American Sociological Association (Essay)

Modernity and Self-Identity

Self and Society in the Late Modern Age

Anthony Giddens

Polity

Introduction

The question of modernity, its past development and current institutional forms, has reappeared as a fundamental sociological problem at the turn of the twenty-first century. The connections between sociology and the emergence of modern institutions have long been recognised. Yet in the present day, we see not only that these connections are more complex and problematic than was previously re(ilised, but that a rethinking of the nature of modernity must go hand in hand with a reworking of basic premises of sociological analysis.

Modern institutions differ from all preceding forms of social order in respect of their dynamism, the degree to which they undercut traditional habits and customs, and their global impact. However, these are not only extensional transformations: mod­ ernity radically alters the nature of day-to-day social life and affects the most personal aspects of our experience. Modernity must be understood on an institutional level; yet the transmuta­ tions introduced by modern institutions interlace in a direct way with individual life and therefore with the self. One of the distinctive features of modernity, in fact, is an increasing inter­ connection between the two 'extremes' of extensionality and intentionality: globalising influences on the one hand and per­ sonal dispositions on the other. The aim of this book is to analyse the nature of these interconnections and to provide a conceptual vocabulary for thinking about them. In this introductory discus­ sion, I shall try to provide an overview and summary version ofl the themes of the study as a whole. I hope the reader will tolerate. the slight elements of repetition which this strategy produces.

Although its main focus is on the self, this is not primarily a

2 Introduction

work of psychology. The overriding stress of the book is upon the emergence of new mechanisms of self-identity which are shaped by - yet also shape - the institutions of modernity. The self is not a passive entity, determined by external influences; in forging their self-identities, no matter how local their specific contexts of action, individuals contribute to and directly promote social influences that are global in their consequences and implications.

Sociology, and the social sciences more widely conceived, are inherent elements of the institutional reflexivity of modernity - a phenomenon fundamental to the discussion in this book. Not just academic studies, but all manner of manuals, guides, therapeutic works and self-help surveys contribute to modernity's reflexivity. On several occasions, therefore, I make fairly extensive reference to social research and practical 'guides to living', not as a means of documenting a definite subject-matter, but as symptomatic of social phenomena or trends of development I seek to identify. These are not just works 'about' social processes, but materials which in some part constitute them.

In general, the focus of this book is analytical rather than descriptive and at some key junctures relies on ideal-typical procedures in order to substantiate its points. I try to identify some structuring features at the core of modernity which interact with the reflexivity of the self: but I do not discuss in any detail how far some of the processes mentioned have proceeded in specific contexts, or what exceptions and countertrends to them exist.

The opening chapter sketches out a framework for the whole of the study. Taking as illustrative a specific piece of social research, it provides an appraisal of key aspects of modernity's develop­ ment. Besides its institutional reflexivity, modern social life is characterised by profound processes of the reorganisation of time and space, coupled to the expansion of disembedding mechan­ isms - mechanisms which prise social relations free from the hold of specific locales, recombining them across wide time-space distances. The reorganisation of time and space, plus the dis­ embedding mechanisms, radicalise and globalise pre-established institutional traits of modernity; and they act to transform the content and nature of day-to-day social life.

Modernity is a post-traditional order, but not one in which the sureties of tradition and habit have been replaced by the certitude

Introduction 3

of rational knowledge. Doubt, a pervasive feature of modern critical reason, permeates into everyday life as well as philosophi­ cal consciousness, and forms a general existential dimension of the contemporary social world. Modernity institutionalises the principle of radical doubt and insists that all knowledge takes the form of hypotheses: claims which may very well be true, but which are in principle always open to revision and may have at some point to be abandoned. Systems of accumulated expertise­ which form important disembedding influences - represent multi­ ple sources of authority, frequently internally contested and divergent in their implications. In the settings of what I call 'high' or 'late' modernity - our present-day world - the self, like the broader institutional contexts in which it exists, has to be re­ flexively made. Yet this task has to be accomplished amid a puzzling diversity of options and possibilities.

In circumstances of uncertainty and multiple choice, the notions of trust and risk have particular application. Trust, I argue, is a crucial generic phenomenon of personality develop­ ment as well as having distinctive and specific relevance to a world of disembedding mechanisms and abstract systems. In its generic manifestations, trust is directly linked to achieving an early sense of ontological security. Trust established between an infant and its caretakers provides an 'inoculation' which screens off potential threats and dangers that even the most mundane activities of day-to-day life contain. Trust in this sense is basic to a 'protective cocoon' which stands guard over the self in its dealings with everyday reality. It 'brackets out' potential occurrences which, were the individual seriously to contemplate them, would produce a paralysis of the will, or feelings of engulfment. In its more specific guise, trust is a medium of interaction with the abstract systems which both empty day-to-day life of its traditio­ nal content and set up globalising influences. Trust here generates that 'leap into faith' which practical engagement demands.

Modernity is a risk culture. I do not mean by this that social life is inherently more risky than it used to be; for most people in the developed societies that is not the case. Rather, the concept of risk becomes fundamental to the way both lay actors and techni­ cal specialists organise the social world. Under conditions of modernity, the future is continually drawn into the present by means of the reflexive organisation of knowledge environments.

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4 Introduction

A territory, as it were, is carved out and colonised. Yet such colonisation by its very nature cannot be complete: thinking in terms of risk is vital to assessing how far projects are likely to diverge from their anticipated outcomes. Risk assessment invites precision, and even quantification, but by its nature is imperfect. Given the mobile character of modern institutions, coupled to the mutable and frequently controversial nature of abstract systems, most forms of risk assessment, in fact, contain numerous impon­ derables.

Modernity reduces the overall riskiness of certain areas and modes of life, yet at the same time introduces new risk para­ meters largely or completely unknown to previous eras. These parameters include high-consequence risks: risks deriving from the globalised character of the social $ystems of modernity. The late modern world - the world of what I term high modernity - is apocalyptic, not because it is inevitably heading towards calam­ ity, but because it introduces risks which previous generations have not had to face. However much there is progress towards international negotiation and control of armaments, so long as nuclear weapons remain, or even the knowledge necessary to build them, and so long as science and technology continue to be involved with the creation of novel weaponry, the risk of mas­ sively destructive warfare will persist. Now that nature, as a phenomenon external to social life, has in a certain sense come to an 'end' - as a result of its domination by human beings - the risks of ecological catastrophe form an inevitable part of our horizon of day-to-day life. Other high-consequence risks, such as the col­ lapse of global economic mechanisms, or the rise of totalitarian superstates, are an equally unavoidable part of our contemporary experience.

In high modernity, the influence of distant happenings on proximate events, and on intimacies of the self, becomes more and more commonplace. The media, printed and electronic, obviously playa central role in this respect. Mediated experience, since the first experience of writing, has long influenced both self­ identity and the basic organisation of social relations. With the development of mass communication, particularly electronic communication, the interpenetration of self-development and social systems, up to and including global systems, becomes ever more pronounced. The 'world' in which we now live is in some

Introduction 5

profound respects thus quite distinct from that inhabited by human beings in previous periods of history. It is in many ways a single world, having a unitary framework of experience (for instance, in respect of basic axes of time and space), yet at the same time one which creates new forms of fragmentation and dispersal. A universe of social activity in which electronic media have a central and constitutive role, nevertheless, is not one of 'hyperreality', in Baudrillard's sense. Such an idea confuses the pervasive impact of mediated experience with the internal referentiality of the social systems of modernity - the fact that these systems become largely autonomous and determined by their own constitutive influences.

In the post-traditional order of modernity, and against the backdrop of new forms of mediated experience, self-identity becomes a reflexively organised endeavour. The reflexive project of the self, which consists in the sustaining of coherent, yet continuously revised, biographical narratives, takes place in the context of multiple choice as filtered through abstract systems. In modern social life, the notion of lifestyle takes on a particular significance. The more tradition loses its hold, and the more daily life is reconstituted in terms of the dialectical interplay of the local and the global, the more individuals are forced to negotiate lifestyle choices among a diversity of options. Of course, there are standardising influences too - most notably, in the form of commodification, since capitalistic production and distribution form core components of modernity's institutions. Yet because of the 'openness' of social life today, the pluralisation of contexts of action and the diversity of 'authorities', lifestyle choice is increas­ ingly important in the constitution of self·identity and daily activity. Reflexively organised life-planning, which normally pre­ sumes consideration of risks as filtered through contact with expert knowledge, becomes a central feature of the structuring of self-identity.

A possible misunderstanding about lifestyle as it interconnects with life-planning should be cleared up right at the beginning. Partly because the term has been taken up in advertising and other sources promoting commodified consumption, one might imagine that 'lifestyle' refers only to the pursuits of the more affluent groups or classes. The poor are more or less completely excluded from the possibility of making lifestyle choices. In some

6 Introduction

substantial part this is true. Issues of class and inequality, within states and on a world-wide level, closely mesh with the arguments of this book, although I do not try to document those inequalities here. Indeed, class divisions and other fundamental lines of inequality, such as those connected with gender or ethnicity, can be partly defined in terms of differential access to forms of self­ actualisation and empowerment discussed in what follows. Mod­ ernity, one should not forget, produces difference, exclusion and marginalisation. Holding out the possibility of emancipation, modern institutions at the same time create mechanisms of sup­ pression, rather than actualisation, of self. Yet it would be a major error to suppose that the phenomena analysed in the book are confined in their impact to those in more privileged material circumstances. 'Lifestyle' refers also to decisions taken and courses of action followed under conditions of severe material constraint; such lifestyle patterns may sometimes also involve the more or less deliberate rejection of more widely diffused forms of behaviour and consumption.

At one pole of the interaction between the local and the global stands what I call the 'transformation of intimacy'. Intimacy has its own reflexivity and its own forms of internally referential order. Of key importance here is the emergence of the 'pure relationship' as prototypical of the new spheres of personal life. A pure relationship is one in which external criteria have become dissolved: the relationship exists solely for whatever rewards that relationship as such can deliver. In the context of the pure relationship, trust can be mobilised only by a process of mutual disclosure. Trust, in other words, can by definition no longer be anchored in criteria outside the relationship itself - such as criteria of kinship, social duty or traditional obligation. Like self­ identity, with which it is closely intertwined, the pure relationship has to be reflexively controlled over the long term, against the backdrop of external transitions and transformations.

Pure relationships presuppose 'commitment', which is a parti­ cular species of trust. Commitment in turn has to be understood as a phenomenon of the internally referential system: it is a commitment to the relationship as such, as well as to the other person or persons involved. The demand for intimacy is integral to the pure relationship, as a result of the mechanisms of trust which it presumes. It is hence a mistake to see the contemporary

Introduction 7

'search for intimacy', as many social commentators have done, only as a negative reaction to a wider, more impersonal social universe. Absorption within pure relationships certainly may often be a mode of defence against an enveloping outside world: but such relationships are thoroughly permeated by mediated influences coming from large-scale social systems, and usually actively organise those influences within the sphere of such rela­ tionships. In general, whether in personal life or in broader social milieux, processes of reappropriation and empowerment inter­ twine with expropriation and loss.

In such processes many different connections between indi­ vidual experience and abstract systems can be found. 'Reskilling' - the reacquisition of knowledge and skills - whether in respect of intimacies of personal life Or wider social involvements, is a pervasive reaction to the expropriating effects of abstract sys­ tems. It is situationally variable, and also tends to respond to specific requirements of context. Individuals are likely to reskill themselves in greater depth where consequential transitions in their lives are concerned or fateful decisions are to be made. Reskilling, however, is always partial and liable to be affected by the 'revisable' nature of expert knowledge and by internal dissen­ sions between experts. Attitudes of trust, as well as more pragma­ tic acceptance, scepticism, rejection and withdrawal, uneasily coexist in the social space linking individual activities and expert systems. Lay attitudes towards science, technology and other esoteric forms of expertise, in the age of high modernity, tend to express the same mixed attitudes of reverence and reserve, approval and disquiet, enthusiasm and antipathy, which philo­ sophers and social analysts (themselves experts of sorts) express in their writings.

The reflexivity of the self, in conjunction with the influence of abstract systems, pervasively affects the body as well as psychic processes. The body is less and less an extrinsic 'given', function­ ing outside the internally referential systems of modernity, but becomes itself reflexively mobilized. What might appear as a wholesale movement towards the narcissistic cultivation of bodily appearance is in fact an expression of a concern lying much deeper actively to 'construct' and control the body. Here there is an integral connection between bodily development and lifestyle - manifest, for example, in the pursuit of specific bodily regimes.

I 8 Introduction

Yet much more wide-ranging factors are important, too, as a reflection of the socialising of biological mechanisms and proces­ ses. In the spheres of biological reproduction, genetic engineering and medical interventions of many sorts, the body is becoming a phenomenon of choices and options. These do not affect the individual alone: there are close connections between personal aspects of bodily development and global factors. Reproductive technologies and genetic engineering, for example, are parts of more general processes of the transmutation of nature into a field of human action.

Science, technology and expertise more generally playa funda­ mental role in which I call the sequestration of experience. The notion that modernity is associated with an instrumental relation to nature, and the idea that a scientific outlook excludes questions of ethics or morality, are familiar enough. However, I seek to reframe these issues in terms of an institutional account of the late modern order, developed in terms of internal referentiality. The overall thrust of modern institutions is to create settings of action ordered in terms of modernity's own dynamics and severed from 'external criteria' - factors external to the social systems of modernity. Although there are numerous exceptions and coun­ tertrends, day-to-day social life tends to become separated from 'original' nature and from a variety of experiences bearing on existential questions and dilemmas. The mad, the criminal and the seriously ill are physically sequestered from the normal popu­ lation, while 'eroticism' is replaced by 'sexuality' - which then moves behind the scenes to become hidden away. The sequestra­ tion of experience means that, for many people, direct contact with events and situations which link the individual lifespan to broad issues of morality and finitude are rare and fleeting.

This situation has not corne about, as Freud thought, because of the increasing psychological repression of guilt demanded by the complexities of modern social life. Rather, what occurs is an institutional repression, in which - I shall claim - mechanisms of shame rather than guilt corne to the fore. Shame has close affiliations with narcissism, but it is a mistake, as noted earlier, to suppose that self-identity becomes increasingly narcissistic. Nar­ cissism is one among other types of psychological mechanism ­ and, in some instances, pathology - which the connections

Introduction

between identity, shame and the reflexive project of the self brin~ into being.

Personal meaninglessness - the feeling that life has nothing worthwhile to offer - becomes a fundamental psychic problem in circumstances of late modernity. We should understand this phenomenon in terms of a repression of moral questions which day-to-day life poses, but which are denied answers. 'Existential isolation' is not so much a separation of individuals from others as a separation from the moral resources necessary to live a full and satisfying existence. The reflexive project of the self generates programmes of actualisation and mastery. But as long as these possibilities are understood largely as a matter of the extension of the control systems of modernity to the self, they lack moral meaning. 'Authenticity' becomes both a pre-eminent value and a framework for self-actualisation, but represents a morally stunted process.

Yet the repression of existential questions is by no means complete and in high modernity, where systems of instrumental control have become more nakedly exposed than ever before and their negative consequences more apparent, many forms of counter-reaction appear. It becomes more and more apparent that lifestyle choices, within the settings of local-global interrela­ tions, raise moral issues which cannot simply be pushed to one side. Such issues call for forms of political engagement which the new social movements both presage and serve to help initiate. 'Life politics' - concerned with human self-actualisation, both on the level of the individual and collectively - emerges from the shadow which 'emancipatory politics' has cast.

Emancipation, the general imperative of progressivist Enlight­ enment, is in its various guises the condition for the emergence of a life-political programme. In a world still riven by divisions and marked by forms of oppression both old and new, emancipatory politics does not decline in importance. Yet these pre-existing political endeavours become joined by novel forms of life­ political concern. In the concluding sections of the book I outline the main parameters of the life-political agenda. It is an agenda which demands an encounter with specific moral dilemmas, and forces us to raise existential issues which modernity has institutio­ nally excluded.