Liquidity

Seventeen years later, I took down from the shelf Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity (2000), a book suddenly without a living author, which I had first read the year we moved to New Zealand. Esther Leslie’s book Liquid Crystals (2016) doesn’t reference Bauman but plays through a dialectical history of crystalline and fluid models of modernity that harmonizes with the older book, while Sean Redmond’s Liquid Space (2017) points toward the Baumanian theme of processes of total erasure, the loss of history and identity, as capabilities of an increasingly digital age. As I read, I heard Wendy Brown’s (2015) elaborations of neoliberalism in Bauman’s analysis of the devolution of once collective responsibilities to the individual, and Jacques Rancière’s Hatred of Democracy (2006) in his analysis of the gap between power and politics.

In a bookmark left in its pages I found this note: “Flow—(1) of granular but sub-perceptual units (2) as (false) unity of the totality. Universal flow and liquid market.” Even less than Keith Tester in this issue, I cannot claim any authority in proposing (or having proposed, even in a forgotten note to myself) this as an interpretation of Bauman, only an annotation, evidence that he could and continues to stimulate new thinking. Liquidity, in accountancy, refers to the speed and stability of exchange. Cash is its measure. Cash can be swiftly exchanged and tends to keep its value—liquid in the sense of flow and of finding its level. Citing Georg Simmel to the effect that “things are worth exactly what they cost” (Bauman 2000: 117), the economy makes its appearance, as appearance, the coincidence, in fact, of being and appearance: thing and price. But it is just this simultaneity of being and appearance that has begun to slip in the liquid modernity he would trace through another five books (Bauman 2003, 2005, 2006a, 2006b; Bauman and Donskis 2016).

The liquidity of the market is today the absolute and universal, describing and defining relations that are no longer social. Drawing on Norbert Elias and Ulrich Beck, Bauman saw liquidity as the state of humans without a commons, freed from everything except responsibility for their individual affairs. Like Brown, he saw individuals damned to look after themselves and to take the consequences if they don’t. There is no we, as there was in the industrial era, only the atomized fluidity of disjointed molecules caught up in the one spate. The nuclear family falls apart: why stay with a partner who doesn’t give me what I want? The nuclear family, invented for consumerism and consolidated in the era of suburbanization, collapsed under the strain of the impossible demands it was invented to fulfill. It ended by consuming itself, by turning its members into consumers competing with each other.

Today the individual is undergoing a parallel breakdown. What we have now has changed since Bauman’s observations at the millennium. The liquidation of the family is now being followed by the liquidation of the individual, from the crystallized family through liquid individuation to the free ions of behaviors. Identity, Stuart Hall once said, is “an endless, ever-unfinished conversation” (in Akomfrah 2012). Today identity is increasingly being abandoned, biography superseded by its performances. As individuals ceased to add up to societies, so the kinds of behaviors logged on and tracked by social media no longer sum up as individuals.

The beautiful and poignant dream of a timeless time in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016) is scarcely science fiction. Everything that has happened returns on “My Memories on Facebook” that opens things I posted a year ago spontaneously on my timeline. What I see is pretty much what I post today, a fact I’m encouraged to repost. A birthday is a birth date, a recurrent data point. “The change in question,” Bauman noted, “is the new irrelevance of space, masquerading as the annihilation of time” (2000: 117). But perhaps it is less irrelevance and more concentration: space condensed down to a platform for behaviors, and time approximating to the eternal present of spreadsheets and databases.

I have been thinking about the nature...