‘Liquid’ writing and liquid modernity

Bauman repeated his nostrums on liquid modernity with only slight variation and often with verbatim repetition across a vast number of mostly lightweight books. These included some very lightweight books such as Liquid Times and Culture in a Liquid Modern World. This chapter emphasises that there are few significant differences between Bauman's characterisations of solid and liquid modernity and his earlier distinction between modernity and postmodernity. If Bauman's 'liquid modernity' is mostly 'postmodernity' in new packaging, this raises ethical issues in relation to the practice of creating an appearance of a newness that simply alters surface features of the old. In Moral Blindness Bauman complains that one of the evils of consumerist liquid modernity is that 'the time between purchase and disposal tends to shrink', and 'all consumer goods are eminently exchangeable'.

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Modernity · Postmodernity · Sociology · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Zygmunt Bauman's Sociology