In four previous books (Liquid Modernity, 2000; Liquid Love, 2003; Liquid Life, 2005; Liquid Fear, 2006), the term “liquid” has proved a useful and generative term for sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in seeking to describe the risk, fear, and uncertainty of current global actions and confrontations. While these books explore the detailed history of how “solid” Western social fabrics have unraveled and been remade into a liquid modernity, Bauman's new, slimmer, and engagingly polemical study distills those earlier contexts in order to reorganize his thesis along an arc that transitions from new fears of insecurity to new global migrations to new deregulating forces and finally to new and strange individual utopias.
For Bauman, liquid modernity is a new period of global development in which five “departures” are simultaneously at work: institutions and social forms are decomposing faster than the time it takes to cast them, power and politics are divorcing as power is held by global business interests which political organizations are unable to regulate, social safety nets are dissolving at the same time as monopolies are being deregulated, long-term planning and thinking about the shape of communities and social patterns has ceded to quick fixes and quick profits, and the economic and political risks generated by global power are shifting the burden of volatile markets onto the shoulders of individuals.
Bauman uses conceptual metaphors to illustrate obscure relationships in select global contexts. For example, a memorable pair of metaphors is mixophilia and mixophobia. The former term refers to the ways in which the city prompts the feelings of attraction and tolerance toward strangers, while the latter term refers to fears brought about by spatial planning that separates, isolates, and homogenizes. Friction between mixophobia and mixophilia leads to more uncertainty, a more liquid state of living. This uncertainty, says Bauman, underscores the confusion in urban planning and architecture which reveals “desperate attempts [by the global elite] to mitigate the pain that anxiety inflicts – by removing the rash while mistaking it for the cure of the illness” (92). In other words, controlling mixophilia has a destabilizing, rather than a stabilizing, effect. The misuse of the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina brings to mind a contemporary example of the strain between mixophobia and mixophilia.
In the final chapter, Bauman's triple metaphor of gamekeeper, gardener, and hunter provides helpful images of processes and limitations inherent in middle-class desires for consumer utopia. While the gamekeeper defends the land assigned to his (sic) wardenship against all human interference, the gardener assumes that there would be no order in the world at all if not for his attention and effort. The hunter, however, is distinct from these two management types: he pursues, or kills, in order fill his game bags to capacity. Bauman's hunter metaphor is his most environmentally aware in the book. The hunter abandons the environment, disposes of last year's wardrobe, escapes responsibility, and then substitutes any personal failure for something, anything, new.
Bauman's ideas are not uncontroversial. Anybody who has studied globalization over the past few years will realize that liquid modernity is a reconfiguration of what usually goes by the name postmodernity. That said, it is a productive reconfiguration. I predict that the theory of liquid modernity will have lasting value for American studies scholars who examine the everyday experience of Americans and the hard-to-trace social, institutional, and global pressures that inform and reflect their identities.
