Liquidity has become a metaphor for a contemporary society in which, paradoxically, the only stability lies in the ephemeral; social forms and identities change too quickly to become sedimented. This article argues, however, that in the global city understood as a space of flows, certain social relations - for example, the link between consumer and commodity- have crystallized. This social, economic and political relation has favored the emergence of a corporeal subjectivity in which the body is not simply a means but an end in itself. The body is approached here as a dual entity that is at once both subjective (the consumer body) and objectified (the commodified body), a ghostly entity ideally adapted to and functional in consumer society.
consumer culture; liquid society; globalization; body; modernity