FULL PDF
Abstract
Zygmunt Bauman, who has died, aged 91, is best known for his analyses of globalization, power and inequality and for his notion of ‘liquid modernity’: the contemporary state in which solid social structures and institutions seem to have melted away. As Mark Davis and Tom Campbell note in their obituary of Bauman (2017), his work was particularly influential among progressive young activists and most recently he had analysed the refugee crisis and the rise of right-wing populism across Europe and the USA. Bauman’s work has also been important for contemporary theorizing of intimacy and eroticism. His work in this area focused on the way that citizenship is being replaced by individualism and consumerism, describing a situation in his book Liquid Love (2003) where relationships have become ‘easy to enter and to exit’ (2003: xii) and human bonds have become ‘light and loose’ (p. xi). In his brilliant essay ‘On Postmodern Uses of Sex’ (1999) he analyses the ways in which eroticism has come to appear independent from reproduction and love, becoming ‘its only, and sufficient, reason and purpose’, and marked by both substance and ‘lightness and volatility’ (1999: 22). He described how postmodern subjects are encouraged to seek sensation and stimuli and to collect sexual experiences; to be endlessly interested and energetic in the pursuit of sex. But this pursuit is contradictory and impossible, requiring both total immersion and distance, and ‘the ultimate sexual experience remains forever a task ahead’, while ‘no actual sexual experience is truly satisfying, none makes further training, instruction, counsel, recipe, drug or gadget unnecessary’ (1999: 24).
View more >>