The book explores these distinctions of solidity/liquidity and lightness/heaviness as they are utilized to probe contemporary transformations in five domains of human experience: "Emancipation," "Individuality," "Time/Space," "Work," and "Community." There are many important and original insights in these chapters. For example, the discussion of shopping as a liquid modern rite for exorcising uncertainty, or the suggestion that the new role of critical theory should be repopulating the agora in a society of would-be "individuals" (80, 41). Yet there are other conclusions, such as the "new irrelevance of space" or "the disengagement of and loosening of ties linking capital and labor," that are schematic and exaggerated (117, 149). Bauman's tendency toward sweeping judgments reinforces his inclination to reify the distinction between solidity and liquidity by placing phenomena into either one or the other category. In one example, a discourse on "health" becomes the biopolitics of solid modernity, whereas the discourse on "fitness" indicates the new liquidity (77f). Bauman's schema is valuable: "fitness" is an ideal of ever-ready-to-deploy corporeal energy appropriate to flexible postindustrial work rhythms, just as "health" calibrated the human body to more stable and predictable industrial rhythms. @dominic Boyer, book review, 2000
