick of civilizationsomething around which real and symbolic missions were organized, domestically and abroad. Culture here included both cultural productions painting, sculpture, literatureand the ways of thinking, feeling, and being that were associated with emerging national identities. Of course these spheres of culture were not discrete social phenomenathe two were entangled with one another and essential to the formation of modern national states, and so to the justification of colonial rule. But over time these spheres tended in different directions, with cultural producers asserting independence from the national projects, eventually founding a (somewhat) autonomous sphere of artistic striving. Having noted its establishment, Bauman traces how this sphere gradually cedes independence to the spell of market forces. Indeed, by the final chapter, Culture Between State and Market, we see the apogee of this process, such that cultural production moves not to its own rhythms but to those of fashion, at which point Bauman ponders whether art as such can survive its fate.
J. Sass (*)
Department of Sociology, Yale University, P.O. Box 208265, New Haven, CT 06520-8265, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Zygmunt Bauman: Culture in a Liquid Modern World. Cambridge: Polity, 2011
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