• ChatGPT Summary
• We presently find ourselves in a time of ‘interregnum’ - when the old ways of doind things no longer work, the old learned or inherited modes of life are no longer suitable for the current conditio humana, but when the new ways of tackling the challenges and new modes of life better suited to the new conditions have not as yet been invented, put in place and set in operation
• To ‘be modern’ means to modernise - compulsively, obsessively; not so much just ‘to be’, let alone to keep its identity intact, but forever ‘becoming’, avoiding completion, staying underfined.
• Being always, at any stage and at all times, ‘post-something’ is also an undetachable feature of modernity.
• ‘Liquid modernity’ is the growing conviction that change is the only permanence and uncertainty the only certainty
• if in it’s ‘solid’ phase the heart of modernity was in controlling and fixing the future, in the ‘liquid’ phase the prime concern moved to ensuring the future was not mortgaged, and to averting the threat of any pre-emptive exploitation of the still undisclosed, unknown and unknowable opportunities to the future was hoped to and was bound to bring
• Change was viewed as a preliminary and interim measure, which it was hoped would lead to an age of stability and tranquillity - and so to comfort and leisure.
• Modernisation then was a road with an a priori fixed, preordained finishing line, a movement destined to work itself out of a job
• In a drastic turnaround, it is now the facility with which things can be turned upside down, disposed of and abandoned that is valued most - alongside bonds easy to untie, obligations easy to revoke, and rules of the game that last no longer than the game currently being played, and sometimes not as long as that. And we are all thrown into an unstoppable hunt for novelty.
• Passage to the ‘liquid stage’, like any other passage in history, occurs on different dates and proceeds at a different pace. What is also crucially important is that each time it takes place in different settings.
• Like so many ideals and values, freedom is perpetually in statu nascendi, never achieved but constantly aimed at and fought for, and as a result an immense driving force in the never-ending experimentation called history.
• The ‘liquidity’ of our plight is caused primarily by what is summarily dubbed ‘deregulation’: the separation of power (ability to do things) from politics (ability to decide what things are to be done) and the resulting absence or weakness of agency, or in other words the inadequacy of tools to the tasks; and also caused by the ‘polycentrism’ of action on a planet integrated by a dense web of interdependencies.
• The prime victim of deepening inequality will be democracy, as the increasingly scarce, rare and inaccessible paraphernalia of survival and an acceptable life become the objects of a cut-throat war between the provided-for and the unaided needy
• Rigidity of order is the artefact and sediment of the human agents’ freedom.
• If the time of systemic revolutions has passed, it is because there are no buildings where the control desks of the system are lodged and which could be stormed and captured by the revolutionaries
• We are presently moving from the era of pre-allocated ‘reference groups’ into the epoch of ‘universal comparison’, in which the destination of individual self-constructing labours is endemically and incurably underdetermined, is not given in advance, and tends to undergo numerous and profound changes before such labours reach their only genuine end: that is, the end of the individual life.
• The pyramid of power was built out of velocity, access to the means of transportation and the resulting freedom of movement
• Power can move with the speed of the electronic signal - and so the time required for the movement of its essential ingredients has been reduced to instantaneity. For all practical purposes, power has become truly extraterritorial, no longer bound, not even slowed down, by the resistance of space.
• What matters in post-Panoptical power-relations is that the people operating the levers of power on which the fate of the less volatile partners in the relationship depends can at any moment escape beyond reach - into sheer inaccessibility
• 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,