Liquid Life

Author

Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) was a Polish-born sociologist and Emeritus Professor at the University of Leeds. Polity Press, Cambridge, June 2005. 170 pages in the paperback, ISBN 0-7456-3515-6.

Liquid Life is part of a sequence of books built on the same metaphor: Liquid Modernity (2000), Liquid Love (2003), Liquid Life (2005), Liquid Fear (2006), Liquid Times (2007), and Consuming Life (2007). The wiki also holds Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty and Consuming Life.

Description

Liquid life is the kind of life commonly lived in contemporary liquid-modern society. It cannot stay on course, because liquid-modern society cannot keep its shape for long. It is precarious, lived under conditions of constant uncertainty.

In earlier societies, people had enough stability to build habits and identities that lasted, and those habits supplied reference points. In liquid-modern society, conditions change before behaviours have time to consolidate into social identities and habits. The skill required is therefore not competence at anything in particular but the ability to keep discarding competence.

Bauman ties this to the shift from a production-based economy to a consumer-based one. Individual consumers have always existed. What is new is the consumer society, which he describes as producing a syndrome, a form of collective behavioural hypnosis.

The general condition he names liquid modernity puts increased freedom and mobility alongside accelerated anxiety, in an era of deregulated consumption. Under it, the lasting gives way to the transient, need gives way to desire, and necessity gives way to utility. Identity stops being something fixed and becomes a flexible, continually revised project shaped by consumption and social pressure.

Bauman intended liquid modernity to replace postmodernity as the operative term, on the grounds that it names what is actually happening rather than positioning itself against what came before. Solidity and liquidity mark the two eras: modernity was solid, and what followed is liquid.

Relevance

The obsolescence cycle is the connection to the rest of this wiki. Bauman is describing the same shortening replacement schedule that shows up in Prosthetic culture, but from the side of the person rather than the object. A device replaced every two years and a skill obsoleted every two years are the same phenomenon, and Bauman's contribution is the observation that a self assembled under those conditions never sets.

His account of identity as an ongoing consumption project also underlies most of what social platforms do. A profile is a self that must be continuously updated, and the requirement to update is the product.

Criticism

One consideration concerns whether liquidity runs one way only. Bauman's account describes disembedding from old forms of engagement with no prospect of re-embedding, and critics have questioned whether that is plausible as an irreversible process. Treating contemporary change as liquid radicalises fluidity while providing no recognition of possible re-solidification, and studies of race, class, and religion suggest re-solidification does occur and that the concept needs re-evaluating.

Bauman wrote quickly and voluminously in his final decades, publishing several books a year, and the liquid series is essayistic rather than evidenced. The metaphor is applied to each new subject rather than tested against it.

Related Reading

• Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty
• Consuming Life
• All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity
• Present Shock
• Alone Together: Technology and the Reinvention of Intimacy and Solitude
• Prosthetic culture
• The System of Objects
• Society of the Spectacle
• Simulacra and Simulation
• Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism - Post-Contemporary Interventions
• Postmodern Theory
• The A to Z of Postmodern Life: Essays on Global Culture in the Noughties
• A Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist, or How Every Culture Keeps Time Just a Little Bit Differently
• Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity
• The 4-hour Workweek: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich
• Supercapitalism : The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life
• Time and Bits: Managing Digital Continuity by Margaret MacLean
• Local vs. Global Connectivity