Individual and society in the liquid modernity
Zygmunt Bauman is one of the greatest interpreters of our present time, a time which turns into a shapeless mass tending to a constant and relentless change. This is not the modern era, nor the postmodern one, if anything, this period can be well identified as liquid modernity: a concept, able to focus on the transformations that affect human life concerning the general policy determinations of life. Moreover, Bauman's liquid modernity is a term that can overcome the concept of postmodernism, because basically leaning towards the contemporary world: the reality in which life considers highly what is transitory rather than permanent, the immediate rather than long term; and regards utility as prior to any other value. Consequently it is fundamental to understand in advance and profoundly the concept of liquidity around which Bauman interweaves his most recent philosophical and sociological reflection. Solidity and liquidity are the distinctive features of two eras: modernity and postmodernity, which becomes liquid modernity as it relates to contemporary existence. It is an existence where the need gives way to the desire that dismays men in the constant changes and transformations that affect their lives, and that turn identity from fact into a task: each of us runs into the self building, which replaces the project itself. Indeed, in our contemporary age the relationship between the individual and society is changing because the concepts of identity, individual and individuality are becoming meaningless. The world demands to the individual a constant and increasingly controversial search for identity and tracking of parameters for standardizing in order to obtain the "role" of individuals, because, today, the identity is a task. Being individuals in the liquid society does not simply mean being good consumers, but also being competitive goods in the global market. Such condition does not only require the purchase of "fashion items" but, also, the purchase of a "fashionable body" assisting to the complete passage from self manipulation of our own physicality, to the real direct and independent choice of the body we want for our children. Structured on this pattern, Bauman's futuristic view asserts that "being suitable for the global" will not be satisfied for long with plastic surgery and remodeling on the basis of topoiwhich are continuously generated by the policies of the global market. It is important not only to buy what makes us "suitable" for the contemporary, but above all to change ourselves, the closest part to our possibility of manipulation and intervention: the body. It becomes a free space on which to shape the visible Self, since if we are not able to dress up our own physical, it means that we are lacking in something. The autonomous management of our corporeality, personal responsibility, which bears the "responsibility of being individuals" derives from the concept of having and not of being. To have means to possess because some form of control is capable of generating security in a world lacking in its solid points of reference. For this reason the conditions of having also falls on the body of contemporary man, who finds in it a form of certainty: to manipulate and control his physical means acting on what you are sure to possess. Incorporation and possession are part of having, that in our times is accomplished through consumerism as <The act of consumption is a form of having, perhaps the most important for today's opulent industrial society. Consumption has ambivalent features: it relieves the anxiety, because what one has, could not be taken back, but it also requires that consumers increasingly consume, since the previous consumption soon loses its rewarding peculiarity> And this vicious spiral, which runs between the possession and consumption, is the most evident effect of what Bauman calls liquid modernity, which unlike postmodernism has a continuous relationship with the modernization process, which has its origins in modern times but it prolongs and intensifies until it reaches the liquidity of our time, characterized by rampant consumerism. And in the convergence between identity and consumption lies one of the main features of our age, because <contemporary society relates to its members primarily as consumers, and only secondarily, and in part, involves them also as producers. To meet the standards of normality and to be recognized as a mature and respectable members of society, we must respond quickly and efficiently to the temptations of the consumer goods market. It should be offered regularly a contribution to the demand fit to absorb the supply and, in the stages of reflection or stagnation of the economy, we must participate to the recovery led by consumers. The poor and the idlers, those who have neither a decent income, or credit cards, nor the prospect of better days, are not up to these requirements. Consequently the rule broken by the poor today, the violation of the rule distinguishes them and tags them as abnormal, is the standard of competence or fitness as consumers, not that of employment. The poor of today (ie those that constitute a problem for others) are first and foremost consumers rather than unemployed people. They are defined primarily by the fact of being bad consumers: indeed, the most basic of social obligations, which they do not comply, is the duty to be active and effective purchasers of goods and services offered by the market This means that if in a modern times consumption assumes the function of a secondary activity compared to production, in the contemporary world the ability of a person to consume determines his own social integration in a society no longer limited to the local context or the sheer size of the daily existence, but, in a macro society demanding accurate and specific entry requirements. And the access falls directly on the responsibility of the individual, who, in order to build his own individuality, prefers to invest its available economic resources for the purchase of those means suitable to classify, to modernize and introduce in the list of who matters. Moreover, in a period of severe economic crisis like the one we are currently experiencing, other statistics show that the primary consumption, referring to the basic necessities, is put aside to buy advanced technology products, clothing and cosmetics. These products aim at updating the body in accordance with the minimal standards required to be "in" ie, to acquire a social status that does not differentiate, if anything, incorporates all those who appear to be able to modernize themselves, regardless of social productive capacity and the role everyone can play. Today consumption seems to be a homologating activity, and according to Bauman it is a way to measure how much a person in liquid society is able to be individual. On that concept, Bauman builds his thought about the individual and society, which runs on two main lines. The first is embodied in the idea that in the liquid world the conquest of identity goes hand in hand with the adherence to rules of a consumers society directed by the policies of the global market: being individuals is equivalent to being consumers. The second line, however, going further that consideration, expands to incorporate the individual in the products. The relationship between the individual and the self, as well as between the individual and the others, acquires through Z. Bauman's thought a new meaning, which is based on a real anthropological metamorphosis. Being consumers and being consumed become, in fact, most general determinations of an individual who is affected the most problematic effects of the process of de socialization, started by globalization, now arrived at one of its most acute and extreme phases. Social aggregation and organization are deprived of their traditional tasks: they stop being identity dimensions of the subject capable of providing a set of standards and benchmarks. The individual becomes an isolated monad always looking for new forms of socialization, which instead of providing safety and welfare, increase the gap between man and the Self and between man and the other. It is a social system that despite being in possession of increasingly innovative means to communicate and interact with their fellows generates discomfort and loneliness, mainly because the son of a networked individualism that <it is a social model, not a collection of isolated individuals> just because <the most important role of internet in the structuring of social relations is the contribution to the new model of sociability based on individualism. More and more people are organized in social networks, which communicate via computer. Thus, it is not the internet to create a model of networked individualism, but the development of the Internet to provide adequate material support for the spread of individualism in the web as the dominant form of online socializing> And this new form arises as a matrix of the identity update required by the global world in order to "be included" as the need for inclusion is nothing more than legacy of the abandonment of the authentic sense of belonging. The belonging, in fact, is characterized as a natural human feeling, that, being suppressed nowadays is manifest in surrogate forms of virtual social aggregation that are the attempt to satisfy the natural human sociability. The consumer society, in fact, does not aggregate, at any rate, disaggregate turning groups into isolated monads, with weak and fragmented bonds, where the individual is crystallized between the search for Self and the disarray in the not Self. The idea of society survives in terms of common trends to follow, where the groups are directed almost anonymously in the pursuit of that "happiness" whose traces are designed by external actors. According to Bauman it is a review and revision of the "mechanical solidarity" in D