Redukcja i proliferacja wieloznaczności: teoria kultury Zygmunta Baumana w polskim okresie jego twórczości
Reduction and Proliferation of Ambivalence: Zygmunt Bauman’s Theory of Culture in His Early, Polish Writings

Summary/Abstract: The paper presents a critical analysis of Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of culture before March 1968. Culture became a central issue in his sociology when he held a position as a chair of the Department of General Sociology at the Warsaw University. He wrote several articles on this topic and two books: Culture and Society: Preliminaries and Sketches on the Theory of Culture. The former one was published in 1966; the print run of the latter was destroyed after Bauman’s expulsion from the University of Warsaw in March 1968. The only one remaining copy of the latter one – to be precise: a major part of the editor’s copy – has been recently found, reconstructed and published together with an author’s afterword. This gave an opportunity to make – for the first time – a comprehensive analysis of Bauman’s early theory of culture. This analysis sheds new light on all his work, as the ways he was interpreting the transformations of modernity in the last decades had its beginnings in his papers written in the sixties of the XX century. The paper is divided in two parts. The first one presents Bauman’s interpretation of culture as a mechanism of reduction of ambivalence. It discusses both his inspirations on the field of sociology and anthropology of culture, as well as originality of his own theoretical concepts. The second part presents Bauman’s vision of culture as a process of proliferation of ambivalence. As far as he was concerned this process was a signum specificum of the western culture in the second part of the XX century. Bauman discussed its following phenomena: individualisation, globalisation and cultural pluralism.

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