Late Modernity - Liquid Modernity

Liquid Modernity

Zygmunt Bauman who introduced the idea of liquid modernity wrote that its characteristics are the privatization of ambivalence and increasing feelings of uncertainty. It is a kind of chaotic continuation of modernity, where one can shift from one social position to another, in a fluid manner. Nomadism becomes a general trait of the liquid modern man, as he flows through his own life like a tourist, changing places, jobs, spouses, values and sometimes even more (such as political or sexual orientation), (self-)excluded from the traditional networks of support.

Bauman stressed 'the profound change which the advent of "fluid modernism" has brought to the human condition...the burden of pattern-weaving and the responsibility for failure falling primarily on the individual's shoulders'. The globalized social world takes on 'the pattern of a caravan site. The place is open to everyone with his or her own caravan and enough money to pay the rent'. The result is a normative mindset dominated by 'the new pieties...that it is both more truthful and better not to know who you are, that it is preferable to slip, shift or float than to know, stop or stay'; a mindset with 'its characteristic conditions of perpetual motion as a mode of being', peopled by a subject 'imprisoned, as it were, in an existential freedom of his own making'.