Have you ever heard of Liquid Times? From the turn of the 20th to the 21st century, precisely in the middle of 1999 to 2000, called the 'millennium bug', it became common daily to see debates in the academia, on the radio and television, and in newspapers and magazines with articles and interviews focused on what post-modernity would be?

The post-modernity of liquid times

In the above context, questions were raised whether or not we were already in post-modernity, if post-modernity really existed, and the most incisive question: what was post-modernity after all, and how to recognize its transparency? On the other hand, many divergent intellectuals said that post-modernity did not exist but that it was merely a post-industrial vision and perception with a technological maturity

That post-modernity was a mere fallacy and a social fiction. The discussions were heated. Until they brought in a debate in RS, at the event Fronteiras do Pensamento (UFRGS) among others, the philosopher and sociologist Zygmunt Baurman, (b. Poland, 19/11/1925 - f. United Kingdom, 19/11/2017) author of several works about post-modernity and its intersections with many emerging themes.

Bauman clarified what modernity and post-modernity were. Nothing better than the genitor of the sociological concept to draw the dividing lines. In lectures and talks Bauman gave an overview of what would be the already declining modernities and how post-modernity was slowly blossoming and surfacing mainly in the social fabric of the Western world.

Liquid Times for Bauman

The biggest dividing line between modernity and postmodernity was the romanticism and symbolism that was beginning to disappear. And it really was an undeniable social fact. The existence centered on purposes, projects, and hierarchies and linked to the not-yet principle, that is, to postpone satisfactions and worry about being someone and having a career and an income and building a life together was disappearing giving way to a disjunctive view, of the unbridled monetary pursuit, of the 'already-provisional principle'.

The philosophy of life's expiration time was gaining ground. The wave was to live the 'here-and-now-with-me principle'. Many things were beginning to crumble, like the boundary between genders, paradigms, the end of the depth in things. Metaphysics was beginning to say goodbye.

Transcendence and determination gradually gave way to indeterminacy and ironies. Polyamory, unbridled desire, and the deconstruction of everything came on the scene. Young people were beginning to experience chance, spontaneity, and set off the descriation of the possible. Everything would have to have a revisionism and who knows how to rewrite history.

Modern Evolution and Liquid Times

Postmodernity began to take its first steps in mid-1995 as a new historical period, the postmodern condition being a consequence of modern evolution. Already in 1945 it was laying foundations until the mid-1960s. From the 1970s to the 1980s everything began to change.

What was once a selection began to be a combination, a search for synergy. Nothing else would have any meaning. People no longer wanted to know the origin and cause, but only tried to deal with the symptoms in a very superficial way. I was beginning a phase of general schizophrenia, which activated a lot of anxiety, panic, existential angst.

Depression exploded and became the vector and a frantic search for medicalization. Prozac gained notoriety. The genital and phallic gave way to a polymorphous androgynous situation. In schools there was no longer talk of 'dysrhythmias' in young people, but of 'hyperactivity' that needed to be medicated and stabilized.

The relationship with technology

Technology begins to evolve, engendering a pre-modern school, a modernity resistant teacher, but attached to the analog vision, and a digital post-modern student. An inversion of values took place and everything was horizontalized. The student as a rebel started to assault the teachers The Google teacher emerges, forbidden by the analogicals.

A young man walks into a bookstore and starts carrying on a pdrive a shelf of books under his arm or in his pocket. The tablet and the electronic board become a demand in middle-class schools. Crises explode and the end of conservative relationships in families. Addictions (drugs) come in and fight for the liberation not only of polyamory, but of abortion and drugs.

LGBT movements spring up in various nations and the libertarian social movement emerges at the core of societies. Presence gives way to absence. The celebration of the market and consumer relations emerge, and money begins to impose itself to be the new God.

Liquid Times and individual freedom

Bauman argues in his analyses that the mark of post-modernity is the very desire for individual freedom and free choice, operating in the social fabric the principle of the here-and-now and the already-provisional, where the yet-not is left aside because it was no longer the focus a security projected around a stable, solid life and rigid and inflexible social structures that characterize themodernity.

The liquid man and woman emerge reflecting fluidity, the absence of defined forms, as faster, more mobile, but more inconsistent people who want to live in the now. Time stock becomes a concern.

For the postmodernist, time flies, it can't wait. Conflicts arise as societies cannot deal with the stocks of time in a timely manner and generate frustrations. And the new post-modern minds everything becomes fragile, fleeting, and malleable, like liquids. Everything that is solid dissolves in air.

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Playfulness and hedonism

The focus is on choice, on option, The playfulness and relaxed hedonism is sought after, at parties. The life story, the fragment, the decentralization, and the 'stay' become valid, with an individualism and a holism taken to the last consequences, the externality of reality, anarchy, silence, chaos, and the end of the vision of a holy spirit or messianic salvation in the hearts of young people. God becomes science and money, everything becomes a game.

The post-modern situation is reinforced by the ideology of the monetarist rentier line that is taking hold in the bill societies. People want to make money and have fun, and let the rest come in tow, all fitting into the here-and-now-with-me principle. The young person expresses that he needs to live, that life is short, that he has few years ahead of him, and everything that shortens the path gains high attention rate.

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Final considerations

We have the case of the lady who screams in a silent room to be talked to and to stop messing with her cell phone, but faced with the cruel and punishing sepulchral silence of the absence of speech, she decides to join in, buys a cell phone and learns how to use it, and in a group gets a boyfriend and the old lady leaves home and goes traveling and has lunch and dinner out.

It is the post-modern dialectic of liquid times that seems to be a paradox, but it is a new paradigm. Television gives way to cell phones in the palm of your hand. In restaurants, young people use one hand to eat with a fork and the other to handle their cell phones. Bauman, therefore, unveils what post-modernity of liquid times is, but he does not fail to expose that hope has not yet been affected.

Is there hope for something above postmodernity, perhaps ultra- or trans-modernity is better? Postmodernity has been transforming the planet. However, it is worth mentioning Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957) Greek poet and thinker who expressed: "Conquer the last, the greatest temptation of all: hope." We will have to wait what will come after postmodernity.

This article was written by Edson Fernando Lima de Oliveira ([email protected]) has a degree in Philosophy and History. He has a PG in Political Science, is currently doing a PG in Psychoanalysis, and is an academic and researcher of Clinical Psychoanalysis and Clinical Philosophy, attending IBPC and Instituto Pacter.