LIVING TOGETHER

IN LIQUID TIMES
Bauman on Liquid Modernity
Liquid modernity

■ ‘increasing absence of ‘solid’ structures that once provided the foundations of human
societies’

■ Liquid society: ‘conditions under which its members act change faster than it takes the
way of acting consolidate into habits and routines’
Liquid modernity

■ Social life is acutely accelerated

■ Social bonds are liquidated, fragmented, weakened
■ We live a hurried life experienced as series of (dis)connected episodic moments
■ Global population movements, immigration, new cross border movements
■ Increased sense of individualization and consumption
■ Liquid modernity: defining characteristic, disengagement
■ Disengagement of business from nation-state, from political constraints, from ethical
constraints

■ Progressive separation of power from politics

■ State: unable to provide an effective brake to the freedom of economic elite
Liquid modernity

■ is dominated by twin processes: Globalization and Individualization

■ All human activity is bonded together by an individualized free market framework in which
we act as individual consumers not collectively as individual citizens

■ Every men and women are increasingly responsible for micro-managing every aspect of
their lives; this situation leads feeling of exclusion and isolation and so also fear, anxiety and
uncertainty.

■ So equality, democracy, living together, social cohesion in such a context?

■ Proteophobia (fear of multiform)
■ Mixophobia (fear of mixing) vs. (proteophilia and mixophilia-adoration, but ignore the
complexity of the other, so still connected to racism)

■ The other is feared/to be removed from society

■ Technique:

■ Stereotyping
■ Scapegoating
■ Misrepresentation
■ Stigmatization
Seeking community, security

■ Community: ‘another name for paradise lost’ (Bauman 2001)

■ we miss it, hope to return
■ evokes everything we miss: security, confidence…

■ Imagined community vs. really existing community

■ Price to be in a ‘community’:
■ Do not speak to foreigners, do not let in strangers, obey…
■ Give up your freedom, autonomy…
■ «Missing community means missing security; gaining community, if it happens, would soon mean
missing freedom» (Bauman 2001: 4)
■ Dilemma: security and freedom?

■ «Insecurity affects us all, as we all are in a fluid and unpredictable world of deregulation, flexibility,
competitiveness and endemic uncertainty, but each one of us suffers anxiety on our own, as a private
problem, an outcome of personal failings….» (Bauman 2001: 14)
■ «Insecurity (among immigrant as much as among the native population) tends to transform
multiculturality into ‘multicommunitarianism’ (Bauman 2001: 141).

■ Beck: biographical solutions to systemic problems…

Moral uncertainty

■ We live in a world of great moral uncertainty (liquid society)

■ Uncertainty is not a threat to morality (certainty????)

■ Uncertainty:
- Danger: not taking responsibility, invoking abstract rules or new forms of authority
- Chance: it allows us for moral choices
Positive recognition (Bauman)

■ Identity + distribution

■ Establishing security

■ «Security is a necessary condition of dialogue between cultures. Without it, there is little
chance that communities will open up to each other and engage in a conversation which
may enrich them all and enhance the humanity of their togetherness» (Bauman 2001:
142)
■ So lets ask questions not seek deliberate answers

■ To offer answers, to legislate rather than interpret world would be to risk ‘switching off’
moral responsibility

■ Liquid sociology reminds people that we are capable of devising an alternative way of living

■ Bauman’s writing is an attempt at ‘reawakening our sense of responsibility for the Other’