Читать книгу Globalization - George Ritzer - Страница 17

However, at an increasing rate over the last few centuries, and especially in the last several decades, that which once seemed so solid has tended to “melt” and become increasingly liquid. Instead of thinking of people, objects, information, and places as being like solid blocks of ice, they need to be seen as tending, in recent years, to melt and as becoming increasingly liquid. It is, needless to say, far more difficult to move blocks of ice than the water that is produced when those blocks melt. Of course, to extend the metaphor, blocks of ice, even glaciers, continue to exist (although, even these are now literally melting), in the contemporary world that have not melted, at least completely. Solid material realities (people, cargo, books) continue to exist, but because of a wide range of technological developments (in transportation, communication, the Internet, and so on) they can move across the globe far more readily.

Everywhere we turn, more things, including ourselves (as tourists or students studying abroad), are becoming increasingly liquefied. Furthermore, as the process continues, those liquids, as is the case in the natural world (e.g. ice to water to water vapor), tend to turn into gases of various types. Gases are lighter than liquids and therefore they move even more easily than liquids. This is most easily seen literally in the case of the global flow of natural gas through lengthy pipelines. More metaphorically, much of the information now available virtually instantly around the world wafts through the air in the form of signals beamed off satellites. Such signals become news bulletins on our smart phones, messages from our global positioning systems letting us know the best route to our destination, or memes shared on social media.

It should be noted, once again, that all of the terms used above – solids, liquids, gases – are metaphors – little of the global world is literally a solid, a liquid, or a gas. They are metaphors designed to communicate a sense of fundamental changes taking place as the process of globalization proceeds.

Karl Marx opened the door to this kind of analysis (and to the use of such metaphors) when he famously argued that because of the nature of capitalism as an economic system “everything solid melts into air.” That is, many of the solid, material realities that preceded capitalism (e.g. the structures of feudalism) were “melted” by it and were transformed into liquids. To continue the imagery farther than Marx took it, they were ultimately transformed into gases that diffused in the atmosphere. However, while Marx was describing a largely destructive process, the point here is that the new liquids and gases that are being created are inherent parts of the new world and are radically transforming it. In the process, they are having both constructive and destructive effects (Schumpeter 1976).

Marx’s insight of over a century-and-a-half ago was not only highly prescient, but is far truer today than in Marx’s day. In fact, it is far truer than he could have ever imagined. Furthermore, that melting, much like one of the great problems in the global world today – the melting of the ice on and near the North and South poles as a result of global warming (see Chapter 11) – is not only likely to continue in the coming years, but to increase at an exponential rate. Indeed, the melting of the polar icecaps can be seen as another metaphor for the increasing fluidity associated with globalization, especially its problematic aspects. And, make no mistake, the increasing fluidity associated with globalization presents both great opportunities and great dangers.

Thus, the perspective on globalization presented here, following the work of Zygmunt Bauman (2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2011, 2012; Bauman and Donskis 2016; Bauman and Leoncini 2018), is that it involves, above all else, increasing liquidity (Davis 2016) (and gaseousness). Several of Bauman’s ideas on liquidity are highly relevant to the perspective on globalization employed here.

For example, liquid phenomena do not easily, or for long, hold their shape. Thus, the myriad liquid phenomena associated with globalization are hard-pressed to maintain any particular form and, even if they acquire a form, it is likely to change quite quickly.

Liquid phenomena fix neither space nor time. That which is liquid is, by definition, opposed to any kind of fixity, be it spatial or temporal. This means that the spatial and temporal aspects of globalization are in continuous flux. That which is liquid is forever ready to change whatever shape (space) it might take on momentarily. Time (however short) in a liquid world is more important than space. Perhaps the best example of this is global finance where little or nothing (dollars, gold) actually changes its place (at least immediately), but time is of the essence in that the symbolic representations of money move instantaneously and great profits can be made or lost in split-second decisions on financial transactions.

Liquid phenomena not only move easily, but once they are on the move they are difficult to stop. This is exemplified in many areas such as foreign trade, investment, and global financial transactions (Knorr Cetina 2016), the globality of transactions and interactions (e.g. on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Weibo [Axford 2016]) on the Internet, and the difficulty in halting the global flow of drugs, pornography, the activities of organized crime, and undocumented immigrants (Ryoko 2012).

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, that which is liquid tends to melt whatever (especially solids) stands in its path. This is clearest in the case of the much discussed death, or at least decline, of the nation-state and its borders in the era of increasing global flows (see Chapter 5). According to Cartier (2001: 269), the “forces of globalization have rendered many political boundaries more porous to flows of people, money, and things.”

It is clear that if one wanted to use a single term to think about globalization today, liquidity would be at or near the top of the list. That is not to say that there are no solid structures in the world – after all, we still live in a modern world, even if it is late modernity, and modernity has long been associated with solidity. And it does not mean that there is not a constant interplay between liquidity and solidity with increases in that which is liquid (e.g. terrorist attacks launched against Israel from the West Bank during the Intifada) leading to counter-reactions involving the erection of new solid forms (e.g. that fence between Israel and the West Bank), but at the moment and for the foreseeable future, the momentum lies with increasing and proliferating global liquidity.