Thank you Malene for a very insightful and nourishing conversation. Loved the food, the coffee, the ice cream .
I found this about the book . I already ordered it!
By Zygmunt Bauman
June 21 2003
Welcome to the age of semi-detached couples. In modern "liquid" society, relationships are, like high-tech toys, upgradable. We want the ties that bind us to be just as easy to cut.
The hero of Austrian writer Robert Musil's great novel was, as the title of the novel announced, the man without qualities. Having no qualities of his own, whether inherited or acquired, he had to compose them himself, using his wits and acumen; but none of them were guaranteed to last in a world full of confusing signals, constant change and unpredictability.
The hero of my book is the man with no bonds - no fixed, unbreakable bonds, and he is the denizen of our liquid, modern society. More importantly, whatever bonds he does make need to be only loosely tied, so that they can be untied again, with little delay, when the settings change - as in liquid modernity they surely will.
The uncanny frailty of human bonds, the feeling of insecurity that frailty inspires, and the conflicting desires to tighten bonds yet keep them loose is what I seek to unravel and grasp. The subject is human relationships, and the central characters are men and women - our contemporaries - despairing at being abandoned to their own wits, feeling easily disposable, yearning for the security of togetherness and for a helping hand to count on in a moment of trouble, and so desperate to relate. Yet they are wary of the state of being related, and particularly of being related for good, since they fear that such a state may bring burdens they feel neither able nor willing to bear.
In our world of rampant "individualisation", relationships are mixed blessings. They vacillate between a sweet dream and a nightmare, and there is no telling when one turns into the other. Most of the time, the two cohabit - though at different levels of consciousness. In a liquid modern setting of life, relationships are perhaps the most common, acute incarnations of ambivalence. This is, we may argue, why they are firmly placed at the top of people's life agendas.
"Relationship" is the hottest talk of the town and ostensibly the sole game in town worth playing, despite its notorious risks. Some sociologists, used to composing theories out of questionnaire statistics, hurry to conclude that their contemporaries are all out for friendships, bonds, togetherness, community.
In fact, human attention tends to be focused on the satisfactions relationships are hoped to bring precisely because somehow they have not been truly satisfactory. And if they do satisfy, the price of this satisfaction has often been found to be unacceptable. In their famous experiment, Neal Miller and John Dollard saw their laboratory rats ascending the peak of excitement and agitation when "the threat of electric shock and the promise of tasty food were finely balanced ..."
The agitation of Miller and Dollard's rats all too often collapsed into paralysis of action. An inability to choose between attraction and repulsion, between hopes and fears, rebounded as an incapacity to act. Unlike the rats, humans who find themselves in such circumstances may turn to expert counsellors. What they hope to hear from the counsellors is how to square the circle: to have the cake and eat it, to cream off the sweet delights of relationship while omitting its bitter and tougher bits; how to force relationship to empower without disempowering, enable without disabling, fulfil without burdening.
The experts are willing to oblige, confident that the demand for their advice will never run dry since no amount of counselling could ever turn a circle into a square. Grateful recipients of advice browse through relationship columns of glossy monthlies, weeklies and dailies to hear what they have been wishing to hear from people "in the know", since they were too timid or ashamed to ask about it in their own name; to pry into the doings and goings on of others like them and draw whatever comfort they can from the knowledge (endorsed by experts) that they are not alone in their lonely efforts to cope.
And so the readers learn, from other readers' experience, recycled by the counsellors, that they may try "top-pocket relationships" of the sort they can bring out when they need them but push deep down in the pocket when they do not. Or that relationships are like Ribena: imbibed in concentration, they are nauseating and may prove dangerous to their health. Like Ribena, relationships should be diluted when consumed.
Or that SDCs - "semi-detached couples" - are to be praised as relationship revolutionaries who have burst the suffocating couple bubble. Or that relationships, like cars, should undergo regular services to make sure they are still roadworthy. All in all, what they learn is that commitment, and particularly long-term commitment, is the enemy of the attempt to relate.
One expert counsellor informs readers that "when committing yourself, however half-heartedly, remember that you are likely to be closing the door to other romantic possibilities which may be more satisfying and fulfilling". Another expert sounds blunter yet: "Promises of commitment are meaningless in the long term ... Like other investments, they wax and wane."
And so, if you wish "to relate", keep your distance; if you want fulfilment from your togetherness, do not make or demand commitments. Keep all doors open at any time.
In Invisible Cities, by the Italian writer Italo Calvino, the residents of Leonia, would say, if asked, that their passion is "the enjoyment of new and different things". Indeed, each morning they "wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, listening to the last-minute jingles from the most up-to-date radio".
But each morning "the remains of yesterday's Leonia await the garbage truck" and one is right to wonder whether the Leonians' true passion is not instead "the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing themselves of a recurrent impurity". Otherwise, why would street cleaners be "welcomed like angels", even if their mission is "surrounded by respectful silence"?
Are not the residents of our liquid modern world, just like the residents of Leonia, worrying about one thing while speaking of another? They say that their wish, passion, aim or dream is "to relate". But are they not, in fact, mostly concerned with how to prevent their relations from curdling and clotting? Are they indeed after relationships that hold, as they say they are, or do they, more than anything else, desire those relationships to be light and loose, so they can be thrown aside at any moment?
When all is said and done, what sort of advice do they truly want: how to tie the relationship, or how - just in case - to take it apart without harm and with a clear conscience?
There is no easy answer to that question, though the question needs to be asked and will go on being asked, as the denizens of the liquid modern world go on smarting under the crushing burden of the many ambivalent tasks they confront.
Perhaps the very idea of "relationship" adds to the confusion. However hard relation-seekers and their counsellors try, the idea resists being cleansed of its disturbing connotations. It stays pregnant with vague threats and sombre premonitions; it tells of the pleasures of togetherness in one breath with the horrors of enclosure.
Perhaps this is why people speak ever more often of connections, of connecting and being connected, rather than reporting their experiences and prospects in terms of relating and relationships. Instead of talking about partners, they prefer to speak of networks.
Unlike relationships and partnerships, which stand for mutual engagement over disengagement, network stands for a matrix for simultaneously connecting and disconnecting. In a network, connecting and disconnecting are equally legitimate choices and carry the same importance. Network suggests moments of "being in touch" interspersed with periods of free roaming. In a network, connections are entered on demand, and can be broken at will.
Connections are "virtual relations". Unlike old-fashioned relationships (not to mention "committed" relationships), they seem to be made to the measure of a liquid modern life setting, where "romantic possibilities" (but not only "romantic" ones) are supposed to come and go with ever greater speed and in never thinning crowds, stampeding each other off the stage and out-shouting each other with promises to be more satisfying and fulfilling.
Unlike "real relationships", "virtual relationships" are easy to enter and to exit. They look smart and clean, feel easy to use, when compared with the heavy, slow-moving, messy real stuff.
One 28-year-old man, interviewed in connection with the rapidly growing popularity of computer dating, pointed to one decisive advantage of electronic relations: "You can always press delete."
Virtual relationships (that is, connections) set the pattern that drives out all other relationships. That does not make the people who surrender to them happy. You gain something, you lose something else.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out, when skating on thin ice, your salvation is in speed. When the quality lets you down, you tend to seek redemption in quantity. If commitments are meaningless while relationships cease to be trustworthy and are unlikely to last, you are inclined to swap partnerships for networks.
Once you have done it, however, settling down turns out to be even more difficult (and so more off-putting) than before. You now miss the skills that would or could make it work. Being on the move, once a privilege and an achievement, becomes a must. Keeping up speed, once an exhilarating adventure, turns into an exhausting chore.
Most importantly, that nasty uncertainty and that vexing confusion refuse to go. The age of disengagement does not reduce the risks; it only distributes them differently.
My book is dedicated to the risks and anxieties of living together, and apart, in our liquid modern world.
This is an edited version of the foreword to Liquid Love, by Zygmunt Bauman, published by Polity Press
