Seventeen years later, I took down from the shelf Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity (2000), a book suddenly without a living author, which I had first read the year we moved to New Zealand. Esther Leslie’s book Liquid Crystals (2016) doesn’t reference Bauman but plays through a dialectical history of crystalline and fluid models of modernity that harmonizes with the older book, while Sean Redmond’s Liquid Space (2017) points toward the Baumanian theme of processes of total erasure, the loss of history and identity, as capabilities of an increasingly digital age. As I read, I heard Wendy Brown’s (2015) elaborations of neoliberalism in Bauman’s analysis of the devolution of once collective responsibilities to the individual, and Jacques Rancière’s Hatred of Democracy (2006) in his analysis of the gap between power and politics.
In a bookmark left in its pages I found this note: “Flow—(1) of granular but sub-perceptual units (2) as...
