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DOI: 10.1177/0263276410382024

2010 27: 95Theory Culture SocietyMartin Jay

Liquidity Crisis: Zygmunt Bauman and the Incredible Lightness of Modernity

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Liquidity Crisis: Zygmunt

Bauman and the Incredible

Lightness of Modernity

Martin Jay

Abstract

After having promoted and then tacitly abandoned the rhetoric of postmod-

ernism, Zygmunt Bauman settled on the metaphor of a modernity that was

growing more liquid and lighter than before. This essay explores the

strengths and weaknesses of these metaphors, and attempts to contextualize

Baumans insights in what has been called by the historian Yuri Slezkine the

Mercurian culture of diasporic Jewish life.

Key words

liquidityj

Mercurianj

metaphorj

modernityj

modernization

It was six oclock and late arrivals were scurrying up, out of breath, dodginground barrels and hawsers and laundry baskets; the crew were turning adeaf ear to any enquiries; there was a lot of bumping and jostling; baggagewas piling up between the two paddle-boxes; and through all this racketthe hiss of steam could be heard escaping through the iron plates and cover-ing everything in a whitish pall. (Flaubert, 1989)

SO READS the celebrated opening tableau of Flauberts l869 novelA Sentimental Education, which describes a boat on a quai in theParis of l840, belching clouds of smoke, all ready to sail. It will

carry the novels fallible hero, Fre de ric Moreau, home to the provinces for abrief respite from the frantic turmoil of the modern metropolis.

At around the same time that Moreau was trying to penetrate theopacity of a world lost in a steamy haze, his real-life contemporary,

Charles Baudelaire, was contemplating the vaporization of the self in his

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autobiographical Mon Coeur mis a' nu (Baudelaire, 1968).1 And Karl Marx,in words that have since become emblematic of the corrosive power of capi-talist industrialization, was writing in his l848 Communist Manifesto: Allthat is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last

compelled to face with his sober senses his real conditions of life, and hisrelations with his kind (Marx and Engels, 1977: 224).2

In short, in the middle of the l9th century, three of the most perspica-cious European thinkers could talk of a gaseous modernity, in which thetransitional stage of liquidity was being by-passed with the rapid dissolutionof the traditional world. The century that followed also experienced theunsettling, often sinister, power of gas, whether in the trenches of the FirstWorld War, the extermination chambers of the Second, or the greenhouseeffects of climate change at the centurys end. There can be few more chill-

ing examples of the vaporization of the self than the utter absence ofbodies in the wreckage of the World Trade Center towers, when the toxicsmoke clouds finally dissipated. And at a moment when we are all too famil-iar with economic bubbles bursting, it seems more than ever an age of gas-eous instability.

Modernity, however, was never fully a matter of the vaporization ofmatter, and the metaphor of its gaseous evanescence could take observersonly so far. Marx, after all, saw enduring patterns of commodification andexploitation underpinning the surface effect of solids melting into air;

indeed, their structural causes were now precisely what was visible to thesober senses of those who could now finally confront them straight on. Forall its exposure of the vaporous haze of modern life, Flauberts novel, asPierre Bourdieu brilliantly showed, revealed a field of social and culturalforces whose deep structure was ultimately intelligible (Bourdieu, 1993).And Baudelaire followed his reference to vaporizing the self with the recog-nition that it could be centralized again. Modernity, it seemed to many,was just as much the rigid, bureaucratic iron cage of which Max Weberfamously spoke as the air its inmates breathed, just as much the bulky, mas-sive steam engine as the steam it belched forth. Although the institutions,routines and belief systems of the premodern world had been undone andthe links of the great chain of Being unfastened, new structures and con-straints were just as swiftly fashioned, sometimes intentionally, sometimesnot, in their place. The process of dis-embedding people from their settledways of life was accompanied by a re-embedding in new forms of social,economic and political order.

Zygmunt Bauman, one of the most acute contemporary analysts ofmodernity, has himself acknowledged the existence of an earlier version ofmodernity that was, in his terminology, heavy, bulky, solid, immobile

and rooted.3 This was the modernity that was produced by a gardeningimpulse, whose purveyors ^ sometimes he called them landscape architects

^ thought they could refashion the natural and historical world accordingto the principles of horticultural pruning, weeding and nurturing. It wasthe modernity of those he once dubbed legislators, authoritative and

96 Theory, Culture & Society 27(6)



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binding arbiters of opposing positions, who sought to replace the haphazardresidues of historical accretion with the benecial eects of rational planning(Bauman, 1987). It was the modernity exemplied by the repetitive disci-pline, routinized time and dierentiation of function of the Fordist factory

and the surveillance model of the Panopticon. It was the modernity thatvalued production over consumption, fostered settled identities and believedin bureaucratic organization and the steering power of the state. At itsmost sinister, it was the modernity that reduced reason to bureaucratic,instrumental rationality, which could lead, so he argued in his controversialbook on the Holocaust, to the extermination of human weeds in the nameof racial hygiene (Bauman, 1989).4 But even in its benign forms, it involvedsubordination, colonization, hierarchy and the control of dierence.

The reign of heavy modernity, Bauman has argued, was, however,

finite, and although full vaporization was not ^ or is not yet ^ the result,we are now experiencing a modernity that has lost its weightiness, immobil-ity and solidity. Despite vain attempts to contrive new forms of stability ^Bauman is especially critical of nationalism as one such effort ^ we arenow uprooted and disembedded in ways that have no easy remedy.Building new communities by the time-honored strategies of abjection orassimilation, what Le' vi-Strauss called anthropophagic and anthropoemic,are ineffective in an epoch of virtually universal nomadism, in which weare all diasporic wanderers unable to settle permanently in a territory we

can call home. Individual consumers with volatile identities driven by medi-ated desires that can never be satisfied, we can never achieve communal sol-idarity. Divided, we shop (Bauman, 2000).

For a while this new state of affairs seemed worthy of being calledpost-modern and Bauman was among the first sociologists in the l980s tochampion the designation. But ever sensitive to the winds of change, hesoon recognized that this terminology was losing favor,5 and so retreated tothe metaphor of a modernity that was liquid, writing not only a book onLiquid Modernity in 2000, but rapidly produced sequels called LiquidLove (2003), Liquid Life (2005), Liquid Fear (2006) and Liquid Times(2006). Each of these develops variations on fundamentally the same argu-ment: we now live in a world of precarious uncertainty, short-term planning,instant gratication, the weakening of institutions, ephemeral relationships,struggles to manage risk, volatile consumerist identities and the collapse ofviable communities. Capitalism, once tied to the ground, seeking dominionover territories, is now light, unmoored to any one locality. Solid moder-nity, reads a typical formulation from Liquid Modernity, was an era ofmutual engagement. Fluid modernity is the epoch of disengagement,elusiveness, facile escape and hopeless chase. In liquid modernity, it is

the most elusive, those free to move without notice, who rule (Bauman,2000: 120).

The epochal transformation thus described is, according to Bauman,of extraordinary importance: The passage from high to light capitalism,from solid to fluid modernity, may yet prove to be a departure more radical

Jay ^ Liquidity Crisis 97



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and seminal than the advent of capitalism and modernity themselves, previ-ously seen as by far the most crucial milestones of human history at leastsince the Neolithic revolution (Bauman, 2000: 126). In contrast to what hap-pened after the dissolution of traditional society, there has been no reinven-

tion of stable and recurrent institutions and behavioral patterns on newgrounds. Liquidization now extends from the system to personal life experi-ences, from the macro to the micro level, and there is no real possibilityfor a collective response that might subvert the whole. We are all nomadicextraterritorials, who restlessly transgress the increasingly porous bound-aries left by solid modernity. We have learned to value transience over dura-tion, and cope ^ more or less ^ with the erosion of even our sense ofenduring individual selves.

***

How are we to judge such sweeping, hyperbolic assertions? What are we tomake of Baumans bold attempt to define the Geist of our Zeit? How con-vincing is his mapping of epochal changes? Have the events of the firstdecade of the 21st century confirmed the intuitions he had at the waningof the 20th? Written in a somewhat breathless style, as light as the moder-nity he seeks to describe, Liquid Modernity and the books that followedoften depend for their effect on the telling anecdote or revealing statistic,

the well-chosen citation from a learned authority, or the power of Baumanscompelling rhetoric to make their case.There is little of the deliberate amas-sing of data by the cautious social scientist carefully weighing alternativeexplanations, crunching large quantities of numbers, or making nuanceddiscriminations based on a welter of contradictory evidence. Instead, theyhazard bold generalizations about epochal transformations and sweepingpredictions of the kind only a life-time of sociological observation might jus-tifiably authorize. As Gran Therborn has put it, Baumans recent writingstravel light, burdened neither by research nor by theoretical analytics, butborne up by an unusual life wisdom, a trained observers eye and a fluentpen (Therborn, 2008).

They also unashamedly draw on the power of metaphor to make theircase, with all of the advantages and dangers of that approach.6 More thanmere ornaments of speech, metaphors work to imbue the objective worldwith attributes that are understood to exceed the anthropomorphic projec-tion of the observing subject. They yoke together what is conceptually orempirically distinct, producing a ash of illumination that may be absentin more sober conceptual language. Baumans root metaphor, the contrastbetween solid and liquid, functions suggestively to characterize complexes

of phenomena that might otherwise seem unrelated. Reinforced by thelight/heavy binary metaphor, which he superimposes on it, it provides uswith a heuristically fruitful way to organize a welter of material from eco-nomic, social, political and cultural sources that only the most daring ofanalysts would try to render coherent. It also does so without positing a




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hierarchy of causation in which, say, the economy is determinant in the lastinstance, to use the familiar Althusserian terminology (always muddied bythe admission that the last instance never comes). And it refrains fromsmuggling in or blatantly announcing an inherent value judgment in its

periodization, allowing us to work out the ambiguous implications of bothstages of modernity. This is not, in other words, a simple story of ascent ordecline. Bauman, to be sure, is not advocating a value-neutral sociology ^the nal essay in Liquid Modernity is devoted precisely to defending theinevitability and even virtue of engagement ^ but the metaphor of liquid/solid does not do the work of presupposing what the values should be.

The potential costs of relying on metaphor are, however, also apparent,especially when they suppress their self-awareness as metaphors andbecome confused with reality tout court. By leaning so much on the transi-

tion from solid to liquid, Bauman sometimes leaves us with an impressionthat the two states are mutually exclusive, one passing into the other in theway ice melts above 32 degrees Fahrenheit. There is thus little acknowledg-ment of the delicate and uneven dialectic of the two, even after the tippingpoint of epochal transition is passed. Might there be, for example, fluidityon the surface level of subjective experience, while on the deeper, moreobjective level of enduring institutions there is much that resists liquidiza-tion? The old Marxist distinction between classes for themselves and classesin themselves is one way to express the disjuncture. Self-conscious class

identities may seem more contingent than ever, but deeper regularities ofcontinuity based on property and wage labor relations do not entirely disap-pear. However much we have come to be defined primarily as consumers,our capacity to spend is inextricably tied to our compensation for our laboras producers. Another variant of this tension is that between the way inwhich capitalism generates new desires met only by rapid changes in fash-ion, seemingly leading to the erosion of anything deemed outmoded, butwhich then works to perpetuate the deeper economic relations that definecapitalism, light or heavy, is still capitalist. Although hierarchies have beentoppled, the result has not been a genuine leveling of all playing fields.Beneath the flux there is the ever same, as Benjamin and Adorno ofteninsisted.

In addition, as the three European figures cited at the beginning ofthis paper indicate, as early as the mid-l9th century some observers wereclaiming that solidity had already passed through the liquid stage andarrived all the way at a modernity that could rightfully be called vaporous.Even if they were atypical prophets ahead of their time, their observationscomplicate any linear and irreversible progression towards de-solidification.To avoid any teleological reading of historical change, fluctuations among

solid, liquid and gaseous stages would have to be taken into account, bothas historical phenomena as well as future possibilities.

Describing epochal changes based on the suggestive power of meta-phor may, in other words, work to shade the interpretation of ambiguousevidence only in one direction. Take the role of human rights, whose recent




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importance Bauman sees as evidence of the withering of an institutionallysupported public sphere and the triumph of the private individual qua con-sumer. In Liquid Modernity, he goes so far as to define human rights asthe imperative to let everyone go her or his own way, and to enable everyone

to do it in peace ^ by guarding the safety of her or his own body and posses-sions, locking actual or would-be criminals in prisons and keeping thestreets free from muggers, perverts, beggars and all other sorts of obnoxiousand malevolent strangers (Bauman, 2000: 36). But might it not also beargued that the concept of human rights is dependent precisely on intersub-

jective recognition, involving reciprocity and mutual acknowledgment ofthe humanness of all who fall under its umbrella? Rather than producingmore isolation and selshness, either individual or tribal (rights accordedonly to a specic religious, ethnic or national group and denied to strangers),

human rights ^ or at least a good number of the principles includedamong them ^ have an inclusive implication that dees radical individualiza-tion. Even arch-individualists and unapologetic defenders of selshness likeAyn Rand, who reduce human rights to self-preservation and the right toproperty, acknowledge that any alleged right of one man, which necessi-tates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewardedduty or an involuntary servitude on another man (Rand, 1964: 96).That is, despite the dissolution of traditional and heavy modernist bonds,

the growing recognition of human rights suggests that new ones arebeing formed that resist the unchecked liquidization of social andpolitical relations.

Another potential drawback of over-reliance on metaphor is the ten-dency to homogenize distinctions based on the seductive power of images.Bauman is not reluctant to posit epochal changes that we have experiencedwithout pausing to question the extent and pervasiveness of the collectivesubject invoked. Modernization theory in its more traditional guise wasrightly criticized for projecting a Western view of the stages of developmentonto a world that had other trajectories in mind (Gilman, 2003).7 Liquidmodernization theory may well suer from the same aw, even if themomentum of globalization does produce pressures to integrate the worldinto a single narrative. Bauman has been justiably taxed for smoothingout the unevenness of development, which in many parts of the world stillinvolves the active construction of solid, heavy, re-embedded socio-economicinstitutions (Lee, 2005). For all its recent economic success, China, with afth of the worlds population, remains largely a society of producers ratherthan consumers. You will look, however, in vain for a reference to theChinese experience in Liquid Modernity or in later works like Consuming

Life (Bauman, 2007).8Baumans response would likely be that he is only pointing to incipient

trends, rather than providing an historical account of irreversible epochalchanges that can be called, as it were, watertight. And despite all the reser-vations one may have about the limits of his metaphorically driven




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narrative, it is hard to gainsay that many of the observations in LiquidModernitystill ring true a decade later, perhaps even truer. In the wake ofthe Great Recession, we are more aware than ever of the fragility, ephemer-ality and riskiness of an interconnected globe whose future course is any-

thing but clearly chartered. The solidity of possessions, including realestate, has eroded as life even in the most advanced countries has becomemore precarious. Whatever residues of the earlier modern faith in progressthat may have survived into the 21st century are now weaker than ever.Even in the case of still developing countries like China, where producersare more important than consumers, Baumans terminology can still helpmake sense of the rapidly changing situation. Take, for example, the veryBaumanian opposition posited by the celebrated New York Times columnistThomas Friedman in response to Googles threatened withdrawal from the

Chinese market:

There are actually two Chinese economies today. There is the CommunistParty and its aff iliates; lets call them Command China. These are the verytraditional state-owned enterprises. Alongside them, there is a secondChina, largely concentrated in coastal cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong.This is a highly entrepreneurial sector that has developed sophisticated tech-niques to generate and participate in diverse, high-value flows of businessknowledge. I call that Network China. . . .We are shifting from a worldwhere the key source of strategic advantage was in protecting and extracting

value from a given set of knowledge stocks ^ the sum total of what weknow at any point in time, which is now depreciating at an acceleratingpace ^ into a world in which the focus of value creation is effectiveparticipation in knowledge flows, which are constantly being renewed.(Friedman, 2010)

In short, as Therborn correctly says, many of Zygmunt Baumans insightshave indeed been borne up by an unusual life wisdom, a trained observerseye and a fluent pen.

What, we might ask in conclusion, is the source of that life wisdom?Out of what milieu did Bauman emerge and how did it enable him to beso sensitive to changes in modern life? Although Bauman has resisted con-necting his life with his work,9 there is, in fact, no mystery about his generalbackground. Born in 1925 in Poznan of non-observant Jewish parents, hemoved to the Soviet Union in l939 and joined the Polish army near theend of the war, serving in military intelligence, as it helped liberate hisnative country from Nazi rule. He came of age intellectually and politicallyin the turbulent years after the imposition of Communism in the postwarera, seeking Party membership in l946. Bauman rose to the rank of major

in the army before being discharged dishonorably in l953, apparentlybecause of his fathers expressed interest in moving to Israel. Preciselywhat his role may have been in these deeply vexed times has been thesource of heated dispute, but for our purposes it is less important to tryto set the record straight than to register the fact that he gradually




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moved away from Communism, indeed Marxism in any of its varieties.Gramsci, however, remained an inuence in his later work and he neveradopted the god-that-failed bitterness of his fellow lapsed Polish Marxist,Leszek Kolakowski. By the late l960s, at a time when anti-Semitism was

on the rise and Communists of Jewish background, however secular, werepurged from the government, Bauman reluctantly was forced to acknowl-edge his Jewish identity. With considerable regret he left Warsaw for a posi-tion in Tel Aviv in 1968, his wife Janina, who had relatives in Israel,having vetoed another possible position in Australia. It was her autobiogra-phy, Winter in the Morning, that apparently rst aroused his interest inthe Holocaust, which he had previously ignored as a topic of scholarly con-cern. Unhappy in Israel, he migrated again three years later to Leeds,where he began the distinguished career that has yet to draw to a close.

These are the barebones of a story that is important as much for itsemblematic character as its personal implications. As a recent flood of liter-ature has made clear, the Jews of central and eastern Europe ^ many ofthem secular non-Jewish Jews in Isaac Deutschers well-known formulation(Deutscher, 1981) ^ were among the harbingers of modernity, in particularits liquid variety. Yuri Slezkine, to take a salient example, begins his extraor-dinary narrative of The Jewish Century by distinguishing between twoideal types of cultures he calls Apollonian and Mercurian (Slezkine,2004). The former are the autochthonous population, settled on the land,

which they cultivate and leave to their heirs. Organized hierarchically, theyunderstand the importance of dignity and honor. When they evolve intopost-agrarian cultures, they remain producers rather than providers of ser-vices. Their values are solidity, rmness, toughness, decisiveness, earnest-ness, simplicity, inarticulateness, and courage (Slezkine, 2004: 212).Although they sometimes lose control and approach the state of frenzyNietzsche famously called Dionysian, they are really the same people,sober or not. When the festival is over, they go back to tilling their land.

Mercurians, in contrast, are derived from stranger minorities whofacilitated exchange between communities and did the dirty work that wasbeneath the dignity of the majority population. Nomadic, diasporic, restless,unsettled, they develop skills of negotiation, curiosity and mental agility.Like the trickster God for whom they are named, they are cunning, wilyand learned in the arts of survival, both individual and communal. Ratherthan valuing martial courage or aristocratic honor, they esteem clevernessand wit. Often compelled to move swiftly from community to community,they pick up the languages and habits of others. If they pause in their wan-derings, it is to live in anonymous cities rather than small towns or rural vil-lages. Entrepreneurial, unmoored to the land, skilled in the uses of

concepts and symbols, reflexive and ironic, they turn their outsider statusultimately to their advantage, emerging in our time as the dominant typeof modern life.

There have been many versions of Mercurian culture, according toSlezkine. Parsis, gypsies, overseas Chinese, Armenians and Indians in




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East Africa are salient examples, but the quintessential variant he examinesare, of course, the Jews. All Mercurians represented urban arts and rurallabors, and most scriptural Mercurians emerged as the primary beneficia-ries and scapegoats of the citys costly triumph, but only the Jews ^ the

scriptural Mercurians of Europe ^ came to represent Mercurianism andmodernity everywhere (Slezkine, 2004: 39). There were, to be sure, costsas well as benets for the pioneers of Mercurian modernity, and not surpris-ingly many Jews decided it was unwise to continue in that role. The creationof the State of Israel was a conscious attempt to reverse allegiances: Israelof the l950s and l960s was not simply Apollonian and anti-Mercurian ^ itwas Apollonian and anti-Mercurian at a time when much of the Westernworld, of which it considered itself a part, was moving in the opposite direc-tion (Slezkine, 2004: 328).

When Zygmunt Bauman was hounded out of Poland, as we know, hetried the Israeli solution, but soon found it unpalatable. Nationalist commu-nalism based on returning to the land was not in his bones. And so, as agood Mercurian, he moved on, mastering a new language, finding a newaudience, re-inventing himself once again. The story of non-Jewish Jewsfrom Poland is one of quintessential Mercurian restlessness and uprooted-ness, with all the attendant dangers and opportunities.10 Bauman was oneof the lucky ones, a survivor who managed to avoid or at least survive thecompromises and moral dilemmas of so many of his compatriots. And

with his survival went an extraordinary sensitivity ^ that unusual lifewisdom of which Therborn speaks ^ that allowed him to formulate hisgrand metaphoric vision of a modernity undergoing rapid liquidization.

There are two main ways to evaluate the implications of this back-ground. The reductive, uncharitable response would be to see Bauman asmerely extrapolating his particular situation into a more general condition,projecting the liquidity of his own experience and that of the cohort he rep-resents on to the modern world as a whole. What John Murray Cuddihydid for Freud and other Jewish thinkers in The Ordeal of Civility ^ seeingtheir work as universalizations of the Jewish experience of exclusion frompolite society ^ might, mutatis mutandis, be extended to Bauman(Cuddihy, 1987).11 To say we are all Mercurians now, living in a modernitythat is entirely liquid, would be an unconscious revenge for the exclusionfrom the world of Apollonian solidity, a world which has by no meansentirely vanished. Maybe it is not true that we are all rootless cosmopoli-tans and nomadic wanderers, at least not yet.12

The second, more generous response would be to say that an advan-tage of Baumans background and life experiences, if scarcely compensationfor the pain they may well have caused, was a special sensitivity to real ten-

dencies in modern life that were less obvious to others. As he himselfacknowledged in works like Modernity and Ambivalence, Jews have longbeen quintessential strangers, ambivalent outsiders with access to a differ-ent perspective on the world from those who are comfortably on the inside(Bauman, 1991).13 Learning to walk on quicksand, as he calls one of the




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chapters in Liquid Life, is a skill worth mastering in a world in which terrais not as rma as it once seemed. Some people get a chance to walk aheadof the rest of us. Time in liquid modernity merely ows, he tells us, itdoesnt march on in a meaningful direction. But well into his ninth

decade, Zgymunt Bauman is still resolutely showing us the value of know-ing when to go with the ow.

Notes

1. The famous passage reads Concerning the vaporization and the centralizationof the Self. Everything is in it (Baudelaire, 1968: 630).

2. The original German reads: Alles Stndische und Stehende verdampft, allesHeilige wird entweiht, und die Menschen sind endlich gezwungen, ihreLebensstellung, ihre gegenseitigen Beziehungen mit nchternen Augen anzu-

sehen. It was, of course, Marshall Berman (1982) who made clear the rele-vance of this passage for an analysis of modern life.

3. All these terms can be found in Zgymunt Bauman (2000: 56).

4. For a powerful critique of his argument see Yehuda Bauer (2001: ch. 4).

5. The change is registered in his Postmodernity and its Discontents (Bauman,1997).

6. For a defense of the imprecision and polyvalence of metaphors over concepts,see Hans Blumenberg (1997). A translation of his classic essay Paradigmen

zu einer Metaphorologie is scheduled for publication in 2010 with CornellUniversity Press.

7. For a general account of its rise and fall, see Nils Gilman (2003).

8. There are, of course, moments in his work where he acknowledges the impor-tance of China, but only in terms of potential consumption. See for examplehis 2005 interview with Lukasz Galecki: The situation becomes more seriouswhen we consider that China as well as India are both in the process of motor-ising their billions of inhabitants. Imagine a world in which every Chineseand Indian family decides to buy a car and fill it up with fuel! (Bauman,2005).

9. I find it very diff icult to connect events in life with events in whatever hap-pens when I am sitting in front of my word processor, think and write. SoBauman responded to a question about his work on the Holocaust and hispersonal connection with it (Bauman, 2002: 102). See also the joint interviewhe gave with his wife Janina to Ulrich Bielefeld in the same issue(Bauman and Bauman, 2002).

10. For an account of the generation just before his, see Marci Shore (2006).

11. For a critique, see Daniel Boyarin (1994).

12. Already in 2000, in a book that ironically was dedicated to Bauman (andLolle Nauta), the Dutch sociologist Dick Pels (2000: 176^7) could write, ithas become a cliche for connoisseurs of postmodern sensibility to say thatwe live in a world of flux, where mobility, experimentation, and transgressionhave turned into core signifiers of the daily management of lifestyles. Toseek adventure, to live the experimental life, to probe the limits of ones




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identity, has become a singularly powerful motif in popular and elite culturealike . . . this discourse of nomadism has recently turned into a cognitive play-thing of the educated elite, into the newest fad in self-stylization and self-celebration.

13. For a discussion of Baumans work on Jews and other strangers, see VinceMarotta (2002).

References

Baudelaire, C. (1968) Mon Coeur mis a' nu, in Oeuvres comple'tes. Paris: Editionsdu Seuil.

Bauer,Y. (2001) Rethinking the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Bauman, J. and Z. Bauman (2002) Conversation with Janina Bauman and

Zygmunt Bauman [with Ulrich Bielefeld], Thesis Eleven 70: 113^17.

Bauman, Z. (1987) Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernityand Intellectuals. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Bauman, Z. (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress.

Bauman, Z. (1991) Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at theUniversity of California, Berkeley. Among his works are The DialecticalImagination (l973 and l996), Marxism and Totality (l984), Adorno (l984),Permanent Exiles (l985), Fin-de-Sie'cle Socialism (l989), Force Fields(l993), Downcast Eyes (l993), Cultural Semantics (l998), Refractions ofViolence (2003), Songs of Experience (2004) and The Virtues ofMendacity: On Lying in Politics (2010). [email: [email protected]]



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