1
INTRODUCTION
The idea of modernity is an important one in contemporary social theory, and has been influential in debates about the direction sociology should take in the twenty-first century. The history of sociology itself is closely bound up with that of the modern, and some argue that sociology’s destiny is intrinsically intertwined with that of modern society. These interconnections have been articulated and debated since sociology’s inception in the nineteenth century, but with heightened intensity more recently. Since the latter quarter of the twentieth century the interrelated fate of modernity and sociology has been the subject of social theoretical debates about ‘post’ and ‘late’ modernity. These debates, in turn, have profoundly impacted on all areas of sociological study, and influence the ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’ of sociology at all levels.
This book examines social theoretical debates about modernity to explicate the insights they generate for the sociological project as it concerns social change – especially with reference to personal life. In doing so, it has a number of aims. First, to theoretically situate recent claims about late (or reflexive) modernity and contemporary social change, and arguments about emergent universalizing tendencies that are said to be reshaping social, cultural and political life. Second, to explore how these theories bring modernity down to earth by incorporating issues of personal life (for example, self-identity, intimate relationships, emotional life and the like). On the one hand, the focus on personal life facilitates more grounded exploration of modernity than theoretical ‘grand’ narratives usually allow. On the other hand, it illuminates arguments about the radical nature and depth of interconnected global and local developments in late modernity. This book takes up arguments about the implications that social change in late modernity is said to have for personal life to ask how contemporary experience might be interpreted differently by diverse frames for understanding modernity. In doing so, it asks whose experience is the subject of theories of late – or reflexive – modernity, and whose fails to register or feature. These questions can help us to evaluate the relevance of theories of modernity for (re)imagining and reconstructing the sociological project.
The concern with differing conceptualizations of modernity and their implications for understanding social change and personal life shapes this book in a number of ways. First, it provides the organizational structure and themes that make up the book. Second, it provides the basis for a number of arguments I put forward in the book, that are introduced in the following section. In terms of structure, Chapters 2 to 5 outline one story (my own) of sociology’s relationship to modernity by considering key constructive, deconstructive and reconstructive movements in social theory and sociology with respect to modernity. These chapters follow a ‘chronological’ order, considering founding ideas about the logics of modernity and social change, radical deconstructive ideas about postmodernity, and recent reconstructive ideas about late or reflexive modernity. To be sure, this ordering represents a subjective reading of theories and debates about modernity, and of sociology’s relationship to the latter. Indeed, it reflects my own experience of studying sociology in the mid-1980s and cultural studies between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, before returning to sociology from the mid- 1990s onwards. This has influenced my view of debates about modernity, and what they imply for sociology. The sociological story of modernity presented here may be, in some ways, familiar to some readers. But readers are unlikely to have come across the combined deconstructive influences on ‘post’ modern thinking as they are conceptualized here, or the arguments that are made about reconstructivist theories of late or reflexive modernity and their implications for sociology. There are several texts about sociology’s constructive and deconstructive movements, although texts about the deconstructive ‘turn’ tend to be limited in the range of influences they include. But there are few about its reconstructive ones, and none that explicitly explore the theory of reflexive modernity as a reconstructive shift in thinking about modernity and sociology.
Chapters 6 to 9 examine the implications that contemporary social change has for personal life, as understood by the reconstructive theory of reflexive modernity. They critically compare these to competing ones generated via different constructionist and deconstructionist frames for conceptualizing modernity and modern experience. These chapters follow a ‘thematic’ order, centred on the themes of self and identity; relating and intimacies; and mortality and life-politics. Chapter 9 draws together the analyses presented in both ‘halves’ of the book, to evaluate the contribution of theories of late modernity for understandings of the sociological project. It pays especial attention to evaluating the potential contribution of the theory of reflexive modernity, and the sociology of reflexive life (social and personal) that it promotes, to a reconstructed sociological project.
The argument
A number of interlinking arguments are forwarded in this book. In the first part of the book (Chapters 2 to 5) it is argued that sociological concerns with the modern have been influenced by a number of critical shifts or ‘movements’ in theoretical conceptions of modernity. Three major or overarching movements correspond to the construction, deconstruction and reflexive reconstruction of modernity. These three movements are not the only notable ones, and some might argue that they are not the most important ones. These movements are made up of diverse theories, ideas and understandings of modernity, and of diverse approaches to analysing its directions and implications, and are themselves comprised of diverse critical ‘sub-movements’. The differences between these sub-movements are important as they characterize modernity and the sociological problems it raises in distinctive ways. But when they are grouped together they gain a significance that is greater than the sum of their parts for a general view – or diagnosis – of the nature, orientation and direction of modernity, and for envisioning the sociological project.
Chapters 2 to 5 argue that each of the three overarching movements towards constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing modernity have profound implications for conceiving social order and social change, which are further illuminated in the second part of the book (Chapters 6–8) by focusing on issues to do with personal life. Reconstructivist theories of late or reflexive modernity claim to generate especially profound insights into social change and its implications for social and personal life through their emphasis on the mediation of the global and the local, institutional and subjective, and structure and agency. How ever, by comparing the insights into social change and personal life that theorists of reflexive modernity claim to have generated with those derived via other frames for conceptualizing modernity and postmodernity, it becomes clear how problematic and contestable reconstructivist interpretations are. The reconstructivist theory of reflexive modernity proposed by Giddens and Beck, for example, has argued the emergence of new universalities and commonalities in global and individualized experience where there are no ‘others’. This argument may be (relatively) convincing when it is focused on the abstract theoretical working out of the ‘reflexivity’ of modernity, but it fails to be convincing when the theory is brought down to earth and compared to other arguments about how otherness and difference are centrally important – locally and on a global scale – to shaping personal life and day-to-day experience, and to strategies of power.
The main argument of the book concerns the different envisioning of the sociological project that emerges from diverse conceptions of modernity, but especially the reconstructivist envisioning of sociology that emerges from the theory of reflexive modernity. The relationship between different visions of modernity and sociology is an issue that is touched on throughout the book, and it is reconstructivist envisioning that is mostly focused in the concluding chapter. Early approaches to constructing modernity and later approaches to deconstructing it implied a corresponding orientation to the sociological project. In con structing modernity, early social thinkers were also constructing the modernist sociological project. In deconstructing modernity, later thinkers were deconstructing the modernist sociological project. The same is true of the reconstructivist approach to late or reflexive modernity: it is not only reconstructed understandings of modernity that are at stake but also of sociology itself. It is on this basis that we can understand the notable influence of reconstructive theories (such as those of Giddens and Beck) in such a relatively short time – because they hold out the promise of sociological renewal. But while these theories appear to open up renewed possibilities for sociology, they have their own problems. These become evident when they are compared to the insights generated by the movements in constructing and deconstructing modernity they claim to have surpassed. This is especially the case in how they inadequately address questions of difference and power. In this respect, despite the understandings they promote of reflexive modernity and the sociology of reflexive (social and personal) life, they fail to provide a convincing basis for reflexive sociology.
In conceptualizing a reconstructed sociological project, the issue of reflexivity is important. Indeed, the deconstructive turn in sociology itself (that the theory of reflexive modernity defines itself against) can be viewed as part of the reflexivity of modernity – and as a prompt to and expression of sociology’s own reflexivity. On the one hand, the deconstructive turn represented a crisis for sociology by undermining the philosophical meta-discourses and theories of knowledge that sociological grand narratives were founded on, and by emphasizing the cultural over the social. On the other hand, it represented the demand and opportunity for sociology to reflect on itself and to rethink its project anew. Reconstructivist theories of late or reflexive modernity should be understood as a response to and rejection of the deconstructive turn. Despite the attraction of their claims, especially in terms of retrieving the social and reintroducing political and personal agency, there are reasons to be cautious about the re-envisioning of modernity and sociology they promote. Chief among these is the erasure or putting aside of the significance difference that goes hand in hand with their promotion of new universalities, and the lack of reflexivity with respect to how sociological narration is involved in the flow of power.
Directions
Chapters 2 to 5
There is little dispute about the influence of founding social thinkers for the models of modernity that subsequent generations of social theorists have worked with, and for shaping the concerns of modernist sociology. Chapter 2 discusses how modernity as a sociological construct has its foundations in the grand, overarching or universalizing frames for understanding social, cultural, political and personal life that first emerged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The historical backdrop to sociology’s inception is one that is often characterized as a critical period of social upheaval and political crises. These crises shaped and influenced the work of Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Freud, which taken together is symbolic of a founding critical movement in social theoretical constructions of modernity and of modernist sociology. In talking about the dynamics of social and cultural change, the processes that underpinned and shaped them, and their consequences, these theorists imbued modernity with certain orientations, logics and order. While each con - ceptualized the energizing impulses that shaped modernity in different ways, they each envisioned modernity as a movement towards something or somewhere, whether it was some utopian vision of harmony and equality, rational-bureaucratic entrapment, disenchantment or civilized order. In each case there was a concern with the shifting social order or transition towards some final or ultimate balance of order. Coupled with this, each theorist constructed a vision of modernity in ways that had crucial implications for understanding how the modern should be studied, emphasizing differently the interconnections between the social and the economic, cultural and subjective. They, in turn, influenced different ideas about what the sociological project could and should be.
Many theorists nowadays acknowledge that despite being historically overshadowed by the four thinkers mentioned, it was probably Simmel, above all, who best expressed the dynamism of modernity. Simmel’s work is nowadays appreciated for its analysis of fragments and psychology of early modern urban experience, and its insights into the implications of modernity for depleted subjective culture. The concern with fragments explains why he is sometimes deemed to be more properly the first ‘postmodern’ theorist. This, in turn, explains why it is only relatively recently that his ideas have been fully acknowledged for the sociological insights they provide. It further explains why his understandings of modernity were not so systematically taken up or deconstructed as those of other founding social thinkers by the ‘critical’ and poststructuralist theorists considered in Chapter 3.
Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the deconstructive movement in theorizing about modernity, along with corresponding deconstructive approaches to modernist sociology. Chapter 3 begins by considering some of the insights that the Frankfurt School critical theorists generated into the nature and orientations of modernity by combining Marxian, Weberian and Freudian ideas, amongst others. Despite the critique of modern culture’s ideological functions, critical theory held out some hope with respect to modern progress, and aimed to provide ‘enlightened’ insights into conditions of domination and strategies for emancipation. Habermas, the influential heir to Frankfurt School critical theory, is the contemporary theorist most identified with the idea that modernity is an unfinished project. Through his ideas about communicative action and ideal speech situations he has outlined the theoretical basis for an emancipated order that is balanced in terms of instrumental reason and the life-world.
In contrast to Habermas, ‘founding’ poststructuralist thinkers, who are also considered in Chapter 3, questioned any basis for faith in the idea of modernity as an unfinished project, and demolished the possibility of the kind of enlightened, emancipated or democratic social order that critical theory promoted. Of the influential poststructuralist thinkers Derrida, Lacan and Foucault, it is the latter’s work that has been most influential in sociology and most amenable to sociological analyses, and that is mostly discussed in this chapter. The poststructuralist position, through its emphasis on discourse, demands that we challenge and deconstruct the foundational philosophical beliefs and assumptions about social knowledge that underpin social theoretical understandings of modernity and that infuse modernist sociology. It argues the case for bringing discourse and difference into the centre of the analytical frame. This, in turn, problematizes ideas about reason, progress, agency, power and subjectivity that were at the heart of both founding and critical theories of modernity and modernist sociology’s self-understanding.
The poststructuralist theoretical movement is a crucial element of a broader deconstructionist movement with respect to modernity and modernist sociology that emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century. This broader movement is not reducible to poststructuralism – or even to theoretical postmodernism (considered in Chapter 4). Rather, other influential elements include feminist, queer and postcolonial theoretical and sociological movements that also challenge modernity and modernist sociology – with and without recourse to poststructuralism. These elements combined with poststructuralism to further influence movements in reflexive methodology. These challenge modernist sociology’s claim to knowledge on the basis of its historical relationships to power and subordination. On the one hand, it is argued, the theory and sociology of modernity has historically privileged class relations to the detriment of other kinds of subordination. On the other hand, despite – and because of – its claims to truth and legitimate know ledge, the social theory of modernity and the modernist sociology have often been imbued with patriarchal, colonial and hetero-normative interests. Radical difference and reflexive methodological deconstructionist movements are often afforded limited regard in social theoretical responses to the deconstructive turn (and modernist sociology more generally), but they have been crucial in bringing radical political interests associated with social and cultural difference into debates about modernity and modernist sociology. Their challenging of phallo-, logo- and Euro-centric constructions of modernity and modernist sociology has been crucial to the overall ‘spirit’ of deconstruction. While there is no space in this book to discuss these latter influences in depth, Chapter 3 does consider their influence in deconstructive debates about radically reflexive methodologies. The emphasis in these debates is placed less on producing knowledge that would stand up to modernist sociological requirements of neutrality and objectivity, and more on narratives of the social, cultural, political and personal that are attuned to issues of difference and power in the production of sociological knowledge. They emphasize selfcritical approaches to social analysis. These arguments are important in their own right, but they are included here because they have distinct implications for envisioning a ‘post’ modernist sociological project.
Chapter 4 considers what is probably the most contested and widely debated theoretical deconstructive sub-movement with respect to modernity and modernist sociology: the theory of postmodernity. The chapter considers different approaches to theorizing postmodernity and assessments of its implications for sociology. Via consideration of ideas about an emergent postmodern paradigm, the chapter considers arguments for distinguishing between deconstructivist and reconstructivist approaches to postmodernity, to identify ‘extreme’ and less extreme positions. This case is rejected on the basis that ‘extremism’ is not an analytically adequate basis on which to evaluate theoretical or sociological arguments. It is argued instead that a deconstructivist/reconstructivist frame is better suited to talking about the distinctions that exist between broadly postmodernist approaches that share a concern with deconstruction and are suspicious of theoretical unities, universalities and the like (and that aim for a deconstructed sociology), and those contemporary approaches to late modernity that self-consciously reject the deconstructivist orientation and argue the case for focusing on new unities, universalizing tendencies and the like (and that aim for a reconstructed sociology). The latter seek, in some way or another, to retrieve or reinvigorate aspects of the modern project and sociology of modernity – but without necessary recourse to the meta-discursive and epistemic claims for knowledge and truth that poststructuralists and postmodernists have critiqued.
In considering arguments about the distinction between the terms ‘postmodernism’ and ‘postmodernity’, this chapter also suggests the value of distinguishing between radical postmodernist, strategic postmodernist and radical modernist arguments as the basis for a more finely tuned evaluation of approaches to postmodernity. The radical and strategic categories are, I argue, a helpful way of loosely grouping different theories of postmodernity, while the radical modernist category is useful for thinking about reconstructivist theories of modernity and sociology. I illuminate these categories by considering Lyotard’s and Baudrillard’s ideas as radical postmodernist (whilst also pointing out the signi ficant differences between their arguments), and by framing Bauman’s arguments about postmodernity as ‘strategic’. I also consider strategic arguments about the need to reincorporate the social within postmodern analyses, which articulate a reconstructive basis for thinking about a postmodern sociology. Such arguments raise a question that gets to the heart of the problem that poststructuralist and postmodernist deconstructive movements pose for sociology: what is sociology without the modernist emphasis on the social? Contrary to the fears of many sociological critics, however, some commentators argue that while theories of postmodernity have tended to be preoccupied by the cultural, this does not mean that they invariably do not – or cannot – also incorporate the social.
Chapter 5 develops the case for considering how some contemporary theories of modernity might be conceptualized as reconstructive ones that have important implications for reconstructed sociology. It does so by considering the arguments about what is variously termed late, second or reflexive modernity as put forward by Giddens and Beck. Giddens and Beck reject the deconstructive orientation to modernity and modernist sociology, and argue instead for a reconstructed understanding of modernity and reconstructing sociology. Giddens and Beck both acknowledge that modernity has changed, and they argue that developments on a global scale warrant rethinking modernity and, by implication, modernist sociology. They agree with postmodernists that uncertainty and ambiguity are defining aspects of the contemporary culture, and they also agree that the Enlightenment principles relating to reason, truth and progress can no longer be relied on to generate order and security. This leads to uncertainty that, they acknowledge, hits at the heart of sociology itself. There can be no scientific – including social scientific – claim that is beyond doubt and contestation. Rather, the current period of modernity, both argue, is marked by radical doubt as a consequence of reason’s reflection on – or confrontation with – itself.
In such circumstances, one might suspect that these theorists would agree with their postmodernist counterparts’ arguments about fragmentation and the demise of the modernist project. On the contrary, Beck and Giddens instead emphasize new universalizing tendencies that, they argue, are afoot in a global world. While they theorize these differently, both emphasize new commonalities emerging in societies being reconfigured by a heightened sense of ‘man-made’ risks that cut across old boundaries of class, generation, geographical location and the like. Late modernity, risk society or reflexive modernity – whatever we choose to name it – is, both theorists argue, an experimental society. It is experimental in that the social, cultural and political forms associated with simple or first modernity are fast becoming redundant, and there are no new forms to replace them yet. Modern social institutions such as class and the family are, Beck says, zombie institutions. This implies living without the certainty of tradition, and with the consequences of radical disembedding processes that lift forms of connectedness out of their old social settings, and undermine given sources of social and personal identity. For both Giddens and Beck, self-identity nowadays has to be reflexively made, and individualization means that we are in the era of do-it-yourself biographies. Further, it is not only ourselves and our lifestyles that must be constantly (re)made, but also our modes of relating to others. While these arguments share some common ground with radical and strategic postmodernism, Giddens and Beck emphasize the new forms of connectedness these developments give rise to – as everybody irrespective of social class, gender, ‘race’ and ethnicity, generation and geographical location comes under the influence of these developments. Also, in a global world, new opportunities arise for individuals and agencies to recognize new commonalities and shared interests.
Giddens places more emphasis on the new opportunities emerging in reflexive modernity than Beck, who talks more cautiously about conflicts and opportunities that arise. Both theorists agree, however, that sociology must rethink its established frames, and the dualisms that comprise them, to grasp the current situation, and to interpret the challenges and opportunities that come ...
