ABSTRACT
My concern in this chapter is with recent analyses of late modernity, especially those which stress that the contemporary condition may be characterised by an increased capacity for reflexivity. While there is some disagreement regarding the exact meaning of reflexivity (see for example Beck, Giddens and Lash 1994; Alexander 1996), Lash (1994) has usefully defined two forms of reflexivity generally at issue in such analyses. First, he refers to ‘structural reflexivity’ whereby agency reflects both on the rules and resources of social structure and on the conditions of existence of agency itself: ‘the more societies are modernised, the more agents (subjects) acquire the ability to reflect on the social conditions of their existence and to change them in that way’ (Beck 1994b: 174). Second, he writes of self-reflexivity in which agency reflects on itself and there is increasing self-monitoring: ‘we are, not what we are, but what we make of ourselves’ (Giddens 1991: 75). Such intensified tendencies towards reflexivity are often understood to be constituted by a destabilisation of the significance of structural forms of determination, a destabilisation which is progressively ‘freeing’ or ‘unleashing’ agency from structure. ‘Reflexive modernity’ is therefore, ‘a theory of the ever-increasing powers of social actors, or “agency” in regard to structure’ (Lash 1994: 111). So thoroughgoing is this process that reflexivity is now understood to characterise a range of domains including the economic (Beck 1992; Lash and Urry 1994; Lash 1994), the political (Beck 1994a, 1997), the aesthetic (Lash 1994; Lash and Urry 1994), the intimate and the personal (Giddens 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995). Indeed, reflexivity is now understood to be central to the formation of the contemporary subject (Giddens 1991).
