phenomena and related publics to Bauman’s claim that the “safety nets” that provide
stability and meaning to social existence have become “lacerated” and “torn apart” into
many pieces. It is not so much the fact that social change occurs more rapidly or that
individuals must master more complex social phenomena, but that the “safety nets” that
provided grounding and understanding, such as a sense of social geography, must be
regained to combat what he calls social “liquidity”.
Baumann is not the only one to discuss the difficulties individuals face in
understanding their social environment, but instead of merely bemoaning a lack of
“safety nets”, these theorists cast the source of these troubles within the specific spatial
and temporal characteristics of this indeterminacy. For example, Fredric Jameson has
highlighted manner in which the current period of “Late Capitalism” has produced under-
acknowledged spatial and temporal difficulties to understanding social and public
phenomena. Just as Dewey laments the existence of “too many publics” contemporary
multi-national firms constantly relocate, fragment, and multiply their locations due to
“frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods
at ever greater rates of turnover.”
In essence, just as Dewey described too many publics
Jameson describes too many markets, too many paths of social causation and too many
contingent possibilities for political action. Similarly David Harvey claims that
capitalism periodically falls into intense periods of “space-time” compression due to
increased adoption of the economic paradigm of flexible accumulation.
He claims this
situation results from the increasing ease of the transportation of goods, people and
information, causing social space and time to become increasingly “compressed” and
9
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001.
10
Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernity: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in The
New Left Review. 1984 July-August, #146 , pp. 53–92 p. 57
11
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of
Cultural Change. London: Blackwell, 1989.
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Convention