Baumans ideas on Identity

 n Identity, a short book based on an email exchange between Zygmunt Bauman and Italian journalist Benedetto Vecchi, the sociologist discusses the question of identity in the context of what he calls 'liquid modernity'. Bauman's thesis, set out in his book of that name (2000), is that we have moved from a solid to a fluid phase of modernity, in which nothing keeps its shape, and social forms are constantly changing at great speed, radically transforming the experience of being human.
The idea of liquid modernity could be seen as Bauman's attempt to resolve the tension that exists in much social theory between explaining social phenomena as aspects of modernity, and accounting for their appearance only recently. After all, the modern condition, with its overturning of tradition, has dominated the past two centuries. Liquid modernity seems perhaps to be the late realisation of a tendency that has characterised modernity from the start. What remains at issue is whether the 'solid' institutions of prior modernity were merely the residue of tradition, or pointed towards a more enduring potential of modernity itself. Most pertinently, is the rational self-determining subject of modernity any more than an illusion that has had its day?

Inevitably, the undermining of familiar institutions, an aspect of modernity that has certainly been intensified in recent years, has had important consequences for people's sense of identity. There is nothing new about the observation that national and class-based identities (both of which had seemed almost definitively modern) have been upset by the end of the Cold War and various other developments discussed under the heading of 'globalisation'. Similarly, Bauman notes that while the workplace was traditionally a very important source of personal identity, changes in the economy have rendered it far less reliable. He suggests that the enduring identities once associated with work have given way to looser and more provisional identities, and conceptions of community, that are subject to constant change and renegotiation. Indeed, Bauman points to a more profound transformation of how we understand what it means to be human in the absence of transcendent ideologies (traditional or otherwise) such as have characterised modernity until recently.

The liquidity of which Bauman writes is nowhere more evident than in his own writing, which, even when not based on email, tends of late to be aphoristic, even whimsical. Reading Liquid Love (2003) is not so much like taking an academic course with Professor Bauman, as being stuck in a lift with him after a particularly well-catered social function, perhaps having set the old man off with an ill-judged confession of new love or a broken heart. 'Ah, love…' Nonetheless, it is in the context of personal relationships (especially what Vecchi quaintly calls 'amorous relationships'), that Bauman is most insightful. What do these represent in the absence of a traditional framework within which to make sense of them. Is there indeed any basis for enduring relationships if we dispense with traditional notions of duty, responsibility and self-sacrifice?

http://www.culturewars.org.uk/2004-02/identity.htm

One section of Baumans writing i imparticulary liked was :

"Nowadays electronically mediated, frail 'virtual totalities', easy to enter and easy to abandon." This has great relevance to the swarm of online communication sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and even Tumblr, many people hide behind the scenes of their computers speaking to others but never showing their real identity and the screen is almost protection between you and this other individual. You have no loyalty to that person online as you there seems no consequences for online actions as that protection seems to give confidence that many people wouldn't have if the communication was face to face. 

(Identity, Bauman Zygmunt, 1st edition, page 25)

Another quote i'd like to refer back to is one of Andy Hargreaves, professor of education:

"In airports and other public spaces, people with mobile phone headset attachments walk around, talking aloud and alone, like paranoid schizophrenics, oblivious to their immediate surroundings. Introspection is a disappearing act. Faced with moments alone in their cars, on the streets or at the supermarket checkouts, more and more people do not collect their thoughts, but scan their mobile phone messages for shreds of evidence that someone. somewhere, may meed or want them." This explores the idea that there is no time in peoples day to day life for self assessing or reflecting, we seem to fill any free time we have with technology. Technology effects what we are not what we do and who we are this should be something that we develop and reassess are selfs, society is missing this and this is why we aren't progressing as a species as we are focusing on the wrong things in life.

(Identity, Bauman Zygmuny, 1st edition, page 25)