Clarissa's Blog: Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Modernity: A Review, Part I

Liquid Modernity (2000) is probably Zygmunt Bauman's most significant work. This is where the philosopher introduces concepts that will inform his Liquid Love: On the Feebleness of Human Bonds (2003), Liquid Life (2005), Liquid Fear (2006),Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (2006), etc.Since Bauman is one of my favorite contemporary philosophers (probably the second favorite after Žiž

k), I hope eventually to place reviews of all these books on my blog. As usual, I will give the foremost piece of my survey to going over some of the ideas fromLiquid Modernitythat I establish to be useful. Later, I will release the back piece of the critique that will discuss what I believe to be flawed parts of Bauman's argument.

The primary theme that Bauman advances in this record is that it isa mistake to see modernism as amonolithicperiod that stretches more or less unchanged from the late XIXth century until today. Bauman distinguishes between two stages of modernity:

1. The beginning phase of modernity, according to Bauman, is the "whole" stage. This is the second in chronicle of our Western civilization where solid certainties of pre-modern times haddisintegratedto such an extent that the sole matter to do was to brush these rotten underpinnings of pre-modern societies out of the way completely. The end of this beginning phase of modernity was to raise its own solid certainties in the position of the ones that were passing to be swept off by change. If we believe nearly the flight of the Soviet approach to modernity, we will see that it fits Bauman's argument perfectly. The transformative push of the first few days of the revolution led to an impenetrable fortress of a repressive Communist regime.

Bauman points out that the main concern of this beginning degree of modernism was that totalitarianism would issue from its drive to make a new set of certainties on the waste of the old society that had been ruined by the coming of modernity. Orwell's 1984, says Bauman, is a complete model of what this solid phase of modernism saw as its worst-case scenario. As we recognize all too well today, totalitarian regimes did, in fact, flourish during this beginning phase of modernity.

2. Bauman refers to the 2nd phase of modernism as "liquid." At this stage, there is no more attempt to substitute a set of old rules, certainties and identities with a new one. The freedom to switch identities as much as we want, move around, transform ourselves is now seen as an end in itself and the most prized characteristic of our existence. Bauman's goal inLiquid Modernity is to study the principal concepts that inform this liquid phase of modernism and to head out the limitations of this freedom.

One of the main struggles of individuals in pre-modern societies consisted of defending their private sector from the invasion of the world sphere. People belonged to their families, their clans, guilds, social classes. Their identities that were assigned to them at birth were grim and inescapable. If you were born a woman, for example, this real fact implied a set of roles, behaviors and life strategies that was pre-ordained and that you could try to run at your own peril. If you feel at the story of art, you will see that it isn't until the birth of the Romantic movement in late XVIII century that individual emotions and minute shades of personal feelings start being discussed as something valuable. It is just at the end of the XIXth century that we start to see a tedious work of release from identities one is assigned at birth.

Today, however, Bauman maintains, it is the world domain that needs to be salvaged from the constant impact of the secret sphere. According to the philosopher, our public sphere has been scoured by a constant parade of exhibitionist private issues that there isn't any public sphere left to talk of. Think nearly the next statement by Bauman in price of what we are witnessing in today's politics:

What are usually and always more often perceived as 'public issues' are private problems of public figures. . . Not one among the 'large and mighty', let only the offended 'public opinion', proposed the impeachment of Bill Clinton for abolishing welfare as a 'federal issue'. (70-1)

We can see that this trend has become yet more pronounced today, 11 days later the issue of Bauman's Liquid Modernity. To have but one example, there is a vast group of people whose political activism is modified to a painstaking investigation of whether Sarah Palin's child is truly hers (I blogged about these folk here), as if her motherhood had anything whatever to do with whether she will take a full presidential candidate. We get regaled with endless stories about Michelle Obama's personality, President Obama's shoes, George W. Bush's daughters, Donald Trump's ex-wives. In the meanwhile, a word of what it is they are doing as politicians gets relegated to the kingdom of the inconsequential.

While we are hard on discussing the private issues of others and exhibiting our own private sector to the world (blogging and Facebook are a stark model of this), we die to notice that the real nature of force has changed. Formerly, those who possessed the greatest mass of state were the most powerful. Power was bogged down by the enormous apparatus of hardware and people required to keep it. Today, says Bauman, power has become liquid:

We are witnessing the revenge of nomadism over the rule of territoriality and settlement. In the liquid point of modernity, the settled majority is ruled by the nomadic and exterritorial elite. Keeping the roads free for nomadic traffic and phasing out the remaining check-points has now get the meta-purpose of politics. (13)The king today is difficult to pinpoint in every sensation of the word. As everything else, it has become mobile and uprooted.

(To be continued. . .)