A
pint of Giddens
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Social
disorientation (risk) that accompanies so called post-modern times is due to
new circumstances we don’t understand and that are beyond our control (3).
Modernity is marked by discontinuity from traditional order. Current times
have seen intensification of interconnection (over last 300-400 yrs!!!!), and
acceleration of the pace of change. Against evolutionist thinking (even in
those like Marxism that note discontinuity) Giddens’s is a project that -
whilst similar to Lyotard's deconstruction of the grand narrative – retains a
confidence in discerning episodes of historical transition. |
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The book
moves to talk of time/ space distan( c)iation and disembedding. The separation
of time and place, due to ‘empty time’ (mechanical clocks, date time) and the
‘lifting out’ (uprooting) of the local both correspond to growth of different
types of movement and institution away from traditional order. Money is one
such social form that allows 'disembeddedness' to occur. A man need not be in
the same place as his possessions, which can circulate independently from him,
money is a ‘symbolic token’ (Keynes, Simmel, Marx used). Money, a central
aspect of modernity, involves relations of trust. Trust is a major aspect of
social life which does not require definite knowledge, such as trust in the
architect that house won’t fall down &c. Risk is a complementary
development representing a replacement of the concept of fate (cosmological)
with human created contingencies, trust is connected with events that can not
be anticipated, we respond to risk with trust and confidence. Here Giddens
talks un-problematically of the individual and his/ her choice of actions.
Trust is a necessary feature of disembedded societies that are not transparent.
(33-34)
Stuff now
on reflexivity, situatedness of human behaviour in modernity in the very system
of social reproduction. Tradition is no longer repeated unless it can be
qualified by the new, the past holds no power to discipline the reflexive
processes of the present – this disqualifies knowledge from certitude.
Practices of social science are ‘more
deeply implicated’ in modernity as their knowledge fashions its institutions
reflexively. Yet make no mistake Giddens is not referring here to the
techniques of authority and order, he is marking the bizarre point that the
economic transformations associated with capital could only come about by
people understanding!!! the concepts of ‘capital’ ‘market’ ‘investment’ and so
on! “Modern economic activity would not be as it is were it not for the fact
that all members of the population have mastered these concepts…”(41) This is a
ridiculous idea and deserves little comment, except to point out that this is a
typical academic replacement of the concept with reality, and then the
adjustment of reality to fit the concept – it shows further the completely the
manner that sociology tends to de-politicise capitalism and view it in
completely technocratic, functionalist and institutional ways. This book is
appalling twaddle really, but onward:
Not only
does our knowledge of its concept drive modernity forward, ‘Modernity is itself
deeply and intrinsically sociological’ (43)
The
following pages show how entwined sociological knowledge is involved in social practices
like marriage but and even though Giddens acknowledges that this occurs in
circumstances where there are power differentials and sectional interests, he
seems on the whole to see sociology in terms of a neutral domain of enquiry,
which is subsequently manipulated though this manipulation does not in anyway
mould the objectives and intentions of the science. Because there is no
transcendental rationalist basis to social values, they are open to question
and revision; a total knowledge is not possible because we can not necessarily
forsee (hence an implicit attack on predictive social science) the outcomes of
our intervention. And finally, the point is “not that there is no stable social
world to know, but that knowledge of that world contributes to its unstable or
mutable character.” (45)
As an
aesthetic movement postmodernism differs from post-modernity – the latter
represents a qualitatively new social order not yet arisen. Giddens rejects
that post-moderntiy signals the end of systematic knowledge of society.
Nietsche and Heidegger are the points of reference for an anti-foundationalist
critique of the Enlightenment (47). But post-modernity is problematic, because
it appears itself to be a narrative, so the author prefers to understand pomo
as modernity’s coming to understand itself. The critique of truth claims of the
enlightenment (which replaced divine law with the certainty of reason and
experience) opens up the enigmatic and reflexive nature of modernity itself.
Rather than being superseded, modernity has been radicalised, through
globalisation its institutions have spread. This radicalisation is partly due
to the critique of its own foundations in the past, evolutionism and certainty
and confidence in reason. (summary p 53-4)
II
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Four institutional sectors of modernity are outlined; capitalism is a sub system of industrialism and is treated in relative autonomy from it, capitalist society is part of the nation state that has centralised military power, exercises control over its dominions and is accompanied by a surveillance system that predominantly controls information. (Foucault, Clausewitz &c). Again although Giddens plays lip service to radical critiques of the power structures of these institutions, his concern is to build a general framework - for instance it is noted that capital depends on the property-less wage- labourer, but none of the other other institutional parameters are configured in respect to this fact, the reasons for the development of ‘total war’ &c are never laid out. Both surveillance and war are connected to industrialism, but only in the sense that the technical developments and its organisation of space provide grounds for them to occur. Giddens is not interested in developing this any further. (61) |
Inherently
globalising, modernity implicates the affairs of the local with the global or
other localities, this interconnection complicates the role of nation state,
whole areas can be affected by changes outside of them, and beyond their
control. International relations is criticised because by treating the
sovereign state as actor it fails to identify agency that cross cuts them. Like
Giddens, Wallersteins world system approach problematises this idea of society
as a bounded space. The world system is economically based rather than
primarily political and has more than one centre and is divided into the core,
the semi-periphery and the periphery in shifting location (68). Here capital is
seen as the driving force that undermines national boundaries. Giddens
typically seeks to question this overemphasis on economic dynamics by
reasserting the importance of political power in governing territoriality and
its monopoly on violence; “No matter how great their economic power, industrial
corporations are not military organisations…and they cannot establish
themselves as political/ legal entities which rule a given territorial area”
(71) Not supporting this remarkably naïve judgment (think of the Ogoni
situation in Nigeria, or Berlusconi in Italy), Giddens proceeds to say that political
control has its own autonomy, and dynamics between sovereign states reflexively
determine the strength and effect of sovereign power. With all its talk of
industrialisation of war, sophistication of weaponry and the truly global
institutions, as well as people thinking globally, Giddens offers us a now
familiar conclusion. The development of the means of communication allowed for
the possibility of globalisation – globality would not have been possible
without the ‘pooling of knowledge’ in the ‘news’! Ma in che mondo vivi?
III
Distinguished
from traditional communities where a stranger is seen as a whole person in his
strangeness, Giddens draws on Goffman to talk of modern societies where the ‘background
noise’ of ‘social rhythms’ and trust lies in slight recognition of other agents
but not fully fledged encounters between them – i.e. passing people in the
street – this is termed ‘civil inattention’- clearly these less direct
encounters involve varying and situation specific degrees of trust. Giddens is
more interested in the abstract systems of trustworthiness that for him are
intrinsic to modernity. This involves the reflexive and open relations between
expert systems, their representatives and lay-people – these inescapable
encounters mediated by their ‘access points’ in the real human operatives
behind them, represent forms of assurance (Giddens’s favoured example is the
air stewardess) and business as usual mentality in circumstances where there is
risk. These mechanisms are part of the ‘re-embedding’ processes of social life,
and characteristically involve a non-transparent expert knowledge base where
various information is withheld from public consumption – important is the
physical contact between participants in these mechanisms. A distinction is
drawn between faceless and face-work commitments. Trust is
necessitated by ignorance (one reason why information is withheld) but
involvement with abstract systems is routinized and often unconscious. ( -92)
So far
these theses are common place. Yet when talking of ontological security,
Giddens makes the most curious about turn. Suddenly the need for identity and
coherence are qualities valid for pre-modern as well as modern societies. What
follows is pretty much trash but here goes. Persons may feel dislocation of the
self, indeed philosophers cannot either give certainty about the category of
and the constancy of the self, schizophrenia etc are conditions of high
sensitivity to the impossibly of gaining certainty about what one is, besides
some ambivalent and equivocal sense of presence, of ‘being there’. In locating
this lack of certainty in the world, in the fear of the real possibility of
nuclear war, or paranoia about other people, Giddens needs to explain why
normality does not become a whole bunch of screaming freaks. This is because
trust mechanisms have been instantiated in childhood by our mothers. He now
characterizes the normal mechanisms of the development of this infant
relation, suggesting that aberrations occur in the face of hostile
environments. He quotes Erik Erikson, of the object-relations school of
psycho-analysis, where he outlines an idea of basic trust that holds the
subject together against a sense of loss and dividedness of identity nurtured
in a child by his parents. Trust thus develops because of absence; this absence
is placated by habit that prevents existential crisis. Hence when these
mechanisms are uprooted the self becomes dislocated. Or something like that.
This really is hogwash because it reaffirms the idea that there are properly
normal and abnormal responses to mechanisms of social inclusion. By explaining
the disjunction from the self in terms of an aberration or discontinuity of
habit, Giddens gives away the fact that he is implicitly viewing what the
social in terms of the law, or in terms of the general as Deleuze
seems to argue in Difference and Repetition. As such sameness is a more
fundamental ontological category than difference, no matter how much he talks
of ontological insecurity. So for Giddens trust is the abstract system of
societies foundations, (of its being normal) whilst angst and dread are the
condition that break down of mechanisms that support trust would provoke. So
trust works as some sort of social contract and existential angst the Hobbesian
state of nature. (- 100)
Having
ripped apart his own construction of the fundamental difference between the
modern and pre-modern, Giddens moves on to try to salvage the distinction from
the never fully worked out implication of his ‘psychology of trust which are
universal, or near universal’ (100). So in the whole history of mankind up to
say 1700 J ‘four
localised contexts of trust’ predominate. Kinship, local community, religious
cosmologies (Freud), tradition (Levi
Strauss)*. With the typical
default of Giddens sociological grey matter set on the imagination that society
is developed in response to more fundamental conflicts, these pre-modern and
local modes of communication give harmony, place, stability and meaning in a
world still governed by the ravages of nature and scarcity. This environment of
risk is different in modernity where uncertainty and insecurity are heightened
by being taken out of local contexts. The impregnation of the global into the
local, and industrialisation change the face of risk, in modernity it is based
on man made dangers even though the direct danger of violence seems to have
been ‘pacified’ whereas in earlier societies civil war was the norm not the
exception. (here no evidence to support what is an unnecessary postulate).
Giddens now has the problem of showing why his banalities and
platitudes about pre-modern society are so distinct from modernity. He suggests
it’s a matter of awareness of risk (why this is could not equally apply to
pre-modern societies is unclear) and estimation of potential dangers, forgetting
now that his whole previous theses have concerned the unpredictability of
modern life, he ends with the ambiguous ‘fortuna tends to return”! (-111)
*“Levi-
Strauss’s notion of ‘reversible time’ is central to understanding the
temporality of traditional beliefs and activities. Reversible time is the
temporality of repetition and is governed by the logic of repetition – the past
is a means of organising the future.” (105)
IV
Giddens, somewhat misleadingly, calls anything that has the least degree of sophistication about it ‘abstract system’. Flying on plane (how tiresome this analogy is getting) involves abstract systems as much as monetary exchange. So abstract system is the general world of technology and mediations that Giddens lumps together here. We depend on these systems for ontological security, they are bound up with intimacy and create psychological vulnerability – the reflexivity of modernity implies the construction of the self. What is so mistaken in the pages that follow is that Giddens a-historical ontology of the self has surreptitiously become extreme. The basic intimacy of trust twixt child and mother is now completely accepted, it might be more secure in pre-modern times and modern times might subvert it quicker by non-personal systems, but Giddens has no problem in assuming that the fundamental parameters of sociation can not be breached. So no matter how different traditional societies were, in this respect their fundamental identity is retained. (Now draws on Tonnies’s distinction of Gemeinschaft (community) with Gesellschaft (society)). Further drawing on both conservative positions and people like Habermas and Horkheimer, Giddens characterises modernity in terms of the break down of the intimate personal contexts of trust, into the predominance of public institutions to which personal relations are a mere adjunct. Discussing friendship the unsubstantiated banalities about pre-modern life (yes that is the whole gamut of all human history folks) continue, as well as noting new forms of community e.g. urban life, alongside abstract systems, a system of what we might call recognition/ acknowledgement goes on in respect to unknown strangers, we accept them and do not bring into question that someone unfamiliar to us is necessarily a threat. The point is that impersonal abstract system structure our everyday social practices which transforms the personal. Self enquiry develops through interaction with the other - through erotic encounter, mutual discovery and love (‘romantic love incorporates a cluster of values scarcely ever realisable in their totality’) (122). BLAH. But this quest for self-identity is based upon the powerlessness people feel and yet there is no authentic withdrawal from the social (Lasch) as all points of retreat whether religion, well being and health are bound up with the abstract societal systems. Giddens spins self identity as an ‘opening out’, ‘mutuality of self-disclosure’ and ‘positive appropriation of circumstances in which globalised influences impinge upon everyday life.’ (124)
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Charting now different types of risk, the favourite examples of nuclear disaster or nuclear war, impossibility of working out the probability of modern risks (can not be verified through experiment). He introduces Beck’s idea that such large scale and global risks reduce the difference of the other, as all will suffer alike. “in respect of the balance of security and danger which modernity introduces into our lives, there are no longer ‘others’ – no one can be completely outside” (148) |
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More on
how experts manage knowledge of risks. The examples of nuclear war show how
bizarre this generalisation of risk is – very little attention is played to the
political processes and conflicts that necessitated the emergence of these
weapons and no attention is paid to the actual determinations that might make
the use of them arise – the matter is treated as if it were above and beyond
our control and as if it were a matter of fate. Giddens conjures up this sense
of dread, the apocalypse, total annihilation that is the dark side of the new
regimes of trust. This is basically Hobbesian reasoning laced with ever more
primordial ontologies of human sensibility. Three ‘lay’ responses are given to
these risks; pessimism, faith in providential reason, or the optimism of social
movements. (137)
Modernity
is described as a juggernaut, relentlessly driving forward partly but never completely
steered by humanity. But then it is no singular machine but a mass of
differentiated counter-acting parts. We can not seize control over it, its very
passage is one of insecurity, risk and displacement and reembedding. Moreover
in opposition to Weber’s iron cage of bureaucracy, Durkheim is invoked to note
the emergence of new places of ‘smallness and informality’, forging of new ties
etc. Against habermas’s
idea that a preexisting life world is colonised, because abstract systems
interact in ‘dialectical interplay’ with everyday life, elements of expert
systems are appropriated and vice-versa. Furthermore, most of us are not
experts in respect to most systems of modern social life. Then follows a
comparison between Giddens’s ‘Radicalised Modernity’ and theories of
Post-Modernity’.
V
The reason
why we cannot ride this juggernaut are attributed to operator failure
and design faults in typical technocratic treatment, but most important
for Giddens are unintended consequences and circularity of knowledge.
From explaining the deficiencies of the system in terms of the complications of
its design (hence conferring human intentionality and choice to the
legitimation of the system) Giddens moves on to say we can never control social
life properly – even more paradoxically
- on of the main reasons for this is inequality of power and differences
in values. But we should still try to steer the juggernaut through positive
models of counterfactual and future orientated though in Utopian Realism.
Here follows some typical abuse and appropriation of Marx, a sociologism of
modelling the ‘good society’ and some general twaddle about life politics,
emancipation, self- actualisation and self identity. But the oppressed are not
of the same cloth, Marx’s master slave teleology! does not apply – outcomes are
open ended – move away from class based/ labour movement in industrialist and
captialistic versions of modernity. Giddens says we can separate the struggle
for democratic rights from these movements for “surveillance is a site of
struggle in its own right” (160)
“The
outlook of Utopian Realism recognizes the inevitability of power and does not see
its use as inherently noxious. Power, in its broadest sense, is a means of
getting things done” (162)
The underdog provides the moral vehicle for ‘getting things done’ but ‘realising the goals involved often depends on the intervention of the privileged’ (162). This section continues endlessly speculating on the necessary post-capitalistic and post scarcity nature of post-modern society and what the plural institutional contours would look like. But really this is just musing on the same themes as before.
VI
Giddens asks himself a question he would have done well to start with. Is modernity western? In its origins then yes, but in its globalising tendencies then no. But as a reflexive reason that questions its own foundations it detaches itself from all other cultures. Postmodernity is only the apparent dissolution and fragmentation - globalising is a countervailing tendency that issues forth this instability. (177) This is in the nature of modernity's future orientation.
Anthony Giddens: The consequences of modernity, Polity 1990 - summarised by an exasperated EE.