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32 Institutional reflexivity
Giddens proposes that (post-traditional) late modernity can be described as a period of increasing institutional reflexivity, combined with a high level of individual reflexivity (e.g., in relations with expert systems). This increase is proposed in comparison to earlier modernity: not to pre-modernity. The relatively low level of individual reflexivity evidenced in early (“classical”) modernity was not a hold-over from earlier, traditional times, despite the popular perception of “tradition” as inflexible and intolerant to change—this perception describes, at most, the conditions of some traditional practices after these were subject to modern (and modernizing) discourses.
Here I would have to agree with Habermas and Bakhtin (in one of the few issues where they agreed with one another) that we need to find a way to look historically at the lifeworld before this was penetrated by the systems of modernity if we are to find how traditional practices1 created normalcy in everyday life.
- “...it is usually the case that normal appearances, typical appearances, and proper appearances are much the same,...
...impropriety on the part of others may function as an alarming sign. ...;conventional courtesies are seen as mere convention, but non-performance can cause alarm”
(Goffman 1971, 240-241).It is sufficient here to suggest that normalcy in pre-modern times included a number of necessary skills, which, because they were skills, allowed people to become more or less skill-full—based on their own initiative and talent. These skills opened up normalcy to the individual capacity for innovation and caprice. Both Giddens and Habermas see subsequent, modern, conditions of the Umwelt as characterized by a general trend of deskilling. While Marxists have looked mainly at deskilling in the arena of what Giddens called “allocative power,” e.g., in the means of production (including, as Bourdieu would remind us, cultural production), cultural theorists, often led by feminist theorists, are exploring deskilling in “authoritative powers”: particularly in the reflexive reappropriation of these, i.e., the power to become one’s own author.
1We can surmise that traditional practices (in pre- post-traditional times), the normalcy that the traditions provided was mostly governed within the individual as a toolbox of skills used by individual practitioners. Today, games retain this feature of traditional practices, and players are expected to show their skilling in their play. Because the practices were acquired individually, individual innovations, and also individual mistakes would have been commonplace. Traditional practices did not require that the individual maintain the traditions as a part of the “undesigned” mode of their Umwelt. Quite the oppposite: a self-refexively organized repertoire of skilling that individuals acquired would have been a central feature of the individual’s Umwelt. To be proficient at doing the wide range of practices that one needed to know in order to get on would require that one designed one’s time and effort toward this end. In fact, innovations in all areas of traditional practices—innovations arising from individual talents—would have been routine, except where these practices became subject to institutional controls.
1Institutions (such as guilds and religions) that attempted to control access to certain “traditional” skills—mostly when these entered into a marketable arena— created a gatekeeper function that enforced secrecy and promoted authority in order to maintain discursive power over these knowledges. This type of “traditional” control—similar to what Giddens calls “authoritative power” (1979, 100)—is also maintained in modern states wherever selected people are authorized to perform actions not available to everyone.
