Take a vase. The shape is ancient, speaking of water and grain, of domestic rituals and offerings to earth deities. Then, upon its smooth surface, the story of our times is etched: contorted bodies, brand logos like sacred iconographies, the glossy drool of cynicism. This is the gesture of an artist like Grayson Perry: taking the humblest of objects, the clay pot, and turning it into the stele of an era where success has lost every moral center of gravity. His work is not decoration; it is an act of dissection. "Without the sex, violence or social commentary," the artist says, "it would just be pottery". Ours is the same era: polished, lacquered with a patina of efficiency, but containing a burning question within. What do we celebrate when we toast to success? What interior desert are we plating with gold?
One navigates a sea of evaporated meanings. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called it, with a perfect and ruthless metaphor, the time of liquid modernity. Nothing is made to last. Not work, not love, not fidelity to an idea. Everything is fluid, reversible, a provisional state masquerading as freedom. In this bottomless ocean, ethics, heavy and solid like an anchor, becomes a hindrance. Loyalty is ballast to be jettisoned to float more nimbly. Empathy is a sentimental optional, a luxury that slows the race. Our neighbor? No longer a fellow traveler, but a consumer object: evaluated, used, replaced at the first sign of wear or when a more high-performing model appears on the screen. Success, in this social hydrology, can only be the ability to stay afloat, indifferent to the water's temperature, to the salinity of others' seas.
The Economy of Illusion and the Comfort Machine#
This fluidity finds its propellant in a precise engine: consumerism. But not the naive kind of mere purchasing. The one described by Bauman is a subtler system, an economy of illusion. It promises not goods, but happiness itself, instantaneous and perpetual, tied to the purchase and consumption of experiences, relationships, identities. Success thus becomes the skill to participate in this race, to possess the symbolic objects, to embody the winning image. It is a success that slips through the fingers like sand, because the object of desire, once obtained, is already revealed as old, surpassed by a new model of aspiration. One builds a life on a dune.
Supporting this race, a Faustian pact with technology. As noted in an analysis of our era, the obsessive search for comfort has replaced ancient virtues. We want machines that think for us, algorithms that choose our partner, frictionless paths. But in this constant lightening of existence, something essential is expelled: the effort, the friction, the resistance that forges character. We become alienated users of devices whose functioning we ignore, in a growing "Promethean gap" between us and our creations. Success, in this realm, is being the most efficient end-user, with the least degree of friction with the system. A smooth, polished being that never causes hiccups. That never asks uncomfortable questions.
"Society assigns places, traces boundaries, and pronounces 'verdicts' that imprint themselves on lives and often nail them down".
This mechanism does not operate in a vacuum. As Didier Eribon writes, society functions as a continuous tribunal issuing silent verdicts. It assigns places, traces class boundaries, defines what is "natural" and what is not. In this logic, the intellectual's "scruple," the worker's emotional "weakness," the subordinate's loyal "naivety" are not character traits. They are signs of a pre-written social condemnation. The cynicism of the winner, on the contrary, is read as realism, as the lucid acceptance of the rules of the game. It is the lucidity of one who has internalized the verdict and executes it upon others. Ethics, then, is not just a competitive handicap; it is an act of disobedience to an unwritten code, a refusal to play the assigned part.
The Rebellion of the Fragment: Art, Sacrifice, and the Search for Root#
In the face of this panorama, where does the possibility of a different success lie? Perhaps not in the peaks of financial charts, but in lateral gestures, in what we might call practices of molecular resistance.
- Art as Uncomfortable Incision: Grayson Perry chooses ceramics, a medium traditionally considered "minor," "craft," to convey stories of violence, social unease, and class hypocrisy. His success stems not from conformity, but from incongruity: beautiful vases that tell ugly stories. It is a warning: an attractive exterior form can be the vehicle for an unpleasant truth. It reminds us that beauty, emptied of content, is like "potatoes without salt". The artist's true success is perhaps this: forcing the gaze to stop on the crack in the perfect glaze.
- Sacrifice as an Act of Presence: The philosopher Simone Weil embodied a path radically opposite to that of comfort. To understand workers' suffering, she went to work in a factory, experiencing on her own skin the dehumanization of the assembly line. She found that experience marked her forever as a "slave". Hers was not a gesture of romantic heroism, but of embodied empathy, an attempt to align her own being with the suffering of the other. Her "success" was a worldly failure, but the trace of a human depth that efficiency can never erase.
- Return as Rewriting: Didier Eribon, having fled his working-class and homophobic origins, returns to them years later through writing. That Retour à Reims is an act of critical success: re-examining class shame, dismantling the mechanisms of exclusion, not to celebrate his own escape, but to understand the chains that still bind others. It is a success that does not erase origins, but interrogates them, transforming individual guilt into collective analysis.
The thread connecting these trajectories is the search for a root in a liquid world. Not a fixed, reassuring identity root, but a point of true contact, even if painful, with the reality of others and with one's own human matter. It is the opposite of cynicism, which is always a detachment, a retreat into the cold, slippery surface of things.
The toxic success of our day is a laboratory phenomenon of liquid society. It demonstrates how, when everything is fluid, the heaviest values – compassion, fidelity, scruple – are discarded for reasons of social hydrodynamics. We prefer the solitary swimmer, who doesn't have to tow anyone, to the raft-builder. And yet, the answer does not lie in dreaming of an impossible return to the solidity of the past. It lies perhaps in learning to navigate liquidity without becoming water ourselves. It lies in doing as Perry does with his vase: taking the fluid form of contemporaneity and, patiently, shaping it, engraving upon it a story, a mark, a question. Making that container not a symbol of emptiness, but the place where, finally, something heavy and precious can find a home. Success, perhaps, is just the gold dust that glitters at the bottom, after the vase has broken. What matters is what was inside.
#LiquidModernity #SuccessToxicity #Bauman #SocialCritique #EthicsInCrisis #Consumerism #Alienation #ArtAsResistance #Empathy #HumanCondition #ContemporarySociety #nostr
Comments
No comments yet. Start the conversation.