Page 112 - Cultural Theory

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••• Giddens and Cultural Analysis •••

doubt’, Giddens argues, is ‘existentially troubling’ for people, and their experience of
risk is shaped by this radical doubt. People can neither trust the knowledge of
experts, nor make satisfying decisions for themselves. Each individual must come to
his or her own assessment of the risks that they face in their lives and the available
solutions to these risks.
As a result of this, each person is forced to regard their sense of self and identity as
a ‘reflexive project’ (Giddens, 1991: 32, 75). The differentiation of the modern life-
world into a plurality of competing and alternative cultural lifeworlds (Berger and
Luckmann, 1966), each with its own specific lifestyles, means that individuals con-
stantly move between lifeworlds and must negotiate the transitions and choices that
they make among these ‘lifestyle sectors’ (Giddens, 1991: 83). Leaving home, getting
a job, becoming unemployed, forming a new relationship, facing illness, and so on,
all pose risks and choices that must be reflexively negotiated. For this reason, argues
Giddens, strategic life planning becomes a major source of anxiety. Only in relations
of intimacy and close friendship – ‘the pure relationship’ – do people feel that they
can escape from this (Giddens, 1992).
This chronic anxiety about the self is bound up with the rise of the academic dis-
ciplines of psychology and sociology, which allow the development of expert systems
available to advise, instruct, and discipline individuals. Alongside the growing num-
ber of economic and political experts is an expansion of those who claim expertise
in relation to social relations and self-identities. At one level, psychotherapies are a
response to the egoism and anomie of modern culture, but they are also a means
through which reflexivity can be organized: ‘Therapy is not simply a means of cop-
ing with novel anxieties, but an expression of the reflexivity of the self’ (Giddens,
1991: 34). There has been a massive growth in the number of counsellors, therapists,
and consultants who specialize in managing the reflexive self (ibid.: 33; see also Rose,
1998). Radical doubt about expert systems, however, means that individuals must
choose their own experts. They must choose, for example, from among the range of
cognitive, behavioural, and psychoanalytical therapies with no real guidance from
the character of the expert knowledge itself.
Globalization and the changes in self-identity in late modernity are the principal
elements in Giddens’ view of contemporary politics and they are the basis for his
own engagement in practical politics. Earlier stages of modernity were organized
around class-based politics, but in late modernity this has given way to a cultural pol-
itics centred around new forms of social movement. One important dimension of
contemporary politics relates to the institutional features of late modernity and is
organized around the characteristic risks that they generate. This is what Giddens
calls the politics of inequality. The other dimension of contemporary politics – the
politics of identity – concerns the shaping of the self and identity. The politics of
inequality centre on the emancipation of people from the systems of domination
that shape their lives and the risks that these systems generate. The labour movement
remains an important element in emancipatory political struggles, but it now
operates alongside other social movements. Ecological movements such as the
European Greens emerged and grew around the risks of the created environment;

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