booklogging

This follows up on his other 'liquid' books but is more focused on the effects of 'liquid modernity' on individuals. It reads more as a series of essays than a whole thesis and feels more like a completing of the thesis of Liquid Modernity by tying up various loose ends than adding anything substantially new. However, it can be useful to see the working out of the thesis to confirm the feel that one may already have gained for the ideas. I like the way that Bauman links the individual with the global and the identification of the 'new' classes in a globalised world.

There is a lot about identity in this book, and rightly so. As such it deserves to be read and thought about by people working with others in arenas concerned with growth, development and learning. I certainly found much to think about in respect of spiritual direction and life coaching as well as prospectively thinking about teaching teenagers. It is also important, in my view, in helping us to identify the gospel tasks of proclamation and spiritual formation in a consumer culture.

Here's some quotes I found helpful or insightful.
Zygmunt Bauman 2005 Liquid Life. Policy Press, Cambridge. Reprinted 2006

'Liquid life' and liquid modernity' are intimately connected. Liquid life' is a kind of life that tends to be lived in a liquid modern society. 'Liquid modern' is a society in which the conditions under which its members act change faster than it takes the ways o acting to consolidate into habits and routines. Liquidity of life and that of society feed and reinvigorate each other. Liquid life, just like liquid modern society, cannot keep its shape or stay on course for long. 1

Perhaps a more adequate way to narrate that life is to tell the story of successive endings. And perhaps the glory of the successfully lived liquid life would be better conveyed by the inconspicuousness of the graves that mark its progress than by the ostentation of gravestones that commemorate the contents of the tombs. 3

At both extremes of the hierarchy (and in the main body of the pyramids locked between them in a double-bind) people are haunted by the problem of identity. At the top, the problem is to choose the best pattern from the many currently on offers to assemble the separately sold parts of the kit, and to fasten them together neither too lightly (lest the unsightly, outdated and aged bits that are meant to be hidden underneath show through at the seams) nor too tightly (lest the patchwork resists being dismantled at short notice when the time for dismantling comes - as it surely will). At the bottom, the problem is to cling fast to the sole identity available and to hold its bits and parts together while fighting back the erosive forces and disruptive pressures, repairing the constantly crumbling walls and digging the trenches deeper. For all_ the others suspended between the extremes, the problem is a mixture of the two. 6

Liquid life is consuming life. It casts the world and all its animate and inanimate fragments us objects o consumption: that is, objects that lose their usefulness (and so their lustre, attraction, seductive power and worth) in the course of being used. It shapes the judging and evaluating of all the animate and inanimate fragments of the world after the pattern of objects of consumption. 9

To save yourself from the embarrassment of lagging behind, of being stuck with something no one else would be seen with, of being caught napping, of missing the train of progress instead of riding it, you must remember that it is in the nature of things to call for vigilance, not loyalty. In the liquid modern world, loyalty Is a cause of shame, not pride. Link to your internet provider first thing in the morning, and you will be reminded of that sober truth by the main item on the list of daily news: 'Ashamed of your Mobile? Is your phone so old that you're embarrassed to answer it? Upgrade to one you can be proud of.' The flipside of the commandment 'to upgrade' to a state-of-consumer-correctness mobile is, of course, the prohibition any longer to be seen holding the one to which you upgraded last time. 9

Since to be an individual is commonly translated- as 'to be unlike others' and since it is 'I', myself, who is called and expected to stand out and apart, the task appears to be intrinsically self-referential. We seem to have little choice but to look for a hint as to how to wander deeper and deeper into the 'inside' of ourselves, apparently the most private and sheltered niche in an otherwise bazaar-like, crowded and noisy world of experience. 1 look for the 'real me' which I suppose to be hidden somewhere in the obscurity of my pristine self, unaffected (unpolluted, unstifled, undeformed) by outside pressures. I unpack the ideal of 'individuality' as authenticity, as 'being true to myself', being the 'real me'. I attempt to perform a sort of Husserl-style, but home-made and mostly half-baked 'phenomenological insight' into my true and unadulterated, genuinely 'transcendental' 'subjectivity' - through the harrowing effort of 'phenomenological reduction', that is by 'bracketing away', suspending, excising and eliminating every 'alien' bit admitted to be imported from the outside. 17

In a nutshell-, as an act of personal- emancipation and self-assertion, individuality seems to be burdened with an inborn aporia: an insoluble contradiction. It needs society as simultaneously its cradle and its destination. Anyone who seeks their own individuality while forgetting, dismissing or playing down that sober/sombre truth is in for a lot of frustration. Individuality is a task set for its members by the society of individuals - set as an individual task, to be individually performed, by individuals using their individual resources. Yet such a task is self-contradictory and self-defeating: indeed, impossible to fulfill. 18

!When the word 'individuality_' is heard today, 'indivisibility' seldom, if ever, comes to mind; on the contrary, the 'individual' (just like the atom of physical chemistry) refers to a complex, heterogeneous structure with elements eminently separable and held together in precarious and rather frail unity by a combination of gravitation and repulsion, of centripetal and centrifugal forces - in a dynamic, shifting and perpetually vulnerable balance. The emphasis falls most heavily on the self-containment of that complex aggregate - and on the task of mitigating the recurrent clashes between _ heteronomous elements and bringing some harmony into their bewildering variety. It also falls on the necessity to accomplish that task inside that aggregate with the tools internally available. 'Individuality' stands today, first and foremost, for the person's autonomy, which in turn is perceived as simultaneously the person's right and duty. Before it means anything else the statement 'I am an individual' means that 1 am the one responsible for my merits and my failings, and that it is my task to cultivate the first and to repent and repair the second. 19

Fundamentalism', choosing to hold fast to inherited and/or ascribed identity, is a natural and legitimate offspring of planet-wide enforced individualization. In the words of William T. Cavanaugh, 'the beliefs of the Jim Joneses and Osama bin Ladens of the world are a significant part of the problem of violence in the twenty-first century. At least equally significant is the evangelical zeal with which 'free trade' , liberal democracy, and American hegemony are offered to - or forced upon - a hungry world_' 27

y those who practise and enjoy it, the new 'unfixedness' of the self tends to be referred to by the name of 'freedom'. One can argue, though, that having an unfixed identity that is eminently 'until further notice' is not a state of liberty but an obligatory and interminable conscription into a war of liberation that is never ultimately victorious: a day-in, day-out battle, with no respite allowed to get rid o/, to put paid to, to forget. 32

surrender to the pressures of globalization tends these days to be claimed in the name of individual autonomy and freedom of self- assertion; but more freedom does not seem to the victims and collateral casualties of globalization to be a cure for their troubles - they would rather trace them back to the crumbling or the forceful dismantling of the life routines and networks of human bonds and mutual commitments that used to support them and make them feel secure. 38

If 'agriculture' is the vision of the cornfield as seen from the perspective of the farmer, the idea of 'culture' metaphorically applied to humans was the vision of the social world as viewed through the eves of the 'farmers of humans': the managers. 53

All human beings are and always were consumers, and the human concern with consumption is not news. It certainly precedes the a vent of the 'liquid' variety of modernity. Its antecedents can easily be traced to times fairly distant from the birth of contemporary consumerism. It is therefore grossly insufficient and in the end misleading simply to look into the logic of consumption (always a thoroughly individual activity, solitary even when conducted in company) in order to comprehend the phenomenon of the present-day consumer. It is necessary to focus instead on one true novelty which is primarily of a social, and only secondarily of a psychological or behavioural, nature: on the individual consumption being conducted in the setting of a society of consumers. 82

As Joseph F. Davis suggests, consumerism and commodification processes have destabilized 'the older institutions of identity formation (family, school, church, and so on)' and so created a vacuum which they have then hurried to fill. Davis quotes the 'branding expert' Scott -Bedburv, who assigns to the 'great brands' the role of 'emotional connection points' , allowing their wearers to 'locate themselves in a larger experience' . Never mind the boardroom lingo - what the expert implies here becomes fairly clear once you pierce through the thick verbal disguise: what is meant is the harnessing of homeless and free-floating needs to the 'great brands' , and the substitution of brand loyalty for human bonds In shaping the life expectations and life skills of the consumers of the future. 115


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