Liquid Modernity

Modernity

  • Scientific reduction: everything can be boiled down and assessed through the methods of science

  • Bauhaus - Walter Gropius

  • A better society is an ordered society (We: Zevegeny)

Modernity and Order

  • Need to explain the unknown concept of truth

“The true world - an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even pbligating - an idea which has become useless and superfluous - consequently, a refuted idea, let us abolish it!” (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Critics of Modernity

  • The cultural, the symbolic, the subjective

  • Failure of the scientific/rational approach: poverty, violence, hunger persist

  • Dualistic perspective (male/female, good/bad, culture/nature, etc.)

Postmodernity

  • Modernists’ Grand Narratives: meta-stories shared within a culture that guide beliefs and habits, ensuring order and stability are maintained

  • PM: focuses on the small narratives, the mundane, the everyday, the contradictions. There is no claim to universal truth: interpreting the subjective world- Bauman

Liquid Modernity

  • “In a liquid modern life, there are no permanent bonds, and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change - they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again”

Melting Modernity

  • Modernity as the dominance of solids

  • Brought in itself the tools to melt the solids: deregulation, liberalisation, flexibilization, and increased fluidity

  • Liquid modernity is a continuation of modernity, but post-modernity is a radical departure from modernity

Liquid Modernity

  • The liquidising powers have from the system to society from politics to life-politics, or have descended from the macro to the micro level of social cohabitation. Ours is, as a result, an individualised privatised version of modernity with the burden of pattern weaving and the responsibility for failure falling primarily on the individual's shoulders - Baumen

Research Idea: the ethics of lquid consumption.

New Paper: Bardhi, Eckhardt chanign meanings of homes

Personal Opnions

  • Individual choices can have a systemic/systematic impact

  • Decisions in our lives do not exist in a vacuum