"Reflexive" in Webster's Dictionary means directed or turned back upon itself; a relation that exists between an entity and itself; an action that is directed back upon the agent or the grammatical subject. |
REFLEXIVITY: THE MODERN WORLD TURNS BACK ON ITSELF This unseats the idea of progress at the heart of high modernity and gives us a new way to think about the problems of politics, society, and the individual. |
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See my detailed reading notes on Beck, Giddens, & Lash: Beck proposes the reinvention of politics Giddens theorizes post-traditional society Lash pursues the option beyond modernism & postmodernism
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Ulrich
Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash. REFLEXIVE
MODERNIZATION:Politics, Tradition and
Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Stanford
CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Ursinus
College Library: 303.49/B388 AN
ESSAY Theorists of culture and society beginning in the 1970s built up a body of thought that we now call postmodernism. With widely varying approaches, they were attempting to understand the changes in modern Western life that began sometime after World War II and reached critical mass in, say, the mid-1970s. They attempted this because the theories behind modernity up to that point no longer could account for the way institutions and individuals were behaving. New explanations would bring the new behavior into the light of understanding and, perhaps, enable people to feel more certain of themselves as they and their world moved forward. Postmodern critical theorists had some success in exposing the limitations of modernist thinking and behaving. Key to their success was their finding that notions of truth, made evident by the application of a universally shared reason, were not what modern people thought they were. Under the scrutiny of postmodern critics, such ideas lacked the universal validity originally claimed for them. This tended to show that exercise of reason in modern society could be a mask for the exercise of power over those lacking it. Modernity based on Enlightenment notions was not what people had been led to think it was. A major casualty of such new thinking was the idea of progress, the keystone for the whole of modern development. Postmodernism persuasively called into question the modernist idea that human progress on the earth would go forward indefinitely, made possible by the logical powers of the human mind and the will of humankind to pursue an ultimate perfection, universally shared. It succeeded in this questioning on a variety of fronts, but none was more important than the ecological front. There, postmodernists showed—through the critique of metanarrative-- that the finite earth would not in the end tolerate never-ending human intervention without fundamentally changing the old relationship between nature and human beings. Cast into doubt by postmodernist critics along with the idea of progress was the idea that persons were autonomous agents operating against a nature that would continue yielding its truths under the pressure of interrogation while retaining its essential otherness. The simple opposition of reason to human tradition, they said, would not yield continuous revelation of truth about the social world. The problematic nature of language, so important to postmodern criticism, lay at the heart of this observation on the failures of modernity. These and other postmodernist insights may have brought some light and understanding to a confused and confusing West. But their more important effect, probably, was to further dilute the optimism and certainty of modern people as they faced increasing dissonance in a society that disappointed their modernist expectations. The postmodern project, in short, failed to provide the West with an adequate understanding of politics, society, and self in conditions that veered farther and farther away from the Enlightenment-based picture of modernity. The insights of postmodern theorists lacked the power to put modernity in clear perspective and to reenergize its sources for the future. People in the West, all the while, remained in dire need of understanding the flaws in modernist thinking and practice. They needed more than ever to get a grip on the world coming into being that so radically digressed from the vision of modernity's eighteenth-century founders. They needed an alternative imaginary, a new root metaphor, with the power to move people in a new way that did not depend on modernist ideas of progress, nature, and individual subjectivity. *** Against this rough sketch of what critics have been thinking about modernity and its limits, the concept of "reflexive modernization" has made a promising appearance. The critical theory of reflexivity may productively address the work left undone by postmodernist theory. Postmodernism found the flaw in the idea of progress but failed to identify a usable alternative metaphor. In the alternative idea of reflexivity, we might discover some power to regenerate Western understanding. Through that we might renew political and social action. We might do so because “reflexivity” reaches down to the same root level of metaphor where we situate the idea of progress. In high modernism, progress meant the continuous revelation of the truth about nature and tradition, leading to never-ending additions to human understanding. Modernist thinkers failed to acknowledge the finiteness of nature and the complexity of tradition. They failed to recognize that, by the very process of modernization, human beings sooner or later would destroy the divide between objective nature and themselves. They failed to see that, at that point, further progress on a continuous line would become impossible. The theorists of reflexivity are in effect declaring that we have reached that point:
That is, modernity now is NOT directed at a nature that we assume can never be totally “colonized.” If we stop to imagine such a fundamental shift in the flow of modernist energy, we come to a realization of the value of this idea of reflexivity. We see that Western civilization has more or less completed its ever-forward march toward the “conquest” of nature and the revelation of human nature. The energy that we once projected outward against nature now turns back on its source, on Western civilization itself, whatever that has turned out to be. Beck and his colleagues say that “huge new problems both in reality and in theory” arise from this fundamental turn in the flow of modernist energy. The relatively orderly world of high modernism has yielded to what Beck and colleagues call “the second modernity.” Beck elaborates:
By studying the reflexivity that characterizes this second modernity, we may gain new insight into the West’s troubles and successes. We may get beyond the impasse in social and political theory and practice that postmodern theorists illuminated. Indeed, in the book by Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash that introduced me to the concept of reflexive modernization, an essential goal is to get beyond this “paralysis of the political will.” (viii) Their book, however, is merely a preface for action. It attempts to describe what modernity has become in terms that do not depend on the categories of modernity’s origins, which fell at the hands of the postmodernist critics. It does not offer a full programmatic menu for a new politics. The authors seem mainly to be clearing the deck of those old categories and installing new ones so that we can have fresh thinking about a new politics. Here, let me merely put together the main ideas about reflexive modernization found in the book by Beck, Giddens, and Lash. My detailed reading notes on the book appear separately. REFLEXIVE MODERNIZATION IN SUMMARY Western modernization, as the quote above from Beck indicates, is in the process of destroying itself and creating a new order, which we call reflexive modernization. That new order coming into being is the creative product of modernization itself. One thing that sets it apart from the simple or high form of modernization that is being destroyed is the definition of risk and the ways to manage it. From the standpoint of modern history, risk arises from the human failure to predict the behavior of nature and society. In high modernization, people looked to science, rational expertise, to manage risk by rolling back ignorance of nature and society and by calculating the remaining uncertainty on rational grounds. The new conditions of reflexive modernization no longer allow these methods of high modernization to yield satisfactory answers about risk. The power of science to speak with universal authority about nature and society has declined. Having lost its early formulaic power, akin to tradition, it is less able to assert control and manage risk. That loss has accompanied (and doubtless contributed to) the decline in the power of nation states to order the world’s affairs. People have been finding new political structures—“sub-politics” in Beck’s phrase—for the exercise of authority outside of the governing structures of states. These are diverse and minimally coordinated. They appear to offer people structures of political action that fit the new conditions of reflexive modernization, which have diluted state controls. The treatment of tradition is a pivotal concept in reflective modernization. Traditions surrounding family and sexual identity resisted the transformative influences of high modernization. Their persistence against the dynamics of modernist change helped to stabilize risk. Moreover, as noted above, modern science somehow acquired the appearance of the formulaic power associated with tradition, even though it was grounded in the process of rational inquiry. That appearance helped reinforce the sense that high modernization enjoyed a certain degree of stability, despite the never-ending change stimulated by free enterprise. Traditions of family and sexual identity and the apparent traditionalism of modern science, however, weakened under the pressure of globalization and a new impulse to “excavate” the traditional contexts of action in reflexive maneuvers. The result was not the destruction of tradition but the persistence of disembedded “traditions” in two reflexively conscious ways. Old traditions either acquired new value in (1) a plurality of values or they transformed into aggressive forms of (2) fundamentalism. These forms of fundamentalism depended on the assertion of formulaic truths and the rejection of debate, regardless of social consequences. In addition to these far-reaching changes in the categories of tradition, reflexive modernization has redefined the relationship between objective nature and human society. Nature no longer stands apart from society. Human beings in high modernization succeeded in processing all of nature, or at least in setting the terms for completing that project. Henceforth, ecology is not an issue about nature apart from society. Human values now decide ecological issues. These values tend to be rationally based and debated. But sometimes they become “eco-fundamentalisms.” Eco-fundamentalists assert formulaic truths about “nature” that brook no debate (e.g., creationist science and opposition to the theory of evolution). Reflexive modernization is disorganizing the familiar structures of politics and capitalism. Autonomy, decentralization, flexibility, and dialogue now mean more to people in those structures than dependency, centralization, rigid organization, and top-down communication. People tend to turn away from these older characteristics of high modernism. Critical analysts are beginning to think preliminarily about tools for operating the new human order in the conditions of reflexive modernization. It may be possible for people in the West (and elsewhere) to begin to prize values other than the economic prosperity that tops the concerns of high modernization. Giddens talks about a “post-scarcity order”—not because he envisions the end of scarcity but because values other than economic scarcity and abundance may take precedence. However the society operates and however individuals define themselves, reflexive modernization will operate with information and communication structures that replace high modern social structures. Cognitive ethics derived from logical analysis will yield to aestheticized ethics derived from hermeneutic interpretation. The isolated individual of high modernization will be resituated in affinity groups. He and she will enmesh themselves in everyday social practices that make up a culture; they will participate in a “hermeneutics of retrieval” of social practice and individual identification. To repeat, the fundamental insight is that reflexive modernization represents an historic shift in the direction of energy in Western capitalist society. Western energy in high modernization flowed forward and outward, reshaping and changing the natural world and detraditionalizing human society. Now, that same energy turns and flows backward onto the “modernized” world itself. This results in a continuously remade human situation that profoundly alters politics, society, and the individual. It calls for radically new ways of managing the processes of civilization and for defining the self. My sense is that the implications and nuances of “reflexivity” could productively preoccupy us as we continue to study the world we have won and continue to seek practices that will allow us to manage human affairs. See my detailed reading notes for more insight into reflexive modernization. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity
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