Page 198 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

RELATIVISM

constitutive element of it. In this way the modern person can be grasped as a
‘reflexive project’, that is, the ordering of self-narratives through self-reflection
constitutes self-identity. Here identity is understood in terms of the self as
reflexively understood by persons in terms of their biography. On a more 175
institutional level, increased social and organizational reflexivity is manifested in
the desire of institutions to know more about the population who are the object of
their surveillance. This involves increased forms of observation and supervision
from cameras in shopping centres and ‘quality management’ at work to the
increased significance of marketing. Thus, institutional reflexivity involves the
paradox that it appears to enhance individual creativity and control over the
direction of lifestyles while at the same time serving forms of social control.
Reflexivity involves constructing discourses about personal and social
experience so that to engage in reflexivity is to partake in a range of discourses and
relationships while constructing further discourses about them. The cultural rise of
reflexivity is connected to the emergence of modernity in that modern life involves
the constant examination and alteration of social practices in the light of incoming
information about those practices. Traditional cultures value stability and the place
of persons in a normatively ordered and immutable cosmos so that the order of
things in life is the way it is because that is how it should be. Here, identity is
primarily a question of social position. By contrast, modernism values change, life
planning and reflexivity so that for moderns identity is a reflexive project.
Without the certainties of traditional religious and cultural beliefs modern life
may appear as a series of proliferating choices to be made without foundations. This
encourages us to be more reflexive about ourselves since we have no certainties to
fall back on. Here reflexivity has been associated with the ‘late’ modern or
postmodern in that it enables increased possibilities for the playful self-construction
of multiple identities. It also requires that we compare our traditions with those of
others. Consequently, for some critics postmodern culture invites the ‘other’ of
modernity, those voices that had been suppressed by the modern drive to
extinguish difference, to find ways to speak.
Reflexivity appears to have particular resonance with the themes of
postmodernism since it encourages an ironic sense of the ‘said before’, that is, the
feeling that one cannot invent anything new but merely play with the already
existent. Eco gives a good example of this with the person who cannot, without
irony, say ‘I love you’ but prefaces it with the words ‘As Barbara Cartland would say’.
The thing is said, but the unoriginality of the words is acknowledged. Indeed, irony
understood as a reflexive understanding of the contingency of one’s own values and
culture is the key sensibility of postmodernism. Further, a widespread reflexive
awareness of the history of film, television, music and literature promotes a culture
of ironic knowingness.
Links Irony, modernism, postmodernism, self-identity, surveillance

Relativism Epistemological relativism is the argument that one cannot judge between
forms of knowledge that have radically different grounds of validity. That is, one