Internal referentiality and the lifespan

The development of internally referential social systems is at the origin of the reflexive project of the self. The creation of an

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internally referential lifespan has been decisively influenced by a series of concurrent social changes. Each of these acts to `pick out' the lifespan as a distinctive and enclosed trajectory from other surrounding events in the following ways:

1 The lifespan emerges as a separate segment of time, distanced from the life cycle of the generations. The idea of the `life cycle', indeed, makes very little sense once the connections between the individual life and the interchange of the generations have been broken. As Shils's remarks aptly emphasise, tradition and the continuity of the generations are inherently tied to one another. Generational differences are essentially a mode of time-reckoning in premodern societies. A generation is a distinct kinship cohort or order which sets the individual's life within a sequence of collective transitions. In modern times, however, the concept of `generation' increasingly makes sense only against the backdrop of standardised time. We speak, in other words, of the `generation of the 1950s', `the generation of the 1960s' and so forth. Temporal succession in this sense retains little of the resonance of collective processes of transition characteristic of earlier eras. In traditional contexts, the lifecycle carries strong connotations of renewal, since each generation in some substantial part rediscovers and relives modes of life of its forerunners. Renewal loses most of its meaning in the settings of high modernity where practices are repeated only in so far as they are reflexively justifiable. ²

2 The lifespan becomes separated from the externalities of place, while place itself is undermined by the expansion of disembedding mechanisms. In most traditional cultures, notwithstanding the population migrations which were relatively common, and the long distances sometimes travelled by the few, most social life was localised. The prime factor that has altered this situation does not lie with increased mobility; rather, place becomes thoroughly penetrated by disembedding mechanisms, which recombine the local activities into time-space relations of ever-widening scope. Place becomes phantasmagoric. ³ While the milieux in which people live quite often remain the source of local attachments, place does not form the parameter of experience; and it does not offer the security of the ever-familiar which traditional locales characteristically display. The intensifying of mediated experience also plays a significant

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part here. Familiarity (with social events and people as well as with places) no longer depends solely, or perhaps even primarily, upon local milieux.

Place thus becomes much less significant than it used to be as an external referent for the lifespan of the individual. Spatially located activity becomes more and more bound up with the reflexive project of the self. Where a person lives, after young adulthood at least, is a matter of choice organised primarily in terms of the person's life-planning. Of course, as with all such processes, dialectical forms of counter-reaction are possible. Active attempts to re-embed the lifespan within a local milieu may be undertaken in various ways. Some, such as the cultivation of a sense of community pride, are probably too vague to do more than recapture a glimmer of what used to be. Only when it is possible to gear regular practices to specifics of place can re-embedding occur in a significant way: but in conditions of high modernity this is difficult to achieve.

3 The lifespan becomes more and more freed from externalities associated with pre-established ties to other individuals and groups. Kinship ties of various kinds were plainly the prime external anchorings of the individual's life experience in most pre-modern contexts. Kinship relations helped determine, and in many cases completely defined, key decisions affecting the course of events for the individual over the whole lifespan. Decisions about when and whom to marry, where to live, how many children to aim for, how to care for one's children, how to spend one's old age were among the more obvious examples. The externalities of place and kinship normally were closely connected. The transmission of property, including especially family heirlooms and familial dwellings, also played an important part. In modern social conditions, successive family groups only rarely continue residence in the same building. In rural areas, or among a few remaining aristocratic groups, there are still houses which have been lived in by members of the same family for long periods, even centuries. But for the mass of the population such a phenomenon becomes virtually unknown and the notion of `ancestors', so central to the lives of many in pre-modern settings, becomes diffuse and difficult to recover.

Lacking external referents supplied by others, the lifespan again emerges as a trajectory which relates above all to the individual's projects and plans. Others always figure in such life-planning, of

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course, from the members of the family of orientation to subsequent familial partners, children, friends, colleagues and acquaintances. New spheres of intimacy with some such others become crucial elements of frameworks of trust developed by the individual. But these have to be mobilised through the reflexive ordering of the lifespan as a discrete and internally referential phenomenon.

4 The lifespan becomes structured around `open experience thresholds', rather than ritualised passages. Ritual is itself an external referent and much has been made by social observers of the decline of ritual activities in relation to major transitions of life: birth, adolescence, marriage and death. The relative absence of ritual in modern social contexts, it has been suggested, removes an important psychological prop to the individual's capacity to cope with such transitions. Whether or not such is the case -- for, after all, Radcliffe-Brown suggested, in his celebrated debate with Malinowski about this issue, that ritual often produces anxiety rather than alleviates it -- what is important for the discussion here concerns the consequences for individual decision-making. Each phase of transition tends to become an identity crisis -- and is often reflexively known to the individual as such. ⁴ The lifespan, in fact, is constructed in terms of the anticipated need to confront and resolve such crisis phases, at least where an individual's reflexive awareness is highly developed.

To speak of the lifespan as internally referential is not the same as arguing from the premises of methodological individualism. The idea of the `self-sufficient individual' certainly emerged in substantial part as a response to the developing institutions of modernity. But such a methodological standpoint is not implied in the analysis elaborated in this book. Nor does it follow from what has been said above that the individual becomes separated from wider contexts of social events. To some degree, the contrary is the case: the self establishes a trajectory which can only become coherent through the reflexive use of the broader social environment. The impetus towards control, geared to reflexivity, thrusts the self into the outer world in ways which have no clear parallel in previous times. The disembedding mechanisms intrude into the heart of self-identity; but they do not `empty out' the self any more than they simply remove prior supports on which self-identity

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was based. Rather, they allow the self (in principle) to achieve much greater mastery over the social relations and social contexts reflexively incorporated into the forging of self-identity than was previously possible.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 755