?■' I ' U»-- t vr j* * j. .1 H4 'I i» -V» •#H! ■■■ . - ^ -='_ _ ** ST&ZÄKe-ä^ť—." ľ— Ili- vi Contents 4 Work Progress and trust in history • The rise and fall of labour • From marriage to cohabitation • Excursus: a brief history of procrastination • Human bonds in the fluid world • The self-perpetuation of non-confidence 5 Community Nationalism, mark 2 • Unity - through similarity or difference? • Security at a price • After the nation-state • Filling the void • Cloakroom communities Afterthought: On Writing; On Writing Sociology Notes Index 130 168 On Being Light and Liquid 202 217 225 Interruption, incoherence, surprise are the ordinary conditions of our life. They have even become real needs for many people, whose minds are no longer fed ... by anything but sudden changes and constantly renewed stimuli. .. We can no longer bear anything that lasts. We no longer know how to make boredom bear fruit. So the whole question comes down to this: can the human mind master what the human mind has made? Paul Valery 'Fluidity' is the quality of liquids and gases. What distinguishes both of them from solids, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica authoritatively informs us, is that they 'cannot sustain a tangential, or shearing, force when at rest' and so undergo 'a continuous change in shape when subjected to such a stress'. This continuous and irrecoverable change of position of one part of the material relative to another part when under shear stress constitutes flow, a characteristic property of fluids, In contrast, the shearing forces within a solid, held in a twisted or flexed position, are maintained, the solid undergoes no flow and can spring back to its original shape. Liquids, one variety of fluids, owe these remarkable qualities to the fact that their 'molecules are preserved in an orderly array over only a few molecular diameters'; while 'the wide variety of behaviour exhibited by solids is a direct result of the type of bonding that holds the atoms of the solid together and of the structural Foreword: On Being Light and Liquid U 4 i \ř^ ilý Hi H arrangements of the atoms'. 'Bonding', in turn, is a term that signifies the stability of solids - the resistance they put up 'against separation of the atoms'. | So much for the Encyclopaedia Britannica - in what reads like a I bid to deploy 'fluidity' as the leading metaphor for the present 'I stage of the modern era. What all these features of fluids amount to, injsimpleJanguage, is that liquids^.unlike solids, cannot easjly holcLlixelr shape. Fluids^ so to speak, neither fix space nor bind time. While solids fiave clear spatial dimensions tut neutralize the impact, and thus downgrade the significance, of time (effectively resist its flow or render it irrelevant), fluids do_npj^keep to any shape for long^and^are constantly readyjand prone) to change it; and sofor them it is the flow of time that counfó^r^ř^thanthe „space they happen to occupy: that space, after all, thej^Lbul^or_ajn^ment'. In a sense, solids cancel time; foFTTquids, on the contrary, it is mostly time that matters. When describing solids, one may ignore time altogether; in describing fluids, to leave time out of account would be a grievous mistake. Descriptions of fluids are all snapshots, and they need a date at the bottom of the picture. Fluids travel easily. They 'flow', 'spill', 'run out', 'splash', 'pour over', 'leak', 'flood', 'spray', 'drip', 'seep', 'ooze'; unlike solids, they are not easily stopped - they pass around some obstacles, dissolve some others and bore or soak their way through others still. From the meeting with solids they emerge unscathed, while the solids they have met, if they stay solid, are changed - get moist or drenched. TlT^x^rjaordinary mobility oj^fluidsjjs_what associ- at5?_í!l?ííL^Ííkjne idea °{ ^lightness\ There are liquids which, cubic inch for cubic inch, are heavier than many solids, but we are inclined nonetheless to visualize them all as lighter, less 'weighty' than everything solid. We associate 'lightness' or 'weightlessness' with mobility and inconstancy: we know from practice that the lighter we travel the easier and faster we move. | These a^ejreasons to consider 'fluidity' or 'liguj4itylAS_fit.ti.ng_ ! !EEiaߣüLSLa£h£lL3S£JSyJ5kJP. Srasp..I&P„.,naíu-re ^ jhejjr^ent^ in \ manx;way^iio^4j?hase m tne history of modernity. í I readily agree that such a p'ropösitiöri'rnay give a pause to anyone at home in the 'modernity discourse' and familiar with the vocabulary commonly used to narrate modern history. Was not modernity a process of 'liquefaction' from the start? Was not 'melt- Foreword: On Being Light and Liquid 3 ing the solids' its major pastime and prime accomplishment all along? In other words, ha^jnodernity_n^ its inception?_ ' " "These and similar objections are well justified, and will seem more so once we recall that the famous phrase 'melting the solids', when coined a century and a half ago by thT alitlTorT'oFT^e Communist Manifesto, referred to the treatment which the self-confident and exuberant modern spirit awarded the society it found much too stagnant for its taste and much too resistant to shift and mould for its ambitions - since it was frozen in its habitual ways. If the 'spirit' was 'modern', it was so indeed in so far as it was determined that reality should be emancipated from the 'dead hand' of its own history - and this could only be done by melting the solids (that is, by definition, dissolving whatever persists over time and is negligent of its passage or immune to its flow). That intention called in turn for the 'profaning of the sacred': for disavowing and dethroning the past, and first and foremost 'tradition' - to wit, the sediment and residue of the past in the present; it thereby called for the smashing of the protective armour forged of the beliefs and loyalties which allowed the solids to resist the 'liquefaction'. Let us remember, however, that all this was to be done not in order to do away with the solids once and for all and make the brave new world free of them for ever, but to clear the site for new and improved solids; to replace the inherited set of deficient and defective solids with another set, which was much improved and preferably perfect, and for that reason no longer alterable. When reading de Tocqueville's Ancien Regime, one might wonder in addition to what extent the 'found solids' were resented, condemned and earmarked for liquefaction for the reason that they were already rusty, mushy, coming apart at the seams and altogether unreliable. Modern times found the pre-modern solids in a fairly advanced state of disintegration; and one oT~tEe"most powerful motives behind tTiTul"gT1^ discover or'"invent"sofids of'-".fbjiláľcJían^^T^^g^lfáity, a" solidity which one could trust and rely upon and which would make the world predictable and therefore manageable. The first solidsto^be melted and the first sacreds to be profaned* werejrj1ditiojT^JJ^yalt^^customary^rjghtejmd^dbligations which bound hands and feet, hindered njOT^ enterprise^ \ 4 Foreword: On Being Light and Liquid To set earnestly about the task of building a new (truly solid!) order, it was necessary to geFnd of tKe~ballast with which The olcT order burdened the builders. 'Melting the solids' meant first and | foremost-shedding the 'irrelevanťl>blígi^^ I of rational calculation of effects; as'Mäx'We'bef^urlľflTBeratíng business enterprise from the shackles of the family-household duties and from the dense tissue of ethical obligations; or, as Thomas Carlyle would have it, leaving solely the 'cash nexus' of the many bonds underlying human mutuality and mutual responsibilities. By the same token, that kind_q£^dtingjd^^ complex network of social relations unstuck - bare, unprotected, unarmed" and exposed, impotent to resist the business-inspired rules of action and business-shaped criteria of rationality, let alone to compete with them effectively. That fateful departure laid thejield open to thejnyasion and domination.of (as Weber put it) instrumental.rationality, oFjas Karl Marx articulated it) the determining role of economy: now the 'basis' of social life gave all life's other realms the status of 'superstructure' - to wit, an artefact of the 'basis' whose sole function was to service its smooth and continuing operation. The melting of solids led to the progressive untying of economy from its traditional political, ethical and cultural entanglements. It sedimented a £iew order| defined primarily in economic terms. That new order was to be more 'solid' than the orders it replaced, because - unlike them - it was immune to the challenge from non-economic action. Most' political or moral levers"'cäpaBľe'of shifting or reforming the new order have been broken or rendered too short, weak or otherwise inadequate for the task. Not that the economic order, once entrenched, will have colonized, re-educated and converted to its ways the rest of social life; that order came to dominate the totality of human life because whatever else might have happened in that life has been rendered irrelevant and ineffective as far as the relentless and continuous reproduction of that order was concerned. That stage in modernity's career has been well described by Claus Of f e (in 'The Utopia of the Zero Option', first published in 1987 in Praxis International): 'comnlgx^ societies 'have become ngidjo such an extent that the very attempt toj-e^ctjiornrnHveTy irjDpiLprrejiewjreh^ tne coordinat[gnT of the processes which take place in them, is virtually precluded by Foreword: On Being Light and Liquid 5 dint of their practical futility and thus their essential inadequacy'. However free and volatile the 'suhsystems3 of that order may Be singly or severally, the way in which they are intertwined is 'rigid, fatal, and sealed off from any freedom of choice'. The overall order of things is not open to options; it is far from clear what such options could be, and even less clear how an ostensibly viable option could be made real in the unlikely case of social life being able to conceive it and gestate. Between the overall order and every one of the agencies, vehicles and stratagems of purposeful action there is a cleavage - a perpetually widening gap with no bridge in sight. Contrary to most dystopian^scenarios, this effect has not been achTCTed"fhrough dictatorial rule, subordination, oppression or enslavement; nor through the 'colonization' of the private sphere by the 'system'. Quite the opposite: the present-day situation emerged out" of the radical melting of the fetters and manacles rightly or wrongly suspected of limiting the individual freedom to choose and to act. Rigidity of order is the artefact and sediment of the human agents' freedom. That rigidity is the overall product of I 'releasing the brakes': of deregulation, liberalization, 'flexibilizatioŕľ, increased fluidity, unbridling the financial, real estate arid labour markets, easing the tax burden, etc. (as Offe pointed out in 'Binding, Shackles, Brakes', first published in 1987); or (to quote from Richard Sennett's Flesh and Stone) of the techniques of 'speed, escape, passivity' - in other words, tejrhmgues which allow the system and free agents to remain radically disengagecXTto by-pasš each other instead of meeting. Ifthe"fime" of system^ has passed, it is because theie are no buildings where the control desks of the system aie lodged and which could be stormed and captured by the revolutionanes; and also because it is excruciatingly difficult, nay impossible, to imagine what the victors, once inside the buildings (if they found them first), could do to turn the tables and put paid to the misery that prompted them to rebel. One should be hardly taken aback or puzzled by the evident shortage of would-be revolutionaries: of the kind of people who articulate the desire to change their individual plights as a project of changing the order of society. The task of constructing a new and better order to replace the_ old and defective one is not presently on the agenda - at least not on the agenda of that realm where political action is supposed to 6 Foreword: On Being Light and Liquid reside. The 'melting of solids', the permanent feature of modernity, has therefore acquired a new meaning, and above all has been redirected to a new target - one of the paramount effects of that redirection being the dissolution of forces which could keep the question of order and system on the political agenda. The solids whose turn has come to be thrown into the melting pot and which ařeTn the process of being melted at the present time, the time_of fluid mödefnity, are the bonds which interlock individual choices in collective projects and actions - the patterns of communication and 'cö-Ördihation between individually conducted life policies oň the~oriě handand" political actions of human collectivities on the other. In an interview given to Jonathan Rutherford on 3 February 1999,(Ulrich Becfe (who a few years earlier coined the term 'second modernity' to connote the phase marked by the modernity 'turning upon itself, the era of the soi-disant 'modernization of modernity'} speaks of 'zombie categories' and 'zombie institutions' which are 'dead and still alive'. He names the family, class and neighbourhood as the foremost examples of that new phenomenon. The family, for instance: Ask yourself what actually is a family nowadays? What does it mean? Of course there are children, my children, our children. But even parenthood, the core of family life, is beginning to disintegrate under conditions of divorce .. . [G]randmothers and grandfathers get included and excluded without any means of participating in the decisions of their sons and daughters. From the point of view of their grandchildren the meaning of grandparents has to be determined by individual decisions and choices. What is happening at present is, so to speak, a redistribution and reallocation ormodernity's 'melting powers'. They affected at first the extant institutions, the frames that circumscribed the realms of possible action-choices, like hereditary estates with their no-appeal-allowed allocation-by-ascription. Configurations, constellations, patterns of dependency and interaction were all thrown into the melting pot, to be subsequently recast and refashioned; this was the 'breaking the mould' phase in the history of the inherently transgressive, boundary-breaking, all-eroding modernity. As for the individuals, however - they could be excused for failing to notice; they came to be confronted by patterns and figurations Foreword: On Being Light and Liquid 7 which, albeit 'new and improved', were as stiff and indomitable as ever. Indeed, no mould was broken without being replaced with another; pex'£E^i^7^~°''lt: iro111 their old cages only to" be admonished and censured in case they failed to relocate theřhsělvesftHfougfi their own,'"JdedičatědranH continuous, truly life-long efforts, in the ready-made niches of the new order: in the classes, .the frames which (äs uncompromisingly as the already dissolved estates) encapsulated the totality of life conditions and life prospects and determined the range of realistic life projects and life strategies. The task confronting free individuals was to use their new freedom tcT]in