Fermenting uncertainty: re-imagining leisure under liquid modernity

Abstract

n Bauman’s terminology, leisure under liquid modernity is characterized by our enslavement to the consuming life. Consumption has replaced work as the backbone of fulfilment, and consumers are becoming ‘de-skilled’ because consumption is presented as the only way to achieve desired certainty (Bauman, 1988). This paper enrols the practices of food fermentation, materially and metaphorically, to complement and extend current understandings of leisure under liquid modernity. The paper offers a sequence of vignettes to propose that leisure might be re-imagined as a skilled performance which acknowledges the comfort of certainty as it embraces the hospitable possibilities of uncertainty. The argument is made that to realize these transformative possibilities there is a need to attend to the consequential role ‘naming’ plays in fixing meanings and expectations of leisure, together with a commitment to disrupting leisure’s consumerist, positivist and humanist heart.