Liquid Modernity

Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 074565701X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 183

Book Description
In this new book, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a 'heavy' and 'solid', hardware-focused modernity to a 'light' and 'liquid', software-based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un-reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under-defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history. This book is dedicated to this task. Bauman selects five of the basic concepts which have served to make sense of shared human life - emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community - and traces their successive incarnations and changes of meaning. Liquid Modernity concludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman's two previous books Globalization: The Human Consequences and In Search of Politics. Together these volumes form a brilliant analysis of the changing conditions of social and political life by one of the most original thinkers writing today.

Liquid Modernity

Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: Blackwell Publishing
ISBN: 9780745624105
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Liquid Modernity

Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Communities
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
In this text, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a "heavy" and "solid", hardware-focused modernity to a "light" and "liquid", software-based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition.

Interregnum

Author: Carlo Bordoni
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839435153
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 133

Book Description
Challenging the thought of Zygmunt Bauman on the subject of liquid modernity, where everything has become unstable, precarious and uncertain, Carlo Bordoni (author with Bauman of »State of Crisis«) proposes to look at contemporary society as an »interregnum«, a temporary break with the past. In a condition characterised by anomie, the questioning of democratic achievements and the primacy of an unbridled economy, he offers a new perspective on our social condition. Understanding the interregnum and being aware of its instability and the social degradation that it entails can help us to make the right choices.

Moral Blindness

Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 074566962X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187

Book Description
Evil is not confined to war or to circumstances in which people are acting under extreme duress. Today it more frequently reveals itself in the everyday insensitivity to the suffering of others, in the inability or refusal to understand them and in the casual turning away of one’s ethical gaze. Evil and moral blindness lurk in what we take as normality and in the triviality and banality of everyday life, and not just in the abnormal and exceptional cases. The distinctive kind of moral blindness that characterizes our societies is brilliantly analysed by Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis through the concept of adiaphora: the placing of certain acts or categories of human beings outside of the universe of moral obligations and evaluations. Adiaphora implies an attitude of indifference to what is happening in the world – a moral numbness. In a life where rhythms are dictated by ratings wars and box-office returns, where people are preoccupied with the latest gadgets and forms of gossip, in our ‘hurried life’ where attention rarely has time to settle on any issue of importance, we are at serious risk of losing our sensitivity to the plight of the other. Only celebrities or media stars can expect to be noticed in a society stuffed with sensational, valueless information. This probing inquiry into the fate of our moral sensibilities will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the most profound changes that are silently shaping the lives of everyone in our contemporary liquid-modern world.

In Search of Politics

Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745656978
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Book Description
We live in a world which no longer questions itself, which lives from one day to another managing successive crises and struggling to brace itself for new ones, without knowing where it is going and without trying to plan the itinerary. And everything important in our lives - livelihood, human bonds, partnerships, neighbourhood, goals worth pursuing and dangers to avoid - feels transient, precarious, vulnerable, insecure, uncertain, risky. Is there a connection between the shape of the world we inhabit and the way we live our lives? Exploring that connection, and finding out just how close it is, is the main concern of this book. What is at stake in this inquiry is the possibility of re-building the"'private/public" space, where private troubles and public issues meet and where citizens engage in dialogue in order to govern themselves. Individual liberty can only be a product of collective work, it can only be collectively secured and guaranteed. And yet today we are moving towards a privatization of the means to secure individual liberty. If seen as a therapy for the present ills, this is bound to produce effects of a most sinister kind. The act of translating private troubles into public issues is in danger of falling into disuse and being forgotten. The argument of this book is that making the translation possible again is an urgent and vital imperative for the renewal of politics today. This new book by Zygmunt Bauman - one of the most original and creative thinkers of our time - will be of particular interest to students of sociology, politics and social and political theory.

Culture in a Liquid Modern World

Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9780745653549
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 144

Book Description
In its original formulation, ‘culture’ was intended to be an agent for change, a mission undertaken with the aim of educating ‘the people’ by bringing the best of human thought and creativity to them. But in our contemporary liquid-modern world, culture has lost its missionary role and has become a means of seduction: it seeks no longer to enlighten the people but to seduce them. The function of culture today is not to satisfy existing needs but to create new ones, while simultaneously ensuring that existing needs remain permanently unfulfilled. Culture today likens itself to a giant department store where the shelves are overflowing with desirable goods that are changed on a daily basis - just long enough to stimulate desires whose gratification is perpetually postponed. In this new book Zygmunt Bauman - one of the most brilliant and influential social thinkers of our time - retraces the peregrinations of the concept of culture and examines its fate in a world marked by the powerful new forces of globalization, migration and the intermingling of populations. He argues that Europe has a particularly important role to play in revitalizing our understanding of culture precisely because Europe, with its great diversity of peoples, languages and histories, is the space where the Other is always one’s neighbour and where each is constantly called upon to learn from everyone else.

Zygmunt Bauman on Education in Liquid Modernity

Author: Shaun Best
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351003178
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 183

Book Description
Zygmunt Bauman on Education in Liquid Modernity evaluates the contribution that Bauman has made to education studies. It outlines the central themes within social analysis in Bauman’s writings, and examines how researchers have applied his key ideas to explore current theoretical issues. The book focuses on Bauman’s ideas in relation to the management and consumption of education, including topics such as student voice and individual identity; relationships and inclusive education. Identifying and discussing underpinning assumptions about Bauman’s work and its application to education, the book addresses the connection between his work and wider debates, providing a critical and clarifying re-examination of Bauman’s contribution to the role of education within solid, post and liquid modernity. This book will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students of education theory and the sociology of education. It will be of great interest to readers seeking a critical appreciation and application of Bauman’s work to an educational context and Bauman scholars interested in the application of contemporary social theory to education and its role in identity formation in areas such as sex and relationships education.

Liquid Times

Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745639607
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 137

Book Description
The passage from ‘solid’ to ‘liquid’ modernity has created a new and unprecedented setting for individual life pursuits, confronting individuals with a series of challenges never before encountered. Social forms and institutions no longer have enough time to solidify and cannot serve as frames of reference for human actions and long-term life plans, so individuals have to find other ways to organise their lives. They have to splice together an unending series of short-term projects and episodes that don’t add up to the kind of sequence to which concepts like ‘career’ and ‘progress’ could meaningfully be applied. Such fragmented lives require individuals to be flexible and adaptable – to be constantly ready and willing to change tactics at short notice, to abandon commitments and loyalties without regret and to pursue opportunities according to their current availability. In liquid modernity the individual must act, plan actions and calculate the likely gains and losses of acting (or failing to act) under conditions of endemic uncertainty. Zygmunt Bauman’s brilliant writings on liquid modernity have altered the way we think about the contemporary world. In this short book he explores the sources of the endemic uncertainty which shapes our lives today and, in so doing, he provides the reader with a brief and accessible introduction to his highly original account, developed at greater length in his previous books, of life in our liquid modern times.

Wasted Lives

Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745637159
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 120

Book Description
The production of ‘human waste’ – or more precisely, wasted lives, the ‘superfluous’ populations of migrants, refugees and other outcasts – is an inevitable outcome of modernization. It is an unavoidable side-effect of economic progress and the quest for order which is characteristic of modernity. As long as large parts of the world remained wholly or partly unaffected by modernization, they were treated by modernizing societies as lands that were able to absorb the excess of population in the ‘developed countries’. Global solutions were sought, and temporarily found, to locally produced overpopulation problems. But as modernization has reached the furthest lands of the planet, ‘redundant population’ is produced everywhere and all localities have to bear the consequences of modernity’s global triumph. They are now confronted with the need to seek – in vain, it seems – local solutions to globally produced problems. The global spread of the modernity has given rise to growing quantities of human beings who are deprived of adequate means of survival, but the planet is fast running out of places to put them. Hence the new anxieties about ‘immigrants’ and ‘asylum seekers’ and the growing role played by diffuse ‘security fears’ on the contemporary political agenda. With characteristic brilliance, this new book by Zygmunt Bauman unravels the impact of this transformation on our contemporary culture and politics and shows that the problem of coping with ‘human waste’ provides a key for understanding some otherwise baffling features of our shared life, from the strategies of global domination to the most intimate aspects of human relationships.