Culture in a Liquid Modern World (PDF)

In its original formulation, 'culture' was intended to be an
agent for change, a mission undertaken with the aim of educating
'the people' by bringing the best of human thought and
creativity to them. But in our contemporary liquid-modern world,
culture has lost its missionary role and has become a means of
seduction: it seeks no longer to enlighten the people but to seduce
them. The function of culture today is not to satisfy existing
needs but to create new ones, while simultaneously ensuring that
existing needs remain permanently unfulfilled. Culture today likens
itself to a giant department store where the shelves are
overflowing with desirable goods that are changed on a daily basis
- just long enough to stimulate desires whose gratification is
perpetually postponed.

In this new book, Zygmunt Bauman - one of the most brilliant and
influential social thinkers of our time - retraces the
peregrinations of the concept of culture and examines its fate in a
world marked by the powerful new forces of globalization, migration
and the intermingling of populations. He argues that Europe has a
particularly important role to play in revitalizing our
understanding of culture, precisely because Europe, with its great
diversity of peoples, languages and histories, is the space where
the Other is always one's neighbour and where each is constantly
called upon to learn from everyone else.