Customer Reviews

Liquid Modernity

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Bauman makes a distinction between solid and the liquid modernity of his title. The book is analysis in several sections of the effect of society in Bauman's terms becoming liquid. Previously people were immersed in solid societies that produced the norms by which people lived. People could structure their lives by being members of their society and could measure their success by measuring themselves against their society's norms.

Bauman gives an account of how modernity's emphaisis on the individual has resulted in the destruction of these norms all in the name of giving freedom and self-determination to the individual. However this freedom and self-determination is in many ways illusional. Society may have restricted an individual but in many ways it enabled the indiviual by supplying the support and infrastrcture for them to live their lives. Now indviduals are are on their own. They must construct themselves from the beginning without support and as Bauman points out they must not only construct themseleves they must construct the measures that allow them to assess the meaning and success of their lives. They are bound by their own freedom.

Bauman shows how the loss of interdependency is enabled by technologies that are not dependent on proximity. Long lasting relationships and societies are built by people who have to find ways to live together and face the exigencies of their physical and ecomomic environments. Woth modern technolgy the dependence on territory is diminished and the technologially and economically enabled can simply move from one opportunity to another and are not tied to the economic fortunes of any one partcular territory. Those tied to a territory are fated to experience booms and busts with no long lasting support from society.

The result of this according to Bauman is a society of individuals who are tied only to themselves and only to the present. They construct not cathedrals to the glory fo their society but talk shows which give them comfort by showing others lost in the problems of their indviduality. Humanity has given up Notre Dame to find comfort in Jerry Springer.

Bauman produces real insights in this book that explain many aspects of modern society. However his views tend to the extereme. Even the technological elite that he describes moving from one territitory to another are in reality bound both territorialy and socially. Knoweledge is created socially and the diffusion of knowledge relies on social conventions and proxmity. Bauman's views do not account for this dimension of tacit knowedge and social norms.

I found Bauman's book titled Globalization: The Human Consequences such an articulate description of the the way that globalisation has ravaged poor communities that I could not resist getting Liquid Modernity. I am certainly not dissappointed.

In this new book Bauman addresses the shifts in some of the large social concepts which effect human identity and our relationships with one another: emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community. Bauman makes sense for me of the way the world is speeding up for some people whilst others are becoming immobilised: of what on the one hand seems to be "progress" and on the other seems to "annihilation of human care. He is very clear about the problematic of this, among other things, and often gives hopeful hints about ways to proceed.

This book is not a light read, thank goodness - but a thorough analysis of what at times seems so bewildering.

Our freedoms are being slowly eroded away by passive, invisible forces that have taken a strangle hold over every aspect of our existence, and have, in the process, stripped away all but the last vestiges of the traditional political, ethical, and cultural attachments that have come to represent the normal American social life, including its norms. In the metaphor of this author, our freedoms are being liquefied and then stolen by a collusion of rational economic forces that exists above our heads, but always under the aegis of being in our best national and individual economic interests. Yet, they continuously and progressively melt our freedoms and our social lives away, looking out only for the interests of a handful of international oligarchs.

These forces, operating under the general rubric of "the global economy" are like gravity or the wind, in that they ride on the ether always just beyond our reach, with no fixed return addresses and immune to our control. The global economy is supposed to answer to only one god, the god of the abstract laws of economic forces. Yet, when the oligarchs come calling, even the rules of economics begin to change decidedly in their favor.

As the global economy continues to float above our societies, with no allegiance or loyalty to any of them, dismantling, reshaping and reordering them as it goes, it has begun to take on a new more sinister and autonomous form. It has become an independent global force unto itself: The personal tool of the autocrats and oligarchs, who benefit from it enormously, but who answer to no one, and give their unfettered allegiance to the almighty dollar (soon to become the almighty Euro and eventually, the almighty Yuan).

The resulting new world order, just like the old one that preceded it, will continue to operate beyond our reach, but with an important twist: We cannot make demands on it because it has no return address; there are no offices, no one to talk to, it operates outside our borders, with only a logo, a passive email box and recorded phone messages.

All that remains recognizable are its trace effect on our lives and the mechanisms that are appealed to in defense of its continued existence. To the visible eye, globalization is just a series of mechanisms, and churning gears, all too complicated for those of us who are being manipulated by them, to understand. It is "releasing the brakes of deregulation," "liberalization of cross border trade," "increased fluidity of the economy," "downsizing," "easing tax burdens," "reducing the depletion allowances," establishing free-trade zones, "going where the labor is cheapest and where there is a comparative advantage," "a comprehensive immigration policy." It is "off-shoring," "decreasing the capital gains taxes," "junk bonds" "hostile take-overs" and "leveraged buy-outs," and of course, everyone's favorite, "out-sourcing."

What this author tells us is that when taken together, these mechanical abstractions all add up to an entirely new ordering of the world, and of American society in particular. This "new passively developed world order" is not one that has come into being by dictatorial rule, or colonial subordination, but by a progressive narrowing of our individual freedom to choose and act -- defined exclusively in "untouchable" economic terms.

Communism used to be bad, but now a Communist country owns two-thirds of all U.S. debts. And as a "carjacker" once told me as he took my BMW: "Your car is now under new management."

If no one has noticed yet, the U.S. is "now under new management." And as creditors, we "democrats" are now obligated to "tap dance" to our new managers, in Beijing. Our norms, as our lives soon will not be our own because the corporations have long since abandon us to our own devices. With only about 25% of our national economy backed up by the production of durable goods, we have become an economic "paper tiger" without anyone even noticing (and the tiger is not worth the paper it is printed on)?

Is this a world upside down, or did I blink and miss something? Have we been sold a "wolf ticket" or was there nothing to democracy all along?" If the amoral corporate state has become our ethical masters, and have abandoned us to our fate, what about abortion, racism, guns, homosexual marriages and all the other things we REALLY care about? Maybe while we have been playing "pocket pool" with ourselves and with all these "non issues," those running the "global economy" have stolen the piggy bank and run off with it to Beijing?

This is not an easy book to read, because the author speaks in "Sociology-speak," which is to say in Pig-latin. Nevertheless, these are ground breaking ideas.

Five stars

The main idea that Bauman advances in this book is that it is a mistake to see modernity as a monolithic period that stretches more or less unchanged from the late XIXth century until today. Bauman distinguishes between two stages of modernity:

1. The first stage of modernity, according to Bauman, is the "solid" stage. This is the moment in history of our Western civilization where solid certainties of pre-modern times had disintegrated to such an extent that the only thing to do was to sweep these rotten underpinnings of pre-modern societies out of the way completely. The goal of this first stage of modernity was to erect its own solid certainties in the place of the ones that were going to be swept away by change. If we think about the trajectory of the Soviet approach to modernity, we will see that it fits Bauman's argument perfectly. The transformative push of the first few years of the revolution led to an impenetrable fortress of a repressive Communist regime.

Bauman points out that the main fear of this first stage of modernity was that totalitarianism would emerge from its push to create a new set of certainties on the wasteland of the old society that had been destroyed by the advent of modernity. Orwell's 1984, says Bauman, is a perfect example of what this solid stage of modernity saw as its worst-case scenario. As we know all too well today, totalitarian regimes did, in fact, flourish during this first stage of modernity.

2. Bauman refers to the second stage of modernity as "liquid." At this stage, there is no more effort to replace a set of old rules, certainties and identities with a new one. The freedom to switch identities as often 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 in Liquid Modernity is to analyze the main concepts that inform this liquid stage of modernity and to point out the limitations of this freedom.

One of the main struggles of individuals in pre-modern societies consisted of defending their private sphere from the encroachment of the public sphere. People belonged to their families, their clans, guilds, social classes. Their identities that were assigned to them at birth were inexorable and inescapable. If you were born a woman, for example, this very fact implied a set of roles, behaviors and life strategies that was pre-ordained and that you could try to escape at your own peril. If you look at the history 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 only at the end of the XIXth century that we begin to see a slow process of liberation from identities one is assigned at birth.

Today, however, Bauman maintains, it is the public sphere that needs to be salvaged from the constant encroachment of the private sphere. According to the philosopher, our public sphere has been eroded by a constant parade of exhibitionist private issues that there isn't any public sphere left to speak of. While we are concentrated on discussing the private issues of others and exhibiting our own private sphere to the world (blogging and Facebook are a perfect example of this), we fail to notice that the very nature of power has changed. Formerly, those who possessed the greatest masses of land were the most powerful. Power was bogged down by the enormous apparatus of hardware and people needed to maintain it. Today, says Bauman, power has become liquid. As everything else, it has become mobile and uprooted.

In spite of these truly brilliant insights, there are grave limitations to Bauman's reasoning. My problem with the entirety of Bauman's work is that whenever he talks of people, humanity, or mankind at large, he always ends up making statements that are only true for a certain part of humanity, namely, white heterosexual males. Let's take, for example, the following statement, in which the erasure of women is so complete as to be shocking: "'Work' so understood was the activity in which humanity as a whole was supposed to be engaged by its fate and nature, rather than by choice, when making its history. And 'work' so defined was a collective effort of which every single member of humankind had to partake. All the rest was but a consequence: casting work as the 'natural condition' of human beings, and being out of work as an abnormality; blaming departure from that condition for extant poverty and misery, deprivation and depravity". These statements are, of course, completely true if by "humanity as a whole" and "every single member of humankind" we refer exclusively to men. For women, the situation was and still is the exact opposite. Working mothers are routinely blamed for causing "extant poverty and misery, deprivation and depravity" of their poor, abandoned children. Women are constantly exhorted to "opt out" of the workplace and demonized for not doing so. Working conditions are geared towards making the life of working women as inhospitable as possible. If we keep this in mind, Bauman's references to "humanity as a whole" become egregiously offensive.

What Bauman prefers to overlook in his anti-divorce rants is that, in the absolute majority of cases in the developed countries, it is women who seek the divorce (in 2010 in the US it was 72% of divorces petitioned for by women to 28% by men). The situation is even more clear-cut among college-educated couples where, according to the data provided by American Law and Economics Review, women file for divorce in about 90% of cases. This is not at all surprising since marriage is still a losing proposition for women even in the most developed countries. Women are still stuck with more housework, the greatest burden of child-rearing and very little gains coming out of being married other than some dubious prestige the TV shows try to convince us exists for women who get married. Married women live shorter lives than single women, while married men live longer than single men. For this reason, in real life (as opposed to what we are being told by television and newspapers) men are a lot more interested in marriage than women. The disintegration of the patriarchal family that bothers Bauman so much is, indeed, robbing men of power. At the same time, it liberates women. Women, however, are not a group that Bauman ever notices.

It is often difficult for me to distinguish whether on this topic Bauman is being purposefully obtuse or if he genuinely, sincerely does not realize how biased his statements are. This is one of the foremost thinkers of our times. Is it possible that the whole history of women has passed him by? Look, for instance, at the following statement: "It is no longer the task of both partners to 'make the relationship work' - to see it work through thick and thin., 'for richer for poorer', in sickness and in health, to help each other through good and bad patches, to trim if need be one's own preferences, to compromise and make sacrifices for the sake of a lasting union." Can Bauman really not know that to suffer in silence, practice resignation, trim one's own preferences, compromise and make sacrifices was only and exclusively the task of a woman in patriarchal family structures? Can he possibly have missed the entire history of manuals for married women that proliferated from the Middle Ages until today and that exhorted (and still do) women to sacrifice themselves for the good of the family in the very terms that Bauman employs here? Is he being disingenuous with full knowledge of what he is doing, or is he truly this blind to the situation of an entire half of humanity? Note also the slippage into the Christian rhetoric that is quite unexpected in a Communist and a Jew. Apparently, Bauman's need to push women back into the confines of the patriarchal family structure is so overwhelming that he forgets even the Marxist dogma that religion is the opium of the people.