Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty

Author

Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017), Polish-British sociologist. Expelled from Poland in the 1968 antisemitic purge, he spent the rest of his career at the University of Leeds. From the late 1990s onward he produced a long sequence of books organised around a single metaphor: Liquid Modernity (2000), Liquid Love (2003), Liquid Life (2005), Liquid Times (2007), Liquid Fear (2006).

Publication Details

Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. 115 pp. ISBN 978-0-7456-3986-4.

Description

Bauman's governing distinction is between "solid" and "liquid" modernity. Solid modernity — the era of the nation state, the lifelong employer, the standing army, the class party, the marriage that outlasted the wedding — melted the old feudal certainties in order to cast new and more durable ones. Liquid modernity melts, and then declines to recast. Institutions now dissolve faster than the time it takes to learn how to live inside them.

Liquid Times is the short, essayistic statement of what this means politically. Bauman identifies a widening gap between power, which has gone global and extraterritorial, and politics, which remains local and territorial. States retain the machinery of governance but have lost the capacity to act on the forces that actually determine their citizens' lives. What remains available to them is the management of fear.

Key Ideas

• The separation of power from politics. Capital, information and violence move at network speed; parliaments do not. The result is not the abolition of the state but its reduction to a manager of anxieties it did not cause and cannot address.
• Wasted lives and "human waste". Modernity historically exported its surplus populations to colonial frontiers. With the planet full, the surplus stays, and appears domestically as refugees, migrants and the permanently unemployed — people for whom no economic role is planned.
• Negative globalisation. Trade, crime, terrorism, capital and surveillance have globalised; law, democratic accountability and social protection have not.
• Security versus freedom. Bauman returns repeatedly to Freud's trade-off in Civilization and Its Discontents, arguing that liquid modernity has bought freedom by liquidating security, and that the resulting anxiety is displaced onto whatever visible stranger is at hand.
• Disposability as a social relation. In a world where jobs, partners, places and goods are all provisional, the habit of disposal generalises into a way of relating to people.

Criticism

The book's brevity is both its strength and its principal weakness. Bauman writes by accumulation of metaphor rather than by evidence, and the "liquid" figure — enormously generative in Liquid Modernity — is by this volume being asked to carry a great deal. Sociologists have also noted that the periodisation is loose: much of what Bauman attributes to liquidity is attributed by others to specific policy choices with datable origins.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Liquidity is the social condition that portable, networked technology both expresses and accelerates. The disposability of devices (future runoff, hand-me-ups), the provisional character of networked relationships, the compression of commitment into the interval between one notification and the next — these are the everyday textures of what Bauman describes at the scale of institutions.

Related Reading

• The Rise of the Creative Class
• Future Runoff
• Time and Space Compression
• Ambient Intimacy