Liquid Life

They wander through the winding passages of the shopping malls prompted and guided by a semi-conscious hope of bumping into the very identity badge or token needed to bring their selves up to date,

relentless and inescapable change that augurs

We may say that role reversal is the rule here, though even that statement distorts the realities of liquid life, in which the two roles intertwine, blend and merge.

For that reason, ‘identity’ holds potentially deadly dangers for both individuality and collectivity, though both resort to it as a weapon of self-assertion.

Being an individual in the society of individuals costs money – a lot of money; the

Those among us who have been drilled to mix identity cocktails and trained to delight in tasting them, and are in addition able to secure all the currently recommended (read: fashionable) cocktail ingredients, feel at home in the society of consumers.

Waste is the staple and arguably the most profuse product of the liquid modern society of consumers; among consumer society’s industries waste production is the most massive and the most immune to crisis.

To be an ‘individual’ is to accept an inalienable responsibility for the course and consequences of interaction.

Or is it just that once it has been impressed upon us as an obligatory, unshakeable and inalienable duty, such control over our bodies now occupies a place in our preoccupations that is larger than ever before and consumes more of our energy than it ever did? And is it indeed so that we are now more unsure about ‘what our bodies are’ and ‘how we sh