It hit me suddenly. Just two words that sank in my mind like a single sugar crystal in a super saturated solution of sugar and water. My mind had been struggling with the issues definitions and paradoxes of modernity for the best part of the last decade and suddenly these two words sank in the mind creating in their wake a beautiful crystalline shape of sugar crystals: bright, shining, amazing.
Let me step back a little and get you into my story. I came upon this idea that modernity is not simply the world as we find it, full of novelty and change. It is not change as every generation has known it. It is not new inventions or new modes of clothing, textiles, fabrics, foods, tastes, architecture, spaces… the whole panorama of innovative design that seems to grip us from all sides. I knew that each new generation thinks of the prior generation as having little, of being poorer than itself. This was simply a definition of the generation gap – the thought that each new generation has better amenities than its parents.
Since 1995, the world has changed in irredeemable ways and if we must study the modern world we must deal with an intellectual construct called modernity. It is not simply a matter of the modern world as defined in a variety of ways since the last four hundred years. It is not as easy as dividing the world into pre-historic, ancient, medieval, per-modern and modern times. Such a classification of history may serve an academic purpose. But the flesh and bones business of living in the year 2016 with the idea that the twentieth century was the modern world and our century is the post-modern seemed to me too bland, even naïve. It was a simplistic effort to capture the complexity of the experience of living today.
In such a swirl of concepts, philosophy, technology Pirsig, New Age, the internet, and the tsunami of information available at a single click I came upon the two words that are the subject of this rumination.
“Liquid Modernity”. AAAAHHH!! The fluidity of these words hit me like a wave at the beach knocking me off my balance, but making me land on the soft sand in the twilight. I had been trying to grapple with solid modernity. The solid modernity of the concrete jungles in the cities which made human crowding a norm and the land unfit for man. The colossal drains, cranes, tanks, and sixteen-wheeler trucks… Those monstrous shapes of steel and concrete that belittled the grandeur of the mountains and the sky. It was so easy to point to it. So easy to demonstrate its obvious evil. With the glare of sunlight replaced by fluorescent light 24/7, with the natural breeze replaced by the air-conditioned recycled air which made huge skyscrapers with glass walls and constant temperatures possible, it was easy to point these as leviathan.
But if since 1995, we have entered into liquid modernity these gigantic monstrous images will not work. They will be pointed at as errors, as a mistake of judgement by the twentieth century master barons of industry and political power. What’s really great is a small tablet eleven by six inches in the hand of a schoolchild in Sub Saharan desert. That child has never been to school, has never seen classes, has never seen or read a textbook. Suddenly he has the tablet connected to you. And me. And anyone else on earth. Suddenly this child has access to the best teachers of the world teaching math or English or Swahili. Suddenly this child can have friends in Chicago, Karachi, Peking on Facebook.
To try to understand liquid modernity by the hideous ugly metaphors of solid modernity is an error. The dark side of liquid modernity is more subtle. Just as the sly antics of Leito (David Belle) in the mock heroic film District 13 served to show the architecture that reduced its inhabitants to violence and drugs, so does the dark side of liquid modernity demand an equally agile movement of the mind to discover the shadowy side of propaganda, pornography and just blatant falsehood dignified as a news report on a TV screen somewhere.
Liquid modernity demands our fullest concentration because it will not stay still or be contained or have no ripples during the time we wish to study it. Yet study it we must before it washes over us
Till human voices wake us and we drown
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Notes:
1. The sugar crystal metaphor is thanks to Robert Pirsig’s Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
2. The last line is the concluding line of T.S. Eliot’s The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.
3. Liquid modernity is a concept developed by Zygmunt Bauman