Miroslaw Aleksander's Reviews > Liquid Modernity

Before Liquid Modernity I’ve read several shorter works by Bauman. I didn’t find them groundbreaking, but they had their strong points. I was anticipating something more from this book, which is considered as one of his more important works.

Liquid Modernity proved to be a frustrating and disappointing read, flawed in many ways. Bauman’s knowledge is based on newspaper articles, casual observations and interpretations found in books written by others. He is selective with his material, and manipulates historical facts to suit his view. He is also fond of using absolute quantifiers, or implying that certain issues are universal. Even when he recognizes that something is not universal, he spins it in a way that would prove his point, as in his observation of the two young men sitting at an airport when he admits that such situations are not common, but immediately adds that this is what people (not some people, not a given group of people, but ‘people’) aspire to, and, as such, it is what will happen.

Bauman’s idea is that liquid modernity, which characterizes the era of ‘light capitalism’ (easily moved from country to country, flexible labor, etc.) is the end of true freedom (this is another problem, as Bauman sees individual freedom as a tool of oppression), ensnares people in the endless search for novelty, and destroys past values. People no longer want to interact. They run around shopping malls, in which there is no interaction, no community, just atomized individuals, who are focused on themselves – it is hard not to read Bauman’s lament as putting ‘society’ and ‘individual’ as a binary opposition. Ha also blames this on the concept of identity – “what matters is who you are, rather than what you are doing” (p. 108). No longer is social change possible, he suggests. There is no authority (or, rather, there are too many authorities, which cancel each other out – an issue that one can agree on), so even if people wanted to change something, they have nothing to protest against. So they go shopping. Bauman doesn’t mention why, in that case, are right-wing politics on the rise, nor why so much political strife can be observed.

The assumption Bauman makes, such as that uncertainty is a principle of liquid modernity and not found in previous epochs. Although he is accurate in his statement that Henry Ford’s increased wages was to decrease turnover, he is incorrect in stating that it tied workers with the company for almost their entire lifetimes. People changed jobs, particularly if they could get a better job elsewhere. Also, his statement that a job with Ford lacked insecurity, as it often was a job for life points to his ignorance – Ford, struggling with serious financial problems in the mid-1920s had to close down his factory for modernization in 1927, firing most of his employees. Bauman further romanticizes this period. Although he sees some flaws of heavy capitalism, he suggests that things under it were better. He notes that people had authorities, which allowed them to change society for the better. They just needed to negotiate with the authorities or protest against them to find a solution. No mention of slavery, child labor, rampant discrimination based on race, sex, religion, political allegiance, extreme exploitation, and a plethora of social issues that plagued that world.
He also makes several far-fetched statements. For instance he claims that the causes of contemporary precariousness are connected with the collapse of the feudal system – peasantry, freed from the land lost “the ‘natural’ link between land, human toil and wealth” and became the tools of capital (p. 142).

His criticisms of modern times are often one-sided and overgeneralized. Yes, some people divorce without trying to fix their marriage. But not all people. Many people work on their relationships. Others divorce their spouses to get out of abusive relationships – but Bauman ignores this. Divorce, he seems to imply, is just an illustration of how we consider durability to be a negative trait. This is similar to his view that racism is ‘outmoded and unpracticed’ in terms of nationalism (p. 175). His approach to other issues, such as the fact that people no longer work in one place throughout their whole lives, are also problematic. Yes, some people do live in perpetual uncertainty. However, there are people, for whom a change of a job can help in the improvement of their conditions, getting away from an exploitive boss, getting a better salary, or finding a place to work closer to home etc. Although a job change can be, and often is, associated with certain problems, it also can mean getting a job one feels more comfortable with, allow one to get away from poor conditions. Finally, Bauman’s treatment of freedom is problematic. As mentioned earlier, he sees individual freedom as a form of domination. It turns people’s attention from civic matters and true work (we no longer work, he claims – we now merely ‘tinker’ – p. 139).

Bauman does not want to convince you. He pines for an old world that never existed, multiplying metaphors. Furthermore, although he does not necessarily romanticize the past, in his presentation it seems that he believed that life was better before liquid modernism. Yet he conveniently ignores discrimination, strife, terrible living conditions, and many other factors that were present in ancient Greece, feudal Europe or early industrial modernism. He does not look at the problems he presents critically, and presents them as one-sided overgeneralizations. Although he is capable of recognizing several social issues, his interpretations are hollow, and easily disproven.