In this text, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a "heavy" and "solid", hardware-focused modernity to a "light" and "liquid", software-based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition.

The Judith Butler Reader is a collection of writings that span her impressive career and trace her intellectual history. Judith Butler, author of influential books such as Gender Trouble, has built her international reputation as a theorist of power, gender, sexuality and identity Organized in active collaboration between Judith Butler and Sara Salih Collects together writings that span Butler’s impressive career as a critical philosopher, including selections from both well-known and lesser-known works Includes an introduction and editorial material to assist students in their readings of theories that stand at the forefront of contemporary theoretical and political debates

The passage from ‘solid’ to ‘liquid’ modernity has created a new and unprecedented setting for individual life pursuits, confronting individuals with a series of challenges never before encountered. Social forms and institutions no longer have enough time to solidify and cannot serve as frames of reference for human actions and long-term life plans, so individuals have to find other ways to organise their lives. They have to splice together an unending series of short-term projects and episodes that don’t add up to the kind of sequence to which concepts like ‘career’ and ‘progress’ could meaningfully be applied. Such fragmented lives require individuals to be flexible and adaptable – to be constantly ready and willing to change tactics at short notice, to abandon commitments and loyalties without regret and to pursue opportunities according to their current availability. In liquid modernity the individual must act, plan actions and calculate the likely gains and losses of acting (or failing to act) under conditions of endemic uncertainty. Zygmunt Bauman’s brilliant writings on liquid modernity have altered the way we think about the contemporary world. In this short book he explores the sources of the endemic uncertainty which shapes our lives today and, in so doing, he provides the reader with a brief and accessible introduction to his highly original account, developed at greater length in his previous books, of life in our liquid modern times.

Modernity was supposed to be the period in human history when the fears that pervaded social life in the past could be left behind and human beings could at last take control of their lives and tame the uncontrolled forces of the social and natural worlds. And yet, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, we live again in a time of fear. Whether its the fear of natural disasters, the fear of environmental catastrophes or the fear of indiscriminate terrorist attacks, we live today in a state of constant anxiety about the dangers that could strike unannounced and at any moment. Fear is the name we give to our uncertainty in the face of the dangers that characterize our liquid modern age, to our ignorance of what the threat is and our incapacity to determine what can and can't be done to counter it. This new book by Zygmunt Bauman one of the foremost social thinkers of our time is an inventory of liquid modern fears. It is also an attempt to uncover their common sources, to analyse the obstacles that pile up on the road to their discovery and to examine the ways of putting them out of action or rendering them harmless. Through his brilliant account of the fears and anxieties that weigh on us today, Bauman alerts us to the scale of the task which we shall have to confront through most of the current century if we wish our fellow humans to emerge at its end feeling more secure and self-confident than we feel at its beginning.

Counter The Postmodern Turn gathers together in one volume some of the most important statements of the postmodern approach to human studies. In addressing postmodern social theory and emphasising the social role of knowledge, this book abandons the disciplinary boundaries separating the sciences and the humanities. The first collection of its kind, it provides the classic essays of authors such as Lyotard, Haraway, Foucault and Rorty. Contributors include well-known theorists in the fields of sociology, anthropology, women's and gay studies, philosophy, and history.

"Originally delivered as the prestigious A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts in 1995, After the End of Art remains a classic of art criticism and philosophy, and continues to generate heated debate for contending that art ended in the 1960s. Arthur Danto, one of the best-known art critics of his time, presents radical insights into art's irrevocable deviation from its previous course and the decline of traditional aesthetics. He demonstrates the necessity for a new type of criticism in the face of contemporary art's wide-open possibilities"--Page 4 of cover.

"This liquid modern world of ours, like all liquids, cannot stand still and keep its shape for long. Everything keeps changing - the fashions we follow, the events that intermittently catch our attention, the things we dream of and things we fear. And we, the inhabitants of this world in flux, feel the need to adjust to its tempo by being 'flexible' and constantly ready to change. We want to know what is going on and what is likely to happen, but what we get is an avalanche of information that threatens to overwhelm us. How are we to sift the information that really matters from the heaps of useless and irrelevant rubbish? How are we to derive meaningful messages from senseless noise? We face the daunting task of trying to distinguish the important from the insubstantial, distil the things that matter from false alarms and flashes in the pan. Nothing escapes scrutiny so stubbornly as the ordinary things of everyday life, hiding in the light of deceptive and misleading familiarity. To turn them into objects of attention and scrutiny, they must first be torn out from that daily routine: the apparently familiar must be made strange. This is precisely what Zygmunt Bauman seeks to do in these 44 letters: each tells a story drawn from ordinary lives, but tells it in order to reveal an extraordinariness that we might otherwise overlook."--Pub. website.

"Management has been one of the driving forces of the last century, indeed an idea and a language that colonized most other institutions, areas of human activity and walks of life, even those that had until recently been regarded as completely unmanageable, such as art, academia and creativity. Some it supported and others it destroyed, but there are few areas in modern societies that have been untouched by it. What is the meaning of management - now almost omnipresent and all powerful - in our current bleak times, in our current state of 'interregnum' that is characterized by an increasing sense of insecurity and hopelessness, a time when, paradoxically, the apparently omnipotent force of management no longer seems to work. Does it have a role to play today and in the future? What can it become and whom should it serve when the interregnum is over and a new, hopefully more humane, system begins to dawn? These are some of the questions explored in this timely new book by Zygmunt Bauman, one of the greatest thinkers of our times, architect and Urban Studies professor Irena Bauman, and two organization and management scholars, Jerzy Kociatkiewicz and Monika Kostera"--Page four of cover.

Until recently, women have been noticeably absent from historical and sociological accounts of modernity. As a step toward remedying this situation, the essays gathered here challenge the continuing separation of sociological from textual analysis in cultural (and feminist) theory and inquiry. They address critically the question of women's writing, exploring the idea that women may begin to define their own lives and construct their own identities in a patriarchal culture through the very process of writing. They also present a cogent defense of a feminist cultural politics, including a politics of the body. Integrating material drawn from a variety of sources--feminist theory, cultural and literary analysis, sociology, and art history-- Feminine Sentences is an original discussion of women's relationship to modern and postmodern culture. Janet Wolff's book represents a major statement of her distinctive position, and will be of interest to everyone working in the areas of cultural and literary theory, women's studies, and sociology. FROM THE BOOK: "Women . . . are sentenced to containment and silence. . . . This collection is intended as a contribution to the overthrow of that 'sentence,' and to the process whereby women find ways to intervene in an excluding culture, and to articulate their own experience. Feminine sentences are those formulations and expressions, in a variety of cultural forms and media, of women's own voice." "The literature of modernity describes the experience of men. It is essentially a literature about transformations in the public world and its associated consciousness. . . . In so far as the experience of 'the modern' occurred mainly in the public sphere, it was primarily men's experience." "I want to argue that a feminist cultural politics of the body is a possibility. . . . There is every reason . . . to propose the body as a privileged site of political intervention, precisely because it is the site of repression and possession."

Aesthetics and Modernity brings together Agnes Heller's most recent essays around the topics of aesthetic genres such as painting, music, literature and comedy, aesthetic reception, and embodiment. The essays draw on Heller's deep appreciation of aesthetics in all its forms from the classical to the Renaissance and the contemporary periods. Heller's recent work on aesthetics explores the complex and fraught status of artworks within the context of the history of modernity. For Heller, not only does the relation between aesthetics and modernity have to be looked at anew, but also the way in which these terms are conceptualized, and this is the two-fold task that she sets for herself in these essays. She engages this task with a critical recognition of modernity's pitfalls. This collection highlights these pitfalls in the context of continuing possibilities for aesthetics and our relationship with works of art, and throws light on Heller's theory of emotions and feelings, and her theory of modernity. Aesthetics and Modernity collects the essential essays of Agnes Heller, and is a must-read for anyone interested in Heller's major contributions to philosophy.

For centuries, knowledge has been thought to be the key to human progress of all kinds and has dominated Western culture. But what if knowing has now become an impediment to further human development? The End of Knowing is concerned with the practical consideration of how to reconstruct our world when modernist ideas have been refuted and many social problems appear insoluble. Newman and Holzman suggest provocatively that we should give up knowing in favour of "performed activity." They show how to reject the knowing paradigm in practice and present the many positive implications this has for social and educational policy.

"This is a book about the public display of death in contemporary culture. It consists of a series of essays on specific cases in which death is displayed in museums and in photography. The essays focus mainly on representations of violence and death in events in recent Israeli history, including the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinian Intifada, and on the visual presence of traumatic events in Israeli culture throughout the twentieth century. They show how images of these events both shape and aestheticize the viewer's experience of death."--