SpringerPlus volume 2 , Article number: Cite this article. Metrics details. Starting from the postmodern, the philosophical and sociological speculation by Zygmunt Bauman, opens - through the analysis of the phenomenon of globalization — to the meta-level of life, and then circumscribes the most recent thinking on political life, until reaching the liquid modernity: overcoming postmodernity itself.
As a result individual, society, ethics, power, religion become those words impregnated with a liquidity capable of condensing in itself the most significant aspects of the present reality: a dimension in which the lasting gives way to the transient, the need to the desire, and the necessity to the utility.
Zygmunt Bauman is one of the greatest interpreters of our present time, a time which turns into a shapeless mass tending to a constant and relentless change. This is not the modern era, nor the postmodern one, if anything, this period can be well identified as liquid modernity: a concept, able to focus on the transformations that affect human life concerning the general policy determinations of life.
Consequently it is fundamental to understand in advance and profoundly the concept of liquidity around which Bauman interweaves his most recent philosophical and sociological reflection. Solidity and liquidity are the distinctive features of two eras: modernity and postmodernity, which becomes liquid modernity as it relates to contemporary existence. It is an existence where the need gives way to the desire that dismays men in the constant changes and transformations that affect their lives, and that turn identity from fact into a task: each of us runs into the self-building, which replaces the project itself.
Indeed, in our contemporary age the relationship between the individual and society is changing because the concepts of identity, individual and individuality are becoming meaningless. Being individuals in the liquid society does not simply mean being good consumers, but also being competitive goods in the global market. It becomes a free space on which to shape the visible Self, since if we are not able to dress up our own physical, it means that we are lacking in something.
To have means to possess because some form of control is capable of generating security in a world lacking in its solid points of reference. For this reason the conditions of having also falls on the body of contemporary man, who finds in it a form of certainty: to manipulate and control his physical means acting on what you are sure to possess.
Consumption has ambivalent features: it relieves the anxiety, because what one has, could not be taken back, but it also requires that consumers increasingly consume, since the previous consumption soon loses its rewarding peculiarity». And in the convergence between identity and consumption lies one of the main features of our age, because «contemporary society relates to its members primarily as consumers, and only secondarily, and in part, involves them also as producers.
To meet the standards of normality and to be recognized as a mature and respectable members of society, we must respond quickly and efficiently to the temptations of the consumer goods market.
It should be offered regularly a contribution to the demand fit to absorb the supply and, in the stages of reflection or stagnation of the economy, we must participate to the recovery led by consumers. The poor and the idlers, those who have neither a decent income, or credit cards, nor the prospect of better days, are not up to these requirements. Consequently the rule broken by the poor today, the violation of the rule distinguishes them and tags them as abnormal, is the standard of competence or fitness as consumers, not that of employment.
The poor of today ie those that constitute a problem for others are first and foremost consumers rather than unemployed people. They are defined primarily by the fact of being bad consumers: indeed, the most basic of social obligations, which they do not comply, is the duty to be active and effective purchasers of goods and services offered by the market ». And the access falls directly on the responsibility of the individual, who, in order to build his own individuality, prefers to invest its available economic resources for the purchase of those means suitable to classify, to modernize and introduce in the list of who matters.
Moreover, in a period of severe economic crisis like the one we are currently experiencing, other statistics show that the primary consumption, referring to the basic necessities, is put aside to buy advanced technology products, clothing and cosmetics. Today consumption seems to be a homologating activity, and according to Bauman it is a way to measure how much a person - in liquid society - is able to be individual.
On that concept, Bauman builds his thought about the individual and society, which runs on two main lines. The first is embodied in the idea that in the liquid world the conquest of identity goes hand in hand with the adherence to rules of a consumers society directed by the policies of the global market: being individuals is equivalent to being consumers.
The second line, however, going further that consideration, expands to incorporate the individual in the products. The relationship between the individual and the self, as well as between the individual and the others, acquires through Z. Being consumers and being consumed become, in fact, most general determinations of an individual who is affected the most problematic effects of the process of de-socialization, started by globalization, now arrived at one of its most acute and extreme phases.
Social aggregation and organization are deprived of their traditional tasks: they stop being identity dimensions of the subject capable of providing a set of standards and benchmarks. The individual becomes an isolated monad always looking for new forms of socialization, which instead of providing safety and welfare, increase the gap between man and the Self and between man and the other.
It is a social system that - despite being in possession of increasingly innovative means to communicate and interact with their fellows - generates discomfort and loneliness, mainly because the son of a networked individualism that «it is a social model, not a collection of isolated individuals», just because «the most important role of internet in the structuring of social relations is the contribution to the new model of sociability based on individualism.
More and more people are organized in social networks, which communicate via computer. Thus, it is not the internet to create a model of networked individualism, but the development of the Internet to provide adequate material support for the spread of individualism in the web as the dominant form of online socializing».
The belonging, in fact, is characterized as a natural human feeling, that, being suppressed nowadays - is manifest in surrogate forms of virtual social aggregation that are the attempt to satisfy the natural human sociability. The consumer society, in fact, does not aggregate, at any rate, disaggregate turning groups into isolated monads, with weak and fragmented bonds, where the individual is crystallized between the search for Self and the disarray in the not - Self.
The singularity and uniqueness of the individual is replaced by the flow of the needs of a group, which - in our contemporary world - seems to assume the appearance of a swarm.
A swarm can do without all the ceremonial and tricks without which it would neither form nor survive. They come together, scatter and gather again, from an occasion to another, every time inevitably for a different reason, and are attracted by changeable aims.
The seductive power of mobile objectives is a rule sufficient to coordinate movements, and this is enough to render superfluous any other command or imposition from above. Bauman, a Polish-born sociologist who has spent much of his career in England, recounts ways in which the technological advances of the past quarter-century have freed knowledge, capital, and political power from the traditional restraints of physical space, allowing them to rocket across the globe at the touch of a computer key.
Corporations move where they wish, when they wish. So do the elites who manage them, the specialists who staff them at the highest levels, and the academics and cultural professionals who operate comfortably in their world. Meanwhile, the traditional world of familiar physical space, of local businesses, stable relationships, and face-toface public communication, is collapsing all across Western civilization.
Andrew Heywood, Political Theory 3 rd ed. Bruce Baum, J. Mill's conception of economic freedom, History of Political Thought , —,. Start reading Globalization for free online and get access to an unlimited Unpacking the social roots and social consequences of globalizing be of interest to students and professionals in sociology, human geography and cultural issues.
Zygmunt Bauman He was driven out of the Polish People's Republic during the Polish political crisis and forced to give up his Polish citizenship. Globalization: The Human Consequences Starting from the postmodern, the philosophical and sociological speculation by Zygmunt Bauman, opens - through the analysis of the phenomenon of globalization — to the meta-level of life, and then circumscribes the most recent thinking on political life, until reaching the liquid modernity: overcoming postmodernity itself.
Globalization: The Human Consequences by Zygmunt Bauman An academic examination of globalization and its consequences. Finding libraries that hold this item Metrics details. Please enter your name. David Cabrera rated it it was ok Dec 01, You already recently rated this item. This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are as essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website.
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