Liquid Modernity E-Book

Zygmunt Bauman

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 481

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In this new book, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a 'heavy' and 'solid', hardware-focused modernity to a 'light' and 'liquid', software-based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un-reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under-defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history. This book is dedicated to this task. Bauman selects five of the basic concepts which have served to make sense of shared human life - emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community - and traces their successive incarnations and changes of meaning. Liquid Modernity concludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman's two previous books Globalization: The Human Consequences and In Search of Politics. Together these volumes form a brilliant analysis of the changing conditions of social and political life by one of the most original thinkers writing today.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title

Copyright

Foreword to the 2012 Edition: Liquid Modernity Revisited

Foreword: On Being Light and Liquid

1: Emancipation

The mixed blessings of freedom

The fortuities and changing fortunes of critique

The individual in combat with the citizen

The plight of critical theory in the society of individuals

Critical theory revisited

The critique of life-politics

2: Individuality

Capitalism – heavy and light

Have car, can travel

Stop telling me; show me!

Compulsion turned into addiction

The consumer’s body

Shopping as a rite of exorcism

Free to shop – or so it seems

Divided, we shop

3: Time/Space

When strangers meet strangers

Emic places, phagic places, non-places, empty spaces

Don’t talk to strangers

Modernity as history of time

From heavy to light modernity

The seductive lightness of being

Instant living

4: Work

Progress and trust in history

The rise and fall of labour

From marriage to cohabitation

Excursus: a brief history of procrastination

Human bonds in the fluid world

The self-perpetuation of non-confidence

5: Community

Nationalism, mark 2

Unity – through similarity or difference?

Security at a price

After the nation-state

Filling the void

Cloakroom communities

Afterthought: On Writing; On Writing Sociology

Notes

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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Liquid Modernity

Zygmunt Bauman

Copyright © Zygmunt Bauman 2000, 2012

The right of Zygmunt Bauman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2000 by Polity Press

Reprinted 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004 (twice), 2005, 2006 (twice), 2007, 2008, 2009 (twice), 2010 (twice), 2011

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978-0-7456-2409-9ISBN 978-0-7456-2410-5 (pbk)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and has been applied for from the Library of Congress.

For further information on Polity, please visit our website www.politybooks.com

Foreword to the 2012 EditionLiquid Modernity Revisited

When more than ten years ago I tried to unpack the meaning of the metaphor of ‘liquidity’ in its application to the form of life currently practised, one of the mysteries obtrusively haunting me and staunchly resisting resolution was the status of the liquid-modern human condition: was it an intimation, an early version, an augury or a portent of things to come? Or was it, rather, a temporary and transient – as well as an unfinished, incomplete and inconsistent – interim settlement; an interval between two distinct, yet viable and durable, complete and consistent answers to the challenges of human togetherness?

I have not thus far come anywhere near to a resolution of that quandary, but I am increasingly inclined to surmise that we presently find ourselves in a time of ‘interregnum’ – when the old ways of doing things no longer work, the old learned or inherited modes of life are no longer suitable for the current conditio humana, but when the new ways of tackling the challenges and new modes of life better suited to the new conditions have not as yet been invented, put in place and set in operation … We don’t yet know which of the extant forms and settings will need to be ‘liquidized’ and replaced, though none seems to be immune to criticism and all or almost all of them have at one time or another been earmarked for replacement.

Most importantly, unlike our ancestors, we don’t have a clear image of a ‘destination’ towards which we seem to be moving – which needs to be a model of global society, a global economy, global politics, a global jurisdiction … Instead, we react to the latest trouble, experimenting, groping in the dark. We try to diminish carbon dioxide pollution by dismantling coal-fed power plants and replacing them with nuclear power plants, only to conjure up the spectres of Chernobyl and Fukushima to hover above us … We feel rather than know (and many of us refuse to acknowledge) that power (that is, the ability to do things) has been separated from politics (that is, the ability to decide which things need to be done and given priority), and so in addition to our confusion about ‘what to do’ we are now in the dark about ‘who is going to do it’. The sole agencies of collective purposive action bequeathed to us by our parents and grandparents, confined as they are to the boundaries of nation-states, are clearly inadequate, considering the global reach of our problems, and of their sources and consequences …

We remain of course as modern as we were before; but these ‘we’ who are modern have considerably grown in numbers in recent years. We may well say that by now all or almost all of us, in every or almost every part of the planet, have become modern. And that means that today, unlike a decade or two ago, every land on the planet, with only a few exceptions, is subject to the obsessive, compulsive, unstoppable change that is nowadays called ‘modernization’, and to everything that goes with it, including the continuous production of human redundancy, and the social tensions it is bound to cause.