Born Liquid

Zygmunt Bauman, Thomas Leoncini

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509530700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Born Liquid is the last work by the great sociologist and social theorist Zygmunt Bauman, whose brilliant analyses of liquid modernity changed the way we think about our world today. At the time of his death, Bauman was working on this short book, a conversation with the Italian journalist Thomas Leoncini, exactly sixty years his junior. In these exchanges with Leoncini, Bauman considers, for the first time, the world of those born after the early 1980s, the individuals who were 'born liquid' and feel at home in a society of constant flux. As always, taking his cue from contemporary issues and debates, Bauman examines this world by discussing what are often regarded as its most ephemeral features. The transformation of the body – tattoos, cosmetic surgery, hipsters – aggression, bullying, the Internet, online dating, gender transitions and changing sexual preferences are all analysed with characteristic brilliance in this concise and topical book, which will be of particular interest to young people, natives of the liquid modern world, as well as to Bauman's many readers of all generations.

1
Skin-deep transformations
Tattoos, plastic surgery, hipsters

Thomas Leoncini:

Young people are a snapshot of the changing times. It is impossible not to love them and hate them simultaneously. They are what we love most about our ‘past’, but also what we instinctively detest, because it didn’t last forever; it was fluid, liquid. Today, when we analyse what being young means, we are victims of a failed cultural relativism – one that is impossible to put into practice efficiently, simply because it doesn’t exist outside ourselves, an ‘us’ that looks on at the doorway of the ego. As we look at the young, we look with the gaze of liquefied persons who have inevitably altered their own boundaries: we are the product of whatever life’s circumstances have made us. The product of that us that today is no longer part of our present and can therefore do nothing except see itself in other people’s faces. If it’s true that the mind travels using cultural schemas created by our brains in order to respond rapidly to any situational event (this is what cognitive psychology says), it is equally true that often our struggle to tolerate the young is also motivated by the regret that we didn’t make the best of, understand or fully observe our earlier life before we unconsciously found ourselves in the current one.

So, when we look at a young boy, perhaps of school-leaving age or thereabouts, we no longer see him using the frame of mind that we had when we were his age, but rather using our completely liquefied schemas – ones that belong to different people, people who are now others compared to what we were then.

Put in even simpler terms: to us, the traits shown by the young, so replete with the present, are unrecognizable, whether as the individual offspring of our desire for self-affirmation, or in terms of aesthetic fashion, that reality which is often undervalued but essential because it pervades and invades our gaze.

‘Appearance is for me that which lives and is effective’, wrote Nietzsche,¹ and, in this, the young represent the mass change par excellence of styles and interests linked to the present, which anthropologists have realized is the most important element of their borderline science, by definition incomplete and unrealized in its fragmented entirety, to the extent that it transforms anthropology from biological and palaeoanthropological physics into cultural and social anthropology. And the young are the most representative examples of what we will become, today and tomorrow. Even Aristotle defined mankind as incomplete.

But the desire for completion (while undoubtedly vain and illusory) has been present since the dawn of civilization. So what could be better than our body as the stage on which to enact a presentation of self? The aesthetic sense, it should be remembered, is partly subjective and objective, but, above all, also cultural and collective.

We often talk about the aesthetic phenomenon as the most representative fashion of the modern age, but fashions are anthropopoietic² – that is to say, they form part of the knowing construction of being human. From the earliest times, humans have refused to leave their bodies as they are and they have always been determined to alter them, based, to varying degree, on the dominant culture. Even washing ourselves every morning is nothing more than a representation of the relationship humans have with their bodies, the need to change it vis-à-vis the natural ‘run of things’: in this respect, the English anthropologist Mary Douglas stated that hygiene is not just a question of scientific progress.

Aesthetic fashions, like cultural ones, are dynamic, and therefore it is particularly useful to start from the clash, the spark, the explosion that results in the genesis of cultural reformulation, fanned by the embrace (a lethal one for models of the past) between one’s own models and mass models. The latter have invaded the adult world through imitation, contagion or natural ageing.

A representative example of one of the most current fashions is tattoos, which are widely present in all age groups, from the very young to the young, and even adults.

Three out of ten Americans have tattoos, and most do not stop at the first. These are some of the findings of a recent survey by The Harris Poll, according to which, tattoos are seen as virtually indispensable by young Americans: almost half of Millennials (47%) and over a third of Generation Xers (36%) have at least one. By Millennials, I mean the famous generation Y, born between 1980 and 2000 – the genesis of the current ‘born liquid’ generation – while Gen Xers are those who were born between roughly the mid-sixties and the late seventies or early eighties.

On the other hand, only 13% of Baby Boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) have a tattoo. Of course, the boundaries between these definitions have never been static, resembling something blurred or liquid, to keep to the same theme. Given their high percentages, Millennials and Gen Xers will obviously extend the trend considerably, and therefore, in a few years’ time, the data for 50-, 60-, 70- and 80-year-olds with tattoos will be completely reversed. Another interesting fact to emerge from the survey is that place of residence has no influence at all on whether Americans consider it fashionable to have a tattoo. Whether you’re a country- or a city-dweller, there are no significant – or even any particularly representative – differences. The same applies to political orientation: Republicans 27%, Democrats 29%, independents 28%.

For Italy, the latest data come from the national Health Institute (Istituto Superiore di Sanità): 13 out of every 100 Italians have tattoos. With a calculator to hand, that means there are some 7 million tattooed Italians. The data also reveal that more women have tattoos than men (13.8% of the women interviewed, compared to 11.7% of men). The average age at which people get their first tattoo is 25, but the highest percentage of people with tattoos is in the 35- to 45-year-old age bracket (29.9%). Approximately 1.5 million people with tattoos are aged between 25 and 34 years old, with a percentage of 7.7% for under 18-year-olds. The vast majority are pleased with their tattoos (92.2%), but quite a high percentage – as many as 17.2% – would like to have them removed; and, of these, 4.3% have already done so. The men prefer a tattoo on their arms, shoulders and legs; the women, above all, on their back, feet and ankles. One tattooed person out of four (25.1%) lives in northern Italy, 30.7% are graduates, and 63.1% are in work; 76% had their tattoos applied in a specialized centre, 9.1% in a beauty salon, but a large group, 13.4%, had them done by an unlicensed practitioner. Again in Italy, there are no relevant details regarding political loyalty – a brand to be impressed on the skin as the sign of a lifetime’s adherence to an ideal. Yet doesn’t everyone remember tattoos being used as a representative sign of political cohesion or creed? Today this has disappeared completely, and the political ‘motive’ for the tattoo has been engulfed by our liquid modernity.

Today, political motivations have been completely redesigned – perhaps it would be better to say (with greater pathos) ‘restructured’ – by individuality. This is because the dividing line between the public and private spheres has been eradicated at its very root. Our private issues constantly invade the public sphere, but this does not mean that our problems become other people’s problems. Quite the opposite: our problems remain our own. Instead, it means that, thanks to our reducing the public sphere to a ‘begging pitch’, we literally destroy the space for all those topics that really belong there. The result is that politics, understood as citizens’ political agency within the public debate, is now dead. The scope of action of today’s ‘born liquid’ generation is bounded by each member’s own individuality, and they frantically try to give it public notoriety by invading the public sphere and deluding themselves that a universal solution for its incompleteness can exist, and even be shared by all.

The question that comes to mind is why have tattoos become necessary for anyone who wants to conform to the aesthetics of liquid modernity?

Zygmunt Bauman:

All the new and striking copy-cat modes of manipulating the public appearances of one’s body (or the ‘presentation of self in everyday life’, as Erving Goffman preferred to brand them), which you noted and listed above so perceptively – all of them short-lived (although, as Charles Baudelaire observed more than century and a half ago, all of them aiming to capture eternity in a fleeting moment) – have their roots in the modern, all-too-human recasting of social identity from a given into a task. It is a task that today is expected, needed and bound to be performed by its individual bearer, while deploying socially supplied patterns and raw materials in a complex operation of ‘creative reproduction’, which goes by the name of ‘fashion’.

As Eric Hobsbawm, arguably the greatest historian of the last century, suggested, ever since the idea of ‘community’ started to be relegated to the margins of social thought and practice (and even earmarked for extinction, courtesy of the once highly influential sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies and the multitude of his nineteenthand twentieth-century followers), the idea of ‘identity’ and the practice of ‘self-identification’ have erupted to fill the void which the anticipated disappearance of the latter would create in the extant routines of social placement and classification.

Thomas Leoncini:

Community and identity are separated by a line that often seems insurmountable in our society.

Zygmunt Bauman:

The difference between community and identity is formidable. In principle, the first is obligatory and coercive as it determines and defines in advance the individual’s social casting; the second is presumed to be ‘freely chosen’ and a ‘do-it-yourself’ job. Rather than eliminating community from the processes of social placement and its expression, such conceptual replacement aims to reconcile the (should we sa...