© Roger M Tagg 2014
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Lash (then at U Lancaster, UK) spent some time in Germany and found similarities between his and Beck's work. Giddens (then at Cambridge) brought in his similar views subsequently. All 3 are - or were - Professors of Sociology.
I understand their meaning of 'Reflexivity' as 'a subject applying its own thinking to itself'. It seems partly an attempt to find a way forward from the 'dead end' of postmodernism on the one hand and the 'ruts' of traditional patterns of thinking on the other.
One particular 'suitable case for treatment' is Ecology - and global risks in general.
Warning - it's hard reading - the authors insist on using lots of obscure words and long sentences. I suspect this is avoidable, but the traditions of sociology research - as with many other fields - don't seem to encourage writing for the understanding of any readers beyond the 'initiated'.
| Chapter | Page | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| Pref- | vi | "The protracted debate about modernity versus postmodernity has become wearisome and ... in the end has produced rather little." |
| ace | It's not a matter of dumping tradition, it's moving "to a social order in which tradition changes its status ..and is "routinely subject to interrogation". | |
| vii | 'Environment' is commonly made to sound "like an external context of human action", but rally it's "thoroughly penetrated and re-ordered by it." | |
| Human life today shows "plasticity", and 'fate' (in its traditional sense) is on the retreat. | ||
| "As a species we are no longer guaranteed survival, even in the short term." | ||
| "The notion of 'risk' is central to modern culture today..." | ||
| viii | "The orthodox sphere of decision-making: the formal political system" has become less relevant. | |
| Beck | 1 | Setting the scene: the communist world fell apart, but could 'capitalism + democracy' work worldwide? "Should we not see the return of nationalism and racism as a reaction to the processes of global unification?" [RT: It might equally be a safety valve of 'someone to hate' now the existing 'bogeyman' has gone.] |
| 2 | The reflexivity is involved with the replacement of one existing modernity (the industrial society) by a newer modernity (post-industrial, presumably). | |
| The previous formalisms, e.g. "of class, stratum, occupation, sex roles, nuclear family, plant, business sectors ..." are being undercut. | ||
| "The constellation that is coming ... has nothing in common with the by now failed utopias of a socialistic society." | ||
| There's no 'revolution', and many issues are "bypassing political debates and decisions in parliaments and governments". | ||
| 3 | Temporary, part-time and contract work [RT: not to mention organized volunteering] "breaks up the old boundary lines drawn between work and non-work". | |
| 4 | Reflexive Modernization (RM) "implies difficult-to-delimit deep insecurities of an entire society, with factional struggles on all levels ..." | |
| More noticeably, we see "nationalism, mass poverty, religious fundamentalism of various factions and faiths, economic crises, ecological crises, possibly wars and revolutions, not forgetting the states of emergency produced by great catastrophic accidents ..." [RT: But didn't these always happen? Maybe they just get more coverage now that some of the old traditional antagonisms have subsided.] | ||
| Risk | 5 | This is seen as when "social, political, economic and individual risks increasingly tend to escape the institutions for monitoring and protection in industrial society". |
| Society | Stage 1: the risks are there, "but do not (yet) become public issues or the centre of political conflicts". Stage 2: they "dominate ... debates and conflicts". | |
| 6 | "It (the Risk Society) arises in the continuity of autonomized madernization processes which are blind and deaf to their own effects and threats." | |
| "Distributional conflicts over 'goods' ... are covered over by the distributional conflicts over 'bads'. | ||
| 'Potential' threats "not only escape sensory perception and exceed our imaginative abilities: they also cannot be determined by science". [RT: I'd say this is not quite as true in 2014 than in 1994.] | ||
| 7 | 'Housework' "has conventionally not been recognized as labour at all, even though it was what made the husband's wage labour possible in the first place". | |
| "Collective and group-specific sources of meaning (for instance class consciousness or faith in progress) in industrial society culture are suffering from exhaustion, break-up and disenchantment. ... Their loss leads to the imposition of all definition effort upon the individuals." [RT: I'd say this is temporary - some new 'movement' often establishes itself sooner or later.] | ||
| "Today, people are not being 'released' from feudal and religious-transcendental certainties into the world of industrial society, but rather from industrial society into the turbulence of the global risk society." | ||
| 8 | "Opportunities, threats, ambivalences of the biography, which it was previously possible to overcome in a family group, in the village community or by recourse to a social class or group, must increasingly be perceived, interpreted and handled by individuals themselves." | |
| "And even the self is no longer just the unequivocal self but has become fragmented into contradictiry discourses of the self." | ||
| The 'ecological crisis' "no longer appears as a problem of the world surrounding us ... but (as) a profound institutional crisis of industrial society itself". | ||
| Bonss: "More and more social conflicts are no longer treated as problems of order but as problems of risk". I.e., they have "no unambiguous solutions ... they can be grasped by calculations of probability, but not removed that way". | ||
| 9 | Some industrial development can be "beyond the bounds of insurance". | |
| "It is possible to chase away critics with a risk approaching zero today, only to bemoan the stupidity of the public tomorrow, after the catastrophe has happened, for misunderstanding probability statements." | ||
| "How are the risks of enterprises, jobs, health and the environment (which in turn break down into global and local, or major and minor risks) to be related to one another, compared and put in hierarchical order?" | ||
| "Risks tell us what should not be done but not what should be done. With risks, avoidance imperatives dominate." | ||
| 10 |
Industrial society, the civil social order and, particularly, the welfare state and the insurance state are subject to the demand to make human living situations controllable by instrumental rationality, manufacturable, available and (individually and legally) accountable. On the other hand, in risk society the unforeseeable side and after-effects of this demand for control, in turn, lead to what has been considered overcome, the realm of the uncertain ..." | |
| "Not only organizational forms and measures but laso ethical and legal principles and categories, such as responsibility, guilt and the polluter-pays principle ... as well as political decision procedures [RT: majority rules OK] are not suited to comprehend or legitimate this return of uncertainty and uncontrollability." [RT: Again, I wouldn't say 'return', but 'renewed appreciation'.] | ||
| 11 | "Facing the consequences of a nuclear catastrophe, there are no longer any non-participants." | |
| "Risk society is by tendency also a self-critical society." | ||
| "While (experts) diagnose zero risk, (insurance experts) decide: 'uninsurable'." And technical experts may undercut each other [RT: as with global warming]. | ||
| "Politicians encounter the resistance of citizens' groups, and industrial management encounters morally and politically motivated consumer boycotts." | ||
| "Polluter sectors" (e.g. chemicals polluting the ocean) "must count on resistance from affected sectors", e.g. fishing and coastal tourism. | ||
| 11-12 | We could just throw more "instrumental rational control" (technology, market. government) at the problems, but it's better to "affirm the ambivalence". | |
| 12 | "There are fewer and fewer social forms (role patterns) that produce binding orders and security fictions which are relevant to action." | |
| "In the theory of RM, the basis for criticism is conceived as in some sense autonomous. There is no clearly definable subject." [RT: unlike with Marxist 'critical theory'.] | ||
| "Industrial society is skidding into the no man's land of uninsured threats." [RT: I'd say it always was, but we are a bit more aware nowadays.] | ||
| Sub- politics | 13 | Beck uses the term 'individualization' to mean that "individuals must produce, stage and cobble together their biographies themselves". [RT: i.e., 'be your own man', not the 'me generation'.] |
| 14 | A person's life is "no longer 'obligatory' and 'embedded' in traditional models". But there are still plenty of 'interdepedences', some of them new. | |
| 15 | Who you are is what you think or do, not the families, roles and categories other people put you in. | |
| 16 | "Institutions are becoming unreal in their programmes and foundations, and therefore dependent on individuals." | |
| 16-17 | "A double world is coming into existence ... two different epochs, that of 'unambiguous' and that of 'ambivalent' modernity." | |
| 17 | "The political is losing both its polarizing and its creative, utopian quality." | |
| The 'two epochs' model also applies between a) the "political system" [RT: as things happen in practice] and b) the "historically political constellation". | ||
| 18 | "The judicial order no longer fosters social peace, because it sanctions and legitimates disadvantages along with the threats ..." | |
| "It is no exaggeration to say that citizen-initiative groups have taken power politically." This is exemplified by Green politics. | ||
| 19 | "The themes of the future, which are now on everyone's lips, have not originated from the farsightedness of the rulers or from the struggle in parliament - and certainly not from the cathedrals of power in business, science and the state. They have been put on the social agenda against the concentrated resistance of this institutionalized ignorance by entangled, moralizing groups and splinter groups fighting each other over the proper way, split and plagued by doubts. Sub-politics [RT: which is how Beck terms this] has won a quite improbable thematic victory." | |
| "It is not only the planned economy which is bankrupt. Systems theory, which conceives of society as independent of the subject, has also been thoroughly refuted. | ||
| 20 | "People no longer just obey. (They) still communicate in and play along with the old forms and institutions, but they also withdraw from them, with at least part of their existence, their identity, their commitment and their courage." | |
| 21 | "Everyone thinks and acts as a right-winger and left-winger, radically and conservatively, democratically and undemocratically, ecologically and anti-ecologically, politically and unpolitically, all at the same time." | |
| "They (these new 'departures') resemble a collective blind person without a cane or a dog but with a nose for what is personally right and important ... This centipede-like non-revolution is under way." | ||
| 22 | Beck distinguishes 'polity', 'policy' and 'politics'. | |
| "Sub-politics is distinguished from 'politics' 1) in that agents outside the political or corporate system are allowed to appear on the stage of social design (... professional and occupational groups, the technical intelligentsia in plants, research institutions and management, skilled workers, citizens' initiatives, the public sphere ...) and 2) in that not only social and collective agents but individuals as well compete with the latter [RT: organisations? groups?] and each other for the emerging shaping power of the political." | ||
| 23 | "Sub-politics, then, means shaping society from below." But this can lead to "a general 'relative paralysis' ". | |
| New | 24 | Beck thinks that 'general paralysis' is just what has happened in Europe since the end of the cold war. [RT: but he was writing only 5 years after the Wall fell.] |
| modernity | "Sociology ... must become ... a bit playful, in order to liberate itself from its own intellectual blockades.... Oppose pseudo-eternal verities, rub them together, agitate them against one another and fuse them together until the intellectual test tube starts giving off sparks and smoking, smelling and spluttering." | |
| 25 | We think too much in 'binary codes' [RT: I take him to mean 'yes it is / no it isn't' distinctions]. | |
| What we would like is "the self-opening of the monopoly on truth". | ||
| 26 | What revolutions might lead us out of the industrial society? Beck suggests "the earthquake of the feminist revolution" is one. Others are the "technical reproducability" of nature, and the uncoupling of technology from its 'mediocre' "yoke of economic and military utility". | |
| 27 | "The broad variety of fundamentalisms are patriarchal reactions, attempts to reordain the masculine 'laws of gravity'." | |
| "Nature, the great constant of the industrial epoch, is losing its pre-ordained character; it is becoming a product, the integral, shapable 'inner nature' of post-industrial society. ... Nature becomes a social project, a utopia that is to be reconstructed, shaped and transformed." [RT: Didn't Marx think similarly?] | ||
| "Society and nature fuse into a 'social nature'." | ||
| 28 | The idea of decoupling technology from its uses is only what happens with most education. | |
| Beck suggests that one way forward is a 'round table' model. | ||
| 29 | What is predictable these days with any 'project' is that whatever the proponents "plan to be a benefit for all is felt to be a curse by some and opposed". | |
| "The benefits and burdens of more or less dangerous and burdensome production or infrastructure plans can never be 'justly' distributed." | ||
| "The conventional instrument of political consultation, the expert opinion, fails accordingly." | ||
| "Even the interplay between opinion and counter-opinion does not resolve the conflicts, but only hardens the fronts." | ||
| 29-30 | What's needed is 1) demonopolization of expertise; 2) informalization of jurisdiction; 3)opening the structure of decision-making; 4) creation of a partial publicity (not 'behind closed doors'); 5) jointly-agreed rules for the decision process. | |
| 30 | "Risks deepen the dependency on experts." | |
| "Laboratory science is systematically more or less blind to the consequences which accompany and threaten its successes." [RT: This remark could clash with the one about decoupling technology from its use.] | ||
| 31 | It is better to base discussion processes "more on a kind of science of questions than on one of answers". One should "subject objectives and norms to a public test in the purgatory of oppositional opinion (to stir up those doubts that would be repressed in 'standard science'). | |
| "The goal ought to be to play the narrow-minded precision of laboratory science off against the narrow-mindedness of everyday consciousness and the mass-media - and vice versa." | ||
| "After nihilism we do not end up with emptiness, but with aestheticism." | ||
| 32 |
"What realities and rationalities become possible and actually come into being when the communicative codes (e.g. truth with beauty, technology with art, business with politics) are applied to one another and fused together; and a neither-nor results, some new third entity, which makes new things possible and permanent?" | |
| 33 | "Doesn't the recognition of the ambivalence forced upon us by the 'civilization of threat' require a different ... rationality of science (logic of research; rules of procedure; methodology of experiment and theory; and a rethinking of the subsystemic procedure of peer review)?" | |
| "RM means a 'rationality reform'." The currently 'prevailing rationality' "is not an excess of rationality, but a shocking lack of rationality". | ||
| New | 34 | Sub-politics might be said to end where real politics begins, i.e. who has power over military, foreign policy, economic growth and unemployment matters. |
| political | Sub-politics might only be able to last with the support of law and money. | |
| The 'Great Antagonism' (East-West) gave "clear possibilities for orienting oneself". | ||
| 35 | Beck's "politics of politics" is "rule-altering politics". | |
| 38 | Politics can't be restricted to one nation; "the antagonisms between wealthy and starving regions of the earth" and "the problem of mobile economic and political refugees storming Fortress Europe" have to be addressed. | |
| A state, like a snake, needs to "shed the skin of its classical tasks and develop a new 'global skin of tasks' ". | ||
| Enzensberger: "The politicians are insulted that people are less and less interested in them ... they would do better to ask what is the basis for that." | ||
| 39 | Enzensberger: "Germany can afford an incompetent government, because ultimately the people who bore us in the daily news really do not matter." | |
| "The 'authoritarian decision and action' state gives way to the 'negotiation' state." [RT: my single quotes] | ||
| 40 |
There is such a thing as "institutional death", and even a "governmental stroke". There are "zombie-like institutions which have been clinically dead for a long time but are unable to die .. (e.g.) class parties without classes, armies without enemies" - and governments pretending that they make happen things that would have happened anyway. | |
| 40-1 | There may be areas of "generational responsibility" to ensure longer-term survival from "creeping catastrophes". | |
| 41 | "The state must practice self-restraint and self-abnegation, give up some monopolies and conquer others temporarily ..." - but that doesn't mean laissez-faire. | |
| 42 | "The political left-right metaphor" may in fact have 3 different dimensions, i.e. "safe-unsafe [risk-avoiding versus risk-taking in uncertainty], inside-outside [attitude to strangers] and political-unpolitical [can we or can't we shape society]". | |
| 43 | "The latter [I think he means the renascent 'people'] gains the upper hand, in broadcasting stations and on title pages ..." | |
| "Nationalism, as bitter as this sounds to many, exudes the enticing aroma of self-determination." | ||
| "The different possibilities of counter-modernization - nationalism, violence, esoterica and so forth - can complement, mix, cancel, amplify and compete with each other." | ||
| "This neo-nationalism ... is a spectre which ... needs broadcast space .. and tacit sub-politics ... in order to be able to haunt effectively." | ||
| 44 | " 'Safe-unsafe' politicization occurs issue-specifically ... anyone who asserts safety (in one case can find him/herself in the ranks of the threatened on the other." | |
| For reflexive sub-politics to work, two possible patterns are "blockade" and "coalition". | ||
| 45 |
"All the things that are considered loss, danger, waste and decay in the left-right framework of bourgeois politics, things like concern with the self, the questions - who am I? what do I want? where am I headed? - in short all the original sins of individualism, lead to a different type of identity of the political life - life-and-death politics." | |
| "Private life becomes in essence the plaything of scientific results and theories, or of public controversies and conflicts." | ||
| 46 | "A new compulsory experience comes into being, which neither coincides with nor should be confused with the dependence on nature in earlier centuries or the class experience of the industrial epoch." | |
| "The philosophical issues of existentialism ... become part of everyday life." | ||
| 47 | "The 'executive branch' of the genetic cultural and social revolution in the future is the individual decision of the 'private individual'." | |
| "First intimations of the fundamentalist conflicts that face late biotechnical modernity can already be felt in the disputes over legalized abortion." Many similar conflicts can be expected in the future. | ||
| 48 | "Vocations and professions are (possible) foci of bourgeois oppositional politics." | |
| 49 | We commonly presume that experts can solve differences of opinion if they try long and hard enough. But this can just as easily break up "claims to clarity and monopoly". | |
| 49-50 | But some will say that "the hard maxims of free market success", or the 'clearing out' effect of a "juicy depression" will override all the multiple opinions, "their banners largely fluttering in the wind of the economic climate". | |
| 50 | But, if business "sectors come into existence ... (in) markets (that depend on) the recognition and elimination of hazards", the above objection will carry less weight. | |
| "The ecological crisis produces and cultivates a cultural Red Cross consciousness ... the role of Cassandra can become a vocation or a career." | ||
| 51 | "In the ecological issue, a postmodern, jaded, saturated, meaningless and fatalistic 'pate de foie gras' culture creates a Herculean task for itself, which acts as a stimulus everywhere and splits business into 'Untergangster' (gangsters of doom) and Robin Hoods." | |
| In the 'blockade' stage (p44) "polluter industries and affected groups face one another exclusively and spectacularly"; in 'coalition', helpers emerge from the "professional intelligentsia (engineers, researchers, lawyers and judges)". | ||
| 52 | Management of polluting businesses split "into the sinful and those absolved from sin" - maybe leading to a 'political trade in indulgences' [RT: like 'emissions trading?]. | |
| "The professional swimmers-upstream in the ecological movement seem to lack the political charisma and realism to pull those instruments [RT: presumably Beck means getting coalitions going] out of the political tool chest by themselves." | ||
| Giddens - | 57 |
Giddens talks about the "processes of evacuation, the disinterring and problematizing of tradition", but fails to define any of them - not a good start. Later, we also get 'disembedding' and 'excavation'. I naturally read 'evacuation' to mean "lots of people quit it", and 'disinterring' as "digging it up after it has been buried". However the 'evacuation' might be of 'meaning' or of 'emotion' - maybe even of 'bullshit'. Sean Conroy suggests that maybe it's like an enema. |
| 58 | Max Weber thought that with modernity, humanity would be condemned to live in a "steel-hard cage". But instead, "it is a world where opportunity and danger are balanced in equal measure". | |
| 59 | "Modernity has become experimental ... we are all, willy-nilly, caught up in a grand experiment" - partly of human doing and partly out of our control. | |
| 63 | Tradition "is bound up with memory ... (it) involves ritual, is connected with what I call a 'formulaic notion of truth' [RT: definition again missing], has 'guardians', and unlike custom, has binding force which has a combined moral and emotional content". | |
| Halbwachs regarded dreams as "what meaning would be like without its organizing social frameworks - composed of disconnected fragments and bizarre sequences". | ||
| 64-5 |
"Tradition involves 'formulaic truth', to which only certain persons have full access ...Ritual language is performative, and may sometimes contain words or practices that the speakers or listeners can barely understand. Ritual idiom is a mechanism of truth because, not in spite, of its formulaic nature. Ritual speech is speech which it makes no sense to disagree with or contradict ..." [RT: No surprise that we are going 'post-traditional', then.] | |
| 65 | "Guardians, be they elders, healers, magicians or religious functionaries, have the importance they do in tradition because they are believed to be the agents, or the essential mediators, of its causal powers." | |
| Guardians are not the same as experts. "Status in the traditional order, rather than 'competence', is the prime characteristic of the guardian." | ||
| "All traditions have a normative or moral content ... not only what 'is' done in a society but what 'should be' done." | ||
| "Tradition has the hold it does ... because its moral character offers a measure of ontological security to those who adhere to it." | ||
| 66-8 | Giddens talks about 'repetition as neurosis, compulsiveness and addiction. | |
| 68 | Freud thought that "tradition was beginning to turn into compulsion". | |
| Weber thought that the Protestant ethic was part of the "obsessional nature of modernity". | ||
| 71 | "Addiction, it has been said, is anything we feel we have to lie about." | |
| "In the post-traditional society ... routinization becomes empty unless it is geared or processes of institutional reflexivity [RT: presumably, how to keep improving the institution's processes]. There is no logic, or moral authenticity, to doing today what one did yesterday ..." | ||
| 72 | "How tenaciously the past searches for its expression in the present." | |
| 73 | " 'Excavation', as in an archaeological dig, is an investigation, and it is also an evacuation. Old bones are disinterred, and their connections with one another established, but they are also exhumed and the site is cleaned out." | |
| 73-4 | Giddens suggests 4 factors: "1) the past becomes emotional inertia when tradition becomes attenuated; the past cannot simply be blanked out ... but must be reconstructed in the present; 3) the reflexive project of 'self' [my quotes], a basic characteristic of everyday life in a post-traditional world, depends on a significant measure of emotional autonomy [RT: we don't get this from parents or schools]; 4) the prototypical post-traditional personal relation - the pure relationship - depends on intimacy in a manner not generally characteristic of pre-modern concepts of social interaction". | |
| Choices | 74 | "Choice is obviously something to do with colonizing the future [RT: presumably he means 'managing one's own future'?] in relation to the past(,) and is the positive side of coming to terms with inertial emotions left from past experiences." |
| On the question of "who are you and what do you want", Giddens quotes 17 typical 'lifestyle choices' (from Helmstetter, who proposed 100). | ||
| 75 | "In post-traditional contexts, we have no choice but to choose how to be and how to act ... Even addictions are choices: they are modes of coping ..." | |
| But ... choices can get blocked by unconscious emotions; daily life is impossible without some routines; there are power constraints (things or other people). | ||
| 76 | In many cases, it's not so much 'choice' as 'decision-making' - and the individual doesn't always have the power to make the decision. | |
| Nature, | 76 | "Formulaic truth, coupled to the stabilizing influence of ritual, takes an indefinite range of possibilities (for choice) 'out of play'." |
| context, | One view of 'nature' is that it is whatever "remains outside the scope of human intervention". So tradition is closely associated with 'nature'. | |
| trust, | 77 | However that isn't really how we think of nature today - it has been "thoroughly transfigured by human intervention". |
| authority, | "We begin to speak about 'the environment' only once nature, like tradition, has become dissolved." | |
| expertise, wisdom | 78 | "The overall consequence (of environmental trends), even should the thesis of global warming prove mistaken, is the creation of new types of feedback effects and system influences." |
| 79 | The body (including human) is just as much invaded by human intervention as is the 'external' environment. | |
| "Separated from (ritual and formulaic truth), tradition lapses into custom or habit." | ||
| "Tradition is unthinkable without guardians ... Secular traditions have their guardians just as much as those concerned with the sacred" - like political leaders. | ||
| "Tradition always discriminates between 'insider' and 'other'. | ||
| 81 | "Tradition thus provided an anchorage for that 'basic trust' so central to continuity of identity; and it was the guiding mechanism of other trust relations." [RT: Nowadays, we need a rational process to build, maintain and cancel trust.] | |
| 82 | 'Authority' can mean 1) "the capacity to issue binding commands" [RT: presumably due to traditional power structures]; 2) "a reference point of knowledge". | |
| 'Traditional authority' often comes from rulers, rather than from guardians. | ||
| 83 | In traditional cultures, "the wise person or sage is the repository of tradition, whose special qualities come from that long apprenticeship which creates skills and states of grace". | |
| "The dominance of the expert ... is largely equated with the replacement of patrimonialism by bureaucracy." (Weber) | ||
| "Rational-legal authority rests upon 'a belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands'." | ||
| 84 | Weber's "bureaucratic nightmare has not come to pass". | |
| "We need here to separate the expert from the official." | ||
| Comparing expertise with tradition, 1) it is "disembedding" (non-local, [RT: multiply-applicable?]; 2) it is "tied not to formulaic truth but to belief in the corrigibility of knowledge, a belief that depends on a methodical scepticism"; 3) "the accumulation of expert knowledge involves intrinsic processes of specialization"; 4) "trust in abstract systems, or in experts, cannot readily be generated by means of esoteric wisdom" [RT: what's that?]; and 5) "expertise interacts with growing institutional reflexivity, such that there are regular processes of loss and re-appropriation of everyday skills and knowledge". | ||
| 85 | "Expertise is as disruptive of hierarchies of authority as it is a stabilizing influence." | |
| 86 |
"Difference in the interpretation of dogma, however, is not the same as disputes relating to expert knowledge ... The 'natural state' of tradition ... is 'deference' ... Experts are bound often to disagree, not only because they have been trained in varying schools of thought(,) but because disagreement or critique is the 'motor' of their enterprise." | |
| "It is the mixture of scepticism and universalism which gives the disputes of experts their particular flavour." | ||
| 87 | "All claims to knowledge are corrigible ..." - that's liberating, but also anxiety-provoking. "Science, Popper says, is built on shifting sand" - but it's not just science, it's the whole of everyday life. | |
| "Since there are no super-experts to turn to, risk calculation has to include the risk of which experts are consulted." Global warming is a prime example. | ||
| 88 | "A balance between scepticism and commitment is difficult enough to forge within ... science" - so it's pretty elusive for practical everyday life too. | |
| 88-9 | Specialists can "revert to being members of the ordinary lay public" in the face of other specialties, but traditional guardians are supposed to have wide-ranging general 'wisdom', as opposed to specialist 'competence'. | |
| 89 | How can we have 'trust' in "a multiplicity of abstract systems"? | |
| 90 | "A general move away from consumerism in modern economies would have massive implications for contemporary economic institutions." | |
| "Compulsiveness ... is 'frozen trust', commitment which has no object but is self-perpetuating." | ||
| 91 | "Expert knowledge is open to appropriation by anyone with the necessary time and resources to become trained; and the prevalence of institutional reflexivity means that there is a continuous filter-back of expert theories, concepts and findings to the lay population." | |
| Modernity | "Modernity destroys tradition ... however a collaboration between modernity and tradition was crucial to the earlier phases of modern social development." | |
| 92-3 | Until recently, local communities retained a degree of autonomy, but in many modern societies they are now largely broken up. | |
| 93 | Many traditions were 'invented' - e.g. Gothic architecture in the 19th century, but maybe all traditions are invented. The issue is whether or not they are authentic. | |
| 94-5 | A lot of the modernity in the earlier phases was 'compulsive', and 'used' tradition as a prop. | |
| 95 | Globalization isn't just a topic to be studied, it's "an 'in here' matter". | |
| 96 | "What ties globalization to the processes of the excavations of traditional contexts of action" (is) "the disembedding consequences of abstract systems". [RT: Full marks for 'fog factor'.] | |
| "Whereas tradition controls space through its control of time, with globalization it is the other way around." [RT: A bit airy-fairy.] | ||
| 96-7 | "A world where no-one is 'outside' (due to electronic communications) is one where pre-existing traditions cannot avoid contact not only with others but also with many alternative ways of life." | |
| 97 | Anthropology has passed through 3 stages: 1) "taxonomy of the alien"; 2) the authenticity of different traditions is recognized, but still as separately alien; and 3) the symmetrically shared interaction with members of the studied tradition. | |
| 100 | This moves towards "a cosmopolitan conversation of humankind". | |
| Traditions that try to stay around in a post-traditional society either 1) are "discursively articulated and defended"; or 2) turn into fundamentalism, possibly involving violence. | ||
| "Fundamentalism may be understood as the assertion of formulaic truth without regard to consequences." | ||
| 101 | "The dissolution of the local community, such as it used to be, is not the same as the disappearance of local life and local practices. Place, however, becomes increasingly re-shaped [RT: mixed metaphor?] in terms of distant influences drawn upon in the local arena." Local customs "become either relics or habits". | |
| Habits often clash with, or are influenced by, abstract systems (e.g. persisting with an unhealthy diet). | ||
| 102 | Habits "that are remnants of more traditional practices" may form a 'living museum', similar to relic artefacts. Giddens digresses into talking about Wigan Pier. | |
| 103 | Customs and rituals may also come to fall into this 'relic' category. | |
| 104 | "Monuments (he instances the Voortrekker monument in Pretoria) turn into relics once formulaic truths are disputed or discarded ..." | |
| Ruth Benedict: "Cultures make a selection from the 'arc of possible values' and outlooks on the world". But they remain autonomous among other cultures. But in a post-traditional society things are different. | ||
| 105 | There are 4 ways "in which clashes of values between individuals or collectivities [RT: ugh!] can be resolved". 1) " 'embedding' of tradition" [RT: the opposite to 'evacuation'?]; 2) "disengagement from the hostile other"; 3) "discourse or dialogue"; and 4) "coercion or violence". | |
| With 'embedding', "power is largely concealed", but "through the activities of the guardians, take a great deal 'out of the play' ". | ||
| South African 'apartheid' was a form of disengagement. | ||
| 106 | "If discursive space is not created and maintained ... one possibility is disengagement: today we live in the separating and divorcing society." | |
| "Where disengagement does not occur, and traditional relations are asserted, we enter the domain of potential or active violence." | ||
| " 'Dialogue democracy' - recognition of the authenticity of the other, whose views and ideas one is prepared to listen to and debate, as a mutual process - is the only alternative to violence in the many areas of the social order where disengagement is no longer a feasible option." | ||
| 106-7 | "The post-traditional society ... 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." | |
| Lash - | 110 | What Lash seems very interested in is finding a 'critical theory' to replace the old Frankfurt School Marxist one. |
| Intro | RM should incorporate a critical theory, which should also be applied to itself. | |
| 111 |
His 3 main sub-chapters are 1) 'Agency or Structure': although Structure isn't as important as before in RM, new structures arise to affect the freedom of 'agency'; 2) 'Cognitive or Aesthetic': Beck's and Giddens' (B&Gs) RM seems limited to Cognitive; and 3) 'The I or the We': while 'individualization' is higher in RM, the 'We' isn't quite dead and reappears in various guises, e.g. Ethnic Cleansing. | |
| 112 | "The idea of RM seems to open up a third space" (between 'utopian social change' and Foucault's 'dystopia'). | |
| "Enlightenment or modernization [RT: pre-RM] ... becomes its own haunting double", e.g. bureaucracies, monopolies, 1960s tower blocks. "... this turn of modernization in which 'system' advances seemingly inexorably to destroy the 'life-world'." [RT: I would say 'put the squeeze on', rather than 'destroy'. I would also say that this squeeze is not that new, just more intense. And we can probably do little to stem the tide.] | ||
| 113 | "If simple modernization means subjugation, then reflexive modernization involves the empowerment of subjects." | |
| 114 | "Traditional society here corresponds to Gemeinschaft; simple modernity to Gesellschaft; and its successor (i.e. RM) to a Gesellschaft that has become fully reflexive. The motor of social change in this process is individualization." | |
| "Whereas traditional societies presuppose 'communal' structures ... simply modern societies presuppose 'collective' structures ... and the 'We' has become a set of abstract, atomized individuals." | ||
| Lash thinks Britain "has made the transition directly from tradition to RM, skipping over, so to speak, the stage of simple modernity". | ||
| 115 | "...further individualization in the second, reflexive phase of modernity has set free individuals also from these collective and abstract structures such as class, nation, the nuclear family and unconditional belief in the validity of science." | |
| There is both 'structural reflexivity' (reflecting on rules and resources) and 'self reflexivity' ('agency' reflecting on agency itself). | ||
| 116 | "Each sort of reflexivity can take place either 1) via the mediation of 'expert-systems' or 2) against the grain of such expert-systems." | |
| [RT: Arvanitakis defines 'expert-systems' as: "Systems of technical accomplishment or professional expertise that organize large areas of the material and social environments we live in today. Although we may only consult professionals like lawyers occasionally, the systems in which the knowledge of experts is integrated influence almost all aspects of what we do. Like symbolic tokens, expert systems provide a guarantee of expectations across ‘distanciated’ time-space".] | ||
| For Giddens, reflexivity comes 1) from the agent then 2) using sociology (for structural) or psychology (for self) as an expert system. For Beck, it comes from "distrust" in expert-systems. [RT: Lash makes a big thing of this difference, but I suspect B&G would in fact find a lot of common ground.] | ||
| 116-7 | "Minimization of insecurity" is a major concern in both B&G's RM. With Beck it's ecology, with Giddens it's 'ontological insecurity' ("what am I?"). | |
| 118 | Both authors have effectively 'revived' sociology from its decline after the fall of communism. | |
| Agency, Structure | 119 | Although it's partly a matter of "freeing agency from structure" it could be seen as "structure effectively forces agency to be free ... (if) agency can free itself from rule-bound 'fordist' structures." |
| "Heteronomous monitoring of workers is displaced by self-monitoring." | ||
| "Agents can reformulate and use such rules and resources in a variety of combinations in order chronically to innovate." | ||
| 120 | B&G don't ask the question "Why do we find reflexivity in some places and not in others?" It's common in software, semiconductors and German machine-building. | |
| But there are now many 'junk jobs' (e.g. in clothing), the 'McDonalds proletariat', and "massive large armies of unemployed, especially among young males". | ||
| There are "reflexitivity winners" and "reflexivity losers". | ||
| "How much freedom from the 'necessity' of 'structure' and structural poverty does the ghetto mother have to self-construct her own 'life-narratives'?" | ||
| 120-1 | Lash thinks the explanation is whether or not one is networked into information and communication structures. | |
| 121 | "In the Japanese firm information flows are optimized through the trust relations which exist between the firm and its workers, subcontractors ... and financiers." | |
| "This stands in contrast to the blocking of information flows in low-trust, market-governed firms in the USA and UK." | ||
| 122 | "It is instead perhaps the proclivity of the Anglo-Saxon institutions for neo-classical, cost-benefit thinking of the calculating rational actor that has predisposed them to the failure of such short-termism." | |
| 123 | "Japanese workers will say they work 'in the firm' while their British or American colleagues work 'for the firm'. | |
| In Germany, "governance of production" is more 'corporatist', whereas in the Anglo-Saxon world it's more market-driven. | ||
| The 3 pillars of German corporatist governance are 1) Technical Colleges 'Fachhochschulen'; 2) their collective bargaining structure; and 3) their apprenticeships. | ||
| 124-5 | German collective bargaining works in conjunction with 'works councils'. These are not quite as involving as Japanese 'Quality Circles'. | |
| 125 | Apprenticeships in Germany and Austria are regulated locally "through chambers of commerce, trade unions, employees' associations and state representatives from the departments of education". There is more education in the workplace than in UK/US, where technical schools are used. | |
| 126 | Loyalty and community in Japan is with the firm, in Germany it's with the profession. | |
| In UK, apprentices earn 75% of adult wages; in Japan it's more like 50%. | ||
| 126-7 | "In contrast to the procedural shopfloor ethics of demarcation disputes and a primary focus on the 'discursive will-formation' of shopfloor democracy, a substantive shopfloor ethics will be rooted in the 'Sittlichkeit' of the trade or company community and will devote primary focus to craftsmanship and making a high quality product." Lash defines Sittlichkeit as "the ethical life of particular, shared and customary practices". [RT: my italics] | |
| 127 | "The training and access to information flows ... involves an upgrading of the new 'reflexive' working class in regard to the classical, fordist proletariat." | |
| 128 | Contrasting Anglo-American with German-Japanese: 1)emphasis on consumption; 2) buying and selling several houses in a lifetime; 3) more divorce, involving lawyers; 4) more use of experts generally (e.g. accountants, financial advisers, personal trainers, psychotherapists). | |
| 129 | "The expanded middle class in RM work inside the Info & Comm structures. They do so very largely as the 'experts' inside the expert-systems ..." | |
| 130 | "The accumulation of information (and capital) in the Info & Comm structures becomes the driving force of RM, just as the accumulation of manufacturing capital and its associated structures had been in an earlier modernity." | |
| "This third class who are downgraded from the classical proletariat of simple modernity are the 'reflexivity losers'." They are the "bottom third" of society. | ||
| 130-1 | The resulting underclass (which includes the "ghetto poor"), and the moving out (e.g. into suburbs or new development areas) of structural institutions leads to 'anomie' and, for example, "gang-bonding of young males and racial violence". | |
| 131 | "The previously existing modes of institutional governance has [RT: have?] not been replaced by market governance at all but instead by a deficit of governance, a deficit of socio-economic regulation." | |
| 132 | "The means of production of for example a new lower-class 'McDonalds proletarian', a garment sector worker, a house servant, a shopping mall employee are substantially less informational in content than, say, the CNC (computer numerically controlled) tools of the reflexive working class." | |
| Lash says the same people are not in with the info-world outside of work or at home either. [RT: but I think that's less true in 2014 than in 1994 - lots (at least in the West) have smartphones.] | ||
| 133 | [RT: It seems also, at the time Lash wrote this, that participation of women in the workforce was very low in Germany and Austria.] | |
| Cognitive, Aesthetic | 135 | Besides the 'economy' of Information & Communication, which is 'cognitive', there is that of the Aesthetic; its symbols are 'mimetic' rather than 'conceptual'. [RT: I.e., they don't 'represent' or 'stand for something'.] |
| "The ... aesthetic moment of reflexivity ... is very much in the tradition not of Enlightenment high modernity but of modernism in the arts." [RT: What should I read in to my distaste for most products of modern artistic endeavour?] | ||
| "It has, partly in the context of ethnicity and the issue of 'neo-tribalism', become transferred into a basis for a new, at the same time situated and contingent, ethics. This aesthetic dimension of reflexivity finally is the grounding principle of 'expressive individualism' in everyday life of contemporary consumer capitalism." [RT: Lash ascribed this to Gerhard Schulze - I wonder if Lash understood it any better than I do. If you read German, see also Erlebnisgesellschaft.] | ||
| 136 | "Nietzsche ... contended that mimesis provides greater access to the truth than conceptual thought." [RT: Some important value in that view.] | |
| "For Adorno ... aesthetic reflection involves not ultimate (as with conceptual) bu 'proximal' mediation. In Nietzsche's aesthetic, there is a blunt immediacy of the minmetic [RT: i.e., no mediation at all.]... In the absence of mediation, it is problematic to speak of reflexivity at all." Lash prefers Adorno's notion. | ||
| 138 | "The objects of the culture industries [RT: presumably cinema, television, pop music] are differently reflexive than (they) were in the earlier era of liberal capitalism ... they are mimetic in a far less mediated way." | |
| "For modes of signification to be less highly mediated (by the subject) is, at the same time, for them to be more highly motivated by the phenomenon which is represented." [RT: I can understand subjects being motivated, but modes?] | ||
| "The most proximally mediated, and and most highly motivated form of signification, is of course, 'signal'." [RT: No clear definition of 'signal' here, and I always suspect 'of course'. We have to assume he means the 'display' (of sounds, body language etc).] | ||
| 138-9 | "And the culture industries, especially television, signify increasingly like signal - in sports programmes, in the news, in 'live' crime and divorce shows, in talk shows, in immediate audience revelation programmes like 'Donahue' and 'Oprah Winfrey'." [RT: I wonder if that's because we mute the TV, or are doing other things as we watch. Sure, we don't 'construe the meaning' of most of the words we hear or read.] | |
| 139 | "Mainstream cultural studies have dismissed Adorno because of his rejection of popular culture's vulgarity." They say that Adorno "misses the point ... that popular culture can in fact serve not domination, but 'resistance'. | |
| But Lash says that Adorno's complaint was that pop culture "exemplified the ultimate mediation of the concept" and comes "under the sign of the commodity". [RT: I think this is a tortuous way of saying that pop culture is deliberately and cognitively manufactured for commercial purposes.] | ||
| Lash says Adorno preferred 'lowbrow' [RT: presumably natural, simple folk art and music]. | ||
| Adorno likened "the very proximal mimesis of the culture industries" to hieroglyphic writing (i.e., communicating meaning directly through pictures, not spoken or written language). But Lash thinks we are now losing that sort of immediacy. | ||
| 140 | "A theory of refelxivity only becomes a critical theory when it turns its reflection away from the experience of everyday life and instead onto 'system'. [RT: I would say that, like it or not, western people are 90% 'system' already.] | |
| Lash thinks B&G's reflexivity is not primarily critical, but "aimed at the transformation of tradition". [RT: maybe more useful than just slagging off the 'system'?] | ||
| Lash doesn't like B&G's concern with risk - he says it is just something that individuals take. [RT: I don't agree - there are shared risks.] | ||
| 141 | "The risk society is thus not so much about the distribution of 'bads' or dangers as about a mode of conduct centred on risk." | |
| In B&G, "a probabilistic calculative mode of regulation imparts narrativity to the life-course". [RT: Lash seems to be lamenting 'colonization' of "ever more regions of the life-world" by expert-systems, which are nowadays better armed with 'probability'.] | ||
| 141-2 | Zygmunt Bauman and Georg Simmel suggest that those who don't like this trend will prefer to be carefree gamblers who are happy to "live with contingency". [RT: It's true that many of us like to expose ourselves to a bit of 'serendipity' - but not all the time.] | |
| 142-3 | Lash dabbles with ideas from Bauman, e.g. "As 'id' it [RT: presumably the above] stands counterposed to 'ego' "; The idea is to construct an aestheticized ethics"; "No totalizing critical movement is possible after the Holocaust"; and "... an end to the ethics of judgment, the triumph of the aesthetic over judgment itself". [RT: All very wordy and hard to relate to everyday life.] | |
| I or We | 143 | Too much swing away from Kantian morality to "complex particularity of a given specific culture" might lead to "neo-tribalism". [RT: I.e., ditching the 'categorical imperative' is like throwing out the baby with the bath water.] |
| 144 | Lash thinks there "is a substantial deficit in any convincing notion of 'community', of the 'we' in these analyses" (he instances Bauman, Rorty et al). | |
| "A neglect of shared meanings ... is systematically integral to allegorical thinking" (he instances Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, Rorty and Bauman). | ||
| These all "presume a radical individualism", aesthetic not utilitarian, not of 'ego' but of "a heterogeneous contingent desire - which itself is hardly conducive to community." | ||
| It is impossible to have "any understanding of the 'we' under the star of aesthetic reflexivity". | ||
| "It may be necessary to reject the 'method' suggested by deconstruction, in favour of the 'truth' advocated by hermeneutics." [RT: whatever that means.] | ||
| We need to "evade the categories of agency and structure, subject and object, control versus contingency and conceptual versus mimetic", in order to reach "ontological foundations ... in habits, in background practices of cognitive and "aesthetic individualism". | ||
| 145 | "None of today's [RT: 1994?] ubiquitous and incessant deconstruction leads to any grasp of the 'we'." | |
| 146 | We need a "hermeneutics of retrieval" instead of "hermeneutics of suspicion" (i.e. the postmodernist approach), to try and "lay open the ontological foundations of communal 'being-in-the-world' ". | |
| 147 |
"The cultural studies model (e.g. John Fiske) resembles that of neo-classical economics, with 'producers' and 'consumers'." But this is pervasive "not only among professors but in everyday life, and would seem to be a reason why cultural communities are indeed very thin on the ground today." [RT: Lash seems to imply that we ought to revive them.] | |
| Dick Hebdige is different, and is interested in 'subcultures'. [RT: like Beck's 'sub-politics?] | ||
| Do people "throw themselves into the communal world of youth sub-culture"? | ||
| 147-8 | But Lash criticizes the idea of "resistance through rituals", because they are based on a 'bricolage' of signifiers from previous styles, instead of shared meanings (shared signifieds). [RT: But that's how it is, so Lash's nostalgia might be in vain.] | |
| 148 | Lash seems to be searching for a Heidiggerian - but communal - pre-cognitive state. He instances footballers in a team who don't have to 'translate' their colleagues' signs into meanings. [RT: But isn't this just a network of person to person body language communications?] | |
| "The movement to subject-object modes of thought takes place only with the breakdown of shared practices and shared meanings of the 'we'." | ||
| 148-9 | Habermas wants to promote this through his 'communicative action', alias "transcendental intersubjectivity", in order to "roll back the claims of 'system' and expand the space of the life-world". | |
| 149 | "Everyday activities in the 'we' are involved in the routine achievement of meaning." | |
| 150-1 |
Does conversation consist mostly of 'speech acts, 'utterances', 'validity claims', "attempts to establish or overturn positions of power" - which are "recursively redeemable"? [RT: I think he means subject to subsequent discussion. It seems that Lash is against this in the 'we', and thinks it should be more natural, without signs and meanings being separated.] | |
| 151 | Both Habermas and Giddens "assume an abstract or 'transcendental' subject-subject relation as a starting point"; Lash sees the 'redeeming' or discussion as a type of expert-system. | |
| "It is only with the breakdown of shared meanings that human beings become 'subjects' for one another. This is where the expert-systems, (alias) 'legitimating discourses' come in ... to repair the breakdown." | ||
| "But when the expert-systems and discourses chronically intervene, when they intervene 'preventively' and pervasively, then the practices, shared meanings and community become increasingly marginalized." [RT: And the football team loses its flow because it is too self-conscious - or too reflective?] | ||
| 152 | Lash likes Charles Taylor's line that "reflexivity lies not in the subject, nor the self, but instead in the sources of the self. It is that reflexivity must be present in the background [practices, in the 'ever-already-there' of the world into which the self is thrown." | |
| However he says Taylor lacks "a communitarian (hermeneutic) source of the self", so his line can't lead to a source of the 'we'. | ||
| 154 | Lash is intrigued by Pierre Bourdieu's "reflexivity in terms of the systematic uncovering of the unthought categories which themselves are preconditions of our more self-conscious practices". | |
| 155 | Bourdieu's categories are 'taste' categories, but apply to "the whole range of our most immediate habits and practices". [RT: But nowadays, these are a much-reduced % of our total life concerns.] | |
| The 'schemata' of Bourdieu's categories are 'unmediated' [RT: I would have said 'proximal'] 'predispositions' and 'orientations', like "the learned, yet unthought, techniques of the body - such as swimming, ways of walking, playing tennis ..." [RT: This is 'bottom up' ontology!] | ||
| 156 | Bourdieu's 'Habitus' is the language of ongoing activities. [Wikipedia calls it 'feel for the game'.] Lash sees this as getting into the area of anthropology. | |
| "In both cognitive and aesthetic reflexivity, a subject is presumed, outside of a world, (and) for whom the world is (conceptually or mimetically) mediated." | ||
| "Reflexive anthropology entails breaking with the objectivism ..." | ||
| "Reflexive human science depends on the emergence of a translation between our schemata and those of our respondents." [RT: We have usually picked up a lot of cognitive and aesthetic stuff before we try to translate, and there's usually discourse needed to check that we both mean the same thing.] | ||
| [RT: I think Lash's overall point concerns where we start our reflection from.] | ||
| Conclu | 157 | Lash's view of 'community' is limited to the bottom-up sort, a 'we' that builds up though people being thrown in or joining voluntarily. |
| -sions | 157-60 | Most of what we call 'communities' are "interest groups". [RT: 'collectivities' is a term used by other authors.] |
| 158-9 | Lash offers an excellent summary table of his viewpoint (see separate page). | |
| 160 | "Lifestyle enclaves" (also not communities) arise from 7 possible trends after consumption is "disembedded from the guidance of communal mores" and is individualized. 1) stay individual; 2) grouped due to marketing information and communication; 3) one-upmanship, keeping up with the Joneses; 4) romanticized; 5) geared to 'needs'; 6) geared to 'spectacle' and 'sign-value'; and 7) 'calculating hedonism'. | |
| 160-1 | But some communities may form, e.g. Berlin's Winterfeldplatz on Saturday nights/Sunday mornings, cores of fan groups or football supporters. [RT: What about the Liverpool Homebaked Cooperative? (my niece is involved).] | |
| 162 | There can be some 'diasporic' communities, e.g. expats or exiles in the same foreign city. [RT: These are not always healthy for the host society.] | |
| Lash asks, is such "reflexive community possible in our time-space distanced societies, in which meaning is by definition emptied out"? [RT: I'd say there is plenty of meaning left, maybe not of Lash's 'we' sort though.] | ||
| 162-3 | Could the "transcendental expressive inter-subjectivity of the love relationship, characterized by intensified semantic interchange ..." get us back on track? [RT: It sounds a bit like St Paul.] | |
| 163 | Maybe such relationships are "inherently unstable", and " 'cocooned' from the wider community". | |
| They might lead to "intersubjective solipsism", rather than Aristotle's sort of friendship, which included the wider community [RT: but that was a very exclusive one]. | ||
| "Perhaps in various subcultures, in various practices that we reflexively commit ourselves to, the meaning is already there, already inscribed in the practices." | ||
| 163-4 | "Is the 'self' possible in the context of a genuine communitarianism?" MacIntyre seems to "lose the self in a Thomist absorption in the communal practice. | |
| 164 | Charles Taylor "seems overly to assimilate the community to the self". | |
| "What is needed is a notion of involvement in communal practices out of which the self grows." | ||
| Or, "a situated ethics grounded in care" (Seyla Benhabib) - similar to Heidegger's care (Sorge). | ||
| 165 |
"There are 3 very important sources of the contemporary self, ...cognitive, aesthetic and hermeneutic communitarian 'moments'. And these exist in us in an often contradictory and irreconcilable way. I don't imagine that this can be remedied a great deal, and am not certain that it should be." [RT: I'd say it should definitely not be, but maybe re-balanced.] | |
| 166 | The core of Bourdieu's 'hermeneutics of retrieval' "is not consensus but power". His "frameworks of classes and class fractions" are "struggling for hegemony", but this is in the field of 'habits'. | |
| 167 | "Specialist fields ... now no longer either dominate or liberate the masses, ... they are the masses." [RT: maybe we are all specialists in something.] | |
| "The sociologist, previously the objective student of the masses, (is) in just another expert-system alongside" (the rest of us). | ||
| 168 | We should "ask ourselves if it is perhaps not also we [RT: sociologists?] who are the neo-tribes". | |
| Beck reaction & comments | 174-5 |
Beck has 4 questions: 1) What's the subject of RM? Ordinary people? Individuals, collective agents, scientists (including sociologists) (Lash)? Or institutions, organizations, 'systems' (Giddens)? 2) What's the medium of RM? Knowledge, or "non-knowledge, inherent dynamism, the unseen and the unwilled"? 3) What are the consequences of RM? Individualization (Beck), disembedding/re-embedding (Giddens) or aestheticization and community formation (Lash)? 4) What's the motor of RM? Not a new modernity, but one that is reflexive and global. |
| 175 | "We are living in the age of side-effects." | |
| Fichte likened reflection to "seeing with an added eye". | ||
| 175-6 | Bourdieu is between consciousness and non-consciousness - his reflexivity is "systematic reflection on the unconscious presuppositions (categories) of our knowledge". | |
| 176 | Lash "misses the central distinction between reflection (knowledge) and reflexivity (unintentional self-dissolution or self-adjustment)". He is only looking at reflection. | |
| Reflexivity (in this sense) "can quite well take place without reflection, beyond knowledge and consciousness". [RT: like knee-jerk reaction?] | ||
| 177 | The optimism that mere reflection will cure our ills "is not shared by the theory of reflexivity; neither does it share the pessimism of (e.g.) Adorno and Horkheimer". | |
| 178 | "Reflexivity of modernity is tantamount then to the prognosis of difficult-to-resolve value conflicts on the foundations for the future." | |
| "The 'communitarians' assert and elaborate the thesis of the loss of community (often with the nostalgic accent characteristic of cultural pessimism)." [RT: sounds like Lash!] | ||
| 179 | Classical sociology overstresses the "two-world theory of individual and system, organization and private life-world as [if they are] autonomous of one another". | |
| "This preordained harmony of control is of course the fairy tale, the innocent faith, of the sociology of simple modernization." But all 3 authors do break with that. | ||
| The newly-discovered reality, "distributional struggle over 'bads' rather than 'goods', interacts with the old conflict in confusing and contradictory ways". | ||
| We see "alternation between news of pollution and unemployment". | ||
| 180 | There is similar insecurity over the roles of men and women. | |
| "The possibility of intended and unintended collective suicide is in fact a historical novelty which blows apart all moral, political and social concepts - even that of 'side-effect'." | ||
| Classical sociology talks about 'externalizability' [RT: i.e. leaving the environment out of the equation as 'external'], but that's a sad joke. | ||
| 181 | "Only the metaphysics of the system can protect the differentiated subsystems against the reflexive action of the self-endangerments (that) they (the subsystems) provoke." [RT: implying that Lash's 'back to community' won't help much.] | |
| 182 | We have gone beyond the "calculus of risk and insurance". | |
| The 'shocks' (e.g. uninsurability) are "either grist for the mills of neo-naturalism and neo-fascism (i.e. ... reaching for the old rigidities as certainties disappear), or ... a reformulation of the objectives and foundations of Western industrial societies". | ||
| Bauman said that we should reach a "homeland of incompleteness". | ||
| 182-3 |
Beck's conclusions: 1) theories about large groups aren't the same as ones about individuals; 2) we can't leave spheres of action as autonomous when they need to be coordinated; 3) faith in linear, perpetual modernization needs to be replaced by "images of self-modification, self-endangerment and self-dissolution of the foundations of rationality; 4) the motive force of social change will be the side-effect; and 5) there are many dimensions besides 'left-right', which need thinking through. | |
| Giddens | 185 | There's nothing really new, "rather the origins of unpredictability have changed. Many (of them have been) created by the very growth of human knowledge. |
| reaction & | Giddens favours "institutional reflexivity" over RM which, he feels, seems "to imply a sort of 'completion' of modernity". | |
| comments | "There are no longer clear paths of development leading from one state of affairs to another." [RT: why the surprise? There never were, despite Marxist historicism.] | |
| Despite "arcane disputes of philosophy, lay actors ... cope." | ||
| Science, too, is no longer sealed off from lay persons. | ||
| 186 | "All kinds of cult, folk knowledge and traditional orientations return to claim some hegemony alongside the realms of orthodox science." These tensions are 'disruptive'. | |
| "This society, nevertheless, is not only a risk society." But, it is one where mechanisms of trust shift, and have to be 'active' - also (p187) trust has to be "won and actively sustained". | ||
| 186-7 | Emotional relations between people thousands of miles apart are something new, and the "old dichotomy between 'community' and 'association' doesn't capture this. | |
| 188 | "The more the demand to 'make one's own life' becomes acute, the more material poverty becomes a double discrimination." | |
| "This very assertion of autonomy (i.e. women actively leaving marriages) has the consequence of plunging many women, as heads of households, into poverty." | ||
| 189 | "Whatever, what used to be settled by 'nature', whether this be the 'environment' or tradition, becomes a matter of decision-making." | |
| 190 | "I take fundamentalism to mean not a 'return to the past' or 'an insistence upon first principles', but a defence of the formulaic truth of tradition." | |
| "Dangerous as they may sometimes be, fundamentalisms need to be listened to by those whom they do not persuade." | ||
| "Conservatism has ... become a mélange of emancipatory impulses [RT: like free markets] and fundamentalisms." | ||
| 191 | "The construction of democratic forms of government is a complex and necessarily protracted process." | |
| 192 | Giddens prefers a 'sturdy plant' view of democracy to the 'fragile flower' one. | |
| 193 | "Expertize has to be demonopolized." | |
| "We see the potential emergence of 'emotional democracy' " (e.g. man - woman). | ||
| 194 | "Self-help groups are in some respects both more interesting and influential..." (than social movements). | |
| "The cybernetic model of social regulation is dead." | ||
| 194-5 | "What might come into being on the other side of capitalism is not socialism ...(but) a post-scarcity order ... (where) the drive to continuous accumulation (of wealth, goods) has become weakened or dissolved." | |
| 195 | This might reduce the gender-typing of men not showing emotion while women are specialists in it. | |
| 196 | There might also be realization that more economic growth might not be desirable, e.g. impossibly crowded streets. | |
| "When we think of the global polity, it is no good any longer envisaging some kind of gigantic redistributive welfare state." | ||
| "The affluent have a great deal to learn from the poor, and the West from other cultures which in the past it has simply threatened with extinction." | ||
| 197 | Giddens is not really sure that there is such a thing as 'aesthetic reflexivity'. He doesn't buy Lash's view that "there is an entire other economy of signs in space" that functions separately from 'cognitive symbols'. His own idea of 'institutional reflexivity' isn't "just cognitive". | |
| "Signs, no matter how wholly non-verbal, never relate to one another ... (except) through human mediation." | ||
| In the familiar Saussurean route, the 'economy of signs' simply discloses what is in any case basic to all language: the creation of meaning from non-meaning by the play of difference." | ||
| Giddens thinks differently to the above. "Language has meaning only because of the indexical properties of its use." [RT: sounds a bit like Wittgenstein.] | ||
| "No signs exist without narrative, even those that appear to be wholly iconic." | ||
| Current aesthetic reflection, Giddens thinks, has "been developed in such a way as to subvert, or place in question, the very narrative forms that it presumes" [RT: sounds like he is talking about 'over-the-top' deconstruction.]. | ||
| Lash reaction & | 199 | Lash's quibble with B&G is that their analysis, though good, is only 'partial', because of "a scientistic character of their assumptions". He wants to include parallel 'culturalist' and 'hermeneutic' analyses. |
| comments | "At the 'culturalist' end of the spectrum stand such unlikely bedfellows as Mary Douglas and Jacques Derrida, who reduce the social to the cultural and deconstruct the distinction between tradition and modernity." | |
| "More towards the middle ... Foucault or Bauman ... do work from the distinction of tradition and modernity, ... understand the distinction of cultural and social ... but for whom expert-systems are at their best normalizing discourses, at their worst the political institutions of the Third Reich." | ||
| 200 | "The attunement or attitude of everyday life in reflexive modernity is as importantly cultural/hermeneutic as it is cognitive or scientisitc." [RT: this seems to be just an assertion, and maybe it's even less true in 2014 than it was in 1994.] | |
| Lash says that his contribution to this book addressed 'reflexive communities', where B&G addressed 'institutional reflexivity'. | ||
| " 'Reflexivity' is like a 'reflex'. It is neither individualistic [RT: surely it can be!] nor conscious nor intentional." | ||
| 201 | "There is little room in this" (i.e. B&G's ideas) ... for the "participatory democracy' of informal everyday lay politics and social movements". [RT: I would have thought that Beck's sub-politics covered this. How is Lash's concept different? Does he think it can be 'system-free'?] | |
| 202 | Some post-traditional "persisting practices" are really 'compulsions' - "they depend on formulaic truths and repetition, but they are shorn of the integrity of the framework of tradition and are unconnected to collective memory". | |
| 203 | Examples of compulsions are alcoholism, drug addiction, even some political discourse, and "contemporary nationalism, speaking the language of 'them and us' ..." | |
| Institutional reflexivity helps "democratically validated expert knowledge" to "disembed traditional meanings". [RT: mostly a good thing?] | ||
| Giddens' 'pure relationship' is not "the traditional situatedness in - and commitment to - the community ... but instead intimate mutual disclosure and 'growth' ". | ||
| 204 |
'Abstract systems' that get involved in Giddens' 'pure relationships' "might be destructive of meaning, intimacy, intense semantic interchange, and emotional sharing and understanding which are central to late modern emotional relationships". [RT: Sure, there's a downside, but they probably add more value than they take away.] | |
| Lash thinks that 'hermeneutic truth' [RT: presumably the same as 'disclosive truth' in his table] "plays ... an equally or more important role" than formulaic or propositional truth". [RT: maybe in his 'communities', but not for most people in the West today.] | ||
| (Hermeneutic truth) is a "web of shared assumptions and pre-understandings". | ||
| 205 | Lash is worried about "the disruption of the hermeneutic truths of the care relationship between lovers, between parent and child ..." | |
| 206 |
Lash doesn't like "the very mediatedness and contractuality which informs Giddens' notion of 'active trust' ". Instead, he wants the "co-creation of a collective habitus". [RT: Sure, that is needed between lovers, or between parent and child. But in the everyday life as most of us in the West know it, where systems are inevitably involved, Lash's 'collective habitus' isn't adequate.] | |
| 207 | Lash prefers to talk of "emotionalization of democracy" rather than Giddens' "democratization of the emotions". [RT: But I think these are separate issues.] | |
| "Institutions are becoming more cultural in character", (presumably) because they incorporate "social construction of reality". | ||
| "Social scientists such as Stuart Clegg have introduced 'actor-network theory' into this context, to reconstitute a Foucauldian theory of power, in which structures are replaced by actor-networks ... forming coalitions in the construction and determination of truth." [RT: This can happen, but while some structures are dominated by actors, others are not, and there is a spectrum between the extremes.] | ||
| 208 |
Hermann Schwengel "argues that only in very late modernity [RT: i.e. very recently in 'advanced' societies in1994 terms] has a cultural sphere fully and finally differentiated off from social, political and economic life. Only now is there full-value pluralism [RT: none in the RC church!], only now is the possibility of genuine multiculturalism". | |
| "Institutional reflexivity must be understood to embrace the way in which institutions reflect upon, contest and construct the very 'semantic horizons' on which they are based." | ||
| 209 | "I think that the institutions of art, including critics, museums, DJs, record shops and cinemas, have been central in the legitimation and distribution of such postmodern cultural artefacts [RT: like what?] - and that both institutions and artefacts are attuned to the sensibility of the lay population in RM." | |
| "An increasing proportion of our social interactions and communicative interchanges are going on external to institutions." | ||
| To his mind, inter-organizational exchanges imply 'disorganization' of contemporary capitalism. [RT: From my own experience, I see it as a natural trend that is by no means new.] | ||
| Helmut Berking "speaks of the disengagement of our affective, cognitive and social competencies from the normative expectation of organizations, and their re-engagement in the closest affinity groups of 'morally overheated' lifestyle communities". [RT: Some people do this, many others do not.] | ||
| Lash wants to call these 'communities' [RT: rather than 'collectivities', but I don't think this quite matches what he said earlier in the book. Only a few 'lifestyle communities, like his example in Berlin, would seem to qualify.] | ||
| 210 | "Knowledge thus becomes a co-production, a 'dialogic' (James Clifford rather than Habermas) process of creating common universes of meaning." | |
| "It (Berking's sensibility) is "not so much a matter of 'man' and the environment, but the systematic balance of ecology and social ecology". [It was emphasized earlier on that 'nature' isn't 'external' any more. And what about threats of ecological calamity?] | ||
| 211 | "Who puts the ecological questions on the agenda?" Klaus Eder's research suggests it is the protest movements. [RT: It might also be the academics and researchers who need to justify their budgets.] | |
| 212 | We all know about the 'genealogy' of cognitive modernity. Lash cites the following for aesthetic modernity: Romanticism, the young Hegel, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Simmel, Surrealism, Benjamin, Adorno, Heidegger, Schütz, Gadamer, Foucault, Derrida - and (today) Bauman. | |
| 213 | If Giddens' ideas are 'late modernity', then the parallel aesthetic version is what many others want to understand as postmodernity. But both are part of RM. | |
| Lash thinks B&G's "notions of ambivalence and experiment come largely from scientific ideas of indeterminacy, and the unintended consequences of the interventions of science. This is insufficient. In everyday life I expect that such a sensitivity derives a lot more from the aesthetic or hermeneutic sensibility". [RT: 'everyday life' includes work time, home time and leisure time.] | ||
| "These information and communication structures, which stretch over broad areas of space and compress time, contain not just informational signs but also images, narratives and sounds - that is, aesthetic or hermeneutic signs." [RT: Giddens would not separate these; as he said, even the most non-verbal signs can contain information and require mediation.] | ||
| 213-4 | "We live in a literally 'disorganizing' capitalism in the sense, not so much of institutional reflexivity, but the 'end' - or more modestly the decline - of institutions and organizations." [RT: I think this is Lash's daydream - 20 years on there is little sign of it.] | |
| 214 | "In public space more impersonal, less effectively invested exchanges are increasingly extra-institutional." | |
| 215 | "Cultural theory is often useless in addressing issues of everyday life and of politics." Social theory can do a better job. [RT: Has it done so?] | |
| "But I must ... urge that such participation (in the study of RM) be at an oblique, interpretive and very critical distance." [RT: I disagree. While some detachment may be good, the idea that one can comment from the ivory towers of academia doesn't wash. I prefer people like Beck and Giddens, who get involved.] |
I apologize, but these are going to be longer than is usual in my 'highlights'.
Writing about modernization, modernism or modernity carries an ongoing problem. 'Modern' is always in comparison to some 'ancient', and this is specific to the time of writing. Tacking on prefixes like 'post-', 'high' and 'late' is futile - it condemns the writings to meaninglessness in 50 years or less.
It's like the 'developing' as in 'developing nations' - all nations develop all of the time, but have 'spurts' and periods of consolidation - maybe even of decline. 'Modernization' may mean little more than 'development', when economy, society and culture are all considered.
Most of the time in this book, 'modernization' seems to mean 'capitalist (including state capitalist) industrialization and systematization'.
It's certainly true that, nowadays, we reflect (cognitively) more about whether our current directions of development are all good, or whether they carry risks and obvious downsides. But Beck distinguishes 'reflexive' from 'reflective'. Reflexive, both he and Lash say, is like a 'reflex' - such as a knee-jerk reaction. It is less reasoned, more like a 'feeling'. This may lead to the forming of interest groups of 'un-thought-out' opposition. But these are most effective if they lead on to practical ideas of how we can better control the 'runaway horses' of scientific and technical progress, capitalism, institutionalization and globalization.
In this context, Beck points to a change in the balance between 'politics' (the hierarchies of government and institutional action) and 'sub-politics' (bottom-up action from groups that form to oppose). Maybe 'Greenpeace' and 'bikie gangs' are examples.
Beck's other important point is that we are now living in a 'risk' society - where even calculated probabilities and insurance may fail to protect us from unenvisaged catastrophes.
Giddens' theme is a 'post-traditional society'. However 'traditional' is a bit like the 'ancient' I refer to above - it's whatever 'was the done thing' before. All the writers primarily think of 'pre-industrial' traditions, but one can envisage tribal traditions in earlier times, and 'Victorian' (e.g. nuclear family values, school, workplace and military hierarchy) traditions in later times.
He makes the point is that we can no longer take 'trust' informally, as we might have done in a traditional society, where we trusted our family, our leaders and our religious orthodoxy. We have to go for 'active trust', something we have to consciously create, build up and maintain. We don't trust 'experts' automatically, especially when they disagree among themselves.
He also takes the line that a lot of the 'modernity' of the time (pre-1994, but still true in 2014) is embedded in 'institutions'. Therefore, he says, the focus should be mainly on 'institutional reflexivity'. And it does strike me that it is 'institutions' that have the biggest need to do be reflexive. There is tendency for an institution to regard its current ethos as fixed - not to mention the leaders wanting to hang on to their perks.
Lash has some good ideas, but he rather spoils these by being too wedded to 'critical theory'. His version of this is not that of the Frankfurt School, or even Habermas, but one where the antidote to capitalism is not Marx but a revival of 'communities' where aesthetics, and the interpretation (hermeneutics)of events according to bottom-up established customs (habitus), have priority over reflective thought (cognitive) and institutions and established patterns of action (expert-systems).
He is also determined to keep the cognitive, the aesthetic and the hermeneutic as separate 'threads', and berates Beck and Giddens for not doing the same. For myself, it seems better to envisage a spectrum of 'mediation'. At one end of this spectrum is Heideggerian 'being-in-the-world', where we do things with minimum mediation (our senses and our learned reflexes and categories). At the other end is rational thought, science-style hypothesis formation, consideration of probabilities, understanding of peoples' motivations etc.
Aesthetics comes somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. 'Letting the artefact speak to you' is less mediated, discussing artistic merit is much more mediated. 'Aesthetic reflexivity' would seem to be nearer the former. It doesn't seem clear what 'aesthetic modernity' is. Modern art? 12-tone music? Pop music or art? And these days, one cannot easily separate out the commercial element; art galleries, record shops and concerts alike have to be run economically.
Lash expresses the view that institutions, as well as systems, are on the decline or even on the way out. Capitalism, he says, is 'disorganized' - although I would say 'evolving in the direction of more inter-enterprise and public-private ventures'. He is right to say that a lot more discourse these days takes place outside existing 'institutions', but this is often through new interest groups, and it still depends heavily on computers, information systems and human mediation.
I feel that Beck and Giddens are more oriented to reality and genuine problems of modernization than Lash is. Beck instances ecological risks and Giddens those of institutions and trust. I don't see many signs in the last 20 years of a significant surge of Lash's 'communities' . Most of the problems of modernity, while maybe recognized reflexively from a less-mediated culture, still have to be addressed from a more-mediated one, with the best data and probability estimates we can come up with.
I rather think that some issues in this book might be analyzed differently in 2014 than in 1994, when the Internet and mobile phones were just getting going, and there were no Facebook, Twitter or smartphones.
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 29th January 2014
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .