Abstract
Zygmunt Bauman (b. 1925), originally from Poland but long a fixture on the British scholarly scene, is represented in the Harvard Library catalogue by 20 books he has published in English during the last decade, plus many more in translation, and still others prior to 2004. Polity Press seems prepared to publish anything he writes, any interview he gives. His earliest works in English (e.g., on hermeneutics) were fairly conventional in scholarly terms. But after his book claiming the Holocaust to be a product of modernity (1989) became an international hit, he began to add certain terms of art to the theoretical lexicon.
One of which he is especially fond is “liquid modernity,” which in this booklet he defines as “the currently existing shape of the modern condition, described by other authors as ‘postmodernity,’ ‘late modernity,’ ‘second’ or ‘hyper’ modernity. What makes modernity ‘liquid,’ and thus justifies the choice of name, is its self-propelling, self-intensifying, compulsive and obsessive ‘modernization,’ as a result of which, like liquid, none of the consecutive forms of social life is able to maintain its shape for long. ‘Dissolving everything that is solid,’ has been the innate and defining characteristic of the modern form of life from the outset; but today, unlike yesterday, the dissolved forms are not to be replaced, and nor are they replaced, by other solid forms” (p. 11). This broad-scale metaphor for contemporary life Bauman has applied to many situations, micro and macro, and in this short study he attends to “culture” as it is experienced in the richer countries. After explaining that earlier conceptions of culture have been outdistanced by everyday life, rendering Bourdieu’s Distinction and other theorists’ works equally outdated, he observes that “‘culture’ was transformed from a stimulant [in the eighteenth century] into a tranquilizer; from the arsenal of a modern revolution into a repository of conservation [sic] products. ‘Culture’ became the name for functions ascribed to stabilizers, homeostats or gyroscopes” (pp. 10–11).
Lest he leave the reader in despair, he then proposes that with his conception of liquidity, culture can be tailor-fitted to anybody, so that if one chooses to hear rap music in the car, but attend opera in the evening, no-one is disturbed or even takes note. If one vacations in Disneyland yet the next month studies art history in Florence, liquid culture has registered its approval and support for “individual freedom of choice and individual responsibility for that choice” (p. 12). In the rest of this short statement, Bauman applies his newish conception of culture to nation-building, globalization (another of his pet topics), diasporas, the contemporary political arrangement of Europe, and markets. This is a lot to do in a few words, all of which go down easily—like drinking Coke with one’s foie gras when taking a break from research in the Bodleian.