Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

accelerated academy acceleration agency AI Algorithmic Authoritarianism and Digital Repression archer Archive Archiving artificial intelligence automation Becoming Who We Are Between Post-Capitalism and Techno-Fascism big data blogging capitalism ChatGPT claude Cognitive Triage: Practice, Culture and Strategies Communicative Escalation and Cultural Abundance: How Do We Cope? Corporate Culture, Elites and Their Self-Understandings craft creativity critical realism data science Defensive Elites Digital Capitalism and Digital Social Science Digital Distraction, Personal Agency and The Reflexive Imperative Digital Elections, Party Politics and Diplomacy digital elites Digital Inequalities Digital Social Science Digital Sociology digital sociology Digital Universities elites Fragile Movements and Their Politics Cultures generative AI higher education Interested labour Lacan Listening LLMs margaret archer Organising personal morphogenesis Philosophy of Technology platform capitalism platforms populism Post-Democracy, Depoliticisation and Technocracy post-truth psychoanalysis public engagement public sociology publishing Reading realism reflexivity scholarship sexuality Shadow Mobilization, Astroturfing and Manipulation Social Media Social Media for Academics social media for academics social ontology social theory sociology technology The Content Ecosystem The Intensification of Work The Political Economy of Digital Capitalism The Technological History of Digital Capitalism Thinking trump twitter Uncategorized work writing zizek

Bauman’s weirdly illiquid conception of liquidity, or, what happens when you confuse ontology and epistemology

From pg 67 of his Wasted Lives:

With the passage of time, successive layers of emergent realities come into view, each calling for a deeper and more comprehensive revision of received beliefs and our conceptual net than was required by the one before in order for it to be scanned and its significance revealed. We haven’t reached the bottom layer yet; even if we did, though, we wouldn’t be able to decide for sure that we had.

I recall other points where he writes like this. This is not liquidity, it’s lamination: successive layers of nested reality which we discover in an accelerating fashion. Liquidity is a feature of our experience, not of reality. Bauman ontologizes a phenomenological concept and then uses it to ground a thematic of modernity. Thoughts? This idea only just occurred to me but I suspect it would be an interesting critique to try and develop.

, , , , ,