REFLEXIVITY: THE MODERN WORLD TURNS BACK ON ITSELF
READING NOTES
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.
These READING NOTES may be read in conjunction with an essay that attempts to summarize the concept of reflexive modernization in its historical context.
beck I. BECK PROPOSES THE REINVENTION OF POLITICS
"The Reinvention of Politics: Towards a Theory of Reflexive Modernization" (1-55) "Self-Dissolution and Self-Endangerment of Industrial Society: What Does This Mean?" (174-183)
Beck's essay proposes a new way to think about the effects of reflexive modernization on the political process. He proposes nothing less than the self-destruction of Western modernization as it emerged from the Cold War, when it stood poised to globalize "simple" capitalism and democracy. (2) The linear progress of simple modernity will not happen, as Beck sees it. "High-speed industrial dynamism" undercuts the structures of simple modernity in an uninterrupted development. This happens to modernity without the intervention of political programs or revolution. (2) The transformation is unintended, unpolitical, and unplanned. (3) A new modernity--that of "reflexive modernization"—is the result. It radicalizes simple modernity by breaking up its "premises and contours." (3) The resulting uncertainty in social and political processes, Beck says, calls for an analytical approach that will enable us to "decode" them and set up a new politics. In the rest of his essay and his back-of-the-book reply to and critique of the other two authors, he talks about such an approach and outcome.
It appears that in the German setting, Beck is attempting to establish a rationale for politics independent of Habermas. Like Habermas, he is describing a world that has emerged from Enlightenment modernity but that no longer responds to the classic formulations of that modernity. Unlike Habermas, he is not attempting to rescue the Enlightenment and resist postmodernist multiplicity with a program of communicative action. He is defining a new modernity produced out of the bowels of the old modernity. He then is looking for ways of dealing with the new modernity on its own terms rather than in terms drawn from modernity as we used to know it.
At the heart of the change from old to new modernity—to reflexive modernization—is a fundamental change in the management of risk. In the old modernity, risks that emerged from the dynamic changes of industrial society remained marginal. People perceived them as marginal. They did not threaten the central rational tenets of high modernity based on Enlightenment assumptions. People adhered to the consensus that social and political risks could still be addressed successfully by applying more science and knowledge to them; continuing progress would result. (5) But when the risks of industrial society moved to the center of public attention, the "foundations of industrial society" were themselves at risk and threatened with self-destruction. The way to control risks in the old modernity would not now work. (6)
"Reflexive modernization" means self-confrontation with the effects of risk that cannot be dealt with and assimilated in the system of industrial society—as measured by the latter's institutionalized standards. (6)
That is, industrial society—the old modernity—ceased to produce ever-increasing progress for people; in its self-created new mode, it came to produce ever-greater risk. Risk moved from the periphery to the center and radiated outward to all corners.
Beck is describing for us the postmodern conditions that not only have made uncertainty and rapid change the everyday expectation but also have spawned the conditions of globalization. Boundaries and protocols that prevailed during the old modernity have fallen as money as well as products have entered a transnational sphere. Now, with the explosive behavior of an America determined to respond decisively to 9-11, that globalized situation takes on fresh complexity. But this simply accelerates the already-advanced risks and dangers inherent in Beck's notion of reflexive modernization.
Beck situates these risks and dangers in the metamorphosis of the nation state and in the gravitation of political energy from old modern polarities (e.g., left and right) into new reflexive polarities.
These include the issue of uncertainty: how safe or unsafe are we?
They include the issue of strangers in a mobile world: are you inside the social body or outside of it—are you with us or against us, as President Bush would ask.
And they include the issue of politics: are we able to reshape society through processes of a new politics or sub-politics. (42-44) In reflexive modernity, Beck sees the disappearance of "the authoritarian decision and action state." (39) A process of self-organization emerges, drawing upon economic, community, and political activities. This process he finds is outside of traditional government tasks. "Self-organization means (reflexive) sub-politicization of society." (39) Participants in self-organization are expert specialists in vocations and professions; they restructure political issues outside the old political arena. Often their opposition constitutes a new kind of "oppositional politics" that could not have occurred in the simple polarities imposed by the old modernity. (48)
In essence, then, Beck is attempting to give us a theoretical explanation of the real-world transformation that we observe all around us. We sense the deep change from the simple modern world we knew to the postmodern world of late capitalism. Beck's contribution is to suggest that the transformation took place while old-type modern people were in the process of thinking rationally about problems and solutions in classical modern terms. Modern conditions outside their purview were proceeding toward novelty that they did not anticipate or plan for. Their methods of analysis and resolution became obsolete before their very eyes, as it were, and before they knew what hit them. The novel conditions eroded and destroyed the foundations of legitimacy of key modern institutions: "political parties, labor unions, science, law, national borders, the ethic of individual responsibility, the order of the nuclear family, and so forth." (178)
The catastrophic magnitude of this destruction reveals how poorly the critics of high modernity saw its problems. Critics such as Durkheim saw that it separated the individual from social roots and produced anomie. But such critics naively believed that modernity's shortcomings would resolve themselves in the ultimate balance of culture and nature. (179) In this "preordained harmony of control" Beck sees "the fairy tale, the innocent faith, of the sociology of simple modernization." (179) In this fairy tale, the problems of correction and renewal did not emerge from the industrial system itself. Somehow, the overarching environment, which was beyond control or need of control, would take care of the problems. Progress would thus go on forever.
I remember the first time I realized the fallacy of this idea of environmental independence of cultural control. When I worked at the Philadelphia Gas Works, I would see engineering system designs. At the edge of the system drawing, I usually would find a squiggle of closure in the phrase, "Exhaust to atmosphere." Ultimately, it dawned on me that atmosphere was not the end of the system design. I could imagine it returning to the system and undermining it—a neat example, I think, of Beck's notion of reflexivity.
At issue, mainly, was the disappearance of the optimistic belief that through unrelenting scientific research, moderns could control more and more things that in pre-modern times were uncontrollable. Reflexive modernization contradicts this "instrumental optimism." (180) It puts on our agenda a number of arguments that demand answers that simple modernity would be unable to advance. These arguments include the following (180-181):
--The "side effects" of industrial production are now globalized and uncontrollable (e.g., the ozone hole).
--Side effects or "secondary problems" can no longer be "externalized" (exhausted to atmosphere) but now circle back or boomerang into the organizational system with unintended and uncontrollable consequences. This shatters "the faith of the sociology of simple modernization." (181)
--Reflexive modernization contradicts the "double optimism of control" in simple modernization. It contradicts the faith that problems will resolve and progress continue (1) if we just pursue "linear scientization" through expert systems and (2) if we anticipate the "controllability of side effects." (181)
Finally, the "fundamental shocks" produced by reflexive modernization lead to one or another political outcome: neo-nationalism and neo-fascism or the "reformulation of the objectives and foundations of Western industrial societies." (182) Only experience will tell us which direction we take.
gid II. GIDDENS THEORIZES POST-TRADITIONAL SOCIETY
"Living in a Post-Traditional Society" (56-109) "Risk, trust, reflexivity" (184-197)
In his section of this book, Anthony Giddens is less interested than Beck in finding the new political dynamic of reflexive modernity. He is more interested in the processes of society—in particular, in how the notion of tradition in simple high modernity is transforming into a new notion of tradition in reflexive modernity.
People maintained the belief that, as high modernity upset the status quo, it did not touch “core aspects of social life,” especially the family and sexual identity. (56) As long as this belief in basic traditions persisted, Enlightenment advocates could argue that there was a universally valid system, progressing toward greater and greater knowledge and control of the world. (58)
This naïve notion of tradition in modernity, Giddens says, allowed for a certain predictability of risk. Involved in this notion was the “given” of a “social life coordinated by tradition” and the “given” of “external nature” as a backdrop to human social intercourse. (58) Simple modernity retreated as tradition dissolved and humans intervened in nature. (58-9) The result was a radically higher level of risk, which experts could not predict. So, modernity transformed into the “dangerous adventure” that our authors call reflexive modernization. (59)
Tradition, Giddens says, involves collective memory, ritual, and “formulaic” truth. It has “guardians” to protect and perpetuate it. It binds people morally and emotionally. (63) The outcome of these conditions of tradition is repetition; this is a system for controlling time. It “presumes a kind of truth antithetical to ordinary ‘rational inquiry.’” (66)
In early modernity, Giddens argues that traditions “remained central.” (94) Moreover, early modern science in popular culture appeared to have the formulaic power of traditional truth. There was a compulsive strain in modernity with roots in the repetitiveness of tradition. New traditions in the context of modernity developed, usually along lines of gender difference. The authority of tradition enabled early moderns to generate personal and collective identities even as the dynamics of modernization went forward. (94)
These varying functions of tradition in early modernity, in Giddens’s account, were disabled or transformed as reflexive modernization took the stage. He finds that two interrelated processes undermined the earlier modernity and keynote the new: (a) globalization and (b) “the excavations of most traditional contexts of action.” (96)
Giddens cleverly contrasts the control mechanism of globalization with that of tradition. By controlling time, tradition controls space. Globalization, by contrast, controls time by controlling space. (96) More concretely, he means that globalization “disembeds” traditional institutions. It does so not from an imperial center, as in early modernity, but from many directions. “There is no obvious ‘direction’ to globalization at all, as its ramifications are more or less ever-present.” (96) Globalization thus is a peculiarly postmodern phenomenon, different from the colonial order of early modernity. Giddens tracks the transformation of the West’s global relations from early modernity to reflexive modernization by analyzing the phases through which the Western discipline of anthropology passed. (97-100)
Giddens tries to give us an idea of the effects of globalization on social constructs worldwide by discussing the term “detraditionalization.” (100) Traditions persist in the new period of reflexive modernization in one of two ways, as he sees them. (1) Defenders justify them by acknowledging the new plurality of values and then arguing that traditions have value in that plurality. They contextualize traditions in the new social conditions. (2) Or, they make traditions into fundamentalism. Traditions in their “traditional sense” assert formulaic truth as of old “against the background of the prevalence of radical doubt," which fundamentalists refuse to acknowledge. Giddens says that fundamentalism is “an assertion of formulaic truth without regard to consequences.” (100) (Somewhere in that notion is the seed of terrorist violence, I think.)
In the post-traditional society of reflexive modernization, traditional social practices, he says, become habits or relics. (101) Habits are not the habits of old, however; they are “regularly infused with information drawn from abstract systems, with which they also often clash.” (One thinks of the influence of market commodification on personal wearing apparel, for example.)
Remnants of authentically traditional habits, Giddens argues, persist without ties to the formulaic truths from which they originated; they exist as relics in a “living museum.” (102) “Relics are not just objects or practices which happen to live on as a residue of traditions that have become weakened or lost; they are invested with meaning as exemplars of a transcended past.” (102) [my emphasis] But that past no longer develops as it did.
In Giddens’s view of reflexive modernization, traditions—habits or relics—“only persist in so far as they are made available to discursive justification and are prepared to enter into open dialogue…with alternative modes of doing things.” (105) In other words, traditional behavior and attitudes become objects of discourse and debates. Giddens points to “the case of gender as tradition” to illustrate this. (105)
Giddens ends with a summarizing statement on the beginning of a “genuinely new social universe of action and experience” in post-traditional society (the society of reflexive modernization). As a reference point for further thinking on this, I am quoting that statement in its entirety:
It is…a global society, not in the sense of a world society but as one of ‘indefinite space.’ It is one where social bonds have effectively to be made, rather than inherited from the past….It is decentred in terms of authorities, but recentred in terms of opportunities and dilemmas, because focused upon new forms of interdependence….To regard narcissism, or even individualism, as at the core of the post-traditional order is a mistake….In the domain of interpersonal life, opening out to the other is the condition of social solidarity; on the larger scale a proferring of the ‘hand of friendship’ within a global cosmopolitan order is ethically implicit in the new agenda…. (107)
Giddens, like Beck and Lash, offers brief "replies and critiques" in a final chapter of this book. He offers a number of assertions about the change from the world that the Enlightenment created to the world that the Enlightenment never anticipated. His title for this supplemental comment is "Risk, trust, reflexivity" (184-197).
--Giddens is uncomfortable with the term "reflexive modernization" because it implies that it "completes" modernity. He does not think the present phase completes high or pure modernity. He thinks that the "manufactured uncertainty" of "institutional reflexivity" (his term of preference) that we now deal with produces a far less predictable world than high modernity anticipated. Risks are higher. (185)
--Echoing earlier assessments of the role of science in the new conditions, Giddens believes that the traditional authority enjoyed by high modern science has diminished. There are no voices powerful enough to assert the "universal legitimacy of science" anymore. (186)
--Giddens returns to the new ways in which individuals negotiate risk and trust in globalized conditions. (186-187) Trust is as much in need of redefinition as risk. He sees "active trust" arising to supplant older traditions of personal trust. In high modernity, trust arose from the stable social position of the individual. Now, people have to win trust and actively sustain it. This "presumes a process of mutual narrative and emotional disclosure" not expected before. (187)
Giddens is particularly helpful when he accounts for the role of active trust in "larger organizational contexts" not person-to-person relations. "Active trust depends upon a more institutional 'opening out.'" (187) Contrary to conventional wisdom, Giddens believes that this new demand for building organizational trust is a greater force than information technology in breaking down organizational hierarchies and "command systems." (187) [But he does not make the obvious observation that information technology can powerfully facilitate the opening out required for active institutional trust.]
--Reflexivity does not lead neatly to emancipation, Giddens continues. It often intensifies "stratification," as Lash emphasizes, of individuals and societies. This contributes to the contemporary lack of over-arching pattern—another way of seeing the pattern of constant change and uncertainty in postmodernity. (187)
--Giddens imaginatively discusses fundamentalism in a section on ecology and nature. As original nature has ended, issues of ecology have become issues for human decision-making in "new ethical spaces." In those spaces, fundamentalist assertions arise regarding nature and traditions associated with it. They are not open to debate. Fundamentalism now means "not a 'return to the past', or 'an insistence upon first principles', but a defence of the formulaic truth of tradition." (190)
Giddens applies his insight into fundamentalisms to the realignment of political conservatism, for example. In light of my exploration of liberalism and conservatism elsewhere, I quote him:
[C]onservatism has become internally contradictory. The free play of market forces that it advocates is radically de-traditionalizing. Yet conservatism depends for its support upon groups who wish to conserve—to protect traditional ways of life. Conservatism has thus become a melange of emancipatory impulses and fundamentalisms. (190)
--Giddens riffs on the many-splendored meanings of democracy in the emergent world of reflexive modernization. (190-194) Let me simply repeat his labels. (1) Emerging "emotional democracy" among parents, children, and friends is reconstructing civic ethics beyond traditional structures. (192) (2) "Flexible and decentralized systems of authority" are replacing bureaucratic hierarchies, though not uniformly. (193) (3) New modes of social association, such as self-help groups, are challenging existing authorities. They are examples of Beck's "sub-politics." (194) (4) On a more global level, these three processes are fueling reflexivity, mobilization, and flexibility. Giddens feels favorably about these developments. Big Brother is unlikely to "organize social and economic life on a global scale." (194) "In the mixture of reflexivity, autonomy and dialogue characteristic of active trust we may eventually generate a cosmopolitan global order where greater justice prevails and where large-scale war has become obsolete." (194) [This is a mandate that governments and people everywhere could contemplate.]
--"Post-scarcity order" (194-196) Giddens tries to imagine a system that could follow capitalistic production. It would be possible IF the capitalistic "drive to continuous accumulation has become weakened or dissolved." (195) This would require individuals to discover values other than economic prosperity and a willingness to "restructure their working lives." (195) A second influence on a post-scarcity order would come from "contradictions of abundance," which demonstrate that production ultimately leads to ecological degradation. These contradictions sooner or later would stimulate a demand for the order to change. (195-6) Giddens rejects the option on a global level of a "gigantic redistributive welfare state." (196) Development in the traditional sense of third-world countries is not an avenue to a post-scarcity order. (196)
--Giddens disagrees with Lash's concept of "aesthetic reflexivity" in postmodern institutional change or "late modernity" (his preferred term). (196-97) He seems uncomfortable when semiotic/aesthetic analysis uncouples signs from narrative, which he believes remains essential. (197)
lash III. LASH PURSUES THE OPTION BEYOND MODERNISM & POSTMODERNISM
"Reflexivity and its Doubles: Structure, Aesthetics, Community" (110-173) "Expert-systems or Situated Interpretation? Culture and Institutions in Disorganized Capitalism" (198-215)
Scott Lash, the third voice in this triptych, does not limit his inquiry to politics, as Beck does, or to social process, as Giddens does. In his chapter—"Reflexivity and its Doubles: Structure, Aesthetics, Community"--he looks to reflexive modernization as a comprehensive critical theory beyond both modernism and postmodernism. It offers, he suggests, “a third space, a fully different and more open-ended scenario.” (112)
He begins with the premise of the Frankfurt School (notably Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment) that early modernity, through its reliance on reason, achieved its emancipatory project against tradition only to turn upon itself. (112) He sees a three-stage line of development from (a) tradition to (b) simple modernity to (c) reflexive modernity. (113) The driving force was individualization in the transition from tradition to simple or early modernity; but industrial and governmental structures arrested the development. These structures included class, nation, nuclear family, and “unconditional belief in the validity of science.” (115) “Full modernization [i.e., reflexive modernity] takes place only when further individualization also sets agency free from even these (simply) modern social structures.” (114)
Lash wants to set up reflexive modernization as an alternative critique. But to give it power to work that way, he feels that it must be critically examined. He wants us to understand it in terms of its “unarticulated other.” He wants to read it “in the context of its unspoken assumptions.” (110)
To perform this analysis, he looks at “its own radical alterity” as it appears, first, through the replacement of social structures by information and communication structures. Second, he looks beyond its cognitive dimension in order to see the aesthetic dimension of reflexive modernity; this includes pop culture as well as the art formerly known as “high.” (111) Third, he looks beyond the individualization of modernity to see the “recurrent phenomenon of community,” evidenced by nationalist and ideological coalescence. (111) Each of these three moves, as Lash sees them, are involved in the "creative destruction" of "agency" or simple individualism; the resulting "reconstruction" produces a new reflexive structure, aesthetics, and community. (119) In the remainder of his essay, Lash examines what these three reconstructions mean.
AGENCY OR STRUCTURE? (119-135)
Lash is interested in structure because it is central to analyzing the social change that occurs with change in economic life. He is talking about the change from "fordist" economic accumulation in hierarchical, rule-bound structures to an economic system featuring "flexible specialization." (119) In the new flexible system, he finds that the old institutional structures of simple modernity yield to "an articulated web of global and local networks of information / and communication structures." (120-121) Individual opportunity no longer depends upon one's place in the production system of old; it now depends upon one's place in these new information and communication structures. (121)
Reflexive production: upgrading the working class (121-127): Lash looks to structures of technical training in Germany and Japan to find examples of the "reflexive traditionalization" of work. Through various modes, companies and technical groups transfer knowledge to young workers. These are essentially modes of information and communication. They marginalize the importance of the individual and maximize the importance of the working community. Lash sees this as a feature of the new post-fordist system of accumulation, despite the roots of such structures in "premodern" and "communal-traditional" forms of regulating information. (127)
Reflexivity winners and reflexivity losers: (new) new middle class and underclass (127-135): Lash finds that the new information and communication structures transform both the old middle class and the working class. (130) The transformed middle class now "works in the information and communication structures." And the reflexive working class now works "for and with these structures." (130) Regrettably, the repositioning of these two classes creates a THIRD class, which is excluded from the information and communication structures—our new underclass. As the social structures accompanying fordism disappear, the underclass loses a supporting structure and becomes economically dyfsunctional. (131-32) [Michael Moore has made a career out of tracking the human consequences of this change, which famously crippled his hometown of Flint, Michigan.] The new underclass, lacking a place in the information and communication structures, takes shape through (a) downward mobility from the working class; (b) informal work of migrants; (c) exclusion of women. (133)
REFLEXIVITY: COGNITIVE OR AESTHETIC? (135-143)
Lash identifies “an entire other economy of signs in space”—a semiotics of mimetic symbols. They make possible an aesthetic, as opposed to a cognitive, reflexivity. (135) These mimetic symbols are “the commoditized, intellectual property of the culture industries”; but they also are portals for “the popularization of aesthetic critique.” That critique targets the very complex of “power/knowledge” that the symbols themselves constitute! (135)
This reflexive aestheticism is “the grounding principle of ‘expressive individualism’ in everyday life of contemporary consumer capitalism.” (135) [I think Lash is describing the brand-savvy shopper who prowls the malls in search of herself in the products delectably displayed for purchase.]
The conceptual and the mimetic (135-139): Expressive individualism in the new modernity, says Lash, does not depend on cognitive reflexivity. It depends on “mimetic mediation.” (136) He turns to Nietzsche, Adorno, and Hegel to support this idea of an aesthetic mode in modernity. The objects of aesthetic critique are produced by the culture industries. They are TREBLY reflexive in Lash’s view: “as symbol-intensive intellectual property, as commoditized and as advertised.” (138) Their mimetic quality grows from their iconic resemblances, not from language. (138) It is worth quoting Lash on “the mimesis of the culture industries:”
Like hieroglyphics, popular culture seems to signify: not abstractly through semiosis but most immediately, through resemblance [which produces reflexivity]. Yet for us in the modern West, hieroglyphics also take on indecipherable levels of abstraction. So may the culture industries, which can take the immediacy of popular cultural experience and metamorphose it into the unhappy utilitarian abstraction of the commodity. (139)
Aesthetic, ethique, ethnique (140-143): In this subtle section, Lash tries to say that the aesthetic turn in modernity has left behind something essential to simple modernity. The “transcendental subject” of high modernity now is at best “a probabilistic calculating subject.” (141) Postmodern society is a “risk society”: the probabilistic calculating subject is able to take risks that no longer can jeopardize a positivistic reality. Living with contingency, “affirming ambivalence,” is a new way to cope (following the thought of Zygmunt Bauman). (141) Lash becomes dense here; but I think he is saying that in reflexive modernity we have to replace the cognitive ethics of high modernity with “an aestheticized ethics.” Morevoer, we have to see this ethics “in terms of ethnicity.” (142) This means that the Holocaust was “the final triumph of ‘the concept’, the victory of identitarian and Cartesian modernity.” (142) That triumph is a thing of the past. Now, over-arching universal concepts that define and subsume the work of art are discredited. “The universal is operative, as it were, ‘autopoetically’, internal to the organism (work of art) itself.” (143) [Lash is much too brief here to do justice to his thought; but it is thought worth pondering. At issue is the old Enlightenment drive toward universal truth –universal identity--and its collapse in the postmodern period.]
THE ‘I’ OR THE ‘WE’ (143-156)
Lash argues that postmodern anti-foundationalists (he counts among them Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, Rorty, Bauman) “presume a radical individualism—surely not a utilitarian but an aesthetic individualism: not an individualism of a controlling ego but the individualism of a heterogenous [sic], contingent desire—which itself is hardly conducive to community.” (144)
Lash thinks that deconstructionists, applying aesthetic reflexivity, repeat a suspicion of universals and of “the Enlightenment ego” already expressed by the masters of high modernity, Marx and Freud. (146) To get beyond this suspicious posture, he suggests that they might pursue a “hermeneutics of retrieval.” This would end the obsessive sweeping away of foundations and “attempt to lay open the ontological foundations of communal being-in-the-world.” (146) He wants practitioners of this new hermeneutics of retrieval to abandon the classic suspiciousness seen in both modernity and postmodernity; he wants them to “look beneath” shifting signifiers “to gain access to the shared meanings which are conditions of existence, indeed are the very existence, of the ‘we.’” (146)
From subjectivity to community (146-153) Lash turns to cultural studies for insight into the state of community. He finds that a pervasive model is that of producer-consumer resembling neo-classical economics, “abstracted from shared and embedded practices and instead operating as rational-choice-making individuals.” (147) He turns to other thinkers, notably Habermas, in search of a more textured model of community. (148-152) Habermas, he says, wants to use the Enlightenment “to protect the life-world from the excesses of the negative (and unintended) consequences of the Enlightenment” itself. (148) But he finds that the “communicative rationality” of Habermas tends to contradict the embedded practices of community rather than rescuing it from the system of Enlightenment rationality. (150-51)
Lash, interestingly, suggests that the alternative to communicative rationality and the “expert systems” to which it gives rise should be “the already shared meanings of everyday social practices.” They, he suggests, “make thinking and truth (and community) possible.” (152) [This is a radical rejection of the state of postmodernist thinking, a call for a root-and-branch reconfiguring of reflexive modernization.]
Then Lash turns to Charles Taylor (Sources of the Self), but he finds flaws in his thinking about “sources” of the self. (152-53) Taylor, like Habermas, fails to "derive the 'we' from the 'I'.
Habitus, habiter, habits (153-156): Lash then looks at Pierre Bourdieu's notion of "habitus" for a source of community and its relation to the self. There he finds "a sociology of the ontological foundations—in categories of habit—of conscious action." (155) These categories are "unthought" but operative. For Bourdieu, "truth is neither conceptual [logical] nor mimetic [aesthetic], but becomes evident through shared practices" as in primitive savage life. (156) Disciplines are "reflexive" for Bourdieu: "we see our own concepts not as categories but as interpretive schemata, as predispositions and orientations, as our own habits." (156) This relativizes science and all other disciplines.
CONCLUSIONS: REFLEXIVE COMMUNITY AND THE SELF (157-169)
Lash sums up a notion of community; its keynote is that the subject "dwells among"—is embedded in, thrown into, or self-thrown into—an experienced world. (157) It rejects the separation of subject from object (I think).
Neither shared interests nor shared properties make community. (157-160) Community forms when a "lifestyle enclave" "takes on the facticity of community, entails shared meanings, practices and obligations." (161)
Lash examines "reflexive community" characteristics in the "fields" of the academy, in diasporic communities, and in "expressive individualism" with roots in aesthetic modernism. (161-62)
Summing up his search for self in community, Lash says his argument here "has been in support of hermeneutic reflexivity and community, against the individualization theses of both aesthetic and especially cognitive reflexivity." (165) He emphasizes a hermeneutics "of retrieval" because it allows for the assertion of community, sorely needed after the effects of "cognitive-utilitarian and aesthetic-expressive individualism." (165) Lash replaces the mode of production with the mode of information as the place where struggle occurs. (166)
The social structures (classes in production) become less important as the information and communication structures include more and more people. These latter are cultural structures. (167)
Lash ends with the idea that reflexive modernity leads to a "groundless ground." (168) This means that the observer ("expert systems") and the observed are enmeshed in the same community. They are both in the world and cannot be isolated. Perhaps, he says, "it is we…who are the neo-tribes." (168) This leaves the Enlightenment "I" far behind. [Lash leaves me wondering how to retain the value of individual freedom, so central in high modernity, in the neo-tribe.]
Lash's replies and critiques: "Expert-systems or situated Interpretation? Culture and Institutions in Disorganized Capitalism" (198-215)
Lash's basic critique of Beck and Giddens is that they neglect the "cultural/hermeneutic sources of the late modern self" in politics and everyday life. (200) Beck and Giddens, he says, are aligned with a "scientist or rationalist" point of view seen in David Harvey, as opposed to a "cultural" analysis seen in Derrida and Foucault. (199-200) This handicaps their analyses because "institutions and politics in late modernity have become increasingly cultural." (200)
Institutional reflexivity: responsibility, tradition, truth: (200-203) Lash affirms Beck and Giddens for understanding the shift from institutional responsibility in high modernity to reflexive responsibility in postmodernity. Expert-systems become "democratically dialogical and political public spheres." (203)
Democracy of emotions or emotionalization of democracy? (203-207) But Lash finds that Giddens mistakenly emphasizes the continuing function of expert-systems in reflexive modernity. Expert-systems (based on cognitive propositions and contracts) invade and destroy intimate relations. (204) Lash opts instead for the operation of "hermeneutic truth" (aka "narrative truth") in reflexive modernity. (204) "Active trust" based on hermeneutic truth resembles what you find in earlier societies but Lash insists that it is "fully post-traditional." It is so because the relationships of active trust are "disembedded from traditional or early modern institutions, as affect is cut loose from traditional customs and reinvested in the relationship." (206) Active trust allows relationships beyond "doxic truth and morality." It insists on the "constant creation of the semantic background on which communications are grounded. Also, the materials of this semantic background are drawn from "modern myths and narratives, the images of popular culture." (206) Lash, in other words, is describing postmodern "aesthetic reflexivity." (206)
Culture, hermeneutics and the limits of institutions (207-211) Lash modifies the idea of institutional reflexivity advanced by both Beck and Giddens as follows:
(1) "Institutions are becoming more cultural in character." (207) They involve themselves in "the social construction of reality." (208) Institutional reflexivity embraces the way they "reflect upon, contest and construct the very 'semantic horizon' on which they are based." (208) That is, they are based on the simple modern "distribution of goods." (208) Now the distribution of goods creates a "semantic horizon" that calls for "avoidance, prevention and helping." (208)
(2) Strictly cultural institutions (education, media, science) "have become increasingly central to reflexive modernity." (208) Universities disseminate postmodern culture, which conflicts with the "professionalized modernism" of early 20th century. (209)
(3) "An increasing proportion of our social interactions and communicative interchanges are going on external to institutions." (209) Capitalism is thus becoming more disorganized. [Richard Florida's findings on the culture of the creative class in "hot" cities perhaps illustrate this.] "Radically individualized" persons now form "tight networks of small 'morally overheated' affinity groups." (209) They do not depend on large corporate organizational environments. People do not relate to such groups in subject-object cognitive terms but in "hermeneutic" terms that interrogate "the semantic backgrounds, the unthought 'primitive' classifications underpinning relationships and lifestyle affinity groups." (210) Reflexivity MEANS "a departure from the subject-object forms of knowledge into which we are socialized." (210) [Why does this make me think of the groups in prime time sitcoms on TV such as "Coupling" and "Friends"?] Trust in affinity groups comes from shared "semantic worlds and an ethics of care." It becomes more abstract and contractual as people move up a hierarchical ladder toward institutions, where ethics comes to depend not on affect but on reason. (211)
Postmodernism and disorganized capitalism (211-215) Lash sees two modernities: scientific and aesthetic:
(1) Scientific genealogy: Galileo, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, the Enlightenment, [the mature] Marx, Corbusier, sociological positivism, analytic philosophy and Habermas. This is analytic modernity.
(2) Aesthetic genealogy: Baroque art, some Dutch landscapes, 19th century Romanticism, the young Hegel, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Simmel, surrealism, Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Heidegger, Schutz, Gadamer, Foucault, Derrida, Bauman. This is hermeneutic modernity. (212)
Lash argues that, in the new post-traditional society at hand, the "sensibility of high modernity", composed of BOTH scientific and aesthetic "competencies," becomes detached from "traditional structures and institutions." (212)
In this detachment this sensibility—both analytic and hermeneutic—becomes reflexive in turning its critical gaze and competencies on symbolic output of high modernity itself. (212)
Lash thinks that this detachment and critical gaze now spreads "to the masses of the population in every nook and cranny of social life." (212)
Lash observes that "information and communication structures" evidence the 'thoroughgoing informationalization" of the contemporary world. These structures extend from the corporate organization outward to "entire production systems" and onward to "the flows of information and communications (and immigration and tourism) that are taking place on an increasingly global level." (213) These cultural structures are the key to understanding reflexivity "for late modern social agents," reflexive production, and aesthetic/hermeneutic sensibility. (213) The degree of access to these structures is the key to understanding "social inequality of class, race and gender." (213)
The context of such cultural structures leads to the disorganization of capitalist institutions. (214)
