Which means liquid modernity? That not only the granite ancient world is over but also the solid era of progress; we have entered a magmatic phase, elusive in his relationships, postmodern, in which everything slides and the flow devours every persistence, every stay, any rigidity. Universal flood, indeed global. Human relationships and social bonds become liquid and changeable, beliefs and identities become labile and fluent, and so on; the borders, the borders disappear submerged by the liquid waves. Liquidity is everywhere (except in the economy, where it is scarce).
We might dismiss it as a discovery of the obvious, as old as the clock, if we think of water as a universal myth of religions, to the universal principle of Thales and Heraclitus (slope rei, everything flows); and at the same time as banal as the discovery of hot water, because the thinkers of early modernity had been thinking about the predominance of becoming over solid being for centuries. The predominance of historicity over eternity was the signal of a primacy of flow. Romanticism was the advent of the liquid in opposition to the solid classical world. Marx and Engels in their Manifesto, already in the mid-nineteenth century they went further and considered once consolidated social relationships not liquid but "volatilized"., with their traditions and their strict rules: “All stable and rigid relationships dissolve, with their succession of ancient and venerable ideas and concepts, and all new ideas and concepts grow old before they can become fixed. Everything that was stable evaporates.".
That liquidity concerns the human, be the principle of life and its essence, our biological composition itself says so: man is made predominantly of water, in a proportion almost similar to our planet, made up of seven tenths of water. And this correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm teaches much more than Bauman's liquid theory. Gaston Bachelard has written penetrating pages on this topic; in recent days it is worth mentioning Massimo Donà's pamphlet “On water” (The ship of Theseus).
But the use of liquidity as an all-encompassing alibi to justify any infidelity, every mutation, any trespassing, it does not account for the much more complex paths of our time. Which cannot be reduced to the advent of the liquid state. They can therefore be asked at least three sets of objections to the dogma of liquidity.
The first is that if we remain within a chemical or purely linear scheme, after the solid state and the liquid state there is the gaseous state and it is therefore time to declare liquid modernity obsolete to talk about the advent of a gaseous condition, more suited to the predominance of the ether and the impalpable electromagnetic waves.
The second objection is that liquidity does not coincide with absolute oblivion and the denial of all forms, because it exists, as molecular biology explains to us, also the memory of water, which retains the imprint of the substances with which it has come into contact. There is Lethe, the water of oblivion but there is also the water of memory, the river that the ancients called Eunoè and which flows near Lethe. There is the undertow of returns, the water that brings back figures, places, lost times. There is also something negative that resists liquidity: for example plastic in our seas, Not biodegradable nor soluble in water.
The third objection is that despite the floating state, liquid and gaseous of our relationships, there is something solid that remains and it is called Nature. There is something that resists liquidity or re-emerges like submerged land: this is also the time of rediscovered identities, of the homelands, of the rediscovered nations, of sovereignties, of the territories, of the borders. Solid identities, leathery.
Beyond nature there is an energy, there is a wind that blows that the ancients called spirit, there is a soul that is vital breath. And we are made of water, of meat, of bones; and of mind, of spirit, of memory. Much of us ends, many of us are transformed, something about us persists. Under Bauman's waters Heidegger's depths re-emerge. In the end, a liquid society needs containers that avoid spillage and dispersion. The more liquid a society or life is, the more it needs containers and channels, that is, of sense of limit. What if the liquid society was a hole in the water?
MV, Panorama n.19 2019