The city as such is disappearing

Growing familiarity with the world-city and the city-world can lead to a feeling [...] that the city as such is disappearing. Of course, urbanization continues on all sides, but changes to the organization of labour, insecurity – that dark downside of mobility – and the technologies imposing on each individual, via television and the Internet, creating a sense of a geared-down, omnipresent centre, make contrasts between town and country or urban and non-urban increasingly meaningless.

Marc Augé, Non-Places (Verso, 2008) p. xv

The world is like a single immense conurbation

The urbanization of the world corresponds both to the expansion of big metropolitan centres and, along coasts and traffic routes, to the spread of Le Bras's urban filaments. The fact that the political and economic life of the planet hangs on decision-making centres situated in world metropolises that are all interconnected, together constituting a sort of 'virtual meta-city', completes this picture. The world is like a single immense conurbation.

Marc Augé, Non-Places (Verso, 2008) p. xii

Nothing is less innocent than laissez-faire

Nothing is less innocent, Bourdieu reminds us, than laissez-faire. Watching human misery with equanimity while placating the pangs of conscience with the ritual incantation of the TINA ('there is no alternative') creed, means complicity. Whoever willingly or by default partakes of the cover-up or, worse still, the denial of the human-made, non-inevitable, contingent and alterable nature of social order, notably of the kind of order responsible for unhappiness, is guilty of immorality – of refusing help to a person in danger.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 215

The trick is to be at home in many homes

It is not true, the novelist and the philosopher suggest in unison, that great art has no homeland – on the contrary, art, like the artists, may have many homelands, and most certainly more than one. Rather than homelessness, the trick is to be at home in many homes, but to be in each inside and outside at the same time, to combine intimacy with the critical look of an outsider, involvement with detachment – a trick which sedentary people are unlikely to learn. Learning the trick is the chance of the exile: technically an exile – one that is in, but not of the place. The unconfinedness that results from this condition reveals the homely truths to be man-made and un-made, and the mother tongue to be an endless stream of communication between generations and a treasury of messages always richer than any of their readings and forever waiting to be unpacked anew.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 207

Borders do not acknowledge and register an already existing estrangement

As Frederick Barth explained, borders do not acknowledge and register the already existing estrangement; they are drawn, as a rule, before the estrangement is brought about. First there is a conflict, a desperate attempt to set 'us' apart from 'them'; then the traits keenly spied out among 'them' are taken to be the proof and the source of a strangehood that bears no conciliation. Human beings being as they are multi-faceted creatures having many attributes, it is not difficult to find such traits once the search has started in earnest.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 177

The labyrinth as an allegory of the human condition was a message transmitted by the nomads to the settlers

Jacques Attali has recently suggested that it is the image of the labyrinth which nowadays comes to dominate, even if surreptitiously, our thinking about the future and our own part in it; that image becomes the principal mirror in which our civilization in its present stage contemplates its own likeness. The labyrinth as an allegory of the human condition was a message transmitted by the nomads to the settlers. Millennia have passed, and the settlers have finally acquired the self-confidence and courage to rise to the challenge of the labyrinthine fate. 'In all European languages', Attali points out, 'the word labyrinth became a synonym of artificial complexity, useless darkness, tortuous system, impenetrable thicket. "Clarity" became a synonym of logic.'

The settlers set about making the walls transparent, the devious passages straight and well signed, the corridors well lit. They also produced guide-books and clear-cut, unambiguous instructions for the use of all future wanderers about which turns to take and which to avoid. They did all this only to discover in the end that the labyrinth is firmly in place; if anything, the labyrinth has become yet more treacherous and confusing owing to the illegible tangle of criss-crossing footprints, the cacophony of commands and the continuous addition of new twisting passages to the ones already left behind and new dead ends to the ones already blundered into. The settlers have become 'involuntary nomads', belatedly recalling the message they received at the beginning of their historical travels and trying desperately to recover its forgotten contents which – as they suspect – may well carry the 'wisdom necessary for their future'. Once more, the labyrinth becomes the master image of the human condition – and it means 'the opaque place where the layout of the roads may not obey any law. Chance and surprise rule in the labyrinth, which signals the defeat of Pure Reason.'

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 138

Modernity knows of no other life but made

The modern romance with progress – with life that can be 'worked out', to be more satisfactory than it is and bound to be so improved – is not over, though, and is unlikely to end soon. Modernity knows of no other life but 'made': the life of modern men and women is a task, not a given, and a task as yet uncompleted and relentlessly calling for more care and new effort. If anything, the human condition in the stage of 'fluid' modernity or 'light' capitalism has made that modality of life yet more salient: progress is no longer a temporary measure, an interim matter, leading eventually (and soon) to a state of perfection (that is a state in which whatever had to be done would have been done and no other change would be called for), but a perpetual and perhaps never-ending challenge and necessity, the very meaning of 'staying alive and well'.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 134

Progress is a declaration of the belief that history is of no account

Progress does not elevate or enoble history. 'Progress' is a declaration of belief that history is of no account and of the resolve to leave it out of account.

[...]

This is the point: 'Progress' stands not for any quality of history, but for the self-confidence of the present.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 132

Modernity is the time when time has a history

In the time of the Greek Olympics no one thought of track or Olympic records, let alone of breaking them. The invention and deployment of something other than the power of human or animal muscles was needed for such ideas and for he decision to assign importance to the differences between the capacities of human individuals to move, to be conceived and to stimulate practice – and so for the prehistory of time, that long era of wetware-bound practice, to end, and the history of time to start. The history of time began with modernity. Indeed, modernity is, apart from anything else, perhaps more than anything else, the history of time: modernity is the time when time has a history.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 110

Don't start from the good old things but the bad new ones.

Don't start from the good old things but the bad new ones.

Berthold Brecht, cited in Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (Verso, 2003) p. 121

The true measure of life is memory

I for my part offer the following interpretation: the true measure of life is memory. Looking back, it traverses the whole of life like lightning. As fast as one can turn back a few pages, it has travelled from the next village to the place where the traveller took the decision to set out. Those for whom life has become transformed into writing can only read the story backwards. That is the only way in which they encounter themselves, and only thus – by fleeing from the present – can they understand life.

Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (Verso, 2003) p. 112

The war of emancipation is not over

Public power portends incompleteness of individual freedom, but its retreat or disappearance augurs the practical impotence of legally victorious freedom. The history of modern emancipation veered from a confrontation with the first danger to facing the second. To deploy Isaiah Berlin's terms, one can say that, once the 'negative freedom' had been struggled for and won, the levers needed to transform it into 'positive freedom' – that is the freedom to set the range of choices and the agenda of choice-making – has broken and fallen apart. Public power has lost much of its awesome and resented oppressive potency – but it has also lost a good part of its enabling capacity. The war of emancipation is not over. But to progress any further, it must now resuscitate what for most of its history it did its best to destroy and push out of its way. Any true liberation calls today for more, not less, of the 'public sphere' and 'public power'. It is now the public sphere which badly needs defence against the invading private – though, paradoxically, in order to enhance, not cut down, individual liberty.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 51

There are no autonomous individuals without an autonomous society

The individual de jure cannot turn into the individual de facto without first becoming the citizen. There are no autonomous individuals without an autonomous society, and the autonomy of society requires deliberate and perpetually deliberated self-constitution, something that may be only a shared accomplishment of its members.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 40

The citizen is a person inclined to seek her or his own welfare through the well-being of the city

The 'citizen' is a person inclined to seek her or his own welfare through the well-being of the city – while the individual tends to be lukewarm, sceptical or wary about 'common cause', 'common good', 'good society' or 'just society'.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 36

We are witnessing the revenge of nomadism

The era of unconditional superiority of sedentarism over nomadism and the domination of the settled over the mobile is on the whole grinding fast to a halt. We are witnessing the revenge of nomadism over the principle of territoriality and settlement. In the fluid stage of modernity, the settled majority is ruled by the nomadic and exterritorial elite.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 13