ABSTRACT
Zygmunt Bauman’s post-2000 writings are based upon the premise that a seminal change in the common experience of being-in-the-world has taken place because a once solid modernity has given way to a form of modernity that is liquid in nature. Bauman uses Harmon Leon’s term phobophobia to describe the feeling of abandonment in an unpredictable world of ‘snares and pitfalls’ that many liquid moderns experience. Adiaphoria has remained a central explanatory concept throughout Bauman’s sociology of postmodernity and liquid turn writings, although in his liquid turn writings adiaphoria generates indifference to the excluded Other rather than cruelty. The move from solid to liquid modernity is a transition from a society of producers within a ‘totalising’ regulated body politic to a society of consumers within an individualised, deregulated society. Bauman’s use of a liquid metaphor to identify a determining substance that is external to the individual has a long history in Western thought.
