An essay by Dominic Hinde
“All that is solid melts into air”, wrote Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto, a line subsequently borrowed as the central frame to Marshall Berman’s later seminal book of the same name on how we experience modernity. The idea of solid turning to liquid as a condition of both modernity and modernisation was subsequently popularised by Zygmunt Bauman in his concept of ‘liquid’ modernity, the idiom being widely applied to economics and social relations in the present.
It is not just our social relations and economies that are liquid, however – climate change means that the physical world is beginning to lose its solidity too as all that is solid melts into air and water, with uncertain results that challenge the idea of nature as a reliable and static component of our realities. The same year that Bauman wrote ‘Liquid Modernity’, the chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer posited the concept of the Anthropocene, a period in earth history in which human impact was so great as to warrant a new geological epoch.